Gutzon's Progress

Another milestone in the artistic progress of Gutzon Borglum, carver of mountains, was marked last week by a clash with Calvin Coolidge and a hurried meeting of the trustees of the Mount Rushmore Memorial Association in Chicago's Union League Club.

Ten months ago, when Mr. Coolidge was new to the field of belles lettres, Sculptor Borglum commissioned him to write a 500-word history of the U. S., which Sculptor Borglum would then carve beside the colossal figures of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt which he is hewing upon the austere face of Mount Rushmore, S. Dak. Discovering that the first hundred years were literally the hardest. Historian Coolidge took his time over the inscription, finally submitted a few paragraphs.

Sculptor Borglum is an artist before he is a respecter of ex-Presidents. He edited the Coolidge text, added dates, omitted phrases, inserted a reference to Christianity. Historian Coolidge refused to accept the revised version, withdrew from the Memorial Association, refused last week to comment. Sculptor Borglum was less reticent.

The only interest I have in the statement which is to be inscribed on the mountain," said he, "is that it shall be as purely as possible a digest of what the subjects mean and that it shall be in beautiful English.* Posterity will hold me responsible for it whether I wrote it or not, I want it right."

In the Union League Club the trustees of the Mount Rushmore Memorial-among them, President Fred Wesley Sargent of Chicago & Northwestern Railway, Board Chairman Julius Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck & Co., onetime Governor Frank Orren Lowden of Illinois-- met to choose a substitute historian, adjourned for a year without being able to do so. They did adopt a budget of $70,000 for 1931, promised newsgatherers that by next November the figures of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would be complete as far down as the waistcoats, that men would be at work on Abraham Lincoln.

*Latest plans for Mount Rushmore have the inscription not only in beautiful English but in beautiful Latin and in beautiful Chinese, Japanese or Sanskrit as well.

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