Why Does Mount Rushmore Exist?

© Giles Price/Institute, for The New York Times George Washington’s profile at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

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Inside the Lincoln Borglum Visitor Center at Mount Rushmore.

1/3 SLIDES © Giles Price/Institute, for The New York Times

Inside the Lincoln Borglum Visitor Center at Mount Rushmore.

Nothing about our trip to Mount Rushmore went according to plan. Our flight was delayed. We found ourselves stranded in the Minneapolis airport for four hours. “Minneapolis airport four hours,” we typed into Google, and the internet responded by persuading us to take a train to the Mall of America. The entrance was shabby; the elevators were slow and small and confusing; locals walked around in the freezing weather wearing short sleeves. It was not just a mall but an elaborate fun house of malls — malls within malls within malls within malls — at the center of which was, somehow, a gigantic amusement park. My children watched in jealous awe as another family floated by on a log ride. I could see their child-minds recalibrating the relative scales and possibilities of American experience. How big could one thing be while still fitting inside another?“It’s like Disney World,” my son said, “but inside of a mall.”
They wanted to stay forever, to be swallowed by the crowds, but we were on a different pilgrimage, in search of a different America, so we continued on.
Late that night, finally, we reached South Dakota.
It was unfathomably empty. In downtown Rapid City, we idled at empty intersections, block after snowy block, waiting for traffic lights that governed no traffic. Emptiness is, to some degree, South Dakota’s natural condition: It is the 17th-largest state in the country but has only the 46th-largest population — the square mileage of Senegal, the people of Fort Worth. The emptiness reaches a new extreme in winter, when all the tourists scatter and the open spaces take over. The map-boards on the sidewalks, set up to guide pedestrians from shop to shop, were covered in a crust of snow. Our hotel, a grand old lodge built concurrently with Mount Rushmore itself, bragged of hosting six presidents over the decades. But its rooms, in February, were cheap and vacant, and we met no one in the grand lobby except imitation wooden Indians and mounted bison heads.
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Why were we there? Why had I dragged my family — my wife and our Snapchatting 12-year-old daughter and our longhaired, talkative 9-year-old son — away from work and school to see, of all places, Mount Rushmore?
I couldn’t say, exactly. All I knew was that I seemed to be suffering a crisis of scale. America was taking up a larger part of my mind than it ever had before. It was dominating my internal landscape, crowding out other thoughts, blocking my view of regular life. I couldn’t tell if it was reaching its proper size, growing the way a problem tends to grow just before a solution is found, or if it was swelling the way an organ does before it fails and bursts.
I felt drawn to Mount Rushmore, instinctively, like a spawning fish to the head of a river. I wanted to look American bigness squarely in the face.
Somewhere on the way to Mount Rushmore, we realized that none of us knew, for sure, which presidents were carved into the mountain. The image was so familiar that we had never really bothered to look closely. After some discussion, we managed to agree on George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. But who was the fourth? John Adams? Benjamin Franklin? Alexander Hamilton? We were just guessing figures from money. We had to look it up. It was Thomas Jefferson. I asked my son to draw me a picture, from memory, of Rushmore, and after several minutes of earnest work, he revealed something that looked like a police sketch of a middle-aged Beatles cover band that has been caught shoplifting after a gig at a strip mall. None of the presidents had a nose, Roosevelt’s glasses had fallen off and Jefferson (who sported a jet-black mop-top) was on the wrong side of Washington. Otherwise, we all agreed, the picture was excellent.
“I think I really nailed Abraham Lincoln,” my son said. “He has that long face and skinny chin.”
My wife read in the local paper about a man who was in trouble for setting off an elk stampede with a drone. We drove off into the South Dakota vastness.
The Black Hills are a geological oddity — an island of rock thrusting out from an ocean of prairie. They contain some of the oldest and hardest stone in the world; over the course of 70 million years or so, erosion has sculpted them into spindly towers and ragged loaves, 5,000-foot-high turrets protected by moats and moonscape boulders. To the Plains Indians, the area was supernaturally charged, a place of powerful spirits, sudden raging storms, magic caves and special trees — ponderosa pine, tall and straight and strong — that they liked to use for lodgepoles. The landscape was so rugged and remote that it managed to repel white civilization deep into the 19th century.
