I attended the unveiling of the memorial to my son at the University of Virginia. I want to congratulate you on this wonderful reproduction. It is magnificently beautiful ... expressive and highly inspiring. I know of nothing in America that equals this splendid work. I believe that not only the University of Virginia but all America will regard this aviator as a triumph of art and will cherish it as a priceless possession. Then there came a committee which had thought about building a memorial to a former governor, Charles Brantley Aycock, in Raleigh, North Carolina. From Josephus Daniels came a letter enthusiastically outlining this project. Gutzon read it without much interest. The committee had decided to hold a competition but wished Borglum to submit a model before they made a decision. Gutzon replied that because Daniels asked it, he would be glad to lay aside his ideas about competitions, but that he simply did not have the time to put in the work of several days on a model that might or might not be satisfactory. “Committees do not realize,” he said, “that the making of a model is about one third of the entire work. Neither do they realize that in at least nine cases out of ten, no model is carried out as first presented. Not only the committee but the artist himself develops it.” So the committee abandoned the competition, invited the sculptor to come to Raleigh for a conference and gave him the commission the day after his arrival. He telegraphed home, “Returning this afternoon. Have contract eighteen thousand.” The family received the news with decent restraint. They knew Gutzon. He was always sanguine. A contract was always the same to him as money in the bank. The Aycock memorial was conceived by its promoters as the monument to an ideal rather than to a man. Aycock, governor of North Carolina from 1901 to 1905, had established two reforms of importance. The first was to make suffrage dependent on education. The second placed education within the reach of all, rich or poor, black or white. And the sculptor soon realized that he was going to have some trouble telling about this in a statue. Most of his correspondence was with Dr. Clarence Poe, son-in-law of Governor Aycock and editor of a widely circulated paper, _The Progressive Farmer_. He was a man of exceptional gifts, but sculpture worried him. His first worry was because Gutzon was working on a life-size model without having made a plaster cast of the small-sketch model. Gutzon wrote him a long treatise on models in which he said: