A Visit to Mount Rushmore, More Than a Shrine of Democracy

It’s fine to think patriotic thoughts, but it’s a great work of art, too.

G reetings from Mount Rushmore! I’d never been, but I had the chance to do what I’ve also never done — an intensive Mountain State road trip — and took it. What a beautiful, blessed country we have, and how grateful I feel to scribble about the Rushmore sculptures on July Fourth. The suite of stone heads, after all, is officially called The Shrine of Democracy.

Rushmore, which I thought might be kitsch, is magnificent. That’s a result of the artist’s vision, nature’s prudence, persistence, of course, and running out of money. Is it, though, a great work of art? Yes, I know, good things come in small packages, but given its craftsmanship, pliancy of meaning, originality, spartan look, and depth, I’d say it is. At 60 feet each, the heads are taller than the Sphinx. When deemed finished in 1941, the collective colossus was the biggest sculpture anywhere in the world.

Everyone recognizes Rushmore. but here are the basics. The artist is Idaho-born Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941), the son of Danish immigrants and a student of Rodin. He was well known in the 1920s for monumental sculpture like the giant marble head of Lincoln in the crypt of the U.S. Capitol and the Stone Mountain monument to Confederate heroes. He was gutsy and bull-headed, a dreamer, a ham, and a human megaphone when it came to what he called the Mountain.

The four presidents, chosen by Borglum, are Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln. Washington represented the founding of the republic while Jefferson vastly expanded it via the Louisiana Purchase. Lincoln, of course, preserved it. Roosevelt was trickier and questioned from the start.

TR died in 1919, too soon to have passed any tests for long-term distinction. By splitting the Republican vote in 1912, he gave us Woodrow Wilson, and an uglier blot on civic life can’t be found. TR is credited with the “development of the country,” as Borglum said, through trust busting, his balanced friendship with both labor and capital, the linking of east and west via the Panama Canal as first envisioned by Columbus, and his 1906 Nobel Peace Prize, establishing America as a consequential, virtuous power. Roosevelt was a sort-of local, having lived, worked, and recovered in the Dakota Badlands after the deaths of his wife and mother on the same day in 1884. And Borglum was a Bull Moose Republican in 1912. That year Roosevelt won South Dakota.

Mount Rushmore is about 20 miles southwest of Rapid City in the Black Hills and a few miles from Black Elk Peak, known for years as Harvey Peak and the tallest mountain east of the Rockies. The sculptures tower about 500 feet over a stately Avenue of Flags. Around 2.4 million people visited last year. How much did it cost to create? Just under a million, around $21 million in today’s money. A good deal.

And it all started for the sake of tourism. South Dakota’s official historian from 1901 to 1926, Doane Robinson, that rare academic who thinks business and money are good things, had his own vision. That was a series of tall rock formations, or the Needles, as they’re known in South Dakota: soaring, granite spires in the Black Hills thought to resemble Red Cloud or Crazy Horse and gringos such as Lewis and Clark, men of substance, grit, and melodrama. Robinson wrote a letter to Borglum, popularly ranked with St. Gaudens and Daniel Chester French, on August 20, 1924, asking whether he’d be interested. Borglum wired back the day he got it, “Great scheme you have . . . hold to it,” and promised to visit in September. Yes, we did indeed live in a country once where men decided things with carpe diem élan, faster than a speeding bullet, while naysaying, faraway, desk-bound, excessively credentialed gnomes were a minute class.

By September 24, Borglum was there. He vetoed local heroes — go national or go home — and sketched a standing Washington, close to 200 feet tall. Now, there’s a Needle that people will drive hundreds of miles to see. No twee paintings for Borglum. He thought American art should be big and bold and sculptural. Sculpting stone is intensely physical work, too, no dabbing pretty colors here and there. America’s big, and we live big and hard.

Borglum and the South Dakota’s geologist talked granite, gneiss, schist, and mica. They talked about what hundreds of millions of years did to igneous and metamorphic rock. The Needles wouldn’t do. Too craggy, too thin. After blasting the outer crust of rock warped by millions of years of weather and infected with invasive material, he’d never get a hard, smooth, substantial passage of granite to carve. Borglum looked at Harney Peak and the mountains near it, tall and massive. “Here is the place,” he said, channeling his inner Mormon — he was raised one, and Mormons love theater — “American history shall march along that skyline.”

