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<ANTIMG id="coverpage" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="Mount Rushmore National Memorial" width-obs="500" height-obs="647" /></div>
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<h1><span class="large"><i>Mount Rushmore</i></span> <br/><span class="small">NATIONAL MEMORIAL</span></h1>
<p class="center">A MONUMENT COMMEMORATING THE CONCEPTION, PRESERVATION, AND GROWTH OF THE GREAT AMERICAN REPUBLIC</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p01a.jpg" alt="Location practically in the Center of the North American Continent" width-obs="300" height-obs="306" /></div>
<p class="center"><span class="small">PUBLISHED BY THE</span>
<br/>Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society of Black Hills
<br/>1948</p>
</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig1"> <ANTIMG src="images/p02.jpg" alt="" width-obs="627" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap">GUTZON BORGLUM</p> </div>
<h2 id="toc" class="center"><span class="small">CONTENTS</span></h2>
<br/><SPAN href="#c1">Foreword</SPAN> 1
<br/><SPAN href="#c2">The Mighty Works of Borglum</SPAN> 5
<br/><SPAN href="#c3">From the Beginning</SPAN> 9
<br/><SPAN href="#c4">The Role of the National Park Service</SPAN> 16
<br/><SPAN href="#c5">Wind Cave National Park</SPAN> 17
<br/><SPAN href="#c6">Badlands National Monument</SPAN> 17
<br/><SPAN href="#c7">Jewel Cave National Monument</SPAN> 17
<br/><SPAN href="#c8">Devils Tower National Monument</SPAN> 17
<br/><SPAN href="#c9">The Antiquity of Mount Rushmore</SPAN> 18
<br/><SPAN href="#c10">The Hall of Records and Great Stairway</SPAN> 20
<br/><SPAN href="#c11">George Washington</SPAN> 22
<br/><SPAN href="#c12">Thomas Jefferson</SPAN> 24
<br/><SPAN href="#c13">Abraham Lincoln</SPAN> 26
<br/><SPAN href="#c14">Theodore Roosevelt</SPAN> 28
<br/><SPAN href="#c15">As Great Men Saw It</SPAN> 30
<br/><SPAN href="#c16">Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society of Black Hills</SPAN> 31
<div class="pb" id="Page_1">1</div>
<h2 id="c1"><span class="small"><i>FOREWORD</i></span></h2>
<p><i>A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of
the events commemorated. We are not here trying to carve an epic, portray a moonlight
scene, or write a sonnet; neither are we dealing with mystery or tragedy, but rather the
constructive and the dramatic moments or crises in our amazing history. We are cool-headedly,
clear-mindedly setting down a few crucial, epochal facts regarding the
accomplishments of the Old World radicals who shook the shackles of oppression from
their light feet and fled despotism to people a continent: who built an empire and
rewrote the philosophy of freedom and compelled the world to accept its wiser, happier
forms of government.</i></p>
<p><i>We believe the dimensions of national heartbeats are greater than village impulses,
greater than city demands, greater than state dreams or ambitions. Therefore, we
believe a nation’s memorial should, like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt,
have a serenity, a nobility, a power that reflects the gods who inspired them and suggests
the gods they have become.</i></p>
<p><i>As for sculptured mountains—</i></p>
<p><i>Civilization, even its fine arts, is, most of it, quantity-produced stuff; education,
law, government, wealth—each is enduring only as the day. Too little of it lasts into
tomorrow and tomorrow is strangely the enemy of today, as today has already begun to
forget buried yesterday. Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor, and out of
its body builds its homes, its temples. Civilizations are ghouls. Egypt was pulled apart
by its successor; Greece was divided among the Romans; Rome was pulled to pieces by
bigotry and a bitterness much of which was engendered in its own empire building.</i></p>
<p><i>I want, somewhere in America on or near the Rockies, the backbone of the Continent,
so far removed from succeeding, selfish, coveting civilizations, a few feet of stone
that bears witness, carries the likenesses, the dates, a word or two of the great things we
accomplished as a Nation, placed so high it won’t pay to pull down for lesser purposes.</i></p>
<p><i>Hence, let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our
leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a
prayer that these records will endure until the wind and the rain alone shall wear
them away.</i></p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig2"> <ANTIMG src="images/p02b.jpg" alt="" width-obs="300" height-obs="88" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Gutzon Borglum</i></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_5">5</div>
<h2 id="c2"><span class="small">THE MIGHTY WORKS OF BORGLUM</span> <br/><i>By</i> RUPERT HUGHES</h2>
<p>How big is great? How high is up?</p>
<p>In the wide and numberless fields of creative
art, size is a matter of spirit rather than of material
bulk. A sonnet may be a masterpiece, and an epic
rubbish; or an epic may be sublime, a sonnet petty.</p>
<p>It is only affectation to confine one’s praise to small
things. Because a poet delights in a brook chuckling
through a thicket of birches he need not therefore despise
Niagara. The word “colossal” should not be surrendered
entirely to the advertisers.</p>
<p>The Shakespeare of the sonnets wrote also “Hamlet”
and “King Lear.” The Beethoven who wrote the giggling
<i>Scherzos</i> wrote also the titanic Ninth and added its mighty
chorus. Michelangelo did statuettes and sonnets, but also
his “Day of Judgment” and his prodigious horned Moses.</p>
<p>To the sincere artist it is the idea that is vital. Once
that has inflamed him, he seeks only to give it the shape
and the size that its nature dictates.</p>
<p>So Gutzon Borglum, being sensitive to all the moods of
life, a born poet, with an innate love of form for its own
sake, quick to glow with inspirations of every kind and
determined to give each its unique and eloquent shape,
has painted and carved without fear or favor the exquisite
and the tremendous with equal fidelity.</p>
<p>His genius shines in the little bas-relief of a nymph; in
sardonic gargoyles; in the tiny yet epic statuette of the
dying Nero, a bloated coward tangled in his toga and
drooping to his ignoble death; in the suave portrait of the
seated Ruskin; the pathos of the old Boer warrior; in the
billowy rush of the stampeding “Mares of Diomedes”; in
his colossal head of Lincoln; in his war memorial for
Newark, New Jersey, with its marvellously composed
forty-two figures and two horses; his magnificent plan for
the Stone Mountain, whose thwarting is one of the great
tragedies of art; and finally in his supreme achievement,
the Mount Rushmore Memorial, where he brought his
art to the mountains and left there the four great faces
for all eternity.</p>
<p>This unparalleled accomplishment seems to have been
not so much the carving of those vast heads upon the
peaks as the beating away of the veiling, smothering
stone and the releasing of the imprisoned statesmen so
that they might look out upon the world and utter their
lofty messages in a silence more pervasive and sonorous
than any trumpet-tone.</p>
<p>The heads stand up there against the clouds like cloud-gods.
Yet they are not offered as gods, but as plain men
who glorified the plain man. Each of them is greater in
magnitude than the so-called Egyptian Sphinx. The
Sphinx represented an unanswerable riddle and she
cruelly destroyed all who could not answer it. But these
presidents of ours represent brave, clear thinking towards
safety and dignity and happiness for all mankind.</p>
<p>The Sphinx was really a portrait, the largest portrait
ever made till Borglum came along. It is the head of King
Khafre set on the body of a crouching lion guarding the
king’s tomb, with his pyramid back of it. Khafre had it
built during a reign that ended over four thousand, seven
hundred and fifty years ago.</p>
<p>Near the Sphinx and Khafre’s pyramid is the greater
pyramid of King Khufu, better known to us as Cheops.
He lived from 2898 to 2875 BC. and his pyramid contains
over two million blocks of stone, of an average
weight of two and a half tons. Herodotus was told that it
took a hundred thousand men twenty years to build it.</p>
<p>Near Karnak there are still standing—or sitting—two
portrait statues of Amenhotep III, who ruled fourteen
hundred years B.C.—just about the time of Moses. These
statues are seventy feet high.</p>
<p>One of the four colossal statues at Abu Simbel represents
Rameses II, who died about two thousand, six hundred
years ago. Lying on its side is a broken statue of
Rameses II, once 90 feet high and carved from a single
thousand-ton block. This and another statue of him in
granite ninety feet high were, according to Breasted
writing in 1905, “the greatest monolithic statues ever
executed.”</p>
<p>But Borglum’s bust of Washington is larger than the
whole figure of Rameses, Lincoln’s nose is 21 feet long
and the sparkle in his eye is secured by a block of granite
thirty inches long.</p>
<p>Some of the Egyptian portraits were carved upon their
cliffs somewhat as Borglum’s statues are upon the peaks.
At Abu Simbel there are four such statues of enormous
bulk.</p>
<p>The Assyrians also built huge monuments, and inscribed
the texts of whole histories on the faces of cliffs.
Their kings were usually represented as enormous winged
bulls with the heads of bearded men. These were called,
strangely enough, “cherubs.”</p>
<p>The Greeks created for their greater gods statues of
gold and ivory—whence the epithet “chryselephantine.”
