Gutzon escorted Mrs. Plane to her car and she shook his hand. “I am ninety-four years old,” she said. “I have waited a long time for this day and I have never, never in my life seen anything like it.”
The unveiling of Lee was merely a beginning for the Confederate memorial. Work on the mountain was resumed immediately.
The bust of Stonewall Jackson was the next subject, and that promised little trouble. Gutzon had made a model of the head in his Stamford studio and had brought a seven-foot enlargement of it to Georgia. While the rough work was proceeding on the mountain, a local studio was completed. Modeling stuff was moved in and Borglum’s horse “Smoke” was brought down from Connecticut to pose for the mount of Lee.
Then the arguments began.
There had been no doubt about whose face would be the first to be carved out of Stone Mountain. Jackson was an easy second choice. But after that nearly everybody in Georgia had a departed Confederate relative who should rightfully be memorialized in the first group. In the original plan Borglum had made room for five figures in this group. Lee, Jackson and Davis were certain of their places. Forrest and Longstreet had many supporters for the last two places. Then somebody suggested that seven men be given this immortal recognition, and trouble renewed itself. The committee squabbled. The state legislature rattled with sonorous debate. Church societies and high-school debaters aired their views, and Gutzon Borglum made a fine assortment of models.
The models were a disconcerting problem because modeling clay in the vicinity of Atlanta was difficult to get and expensive to import. For his preliminary work the sculptor modeled in plaster which turned out to be a pure makeshift, because it is not pliable and cannot be used for fine work. Wax was better for small figures but out of the question for the stupendous casts used on the mountain.
In addition to these causes of delay, funds began to get short. Borglum found the money situation an imposing study. The executive committee seemed to be getting plenty of financial aid, but this money didn’t seem to be coming in quickly enough. There were always enough funds to support the office and hire the stenographers and get the printing done. But there was never enough of a residue to push the work on the mountain as fast as the sculptor wanted it pushed.
Gutzon was hard-eyed about this situation. Some of the committee members declared that he was an irascible old obstructionist—that he didn’t understand their difficulties nor give them credit for the work they were doing.
To this Gutzon’s reply, generally delivered to them in a harsh tone, was that the only thing of real importance about a carving on a mountain was the carving. If the fund raisers couldn’t raise enough funds to pay the hard-rock men, he declared, then there wasn’t much use in their raising any funds. During the first eight years of getting ready for the work on Stone Mountain—which started in 1915—Gutzon said that he had advanced $20,000 for labor, materials and machinery. He had kept no account of the expense of traveling around the country in support of the enterprise, he said. Nor had he kept any record of what he had put out for experimentation with new tools, his sketches, studies, drawings and models.
He observed more violently that for the first few months of the newly organized association he had worked without a definite agreement. A contract was finally drawn by which the sculptor agreed to carve the central group for $250,000, he to furnish labor, power, machinery, explosives and other materials and his own salary. A portion of an old labor-and-lumber bill was paid to him on account of his advances during the preceding years. Other payments were postponed for future settlement. For the time being the association was supposed to pay all expenses at the mountain, together with a certain monthly stipend for the sculptor. These payments were always in arrears.