Smithsonian: The Sordid History of Mount Rushmore [View all]
(This is 2 yrs. old, I never saw it until tonight, by chance. Too interesting to put aside.)
Smithsonian: The Sordid History of Mount Rushmore
The sculptor behind the American landmark had some unseemly ties to white supremacy groups
By Matthew Shaer
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
October 2016
Each year, two million visitors walk or roll from the entrance of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, in South Dakota, to the Avenue of Flags, to peer up at the 60-foot visages of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Dedicated 75 years ago this month, Mount Rushmore was intended by its creator, Gutzon Borglum, to be a celebration of not only these four presidents but also the nations unprecedented greatness. This colossus is our mark, he wrote with typical bombast. Yet Borglums own sordid story shows that this beloved site is also a testament to the ego and ugly ambition that undergird even our best-known triumphs.
In 1914, Borglum was a sculptor in Connecticut of modest acclaim when he received an inquiry from the elderly president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, C. Helen Plane, about building a shrine to the South near Atlanta. When he first glimpsed the virgin stone of his canvas, a quartz hump called Stone Mountain, Borglum later recalled, I saw the thing I had been dreaming of all my life. He sketched out a vast sculpture of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and was hired.
The son of polygamist Mormons from Idaho, Borglum had no ties to the Confederacy, but he had white supremacist leanings. In letters he fretted about a mongrel horde overrunning the Nordic purity of the West, and once said, I would not trust an Indian, off-hand, 9 out of 10, where I would not trust a white man 1 out of 10. Above all, he was an opportunist. He aligned himself with the Ku Klux Klan, an organization rebornit had faded after the Civil Warin a torch-light ceremony atop Stone Mountain in 1915. While there isnt proof that Borglum officially joined the Klan, which helped fund the project, he nonetheless became deeply involved in Klan politics, John Taliaferro writes in Great White Fathers, his 2002 history of Mount Rushmore.
Borglums decision to work with the Klan wasnt even a sound business proposition. By the mid-1920s, infighting left the group in disarray and fundraising for the Stone Mountain memorial stalled. Around then, the South Dakota historian behind the Mount Rushmore initiative approached Borgluman overture that enraged Borglums Atlanta backers, who fired him on February 25, 1925. He took an ax to his models for the shrine, and with a posse of locals on his heels, fled to North Carolina.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/sordid-history-mount-rushmore-180960446/#ol60a4AtlDi8eW3S.99