He built a plaster model of Corpus Christi with a fine new--and artistic--concrete promenade along the sea front, with steps down to the water’s edge, and exhibited it in the rooms of the Chamber of Commerce. He designed approaches for a new bridge to replace the old drawbridge that frequently tied up traffic for half an hour at a time. And he got a Mr. Harrington of Kansas City, a reputable bridge builder, to design a bridge. The cost of this improvement, he felt, would speedily be paid by toll collected from the passing cars. Everybody was interested in Borglum’s great enterprise. A loan project was placed before the R.F.C., which turned it over to the W.P.A., which started everything all over again. In the end the whole business got into the hands of the state W.P.A. at Fort Worth, and the water-front-bridge development was changed to a sewer project. Probably the sewer was needed and anyhow it had not been proposed by a stranger. Texas, the sculptor learned, was a place where big things were done bigly; but, nevertheless, in the accustomed fashion. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE _AND SO FORWARD_ Texas owed something to Gutzon for the suggestion of the Four-City Centennial celebration of 1936. This hundredth year that Texas had been independent of Mexican rule had to be something unique. The sculptor wrote a letter about his idea to Jesse Jones, the managing director, stating that the great fair should begin in San Antonio, the ancient Mexican capital, then proceed to Dallas and Fort Worth and end in Houston. He outlined the historical features of these cities, listed their natural advantages as exhibition towns and finished with an unusual thought: “These cities will draw enormous income from the tourist travel that the centennial will surely set in motion. For that reason all exhibition buildings should be made permanent in character, thus saving what might otherwise be considered an enormous total loss.” But though many of his suggestions were carried out, and though an art committee from each of the four cities consulted him, not one of the more than forty monuments they built was his design. The explanation is that each committee was hidebound by the idea of a competition with prizes, and Gutzon would have none of that. He worked hard for the beautification of roads in that part of Texas where the greenery gives way to the desert. He was appointed chairman of an advisory committee to supervise the spending of the W.P.A. and the Federal Highway Department funds. But local rivalries kept many a town out of funds, and the Federal Highway Department’s $5,000,000, allotted for _road beautification_ in Texas, was demanded by an influential highway engineer who outweighed Gutzon. All road funds, he declared, must be under the State Highway Department’s control; and to this simple proposition the federal government would not agree. So Texas got little, and the beautification of Texas roads was left to Texas.