“But where to?” asked Gutzon.
“I’ll tell you that afterward,” said Tucker, pulling him toward the door.
Shortly they were gone and the people in the house heard a car roaring out the back way on a road from the city that was virtually impassable. The sound had died out and they were well on their way when the local constable arrived and sheepishly produced an order for Gutzon’s arrest on a charge of “malicious mischief.” The complaint declared that the sculptor had destroyed a model valued at $25.
Nobody has ever pointed out how the Association directors found out about the smashing of the models within two hours after it happened. The constable didn’t know. He had just been called on to serve it, and, well, if Mr. Borglum had gone away, he couldn’t do that. So he accepted a drink and sat down to enjoy it.
Not until long afterward did Mrs. Borglum discover that the head Gutzon was accused of having destroyed was the useless plaster image of Lee.
The morning after the Association meeting of February 25, 1925, the Atlanta newspapers gave roaring accounts of the affair, one of them announcing in letters three inches high: “Borglum Fugitive From Justice.” There were long lists of his crimes, misdemeanors and delinquencies for which he had been driven away from Stone Mountain. Chief of these were “loafing on the job,” “inordinate love of money,” “wasteful expenditures,” “ungovernable temper.” And there was the old story of the angels of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Clarke Howell, editor of the Atlanta Constitution and Francis Clark, the city editor, were Gutzon’s friends, and they sniffed at the angel story. They were the ones who telegraphed the cathedral to get the straight of it. But no matter. There was no end to such charges nor to the people who believed them. Mrs. Borglum, warned by her attorney, Albert Howell, to refrain from comment, nevertheless issued one statement: “The Greeks of old drove Phidias into exile, but his name has lived on while those who persecuted him are forgotten.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
AFTERMATH
Borglum and Tucker sat down to rest on the plantation of Colonel Beniham Cameron, head of the Bankhead Highway Commission, near Durham, North Carolina, and entertained a great outpouring of their friends. Georgia made one weak effort at extradition, but the warrant was promptly thrown out by a sympathetic judge. Governor Angus McLean announced that he would call out the militia if necessary to prevent extradition, and there the matter rested. Gutzon never condescended to answer the Association’s charges. On July 7, 1925, he wrote to Gerald Johnson:
It should be remembered that we undertook the building of a memorial to honor, not to war. We built it to the soul of Robert E. Lee, to his conscious martyrdom, to the valor and development of those the world said had failed.... Can we who have worked so disinterestedly and succeeded somewhat in reaching the ear of God for Lee and his hosts forget? Can we fail in those qualities? I am determined that history shall carry no such item in her record of our acts.
The Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial Association eventually gave the job of finishing the mountain carving to a practitioner who was at Stone Mountain only briefly and with little success in furthering the art.