Give the man room

by Robert J. Casey; Mary Montgomery Borglum

Most of his correspondence was with Dr. Clarence Poe, son-in-law of Governor Aycock and editor of a widely circulated paper, The Progressive Farmer. He was a man of exceptional gifts, but sculpture worried him. His first worry was because Gutzon was working on a life-size model without having made a plaster cast of the small-sketch model. Gutzon wrote him a long treatise on models in which he said:

I don’t mind making three or four. The man must be on his feet. Except for that every action of the body is changeable.... In the work I do in my studio I keep my small model in clay and do not cast it in plaster in order not to be bound by it. If it is in plaster it cannot be changed.... I am anxious to keep it as flexible as possible, and to keep in mind that the big figure is the sole thing and the permanent thing....

There was more correspondence and eventually Gutzon invited the committee to come and look at the life-size model. In the fall of the year the party arrived—Colonel P. M. Pearsall, Mrs. Charles Aycock, the widow, and Judge Frank Daniels, Josephus’ brother. After suggesting some slight changes they expressed complete satisfaction and went home. The sculptor was on the point of casting the statue in plaster when he got a telegram from Dr. Poe, who had been unavoidably detained. Poe, who had learned his lesson about models, begged Gutzon to delay the casting till he could get to Stamford. Nobody had told him what work it is to keep a heroic-size clay figure moist for an indefinite time. For the next three weeks Gutzon had little else to occupy his time.

Dr. Poe and a new committee were more critical than the first group had been. Dr. Poe shook his head and announced that for one thing the model was underweight. Aycock, he said, had weighed at least fifty pounds more than the sculptor allowed. The rest of the committee agreed.

Gutzon had acquired patience. It was not serious, he said. He would adjust the governor’s proportions. Sleeping quarters were engaged at a hotel for the committee. And for three days Dr. Poe and his friends sat around the studio while Borglum added to the governor’s girth. For this work Judge Daniels was a voluntary model. In the end everybody was pleased. Dr. Poe declared that “The result is a distinguished success.”

The memorial was unveiled on March 15, 1924, a year later. Dr. Alderman and Josephus Daniels made the chief speeches. Thousands of the governor’s old friends attended, together with a crowd of school children. It was a grand affair.

The Sheridan equestrian statue, which stands at the beginning of Sheridan Road in Chicago, came out of this same period and was one of the sculptor’s favorites. The technical perfection of it gratified him. He used to say of the horse, rearing with his front feet off the ground, that he could see the play of the muscles under the skin—and that is very likely true.

The work was accomplished under external difficulties. In the first place the construction of an armature for so huge a group was no small undertaking. It was built of heavy timbers, boards and lath and looked something like the pictures of the Trojan Horse. It wasn’t as commodious, perhaps, but several able-bodied men could work inside it—and did. A new studio was under construction with the sculptor supervising all details. And outweighing all physical handicaps was the mental strain of his work on Stone Mountain, where things were rapidly approaching a crisis.

However, for his creative work there was always one tranquil spot in his brain that no outside disturbance could enter. He believed in changing his models frequently, stopping only when he could see what he thought to be right. Jesse Tucker, the Stone Mountain engineer, recalls that this was one feature of his sculpture in which he would permit no compromise.

At one stage of the Sheridan memorial, Tucker pointed out, the sculptor was seriously handicapped by lack of funds. Everybody in the studio knew that he would receive a substantial sum as soon as the group was finished and ready for casting. And one evening it looked as though this happy moment had arrived.