The origins and meaning of Mount Rushmore

Two million a year. Yeah. In excess of two million a year. Yeah. Yeah. And, it is in part something, even if you haven't been to, you feel like you know. But your book is like, no, there's so much more, whether you go there or not, you need to know. Yeah.

Fill in some of the blanks that people may not need to-- may not know but need to know about Mount Rushmore. Well, first of all, writing a book is about something that people think they know but they don't really know. Reading a book about something that you think you know but you don't really know is one of my favorite things to do. So being able to the right one was great. I think the first thing that many people don't know about Mount Rushmore, because it's so big, because it's so monumental-- for lack of a better word-- people assume that the federal government was behind it from the very beginning, when really, my favorite part of the story is that the idea for Mount Rushmore was created by a state historian named Doane Robinson, who in the 1920s was really concerned about South Dakota's economy. At the time, South Dakota's markets were collapsing because World War I had devastated European markets. But when they recovered, the markets in South Dakota really tanked. And so banks were closing, farms were foreclosing. As I read in your book, South Dakota was a pre-Depression-era state, 10 years ahead of time. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It sort of was the precursor to what was about to come down the line several years later for the entire country.

So it needed some kind of elixir, and Doane Robinson thought tourism might be one of them. He did. Yeah, there were a bunch of cars and car tourists that were driving around that part of the country. What do we do? What do we do? He felt it would be a really great idea to carve sculptures into the Black Hills to attract these tourists that were moving around the state at the time. So his idea was to create figures that were representative of the American West.

But not the figures we see on Mount Rushmore.

Not the figures we see on Mount Rushmore. And that's crucial to the story, because the idea that Doane Robinson had was really an economic idea. It was one of tourism. He wanted to diversify the economy. But when Doane Robinson hired Gutzon Borglum as a sculptor, the idea began to shift to one of politics. Economics was still there, of course, but the political aspect of it really got going. And Doane was OK with the idea of this original monument in his mind representing key American, white American, figures of Western expansion, but also Native peoples? Well, Doane initially did want to have the Lakota leader Red Cloud. He wanted to have Lewis and Clark, Custer, Sacagawea, who was the guide for Lewis and Clark. And so Doane Robinson's idea was much more diverse in terms of what it ended up becoming. But it should be said that Doane Robinson wasn't necessarily upset in the direction that Mount Rushmore eventually went to. He had, especially initially, a great deal of awe and respect for Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor. Talk to my audience about who Gutzon Borglum was and the complexities in his life. He is a fascinating character, a fascinating man. He's an amazing artist, very talented artist, who really grew up from the middle of American Earth. He was born to a Mormon immigrant family from Denmark, and he was born in what is now Idaho. But as his family moved west-- or excuse me, moved east, the polygamy that his father practiced became more illegal as they moved east. And so Gutzon Borglum, his birth mom was a woman named Christina Mikkelsen. And she was married to his father, but so was her sister. So the two sisters were married to the same man. Gutzon happened to be born to the younger of the two sisters. And when they came to the middle of the United States and polygamy was illegal, they had to make a decision, and the decision was to ask Gutzon's mother to leave the family. And so when Gutzon was five years old, he said goodbye to his mother for the first time-- or he said goodbye to his mother, and that was it. He never saw her again. So it was a very traumatic experience for Gutzon. But he eventually moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. Really developed his artwork, became passionate about art, went to Europe for about a decade there and really grew as an artist, as a sculptor. He was someone who studied with and learned a lot about Auguste Rodin, the French sculptor. And when he came back to the United States in the early 20th century, he said, "I'm going to be a sculptor, and I'm going to be an American sculptor." You can listen to the rest of my conversation with Matthew Davis on your favorite podcast platform.