What's behind faces of Mount Rushmore?

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), Dec 14, 2003 by Chris Welsch Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune

We were standing under the noses of the presidents, looking up.

A rubble pile sprawls under the iconic portraits. It was left when the mountain was blasted, drilled and carved away to create images of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln.

"There are 450,000 tons of rock on the talus slope," said ranger Brian McMahon. He told my tour group that if the presidents were carved to their full height, they would stand more than 400 feet tall.

From the boardwalk at the foot of the mountain, I could see the magnitude of Rushmore. A mountain had literally been remade in the image of men.

The pile of stone at our feet left the impression that the carving had just happened. In midday sun, the bright white granite of the presidents' faces contrasted with the ruddy, weathered stone around them, the way the flesh of a freshly cut apple stands out from the color of its skin.

In his 30-minute talk, McMahon spelled out the basic story of Rushmore, and something about the accomplishments of each president.

A fixture in ads, political campaigns and movies, Mount Rushmore is easy to dismiss as a cliche -- the quintessential mid-America tourist stop. This year, I stopped to consider it again with fresh eyes and came away with a much different, more complex picture.

The self-styled "Shrine of Democracy" is mainstream America's civic holy mountain. A record 2.9 million visitors made a pilgrimage to it last year.

Rushmore is also a herculean engineering accomplishment. It's a fitting symbol of American ambition, and the sculptor knew it: "American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life," said Gutzon Borglum.

For all the superlatives, Rushmore's saga also has its troubling plot twists. The whole messy story of its making is also achingly American.

To start with, there's the fact that Rushmore honors four white guys by blasting apart a mountain in the middle of Indian country.

Then there's Borglum's ties to the Ku Klux Klan. He befriended Klan leaders and advocated their causes during the years he spent working on the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain in Georgia.

Furthermore, not everyone is enamored of the gantlet of tourist traps and screaming billboards on all roads leading to Mount Rushmore -- from Holy Terror Mini Golf to Bear Country, USA.

"Everyone wants America to be a simple story, without shades of irony," author John Taliaferro said in an interview. Taliaferro, a former editor at Newsweek, wrote "Great White Fathers," a book on Mount Rushmore that was published earlier this year, and which documents Borglum's Klan connection. "The truth is more complicated than that . . . if Mount Rushmore is supposed to be the sum of what America means, then the complications are part of that."

Gutzon Borglum was the son of a Danish Mormon immigrant who was in a polygamous marriage with two sisters. Borglum was born in Idaho in 1867 to the younger sister and grew up in Fremont, Neb.

In his late teens, he struck out for California to become an artist. He studied painting and at 22 married a well-connected fellow artist who was 18 years his senior. They went to Paris together, and there he became a student and friend of Auguste Rodin, the famous sculptor of "The Thinker."

Borglum was fascinated by the idea of "great men" who shape history, and while he did sculpt some amazingly beautiful female portraits and nudes, he favored presidents and generals. An outrageous character, he managed to meet and befriend many of the famous and powerful people of America in the early 1900s.

"Borglum was a Zelig," said author Taliaferro, referring to a Woody Allen movie. "He was in the corner of every photo of every important moment of the age."

Borglum was friends with the Wright brothers, for example. He hobnobbed with Teddy Roosevelt and campaigned for the Bull Moose Party. He completed a redesign of the torch on the Statue of Liberty. He made national news and created controversy when he charged that there was an industrial conspiracy during World War I.

All the while he was making sculpture and trying to find a venue that would raise his work to the kind of national audience that fine art seldom sees.

His first effort to carve on a monumental scale was in Georgia, on Stone Mountain, beginning in 1915. He worked on the project on and off for 10 years.

Stone Mountain was plagued by a lack of funds and constant bickering, most of it initiated by Borglum, who had no patience for those who didn't kowtow to his genius or his often-unreasonable demands.

By 1924, he had finished a gargantuan relief of Robert E. Lee on horseback in the granite face of the mountain. Not long afterward, he was fired amid a flurry of accusations, and, according to Borglum's version of the story, he was chased out of Georgia in a hail of gunfire.

Not long afterward, the owners of Stone Mountain blasted Borglum's Lee off the mountainside. The project was eventually redesigned and completed by a different sculptor.

But by then, Borglum had already secured a foothold in a new project: