GutzonBorglumOnline

My friends Mr. Epp and the SDBWM have cleared up my confusion about the chicken revolution and I just wanted to thank everyone for their concern. I will be mostly unavailable this weekend and likely during all of next week. Perhaps I should have waited until the middle of July to start this web log because I am afraid that I won’t have much time to contribute to it until, perhaps, July 10 or so.

This might sound odd coming from an old man, but does anyone know if Pierre has any hot spots? By that I mean, locations where I might add various comments to this internet site. It’s the only city of any size that I will be visiting, and so I’d like to take the opportunity, during my travels, to update all of you on the happenings at Mount Rushmore.

Mr. Sibson has written an item today defaming my friend Todd Epp for mounting a poultry Coup d’tat. He summarizes it this way:

Come on Epp, let’s start blogging on the merits of real issues and stop running a chicken coup.

I have read stories about this generation’s super sciences, but I was unaware that chickens had evolved so quickly that they are now able to overthrow the government, even with the help of someone as bright as Mr. Epp. I have been using my search engine to try to find further information about this so-called chicken coup that Mr. Sibson refers to, but I can’t seem to find mention of it anywhere.

Until I am notified, I will just hunker down and wait for the worst to pass.

When you carve a monument as big as Rushmore, you don’t have to worry about it getting noticed. But when you are writing a web log on the internet and there are an infinite number of other web logs (I guess you call them blogs), you worry, as I have, that your work will be underappreciated.

So, I must express my appreciation for the warm reception that Gutzon Borglum Online has received. Foremost, I am appreciative of the kind comments of Mr. Todd D. Epp, who has written twice about my work on his S.D. Watch web log. (Can someone explain to me why I have to type Thunewatch.squarespace.com at the top of my computer to access a web log entitled S.D. Watch? This technology can be so confusing.)

When I learned of Mr. Epp’s identity, I furrowed my brow, for it was a name that I had seen before. Then I remembered that he had written an excellent piece 12 years ago about the filming of North By Northwest at the monument. Epp correctly reported that the curators of the site were concerned about the image Alfred Hitchcock would convey when presenting his film. Although the filmmaker used his creative license to change the surroundings of Mount Rushmore, I still found the movie quite entertaining.

I would also like to thank the South Dakota Blog Watch Man for mentioning my work on his web site. He’s a rather moody fellow, but I do enjoy his web log and I feel fortunate that he hasn’t developed a moniker for me like the ones he uses for other writers, particularly the person he calls the Hillbilly. In my day, that sort of reference wasn’t looked upon kindly, even by actual hillbillies.

Now, as to Mr. Epp’s questions concerning my longevity: My God, man, I am 137 years old, I will do as much as I care to do and as much as I my health allows, and not one bit more.

I’m amused by the news that my glorious monument will get a power wash on July 5. As you probably know, building the monument was an arduous task. In fact, just between you and me, I’m sometimes surprised the whole thing hasn’t collapsed under its own weight. This power wash — a high powered stream of watch that will remove dirt and grime and rid the monument of tiny lichen — will ultimately prolong the life of Mount Rushmore. But I hope workers don’t knock off Lincoln’s nose in the process. (Ha ha. Just kidding. I hope.)

I read recently that the little microbes growing on the faces cause the monument to decay at a rate of one inch every 10,000 years. The workers who inspected the monument up-close in April said the father of our country was covered with lichen, fungi, moss and bird droppings.

As much pride as I take in the monument, you mght not know that it isn’t exactly the way I originally envisioned it. Initially, I wanted to include a giant inscription on the side of the mountain outlining the nation’s history. It was to be a message to future generations. I rationalized the idea to others by stating, “You might as well drop a letter in the postal system without an address or signature as to send that carved mountain in to the future without identification.” I wanted to put the entablature in the space where Lincoln’s head is currently located and estimated the writer would have about 500 words to complete the task.

The Europeans howled when this was reported in newspapers over there. “The story of a nation in 500 words?” they said.

But I was committed to the idea and had a plan to make sure it happened. When President Calvin Coolidge traveled to the Black Hills in 1927 for a ceremony that marked the completion of an early stage of the project, I used my time at the podium to ask him to write the entableture and told him that it would be signed in stone with his name at the end.