Such was the colossal Zeus that Pheidias made for Olympia.
It was about fifty feet high. Pheidias made also two
colossal figures of Athena for Athens, one in bronze that
stood up like a lighthouse and was visible to sailors far
<span class="pb" id="Page_6">6</span>
out to sea. The other had ivory flesh and robes of gold,
and was seventy feet high.</p>
<p>The famous bronze Colossus of Rhodes, erected about
274 B.C. by Chares of Lindus, was 105 feet high. It did
not straddle a stream, as tradition has it. Half a century
after it was set up, an earthquake overthrew it; in 656
A.D. it was sold for junk and carried off by a caravan of
900 camels.</p>
<p>In China one still sees enormous Buddhas, and in our
own world the Mayan monstrosities are being brought
back from the jungle that swallowed them like a sea.</p>
<p>The statue of Liberty—a gift to us from France—is 151
feet high; with its pedestal it is 305 feet tall.</p>
<p>But none of the giants ancient or modern has approached
the size of the greater works of Borglum.</p>
<p>This carver of mountains was himself a mountainy
man, born in the mountainous state of Idaho on March
25, 1871. His full name was John Gutzon de la Mothe
Borglum. His parents had come over from Denmark. His
father, at first a woodcarver, became a physician and surgeon,
also a breeder of horses on a 6000-acre ranch. He
had no money to give his children, but he gave them a
love of form and a knowledge of the horse that not only
inspired Gutzon Borglum to some of his most magnificent
work, but also made a splendid career for his younger
brother, Solon. Solon took fire from Gutzon’s fire,
worked his way to Paris, won honors there, and came
home to his West where he turned out a stream of important
sculptures that perpetuate many poignant phases of
Western life. His life was suddenly ended in 1922 by an
attack of acute appendicitis.</p>
<p>Gutzon’s indomitable will carried him from the Idaho
ranch to an art school in San Francisco, thence to Paris.
He began as both painter and sculptor and was accepted
as both by the French salons. In England, critics and
royalty heaped honors on him. After painting a series of
murals for a big hotel at Leeds and another series for a
concert hall at Manchester, he began to abandon the
brushes for the chisel, and to turn out statuary in almost
every field and almost every imaginable form.</p>
<p>From the first, his works won the highest honors. The
Metropolitan Museum bought his “Mares of Diomedes”
at once and the French Government promptly purchased
a partial replica of it for the Luxembourg Gallery. Commissions
rained on him and there was never any repetition
in the spirit or treatment of his responses.</p>
<p>There is not space here for even a catalogue of his
triumphs. He also wrote much and well. He was an engineer
and an inventor, overcoming by his own skill supposedly
unconquerable problems involved in the construction
of his larger works. He was an orator of eloquence
with a practical skill in politics. At times he was
a statesman and the close associate of Paderewski and
Masaryk in their re-creation of their lost republics.
During the first World War he investigated and exposed
the causes for a mysterious and dangerous failure in
American aircraft manufacture. His career has a strange
kinship in its versatility with that of Leonardo da Vinci,
and I believe that his name will live as long.</p>
<p>In 1909 he married Mary Montgomery, a distinguished
scholar in ancient Oriental languages, and a translator of
cuneiform inscriptions. A son and a daughter blessed this
union of two great souls.</p>
<p>It was in 1907 that I first met Gutzon Borglum while
preparing an article on his work, to which I paid complete
homage. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship
of which I wrote him while he was glorifying the
South Dakota mountains:</p>
<p>“I have always had an awe and a reverence for you
that fought with my love for the simple, jovial, twinkling-eyed
friend you always were.”</p>
<p>He answered: “You have said your say about me and
it is a wet eye that reads through the letter. You know
how vandalism in the name of Civilization raids the
tombs of our ancestors and destroys the records of History.
One of my motives in this work was to carve these
records of our great West-World adventure as high into
the heavens as I could find the stone.”</p>
<p>As man and as sculptor he was passionately American
and he has not only given to his country monuments of
art that equal the greatest of other nations, but he has
given artistic expression to the ideals that make America
America.</p>
<p>The Sphinx and its temple have only recently been
recovered from the sand that submerged them for
thousands of years. Yet even now the worst tyrannies and
cruelties of the Pharaohs have been revived and paralleled
in Europe, just as our gentlest, noblest ideals were
to be found co-existing with savagery in ancient Egypt.</p>
<p>I hope, I believe that in 7000 A.D. there will be pilgrimages
to Mount Rushmore by Americans still keeping
alive the flames of freedom kindled and rekindled by the
four heroes Borglum had immortalized, immortalizing
himself and his and their ideals along with them.</p>
<p>His Mount Rushmore Memorial presents to posterity
four great Americans who upheld the rights and equalities
of all mankind, and who were themselves the very
personifications of Americanism.</p>
<p>Their noble heads are lofty enough to mingle with the
clouds, and the parading lights of sun and moon and
stars, and the processionals of rain and snow and mist
give them a beauty that is always changing yet everlastingly
changeless.</p>
<p>Only a great soul and a great artist could have conceived
or achieved such a monument to them and to
himself. His gifts of spirit and execution were, I feel, unsurpassed
by anything of their kind in the history of the
world.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_7">7</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p03.jpg" alt="The Memorial" width-obs="800" height-obs="610" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_8">8</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig3"> <ANTIMG src="images/p04.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="608" /> <p class="pcap"><i>The Memorial in winter with a light fall of snow softening the surrounding landscape.</i></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_9">9</div>
<h2 id="c3"><span class="small">FROM THE BEGINNING</span> <br/><i>By</i> MRS. GUTZON BORGLUM</h2>
<p>A nation’s memorials are a record of its civilization
and the artist who builds them is the instrument
of his time. He is inspired by the same forces that
influence the nation’s destiny—the greater the period,
the greater the art. The artist cannot escape his destiny.
Like the “Hound of Heaven” it “pursues him down the
years,” forces him to leave his home, to go into exile, to
combat mountains even, to accomplish what must be.</p>
<p>How else can we explain why a man should abandon
a comfortable way of life, among pleasant surroundings,
to hurl himself against a gigantic rock, to cling like a
human fly to a perpendicular peak, to struggle with
hostile human nature, in order to carve against the sky
a record of the great experiment in democracy on this
continent—a record which will live on and be an inspiration
to future generations, a shrine to be visited, even
after the thing it commemorated may have passed.</p>
<p>This is the history of Rushmore told in a few words.
The contributing factors are of interest and should be
related but two outstanding facts are that a few kindred
souls, giants in their day, fostered a form of democratic
government and established a great nation and that a
hundred and fifty years later another group of Americans
realized the importance of making a record in the granite
for all time of what manner of men they were and what
they achieved.</p>
<p>The initial step in this great enterprise was taken by
Doane Robinson, state historian of South Dakota, who
had heard of the monument being carved in Georgia by
Gutzon Borglum to honor the heroes of the South in the
war between the states and thought it would be a fine
idea to have a similar patriotic shrine in South Dakota to
bring that state to the attention of the nation.</p>
<p>Mr. Robinson invited Mr. Borglum in 1924 to visit the
Black Hills to see what could be done. The first thought
was to carve the likeness of Washington and perhaps of
Lincoln in one of the granite upthrusts known as the
Needles. The stone, however, was not suitable and there
was no special reason for memorializing Washington and
Lincoln as individual presidents in South Dakota. Then
Mr. Robinson told the sculptor of a lead tablet discovered
by children playing near old Fort Pierre, which had been
planted there in 1743 by Verendrye, an emissary of Louis
of France, sent to establish French territory behind the
English. This fired his imagination. Here was a subject
for the great memorial he wanted to carve in the Hills.</p>
<p>South Dakota lies in the heart of the old Louisiana
Territory, purchased by Jefferson in 1803, in order to
control the mouth of the Mississippi, which marked the
first step away from the Atlantic seaboard colonies in the
expansion of the little republic. That step led to the establishment
of Texas, the conquest of California, the
acquisition of Oregon and Alaska and the spanning of the
continent from ocean to ocean by the empire nation
called the United States. This was a subject worthy of a
mountain—a monument to a nation, to its philosophy of
government, its ideals and aspirations, its great leaders.
Here in this remote spot, protected by its inaccessibility
from the vandalism of succeeding generations, would be
carved a Shrine of Democracy, as an imperishable record
of a great people.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig4"> <ANTIMG src="images/p04a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="628" height-obs="799" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Here is Mt. Rushmore as it stood for countless ages before the poetic and patriotic idea of the great national memorial was born in the mind of Gutzon Borglum.</i></p>
</div>
<p>Mr. Borglum paid a second and third visit to the Hills
<span class="pb" id="Page_10">10</span>
and camped among them for two weeks, exploring and
examining every rock large enough to suggest a monument,
with the result that the huge granite upthrust
called Mount Rushmore was selected as the only stone
sound enough to be suitable for carving. Another reason
for choosing Rushmore was the important consideration
of lighting. It was imperative that the cliff on which the
figures were to be carved should face the east in order to
get the maximum amount of sunlight all the day long.