Then money, or where it could be found, raised its head and tossed its curls. The dynamic duo of Robinson and Borglum soon got an almighty, all-in ally in oil- and water-driller Peter Norbeck, South Dakota’s senior U.S. senator, the state’s first native-born governor and senator, raised in a dugout on farmland his family claimed by way of the Homestead Act.

Most everyone in official South Dakota started with rough, dirty work, as practical, get-it-done herders, loggers, miners, drillers, hunters, and hog-sloppers — hissy-fitters-need-not-apply jobs. Norbeck had friends in high places, top among them was Calvin Coolidge, the Fourth Musketeer.

Borglum thought he’d find in Rushmore the 200 or so running feet of hard granite he needed, but he needed guesswork, too. The mountain’s surface wasn’t flat. Like every mountain, it was pockmarked with crevices. When developing Jefferson’s upper lip, workers hit feldspar, glittery and a different color. It was carveable, but the genius behind the Declaration would have looked like he had herpes. Workers made a filling from small pieces of granite, fixed them in place with mortar, and fit it into the hole. An easy fix compared with other problems.

Norbeck pushed Rushmore in a hundred ways, locally and in Washington, but Coolidge was decisive in one big way. He blessed the South Dakota delegation’s bill to appropriate $250,000 for Rushmore, signing it a few days before he left office in 1929. It was the first of a few deep drinks from the D.C. trough. Coolidge’s enthusiasm for the project started with two magic words: “No mosquitoes.”

In 1927, the Coolidges were looking for a summer vacation spot, a Summer White House kind of place. After intense lobbying, they chose the Black Hills mostly on the promise of no mosquitoes, a Coolidge bane, and dry mountain air that would ease his chronic bronchitis. There, at a lodge near Rushmore, Coolidge fished, famously donned an Indian headdress, sent Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair, wrote “I do not choose to run” on a slip of paper that was copied and handed to the press, and absorbed a schmooze campaign like no other, aimed at winning his nod for federal money for Rushmore. Coolidge spoke at the 1927 dedication of the start of Rushmore’s carving, endorsing federal largesse. Charles Lindbergh flew the St. Louis over Coolidge’s lodge and Rushmore. He’d just done his Atlantic crossing. Things were looking good.

Borglum didn’t carve Rushmore. He’s the artist, but here “artist” means visionary, designer, salesman, decider, director, and primary donna. Over the 13 or so years of measurable work on Rushmore, around 400 workers did the front-line, physical labor of drilling, blasting, and carving while suspended in harnesses hundreds of feet above flat earth, with winchers raising and lowering them based on hand signals, and while blacksmiths, cooks, housekeepers, and mechanics cared for hoists and compressors. Up and down they went, twice a day, 506 steps. On Friday afternoons, they picked up their paychecks halfway down, then continued to the bottom, where they met local bootleggers to acquire the weekend’s supply of hooch.

A plaque naming them is right at the start of the Avenue of Flags, full names carved in granite along with nicknames, among them Happy, lots of Reds, Palooka, who’d been a prizefighter, Pee Wee, Doc, Pop, Spot, Sport, Howdy, Hoot, Little Hoot, Shorty, Slim, Dick, and Big Dick. No one died while working on the project.

When we look at the four presidents — resolved, austere, serene and sound, cool and effective, placed and spaced in equipoise but with enough irregularity to grab and hold us — it’s amazing to know how close to disaster and failure Rushmore came. Each brush with doom, averted through aesthetic economy and abstraction, made it better.

Jefferson was supposed to be to Washington’s left, but there were too many fissures in the stone to finish him. So he landed to Washington’s right, what was done of his figure blasted away. Washington juts out, the only figure visible from the main road southwest of the mountain and the only one that’s forcefully three-dimensional.

