Art: Mountain Man

Fifteen miles from Atlanta rises the bleak face of Stone Mountain. Weather-beaten tool houses and engineers' shacks balance precariously on its summit; ladders, derricks, remnants of scaffolding cling to its flank. Two sculptors have blasted and worried a hole in its face into a semblance of General Robert E. Lee on his horse, Traveller. They have left a pile of granite debris at its base which Quarryman San Venable of Atlanta, former owner of Stone Mountain, declares will take five years to remove. To Stone Mountain there returned last week Gutzon Borglum, carver of mountains.

In April 1915, Sculptor Borglum was invited to Atlanta by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to cut a ten-foot head of Lee in the face of Stone Mountain. Within three days Sculptor Borglum convinced the good ladies of the U. D. C. that what they wanted was no picayune head but a frieze, 1,300 ft. long, 200 ft. high, the biggest stonecutting ever attempted, representing Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, "Stonewall" Jackson, leading the armies of the South. Corporations were formed, the inspired U. D. C. went to work to collect money.

For 15 years, five times as long as General Lee commanded his armies, the battle of Stone Mountain has been waged between Sculptor Borglum, committees, women's clubs, politicians. At the last attempt to obtain a financial accounting from the backers of the memorial, at least $800,000 had been collected from schoolchildren, sentimentalists, and spent. The Federal Government was persuaded to issue special Stone Mountain half dollars. Of these 1,400,000 were sold at $1 each; 700,000 are stored in the Federal Reserve Bank at Atlanta. In 1925, largely as a result of a political feud between Clark Howell, publisher of the Atlanta Constitution and Political Boss Hollins Randolph, Sculptor Borglum was dismissed for incompetence, lack of progress. Sculptor Borglum destroyed his clay models in a fit of pique, was promptly indicted as a felon by an Atlanta grand jury. He removed to South Dakota, where he undertook to chisel the face of Mount Rushmore into 400-ft. statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and embellish the whole with a 500-word history of the U. S. by Calvin Coolidge.

Borglum's successor at Stone Mountain was Augustus Lukeman who promptly blasted away all the original Borglum sculpture, carved in the resulting hole another statue of General Lee and Horse Traveller before funds ran out. Then Lukeman, too, washed his hands of Stone Mountain, went north. Three months ago one Will Tuggle, Atlanta Justice of the Peace, attracted attention to Stone Mountain by scaling the back of Traveller and pouring thereon a pail of "colored brick water." The "brickwater" trickled through Traveller, made a large and ugly stain beneath, thereby proving Will Tuggle's premise that a crevice existed which might in time become a rift and finally a mountainside to carry the whole memorial down to the dust heap below (TIME, June 16).