Washington’s face is so placed that it catches the first rays
of light in the morning and reflects the last ruddy glow
in the evening. Many beautiful works of art are made
insignificant by poor lighting.</p>
<p>Senator Peter Norbeck, who had created the park system
of South Dakota and played an important part in the
creation of the Rushmore Memorial, also agreed that, in
spite of its remote position with only riding trails leading
to it, there was no other location possible.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig5"> <ANTIMG src="images/p05.jpg" alt="" width-obs="569" height-obs="799" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Ranging downward like spiders swinging on fine threads, workmen made the strokes on the granite mountainside which now bears the features of George Washington.</i></p>
</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig6"> <ANTIMG src="images/p05a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="611" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Scaffolding suspended from cables enabled the workmen to reach down from the brow of the mountain in order to carry on their courageous and difficult labors.</i></p>
</div>
<p>That autumn a group of Rapid City women put on a
pageant of flags, designed by Mr. Borglum, on the top of
the cliff to show the different epochs through which the
territory had passed. The French flag was first hoisted,
then the Spanish, then the flag of Napoleon, next the
colonial flag and finally the present flag of the United
States. Thus was Mount Rushmore officially dedicated
to the Memorial. Mr Borglum then returned to his temporary
studio in San Antonio, Texas, to make the models
and decide what characters best illustrated the idea to
which he was trying to give form.</p>
<p>George Washington’s presence in the group was inevitable.
He was the rock on which the republic was founded—the
plumb line to establish its direction. So on Mount
Rushmore his head is exactly perpendicular, facing the
east, unaffected by the others in the group, the measuring
rod determining the position of the others. Equally important
with Washington was Thomas Jefferson, the
author of the Declaration of Independence. By the purchase
of the Louisiana Territory, as stated above, he had
taken the first step westward in the course of the nation’s
growth. He is represented on the mountain as a young
man. He was only 33 when he wrote the Declaration of
Independence.</p>
<p>Abraham Lincoln, the saviour of the republic, was
inevitable in any record of the country’s history and finally
<span class="pb" id="Page_11">11</span>
Theodore Roosevelt was selected because, by cutting
the Panama Canal, he had accomplished the dream
of Columbus and opened a Sea-way from Europe to
Asia and his name was closely linked with the territorial
expansion following the war with Spain. He was also the
first president to attempt the curbing of big business
interests and the only president who had been familiar
with the west. He had close associations with South
Dakota.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig7"> <ANTIMG src="images/p05c.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="568" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Models in the studio at the foot of the mountain which guided construction of the actual figures (seen through window).</i></p> </div>
<p>The Mount Harney Memorial Association was authorized
in 1925 by the state legislature to undertake the project
on Mount Rushmore. No funds were voted for the
purpose. Contributions were obtained from the three
railroads serving the state, from the Homestake Mine and
from private individuals, among them Mr. Charles
Rushmore, a New York lawyer, after whom, quite accidentally,
the cliff had been named. The work went on
slowly, with considerable opposition, until President
Coolidge’s visit to the Black Hills in 1927. He made a
splendid speech at a picturesque ceremony held at Rushmore,
immediately following which he took Mr. Borglum
aside, inquired about the financing and urged him to
come to Washington for help. It is doubtful whether,
without this impetus given by President Coolidge, the
carving would ever have been accomplished.</p>
<p>The Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission
came into existence as the result of a Congressional
Bill, passed on Washington’s Birthday in 1929. The act
carried an appropriation of $250,000 for the memorial,
which was to be matched on a fifty-fifty basis by private
subscriptions; it designated Gutzon Borglum as the sculptor
and designer of the four figures and provided also for
an inscription on the mountain.</p>
<p>The first ascent of the mountain was made up the
canyon where the present wooden stairway now is. After
the initial survey was made, pine trees with branches cut
off and cleats nailed at right angles to the trees were laid
in the crevices to serve as ladders. Heavy ropes were
then carried by hand to the top and a small winch was
carried as far as possible by pack horse and then carried
to the top by hand. After this winch was fastened on the
top of the mountain, it in turn was used to pull up the
<span class="pb" id="Page_12">12</span>
heavy cable that became the tramway from the ground
to the mountain top. Building material was pulled up
and shelters built for the men. A small studio was also
built to house the plaster reproductions of the master
models that were in the studio at the foot of the mountain.
These reproductions were used for measurements to
save time required to go to the studio 1500 feet away and
500 feet below. In some cases these models were hung
over the side of the mountain so that they could be consulted
and compared with the measurements as the
actual stone work progressed. By this method it was
possible to save considerable time and labor.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig8"> <ANTIMG src="images/p06.jpg" alt="" width-obs="700" height-obs="644" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Roughing out the face of Theodore Roosevelt. The strong chin and the mouth are already visible. The mass of stone at the top will be carved away to form the mustache.</i></p>
</div>
<p>The work of fitting the figures into the cracked granite
upthrust called Mt. Rushmore has been a constant
struggle between composition and finding solid stone
for each of the four heads.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig9"> <ANTIMG src="images/p06a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="495" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Close-up of Lincoln. Note the shafts of granite in the eyes of Lincoln. The light reflected by these shafts gives the eyes their lifelike glint when seen from a distance.</i></p>
</div>
<p>In the first design Jefferson was placed at the right of
Washington and Lincoln on his left, and Theodore
Roosevelt occupied the position now occupied by Lincoln.
However serious flaws developed in the stone on
this side of Washington; and it therefore became necessary
to change our design and place Jefferson to Washington’s
left. This made it necessary to place Theodore
Roosevelt between Jefferson and Lincoln, and the
stone had to be removed to a depth of approximately 120
feet from the original surface to get back far enough for
the Roosevelt face. The heads were finally relegated to
their approximate position (being moved several times
as new conditions of the stone developed), that is they
were tilted or dropped or made to look more to the right
or left as the case might have been, to meet the composition
or avoid flaws in the stone. This movement being
made simply by moving the respective heads on the
model and cutting the stone accordingly. It was not
possible to fit the heads so that they would be entirely
free from fissures, but it was possible to place them so
that none of these fissures would be unsupported from
below and that removes the danger of some vital part
dropping off. As each head was started its center was
located, and at this center point on the top of the head a
plate was located. This was graduated in degrees 0 to 360
degrees, and at its center a horizontal arm was located
that traversed this horizontal are. This arm was about
30 feet long, in effect a giant protractor laid on top of
the head. The arm was graduated in feet and inches so
that at any point we could drop a plumb bob from this
arm, and by measuring the vertical distance on this
plumb line determine exactly the amount of stone to be
removed. After determining this master center point
on the mountain, we set a smaller arc and arm on our
model in the same relative position. With this small
device we would make all our measurements on our
model and then enlarge them twelve times and transfer
them to the large measuring device on the mountain.
Thru this system every face had a measurement made
every six inches both vertically and horizontally. These
<span class="pb" id="Page_13">13</span>
measurements were then painted on the stone and it was
thru this means that men totally unfamiliar with sculptural
form were able to do this undertaking. In fact all
the men employed on the work were local men trained
by the sculptor.</p>
<p>Pneumatic drills are used for drilling and the compressed
air is provided by large compressors located on
the ground and driven by electricity. The air is forced
or conveyed to the top of the mountain by a 3″ pipe and
then by the use of smaller pipes and rubber hoses is conveyed
to the drills.</p>
<p>Over 400,000 tons of granite have been removed from
the mountain in carving the figures, at a total expense
of slightly more than $900,000. This includes all building,
stairways and machinery.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig10"> <ANTIMG src="images/p06c.jpg" alt="" width-obs="571" height-obs="799" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Workmen putting the finishing touches on the strong face of the Rough-rider President.</i></p> </div>
<p>The men are let down over the face of the stone in
leather swings similar to bos’n chairs used on ships.
These swings are fastened on to ⅜″ steel cables which
are in turn fastened on to winches located on the top of
the heads. These winches are operated by hand. There
are about seven winches on the top of each head. The
men are lowered to their place of work by these winches,
taking with them their jackhammers or pneumatic tools
and other necessary equipment. One man is located in a
position where he can see all the men at work, and is
“The Callboy,” and has a microphone with a loud
speaker at each of the winches and when any of the
men working in the swings wants to be raised or lowered
they signal this call-boy and he relays the message thru
the loud speakers to the winchman. He also keeps the
workmen supplied with new drills as they need them, by
relaying their requests to the steelman who carries the
steel to the men in the swings as it is needed. This steel
is used over and over again; as it is dulled it is taken to
the blacksmith shop on the ground via the cable car,
heated, sharpened, re-heated and tempered and sent
back to the mountain again. About 400 of these drills
are dulled each day. They drill on an average about four
feet before being sharpened. In some places the stone is
so hard they will only last or drill about six inches and
in other places they will last seven or eight feet before
being re-sharpened.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig11"> <ANTIMG src="images/p06d.jpg" alt="" width-obs="700" height-obs="636" /> <p class="pcap"><i>The work in process as it appeared from an odd angle ... from the road running along the side of the mountain. Not many have seen the Memorial from this point of view.</i></p>
</div>
<p>The problem of finance has always been acute in connection
with the work of the Rushmore Memorial. The
economic hardships of the country made it increasingly
difficult to match the Federal appropriation, without
which the carving could not go on. The sculptor made
repeated trips through the state and beyond its borders
to arouse interest in the undertaking. He succeeded in
raising some money by publishing a small book about
Rushmore. There were never enough funds for as much
power or as many men as he would have liked to use.
