“In old age one should do something mounmental.” — Xiao Qiam
Mount Rushmore -- Photo by Pat Bean
Travels With Maggie
I finally made it to Mount Rushmore. So much of my sight-seeing before I began doing it full time had to be squeezed in during trips from Utah, where I lived and worked,” and places where my kids lived, mostly Texas and Southern California. There was never time to detour through South Dakota.
Although I’m one who doesn’t believe Mother Nature can be improved upon, I still found this mountainous granite sculpture of four U.S. Presidents – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt – impressive. To understand the size of these heads, with their 20-foot noses, one has to visualize them atop men 465-feet tall.
The retooling of the mountain, originally undertaken to attract tourists to South Dakota, took 14 years, and included the removal of 800 million pounds of stone in the process.
The man behind the sculpture was Gutzon Borglum, a student of renown French artist sculptor Auguste Rodin. Borglum was 60 years old when he began the monumental task, and sadly died just months before it was completed in 1941. His son, Lincoln Borglum, finished the politically controversial task his father had begun in 1927.
Some historians allege the monument’s underlying theme is one of racial superiority, a suggestion encouraged because of Borglum’s membership in the Ku Klun Klan. I admit that learning this bit of information dimmed my admiration for Borglum. But South Dakota thrives on the tourist attention it gets from the presidential memorial. And it’s certainly not an American wonder I would have wanted to miss.
This is the first time I’ve heard there was a theory that the underlying theme of the monument was racial superiority. WHY would Borglum have named his own son Lincoln – after the president who brought about the abolition of slavery in the U.S.?
The KKK has an interesting history – one I’m only superficially aware of – but Borglum would have been a member of the “second Klan” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan#Second_KKK Apparently, relations were somewhat tense – he rose in the ranks, but may have broken with them in 1927 (or not – it’s unclear to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutzon_Borglum ) Interesting bit of history, though. The KKK backed the Stone Mountain Monument financially, but I think Rushmore was begun later and after he’d had a bit of a falling out with the KKK.