“Mr. Coolidge!,” I told him, “As the first president who has taken part in this great undertaking, please write the inscription to be carved on that mountain! We want your connection with it shown in some other way than just by your presence! I want the name of Coolidge on that mountain!”

How can a politician turn an offer like that down. Cool Cal might have known that he would probably never get his face on the side of a mountain, but his name was a nice consolation prize. He readily agreed.

An aside: Has anyone considered changing the name of Ellsworth Air Force Base to the George W. Bush Air Force Base? Who knows what might massage the president’s ego?

Anyway, one of Coolidge’s last official acts as president was the signing of Public Law 805 which established a commission. The law read: “The commission is to complete the carving of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, to consist of heroic figures of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, together with an entablature upon which shall be cut a suitable inscription to be indited by Calvin Coolidge.” The bill also provided a quarter million dollars for the project.

But then disaster struck. We discovered that while working that the stone surface where we had planned on placing Jefferson would never support his massive forehead. So we had to move Jefferson to Washington’s left — ha ha, how is that for political irony — and we no long had room for the entableture on the face of the monument.

I didn’t give up on the idea immediately, however. My idea was to write the inscription in English, Latin, and Sanskrit, a language my wife Mary had studied. It would serve as a new Rosetta Stone, aiding future scholars in unraveling the mysteries of our languages and helping to decipher them. I proposed putting the entablature on the backside, so that if faced what is now the Hall of Records.

The president sent me a copy of his first two paragraphs, and I did a little bit of good-natured editing. Then I released the work to the general public and suddenly every booze-filled newspaper editor in the country was a literary critic. They mocked the president to the point where I was forced to step forward and admit that I had done a little bit of tinkering. Coolidge withdrew from the assignment.

A year after the president died, in 1934, I asked newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to publicize the contest in his chain of journals. He agreed and even said that he would offer cash and scholorhips for prize. Alas, the Rushmore Commission expressed reservations because the law expressly stated the Coolidge must write the text. Helloooooo, he’s dead.

Luckily, the contest was announced in the Hearst papers before the commission could officially act. The commissioners wisely decided to keep the legal issue quiet and deal with the problem if it came up.

Meanwhile, President Franklin Roosevelt accepted Borglum’s invitation to head a judging committee to include Eleanor Roosevelt, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, and other VIPs. The contest was extremely popular (one estimate put the number of entries at 100,000) and Mt. Rushmore was national news.

The judges named winner in several age groups. The college edition winner was William Burkett of Nebraska. His scholarship allowed him to go to college and he later became a successful businessman in California. I was pleased when he later said that he owed his success to the Rushmore Entablature Contest and wished to be buried near the monument.

When I received the bundle of winning entries by post, I was horrified and rejected them all. I decided that if you want to get something done, you have to do it yourself and began working on the text myself. But when World War II broke out, Congress was in no mood to provide me with the additional funds necessary to carve the entablature and so the idea was shelved.

This news item really frosted my blasting caps until I realized it was someone’s idea of satire?

I just realized this. Do you know what I was doing 75 years ago today? I was rushing around like crazy trying to make sure that Washington’s head would be finished in time for a big July 4 dedication at the park. That was one big task. Did you know that the Sphinx in Egypt would fit in the space between the end of the nose and the eyebrow?

I was born in St. Charles, Idaho on March 25, 1867, and at the age of seven moved to Nebraska. My father was a Danish Latter-Day Saint who practiced plural marriage in backwater Idaho. I spent time in Paris, training under the watchful eye of Aguste Rodin.

I carved big things my whole life. My sculpture of Abe Lincoln’s head can be found in the Capitol Rotunda and was carved from six tons of granite. In 1908, I won a contest to carve a statue of General Philip Sheridan in Chicago.

In 1915, the Daughters of the Confederacy hired me to carve a 70-foot statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee into the site of Stone Mountain, Georgia, a project financed by the Ku Klux Klan. It didn’t take me long to realize that Lee would look like a postage stamp on the side of Stone Mountain and so I convinced them to include Jefferson Davis, and ‘Stonewall’ Jackson riding around the mountain, followed by a legion of artillery troops.
After a delay caused by World War I, I began work on this unprecedented monument. After finishing the detailed model of the carving, I was unable to trace my ideas onto the massive area onto which I was working, until I developed a gigantic magic lantern to project the image onto the side of the mountain. I was so damn clever back then.