There were long months when the work was stopped
altogether. Finally the government took over the whole
burden of financing and the work continued regularly,
after 1938, being halted only by weather conditions.
<span class="pb" id="Page_14">14</span>
The sculptor was at last able to employ one or two trained
stone carvers to do the finer work of finishing.</p>
<p>The Washington head was unveiled in 1930, with Mr.
Cullinan, first chairman of the Rushmore Commission
presiding. President Franklin D. Roosevelt came for the
unveiling of the Jefferson head in 1936. His unfailing
interest and support have insured the finishing of the
Memorial. At the unveiling of the face of Abraham Lincoln
in 1937, a nation wide radio hookup carried the
speeches to all parts of the country and again in 1939,
when Governor Bushfield of South Dakota conducted
ceremonies celebrating the Golden Jubilee of the State
of South Dakota at Mount Rushmore, the radio carried
the speeches and music all over the United States. The
upper part of the face of Theodore Roosevelt was uncovered
at that time.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig12"> <ANTIMG src="images/p07.jpg" alt="" width-obs="652" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap"><i>The face of Jefferson begins to take form. The nose and the forehead are already plainly visible, but many tons of stone must be removed before the picture is complete.</i></p>
</div>
<p>Mr. Borglum was always scrupulously careful to protect
his men from harm and it was his boast that in all
his years of hazardous mountain carving no worker was
seriously injured. He took no care of himself, however,
and physicians said that undoubtedly the strenuous work
of carving at that altitude weakened his heart and in
March, 1941, it stopped beating. The carving was practically
finished; there remained only the finishing of the
hands and hair of the four figures and the Rushmore
National Memorial Commission entrusted that work to
the sculptor’s son, Lincoln Borglum, who had been with
his father from the beginning of the work.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig13"> <ANTIMG src="images/p07a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="515" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap"><i>A blast is set off. The handling of powder and dynamite was an especially delicate problem, since a single badly placed charge might easily spoil the work of many months.</i></p>
</div>
<p>The faces of the four presidents, as carved on Mount
Rushmore, are approximately 60 feet from chin to forehead;
if completed from head to foot the figures would
be 465 feet high. The entire head of the sphinx in Egypt
is not quite as long as Washington’s nose. The entire cost
of the Memorial, including all expenses of carving, buildings
and salaries, is $900,000. This is at the rate of less
than two dollars for every ton of stone removed, which
is a cost incredibly low considering the hardness of the
granite and that every piece must be removed in such a
way as not to injure the surface behind. On this investment
the Federal Government has received from tourists
from the one cent gas tax on the increased sale of gas
during the years since the work started over two million
dollars and the income to South Dakota is over twenty
million dollars annually.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_15">15</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig14"> <ANTIMG src="images/p07c.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="604" /> <p class="pcap"><i>From these beginnings today shine forth the faces of four of the greatest men of American history, to light the path of freedom for countless generations yet to come.</i></p>
</div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_16">16</div>
<h2 id="c4"><span class="small">THE ROLE OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE</span></h2>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p08.jpg" alt="{uncaptioned}" width-obs="800" height-obs="522" /></div>
<p>Millions of Americans and liberty-loving people
from all over the world have come to the Black
Hills of South Dakota to look upon Gutzon
Borglum’s <i>Shrine of Democracy</i>.</p>
<p>The exact number of visitors to the great granite carvings
is not known but each travel season the pilgrimage
increases in size.</p>
<p>During the period of construction from 1927 to 1941,
when work was under supervision of the Mount Rushmore
National Memorial Commission, no accurate records
of visitors were kept. Hundreds came each day,
however, to keep a fascinated watch over the emergence
of the likenesses of the four great presidents from the
great stone uplift.</p>
<p>Consecration ceremonies attended by President Coolidge
and the unveilings of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore
Roosevelt, and Lincoln were attended by thousands
of people. Distinguished guests participating in these
ceremonies included the late President Franklin D.
Roosevelt.</p>
<p>Then in 1939, the Memorial was placed under the
supervision of the National Park Service of the Department
of Interior. World War II intervened, but in the
peace years since the transfer, the flow of visitors has
been measured at close to a half million persons each
travel season, 419,817 being reported for the 1947 travel
year.</p>
<p>Among the nine great memorials in the National Park
Service system, Mount Rushmore, by 1947, had risen
from seventh to fourth place in attendance. So far as
these memorials are concerned, those reporting larger
visitations were the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson
Memorial, and the Washington Monument, all in the
District of Columbia.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_17">17</div>
<p>As with other national parks, monuments, and memorials,
Mount Rushmore was designated for inclusion in
the National Park system because it had become a most
inspiring site of historic significance.</p>
<p>Its present administration is designed to promote and
regulate the use of the memorial area to conserve the
scenery and the natural and historical objects and to provide
for the enjoyment of it in such a manner as to leave
it unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.</p>
<p>A total of nearly 1,800 acres of the Federal Game Sanctuary
in the Harney National Forest now comprises the
memorial area. It is under the administration of Superintendent
Harry J. Liek with headquarters at Wind Cave
National Park. The memorial is directly under Acting
Custodian J. Estes Suter.</p>
<p>A brief description follows for Wind Cave National
Park and the three national monuments—the Badlands,
Jewel Cave, and Devils Tower—that are embraced in
the Black Hills and Badlands area of southwestern South
Dakota and northeastern Wyoming.</p>
<h3 id="c5">WIND CAVE NATIONAL PARK</h3>
<p>Wind Cave is the most widely known of the many
limestone caverns found near the margin of the Black
Hills. Discovered in 1881, it was created a national park
in 1903. The strong currents of wind that blow alternately
in and out of the mouth of the cave suggested its
name.</p>
<p>Boundaries of the park were extended twice and now
embrace a total of 28,000 acres of federally-owned land,
supporting a large buffalo herd in its natural habitat and
other wildlife, such as elk, antelope, and deer.</p>
<p>Chief feature of the park is the exceptional limestone
cavern, noted for its unique boxwork rarely found in
other sections of the world. Other crystalline formations
in various color shadings line a series of subterranean
passages, known to be at least 10 miles in extent.</p>
<h3 id="c6">BADLANDS NATIONAL MONUMENT</h3>
<p>In sharp contrast to the verdant Black Hills country,
the White River Badlands, a barren, treeless region, lies
about 50 miles east of the western foothills.</p>
<p>Here nature has beautified the earth with all shades
of buff, cream, pale green, gold, and rose. Fantastically
carved erosion forms rise above the valleys, some of them
150 to 300 feet high.</p>
<p>The constantly shifting color and the weird formations
make this a region of strong imaginative appeal.</p>
<h3 id="c7">JEWEL CAVE NATIONAL MONUMENT</h3>
<p>A unique coating of dogtooth calcite crystals which
sparkle like jewels in the light distinguish Jewel Cave
from other crystal caverns in the Black Hills and provided
its name.</p>
<p>One of the finest stands of virgin ponderosa pine remaining
in the Black Hills is found within the monument
which was established in 1908. It was originally part of
the present Harney National Forest but was transferred
to the National Park Service, by Executive Order, in
1934.</p>
<h3 id="c8">DEVILS TOWER NATIONAL MONUMENT</h3>
<p>Another unusual natural phenomenon of the Black
Hills country is the Devils Tower across the South Dakota
state line in Wyoming. This is a great column of
igneous rock towering 1,280 feet above the Belle Fourche
river, whose course is near the base. Devils Tower has
the distinction of being the first national monument created
under the Antiquities Act of 1906. It was established
by proclamation of September 24 of that year, by
President Theodore Roosevelt.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig15"> <ANTIMG src="images/p08a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="499" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Devils Tower in Wyoming’s western border of the Black Hills National Forest.</i></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_18">18</div>
<h2 id="c9"><span class="small">THE ANTIQUITY OF MOUNT RUSHMORE</span> <br/><i>By the late</i> JOSEPH P. CONNOLLY <br/><i>President, South Dakota School of Mines</i></h2>
<p>At the Battle of the Pyramids, Napoleon is reported
to have exhorted his men by saying, “Soldiers,
from these pyramids forty centuries look down
upon you.” From the standpoint of human history four
thousand years represent great antiquity indeed. But as
one gazes upon the rugged slopes of Mount Rushmore,
he is face to face with antiquity beside which the age of
the Egyptian pyramids seems but a moment.</p>
<p>How old is the granite of Rushmore? We have a yardstick
by which we can measure that quite accurately. Not
far from the mountain, in a subsidiary mass of granite,
there was found a few years ago a small piece of coal-black,
lustrous mineral known as pitchblende or uraninite,
of which the chief constituent is the heaviest known
element, uranium. We know that uranium continually
undergoes atomic disintegration, changing at a slow, but
uniform and measurable rate into lighter elements. The
end product of this change is the metal lead. If we submit
the specimen of pitchblende to chemical analysis, determine
how much lead it contains, how much uranium is
still left, it is a comparatively simple calculation to determine
from the known rate of change, the number of years
that have elapsed since the pitchblende came into existence.
