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Mount Rushmore: Enjoy It While You Can
Ninety-one years ago today, on October, 4, 1927, John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, son of Danish immigrants, and a prominent American sculptor, set chisel and dynamite to stone and began what is his best-known work, the carvings of the 60-foot-high heads of four American Presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt into the side of South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore. 400 workers, 450,000 pounds of rock removal, and 14 years later, he died, and the few remaining bits of his masterwork were completed that same year by his son, Lincoln Borglum.
Gutzon Borglum was born in St. Charles, Idaho Territory, on March 25, 1867. His father was a woodcarver who later established a homeopathic medical practice, and the family moved around the American West throughout Gutzon’s youth. The boy became interested in art at a young age, and with the help of some family friends and a few commissions, was able to leave the United States and study in Europe for two years in his early twenties. During this time, he became acquainted with, and forged a close friendship with, August Rodin, sculptor of The Thinker. Borglum returned to the United States from England in 1901.
His art could be controversial, as evidenced by the ruckus that erupted over an early project, his statues of angels for the church of St. John the Divine in New York City. Many of the clergy objected that Borglum had feminized the angels’ features too much, and required him to re-cast some of them with a more masculine look. A spirited public debate ensued as to whether angels were masculine or feminine (today’s iteration of “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” or perhaps even “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”):
The clergy were admiring them when the up-State clergyman stopped before two statues, and broke the silence with this
“Whoever heard of a woman angel?”
The clergy gasped: then the truth dawned upon them. For hundreds of years all over the world art had been depicting angels as female and in no place in the Bible could it be ascertained that angels were other than male.
Having unsettled the spirits, and ruffled the feathers, of his clerical friends, Borglum moved on and began to develop a growing interest in monumental art and the “emotional impact of volume.” One of his first efforts in this regard, his marble carving of the head of Abraham Lincoln is now in the United States Capitol.
In 1923, at the request of the Daughters of the Confederacy, Borglum began work on a new commission, a plan for a massive carving of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and a column of Confederate soldiers on the side of Stone Mountain in Georgia. Controversy followed him again, however, and he was dismissed from the project. None of Borglum’s original work remains in the Stone Mountain carving today.
But his work at Stone Mountain garnered him some notoriety, and he was soon contacted by the State of South Dakota and asked to carve a new monument into the side of a mountain in the Black Hills.
The rest, as they say, is history. For now.
Gutzon Borglum was a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan (his dismissal from the Stone Mountain project probably came about because of political infighting within the Klan, who were largely underwriting the cost of the sculpture). But even without that inconvenient and troubling part of his history, some of his sculptures have come under fire in recent times because of their commemoration of events that many contemporary citizens would rather ignore, forget, or pass over entirely.
Even Mount Rushmore, Borglum’s crowning achievement, and one that might be expected to be set in stone forever, is not immune from these depredations. What began (some think) as a rhetorical question posed by the Right (“What’s next? Mount Rushmore?”) is now being taken seriously by the Left, which sees it as a monument to white conquest, Manifest Destiny, and the patriarchy. Exercises in self-loathing abound, both in country and with the able assistance of the Baghdad British Broadcasting Corporation, abroad. Read a few of these articles, and it’s hard not to conclude that it’s only a matter of time before the monument itself is history, and the men it commemorates are reviled, if not forgotten entirely. (To this point, though, the campaign to remove the carvings on Mount Rushmore has not garnered nearly the steam of the one to remove the Stone Mountain carvings, which is heated and gaining steam despite the admittedly overwhelming cost of removal.)
The only question, it seems sometimes, is whether the outcome is inevitable, and if so, how long it will take.
What do you think? Is it inevitable? Or do you think the pendulum will swing the other way at some point, and if so, how, or why?
Published in History
The optimist in me says sanity will ultimately prevail.
But that’s not really why I’m commenting.
My dad was stationed in Rapid City for B-17 Gunnery training late in the war. He once told me that the army made flying near Mt. Rushmore “off-limits”, because the gunners were shooting at the faces, and a .50 caliber bullet can do a lot of damage, even to granite.
This is him (tan overcoat) with a few members of his crew, on the day FDR died.
There’s a limit to pulling down statues.
You’ll notice that there isn’t a serious effort to knock down the Washington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial. Nobody is trying to burn down Mount Vernon or Monticello. Some places, some people, are too iconic.
Nobody is going to cry about taking down a statue of J. Marion Sims. But Mount Rushmore is a shade too far.
(Now, whether we, as a republic, should be carving the faces of political figures into the sides of mountains in the first damn place is a different discussion, which probably deserves its own thread.)
He also did this statue of General Phil Sheridan:
It commemorates Sheridan’s ride to rally the troops at the Battle of Cedar Creek.
Guess we will have to tear that one down, too.
I prefer to see things from the other side.
I’m actually sympathetic to this argument. We took the family on a long trip out west 2 years ago (I had a series of posts about it here), and Mount Rushmore I found deeply unsettling (Crazy Horse, by contrast, I found marvelous).
I’ve been there twice – once as a kid, and then this trip. When I was a kid, the visitors’ center was the usual mediocre federal parks building typical of the 50s-70s, inane and forgettable.
What’s there today is a monumental monstrosity that actually drives home the sheer oddity of Rushmore, and is part of a trend of ghastly reinterpretations of the past, of which both the FDR and MLK monuments in DC are a part.
Rushmore, in the zeitgeist of the 20s and 30s, was part of the wider international mythic social realism sculpture trend of, first the fascists in Europe, and later the communists after WWII. Take a look at some of the Lenin, or Stalin, or Soviet war memorial statuary, then look at Rushmore again – there is a similarity to them.
