Gutzon changed the wording slightly. He cut out the word _through_ before _self-government_ in the first paragraph. In the second he eliminated the phrase _under the law_ after the word _justice_. Mr. Coolidge objected to the editing. The newspapers raised another storm. Coolidge complained of the publicity. The sculptor assumed all blame and got this somewhat annoyed reply from Coolidge: I know that you are a great artist. What I meant to convey is that I do not wish to be engaged in putting up a monument to myself. I wished my name kept off the mountain. I do not see any reason for your committee giving the press any statement of any kind in relation to me. I wish you every success.... Then there were letters to the _Times_, and essay contests in the newspapers, and speeches by high-school students, and resolutions by the Rushmore Commission. But in the end there was not one single contribution of the required length. Flaws in the granite caused a shift of figures that left no room for the entablature; and the Commission set the whole matter aside for future reference. CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE _CARVING THE MOUNTAIN_ Some sons of God must stand upon the mountaintops And there through all the deathless generations guard The continents, and guide the gracious stars of fate: So God made mountains for the throne of these. Upon this mountaintop America enshrines Her sturdy sires, exalts her noblest knight. Where children of the earth may lift appraising eye And feel his virtue while his strength invests their souls. --DOANE ROBINSON Gutzon Borglum carved a mountain. And as the years went by he became a dynamiter, a geologist, a practical miner and, very definitely, an engineer. He got used to crawling about on the face of a cliff, and in time he used to say that his sculpture was not greatly different from the cutting of a large block of stone in a studio. But, of course, the stone of the mountainside wasn’t dressed or prepared. It couldn’t be shifted into the light or away from it. The amount of stone to be removed was prodigious, and injury of the material left for carving was always a serious possibility. How one of these projects ever got itself done is something that he wasted thousands of words trying to explain. When Gutzon first used dynamite for carving on Stone Mountain it had been taken by the world as a fantastic idea. But there was no coyness about its use when it came to Rushmore. It was laid out there in all proportions and all quantities. The sculptor had experts who knew what could be done with a six-inch stick, or half an ounce of it, or with a percussion cap alone. And they had to be in touch not only with the drilling of the moment but with the design of the whole monument to avoid the chance of an overcharge at one point injuring stone at a distance.