One Summer: America, 1927 (43 page)

For Borglum, it was love at first sight. Rushmore had a noble profile and a durable surface. Geologists estimated that it would erode at a rate of no more than one inch per one hundred thousand years. In fact, this estimate proved to be true only in parts; Borglum would have to resort to a great deal of ingenuity and adaptability to realize his dream.

The budget was set at $400,000, which included a fee for Borglum of $78,000. In addition to the sculpture itself, Borglum envisioned a monumental “Hall of Records” cut into the cliff behind the presidents’ heads, reachable by a grand staircase from below. It would hold the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Sculpting a mountainside was much more a matter of engineering and pyrotechnics than of artful chiseling. Most of the features were magically blasted from the rock. Even the most delicate finishing work was done with pneumatic drills. The ambition was staggering. The four faces that greet the visitor today are each more than sixty feet high. The mouths are eighteen feet wide, the noses twenty feet long. You could insert a car lengthwise into each eye socket.

The possibility of a miscalculated blast turning one of the presidents into a noseless sphinx kept interest high, and the fact that Borglum looked and acted at least slightly mad, and was always difficult to work with, ensured constant press attention. In fact, mistakes did happen. Jefferson’s nose developed an ominous crack, so the face had to be “reset” at a different angle and many feet farther into the stone. Finding sufficient runs of good stone was one of the biggest challenges. The orientations of the four heads—each looking in a different direction, Jefferson tucked almost impishly behind Washington—was dictated by the availability of workable stone. Most of Washington’s face is about thirty feet
in from the original surface; Jefferson’s is twice that. Altogether, Borglum and his workers removed four hundred thousand tons of rock to create their heroic composition.

The greatest problem was financing. The frugal legislature of South Dakota declined to appropriate a penny for the project. Private contributors proved only slightly more generous. In consequence, work often came to a standstill. In the end, most of the cost was borne by the federal government, but even so it took fourteen years to complete the job, about twice as long as necessary in terms of just getting the work done. Among those donating money were Charles Rushmore, now a wealthy lawyer in New York, who sent $5,000.

For his subjects Borglum selected Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and—to widespread consternation—Theodore Roosevelt, who was chosen, it seems, not for his greatness but because he and Borglum had once been chums.

On the day of the dedication, all this lay some way in the future. A road was now under construction, but wasn’t anywhere near finished, which meant that the audience of about 1,500 people had to trek two miles up a steep track to attend the ceremonies. President Coolidge made that part of the trip on horseback. He was dressed in a business suit, but wore his cowboy hat and boots. Upon arriving, Coolidge impressed everybody by drinking from a community dipper. As part of the ceremonies, engineers laid explosives into the bases of trees lining his approach route and gave him a twenty-one-stump salute. Speeches were made and a flag was raised, and then Borglum was lowered by rope onto the face of Rushmore, where he bored some holes with a pneumatic drill. Borglum’s brief labors didn’t produce anything recognizable, but it did represent the symbolic beginning of work, and everyone went away happy.

Borglum and Coolidge got along fine. Borglum intended to include beneath the heads of the presidents a vast inscription, called “The Entablature,” which would encapsulate in five hundred words the history of the United States, carved in letters so large that they could be read three miles away. At the dedication ceremony, Borglum impulsively offered the task to Coolidge, who accepted with uncustomary enthusiasm.

Coolidge gave the matter much thought and effort over the following
months, but when at last he submitted his compositions they proved to be hopelessly unusable. Most read more like preparatory notes than considered text. Here was Coolidge on the Constitution: “The constitution—charter of perpetual union of free people of sovereign states establishing a government of limited powers—under an independent President, Congress and Court, charged to provide security for all citizens in their enjoyment of liberty, equality and justice under the law.” The Entablature proposal was quietly dropped, to Coolidge’s supreme annoyance. But in the summer of 1927 all that was in the future, too, and the president and Borglum parted great friends.

Back at the Game Lodge, waiting on Coolidge’s desk on his return from Mount Rushmore was an appeal for clemency for Sacco and Vanzetti. He ignored it.