This changed suddenly in the 1870s, when the notorious George Armstrong Custer arrived to make a map of the Black Hills. (In a bizarre coincidence — history ripped from today’s headlines — Custer’s most trusted Indian guide joined the expedition from Standing Rock and was named Maga.) In the course of their exploring, Custer’s men discovered gold. Word flew across the nation (“From the grass roots down, it was ‘pay dirt’ ”), and before long a fire hose of white Americans went spraying into the isolated land, violating an Indian treaty with impunity, setting up mining towns and trading posts, blasting roads through mountains, changing the nature of the place forever.
Before long, of course, the boom went bust. Many miners left; the region’s economy sagged. In the 1920s, local boosters proposed an eccentric solution. What if some of the Black Hills’ ancient rock could be carved into a monument to American history — a patriotic tribute that would also serve, in this new era of automobiles, as a roadside attraction? Spindly granite towers, it was suggested, could be carved into free-standing statues honoring heroes of the American West: Red Cloud, Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark. Instead of gold, South Dakota could harvest tourists.
Only one American sculptor seemed up to the task. He was, like the sculpture he would create, a larger-than-life weirdo: John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum, son of a Danish immigrant, friend of Auguste Rodin, publicity hound, populist, salesman, self-styled tough guy with a white Stetson and a flowing scarf and a dark, bushy mustache. At the time, Borglum was working on another huge sculpture chiseled into the front of a mountain: a tribute, in Georgia, to great heroes of the Confederacy — Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson. (The project was initially sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and entangled with the Ku Klux Klan.)
When Borglum was enticed to visit the Black Hills, he saw presidents: Washington, Lincoln. Anything else, he argued, would be too limited, too provincial, not sufficiently star-spangled “U.S.A.!!!” Borglum believed that America was a special artistic challenge, a place so heroically grand that the effete styles of Europe could never hope to do it justice. “Art in America should be American,” he wrote, “drawn from American sources, memorializing American achievement.” He accepted the challenge to transform the Black Hills.
From the beginning, the project struck many locals as absurd. Controversy raged in the newspapers. To carve statues in the mountains, one wrote, “would be as incongruous and ridiculous as keeping a cow in the rotunda of the Capitol building.” “Why not just paint a mustache on everything?” another asked.
Funding for Mount Rushmore was touch-and-go, as was political and public support. But Borglum would not give up. The project took far longer, and cost far more money, than anyone could have imagined. Logistics were murderously complex. Men were lowered over the rock face on sling chairs; carving was done mainly with dynamite and jackhammers. At one point, a crack running through the stone threatened to break Thomas Jefferson’s nose, so his face was blown off the mountain and started again in a different spot.
Mount Rushmore is not just big; it is about bigness — a monument to monumentalism. Borglum was obsessed with America’s size: the heroic story of a handful of tiny East Coast settlements growing to engulf an entire continent. The four presidents were chosen largely for their roles in this expansion. Jefferson, for instance, not only wrote the Declaration of Independence but also greatly increased the country via the Louisiana Purchase. Teddy Roosevelt oversaw the creation of the Panama Canal, which increased America’s global reach.
The sculpting of Mount Rushmore began in 1927, with a ceremony overseen by President Calvin Coolidge, who wore a comically large hat. Work spanned 14 years, encompassing some of the defining spasms of American history: the Great Depression, the beginning of World War II. Separate dedication ceremonies were held for each of the four faces; Franklin Roosevelt himself came to dedicate Jefferson. The sculpture was finished one month and one week before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Work would have continued — the plan was to depict each of the presidents down to the waist — but funding began to dry up again, and Borglum died, and after a few finishing touches, the figures were abandoned as good enough. This was precisely the moment when American influence was about to explode, the dawn of 50 years of prosperity and cultural dominance. Mount Rushmore was completed, conveniently, just in time to serve as a kind of superheated mascot for the mythology of the Greatest Generation and baby boomers: that America’s hugeness is bound up with its nobility, that it deservedly dominates the globe.
The granite of Mount Rushmore is so hard that the sculptures will erode at a rate of one inch every 10,000 years.
