More about Mount Rushmore

Anna McNeary

Contributor

The lineup is George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt--four of America’s shiniest presidents.

But the original plan didn’t include these heads of state. In the mid-1920s, South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson had proposed a relief of Western figures, like Buffalo Bill and Chief Red Cloud, to entice more tourists to visit the state.

Around this time, Gutzon Borglum found himself with some time on his hands after another mountainous monument project of his fell through (due to him being a jerk). That’s when Robinson invited him to work on Mount Rushmore. Borglum convinced Robinson to make the piece more widely relatable by doing 60-foot busts of presidents, instead of cowboys. He started the sculpture when he was 60 and worked on it for 14 years, with the help of a crew of 30 men at a time and lots of dynamite. He died before it was finished, but his son Lincoln saw it through to sort-of-completion (it still lacks many elaborate details that Borglum had planned, like the torsos of the presidents and a grand staircase leading up from the mountain’s base).

Environmentalists of the day were scandalized by Borglum’s eagerness to dominate the natural beauty of the Black Hills. And understandably, many Lakota people in the area view a monument to four unwelcome white guys as a blatant desecration of their land. In the 1930s, Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear commissioned an EVEN BIGGER monument to Crazy Horse, which was carved into a different cliff about 15 miles away. That’s an F U of historical proportions.

Mount Rushmore has made a few cameos on the silver screen. Movie credits include Dances with Wolves, Nebraska, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and most famously, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Hitchcock had obtained a permit to shoot the film’s climactic scene at Mount Rushmore, but the folks in charge revoked it at the last minute for fear of “patent desecration,” meaning that Al might have his actors prance around irreverently on the presidential faces. So his cast and crew shot some footage in the Mount Rushmore parking lot and cafeteria, but the good stuff (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint scrambling down Washington’s ears) was actually filmed on a very impressive Hollywood set.

 

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Here is what Wikipedia says about Mount Rushmore

The Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a national memorial centered on a colossal sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore (Lakota: Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, or Six Grandfathers) in the Black Hills near Keystone, South Dakota, United States. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, named it the Shrine of Democracy, and oversaw the execution from 1927 to 1941 with the help of his son, Lincoln Borglum. The sculpture features the 60-foot-tall (18 m) heads of four United States presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, chosen to represent the nation's birth, growth, development, and preservation. Mount Rushmore attracts more than two million visitors annually to the memorial park which covers 1,278 acres (2.00 sq mi; 5.17 km2). The mountain's elevation is 5,725 feet (1,745 m) above sea level.

Borglum chose Mount Rushmore in part because it faces southeast for maximum sun exposure. The carving was the idea of Doane Robinson, a historian for the state of South Dakota. Robinson originally wanted the sculpture to feature American West heroes, such as Lewis and Clark, their expedition guide Sacagawea, Oglala Lakota chief Red Cloud, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Oglala Lakota chief Crazy Horse. Borglum chose the four presidents instead.

Peter Norbeck, U.S. senator from South Dakota, sponsored the project and secured federal funding. Construction began in 1927 and the presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. After Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, his son Lincoln took over as leader of the construction project. Each president was originally to be depicted from head to waist, but lack of funding forced construction to end on October 31, 1941, and only Washington's sculpture includes any detail below chin level.

The sculpture at Mount Rushmore is built on land that was illegally taken from the Sioux Nation in the 1870s. The Sioux continue to demand return of the land, and in 1980 the US Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians that the taking of the Black Hills required just compensation, and awarded the tribe $102 million. The Sioux have refused the money, and demand the return of the land. This conflict continues, leading some critics of the monument to refer to it as a "Shrine of Hypocrisy".

Check out the full Wikipedia article about Mount Rushmore