That experiment has been performed and the result
is one billion four hundred and sixty-five million
(1,465,000,000) years. Bear in mind that this enormous
figure represents the time that has elapsed since the
molten rock came to rest at some depth under the surface
of the earth, and cooled sufficiently to crystallize into
granite. It represents the age of the solid granite.</p>
<p>But, although the granite of which the mountain is
composed dates back to a period almost inconceivably
remote, Mount Rushmore itself is much younger. We
know that all of the granite mountains of the southern
Black Hills were carved out of the rocks by the process of
erosion. Field evidence indicates that fairly early in the
Tertiary period, approximately thirty million years ago,
erosion had carved out the topography of the Black Hills
into much the same stage as we see it today. Perhaps
Mount Rushmore was not fully born in that period; its
form may not yet have been completely sculptured under
the chisel of time, but we know that its age must be measured
in millions of years and not in centuries.</p>
<p>Mount Rushmore is a child of weathering and erosion.
They brought the mountain into being and gave it form.
But those relentless parents will not be content to leave
their child as they fashioned it. They will continue their
work of disintegration on the surface of the rock and along
the cracks, until eventually they will completely destroy
the mountain they formed, and long before the mountain
will have been destroyed, the magnificent carvings of
man will disappear. “How long,” we anxiously ask, “will
the carvings endure?” Two processes will tend eventually
to destroy the memorial, chemical weathering and physical
disintegration.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig16"> <ANTIMG src="images/p09.jpg" alt="" width-obs="580" height-obs="801" /> <p class="pcap"><i>A typical view from the Needles highway with the Cathedral Spires in the background.</i></p> </div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_19">19</div>
<div class="fig"> id="fig17"> <ANTIMG src="images/p09a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="800" height-obs="500" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Fantastic formations in the Badlands. The variegated coloring is at its best in the early morning or the late evening.</i></p> </div>
<p>Chemical weathering will take place very slowly, so
slowly that if it were the only destructive process we had
to consider, we could with some confidence say that the
memorial would endure for hundreds of thousands of
years. And the progress of chemical weathering will
probably be impeded by the sculpturing of the memorial,
for on the figures the rock will be smoother, water will
drain off more rapidly instead of penetrating, lichens and
other vegetation will not have as secure a foothold as on
the natural face of the rock, and thus will not contribute
to so great an extent their destructive acids to such waters
as do penetrate.</p>
<p>Physical disintegration is somewhat more to be feared.
This operates in two ways, by exfoliation due to changes
in temperature, and by frost action. Differential stresses
set up by unequal expansion and contraction, owing to
the poor heat conductivity of granite, tend to spall off or
<i>exfoliate</i> the surface layers of rock.</p>
<p>When water gets into the cracks and pores of the rocks
and freezes, it exerts an enormous pressure, a pressure
that will spall off flakes and blocks of rock. The artist
and his associates, fully aware of this hazard, have
guarded against it. All cracks and fissures have been carefully
avoided in the sculpturing so far as is possible. Such
as have been impossible to avoid are being sealed to prevent
the ingress of water, thus inhibiting to a very large
extent both frost action and chemical weathering.</p>
<p>We have traced in part the geological history of the
Mount Rushmore region, hoping that by learning something
of its past we may predict something of its future.
We see the hazards to which the memorial is exposed.
We must frankly recognize them and guard against them
so far as possible, as it would be folly to ignore them. If
the science of geology can do no more in a practical way
for mankind than to point out dangers and sound warnings,
it does a worth while service. “How long will the
memorial last?” Geology cannot answer specifically. An
eminent geologist has already given as definite an answer
as it is possible to give, and I can do no better than to
close by quoting from the address given by the late Dr. C.
C. O’Harra at the unveiling of the head of Washington.</p>
<p>“How long will Mount Rushmore last? Many millions
of years. The number nobody knows. How long will endure
this monumental, sculptured figure of the Father of
our Country which today we unveil? One hundred years?
Yes. One thousand years? Yes. A hundred thousand
years? In all likelihood, yes. A half million years? Possibly
so, nobody knows. The time at any rate will be long, far
longer than we can readily comprehend. And this doubtless
will abundantly suffice.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_20">20</div>
<h2 id="c10"><span class="small">THE HALL OF RECORDS AND GREAT STAIRWAY</span> <br/><i>By</i> LINCOLN BORGLUM</h2>
<p>The Hall of Records and Stairway have been part
of the Memorial plan from the beginning and are
provided for in the so-called “Rushmore Bill” of
1938. A good start has been made in the carving of the
Hall, which already has been excavated to the extent of
seventy feet. Great care has to be exercised in the use of
dynamite in carving this hall, as in carving the faces on
the mountain, not to injure the stone which is to remain.
Careless explosions of large amounts of powder might
crumble the walls.</p>
<p>The Hall is located about two thirds of the way up to
the mountain: the entrance to it is in a small gorge or
canyon, cut by the ice aeons ago, to the right of the carved
faces as one looks at them from below. The Hall is on the
opposite side of the gorge from the heads and is not
under them. The following is quoted from Mr. Borglum’s
plan.</p>
<p>“The façade to the Hall’s entrance is the mountain
wall 140 feet high; supporting pylons, cut into the mountain,
flank the entrance. The entrance door itself is 12
feet wide and 20 feet high; the walls are plain, dressed
granite and of a fine color. I want to finish the inner
entrance wall in mosaic of blue and gold lapis. The depth
to the door entrance from the outer façade is 20 feet. The
door, swung on a six inch offset of the wall, will be of
bronze and glass. Small, carefully modeled bronze figures
of historic importance from Columbus and Raleigh to the
present day will ornament the doors or be modeled into
the supporting frame. The walls of the entrance will
carry in gilded bronze immediately within the entrance
ancient Indian symbols; British, French, Spanish and
American seals.</p>
<p>“The floor of the Hall will be 100 by 80 by 32 feet to an
arched ceiling. At the height of fifteen feet an historic
frieze, four feet wide, will encircle the entire room. Recesses
will be cut into these walls to be filled with bronze
and glass cabinets, which will hold the records stamped
on aluminum sheets, rolled separately and placed in
tubes. Busts of our leaders in all human activities will
occupy the recesses between the cabinets. The original
thought of a hall of human records I developed at Stone
Mountain in Georgia and my drawings and full plans
are extant; that was never completed.</p>
<p>“The records of electricity, beginning with Franklin,
which has given us light, heat, music, the radio, the telegraph,
the telephone and controls in power the extent of
which we can hardly imagine, must be here, together
with the records of literature, the records of travel, immigration,
religious development and also the record of
perhaps the largest contribution that we have made to
humanity, which has been free controlled peace, a government
of the people, by and for the people. Struggle as
we will that great contribution is today the cause for the
real unrest of Europe. Despotism, tyranny of every form
is fighting us wherever it can, to take away from humanity
the power freedom gives it—the power that freedom
has given America.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig18"> <ANTIMG src="images/p10.jpg" alt="" width-obs="560" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap"><i>Opening of a gorge reached by the Great Stairway is the massive twenty-foot-high entrance to the Hall of Records.</i></p> </div>
<p>“The Hall will be reached by a monumental flight of
steps varying from 15 to 20 feet in width, which will
ascend the mountain in front, a little to one side of the
<span class="pb" id="Page_21">21</span>
sculpture, rising from a great granite disk or platform in
the canyon below, which may be used as a rostrum from
which speakers may address the public occupying the
amphitheater facing the great group.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig19"> <ANTIMG src="images/p10a.jpg" alt="" width-obs="695" height-obs="600" /> <p class="pcap"><i>This picture shows the workmen busy in the early stages of the work of carving the Hall of Records from the granite.</i></p> </div>
<p>“These steps of granite and cement will be provided
with seats at intervals of every fifty feet; they will have a
five inch rise and an eighteen inch tread. The ascension
from the foot of the steps to the floor of the great entrance
is four hundred feet; the entrance way from the steps’
landing to the great Hall is 190 feet; the floor of this
Hall, reached by three steps, is two feet above the floor of
the entrance way in the canyon; this to provide for proper
drainage.”</p>
<p>Owing to repeated requests from important organizations
of women, the urging of some senators and congressmen
and Mr. Borglum’s own realization of the part
women have played in the development of our country,
plans had been under way for some years to include
women in the great Shrine of Democracy. There was no
room in the rock which contains the heads of the four
presidents and the only other place seemed to be the
west wall of the granite cliff, or in the hall of records.
