The time was the dawn of the Progressive movement which aimed to do away with bossed and machine-controlled government, demanding honesty and efficiency in high places. A new national election, that of 1912, was in the offing. Gutzon’s old friend, Theodore Roosevelt, was running for President on a third-party Progressive ticket. What was more natural than that the sculptor should enter this campaign with gusto. He became chairman of the Progressive Party of Stamford, and nearly wore himself out trying to arouse the progressive element in the citizenship of the whole state of Connecticut.
There was a strong element of drama in the campaign as waged in the city and town of Stamford. In the first place, the “Old Guard” was not going to allow a newcomer to meddle unchallenged with their ancient customs. One of the most respected members of the community wrote an indignant letter to the Stamford Advocate, the only local paper, protesting against the upstart sculptor who “had not been able to achieve fame in his own calling” and was trying to gain a little notoriety by attaching himself to Roosevelt’s kite.
Gutzon addressed mass meetings from the Town Hall steps. He spoke on street corners and in front of the huge Yale and Towne Lock factory where men and women were going home from work. He got to be a ready speaker and learned to think on his feet. One incident was memorable. Some heckler had asked why Roosevelt had suddenly changed his mind on a certain question. “Don’t you know,” Gutzon shot back at him, “that Saint Paul lived to be fifty-two before he suddenly changed his whole way of life and became a Christian?”
People in Stamford still remember the picturesque and effective fight carried on by the Progressives under the leadership of the imaginative Gutzon. On one occasion a torchlight procession was arranged in which the Borglum donkey, “Shamrock,” a large, gray, intelligent creature, appeared as a symbol of both the old parties, wearing on his rear end an elephant head, the trunk of which concealed his tail.
Two Stamford citizens, who were Gutzon’s chief lieutenants in the fray and remained his friends ever after, were featured in the press of the day as “Handsome Harry” Abbot and “Young” Arthur Crandall. The latter lived and worked with Borglum at one time and never got over his youthful reverence for Gutzon, which was not diminished by close contact. When he heard this book was being written he said: “Don’t forget to mention his real humility,” which was a side of the sculptor’s nature revealed only to those who knew him best.
Joseph Alsop was state chairman of the Progressive Party of Connecticut, and Gutzon developed a deep friendship with him. Mr. Whittaker, editor of the Stamford Advocate for many years and a reactionary and autocratic individual, came to the Borglum farm one night about midnight to try to influence the sculptor to change his attitude. The mayor of the city, Charles P. Rowell, came out at dusk, wearing a big black hat and a long cape, like a villain in a play.
He would not come into the house, where someone might hear what he had to say, but asked Gutzon to come outside. They talked by the footbridge on the way to the studio. Mr. Rowell tried to make a deal, and when the sculptor refused he exclaimed with conscious drama, “Then it’s a fight—a fight to the finish!”
“Yes,” agreed Gutzon solemnly, “and a sword to the hilt!”
A few days after the election S. E. Vincent, the newly elected Progressive congressman, wrote to Gutzon.
With election over it is now time to figure up and take inventory of conditions. If I have a clear idea of how the Progressive party stands, that party has every reason to be proud of the results accomplished in a campaign of only ninety days, without funds or party machinery, with all the papers against our cause and some of them not overcareful about telling the whole truth.