Arts: Glum Borglum

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"Sad, destroying fact ... no funds . . association has shrunk. . . ." Such phrases came, last week, from the lips of Gutzon Borglum, famed sculptor. He, glum, was deploring the withdrawal of public support from the great memorial to the Confederacy which, under his direction, has been rising on the face of Stone Mountain, Ga. (TIME, Aug. 13, 1923; May 26, 1924). Those two proud gentlemen, Generals Lee and Jackson, stand raised among their armies on the mountain's craggy front, half- formed. In the U. S. mint, 5,000,000 half-dollar coins, with Lee and Jackson riding their horses across one side, and an inscription commemorating the valor of Southern arms on the other, await distribution. There are no funds to bring Lee and Jackson from the rock, no funds to distribute the coins which, designed by Sculp tor Borglum, are being minted by the U. S. to stimulate interest in the me morial. Said Mr. Borglum:

"From the very inception of this work, running hand in hand with the conception of this Southern memorial, has been the part all America has played, which is the indestructible proof of the unity of our country. My duty as a citizen of this Nation, wholly apart from the creator of this work, makes it impossible for me even to consider the abandonment of so splendid a thing. Opposition means but one thing— I must continue and fight."

From Atlanta came a statement of Colonel Hollins Randolph, President of the Memorial Association. Said he: "For more than a year the greatest problem of the Stone Mountain Memorial has been the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. . . . He loafed on the job. . . . It has been extremely difficult to get him to do any work at all on the mountain, notwithstanding the large amounts of money paid him. His main desire seems to be to get his name in the newspapers as often as possible."

John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was born in Idaho, studied art in San Francisco, in Paris, in Spain. His exhibitions in the U. S. went without recognition until, in London, the Duchess of Manchester lauded his statues and water-colors of the American Indians. He harnessed fame to his able statues of wild horses, won the gold medal in the St. Louis Exhibition of 1903, completed a statue of Lincoln (now in Newark, N. J.) of which the late Colonel Roosevelt passed the equivocal criticism: ''Why, this doesn't look like a monument at all." Always he has been active in public affairs: he helped the farmers of the Northwest when they cried for better prices, he investigated, at the request of President Wilson, inefficiencies in aircraft building during the War. Said he: "The man of position or wealth who remains passive in the public life going on about him is in the same class with the man who feigns sleep with a burglar in the room."