The Memorial

In Charlottesville, however, the focus remained all along on what the pilot had meant for the students and faculty at the university. After initial enthusiasm for a memorial on grounds, the suggestion for a similar commemoration also came from McConnell’s brother-in-law, Mitchell D. Follansbee, a prominent attorney and professor in Chicago. Alderman replied that it should be more than just a plaque, but something created by a real artist such as Saint-Gaudens, Borglum, or Taft. Students took it upon themselves to approach Gutzon Borglum and make him an offer. And so, a formal commission was agreed upon by that summer. Alderman remained deeply involved in the design of the statue all along, even promoting Borglum to McConnell’s mother and suggesting ideas to the artist for how the sculpture should look, something dignified in uniform. Eventually, Borglum would come to the main campus to pick a site just off the Lawn that would be near where the eventual Alderman Library would be built years later.¹ The sculptor had already done some sculpture for the university in the rebuilding of the portico of the famous rotunda. His final design for “The Aviator,” his tribute to McConnell, imagined the airman as Icarus, flying free from his prison with wings of wax. The figure itself is a Beaux Arts interpretation of Classical themes, like much of Borglum’s earlier work, but it is also an unusual piece for him in its dramatic flair of outstretched wings and the struggle for height. A modest codpiece is the only reference to modern tastes, but this too has an individual style that separates the sculpture from other work of the time and from traditional funeral sculpture. Borglum, himself an early member of the national Aero Club,² had written a decade earlier, “But you must speak your soul’s cry and if your heart is right, it will be our nation’s cry and we will all understand.”³ He thought that artists should not only give up on imitating European style but also live full, dramatic lives that would come through in their work. “The Aviator” clearly seeks to express that. The bottom portion of the monument has much more concrete references to McConnell and modern life, with biplanes carved into the foundation stone and a hemisphere of bronze showing storm-tossed waves and a dramatic Borglum signature. It would take a deeper analysis to discuss the meaning of the prison from which the figure is trying to escape, but it is easy to imagine the ambitious pilot getting too close to the sun in his love of flight, only for his young dreams to be smashed. Later works by Borglum would have more commentary about modernity, but shortly after finishing the “The Aviator” he turned most of his attention for the rest of his career to gigantic monuments that expressed their American spirit in size: the Confederate monument of Stone Mountain in Georgia and Mount Rushmore.