Borglum modeled Washington after portraits by Peale and Gilbert Stuart and Houdon’s plaster life mask made at Mount Vernon in 1785. Houdon’s marble bust is based on the mask. Borglum’s Washington has no tilt, up, down, or sideways. He looks straight at us, the man who could not tell a lie. Borglum pushed his left shoulder back, though, for animation, since he felt the look would be too stiff otherwise. Roosevelt’s pince-nez glasses were a design challenge solved by carving a mere curved ridge over one eye and leaving the rest to the imagination. For the eight presidential eyes, Borglum designed concave depressions carved so that dark shadows gave a sense of depth. Twenty-inch shafts of granite projecting from the socket represent pupils, with the granite’s surface ground smooth to reflect sunlight.

Roosevelt’s face was a near fail — workers found fissure after fissure as they peeled the right side of a boomerang-shaped part of the mountain. Jefferson had gotten the other wing of the boomerang and that was tough enough, but, for Roosevelt, more than 100 feet of stone were removed before a bit of solid granite revealed itself, a mere 30 feet from an interior canyon on the other side. Figures were supposed to be busts running to the waistline, but the project ran out of money and will. Washington’s has a hint of a uniform but that’s it.

The most salubrious of failures was the entablature’s, since, if the thing had happened, it would have turned Rushmore into the world’s largest piece of kitsch. It was to be a 500-word history of the United States written by Coolidge and carved on a flat passage of rock shaped like a map of the Louisiana Purchase and set to the right of Lincoln. Borglum had offered Coolidge the honor — and, it turns out, headache — of appearing on the mountain along with the four presidents, not through his face but in his words. He was to write a few lines about nine transformative events by year from 1776 — the Declaration — to 1904 and the acquisition of Panama’s isthmus. Letters were to be 3 feet tall.

Talk about clutter and a mammoth distraction and a way immediately to prematurely age Rushmore, as if nothing memorable would happen after 1904.

To Borglum, the project was a carrot aimed at getting Coolidge’s backing for federal money for Rushmore. The legislation to quickly appropriate the money included the Coolidge-authored entablature in the prescribed scope of the project. He did indeed submit his text soon after he left office. Borglum released it to the press in 1930, edited by him, so it wasn’t Coolidge any longer. Though mostly well received, the language attracted the pedants of the world, less pleased and unaware of how much fiddling Borglum had done, infuriating Coolidge. He withdrew, definitively, leaving the Rushmore team with the edit’s sticky language. Would Coolidge reconsider? Never, and he conveniently died in 1933. Borglum eventually shelved the entablature. He might never have wanted it.

As the 1930s marched to its lugubrious tune, public interest waned. Competing with Rushmore for headlines were a killer drought, the Depression, Bonnie and Clyde, the Long March, Donald Duck, Mussolini, and Hitler. With Norbeck’s death in 1936, and Borglum’s four years later, and with the war in Europe and the Pacific relentlessly set to grab us, no more money from Congress was possible. Even drives aimed at school kids flopped, their spare nickels going to the yo-yo. Work stopped three months before Pearl Harbor.

Rushmore has a huge shop, an underground parking garage, a restaurant, and an auditorium, all discreet, as is the very good museum under the Avenue of Flags. It looks at Borglum’s career. He’s no St. Gaudens but, rather, worked in a modern bourgeois style, making realist sculpture with just enough swagger to not look embalmed. Stone Mountain’s salute to the Confederacy wasn’t finished, either, after Borglum was fired for Yankee belligerence. The museum dives fairly into Borglum’s models, all showing his vision for a flashier, more expansive look. Workers and technique get the spotlight. Rushmore was both labor- and machine-intensive. Its workers mostly stayed local and became celebrities who were extensively interviewed. The last living worker died in 2019. Borglum’s marketing prowess is on parade, too. He attracted FDR to visit in 1936 for the dedication of the Jefferson head. He hated Hoover, who was cool on supporting his project.

Rushmore’s unfinished spots, mostly at the edges? The museum tackles these as well. There’s no room for any other figures, it notes. There’s no good stone surface left. Technically, the entablature would have been impossible. Too bad for Ike and Ronnie. Politicians come and go, but America’s always on the move. It’s up to us to finish the story. Humanity is always in flux, making our wonderful country, never finished, our beacon light.