John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (March 25, 1867 – March 6, 1941) was an American sculptor best known for his work on Mount Rushmore. He is also associated with various other public works of art across the U.S., including Stone Mountain in Georgia, statues of Union General Philip Sheridan in Washington, D.C., and in Chicago, as well as a bust of Abraham Lincoln exhibited in the White House by Theodore Roosevelt and now held in the United States Capitol crypt in Washington, D.C.
The son of Danish immigrants, John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was born in 1867 in St. Charles, in what was then thought to be in Utah but was later determined to be in Idaho Territory. Borglum was a child of Mormon polygamy. His father, Jens Møller Haugaard Børglum (1839–1909), came from the village of Børglum in northwestern Denmark. He had two wives when he lived in Idaho: Gutzon's mother, Christina Mikkelsen Børglum (1847–1871), and her sister Ida, who was Jens's first wife.
Jens Borglum decided to leave the LDS Church and moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where polygamy was both illegal and taboo. Jens Borglum had worked mainly as a woodcarver before his decision to attend the Saint Louis Homeopathic Medical College in St. Louis, Missouri. At this point "Jens and Christina divorced, the family left the LDS church, and Jens, Ida, their children, and Christina's two sons, Gutzon and Solon, moved to St. Louis, where Jens earned a medical degree." Upon his graduation from the Missouri Medical College in 1874, Dr. Borglum moved the family to Fremont, Nebraska, where he established a medical practice. Gutzon Borglum remained in Fremont until 1882, when his father enrolled him in St. Mary's College, Kansas.
After a brief stint at Saint Mary's College, Gutzon Borglum moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where he apprenticed in a machine shop and graduated from Creighton Preparatory School.
In New York City, he sculpted saints and apostles for the new Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1901; in 1906 he had a group sculpture accepted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the first sculpture by a living American the museum had ever purchased—and made his presence further felt with some portraits. He also won the Logan Medal of the Arts. His reputation soon surpassed that of his younger brother Solon Borglum, already an established sculptor.
In 1889, Borglum married his painting instructor, Elizabeth Putnam Janes, who was 18 years his senior. After divorcing his first wife, Borglum married Mary Montgomery Williams, on May 20, 1909, with whom he had three children, including a son, Lincoln, and a daughter, Mary Ellis (Mel) Borglum Vhay.
Commissioned to design David Livingstone Centenary medal
According to the American Geographical Society website, "The David Livingstone Centenary Medal was founded at the initiative of the Hispanic Society of America in March 1913". The site goes on to state "Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mt. Rushmore, was the designer of this unusually beautiful example of medallic art." The same website page notes that Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the medal in 1917.
Borglum was active in the committee that organized the New York Armory Show of 1913, the birthplace of modernism in American art. By the time the show was ready to open, however, Borglum had resigned from the committee, feeling that the emphasis on avant-garde works had co-opted the original premise of the show and made traditional artists like himself look provincial. He moved into an estate in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1914 and lived there for 10 years. He sheltered Czechoslovak Legion members on his land at Stamford in 1917.
Borglum was an active member of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons (the Freemasons), raised in Howard Lodge #35, New York City, on June 10, 1904, and serving as its Worshipful Master 1910–11. In 1915, he was appointed Grand Representative of the Grand Lodge of Denmark near the Grand Lodge of New York. He received his Scottish Rite Degrees in the New York City Consistory on October 25, 1907. He was friends with Theodore Roosevelt for many years and during the 1912 United States presidential election Borglum was a very active campaign organizer and member of the Bull Moose Party.
While it has been claimed that Borglum was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, an article in the Smithsonian Magazine denies that there is proof that he officially joined the KKK. That said, he became "deeply involved in Klan politics", attending Klan rallies and serving on Klan committees. In 1925, having only completed the head of Robert E. Lee, Borglum was dismissed from the Stone Mountain project, with some holding that it came about due to infighting within the KKK, with Borglum involved in the strife. Later, he stated "I am not a member of the Kloncilium, nor a knight of the KKK", but Howard Shaff and Audrey Karl Shaff claim that "that was for public consumption". The museum at Mount Rushmore displays a letter to Borglum from D. C. Stephenson, the infamous Klan Grand Dragon who later was convicted of the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer. The 8 in × 10 in (20 cm × 25 cm) portrait contains the inscription "To my good friend Gutzon Borglum, with the greatest respect." Correspondence from Borglum to Stephenson during the 1920s detailed a deep racist conviction in Nordic moral superiority and strict immigration policies.
A fascination with gigantic scale and themes of heroic nationalism suited his extroverted personality. His head of Abraham Lincoln, carved from a six-ton block of marble, was exhibited in Theodore Roosevelt's White House and can be found in the United States Capitol Crypt in Washington, D.C. A "patriot", believing that the "monuments we have built are not our own", he looked to create art that was "American, drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement", according to a 1908 interview. Borglum was highly suited to the competitive environment surrounding the contracts for public buildings and monuments, and his public sculptures are found all around the United States.
In 1908, Borglum won a competition for an equestrian statue of the Civil War General Philip Sheridan to be placed in Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C. A second version of General Philip Sheridan was erected in Chicago, Illinois, in 1923. Winning this competition was a personal triumph for him because he won out over sculptor J. Q. A. Ward, a much older and more established artist and one whom Borglum had clashed with earlier in regard to the National Sculpture Society. At the unveiling of the Sheridan statue, one observer, President Theodore Roosevelt (whom Borglum was later to include in the Mount Rushmore portrait group), declared that it was "first rate"; a critic wrote that "as a sculptor Gutzon Borglum was no longer a rumor, he was a fact".
President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an address on May 3, 1934, dedicating a statue of William Jennings Bryan created by Borglum. This Bryan statue by Borglum originally stood in Washington, D.C., but was later displaced by highway construction and moved by an Act of Congress in 1961 to Salem, Illinois, Bryan's birthplace.
In 1925, the sculptor moved to Texas to work on the monument to trail drivers commissioned by the Trail Drivers Association. He completed the model in 1925, but due to lack of funds it was not cast until 1940, and then was only a fourth its originally planned size. It stands in front of the Texas Pioneer and Trail Drivers Memorial Hall next to the Witte Museum in San Antonio. Borglum lived at the historic Menger Hotel, which in the 1920s was the residence of a number of artists. He subsequently planned the redevelopment of the Corpus Christi waterfront; the plan failed, although a model for a statue of Christ intended for it was later modified by his son and erected on a mountaintop in South Dakota. While living and working in Texas, Borglum took an interest in local beautification. He promoted change and modernity, although he was berated by academicians.
Borglum was initially involved in the carving of Stone Mountain in Georgia. Borglum's nativist stances made him seem an ideologically sympathetic choice to carve a memorial to heroes of the Confederate States of America, planned for Stone Mountain, Georgia. In 1915, coinciding with the Klan-glorifying, highly successful The Birth of a Nation, he was approached by the United Daughters of the Confederacy with a project for sculpting a 20-foot (6 m) high bust of General Robert E. Lee on the mountain's 800-foot (240 m) rockface. Borglum accepted, but told the committee, "Ladies, a twenty-foot head of Lee on that mountainside would look like a postage stamp on a barn door."