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June 16, 1775. Little of note happened on this day, so I will write about Mount Rushmore.
When I was six years old, our family took a road trip from Oklahoma to Manitoba to visit my uncle, aunt and cousins. Along the way, we stopped to sightsee, including at Mount Rushmore. I have only vague memories of seeing the monument itself. But I was more impressed by the enormous parking lot filled with cars surrounding the visitor center and especially by the telescopes at the visitor center. You could insert a coin into a telescope and then use it to look at the presidential likenesses on the mountain. But being a frugal Mennonite, my mom said that we could look at the mountain without wasting a coin on the telescope. Someday, I should go back to Mount Rushmore to gain an adult appreciation of it.
What is astonishing is how this sculpture wound up in South Dakota. In 1923, the Black Hills, Wind Cave, and Needles Highway had already made South Dakota a destination for tourism. Doane Robinson, the secretary of the South Dakota State Historical Society, decided that the state needed another tourist attraction. He knew of the Stone Mountain project in Georgia to carve Confederate generals into the mountain, so he proposed to do something similar in South Dakota. Robinson wanted to carve figures from the Old West, such as Lewis and Clark, Sacajawea, Red Cloud, and John C. Fremont, into a mountain, and eventually he engaged the first Stone Mountain sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, to work on his project. Since Borglum had fallen out with the Stone Mountain committee, he was available.
In an inspired move, Borglum vetoed the idea of Old West figures and proposed four U.S. presidents. Borglum chose Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln to represent, respectively, American foundation, expansion, development, and preservation. Carving began in 1927 and was halted in 1941 due to a lack of funds.
Fireworks, an annual tradition at Mount Rushmore, will return in 2026 as part of the America250 celebration after the demented Biden canceled them from 2021 to 2024, supposedly due to the fire risk.
Have you visited Mount Rushmore? What impression did it make on you?
Discussion (14)
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Of the four presidents chosen, I think TR is the weakest. I would have chosen Andrew Jackson as being more consequential.
Also, it's interesting that they are not in chronological order, since Lincoln is after TR.
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Putting Teddy Roosevelt up there with those great men is bordering on vandalism.
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I saw it when I was a kid, and in the late 80s or early 90s when we took our boys there. It's a tourist thing. Been there, seen that.
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It's a great monument to the value of human, short-term judgment.
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Been there. Liked it. Visiting/camping in the Badlands was cool.
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