It was the centenary of Lincoln’s birth, and Gutzon, as a matter of sentiment, asked President Theodore Roosevelt if he would let the head stand in the President’s room at the White House during Lincoln’s birthday. Roosevelt welcomed it and after it had gone back to New York wrote to inquire what had become of it. He said he wished it could be kept in Washington permanently. The letter was brought to the attention of Eugene Meyer, Jr., who bought the colossal head and presented it to the nation. Congress, in accepting the gift, specified that it should be placed in the rotunda of the Capitol, never to be removed. As a demand for replicas began to be heard, the superintendent of the Capitol grounds allowed the sculptor to make a copy of it in plaster. Bronze duplicates of it are now at Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, Illinois, in the Hall of Fame in New York, in the University of Southern California and in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society. The sculptor made another head for himself, which is now at the Detroit Museum of Art. The carving of this head in marble, done as a labor of love, had far-reaching consequences. It brought to Gutzon friends and admirers. It led, undoubtedly, to his making the seated figure of Lincoln in front of the courthouse in Newark and finally to the carvings at Stone Mountain and Mount Rushmore. CHAPTER NINE _THE BIRTH OF A MYTH_ The building of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine at Morningside Heights, New York, might have been done for Gutzon Borglum alone. At any rate, it had his close and abiding interest for a number of years. “It is a fine example not only of medieval art but of the spirit of the early churchmen,” he said. “It is something out of another age untouched by pretentiousness and vanity.” So he was immensely pleased in 1905 when he was asked to make the statues for the structure and to supervise the carving on the Belmont chapel, the first section of the cathedral to be finished. It was a definite honor that must have been coveted by most of the sculptors in New York, and out of sheer enthusiasm for the work he agreed to make models of a hundred saints and angels. The fee wasn’t anything that could be called remunerative in itself, and Borglum was presently to learn that medievalist sculptors had about as many troubles as moderns. It was in this pious undertaking that he laid the groundwork for the first of the stories about his alleged evil temper. He was profoundly disturbed by this development because, he argued, he didn’t have any evil temper at all. He could have admitted, however, that he was saltily vigorous in defense of what he decided was right. But anyway, the longevity of what he titled an unfounded legend frequently puzzled him.