Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

I am sure that it will ever remain a monument to your art. Could Mrs. Butterfield see it, it would have her complete approval and gratify her pride in leaving a memorial so creditable to her husband and to the city. It is located, as I can tell you, only a short distance from the home of her birth and girlhood.

And then the unbelievable happened. The three executors with whom most of the sculptor’s contacts had been made all died within a very short time of one another. Everything was left in the hands of the fourth, Albert Hagar, who announced that he had never liked the statue, that the “bas-relief in Utica” mentioned in the will showed the general without a hat, with his arms down, and that he didn’t think the figure was big enough. He wanted the whole thing done over and refused any further payment unless this was done. The worst feature of this arbitrary decision was that many beneficiaries of Mrs. Butterfield’s will could not be paid until the status of the monument was settled. Hagar’s sudden reversal was no doubt sincere but it made inconvenience and trouble for many.

The Gorham Company offered to handle the suit which had to be brought against Hagar. The case dragged into the time when the sculptor had the aircraft investigation on his hands. Meanwhile the contractors who had done the granite work sued Gutzon for the payment of their bill. Gorham had not been paid for the casting, the architects were clamoring for their money and Stamford taxes were in arrears. The suit was carried on at Cold Spring, near Poughkeepsie, so far away that the sculptor lost a whole day every time he appeared as a witness.

Of course the Gorham Company won the suit eventually, but payments were not made until 1920. By that time the sculptor had assigned what little would have been left over for him to other debtors, so it is doubtful if he ever received a penny for all his work on this big contract. It was said by people who should know that some of the Butterfield heirs went to the poorhouse while waiting for their inheritance. Gutzon blamed himself for having accepted the commission in the first place. When later the location of the statue had to be changed on account of the Rockefeller church construction he declared he wouldn’t mind if they dropped it into the Hudson River.

The Vance memorial for North Carolina, of which a copy stands in Statuary Hall in the nation’s capital, was made during this period. It remains where it was put in the first place.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AIRCRAFT INVESTIGATION

The American Congress appropriated over one thousand million dollars that were expended for aviation during the nineteen months of war. When the armistice was signed, not a single American-made fighting or combat plane had reached the front. No American-made fighting or combat plane was ever produced. America depended upon her allies to furnish a few obsolete fighting planes with which our armies were equipped. Our contribution to wartime aircraft consisted of two hundred and thirteen “utterly dangerous” observation planes that reached the front with others on the way. That is the record. (Report of aircraft investigation under House resolution of June 4, 1919.)

Mr. Borglum is the man who started the entire aircraft investigation at the outset and performed a great public service. (Congressman James A. Frear, Wisconsin, speech to House of Representatives, Congressional Record, March 1, 1920.)

You may have gathered from the record thus far that Gutzon Borglum was a bit unused to doing things the way other people did them. There was only one of him, and there were so many of the rest of the population that maybe one shouldn’t be disturbed by this technique. He had a genius’ variety of talent; so it probably isn’t remarkable that his art studio should have been filled with frightening projects for roads, transportation, parks, breakwaters, engineering, airplane models, philosophy, abstract science and the saving of the world. He believed he could do anything—so he did it. All of this is fairly obvious on his history sheet. But, for all that, his investigation of the aircraft industry in 1918 remains today one of the most incredible things that ever happened to America.

We start our study of this attempt of one man to produce some honesty in a $1,000,000,000 delusion with the knowledge that Borglum was not only a fairly competent theoretical engineer, but also a practical mechanic who had been following closely the growth of air power. And that is fortunate, because few other matters in the aircraft investigation are that obvious or sensible. In November 1917, after the United States had been eight months in World War I, he got a look at an airplane factory in Dayton, Ohio. He was shocked, as he admitted, almost into a state of speechlessness. He had a brief visit with a man in a high position in the direction of aircraft production, listened to him, and, instead of going home, made a quick trip to Washington. Next morning he was at the White House, demanding to see President Wilson.