Mount Rushmore: Monument to America’s great men, or a menace?
Now, its future is in doubt.
In an era when the woke have seen fit to cut Captain James Cook off at the ankles in Melbourne, decapitate Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town, topple Christopher Columbus in Minnesota, throw Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour and demolish Ulysses S. Grant in San Francisco, Mount Rushmore has its enemies.
And some of them have their sights set on the biggest target of all: the mountainside in South Dakota where the faces of four of the greatest American presidents – in escarpment order, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln – glare across the brooding Black Hills.
One of the issues is that notwithstanding their crucial roles in the nascent republic, two of those presidents owned slaves.
It is 100 years ago this week that the US congress passed the bill that effectively gave the green light for Gutzon Borglum, the Idaho-born son of Danish immigrants, to start work on the 20m high, 62m wide panorama of American history to that point.
It has been controversial since the day it was proposed. Originally, it had not been planned to commemorate American presidents. Local historian Doane Robinson dreamt up the idea but he wanted the mountain to feature the faces of regional legends William Cody (Buffalo Bill), Red Cloud (the Lakota tribal leader famous for defeating the US Army at Fort Phil Kearny, Wyoming), sharpshooter Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Cannary), and explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark of the legendary Lewis and Clark Expedition (ordered by Jefferson after he had read a first edition of Cook’s 1784 book A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean).
Borglum, a confused, eccentric, obsessive but clever man, may not have joined the Ku Klux Klan but he was sympathetic and attended KKK rallies. He had quite a profile in Washington and had been a friend of and campaigned for president Woodrow Wilson. He reckoned that it was more likely federal funds would flow if American presidents were being immortalised grandly in granite.
While travelling the world to raise funds for the project and to varnish his own increasingly grandiose life story, he also found time to create a statue of Wilson for a grateful Poland, whose independence the president had secured and incorporated in the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson died in 1924, but Borglum had known him well. As president, Wilson has asked the sculptor, who had a deep interest in the emerging field of aeronautics, to investigate the country’s chaotic aircraft manufacturing industry. President Herbert Hoover spoke at the unveiling of Borglum’s statue of Wilson at Poznan, in Poland’s west, on July 4, 1931.
How and why the Wilson statue was destroyed within a decade is an extraordinary tale.
Borglum had close Jewish friends to whom he would send anti-Semitic diatribes. He once wrote: “Jews refuse to enter the mainstream of civilisation, to become producing members of the world community.” Yet he was horrified when he learnt of the industrial concentration camps for Jews in Europe and published fierce statements critical of Adolf Hitler. The fuhrer clearly read them. His soldiers blew up the statue when they occupied Poland and, claimed the Nazis, had its metal turned into bullets.
Hitler also ordered a placard be placed at the site that read: “The American sculptor made the legs too short, the body too long and the head too large. Such an artistic eyesore cannot continue to stand in the city.”
By then, work at Rushmore – which peaks at 1745m above sea level – was well under way. In the early years from 1927, the mountainside was largely “sculpted” with dynamite as Borglum excavated deep into Rushmore, shifting 407,000 tonnes of rock. The rock blasted from it sits beneath the carvings as a not unattractive scree slope. Borglum had planned that the figures would be standing and that not just their heads but also their upper bodies and formal coats would be included. Money was too tight for that.
The faces – sitting back about 7m from the original rock face – took shape across five years from 1934, during which time the workforce hit its peak. Almost 400 people worked on the project. Most of them were harnessed to ungainly wooden platforms suspended on steel wires and elevated by pulleys much like modern skyscraper window cleaners.
In the years of construction, from 1927 to 1941, only two people were injured: a lightning strike set off a dynamite blast before the site was evacuated and a worker was rendered permanently deaf; another jumped from a platform descending too rapidly and broke ribs and a shoulder.
It was detailed and time consuming, men carving out the facial features bearing 26kg jackhammers, but the safety-conscious crews were well managed by Borglum’s son Lincoln during his father’s long absences and the younger man certainly inherited his father’s perfectionist disciplines. And it was tough going at some times of the year. South Dakota has two seasons: winter and the colder one.
Gutzon Borglum made some changes on the run, the most significant being moving Jefferson from the far left to the right of Washington when he encountered seams of poor quality rock. About 18 months’ work was lost.
In Chicago on a promotional trip in March 1941, Borglum fell ill and underwent prostate surgery but blood clots formed and blocked arteries in his heart killing him on March 6. He was temporarily buried there until a plan was devised to bury him within Mount Rushmore. It certainly had the space; Borglum had secretly built a 23m vault behind Abraham Lincoln’s head. He had hoped this might be a repository for America’s great national documents, including the Declaration of Independence which was largely drafted by Jefferson. But that offer was not extended to his wife, Mary, so the family passed on it and Mary and her husband were buried together in California when she died in 1955.
