Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

Some sons of God must stand upon the mountaintops
And there through all the deathless generations guard
The continents, and guide the gracious stars of fate:
So God made mountains for the throne of these.
Upon this mountaintop America enshrines
Her sturdy sires, exalts her noblest knight.
Where children of the earth may lift appraising eye
And feel his virtue while his strength invests their souls.
—Doane Robinson

Gutzon Borglum carved a mountain. And as the years went by he became a dynamiter, a geologist, a practical miner and, very definitely, an engineer. He got used to crawling about on the face of a cliff, and in time he used to say that his sculpture was not greatly different from the cutting of a large block of stone in a studio. But, of course, the stone of the mountainside wasn’t dressed or prepared. It couldn’t be shifted into the light or away from it. The amount of stone to be removed was prodigious, and injury of the material left for carving was always a serious possibility. How one of these projects ever got itself done is something that he wasted thousands of words trying to explain.

When Gutzon first used dynamite for carving on Stone Mountain it had been taken by the world as a fantastic idea. But there was no coyness about its use when it came to Rushmore. It was laid out there in all proportions and all quantities. The sculptor had experts who knew what could be done with a six-inch stick, or half an ounce of it, or with a percussion cap alone. And they had to be in touch not only with the drilling of the moment but with the design of the whole monument to avoid the chance of an overcharge at one point injuring stone at a distance.

Such drilling skill was developed that the sculptor could depend on them to block out a nose to within an inch of the finished surface, to shape the lips, grade the contours of the neck, cheek, brow and all round areas. He could even shape the eyeball as a whole, but the defining of the eyelids and the pupils was done by drills, air tools and by hand.

The sculptor’s first concern was the position of Washington. He put in days studying the surfaces, shadows, reflections and the course of the sun; and eventually he chose the place where Washington’s head rises today. It was the best spot on the mountain.

He began to make models to suit the cliff. He discussed the angle of the head with Carothers, one of the literary secretaries of the Hoover administration, and he had long conferences about the character of the first President with Hoover himself. They decided that uprightness should be emphasized in Washington’s statue. The head should not incline to right nor left, nor forward nor back, but should be set on the shoulders so that it would show dignity and poise. Carothers drew a straight line down the middle of a paper, put a ball on the top of it to indicate the head and remarked quite gravely, “This is the way it should be drawn.”

And that is the way it was drawn. The center of Washington’s head was fixed at the point where the horizontal line going across the brows met the vertical line through the chin. In roughing off they had to remove fifteen feet of rock before they found a hard, undamaged surface. This was done late in the summer of 1927. Blasting was not resumed until 1929.

Work on Washington taught them how to proceed quickly with other figures. It established methods, determined tools, temper of steel, arrangement of scaffolding for hoists and a labor gauge on the men who were to perform most of the rough toil on the monument.

The first preparation for carving was to draw in its proper position on the mountain an oval of the required length and width. This oval was divided into three sections—one at the line of the eyebrows, one at the end of the nose and a third at the end of the chin. These measurements were in the scale of the model; in other words, a model sixty inches in height had an enlarged outline sixty feet in height.

The work on Rushmore was done from swing harnesses developed at Stone Mountain. They were made of a leather-covered steel frame and were quite strong. The men were buckled into them. Thereafter they might be bumped or fall, but they could not get out without unbuckling themselves. The swings were suspended at the end of a 300-foot steel cable from a winch on the top of the cliff. They were housed in a shack on Washington’s head.