The date of the Association’s election day was the same as that of the selection of a presidential primary candidate. The political meeting was held first. After it had adjourned the Association president went to the Association’s annual meeting accompanied by a large number of politicians.
Up to that point the Association hadn’t had many active members. The dues had been five dollars. Nobody seems to have known what the total membership was. Nobody ever counted the attendance. And most of those present were members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
Eighty-six politicians came into the hall with the re-elected Association president. Somebody moved to reduce dues to one dollar, and someone else slapped eighty-six dollars on the desk of the treasurer. Eighty-six new names were added to the roster of the Association. And these eighty-six, along with the president, dominated the meeting.
There had hitherto been five or six people on the board of directors. The number was immediately changed to fifty. The membership of the executive committee was increased from nine to fifteen and was to be chosen by the board of directors. A resolution was passed to bar any increase in the membership of the Association except with the approval of the president and a subcommittee of three appointed by him. The president and the executive business manager, as the result of these arrangements, were then in absolute control of the organization. The president forgot his promise to resign.
An executive committee of fourteen men and one woman was named. The men were persons of big affairs—several of them bankers whose daily routine gave them little time for benevolent causes. There was not a member to represent the U.D.C.
There has been a lot of controversy over the Stone Mountain memorial. There will, no doubt, continue to be. Nobody who ever knew Gutzon Borglum would attempt to say he was a complacent character. Decidedly he was not. He knew what he thought was right, and that is what he wanted. He wanted nothing else. Calm argument could change his point of view, of course, for he was intelligent. But he could not be browbeaten. He was honest—so he could not be bribed. His anger could be Jovian, and in his indignation he could be intolerant and insulting. No one will deny these things.
There isn’t much doubt that the executive committee of the Stone Mountain Association encountered him in many moods, for he was in and about the premises from 1915 to 1925. When things went wrong with Gutzon’s plans, when anybody thwarted him, the world knew about it, and few will say that the early days of the work on the mountain were without confusion.
The story is still circulated in the South that Gutzon Borglum was a genius of evil temper with whom no one could possibly get along; that he had quarreled bitterly with the ladies of the U.D.C. and, in a huff, had destroyed his models and all that it was possible to destroy of the carving on Stone Mountain, and had gone away. But none of that is true except that he did destroy a pair of models.
If anybody thinks that the carving of the Confederate memorial was a simple thing, he may consider the odd politics that took over the project at the annual meeting of the Association in 1924. There would have been nothing simple about that even if Borglum had never lived.
Little had changed in the atmosphere except that money had begun to roll into the treasury and there was prospect of more. The Children’s Founders’ Roll was getting a large number of members, the children’s medals were being distributed in quantities, and presently the memorial coin would come out of the mint.