Carving officially began on June 23, 1923 Lee’s head was unveiled on Lee’s birthday January 19, 1924. It was magnificent, but I started bickering with the old bags in the DAC soon thereafter (although I never had much trouble with the fellas in the KKK). Eventually, I gave up on the project, smashed my model, and left. My work was cleared and Augustus Lukeman completed a similar project.

The good news is that the sculpting bug had bit me and I was anxious to try another large-scale piece. That’s how I ended up in South Dakota.

Doane Robinson came up with the idea for Mount Rushmore and initially suggested that it include Washington and Lincoln. But because the monument sat in the center of lands that we, how shall I say, acquired from the Indians, we decided to include Jefferson, too. Afterall, Jefferson was responsible for the Louisiana Purchase and for the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and without him, we wouldn’t own the hills. Some say that Teddy Roosevelt was added as an acknowledgement of Manifest Destiny, but to be honest, I thought we needed another face up there and knew that if we put up a monument to T.R., it would really tick off North Dakota.

Much of the work at Mount Rushmore was overseen by my son Lincoln while I was traveling the country raising funds for Mount Rushmore. Lincoln finished the season after I died in Chicago in 1941 after complications from surgery. Lincoln cleaned up the work a little, but left it the way I did, which is to say, “marvelous”.

I am buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale in the Memorial Court of Honor. My dear wife, Mary Montgomery Williams Borglum, is interred alongside me.

After 41 years of silence, there are a few things I want the world to know:

1.) Stop naming every crappy tourism store in the Black Hills “Rushmore this” or “Rushmore that”. This is one of the greatest monuments in the world, a modern wonder. If what you sell can’t stand on its own merits, then you ought not be in business.

2.) I’m not too pleased about Mt. Rushmore sharing the new state quarter with a pheasant. The pheasant is an import from China and Rushmore is American-made.

3.) Pick up your garbage when you leave the monument, dammit.

4.) I never intended for the Black Hills to be a sculpture garden and I don’t like the giant concrete dinosaurs scattered about the region. But I am a fan of Crazy Horse monument and think every effort should be made to get it finished. I spent far too many years running around the countryside with hat in hand looking for the money necessary to finish Mount Rushmore. It’s sad that not once but twice in the last century, someone didn’t step forward and finance a great piece of public art. I should have accepted Coolidge’s offer to give me the full $500,000 for the monument — Sen. Norbeck was furious when I didn’t — but I was also afraid of being indebted to others.

5.) I just loved North by Northwest.

6.) No matter what anybody tells you, follow my lead and marry the first time for sex and the second time for love.

7.) Nebraska is a great place to be from.

8.) I always wondered why the name Gutzon didn’t become a crazy among new parents the way that Britney and Phoenix did.

9.) I wouldn’t do well in this politcally correct society where you subsist today. I never really thought women and men should be on equal ground. That’s why I had so much trouble with the broads in the Daughters of the Confederacy and why I was livid when someone in Congress proposed, in 1937, that Susan B. Anthony’s face be added to the monument. We had already struggled with the four president and weren’t close to being done and all of a sudden they wanted another face? Luckily, some quick thinking lawmakers added a rider to the bill requiring that any additional faces be financed privately. Show me the money! Ha. It will be another 20 years before women make as much money as men, you think they could have afforded Susan B. on Mount Rushmore back then.

10.) I always kind of liked the name, “Mt. Harney”.

A busy week at Mt. Rushmore. We always see a fair number of tourists this time of year, but on Tuesday, we also had the pleasure of hosting three impressive gentlemen from the Base Realignment and Closure Commission. They were here for libations as part of their visit to tbe Ellsworth Air Force Base.

Naturally, I’ll always think of it as the Rapid City Army Air Base because that’s what it was originally called. And I have a hard time getting used to those slick B-1 Bombers. The Rapid City Army Air Base was home to B-17s a year after history books will tell you that I expired in 1941. Sonuvabitches who flew those B-17s used to love to fly close to Mt. Rushmore while my son and his crew were finishing the work I started. They thought it was great sport, but it put my men in danger.

People might be surprised to see that I have a blog. I am a big fan of the internet because I think it finally allows a man the resources he needs to create the kind of art work that he finds fulfilling. For the last year, my creative energy has been devoted to writing. I wore myself out turning a mountain into a national treasure. Now, it feels good to just sit behind a keyboard and pontificate.