Many of those who knew him well thought he was a man of great humility. He accepted criticism with great calm and respect. He was an ideal father and husband and a pleasant, unexacting friend. That’s what those closest to him say--which is one of the things that makes Gutzon Borglum so difficult to understand. There were hundreds of people in the United States who weren’t so close to him--the ones who thought he talked only about tons of rock, and man hours, and A-rigs, and dynamite--and many of them figured him for a hard businessman with a Class “C” temper. That, unfortunately, is the picture of Gutzon that he left for himself in so many parts of this calm and pleasant land. And the worst part of it is that in many particulars it is authentic. Gutzon was intense in his work. He believed in himself. And when he ran into opposition in what he considered a perfectly obvious course, he had a devastating vocabulary and a voice like the crack of doom. He was afraid of nothing. It is odd, of course, that such a man could be a dreamer and a poet. Those who stood up to him toe to toe in bitter wrangles would never be convinced that he could see both sides of anything--that he could be tolerant and kindly. But he was a poet, and those who put flowers on his grave remember him for softness and gentleness. Once he said that a man who wasn’t a great poet could never become a great artist. He had a reverence for a child’s unspoiled outlook on life, and when asked what was his favorite poem he frequently cited Francis Thompson’s essay on Shelley and the lines that begin: “Know you what it is to be a child?” For all that he was still the man whom the hard-rock worker epitomized with the comment that he was a good stonecutter but he didn’t talk pretty. He made a lot of remarkable friends, about half of whom never knew a thing about art. They liked him personally, and when he talked they listened. Otherwise, you can’t very well explain the financing of Stone Mountain, and Mount Rushmore, the work of liaison between two great political parties, the fantastic air investigation. He knew countless people--politicians, artists, travelers, writers, soldiers, actors, cowhands, drillers, bankers--who would turn a hand for him if he asked them to. Quite likely he didn’t talk sweet to them either. “Any man, in any walk of life, has something to tell you if you’ll listen,” he once explained. And he listened. “It would be a godsend,” he mentioned when his bank balance was down nearly to zero after the Stone Mountain fiasco, “if every man had enough money so that he could do what he wanted to do.” But even then he was never able to keep what money he got. Somebody else always needed it. Of his conflicting characteristics his friend “Missy” Meloney, the editor, once wrote this to him: