Give the man room

It is an impressive spot, quiet, little visited, a vast bubble of granite rising abruptly some 800 feet out of a grassy plain, and thousands of feet long. Good roads lead to it...

The beginnings of Gutzon Borglum are not easy to trace. Until more than fifty years after his birth nobody seems to have cared where he came from or when. Nobody was much intere...

Gutzon Borglum was seven years old; so the time must have been roughly 1874. In the twelve or thirteen years since James de la Mothe Borglum’s caravan had come to Bear Lake, Ida...

Dr. James de la Mothe Borglum is somewhat difficult to see as he moves briefly and grayly through the background of Gutzon Borglum’s records. But it is quickly obvious that the...

Gutzon left California in 1890 accompanied by his wife and forty unsold canvases. He was fairly happy. He had made a little money, he had learned something about art and he had...

Rodin meant more. He meant what I will add. The artists have not seen, nor felt, nor understood the present, although they still seem to appreciate the beauty of the Greek.

There are not many people alive in the United States today who remember “the panic of 1893” and the “hard times of ’94, ’95 and ’96,” but the histories point out briefly that th...

The first thing Gutzon Borglum did in New York was to join--or, perhaps, originate--a movement whose object was to make American art distinctive and national. This was a bit out...

Gutzon’s first studio in New York was originally a barn that extended across the rear of some ancient brownstone-front houses in Thirty-eighth Street near Third Avenue. He trans...

The building of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at Morningside Heights, New York, might have been done for Gutzon Borglum alone. At any rate, it had his close and abiding i...

It isn’t remarkable that Borglum had virtually all the work he could do in the early 1900s. Nobody in New York seems to have been talking about anyone else. He was no mute and l...

In 1909 John Gutzon Borglum married Mary Williams Montgomery, to nobody’s great surprise. Mary Montgomery was born in Turkey of missionary parents and had lived there twelve yea...

The First World War started in August 1914, and was catalogued as somebody else’s trouble by nearly everybody in the United States. Its effect on local politics was to start arg...

Three works that Gutzon Borglum completed around 1915 had nothing at all to do with war or politics. One was a tablet with a bas-relief sketch in honor of Robert Louis Stevenson...

The American Congress appropriated over one thousand million dollars that were expended for aviation during the nineteen months of war. When the armistice was signed, not a sing...

None of his sundry war activities seems to have had much of an effect on Gutzon Borglum’s handiwork. His figure of James McConnell, in the monument to him on the University of V...

The Wars of America group in Newark, New Jersey, is the story of a nation told in figures from life and not by allegorical or classic symbols. It is one of the largest bronze me...

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,...

The sculptor came out of the war and the aircraft investigations heavily in debt. Fortunately he received some large commissions for carving public memorials, but the sponsors o...

There have been few days in the history of Atlanta so festive as the one set for the dedication of the Confederate memorial. And, possibly, there will never be another. The prog...

It became evident during the summer of 1924 that the Confederate memorial of Stone Mountain was on its way to a considerable solvency. The memorial half dollar would presently b...

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 o...

One of the most remarkable features of Gutzon Borglum’s quarrel with Georgia seems to be Georgia’s unawareness of it. The sculptor left Stone Mountain ahead of the constables on...

Texas owed something to Gutzon for the suggestion of the Four-City Centennial celebration of 1936. This hundredth year that Texas had been independent of Mexican rule had to be...

The travelers never forgot Paderewski as he met them at the Morges station. He was standing on the runway, a little derby hat perched on the top of his head, with his wave of ha...

It is one of the amazing things about a sculptor that the more work he does and the more recognition he gets, the more his friends demand that he stick to his proper business. A...

Many people on the Borglum visiting list figured that Gutzon was a Czecho-Slovak merely because he ran a Czecho-Slovak army on his front lawn in Stamford. He wasn’t, of course,...

And then there was the matter of The International Sporting Club. It was among Gutzon Borglum’s most altruistic endeavors and certainly one that can be viewed without any refere...

One of the chief errors in the life of Gutzon Borglum was his belief that everybody loved him--or nearly everybody. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t quite that popular. His record...

Back to the mountains came the boy who had felt kinship for them more than half a century before, to put into form a dream that was as yet nebulous and disturbed. Vaguely he fel...

One of the favorite jibes of the scoffers who didn’t think the Shrine of Democracy would ever amount to more than a big scar on a hill was that the workmen spent all their time...

Some sons of God must stand upon the mountaintops And there through all the deathless generations guard The continents, and guide the gracious stars of fate: So God made mountai...

In those days Gutzon Borglum found time to smile once in a while, although anybody who knew the trials of mountain carving might have wondered why. He had been written down for...

So then there was no trouble at all save bureaucratic misunderstandings and the vagaries of Rushmore rock. Accurate estimates of the time required to finish the work were imposs...