Chapter TWENTY-NINE: Shrine of Democracy

A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to
civilization of the events memorialized.--GUTZON BORGLUM.

Back to the mountains came the boy who had felt kinship for them more than half a century before, to put into form a dream that was as yet nebulous and disturbed. Vaguely he felt that he was going to preserve forever some symbol of a great national ideal. The trouble was that he did not yet have an inkling of what the symbol looked like or how he was going to keep it intact for future generations to look at. And he had the granite--the living rock of the mountains--that would turn the weather as it had been turning it for thousands of years. It would keep what he carved on it down through time to the rim of eternity.

It sprang from the Stone Mountain conception, this project. But it wouldn’t be the same thing. There would be no army of horsemen riding across the white face of a cliff. For this, as he knew but found it hard to express, must provide a quick glance at the history of the whole republic, and not until he had accomplished it did he find the words. He said:

The Shrine of Democracy, carved on Mount Rushmore in the Black
Hills of South Dakota, is the first of its kind in the Western
Hemisphere and perhaps in the world. It is a memorial to the
conception and organization of this great government. Monuments
have almost never been built deliberately to make note of the
intellectual or political acts of a people. The great memorials of
China, Angkor, India, Egypt and Greece were incidental to the life
and religion of the nations. None, I believe, was deliberately so
conceived, so designed and so located that it would remain an
understandable message to posterity ten thousand, a hundred
thousand, or, if the material survived, a million years hence.

Each succeeding race destroys or buries its predecessor,
appropriates what it can and throws the rest to the winds. Only the
most enlightened of human beings revere the remains of others. So
it was thoughts of this sort regarding the failure of mankind to
make suitable, indestructible records of its attainments that led
me to carve our national record on a cliff, on rocks that are of
communally useless material. Therefore our sons will not pull them
down.

Gutzon Borglum arrived for the first time in Rapid City, accompanied by his son Lincoln, then 12 years old, on September 25, 1924. He was met by State Historian Doane Robinson, who had invited him on behalf of the Black Hills and Yellowstone Park Association, and was taken to the Harney Peak region by a group of citizens including Dr. Cleophas C. O’Harra, president of the South Dakota School of Mines. The road led into a region of rising plateaus, then past rocky spars that were called the Needles, and to the Sylvan Lake, where they spent the night The next day they climbed Harney Peak. Gutzon observed several locations suitable for carving, and he said so. But there was nothing so fine in that area as the Stone Mountain cliff. He reserved decision pending further inspection and went back East.

The result of this short visit was that Mr. Robinson proceeded to get the permission of the government to undertake the carving in the Harney Forest area, which was federal property, and to try to get an appropriation from the South Dakota state legislature. There was no difficulty about his first effort. He got his governmental permission through the Congressional delegates from South Dakota, led by Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson, whose support and interest were valuable assets. Mr. Robinson almost as quickly discovered something that is undeniably true about mountain-carving projects: They cost a lot and it is almost impossible to get anybody to donate money toward them. The state authorized the formation of the Mount Harney Memorial Association, but could find no money. The state of South Dakota, as an organization, never did find any.

The Stone Mountain storm burst in the spring of 1925 and was responsible for a lot of Robinson’s troubles, for the desks of the legislators were shortly piled high with literature sent out by the Stone Mountain Association trying to discredit Borglum. The only result of this warning call was a temporary delay. Senator Norbeck reported that Gutzon was a friend of the President and was known and respected as an artist and a patriot by both senators and congressmen. So the legislators of South Dakota figured that the gentlemen in Atlanta were kindly but mistaken.

Gutzon came back to the Black Hills in the fall of 1925 to look for available granite. He was piloted on a camping trip by Theodore Shumaker, an old bear hunter and former man-hunting sheriff. Before meeting Gutzon he had been well acquainted with Theodore Roosevelt, “Wild Bill” Hickok and “Calamity Jane” Burke.

They entered the Hills near Harney Peak through pathless, rugged, almost impassable timber and tree falls. What Borglum wanted was a granite cliff, four or five hundred feet in height and towering that much above neighboring cliffs. It must lie in such an angle that the main wall would face the southeast, and there should be enough of fairly even, unbroken stone to provide at least an acre of upright surface for carving.

The wall facing southeast was a necessary condition because on it the figures would be cut to face the sun. It looked almost like an impossible requirement.