Charles Lindbergh’s tour continued. On August 10 he flew into Detroit, where Henry and Edsel Ford took time off from designing and testing the new Model A to go up for short spins in the
Spirit of St. Louis
—an honor accorded few others. Although the Ford Company manufactured planes, neither Henry nor Edsel had ever been up in an airplane before. Because there wasn’t a passenger seat, Henry Ford, like all other passengers, had to sit on the armrest, more or less doubled up. Back on the ground, Henry boasted that he had “handled the stick” for a while, and looked awfully pleased with himself. Asked by newsmen about progress on the secret new car, Edsel said that things were going so well that it was ready to go into production. It isn’t clear if he was being optimistic or deluded, but in either case he was quite wrong. Production was still some months off.

After a day off in Detroit spent mostly with his mother, Lindbergh continued west across Michigan and onward to Illinois on August 13. Among those who may well have turned out to watch him pass over, and possibly even joined the crowds at Benton Harbor, where Lindbergh made a brief stop, were the Anti-Saloon League’s Wayne B. Wheeler and his wife and her father, who were vacationing together at the Wheelers’ lakeside cottage at Little Sable Point on Lake Michigan.

What is known is that while Mrs. Wheeler was preparing to cook
dinner at the cottage that evening, her oil stove exploded as she lit it and she was drenched from head to toe in flaming oil. Mrs. Wheeler’s eighty-one-year-old father rushed in from a neighboring room and suffered a fatal heart attack at the sight of his daughter in flames. Wayne Wheeler, who had been resting upstairs, arrived a moment later. He stifled the blaze with a blanket and summoned an ambulance, but his wife’s burns were too severe and she died that night in the hospital. The shock of the incident was more than Wheeler could bear. Three weeks later, he suffered a heart attack of his own and died.

With Wheeler dead, Prohibition lost its spirit and momentum, as well as its chief fund-raiser. Within three years, the Anti-Saloon League would be so hard up that it would have to cancel the newspaper subscription at its Washington office. Within six years, Prohibition was dead.

On August 18, an act more important than anyone at the time appreciated, both in symbolic terms and practical ones, took place in Cleveland, Ohio, when the last piece of steel framework was hoisted into place on the massive new Union Terminal construction project. There had never been anything quite like it. As well as a spanking new railroad station, the complex incorporated a hotel, post office, department store, shops, restaurants, and a fifty-two-story office building, the tallest building built in America that year (and second tallest anywhere until the Chrysler Building went up). All the component parts of the project were physically interlinked, something that had never been done before.

Union Terminal was as notable for who built it as for what it was. The developers were brothers Oris and Mantis Van Sweringen. Of all the business titans America produced in the 1910s and 1920s, none were more extraordinary or are now more forgotten. Born into modest but respectable circumstances in Cleveland—their father was a bookkeeper—they started off as small-time property developers, but they plugged away and branched out into other areas until by the 1920s they were two of the richest men in America. They were also by a long shot two of the strangest.

No one knew where their odd first names came from. Their parents
had evidently just liked the sounds and made names out of them. The brothers were pale and small and inseparable. In the words of their biographer, they were “almost wholly dependent on each other.” They lived in a fifty-four-room mansion but slept side by side in twin beds in the master bedroom. They didn’t smoke, drink, or stay up late. They were pathologically shy. They took no part in public life and avoided having their pictures taken. They never named any of their projects after themselves. They didn’t attend the topping-out ceremony for the Union Terminal on August 18 or the dinner afterward.

Oris was three years older than Mantis but was very much the junior partner of the relationship. Mantis essentially ran his life for him—packed his bags, looked after his pocket money, kept track of his appointments. Oris slept a great deal; twelve hours a night was usual. Mantis sometimes rode horses, but otherwise neither man had any known interests. They never took vacations.

