Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

It was Robinson who gave the clew. Years before, in the shale hills west of old Fort Pierre on the Missouri River, some children had found a leaden plate left there in 1743 by the Vérendrye brothers, French explorers. They had claimed the region for the French king as part of the Louisiana Territory. And it was brought out that Dakota was linked with the little colonial republic on the Atlantic seaboard in 1803 when President Thomas Jefferson sent out the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Considering these two episodes, Gutzon Borglum in his own stepless way decided what he would do. He would build a memorial to symbolize the creation and extension of the great republic, the forming of its government, the saving of its political union, and the completion of the dream of Columbus—a water route to India—by the cutting of the Panama Canal.

The characters he chose for the carving were obviously four: Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and our political gospel; Washington, who made the visions of Jefferson practicable; Lincoln, who preserved the union; and Theodore Roosevelt, who was chiefly instrumental in the building of the Panama Canal. When the design became clear in his mind Gutzon said:

Our forefathers wrote in the canon of human government that a man has the right to be free and happy. They formed a sisterhood of states on that simple creed, and their challenge became the tocsin cry of the world’s oppressed souls. Those words have changed the philosophy of the world’s governments. They are the motive, spirit and purpose back of the Rushmore memorial.

We have not created a monument to Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln or Roosevelt, but to the meaning of those eleven words as maintained in our government by those four great leaders. Those words—man has a right to be free and to be happy—hold the Western experiment as the guide that leaped out of medieval Europe, more important to humanity’s immortality than creeds and governments.

So the names of the Presidents to be carved on Mount Rushmore were agreed on by Norbeck, Robinson and Borglum as early as the fall of 1925. But that wasn’t the end of it. Of course not. From press reports it was difficult to see that any two people agreed on any man as a possible candidate for the super carving. The women’s clubs got turned into a movement for Dr. Susan B. Anthony, the noted feminist. And they argued bitterly and earnestly. Somebody introduced a bill in Congress for her support.

Gutzon, however, wasn’t to be shaken. He said that the men selected might not be the greatest the United States had produced, but they exemplified the four great periods of the country’s progress and so deserved their places in the memorial. He would carve other figures later, he said, in some places where they would not be crowded.

He went to work first on the head of Washington and studied long in an attempt to find out what kind of man he was. Of the familiar Washington portraits he said:

I have examined all the available portraits of value—the Stuart and Trumbull portraits, and the Houdon portrait which I consider best of all. Not the statue by Houdon in Richmond, the figure of which is poor, but the unretouched mask by Houdon which is now in the Corcoran Art Gallery. It is unquestionably the most valuable evidence of the appearance of Washington extant. I choose to represent him before retirement. In retirement a certain fulness of cheek becomes apparent as in Stuart’s last picture. His face, definitely masculine, takes on a more rugged form and reminds one of Cromwell at forty-five. There is much of the robust Britisher, the country squire or nobleman. There is none of the prettified Virginia gentleman that Stuart always produced. I recall a story to the effect that Martha Washington once told him that Stuart had said he had an awful temper, and that he must warn Stuart not to circulate such stories. Washington is said to have pondered a moment and replied, “My dear, I’m afraid Mr. Stuart is right.”

The sculptor made a small model of the group in San Antonio in 1926. When he returned to Rushmore that same year he made an enlarged plaster model of Washington’s head on a scale of an inch to a foot. By this time he had determined to make the heads sixty feet high; his previous thought of thirty-foot heads he found to be completely out of scale with the mountain. To make sure of the size he had gone down over the face of the cliff, located the nose line perpendicularly and the eyebrows and chin horizontally. From those lines he was able to calculate the scale. For the next several days he crawled about the cliff and valley studying the points he had marked on the mountain in red paint with a six-inch brush.

The enlargement of the Washington head was made in an old log cabin more than two miles away from the cliff of Rushmore. Plans were afoot to raise money for the vast work, he was told. But that summer, at least, nobody was able to find it. Gutzon and his family lived until September in Keystone. Their living quarters were typical of the mining boom that had cluttered the valley with shacks in the late seventies.