A Mom-umental Failure

The organization Calhoun founded was called the Woman's National Foundation, and chief among its bylaws was the promise to educate "women in their civil rights and duties as citizens, by giving and receiving instruction in history, civics and statescraft and all other branches helpful to good citizenship . . ."

She raised funds from wealthy donors, pooled them with her own money and in 1921 spent $80,000 on an option to buy 10 acres of prime land at Connecticut and Florida avenues NW. Known as the Dean estate, the property included a mansion that became the foundation's headquarters and was the setting for a hectic schedule of civics lessons, socials and inspirational pageants.

One of the foundation's members -- a certain Mrs. George Barnett -- proposed building a Hall of Remembrance "in memory of the achievements of American womanhood from pioneer days to the present time." There was as yet no suggestion in the proposal that being a woman was somehow synonymous with being a mother, but Calhoun's husband had an idea. Surely the most vital role that women played should be celebrated. That year, Clarence Calhoun pledged $1,000 for a marble pillar honoring his mother. A man named William Deane Ham said he would give $100 if his mother's name could be engraved second.

What loving son could resist the opportunity to enshrine forever the name of the woman who gave him life? What newspaper hack could resist leaping on the bandwagon with two thudding feet? As The Washington Post wrote in an editorial lauding the proposed monument: "No man is ever good or great but that back of him stands a great mother. The mothers of America! God bless them, every one."

Daisy Calhoun was soon to decide, however, that along with their maternal instincts, women had a less praiseworthy trait: They could be jealous, sniping harpies. "Many women are so constituted that they cannot bear to see one of their sisters, who has been on a par with them, suddenly elevated to a position of authority over them," she wrote later in her memoir, The Autobiography of a Chameleon. Other members of the Woman's National Foundation had become resentful of Calhoun's figurehead status and had, she said, set about tearing her down. The organization was dissolved in a frenzy of whispered accusations. Calhoun didn't describe the precise nature of those accusations in her memoir, though she pointed out that all the foundation's funds "had been handled by a bonded officer and had been found at all points straight and correct." The italics are hers, suggesting this might have been a touchy subject.

Calhoun refused to be defeated. In February 1922, she founded a group with a more grandiose name -- the Woman's Universal Alliance-- and promised that it would build in Washington "an acropolis to the womanhood of all lands, as a tribute to the great women of the past and to the motherhood of the world." But who would design the Parthenon for this Acropolis?

That December, the Washington Star published a full-page article about the newest member of the city's art colony, a 65-year-old sculptor named William Clark Noble. Toward the end of the story were a few sentences that must have caught Calhoun's eye: "Some day, perchance, the millions of America may revere a great memorial to the American woman, which Clark Noble hopes some day to build. This has been his cherished dream of more than thirty years."

NOBLE ALWAYS TOLD PROFILERS that he had been orphaned when he was 10 months old after his sea captain father went down with all hands in a violent storm off the coast of New England. Clark, as he was called, went to live on his grandfather's farm in Gardiner, Maine, where as a young boy he spent hours playing with clay he dug from a hill at the back of the property.

At age 8, he found a biography of Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen -- this apparently being standard issue in Maine farmhouses at the time -- and read it over and over. While his family wanted him to go to sea, he refused, vowing to become an artist.

Noble worked in a Maine lumber mill until he was 14, then moved to Boston.

He was rebuffed at the sculpture and architecture firms he applied to, until a partner at an architectural fabricator asked how much he hoped to earn. "I don't want to earn anything," the teenager replied. "I would like to learn something."

Hired on the spot, Noble was soon earning $12 a week. By 17, he'd become the plant's foreman and was overseeing 84 men. He learned the rudiments of design and how to shape clay, plaster, wood, marble and bronze.