Their estate, called Daisy Hill, spread over 477 acres. The house had eighty telephone lines to keep them in touch with their business empire. Among the other rooms were two dining rooms where no guest was ever entertained, a gym that was forever undisturbed, and twenty-three bedrooms that never received a visitor. They had no friendships, though Mantis did eventually fall for a widow named Mary Snow and enjoyed a relationship with her, which he somehow kept secret from Oris. A field on the property was used sometimes for polo matches and more occasionally as an airstrip. According to the brothers’ biographer, Herbert H. Harwood Jr., Charles Lindbergh landed there once and gave Mantis a ride while Oris remained on the ground and fretted, but Harwood didn’t say when this was. It wasn’t the summer of 1927.

If Mantis didn’t invent the leveraged buyout, he became one of its first great masters. Essentially the brothers borrowed heavily to acquire a business, then used existing businesses as collateral to borrow and acquire still more. Their business was a tangled network of interconnected holdings, which by the late 1920s consisted of 275 separate subsidiaries. They had so many companies that they struggled to come up with original names for them all, so that, for instance, they owned a
Cleveland Terminals Building Company, a Terminal Building Company, and a Terminal Hotels Company. They bought the Nickel Plate Railroad for $8.5 million, but put up just $355,000 of their own money—and all of that was borrowed from the Guardian Bank of Cleveland (which eventually went out of business without being repaid a penny). They had built this colossus with a personal investment of less than $20 million, nearly all of it borrowed. Nobody did leveraged buyouts better than the Van Sweringens.

Mantis’s real passion, however, was railroads. The industry was incredibly fragmented: in 1920, America had almost 1,100 different railroad companies. Many lines went from nowhere much to nowhere much, either because the towns or industries along the way never developed as expected or because the original builders never managed to extend the lines to the main metropolises. The Lake Erie & Western ran from Sandusky, Ohio, to Peoria, Illinois; the Pere Marquette wandered confusedly around the upper Midwest, as if looking for a lost item. These forlorn lines—“orphans” as they were known in the trade—were generally pretty easy to acquire, and the Van Sweringens did so with enthusiasm. They loved to acquire railroads. When Oris was asked who his favorite authors were, he replied brightly, “Rand and McNally.”

Within eight years the Van Sweringens had built up the third-largest railway empire in the country. By 1927, they controlled almost thirty thousand miles of rail line, about 11 percent of the national total, with routes stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Salt Lake City. Along the way they also scooped up warehouses, ferries, and the Greenbrier resort hotel in West Virginia. At their peak, they had one hundred thousand employees and assets of between $2 billion and $3 billion. Their personal wealth was put at something over $100 million—from almost nothing ten years earlier.

While building their empire, they also quietly but significantly changed the world. At a place called Turkey Ridge outside Cleveland they built a new town from scratch and called it Shaker Heights. Shaker Heights was the first planned dormitory community in America, and as such it became the model on which nearly all other suburbs were built.
In like manner, the Union Terminal complex neatly anticipated the modern American shopping mall.

Unfortunately, their empire was essentially an inverted triangle. If any part of it at the bottom failed, the whole mighty edifice would come tumbling down, and that is just what happened. Though they could have had no idea of it at the time, the topping out of the Union Terminal complex on August 18 was in every sense the high point of their careers.

When the Great Depression came they were inescapably exposed. Their money was nearly all in railroads and real estate—two of the most vulnerable places to put it—and they were grossly overextended in any case. They had bought Missouri Pacific stock at $101, but by the early 1930s it was trading at $1.50. They were unable to pay off bonds that came due or interest on loans. The Missouri Pacific and the Chicago & Eastern Illinois failed and brought the whole precarious enterprise down with them.

In the end, nobody better personified the giddy recklessness and
folie de grandeur
of the 1920s than the Van Sweringens. The stress and disappointment proved too much for Mantis, who died of heart failure at fifty-four in 1935. Oris sat with him for the last ninety minutes of his life. Mantis was conscious, but they didn’t exchange a word. Mantis’s estate was valued at $3,067.85, half of which consisted of seven horses. Lost without his brother, Oris died eleven months and ten days later of heart failure of his own. His estate was worth even less than his brother’s.