And Ralph Lum added: “You know how much the association with you has meant to me, and my joy that it has all worked out so beautifully is an abiding and comfortable one.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
STONE MOUNTAIN

You probably have heard the story of Stone Mountain, Georgia, as who, alive, hasn’t. Stone Mountain is an isolated mass of granite that rises abruptly from a plain near Atlanta, and on its precipitous face Gutzon Borglum once started to carve the pageant of the Confederate Army. The idea had its inception somewhere around 1910 or 1911. Borglum was asked to look at the project in 1915; began his preliminary work on it shortly before the First World War; carving was started in June 1923; the head of Robert E. Lee, a gigantic sculpture, was unveiled in January 1924; the figures of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis were roughed out during the summer of 1924; on February 18, 1925, there were words between the sculptor and a representative of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association; by midsummer the models were broken, Borglum had left Georgia, and what was probably the world’s first attempt at mountain carving was abandoned.

The years have produced a variety of stories about what happened at Stone Mountain, most of them untrue, and there is little use now in summing them up. But the wreckage on the mountain was an evident fact, as was the finish of one of sculpture’s most astounding efforts. From what remained of the carving it was easy to envision the Confederacy’s last glorious march—the ride of the great leaders with horse, foot and artillery across the vast granite wall toward what had looked like immortality. But there wasn’t going to be any immortality.

Borglum’s plan for the depiction of the army had kept pace with his far-reaching mind. He hadn’t overlooked a detail: In the front would be the leaders. Behind them the men, a horde of gray-uniformed men, riding their horses or dragging their guns or staggering afoot from the brink of the great cliff top, entering this last great parade from out of the sky. He had made no count of the figures. Apparently there was to be no end to them ... and no matter. There was a tall precipice in front of him—thousands and thousands of square yards.

All that was gone now, not only the first of the striking carvings, but the hope for the memorial’s completion. Gutzon Borglum waited for a long time for the aid he felt must come—for the miraculous intervention that would bring the stone soldiers back to the mountain. But nothing came of half a dozen efforts to put the hard-rock men back at work. Gutzon Borglum died, and nobody in Atlanta talks about Stone Mountain any more. Borglum, they figure, is the only man who ever knew how to carve a mountain, and they are at least partly right. He is certainly the only man who ever did it.

On February 27, 1927, Lynn Haines, who obviously knew something about this dramatic episode, introduced Gutzon Borglum to the Penguin Club in Washington. What he said may not have been too reserved, but anyone who knew anything about the Georgia project would have admitted its truth. Haines declared:

Borglum had an impossible dream for Stone Mountain. Its inception was beyond belief. Its execution was unimaginable. Every phase of it presented problems which his smart friends considered insurmountable. He ignored human limitations and took up the job. He created a national state of mind that accepted and approved his impossible project. Then he financed the memorial. He calmly accomplished what it was said could not be done in engineering. He had to have and therefore produced entirely new and hitherto unknown devices in photography, and in mechanics and in his own art. He proceeded to carry out his idea on a scale so colossal as to make it the most miraculous thing ever shaped by human hands.... I have been at Stone Mountain several times with Mr. Borglum. It is rightly described as “the largest upthrust of unbroken granite in the world.” It stands alone.

We have all wondered about Mr. Borglum in that work. He was so high that he was merely a small black spot moving across the mountain in the wind. He was giving shape to statues some two hundred feet tall and giving them the grace and detail that you would find in figures in his studio.

They said it could not be done.... So Gutzon Borglum did it.