To quote again from Mr. Borglum, from a letter written
in January 1940: “If we decide that the west side of the
mountain is suitable, I am for it. We must work out a
design that is fitting and in no sense harmful in the
matter of lighting or location to subjects determined
upon and I am entirely in favor of carving the faces of
two or three women. If that is determined upon, these
figures will be near what has been known in the Rushmore
Law as the Inscription and there will be a special
paragraph given to the work and services of women. The
original inscription referred to the framing of the Declaration
of Independence; that was Jefferson’s work and the
second was the Constitution. That was Washington’s
greatest service. The third dealt with the purchase of the
Louisiana Territory and the fourth, fifth, and sixth, the
progress towards the south and southwest, involving
Florida, Texas and California, which included Arizona,
a portion of Nevada, Utah and a portion of Idaho. The
seventh paragraph brought in the Oregon cession from
England and the purchase of Alaska. There was one paragraph
for Lincoln and one for the finishing of the Panama
Canal, which was achieved by Theodore Roosevelt.</p>
<div class="fig"> id="fig20"> <ANTIMG src="images/p10c.jpg" alt="" width-obs="587" height-obs="800" /> <p class="pcap"><i>The corridor leading from the doorway into the Hall of Records, showing the marks of the stonecutters’ tools.</i></p> </div>
<p>“So by these suggestions you will see that a splendid
paragraph can be developed for the part women have
played in the development of the nation.” In another
part of the letter Mr. Borglum made a place for women
in the Hall of records and even suggested that a special
hall might be carved for them, as there is ample rock for
many rooms.</p>
<p>Calvin Coolidge had been asked to collaborate on the
inscription and wrote the first two paragraphs. Mr.
Borglum stood strongly for “Justice” in the wording,
whereas Mr. Coolidge insisted upon “Justice under the
Law.” Newspaper accounts exaggerated the discussion,
which unfortunately was terminated by Mr. Coolidge’s
death.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_22">22</div>
<h2 id="c11"><span class="small">GEORGE WASHINGTON</span></h2>
<p><i>In carving the head of George Washington, Mr. Borglum
studied all the known portraits of him and drew heavily on
certain famous likenesses which he preferred because he
believed them most faithful to the character of the man.
Borglum was confronted by an extraordinary problem. He
had undertaken to place his sculpture on a mountain peak
over 6000 feet above sea level. His face of Washington, tall
as a five-story building, was to be far up in the sky “where
the clouds fold about it like a great scarf, where the stars
blink about its head, and the moon hides behind a lock of
hair.” As Borglum himself pointed out, it has been the
practice of the sculptors of history, immediately they departed
from the normal dimensions of men, to conventionalize
and simplify their faces and to generalize the portraiture,
and, in so doing, lose those qualities which gave distinction.
Such methods had no appeal to Borglum. Vehemently, he
brushed aside “the claptrap standards of Good Enough.”
The faces he placed upon the mountain to gaze down upon
hundreds of generations of mankind must be true, great, and
noble faces, and that of Washington would be the gauge of
all the rest. Borglum spent thirteen years digging into every
corner of Washington’s life in order that his portrait might
say the last word about the man who is called the Father of
his Country. He made an extensive study of his character and
was deeply impressed by the picture presented by Thomas
Jefferson in the following letter to Dr. Walter Jones, dated
at Monticello, January 2, 1814</i>:</p>
<p class="tb">I think I knew Gen. Washington intimately and
thoroly; and were I called on to delineate his character,
it should be in terms like these.</p>
<p>His mind was great and powerful, without being of the
very first order; his penetration strong, tho not so acute
as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he
saw, no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation,
being little aided by invention or imagination, but
sure in conclusion. Hence the common remark of his
officers, of the advantage he derived from councils of war,
where hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was
best; and certainly no general ever planned his battles
more judiciously. But if deranged during the course of
the action, if any member of his plan was dislocated by
sudden circumstances, he was slow in readjustment. The
consequence was that he often failed in the field, and
rarely against an enemy in station, as at Boston and York.</p>
<p>He was incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers
with the calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature
in his character was prudence, never acting until
every circumstance, every consideration, was maturely
weighed; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when once
decided, going thru with his purpose, whatever obstacles
opposed.</p>
<p>His integrity was most pure, his justice the most inflexible
I have ever known, no motives of interest or consanguinity,
of friendship, or hatred, being able to bias his
decision. He was, indeed, in every sense of the words a
wise, a good, and a great man. His temper was naturally
high toned; but reflection and resolution had obtained a
firm and habitual ascendancy over it. If ever, however,
it broke its bonds, he was most tremendous in his wrath.</p>
<p>In his expenses he was honorable, but exact; liberal in
contribution to whatever promised utility; but frowning
and unyielding on all visionary projects and all unworthy
calls on his charity. His heart was not warm in its affections;
but he exactly calculated every man’s value, and
gave him a solid esteem proportioned to it.</p>
<p>His person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly
what one would wish, his deportment easy, erect and
noble; the best horseman of his age, and the most graceful
figure that could be seen on horseback. Altho in the
circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with
safety, he took a free share in conversation, his colloquial
talents were not above mediocrity, possessing neither
copiousness of ideas nor fluency of words. In public,
when called on for a sudden opinion, he was unready,
short, and embarrassed.</p>
<p>Yet he wrote readily, rather diffusely, in an easy and
correct style. This he had acquired by conversation with
the world, for his education was merely reading, writing,
and common arithmetic, to which he added surveying at
a later day.</p>
<p>His time was employed in action chiefly, reading little,
and that only in agriculture and English history. His correspondence
became necessarily extensive, and, with
journalizing his agricultural proceedings, occupied most
of his leisure hours within doors.</p>
<p>On the whole, his character was, in its mass, perfect,
in nothing bad, in few points indifferent; and it may truly
be said that never did nature and fortune combine more
perfectly to make a man great, and to place him in the
same constellation with whatever worthies have merited
from man an everlasting remembrance. For his was the
singular destiny and merit of leading the armies of his
country successfully thru an arduous war, for the establishment
of its independence; of conducting its councils
thru the birth of a government, new in its forms and
principles, until it had settled down into a quiet and
orderly train; and of scrupulously obeying the laws thru
the whole of his career, civil and military, of which the
history of the world furnishes no other example....</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_23">23</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p11.jpg" alt="{George Washington}" width-obs="792" height-obs="1047" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_24">24</div>
<h2 id="c12"><span class="small">THOMAS JEFFERSON</span></h2>
<p>Writing just a century ago, and a few years
after Jefferson’s death, one of his earliest biographers
said that it had been that statesman’s
fate “to be at once loved and praised by his friends, and
more hated and reviled by his adversaries than any of his
compatriots.” The fact that much the same could be said
of the writing about him today merely shows that the
man is still alive in so far as his influence is both felt and
feared. So is his great antagonist Hamilton. These two
exponents of contrasted philosophies of government,
though dead, yet live and are in the thick of the fight
today. The issues for which they fought with all their
strength are not yet settled. Indeed these issues have
broadened and deepened until one in especial has become
perhaps the most burning of all in a bewildered
and angry world, the question whether the people can
govern themselves or must be governed.</p>
<p>Although a political philosopher, Jefferson never set
forth his views in any formal treatise, as did John Adams
in his voluminous works or Hamilton in <i>The Federalist</i>.
Probably the most widely read man of his time in America,
Jefferson had a broader range of interests—political, religious,
economic, agricultural, aesthetic and scientific—than
did any other of the leaders. His curiosity was insatiable,
but in spite of what has so frequently been asserted,
usually by his enemies, although sometimes by his
friends, he was not a mere theorist. He kept his feet on the
ground. It was the practical application of ideas and their
practical effects which appealed most to him and not the
ideas in themselves as viewed by a philosopher. Even
when he could not use the touchstone of experiment in
such matters as his belief in the common man or religious
freedom, he was never a doctrinaire. He not only believed
but said over and over that government and institutions
had to be suited to a people of any given time and place
and could not be true or good everywhere and always.</p>
<p>We do not look to Jefferson for a theory of government
or of the state. To a great extent the things he had to say
about government, and the things for which he strove in
his active political life, were based on the America of his
day and the slowly developing agricultural one which he
envisaged in the future, writing as he did, before the
machine age. What gave Jefferson his profound importance
in his own day, as it does now, was his view of
human life. He was, and still is, the greatest and most
influential American exponent of both Liberalism and
Americanism.</p>
<p>Liberalism is rather an attitude than a program. It is
less a solution of governmental problems than it is a way
of looking at them. It is based on the doctrine of live and
let live. The Liberal is willing to take risks feared by both
Conservatives and Socialists. Not being a fool, he realizes,
as do the others, that society must have a structure; but
he is more concerned with the freedom and fullness of the
life of the citizen within that structure than with the
structure itself.</p>
<p>It may also be noted that even in his native Virginia,
Jefferson antagonized many of the most important interests
and families by what was considered his undermining
of a social order. His struggle to break down entail
and primogeniture, to free religion from the fetters
of a State church, and his well-known opposition to
slavery, have not even yet been forgiven by many Virginians
who feel that the downfall of the, in many ways,
charming and delightful society of the eighteenth century
was due to one whom they consider a renegade from his
own order. As we shall see later, when Jefferson was involved
in financial difficulties in his old age, the citizens
of his own State, unlike many elsewhere, did not offer
him the slightest aid.</p>
<p>Europe, in the early days of our country, was filled
with restraints and barriers. Jefferson felt that the America
of his day offered a unique opportunity in the annals
of mankind to try out the great experiment of self-government
on an unprecedented scale. His Americanism,
written in part into the Declaration of Independence,
which he preached throughout life by word and act, grew
out of his personal experience of America itself. In so far
as those qualities of the American people which we group
under the word “Americanism” have been fostered by
any one man, in addition to the natural forces of the
American environment, Jefferson is beyond question that
man.</p>
<p>The struggle going on almost everywhere today, in our
own country no less than in some of those others which
have already lost their liberties, is the struggle between
the conception of a strong centralized state controlling
the lives of the citizens for the sake of economics and
national power, and the conception of personal liberty
affording the greatest possible scope for the individual
to live his life as he wills. The old questions which
Jefferson and Hamilton fought over were who is to rule,
why are they to rule, what is the object of their rule?