Lincoln Borglum took over – his father’s work was almost complete – and Mount Rushmore’s great sculpture was officially completed on October 31, 1941. Just 37 days later the Japanese attacked America at Pearl Harbor and a shocked nation was soon at war. It was not until 1991 that president George HW Bush conducted an official dedication ceremony.
Remarkably, Gutzon Borglum was not mentioned, but Bush said: “Each of these four presidents enriched this country. Each made full use of his presidential powers without forgetting that he owed his power and legitimacy to the people.” (Present that day were several of the men, known as carvers, who had chiselled away at the rock face years before, the last of whom, Donald Clifford, died in November 2019, aged 98. He had been the youngest worker on the site and was paid US55c an hour.)
These days not everyone agrees with Bush’s assessment of those men who preceded him in office (but not the Oval Office; that was built in 1909). Dissenters include local Lakota Sioux to whom that land had been bequeathed – until gold was found nearby and a free-for-all ensued.
But the loudest voice in support of removing the presidents’ heads is that of Kimberly Ford Chisholm, Borglum’s great-granddaughter.
After Donald Trump held a rally at Rushmore during his first term, she wrote an opinion piece for several American newspapers.
“At this moment when we are doing work as a nation to think hard about the horrendous injustice of slavery and the pervasive, systemic racism that has followed, we also need to remember the near annihilation of indigenous peoples,” she wrote. “We need to recognise their centuries of torment and how we continue to fail those individuals.”
Then, condemning her great-grandfather as white supremacist, she concluded: “I believe it is time … to remove a monument that celebrates the perpetrators of a genocide, a monument that sits on the sacred land of the very people who continue to be so deeply wronged today.” She certainly has the means to mount a countrywide campaign; her husband Bill Chisholm recently bought the Boston Celtics basketball franchise for $6.1bn ($9.37bn), the most paid for an American sports club. But she may not find the time; after all, her most notable achievement is to have written the book Hump: True Tales of Sex After Kids.
Borglum was specific about why he chose the four presidents.
Washington led the colonists in the revolutionary war against the British, was victorious and became the first commander in chief. Jefferson helped write the Declaration of Independence and concluded the Louisiana Purchase, buying more than two million square kilometres – effectively all the mid-west – from the French, doubling the size of the country.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2020
Roosevelt worked on developing the economy and single-handedly revived the transformative Panama Canal project, even choosing the route. Lincoln is seen as saving the American project, winning the civil war and ending slavery, and after his assassination he was considered something of a national martyr.
The objections to the Mount Rushmore are that many consider three of the presidents to have been racist and that it is on Indian tribal land long ago gazetted for occupation by the Latoka people.
Washington and Jefferson both owned slaves, at first inheriting them, and each had conflicted and contradictory views on the trade. And Roosevelt once said “the most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian”.
Appalling as it was then and now, the idea of ownership of others was widespread and 12 of the early presidents had owned slaves. The men who wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” couldn’t see that their ownership of slaves rendered this absurd.
Many famous people have owned slaves: Julius Caesar; Cicero; Plato; Mohammed; Benjamin Franklin; Simon Bolivar, who liberated much of Latin America; William Barton Rogers, founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Christopher Columbus; Ferdinand Magellan; Martin Van Buren, a US president and founder of the Democratic Party; and even Caravaggio. Some abolitionists once had owned slaves, as did Indian tribal chiefs Walkara and Joseph Brant.
Modern Saudi Arabia, a key Western ally, hosts an estimated 740,000 migrant workers who to all intents and purposes are slaves tied to their employers, another chapter in Islam’s long history with slavery.
The stronger case against the monument is that it is on territory ceded to the local tribes under the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. Local Indians believe, quite rightly, that the land was reclaimed by the US government when gold was discovered in the Black Hills gold rush six years later. The area around Rushmore is sacred to them – they see the gigantic sculptures as a desecration – and in 1980 they won a judgment in the US Supreme Court that awarded them $US15.5m for the 1877 value of the land, adjusted to $US105m after interest of 5 per cent over 103 years was calculated. The Lakota refused to accept the money, demanding the return of the land. With interest, the award is valued at more than $US1.2bn today.
Originally, Indian leaders wanted the presidential faces removed by dynamite. But local tribes profit from the local tourism the faces drive and since the Black Lives Matter furore has subsided they would now like the land back and to keep the monument.
Local Indian leader Phil Two Eagle says the tourist attraction is of great value to his people. He wants Mount Rushmore turned into “the United States Holocaust Museum”: “The world needs to know what was done to us.”
More Coverage
Is the Liberal Party finished? Don’t bet the rent on it yet
It’s too big, it’s too small, it’s in the wrong order, it was built by a Ku Klux Klansman, it’s on stolen land and it isn’t even finished. But the Mount Rushmore National Memorial attracts three million visitors every year. And can you think of any other reason to go to South Dakota?