Several times, as we drove to Mount Rushmore, we worried that the road was too small for our car. We had rented a huge S.U.V., like a tank without the gun turret — a rolling monolith of American power — and the road to Rushmore was old, narrow and winding. It passed through forests of ponderosa pine; the trees held the snow way out on the tips of their branches, in clumps, as if they were clutching snowballs. The road, in summer, is loaded with traffic, but that morning we had it all to ourselves. The pavement was covered with a skin of snow; we chugged over it with total confidence. In this way, winding and winding, switchback after switchback, we made our way up the mountain.
Huge thrusts of rock burst out of the landscape at random intervals in the forest. My wife said they looked as though they had fallen from outer space.
“They’re just rocks, Mom,” said our daughter, who was listening to Chance the Rapper on one earbud. “Calm down.”
We passed over quaint wooden bridges that curled like pigtails and through old stone tunnels that looked, every time, as if they were going to rip off our side mirrors. More than once, I had the feeling that we were driving in a theme park. Each tunnel had been carefully blasted to frame a perfect view of Mount Rushmore. The presidents were watching us come to them. Our daughter screamed when she saw them and made me pull over so she could get a good angle for Snapchat.
“I hate pictures,” our son said. “Your mind is your own picture-taker-thing.”
At one point, we passed a roadside cliff that looked vaguely like a face, and we all spent several minutes debating whether it had been carved like that deliberately or if we were maybe going slightly crazy in the snowy, empty woods. Soon everything we saw started to look like a face: rocks, trees, snowdrifts. “They’re haunting me!” our daughter shouted. “Every rock I look at! I don’t understand life!”
By the time we pulled into the Mount Rushmore parking garage, after an eternity of winding, everyone was exhausted and starving. The park’s restaurant was closed for renovation, so we settled into a sort of triage-unit cafe next door. We ate in tense silence. The food was bad. I drank a beer called Honest Abe Red Ale, the can of which featured a picture of Mount Rushmore below the slogan GET SICK-N-TWISTED. Our son complained, bitterly, that his plastic cup of applesauce was “hot.” “I don’t want to be here,” he said — and that “here” seemed to encompass everything: the cafe, Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, America, the 21st century.
After lunch we walked outside, to the viewing deck, and there — well, there was Mount Rushmore. That was really the biggest thing you could say about it: There it was. Rushmore is a ubiquitous American image, tattooed on the inside of every citizen’s eyelids, so it felt disorienting to see it in three-dimensional space, pinned to this particular spot on the earth. We had the viewing deck almost to ourselves, which meant that the presidents and our family faced off. Four of us, four of them.
There was Washington, out front, the leader of the band — noble, aristocratic and smooth, his mouth a grim stone line. A dollop of snow stuck to the bridge of his nose. Peering over his shoulder, like a shy sidekick, was Jefferson, his big nose held high, showing his nostrils to the world. (This was not an artistic choice; the grain of the rock forced Borglum to tilt the head back.) Lincoln stood apart from them, heavy eyebrows frosted with snow, and in the middle, almost swallowed by the mountain, was Teddy Roosevelt, with his wire-rimmed spectacles and Freddie Mercury mustache. They were all looking in slightly different directions, not at us but far over our heads, into the great American distance.
I must admit that, in person, I was not especially moved by the beauty of the sculptures. They were, essentially, traditional busts, distinguished mainly by their insane scale and placement. The novelty of it was stronger than the beauty.
What stood out most was everything around the presidents’ faces: the Black Hills landscape that spreads and spreads, incorporating eons of old rock and new growth, last century’s roads and yesterday’s snow. This was something that was hard to appreciate in photographs, which tend to be tightly cropped — just the presidents, stony and smooth. But the mountain itself is magnificent: rough and rutted and craggy, like an ancient crocodile’s back. The stone is warped and twisted, a frozen surge flowing toward and around the artificial faces; it is like a diagram of the geological energy that thrust it into being nearly two billion years ago. This speaks to forces much larger than America or nationalism of any kind. It made the giant heads look small.
I felt a rush of emotion that was not patriotism but awe: awe at human weirdness, at our capacity to create, in the actual world, such an improbable and unnecessary artifact as this. Why had humans done this? Why did Mount Rushmore exist?
“Oh, it’s a nice little mountain thing,” my son said appreciatively, and then he asked if we could leave.
We drove away from Mount Rushmore, down and down, through the uncarved wilderness, into the city of Custer, a windswept Old West outpost where the guidebook recommended a coffee shop and a bakery, both of which turned out to be closed. We sat for a while, instead, sheltered from the icy wind, inside a Pizza Hut. We debated whether it was snowing outside or whether the outrageous wind was just blowing all the old snow around. Our children giggled over their phones. A vending machine by the door sold Christian stickers for 50 cents: “I don’t believe in luck, I believe in Jesus.”
