Carve All the Mountains
CARVE ALL THE MOUNTAINS MR. COOLIDGE has done a very good job in the first two chapters of the 500 word history of the United States which he is writing for Gutzon Borglum to carve upon Mount...
...no doubt the Eighteenth and the Nineteenth would have their chroniclers...
...Borglum's work is made somewhat easier by the fact that trivial faults in the carving will take care of themselves...
...Like Swift's Brobdingnagians, seen close up, the mountain visage may be full of imperfections, but from the ground appear "very well proportioned...
...Meanwhile a granitic mass becomes the repose of noble shapes, and the tablet of the living word...
...And so it is our conviction that while another man might have written as good a history of the United States on seven different topics, no one could have written a better...
...Coolidge's assignment, would insist upon including the Tenth Amendment, others the Fourteenth...
...The language is simple, stately, copious in its brevity...
...Carve all the mountains from Seattle to Key West...
...As we have carved our destinies, so let us make us a monument, in the rough, in the huge raw...
...Some, given Mr...
...By our works shall we be known...
...Some have objected that the topics chosen by Mr...
...Probably Mr...
...And for such, of course, the memorial on Mount Rushmore is intended...
...Since there is reason to suppose that our skyscrapers, country clubs and Hollywood palaces will not long outlive us, we must look elsewhere for a memorial...
...A history acceptable to North Dakota need not bind the citizens of Maine...
...For in the first place Mr...
...Besides mountain carving is a healthy and congenial occupation...
...Coolidge clings to the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, the admission of Texas, the admission of California, the settlement of the Oregon boundary and the cutting of the Panama Canal-surely that is a history good enough for one North Dakota Mountain...
...Errors, if they are less than major, will disappear...
...COOLIDGE has done a very good job in the first two chapters of the 500 word history of the United States which he is writing for Gutzon Borglum to carve upon Mount Rushmore...
...Road building is not a work for free Americans...
...Each man's true history of the United States will differ according to his special interests...
...Edison and Senator Borah can also offer courses...
...The answer ought to be "What seven topics will form such an outline...
...Free people of sovereign states," writes Mr...
...It would have its desirable economic results: solve our unemployment problem for the next ten years without recourse to such dangerous expedients as road building...
...In the second place, the words will not be helped out by their setting...
...A nation-wide devotion to mountain carving would do more than satisfy our vanity...
...It is hard work: drill and chip, hour after hour, day after day, but it fills the lungs with clean air, and exposes the skin to the beneficent rays of a sun which is ultra-violet at heart...
...Coolidge could not take advantage of any short-cuts by way of allusions which might be perfectly clear to us, but unintelligible to the Martians, or the people of an age so remote from ours as to have no more complete an idea of us than we have of the mound-builders...
...Let other histories be carved on other mountains...
...Coolidge, and that is our clew...
...Coolidge...
...After a careful reading we should say that his task has been more difficult than that which now confronts the sculptor...
...The spirit of our age is too big and too vital to be set down in miniature on ivory, cameo and cherrystone...
...The invention of the cotton gin, the discovery of gold, the birth of Henry Ford, the Emancipation Proclamation, the acquisition of Alaska, the Indian Wars in the seventies, the dime novel, the nickle cigar, the Latin immigrations, the Federal Reserve Act, the war to end war, Muscle Shoals and Boulder Dam-somewhere in the United States are men who would place these things in a shorter than the Coolidge history...
...Coolidge, or chosen for him, do not constitute an adequate outline of the history of the United States...
...Coolidge would be the first to agree that Mars should not take its history from him alone when Mr...
...It would have its spiritual advantages: put an end to all our internecine bickerings by uniting us in a common purpose and recreation...
...All roads lead to Rome, and we have had enough of this sort of foreign influence, insidiously exerted...
...No such grace as this extends to Mr...
...Neither the color of the stone (whatever it is) nor the distance at which they will be conned will lend them any excellence which they do not of themselves possess...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 25
