One Summer: America, 1927

both he and Coolidge were back in Washington in September, though other sources say they met sooner. When at last they caught up, Hoover, looking for clarity and perhaps even a kind of blessing, asked if Coolidge thought he should run. To which all Coolidge would say was ‘Why not?’
    If Coolidge secretly hoped that he would be implored by his party to stay on, that never happened, and if it bothered him he never indicated it. All that can be said is that he declined to endorse Hoover or any other candidate on the grounds that people should make up their own minds. He also, at once, looked much more relaxed and even amiable than he had in a long time.
    Within a couple of days he was happily allowing himself to be inducted into the Sioux Indian nation as an honorary chief with the name of Womblee Tokaha, or Leading Eagle. For this ceremony he was presented with a large feathered headdress, which he proudly donned for photographs. He looked ridiculous, but somehow enchantingly so. The nation was delighted.
     
    So high were Coolidge’s spirits that five days later he cheerfully travelled twenty-three miles into difficult back country to dedicate a seemingly hare-brained scheme on behalf of one of the most fantastically obstreperous men of the twentieth century. The scheme was Mount Rushmore. The man was Gutzon Borglum.
    Mount Rushmore was a granite outcrop so off the beaten track that no one had even noticed it until 1885, when one Charles Rushmore of New York happened to pass by on horseback and bestowed his name upon it. The idea for a mighty carved monument there of four presidents’ heads originated with the state historian, Doane Robinson, who saw it as a way of attracting tourists. It would be, as Time magazine epically described it, ‘the largest piece ofsculpture ever wrought in the Christian Era’. The notion was eccentric, to put it mildly. The project had no secure funding and no government support at any level. There was no certainty that anyone could actually carve a mountainside, and the site was unreachable by road, which meant that people would struggle to see it anyway.
    Just one man on earth had the necessary skills and experience to carry out the project, but he was also one of the most hot-tempered, quixotic and maddening individuals ever to grasp a jackhammer. He was also, as it turned out, the perfect choice.
    In the summer of 1927, Gutzon Borglum was sixty-one years old. Nearly all the details of his life must be treated with a certain caution since Borglum liked to change them as time went along. He occasionally awarded himself a new year or month of birth and frequently claimed achievements that were not his to claim. In his Who’s Who entry he declared himself an aeronautical engineer. He was not. Though born in Idaho, at Great Bear Lake, in 1867, he sometimes claimed, for no evident reason, to be from California. He listed two different women as his mother, though there was a certain justification for this. His father, a Danish-born Mormon, had married two sisters. One gave birth to Borglum, but then withdrew from the family, and the other sister raised him as her own. Fiery-tempered and barrel-chested, he was pathologically pugnacious. ‘My life,’ he once reflected, ‘has been a one-man war.’
    Borglum grew up mostly in Nebraska. As a young man, he worked as a machinist and apprentice lithographer, but then decided to pursue an interest in art. He took lessons from a woman in Los Angeles named Lisa Putnam, and eventually married her, even though she was eighteen years his senior. Together they moved to Paris, where Borglum trained as a sculptor (one of his teachers was Auguste Rodin). Borglum lived in Europe for eleven years before he abandoned his wife and returned to the United States, where he quickly established himself as a sculptor.
    During the First World War, and evidently from out of nowhere, Borglum developed an obsession with inefficiencies in theaircraft industry. Without encouragement or authorization, he conducted inspections of several factories, during the course of which he actually uncovered some significant failings. President Woodrow Wilson asked him to write a report, and on the strength of this Borglum secured an office in the War Department Building in Washington, DC. Eventually Borglum made such a nuisance of himself that Wilson dismissed him, even though he actually held no position to be dismissed from.
    When the war was over, Borglum persuaded the