The party had been two weeks in the open, clambering up and down over seemingly inaccessible mountains, when they suddenly came face to face with Mount Rushmore. Gutzon was too tired to try to scale it in the waning day. But he knew that, barring serious cracks in the rock, this cliff was the one he’d been seeking. They camped in a quiet ravine in the mountain’s shadow, preparing for supper and a comfortable night’s rest.

“This looks like what I want,” said Gutzon. “Where is it?”

One of his guides shook his head. “About due east of Harney Peak,” he said. “But I never saw it before. There’s probably never been a man within miles of this place.”

So the next morning they started to climb and presently came to an entrance to the great dike they hoped to surmount. Wear and tear of wind, water and ice had cut this opening, piercing the cliff to half its depth. The climbers were still 150 feet from the top--the top that became the heads of Lincoln and Roosevelt. The heads of Jefferson and Washington were placed 200 feet farther south and higher.

They surmounted this last perpendicular wall by pyramiding one man on the shoulders of two others and using a lariat over a projecting sliver of rock as a hoist line. With torn hands and broken nails they reached the upper floor and looked down on the mining town of Keystone, about three miles away. The sculptor related his impressions thus:

When I first saw the shoulders of Rushmore I knew instinctively
that I was a doomed man. I knew that while the years and I reshaped
the mountain, I must be reshaped myself.

Once before I had something of the same intense, emotional shock.
That was when I stood in front of Stone Mountain and listened to
Helen Plane pleading with me to cut into the wall the story of Lee
and his associates.

Such thoughts passed through my mind as we lay prostrate to rest
in the sun on the top of Mount Rushmore. Here great masses of rock
of new dimensions, of greater hardness, rose above and about me. I
was conscious we were in another world. We could imagine clouds
moving over us and around us in stately dignity, or driven by
hurrying winds out of the north, or falling as rain or snow against
the chill white cliff. And there a new thought seized me--a thought
that frightened me and was to redirect me and dominate all my
carving: the scale of the mountain peak!

We were 6,200 feet above sea level--500 feet above the surrounding
cliffs. We looked out over a horizon, level and beaten like the rim
of a great cartwheel, 2,000 feet below. We had reached up toward
the heavenly bodies; we were looking at the forms removed from the
detail of earth in the valleys, with crude colossi piercing the
sky. I had worked seven years on Stone Mountain without real
consciousness of this changing relationship of lofty mountain forms
isolated in space. And it came over me in an almost terrifying
manner that I never had sensed what I was planning. Plans must
change. The vastness that I saw here demanded it.

The Rushmore elevation is the highest elevation of granite, except near-by Harney Peak, between the Rocky Mountains and Europe. It is a hard formation called pegmatite, peculiar to the Black Hills, and on Rushmore it is of a finer, more even grain than that of surrounding rocks.

Once there was a sea in this region, then rising tracts of sediments compressed into complicated folds. At some remote time the earth’s interior intruded upon the sedimentary folds, pushing steadily upward beneath the surface, and so formed in time the granite batholith of the Harney Peak region. The overload above the granite must have been of great height before it was destroyed by erosion. It was torn down and now lies scattered across the Bad Lands and in valleys all the way to the sea.

There is no telling when Mount Rushmore was exposed to the sky. Dr. O’Harra believed it to be one of the oldest mountain formations in the world--older than the Alps or the Apennines or the Pyrenees or the Caucasus--older, even, than the Himalayas. Said Dr. O’Harra:

Mount Rushmore, placed near the center of the Black Hills, in the
heart of the continent, midst a galaxy of the world’s profoundest
splendors, where every stone shows an imprint of sanctity and every
bush is aflame with glory, for thousands of years, yes, for
millions of years, has surveyed its entrancing surroundings and
with uncovered head has looked into the benign face of a kindly
creator.

So now a mountain had been discovered such as the sculptor had never hoped to see. There remained the twin problems of getting the means to carve it and a majestic design to put on it. Senator Norbeck, notified the next day, was cautious. He declared flatly that the location wouldn’t do. It was inaccessible. There were better cliffs and he could point them out. He and the sculptor met in Keystone, twenty miles from Rapid City, and spent another day in the hot sun looking for the cliffs that Norbeck remembered. After that the senator gave in.

The parks of South Dakota were Senator Norbeck’s hobby. He had antagonized farmers by including their lands in park areas, and he had schemed to find money in the state and national treasuries that could be used for landscaping them. Virtually every road in the Black Hills and Bad Lands is his creation. If he needed a new one, he could make it. So he wasn’t much worried about the remoteness of Rushmore.