Now I know America never went full fascist, but both Woodrow Wilson and FDR certainly had an admiration and flirtation with the fascists, and there was a streak in American patriotism of that era that bears some of the same hallmarks of the fascist creation and worship of one’s own national mythology. When you see Gutzon’s full plans for how he envisioned Rushmore, he was definitely veering towards something of a national secular temple of America.
And the visitors’ center today only amplifies that impact. The center itself is massive and intimidating. You feel small walking through it to get to the viewing deck – the experience is not unlike walking through the ugly bulk of Soviet architecture in its dehumanizing feel. And of course while the 1930’s streak of lite fascist patriotism is explicitly condemned, it is just replaced with the modern PC fascism of our own time.
The kids all got their Junior Ranger workbooks, and what I read inside was very strange. The entire book avoided discussing who the figures were on the mountain, but instead got into asking the reader what Rushmore was supposed to mean to non-Americans. In fact, this book was substantially un-American in that it cast Rushmore as something outside of America entirely, something that not only did not belong to America’s past because it was jingoist, but also did not belong to America’s present except as an engineering feat.
If Gutzman was carving out one distorted mythology of America, a secular one where The Founders were to be venerated in a temple of Patriotism, then the entire complex there today instead distorts it all as an entirely different myth.
I was glad to leave the place, wanting no part of either Gutzman’s mythos, nor of the current one.
Well, it was good enough for Hitchcock in one of his best and will always associate it with that.
I completely agree with this.
The people who want to pull down statues in have gained a lot of traction. Mainly I think because there are a lot of non-political people in the country. People who hear about some confederate statue in in North Carolina and simply don’t care whether it stays or goes.
I think Mount Rushmore ( and the rest from Fred’s list) are in a different category. I think there would be an awful lot of push back against taking down iconic monuments. At least I hope so.
Yet.
We just have our own Taliban. Fanatics and anti-civilization.
One might almost think that those who brought about Rushmore realized that, at some point, our institutions would come under attack and wanted to produce something that would be too big to take down.
Except that was never its intent and is reading in to why it was done.
Read into the education theory literature of the time and you see a desire to use the very schools as patriotism factories, similar in methodology to the fascists if Europe, where people would all come out the same. One unquestioned US history and culture would be taught. Rushmore was no mythic defense against a culture in decline, it was a symbol of an aggressive culture where dissent had little place.
Take Rushmore for what it was intended to be, not what you want it to be now, that’s what the Left has already done to the place, and it is ghastly.
Nothing is ever too big to take down.
I don’t know enough about the time to challenge your link between fascistic educational theory and the creation of Rushmore, but, for the record, my post was couched in terms of a “wishful thinking” hypothetical.
I doubt that this is true. My impression is that the Left tries to move the line, and if you let them, they move it further. We see this, most obviously, with the progression from feminism to the gay agenda to the transgender stuff. Heck, we even see it with the speed limit.
Understood.
This analogy is very apt to the antifa SJWs of today’s Left.
Sure. And nobody is trying to fill the Lincoln Memorial with live shrimp.
Yet.
Probably because you cannot figure out where to get the shrimp. Let me suggest the fish markets in Seabrook. My favorites are Golden Seafood, T H Seafood, and Emery’s Seafood. Between those three, I bet you could find enough. I’ll leave the transportation question to you. No sense making it too easy. That would spoil the fun.
I hope so. The attack on Confederate monuments and memorials has got a bunch of us down here in the South steamed. Taking them down removes a piece of history that needs to be remembered. People should know why such figures were revered in their time. I know some of you might agree with the idea, but think for a moment.
I would like to refer to the Niemöller Effect. You know his famous writing, “First they came for the socialists . . . and there was no one left to speak for me”. If we let people (especially liberals) get away with one deed which erases history, they’ll move on to the next one, then the next one, etc. until you have nothing left. All the while, they’re replacing what they destroy with their own monuments and memorials to progressivism and victimhood (look for statues of Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown to show up in their former communities).
Now we have the city of Austin, Texas seriously considering changing its name because of a past sin by its namesake . . .
That would be very cool. I’d like to see that.
See what the islamists have done from Afghanistan to Syria.
But strangely he named his son after Lincoln.
Interestingly, the visitor center is named after the son.
For the past week or two I’ve just been skimming the titles of Ricochet posts, looking for diversity (not to say that Ricochet has been monotonous, or for that matter to say anything judgemental about monotony, not irregardless of whether it has been monotonous, but on the contrary quite nonregardful. Heck, someday I myself might become a little boring to read or wordy, or loquacious or repetitive, in the aging process of getting older).
I apparently should have been more careful, because I totally missed the controversy about the Lincoln Memorial and the live shrimp. Shouldn’t there have been some kind of Ricochet Alert Message? Like we get rolling across the top of the TV screen, with a loud rasping braaap-braaap-braaap sound, when there might be lightning coming later and we might forget not to go outside and get hit by it?
I’ll ask Max and see if he can run a shrimp test.
When it comes to wondering what the Left will find problematic next, we’re all this kid. We’ve heard it before and we now it’s coming and we know it’ll be loud.
I think this would be excellent. We might also have a fund-raiser, perhaps to refill the coffers of that (I’m sure) strangely depleted fund out of which the Congresscritters have been paying off those accusing them of sexual harrassment over the years, so as to keep them quiet and off the television.
It could be one of those “guess how many shrimp are in the Lincoln Memorial things. Person who comes closes to the actual number wins–what? Lemme think on that for a bit.
That’s true, given a long enough time scale. Hard to say where we’ll be in 1,000 years. But I think the OP was intended on a shorter time scale.
Only takes a few weeks, Fred.
Well, yes and no. The Taliban had been trying by way of other means before they got really serious.