Hurriedly and in anger Borglum made his second report to the President. He hadn’t been too successful with his first report; there had been leaks concerning its contents. His second report, which he delivered himself on February 9, was in the hands of Secretary Baker on February 11. Baker made light of it after it had become public property.
Who released the report was never learned, but shortly the newspapers had it and were charging that America, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars for aircraft, had produced nothing but brag and bluster; that we were in a war with no planes and no engines of our own. White House and War Office press departments began to make counter charges, ridiculing the report and charging Borglum with falsehood.
Washington seethed for a couple of weeks. Some unknown person called the Dayton factory to fill two freight trains with airplane parts and to paint on the boxcars in big letters, “Planes for Europe,” “Right of Way,” “Our Boys Need These Planes,” and similar legends. Newspaper reporters and government agents were posted between Dayton and Hoboken to see these trains pass with their painted signs. From them the news flashed to all parts of the country, and Borglum was a liar by official count.
Borglum had his own agents scattered over the route and he knew that not a single plane had left Dayton for anywhere. He was just getting part of the pay for his appointment. Verification of the reports of his own investigators was made two or three days later by General Goethals, whom he met at breakfast at the Metropolitan Club. General Goethals was then Quartermaster General and well acquainted with what was shipped out of Dayton. Borglum wrote in his journal:
About this time Senator Thomas of Colorado turned bitterly upon me and introduced a resolution “inquiring into the charges that Gutzon Borglum had so recklessly made.” A small committee, composed of himself as chairman, Senator Reed of Missouri, Senator Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and Senator Wadsworth of New York was appointed. Its duty was to visit the factories against which Borglum had cast aspersions.
This committee proceeded via New Jersey up the Hudson to the great Curtiss plant, on to Detroit and down to Dayton. At Elizabeth, New Jersey, they reported that the speed and anxiety of the workmen to get parts of planes into cars and on their way to Hoboken was “little short of phenomenal.” The officer in charge was courteous to the senators but begged them to keep out of the way, saying that the boys in Europe needed planes and there must be no delay—all of which impressed the senators so much that they thanked him and left. Then they proceeded north to the Curtiss plant at Buffalo—a plant having 14,000 men on the payroll and producing only ten to twelve planes a day. (In Toronto a factory employing 2,800 people was producing twelve fighting planes and twenty-four training planes a day.) There was present the same kind of apparently furious activity which the senators had witnessed at Elizabeth.
The committee then went on to Dayton Field, where, after watching a schooling of the officers and a workout of the young men, they turned to leave. As they were walking away, the officer of the day approached Senator Reed and said, “Aren’t we going to be heard?” Without waiting for a reply he said, “I’m through. You can strip my buttons off, but I’ll have no more damned humbug. I am killing two boys a day. We dig two graves every morning before breakfast, just to be ready for their deaths. You may do what you like with me. I am through.”
As a result, so the senator himself told me, the committee determined to return secretly to the factories they had just visited. There the men who had brusquely pushed the committee aside in their anxiety to ship planes to Europe were disgorging the airplane parts they had so carefully boxed. Thomas, who had been very rude to me, wrote the report and presented it to a Senate that had less than a dozen members in their seats. He complained feelingly of the lack of interest, the lack of patriotism in a matter which had impugned the honor and the integrity of our War Department. To one of his committee he said afterward, “I wish there were some way I could apologize to Mr. Borglum and tell him how mistaken I have been.”
There was a little more to come before Gutzon could be through with his aircraft investigation. His inquiry had brought reliable evidence of the theft of securities worth more than a million dollars from a Western bank through the connivance of some members of the Aeronautics Board. This matter he took to Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, whom he had known for many years. With his own authority from the President he took it for granted that he would not have to tell the names of the people involved until after subpoenas for them had been issued. Hitchcock agreed. The next day he declared he couldn’t do it, and the day after that he made a speech in the Senate declaring that he had had a long conference with Mr. Borglum, had seen all the aircraft evidence and that there was nothing to it.
Monday morning Borglum saw Hitchcock and was in the middle of his attack when Senators Joseph Frelinghuysen, James Reed, John Thomas and James W. Wadsworth, the military committee, came into the room. Somewhat informally, as everything in Washington seems to have been done in those days, they sat down and listened to Borglum’s demand for blank subpoenas. Senator Reed nodded, stood up, and said, “Mr. Chairman, owing to the high character of this witness, I move that the subpoenas he asks be given. If he gets the evidence he says exists, I will move from the floor of the Senate the hanging of those men.”