investigation. Also there were vexatious problems of cutting, setting and preparing the site for the statue. All these were generously solved by Doctors Walter James and Lawrenson Brown and others of Trudeau’s physician friends. Eventually the memorial was unveiled in August 1918. On the marble was carved Dr. Trudeau’s favorite quotation:
Guerir quelquefois, soulager souvent, consoler toujours.
(Heal sometimes, soothe often, comfort always.)
Carl Snyder, the writer, at that time connected with Harper’s, after driving to Saranac to examine the statue wrote this friendly word to the sculptor:
May I tell you that I have never seen a portrait that impressed me so deeply. This was equally true of my wife. She and I agreed that we never had seen a piece of sculpture that seemed so alive. It seems to tell the whole life story of an extraordinary man. And I am told you only saw him once!
Man! Man! Man! With the genius to do magnificent things like this, to create and to embody the living likeness of a great man, why, why, why do you waste your precious time on anything else?
One answer to the query, which he was often heard to give, was that he was never given half the work that he was capable of and wanted to do. In quick succession members of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn wanted a monument to Henry Ward Beecher, the famous pulpit orator; the Wheeler family in Bridgeport wanted a memorial fountain in honor of the inventor of the sewing machine. For St. John’s Church, near by, he was asked to make a reredos back of the altar. From North Carolina came a call from the Daughters of the Confederacy to build a memorial to Henry Wyatt, the first Southern soldier killed in the War between the States. From England came a committee to join with Americans to plan monuments along the border between the United States and Canada to celebrate the hundred years of peace between the two nations.
All these were not enough to keep him busy. He wrote an incredible number of letters to committees that were planning public monuments, but he got very few commissions that way. Most of his jobs came through friends or others who had seen his work and liked it. Every commission brought a different set of characters and circumstances with it and threw different side lights on the sculptor’s personality. His commission to build a memorial to Altgeld in Chicago was due to the crusading spirit which had made him widely known as a champion of democracy in art as well as in politics.
Governor Altgeld of Illinois had become widely and unfavorably known as “the governor who pardoned the Haymarket rioters” after they had been tried and condemned as bomb throwers. Such was his reputation for a long time, during which he remained silent. Then an unbiased study of his career brought about a reversal of public opinion. It was presented that he was wholly unselfish; that his life motive had been to help the underprivileged; that, in the words of the poet Vachel Lindsay, “He set himself tasks which took a lion’s courage and a martyr’s heart,” and that to carry out his purpose “He threw his reputation and his health into the furnace every hour.”
So it happened in 1913, eleven years after Altgeld’s death, the Illinois legislature appropriated $25,000 for an Altgeld monument. A committee of five was appointed, including Louis F. Post of the Department of Labor, with instructions to select a sculptor after a public competition. Two competitions were held, bringing over thirty models, none satisfactory. In a letter to the committee the landscape artist, Walter B. Griffin, wrote:
This particular task should be committed to a sculptor who has attained in his art that fundamental character, the American ideal, which Altgeld served in his own field and exemplified in his career. There appears to be in our time at least one sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, who is recognized as bearing to the plastic arts a relation like Whitman’s to literature. It would be a pity not to avail ourselves of the opportunity to bring together such a man and the work he is so eminently fitted for.