“Yes,” said Borglum.
“All right,” pursued the President. “He and you and I will sit down and figure out what can be done to promote this work. I know great governments do things like this.”
The President then handed the sculptor the drills and Gutzon climbed to the top of the mountain. The engines were turned on for the first time. The huddled, silent witnesses caught the sudden chatter of the drills. The carving of Mount Rushmore had begun.
Gutzon came down and presented the first drill in use to President Coolidge. The next two went to Doane Robinson and Peter Norbeck, and he kept the fourth. Then everybody plodded back down the hill to Keystone.
“See me in Washington,” repeated Coolidge as they said good-by. And that the historian might record as the beginning of Rushmore financing.
Norbeck and Borglum disagreed as to the proper approach to the problem. Borglum said that he would ask the federal government to donate as much as the memorial promoters were able to collect from other sources. Norbeck said no, that money was hard to collect privately, that you couldn’t run drills on promises and that Mellon could be made to pay the full cost. Gutzon, remembering how he had raised more than a million dollars for Stone Mountain, refused to listen to this argument. But, it turned out, Norbeck was right.
Toward the end of 1927 Borglum was in Washington. He laid his plan before Mellon just as he had said he would, and Mellon was pleased. So was President Coolidge, for Gutzon’s modesty was something unusual at the time.
Norbeck was not pleased. “You could have got it all,” he said. “Now I don’t know what you’ll get.” He put a bill through the Senate, while Congressman Williamson was doing the same thing in the House, providing for a twelve-member commission to take over the drawings, contracts and material now held by Borglum, to be held and owned by the United States government. The $50,000 fund in the Rushmore treasury was exhausted in the middle of December 1927; so work was abandoned and nothing was done in 1928 while everybody in the Black Hills waited for Congress to act.
Norbeck was discouraged in 1928. In a letter to Gutzon he wrote:
Previous to this, public sentiment has held up pretty well under our repeated assurances that everything would go right along. But the fact that neither you nor I could scare up a few dollars for the work during the summer of 1928 has led people to believe that we were just talking hot air. Very few people in South Dakota take the matter seriously any more. Doane Robinson tries to, but it keeps him awake nights and he needs sleep....