In one of his last Presidential acts Calvin Coolidge appointed ten men and one woman as the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission: John A. Boland, Rapid City, South Dakota; Charles R. Crane, New York City; Joseph S. Cullinan, Houston, Texas; C. M. Day, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; D. B. Gurney, Yankton, South Dakota; Hale Holden, Chicago; Frank O. Lowden, Oregon, Illinois; Julius Rosenwald, Chicago; Fred W. Sargent, Evanston, Illinois; William Williamson, Rapid City, South Dakota; and Mrs. Lorine Jones Spoonts, Corpus Christi, Texas. At their first meeting, called by President Hoover in the White House in June 1929, J. S. Cullinan was elected president of the commission and John A. Boland chairman of the executive committee. Work on Mount Rushmore began at once. Some people remember 1929 because of renewed hope that the great memorial would be finished. But most of the rest of the United States recall it as the year that started the big depression. Contributions came in slowly; then they stopped. Cullinan, with the blessing of President Herbert Hoover, organized the Rushmore National Memorial Society of the Black Hills to handle advertising, fund raising, memberships, management of concessions, maintenance of the park area, publicity and other matters not directly connected with the building of the memorial. Memberships were set at $100 apiece, which brought in $6,000, and that was the biggest sum that anyone in the undertaking saw for a long time. Then there was the matter of a suitable inscription. The idea of such explanatory matter to accompany the carved figures had been set forth in the Congressional bill. It had been discussed by the sculptor and President Coolidge in the summer of 1927 and again when the pair met two years later in Texas. Borglum asked of the ex-President some eight or nine terse paragraphs covering the territorial expansion of the republic and starting with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The available space on the mountain gave room for about 375 words in letters three feet high. If reduced to two and a half feet, there would be room for 475 words. Reporters spread word throughout the country that Coolidge was writing a history of the United States in 500 words. He denied it. Gutzon wrote a letter to Mr. Coolidge after that restating what he wanted. He was about to dress the mountainside for the entablature, he said, and would appreciate some copy. Mr. Coolidge sent the two paragraphs which read: _The Declaration of Independence_--The eternal right to seek happiness through self-government and the divine duty to defend that right at any sacrifice. _The Constitution_--Charter of perpetual union of free people of sovereign states establishing a government of limited powers under an independent President, Congress and Court, charged to provide security for all citizens in their enjoyment of liberty, equality and justice under the law.