Mountain in Labor

Michelangelo was dead, so in 1916 the United Daughters of the Confederacy hired Gutzon Borglum. All they wanted him to construct at Stone Mountain, an island-size rock five miles round and 825 feet tall near Atlanta, was the world's biggest sculpture: a memorial to the Confederacy.

Borglum had big ideas too. At first, he planned to carve nearly the whole Confederate army on the mountain. He worked on models, and in 1923 was given a $250,000 contract for the first seven figures. But he was thrown off the job in 1925 because his patrons felt he was not working as hard as he might. Borglum retreated in pique to hack out the second largest sculpture in the world--Mount Rushmore.

Another sculptor, Augustus Lukeman, took over. He began by blasting off the mountain any Borglum work that interfered with his own. Then he banged away at the Georgia granite until funds ran out in mid-1928. He died in 1935. The unfinished memorial was left to the wind and wildlife.

In 1958 the State of Georgia bought the rock, and in 1963 a new sculptor, Walter Hancock of Massachusetts, was hired. Plans for the project had shrunk by then to a mere three figures on horseback. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, their two-foot stone eyeballs popping and their megalithic hats held reverently over their huge hearts, rode across the cliff face on horses that seemed to have been resurrected from a dim memory of the Parthenon frieze by the resident soapcutter of Forest Lawn.

But it was still impressive--at least to Hancock, who is his own best publicist. "There really is no valid comparison to this work. The Stone Mountain carving is bigger than any other in the world," he says. Lee's horse, Traveller, is 147 ft. from nose to tail; those so inclined, says Hancock, "could ride a horse along Traveller's back." Jackson's nose is 41 ft. long, one of the biggest--if not the best--noses in the history of Western art. The whole composition measures 190 ft. by 305 ft., set 400 ft. up in a carved-out area "larger than a football field." It was unveiled last week in the presence of Spiro Agnew (see THE NATION).

Those given to pessimism may reflect that after the Apocalypse, when Palazzo Strozzi, Santa Sophia and Chartres are dust and every Titian in the world has been reduced to radioactive tinder, Stone Mountain may yet survive.

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