These are now being fought out again, as they always
have been, but with increasing bitterness among vast
masses of populations. That is why both men are living
today and why it is worth while to consider again the life
particularly of the one who laid more stress upon freedom
and toleration for the individual than on the strength of
national power.</p>
<p><span class="lr">JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS</span>
<span class="lr"><i>from “The Living Jefferson,” 1936</i></span></p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_25">25</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p12.jpg" alt="{Thomas Jefferson}" width-obs="797" height-obs="1051" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_26">26</div>
<h2 id="c13"><span class="small">ABRAHAM LINCOLN</span></h2>
<p>Carlyle once said to Holman Hunt: “I’m only a
poor man, but I would give one third of what I
possess for a veritable, contemporaneous representation
of Jesus Christ. Had those carvers of marble
chiseled a faithful statue of the Son of Man, as he called
himself, and shown us what manner of man he was like,
what his height, what his build, and what the features
of his sorrow-marked face were, I for one would have
thanked the sculptor with all the gratitude of my heart
for that portrait as one of the most precious heirlooms of
the ages.”</p>
<p>Remarkable as it may seem, were it not for photography
and one life mask, this, with equal truth, might be
said of a man who, as the ages run, has hardly gone from
among us.</p>
<p>Lincoln, one of the greatest of observers, was himself
the least truly observed. God had built him in the backyard
of the nation and there, wrapped in homely guise,
had preserved and matured his pure humanity. He was
heard, but seems rarely, if ever, to have been truly seen.
The reports we have of him do not satisfy, do not justify,
are inconsistent. The eastern, old-world eye could not
read beyond the queer hat, bad tailoring, and boots you
could not now give away—and he was so long he fairly
had to stoop to look the little world in the face. Never has
bad tailoring, homely, deferential manner, so completely
hidden seer, jester, master of men, as did these simple
accoutrements this first great gift of the West. But it is
surprising that professional observers, artists and writers
alike, have drawn and redrawn the untrue picture.</p>
<p>A great portrait is always full of compelling presence,
more even than is seen in the original at all times, for a
great portrait depicts great moments and carries the
record of the whole man. It is, therefore, not enough to
draw a mask.</p>
<p>Lincoln is a comfort and a reality, an example, a living
inspiration to every mother and every son in America.
No mask will satisfy <i>us</i>; we want to see what we care for;
we want to feel the private conscience that became public
conduct. We love this man, because he was all in all
one of us and made all the world peers. Now we begin to
see him truly. Within his coming the West has steadily
rolled back the East, and of his ways the world has many.
The silk hat, the tall figure, the swing, the language and
manner have become American, and we all understand.</p>
<p>Official Washington was shocked by his address. Men,
who could have given us master pictures of a master man,
remained unconvinced until he had passed away. The
great portrait was never drawn, and now it is too late; we
must wade through mountains of material and by some
strange divination find in fragments the real man, and,
patiently, lovingly, yet justly, piece them all together.</p>
<p>It was speculation of this kind that gradually led me to
a careful analysis of Lincoln the man. The <i>accepted</i> portraits
of him do not justify his record. His life, his labors,
his writings, made me feel some gross injustice had been
done him in the blind, careless use of such phrases as
<i>ungainly</i>, <i>uncouth</i>, <i>vulgar</i>, <i>rude</i>, which were commonly applied
to him by his contemporaries. These popular
descriptions do not fit the master of polished Douglas—nor
the man, whose intellectual arrogance academic
Sumner resented.</p>
<p>I believed the healthy, powerful youth and frontiersman,
the lover, lawyer of spotless record, legislator, the
thrice candidate for President, had been falsely drawn. I
believed if properly seen and truly read, the compelling
and enduring greatness of the man would be found
written in his actions, in his figure, in his deportment, in
his face, and that some of this compelling greatness might
be gotten into the stone. To do this, I read all or nearly
all he had written, his own description of himself, the few
immediate records of his coming and going. I then took
the life mask, learned it by heart, measured it in every
possible way—for it is infallible—then returned to the
habits of his mind, which his writings gave me, and I
recognized that <i>five</i> or <i>six</i> of the photographs indicated
the man.</p>
<p>Whether Lincoln sat or stood, his was the ease of movement
of a figure controlled by direct and natural development,
without a hint of consciousness. Chairs were low
for him and so Lincoln seemed when he sat down to go
farther than was quite easy or graceful. His walk was free
and he moved with a long but rather slow swinging
stride. His arms hung free, and he walked with an open
hand. He was erect; he did not stoop at the shoulders.
He bent forward, but from the waistline. His face was
large in its simple masses. His head was normal in size;
his forehead high, regular and ideal in shape. His brow
bushed and projected like a cliff. His eyebrows were very
strong. His mouth was not coarse or heavy. His right side
was determined, developed, ancient. The left side was
immature, plain—and physically not impressive.</p>
<p>You will find written in his face literally all the complexness
of his nature. We see a dual nature struggling
with a dual problem, delivering a single result—to the
whole. He was more deeply rooted in the home principles
that are keeping us together than any man who
was ever asked to make his heart-beat national—too
great to become president, except by some extraordinary
combination of circumstances.</p>
<p><span class="lr">GUTZON BORGLUM</span></p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_27">27</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p13.jpg" alt="{Abraham Lincoln}" width-obs="800" height-obs="1057" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_28">28</div>
<h2 id="c14"><span class="small">THEODORE ROOSEVELT</span></h2>
<p>Fromentin said of Peter Paul Rubens, one of the
greatest masters who ever used brush and paint to
interpret human character: “He is systematic, methodical
and stern in the discipline of his private life, in
the ordering of his work, in the regulating of his intelligence,
in a kind of strong and sane wholesomeness of his
genius. He is simple, sincere, a model of loyalty to his
friends, in sympathy with every one of talent, (and)
untiring and resourceful in his encouragement of beginners
* * *.” The same might have been said with equal
truth and propriety of Theodore Roosevelt.</p>
<p>Of all the great leaders of this country, he was the most
typically American. The grief and melancholy that
seized him following the death of his first wife drove him
into Dakota. Here upon the range he found surcease
from sorrow and sufficient time off from his duties as
manager of his ranch to write about the West. This work
won instant recognition and not only established his
place among the literary men of his day but made him
the idol of the Great West. The cowboys with whom he
rode the night herd liked and admired him, and even the
roughnecks soon learned to respect his cool courage and
resourcefulness. One encounter with him did not give
encouragement to a second.</p>
<p>But he was more than a frontiersman and writer. He
represented all that was best in the home, in business and
in government. He was energetic, intelligent and purposeful.
He had an aim in life and drove hard and steadily
toward his goal. His enemies seldom outmaneuvered
him and he knew how to strike when a bold stroke was
required to accomplish a desired end. His association
with men of all types and his keen observation gave him
an insight into men that enabled him to distinguish
quickly and accurately the spurious from the real. Surface
indications or social position had for him little
meaning. He would rather associate with an uneducated
but quick-witted cowpuncher than with the dull and unimaginative.
This accounts for his friendship with men
and women in all walks of life. Talent and ability, usefully
employed, always had for him a special appeal but he was
bored and annoyed by the pretentious commonplace.</p>
<p>He was by instinct and inclination a reformer and
sought to improve all that was best in public morals, both
spiritually and politically. No man struggling as mightily
as he could escape making mistakes, but he was great
enough to recognize them and fair enough to seek to
rectify any injustice that had resulted. His enthusiasm,
zeal and sureness of himself sometimes led him to pursue
hopeless and occasionally ill-considered causes that he
later had reason to regret, but by the large he was a most
useful and inspiring personality.</p>
<p>Two outstanding achievements stand to his credit. One
of these was the building of the Panama Canal, an accomplishment
of transcendent importance to the American
people. It is the link that binds the East to the West by
water and has helped to make this country one of the
great commercial and industrial nations of the world.
