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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
Wins the privilege of cleaning the place out?
The local seabirds would do that. Just wait until they are done and hose the place down.
I love starting the day with a good chortle. Thx.
Mount Tushmore?
A lifetime supply of shrimp? Seems efficient.
Yummy!
It’s not a contest I would enter, seeing as I’m allergic and it would kill me in short order. More shrimp for you, though!
Same here. I love fish, squid, and octopus (don’t knock squid and octopus until you have had them done right), but am violently allergic to shrimp and most shellfish. I’d get shrimp for the family, at the Seabrook markets, but someone else had to clean and cook them. (And do the dishes afterwards.)
I submit that the carvings on Mt. Rushmore should NOT ever be destroyed.
I call your attention to Genesis 50: 15-20; God can even use evil for good! No matter how flawed Borglum was, the Monument is, in itself, a truly marvelous creation.
Is it a graven image?
Only if you also have a lifetime supply of freezer space. Otherwise they’re gonna go off loooong before anyone could eat ’em, and then you’ll have instead a lifetime supply of seagulls and stank. And given the smell and the seagulls, I’d run away, so far awayayayayay
Nope, even though some folks might worship the people on it.
What’s the definition of “graven image”?
Just wait until the Progs figure out that the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Republican!
Or that Cesar Chavez was against illegal immigration.
All the streets in the country will have be renamed after trees again.
All the monuments in DC dedicated to individuals glorify those who expanded federal power in some way. Even Jefferson did so with the Louisiana purchase . Those are not endangered by either the statist left nor the statist right .
And if I’m not mistaken, led mobs to attack them . . .