All in all, 1937 was a typical Borglum year. His contract with the Commission was due for revision. The matter dragged along for months before an agreement could be reached. The sculptor got no pay for all that year, and he had to pay his lawyers a quarter of what he would have received to get any contract at all. The new contract was, in the main, satisfactory. It provided that the sculptor working with the Commission should prosecute work on the memorial to a successful conclusion. Gutzon felt that nothing but his death could stop it now. In 1938 there was a tremendous rush of tourists who could hardly be accommodated. Congress appropriated $300,000 for the comfort of visitors and the finishing of the carvings. In the same year the Rushmore Commission was reorganized. Senator Key Pittman, long a friend of Rushmore, became chairman, succeeding Fred Sargent, who had died. Kent Keller, chairman of the House Library Committee, became vice-chairman. An executive office was established at Rushmore for the handling of accounts and materials. The new commission met at Rushmore in August 1938, and the sculptor made a report. He wasn’t worried about the statues any more, now that he’d hit enough rock to take Roosevelt’s face. But his plans for the future included a lot of other things, including a big storehouse, more electric power, an adequate water supply to replace the trucking of water four or five miles in cans. He said it was time to begin work on the Hall and Stairway under the figures as specified in the original contract. And he got everything but the Hall and Stairway. The President’s reorganization bill of 1939, which conferred additional control over Rushmore to the Department of the Interior, caused havoc. Work on the Hall was immediately discontinued over Gutzon’s protest. Construction of the storehouse was stopped. Lumber and materials were left strewn about to be ruined by the weather. He complained to the President and got a compromise order. The Commission was authorized to control carving and finish the storehouse. But the Commission still refused to permit Gutzon to dig his Hall. It would have been an amazing thing, this Hall, and one day possibly will be. It was to be a room cut out of the solid rock 100 × 80 × 32 feet to an arched ceiling, finished in dressed granite. Here Borglum had planned to store the records of electricity beginning with Franklin--light, heat, music, radio, telephone, telegraph and controls of power as they were used in the spread of the republic. Man’s accomplishments were to be preserved here, sealed in airtight glass cases. If such an exhibition could be provided, he declared, the world a thousand years from now would have something interesting and educational to look at.