“We’ll get a highway up to it,” he said. “Now, what are you going to put on it?”

It was Robinson who gave the clew. Years before, in the shale hills west of old Fort Pierre on the Missouri River, some children had found a leaden plate left there in 1743 by the Vérendrye brothers, French explorers. They had claimed the region for the French king as part of the Louisiana Territory. And it was brought out that Dakota was linked with the little colonial republic on the Atlantic seaboard in 1803 when President Thomas Jefferson sent out the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Considering these two episodes, Gutzon Borglum in his own stepless way decided what he would do. He would build a memorial to symbolize the creation and extension of the great republic, the forming of its government, the saving of its political union, and the completion of the dream of Columbus--a water route to India--by the cutting of the Panama Canal.

The characters he chose for the carving were obviously four: Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and our political gospel; Washington, who made the visions of Jefferson practicable; Lincoln, who preserved the union; and Theodore Roosevelt, who was chiefly instrumental in the building of the Panama Canal. When the design became clear in his mind Gutzon said:

Our forefathers wrote in the canon of human government that a man
has the right to be free and happy. They formed a sisterhood of
states on that simple creed, and their challenge became the tocsin
cry of the world’s oppressed souls. Those words have changed the
philosophy of the world’s governments. They are the motive, spirit
and purpose back of the Rushmore memorial.

We have not created a monument to Washington or Jefferson or
Lincoln or Roosevelt, but to the meaning of those eleven words as
maintained in our government by those four great leaders. Those
words--man has a right to be free and to be happy--hold the Western
experiment as the guide that leaped out of medieval Europe, more
important to humanity’s immortality than creeds and governments.

So the names of the Presidents to be carved on Mount Rushmore were agreed on by Norbeck, Robinson and Borglum as early as the fall of 1925. But that wasn’t the end of it. Of course not. From press reports it was difficult to see that any two people agreed on any man as a possible candidate for the super carving. The women’s clubs got turned into a movement for Dr. Susan B. Anthony, the noted feminist. And they argued bitterly and earnestly. Somebody introduced a bill in Congress for her support.

Gutzon, however, wasn’t to be shaken. He said that the men selected might not be the greatest the United States had produced, but they exemplified the four great periods of the country’s progress and so deserved their places in the memorial. He would carve other figures later, he said, in some places where they would not be crowded.

He went to work first on the head of Washington and studied long in an attempt to find out what kind of man he was. Of the familiar Washington portraits he said:

I have examined all the available portraits of value--the Stuart
and Trumbull portraits, and the Houdon portrait which I consider
best of all. Not the statue by Houdon in Richmond, the figure of
which is poor, but the unretouched mask by Houdon which is now in
the Corcoran Art Gallery. It is unquestionably the most valuable
evidence of the appearance of Washington extant. I choose to
represent him before retirement. In retirement a certain fulness of
cheek becomes apparent as in Stuart’s last picture. His face,
definitely masculine, takes on a more rugged form and reminds one
of Cromwell at forty-five. There is much of the robust Britisher,
the country squire or nobleman. There is none of the prettified
Virginia gentleman that Stuart always produced. I recall a story to
the effect that Martha Washington once told him that Stuart had
said he had an awful temper, and that he must warn Stuart not to
circulate such stories. Washington is said to have pondered a
moment and replied, “My dear, I’m afraid Mr. Stuart is right.”

The sculptor made a small model of the group in San Antonio in 1926. When he returned to Rushmore that same year he made an enlarged plaster model of Washington’s head on a scale of an inch to a foot. By this time he had determined to make the heads sixty feet high; his previous thought of thirty-foot heads he found to be completely out of scale with the mountain. To make sure of the size he had gone down over the face of the cliff, located the nose line perpendicularly and the eyebrows and chin horizontally. From those lines he was able to calculate the scale. For the next several days he crawled about the cliff and valley studying the points he had marked on the mountain in red paint with a six-inch brush.

The enlargement of the Washington head was made in an old log cabin more than two miles away from the cliff of Rushmore. Plans were afoot to raise money for the vast work, he was told. But that summer, at least, nobody was able to find it. Gutzon and his family lived until September in Keystone. Their living quarters were typical of the mining boom that had cluttered the valley with shacks in the late seventies.

“Compared with the setting of the rest of the project,” said Gutzon, “they were ultramodern.”