Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon BorglumCasey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
General
Give the man room : $b The story of Gutzon Borglum
Casey, Robert J. (Robert Joseph)
Borglum, Gutzon, 1867-1941
Gutzon addressed mass meetings from the Town Hall steps. He spoke on
street corners and in front of the huge Yale and Towne Lock factory
where men and women were going home from work. He got to be a ready
speaker and learned to think on his feet. One incident was memorable.
Some heckler had asked why Roosevelt had suddenly changed his mind on a
certain question. “Don’t you know,” Gutzon shot back at him, “that Saint
Paul lived to be fifty-two before he suddenly changed his whole way of
life and became a Christian?”
People in Stamford still remember the picturesque and effective fight
carried on by the Progressives under the leadership of the imaginative
Gutzon. On one occasion a torchlight procession was arranged in which
the Borglum donkey, “Shamrock,” a large, gray, intelligent creature,
appeared as a symbol of both the old parties, wearing on his rear end an
elephant head, the trunk of which concealed his tail.
Two Stamford citizens, who were Gutzon’s chief lieutenants in the fray
and remained his friends ever after, were featured in the press of the
day as “Handsome Harry” Abbot and “Young” Arthur Crandall. The latter
lived and worked with Borglum at one time and never got over his
youthful reverence for Gutzon, which was not diminished by close
contact. When he heard this book was being written he said: “Don’t
forget to mention his real humility,” which was a side of the sculptor’s
nature revealed only to those who knew him best.
Joseph Alsop was state chairman of the Progressive Party of Connecticut,
and Gutzon developed a deep friendship with him. Mr. Whittaker, editor
of the Stamford _Advocate_ for many years and a reactionary and
autocratic individual, came to the Borglum farm one night about midnight
to try to influence the sculptor to change his attitude. The mayor of
the city, Charles P. Rowell, came out at dusk, wearing a big black hat
and a long cape, like a villain in a play.
He would not come into the house, where someone might hear what he had
to say, but asked Gutzon to come outside. They talked by the footbridge
on the way to the studio. Mr. Rowell tried to make a deal, and when the
sculptor refused he exclaimed with conscious drama, “Then it’s a
fight--a fight to the finish!”
“Yes,” agreed Gutzon solemnly, “and a sword to the hilt!”
A few days after the election S. E. Vincent, the newly elected
Progressive congressman, wrote to Gutzon.
With election over it is now time to figure up and take inventory
of conditions. If I have a clear idea of how the Progressive party
stands, that party has every reason to be proud of the results
accomplished in a campaign of only ninety days, without funds or
party machinery, with all the papers against our cause and some of
them not overcareful about telling the whole truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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