The canal is also of first importance from the standpoint
of national defense and has added greatly to the mobility
and usefulness of our Navy, which has always been our
first line of defense against any possible foreign foe.</p>
<p>The second was the injection of morals into our politics
and the insistence upon the square deal for every American,
be he small or great. It was this characteristic more
than any other that endeared him to the ordinary man
and made him one of the most powerful political figures
and one of the greatest moral forces that has taken
possession of the hearts and minds of men in any age. It
was not that he was always right, but men and women
clung to him because they felt that he was right most of
the time and was trying to be right all of the time.</p>
<p>As a lone fighter he was without a peer in his day and
generation, and had the impetuosity and zeal required to
arouse a mighty following in any cause which he espoused
and upon which he had deep convictions. Every word
that he spoke and every manifestation of his personality
left a profound impression upon all those who came into
contact with him either personally or upon the hustings.
Everywhere he was impressive, persuasive and compelling.
While he may never be loved as Lincoln was loved,
or rise to the stature of Washington, his example, fortitude
in adversity, and fight for the betterment of his
fellow men will ever be like a beacon going before to
inspire men and women everywhere who are seeking to
make the world a better place in which to live.</p>
<p>It was President Calvin Coolidge who said to Sculptor
Gutzon Borglum that among the immortals to be carved
upon Mount Rushmore a place must be found for
Theodore Roosevelt, “because he was the first president
to say to Big Business, ‘thus far you shall go and no
farther.’” Washington is there because he was the
trusted leader that made these United States possible,
and was great and strong enough to refuse a crown and
lay down the scepter when his work was done. Jefferson
stands at his side because of his contribution to the rights
of man as set forth in the bill of rights; Abraham Lincoln
because he saved the Union from division by his own
martyrdom and his infinite compassion for those who
suffered, and Theodore Roosevelt because he was the
greatest moral force for clean government and the square
deal of modern times.</p>
<p><span class="lr">WILLIAM WILLIAMSON</span></p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_29">29</div>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p14.jpg" alt="{Theodore Roosevelt}" width-obs="800" height-obs="1056" /></div>
<div class="pb" id="Page_30">30</div>
<h2 id="c15"><span class="small">AS GREAT MEN SAW IT</span></h2>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p15.jpg" alt="{Calvin Coolidge}" width-obs="693" height-obs="786" /></div>
<p>Excerpts from speeches at dedicatory and unveiling
ceremonies or comments made during personal
visits to the Memorial.</p>
<p class="tb">President Calvin Coolidge (Consecration Ceremony,
August 10, 1927)</p>
<p>“We have come here to dedicate a corner stone that
was laid by the hand of the Almighty.... This memorial
will be another national shrine to which future generations
will repair to declare their continuing allegiance to
independence, to self government, to freedom and to
economic justice....”</p>
<p class="tb">President Franklin D. Roosevelt (Jefferson Unveiling)</p>
<p>“An inspiration for the continuance of the democratic
republican form of government, not only in our own beloved
country, but, we hope, throughout the world.”</p>
<p class="tb">Lord Halifax (Visiting the Black Hills, March 29,
1946)</p>
<p>“The most remarkable confluence of the wonder of
nature and the art of man I have ever witnessed.”</p>
<p class="tb">Judge Albert R. Denu (Borglum Banquet, December
28, 1938)</p>
<p>“The historian of the future ... will record America’s
enduring achievements and include in his history the
name of a Master Sculptor, whom the earth’s inhabitants
of the twentieth century knew as Gutzon Borglum.”</p>
<div class="fig">> <ANTIMG src="images/p15a.jpg" alt="{Franklin D. Roosevelt}" width-obs="673" height-obs="800" /></div>
<p class="tb"><i>Photograph Credits: Bell Studios, Lincoln Borglum, Charles
d’Emery, Verne’s Photo Shop, Publishers’ Photo Service, Inc.,
Wyoming Department of Commerce & Industry, and Rise Studio.</i></p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_31">31</div>
<h2 id="c16"><span class="small">MOUNT RUSHMORE NATIONAL MEMORIAL SOCIETY OF BLACK HILLS</span></h2>
<div class="fig"> id="fig21"> <ANTIMG src="images/p15c.jpg" alt="" width-obs="400" height-obs="464" /> <p class="pcap">John A. Boland, Sr. <br/><i>President of Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society of Black Hills</i></p> </div>
<p>The state of South
Dakota and the community
of the Black
Hills have logically and with
undiminished zeal accepted
a considerable financial and
moral responsibility in the
evolution of this magnificent
Shrine of Democracy.</p>
<p>Through the successive
stages of locating, planning,
sculptoring, improving and
publicizing Mount Rushmore,
a liaison with Sculptor
Gutzon Borglum and his
son, Lincoln, the President,
the Congress and the Department of Interior has been
maintained through the instrumentalities of three nonprofit
organizations.</p>
<p>The Mount Harney Memorial Association was first
authorized to “carve a memorial in heroic figures” under
an act of Congress, approved by President Coolidge on
March 4, 1925. Brought into being through a bill passed
by the South Dakota Legislature, the Association entered
into a formal contract with Gutzon Borglum and work
was commenced in 1927.</p>
<p>Subsequently in 1929, when Federal funds were appropriated
for matching purposes, the Mount Rushmore
National Memorial Commission was created, consisting
of twelve members to be named by the President.</p>
<p>Appointed by President Coolidge to serve on the commission
were John A. Boland, Rapid City, S. D.; Charles
R. Crane, New York, N. Y.; Joseph S. Cullinan, Houston,
Texas; C. M. Day, Sioux Falls, S. D.; D. B. Gurney,
Yankton, S. D.; Hale Holden, Chicago; Frank O. Lowden,
Oregon, Ill.; Julius Rosenwald, Chicago; Fred W.
Sargent, Evanston, Ill. and Mrs. Lorine Jones Spoonts,
Corpus Christi, Texas.</p>
<p>Mr. Cullinan became the Commission’s first president
and Mr. Boland was named chairman of the executive
committee at a session in the White House, where it met
upon invitation of the President on June 6, 1929.</p>
<p>It was the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission
which assumed financial responsibility for the
Memorial, taking over all property and contracts from
the Mount Harney Association, employing the services
of a staff for the sculptor and disbursing federal and privately-solicited
funds during the course of construction.</p>
<p>It was also the parent organization for the present
Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society of Black
Hills, incorporated under the laws of the District of
Columbia in 1930. And while the Society’s objectives
were identical with those of the Commission, it had
additional authority, including the sale of memberships,
management of concessions and the use of available funds
for advertising and publicity.</p>
<p>A long list of “Who’s Who” in America and South
Dakota have been recorded in the annals and on the
membership roll of the Mount Rushmore Society. Membership
certificate No. 1 is held by John Hays Hammond,
world famed mining engineer, lecturer, consultant of
Cecil Rhodes and active in the development of hydro-electric
and irrigation projects. Number two belongs to
Newton D. Baker, Secretary of War under President
Wilson and a one-time member of the Permanent Court
of International Justice at The Hague.</p>
<p>Other original members, some of whose heirs hold the
certificates, are John N. Garner, vice president of the
United States; Julius Rosenwald, American merchant
and philanthropist; Sewell L. Avery, chain store magnate;
Mary Garden, American operatic soprano; Walter
Dill Scot, author and president of Northwestern University;
Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia
University and Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1931, and
Vilhjalmur Stefanson, Arctic Explorer, to mention a few.</p>
<p>The Society’s Board of Trustees presently is composed
of Paul E. Bellamy, John A. Boland, Mrs. Gutzon
Borglum, Lincoln Borglum, Francis Case, Fred C.
Christopherson, Miss Nina Cullinan, George E. Flavin,
Mrs. William Fowden, Mrs. Peter Norbeck, Robert
E. Driscoll, Sr., Eugene C. Eppley, Mrs. Frank M.
Lewis and William Williamson. Walter H. Johnson is
treasurer and K. F. Olsen secretary. The Commission
is not active at this time.</p>
<p>Originally a portion of the Federal Game Sanctuary in
the Harney National Forest, the 1,686-acre tract that
comprises the Mount Rushmore National Memorial was
established in 1929 but did not come under the National
Park Service jurisdiction until 1939.</p>
<p>During the interim, the South Dakota State Highway
Commission constructed the present Memorial Highway
from its junction with U. S. Highway 16. It also built the
Iron Mountain Drive with the three tunnels that frame
the Shrine of Democracy. The planning and intricate
engineering skill that went into building the Iron Mountain
Highway was extremely ingenious in itself.</p>
<h2>Transcriber’s Notes</h2>
<ul>
<li>Silently corrected a few typos.</li>
<li>Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.</li>
<li>In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.</li>
</ul>
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