In July 1923 the sculptor wrote to Mr. Rivers, reporting a meeting he had attended with Hollins Randolph in Cleveland and their visit to the factory where some of the new machinery for the mountain work was being completed. In the same letter he mentioned that Mr. Tucker had reported to him several times that Mr. Rivers had cautioned him to go slowly with the work on account of lack of funds. Gutzon warned Mr. Rivers that no real carving could be done without the preliminary work Tucker was doing, repeating that the carving was the most important thing and the only thing that would get subscriptions. He deplored the fact that he himself had to be concerned with the money-raising, and cautioned Mr. Rivers against spending more money in the office than was being spent on the mountain, which he had learned was also a fact.
The goal set for the finishing of Lee’s head was January 19, the general’s birthday. The sculptor left Stamford for Atlanta more and more frequently as the work neared the final surface. It was his practice to do the finishing himself. He never finished a model perfectly and handed it over to someone else to copy or enlarge, as is common practice among sculptors. Especially in enlargements, he believed that better, more individual results could be obtained if he himself modeled the figures in their full size. If he had
already expended much of his creative interest on finishing a small model, the final figure, he felt, would lack spontaneity and vigor.
In mountain carving this practice was absolutely necessary, owing to the unpredictable character of the stone surface. Blemishes are often found in a block of quarried marble when the sculptor starts to carve into it. It requires little imagination to realize the imperfections that are bound to appear on a cliff exposed to all the elements for thousands of years. As an example, when the Jackson head was being carved a crack suddenly appeared on the bridge of the nose. In previous cases such cracks were not deep, but in this instance the blemish persisted even after the position of the head had been pushed back four times. One more move and the whole design would have had to be changed.
The crack was slight and might have been left, except for the danger of water getting into it and freezing. After fifty years or so it might have become a serious defect. Jackson’s face in the original model was looking at Lee. The sculptor decided to turn it to look in the direction toward which Jackson’s arm seemed to be pointing. Thus that crack was lost in the six-foot hole of the eye socket, and the nose occupied an area of solid stone.
Only the sculptor made the change possible. He stood over the carvers directing the work. A man trained only to copy a model would have been helpless and hopeless in a situation like this.
During the final six weeks of working on Lee’s head, when it appeared that the carving could not be finished otherwise, the men worked all day and all night, in shifts of eight hours each. Gutzon worked with them and was there virtually all the time. Frequently he worked the whole night through.