Mount Rushmore: Monument and Argument
Near Custer, South Dakota
About twenty-three miles southwest of Rapid City, carved into a granite cliff in what the Lakota call the Six Grandfathers, four American presidents stare out across the ponderosa pines. Mount Rushmore is one of the most visited sites in the United States, drawing more than two million people every year, and it may also be one of the most contested pieces of public art in the country.
The project was conceived by South Dakota state historian Doane Robinson in nineteen twenty-three. Robinson wanted something to attract tourists to the Black Hills and initially imagined western heroes: Lewis and Clark, Buffalo Bill, perhaps Red Cloud. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had already worked on Stone Mountain in Georgia, was brought in and redirected the project toward national figures. Borglum chose Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, and he chose the Six Grandfathers because its fine-grained Harney Peak granite would hold detail for an estimated one hundred thousand years.
Work began on October fourth, nineteen twenty-seven, with President Calvin Coolidge in attendance. Four hundred workers used dynamite and pneumatic drills to remove approximately four hundred fifty thousand tons of rock. The faces were carved using a pointing machine transferred from scale models Borglum sculpted in his studio. Borglum died in March nineteen forty-one before the project was declared complete. His son Lincoln oversaw the final months. Not one worker died during construction, which given the conditions, was remarkable.
The site carved by Borglum sits inside the Black Hills, on land the Lakota never ceded. That fact has generated sustained protest since the monument's dedication. The American Indian Movement occupied the monument in nineteen seventy and nineteen seventy-one. Lakota scholars and elders point out that the Six Grandfathers, the Lakota name for this peak, was a sacred site long before Borglum arrived. The mountain that became an American icon was, and for many Lakota still is, a wound rather than a celebration.