Outside Custer was the Crazy Horse Memorial — another granite mountain being carved, Rushmore-style, into the enormous likeness of a historic figure. This one depicted Crazy Horse, the enigmatic leader of the Oglala Sioux, one of the fiercest defenders of the Black Hills from the indignity of white invasion. It was a sort of corrective to Rushmore, a reclaiming of the landscape by the people from whom it was stolen. My family was tired and refused to get out of the car, so I walked through the museum myself. I looked at a tiny model of the monument. The carving has been in progress, without federal funding, for nearly 70 years. The finished figure would be 563 feet tall, sitting on his horse, pointing toward the Black Hills.
I understood the impulse, of course, but it also struck me as strange: to honor a Native American leader in terms of Rushmore-style gigantism.
And it began to seem foreign to me, our American obsession with size. We are born a fantasy of bigness. We are tall and strapping, with big hats and big hair and loud clothes and booming voices. We drive our big cars through the epic landscapes of our giant continent. We work in tall buildings, where we give 110 percent in order to build larger-than-life careers that distinguish us from the huge teeming masses of our fellows. Our great ideas define infinite eras. Our big weapons win big wars. We are economically, geographically, culturally and spiritually huge: the Gigantic States of America.
There is something childish about this fantasy — the way it tends to conflate virtue and size. Why does goodness have to be huge? It is a dangerous belief, and one that inevitably causes stress and confusion when — as it must — it runs up against reality. Inevitably, there will be a shift in scale; the dominant thing (nation, culture, religion, demographic) will begin to shrink. Does it lose its virtue with its dominance? If we truly believe that, then what virtue will we not be willing to sacrifice to make ourselves feel big again?
At the gift shop, I bought a length of braided sweet grass, which was said to dispel negative energy; we set it on our dashboard as we pulled away.
Later, as the sun was beginning to set, we drove through the spreading wilderness of Custer State Park. We passed through huge, shaggy herds of buffalo, which raised their heads and stared. The landscape seemed to change every 500 feet: lakes, buttes, forests, gashes of red dirt. A small herd of pronghorns glided over a bluff, ghostly white on the snow. It was as beautiful as any land I’ve ever seen; driving through it inspired the kind of awe that the sculptures of Rushmore had not. But then again, we never would have seen this landscape if we hadn’t come to look at Rushmore.
At one point, our car was besieged by a herd of burros. They surrounded us completely, forcing us to stop. We rolled our windows down. They stuck their heads in and worked their giant lips; we could see, deep inside their mouths, tiny sets of teeth clacking away in anticipation of food. It was like a horror movie, but hilarious. The burros were not native to the Black Hills: Their ancestors had been brought to the region as pack animals, then set loose, so these creatures were a result of many generations of acquired wildness. We had nothing to feed them, so they started licking our car, presumably for the salt from the roads. When we got out later, the entire vehicle was covered in thin white swirls.
It took some doing to find a lodge near Rushmore that was open in the off-season. Its driveway was thick with unplowed snow, but our S.U.V. ate its way through. The place was a log cabin bed-and-breakfast, lushly decorated with antler-based furniture; it billed itself as the only lodge with a full-frontal view of the monument itself. After our day of driving, I looked forward to studying the presidents’ faces in detail, at length, warm and undisturbed. The owner of the lodge was a living exponent of the story of Rushmore, the granddaughter of the man who designed the pigtail bridges. Whenever I asked her a question, history books poured out of her mouth.
She pointed me to the Rushmore view, and sure enough, there it was, unobstructed. But it was so far away that you could barely see it. Binoculars hung by the window. Even magnified, the heads were tiny. Borglum made the sculptures on Mount Rushmore 80 times as large as an average human head — each one roughly the size of a sperm whale. This window shrank those heads down to the size of a pin.
As the evening wore on, the view got stranger. Outside, somewhere in the wilds of the Black Hills, a fire was burning. As the sky darkened, the fire grew and grew, and from our perspective through the window, it was directly in front of Rushmore. It sent its smoke into the presidents’ miniature faces, and the smoke glowed an eerie red. George Washington looked at us through the screen of a red cloud. It seemed like one of those weird meteorological events, an eclipse or a comet, that ancient cultures invested with meaning. Tiny giant America seemed to be burning.

The New York Times

By SAM ANDERSON 2 hrs ago