Art: Big Lincoln

High above the pine slopes of South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore one day last week a great U. S. flag slowly furled, disclosing the stone carved face of Abraham Lincoln as it would have appeared had that President been 465 ft. tall. Measuring 66 ft. from chin to crown, Lincoln’s was the third face to be unveiled in Mountain Carver Gutzon Borglum’s huge and heroic Mount Rushmore Memorial. George Washington’s was dedicated in 1927 at ceremonies attended by President Coolidge, Thomas Jefferson’s last year before President Roosevelt. Last week the chief dignitary in the crowd of 5,000 Dakotans and tourists at the unveiling was Nebraska’s Senator Edward Raymond Burke, whose dedicatory address was a scorching attack on the Roosevelt Court Plan.

Begun with State funds in 1927 and carried forward by Congressional appropriations, the Mount Rushmore Memorial has long been Sculptor Borglum’s biggest, most continuing job, resumed every summer after winters spent on jobs in Texas and intermittent work on Georgia’s Confederate Memorial (Stone Mountain) where active operations long since came to a halt. But after ten years of swinging his stocky figure in a leather sling up Mount Rushmore’s cliffs, supervising workmen with jackhammers and dynamite, 66-year-old Sculptor Borglum has that memorial near completion. The only remaining Presidential head, that of Theodore Roosevelt, has already been roughed in. His final task will be finding a suitable historical inscription. The 500-word history of the U. S. submitted by President Coolidge was edited so extensively by Sculptor Borglum that Mr. Coolidge withdrew it in a huff. ”Posterity,” says Gutzon Borglum, “will hold me responsible for it,whether I write it or not, and I want it to be right.”