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The creator of Mount Rushmore’s forgotten ties to white supremacy

  

Category:  News & Politics

Via:  john-russell  •  4 years ago  •  37 comments

The creator of Mount Rushmore’s forgotten ties to white supremacy
In a letter to a friend in New Jersey in the early 1920s, Borglum asked, “Is it true you joined the Ku Klux Klan? I hope so. They’re a fine lot of fellows as far as I can learn and if they elect the next President, by gosh I’m going to join ‘em.” The artist became close friends with the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana, Klansman David “Steve” Stephenson of Indianapolis. In one letter to Stephenson, Borglum wrote, “While Anglo-Saxons have themselves sinned grievously against the principle...

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T



Since Calvin Coolidge spoke at Mount Rushmore’s groundbreaking ceremony in 1927, the national memorial in South Dakota has served as a backdrop for presidential patriotism.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton spoke there. Now, President Trump will travel to Mount Rushmore for a controversial fireworks celebration on the eve of Independence Day.

The depiction of four of America’s greatest presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt — has always been considered a grand tribute to the ideals of American democracy. That’s exactly what its mastermind, sculptor Gutzon Borglum, intended. Less well known: Borglum’s ties to   the Ku Klux Klan .

Borglum was born the son of Danish Mormon polygamists in 1867 in Idaho. A talented artist, he spent his childhood on the Western frontier and plains, in Utah and Kansas until leaving for Europe in the early 1880s to study sculpture. There, Borglum became fascinated with art on a grand scale with nationalistic subjects, which suited what many described as his bombastic, egotistical personality.

“Borglum was imperious, he was cocky. He was prone to angry outbursts,” said John Taliaferro, author of the 2002 book   “Great White Fathers: The Story Of The Obsessive Quest To Create Mount Rushmore.”

In Europe he was heavily influenced by ancient colossal sculpture from the Egyptians to the Greeks. The 66-foot Sphinx of Giza and the 70-foot carved guardians of Memnon’s Temple on the upper Nile became examples of the kinds of works he wanted to create in the United States.

Returning from Europe at the turn of the century, he set up shop in New York and then Connecticut and began to sculpt statues of statesmen and generals that memorialized American history, including a bust of Lincoln for Teddy Roosevelt’s White House that now sits in the Capitol Rotunda.

Then, in 1915, Helen Plane, the founder of the Atlanta chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, approached Borglum about a possible project.

After the Civil War, the North began an “orgy” of Civil War monument building, Taliaferro writes in his book. One of the primary missions of the Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, was to even the score, he wrote.

The group began erecting statues throughout the South, including   many that are being removed today   in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in the custody of Minneapolis police officers.

Plane asked Borglum whether he would be interested in working on the group’s biggest project ever: a   monument to the Confederacy on Stone Mountain   outside Atlanta.

Right away, Borglum was interested in sculpting on such a grand scale. After visiting the site, he saw the potential to build a colossus of his own, a tribute to what he considered great men. He immediately accepted and drew up a proposal featuring Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and Jeb Stewart riding in a cavalry carved in deep relief across a 1,200-foot-span of the mountain’s eastern face. The fathers of the confederacy would be 50-feet-tall, surrounded by stampeding horses and cavalrymen.

At the same time that Borglum was drawing up his plans for Stone Mountain, D.W. Griffith released “Birth of a Nation,” the epic silent film about the Civil War and Reconstruction. In the film, the Ku Klux Klan rescues the South from white carpetbaggers and freed slaves who had turned the great Confederacy into a drunken Sodom.

The film, which opened in January 1915, grossed an unprecedented $60 million in its first run. It also inspired a resurgence of the Klan, which coincided with Borglum’s development of the Confederate monument. The Klan soon became a major funder of the memorial.

Plane worked out a fundraising scheme whereby an Atlanta theater donated its box office proceeds from a screening of the film to Borglum’s project, Taliaferro writes. When Plane wrote a cheery letter to Borglum announcing the development, she added: “Since seeing this wonderful and beautiful picture of Reconstruction in the South, I feel that it is due to the Ku Klux Klan which saved us from Negro domination and carpet-bag rule, that it might be immortalized on Stone Mountain.”

She requested that Borglum represent the Klan in his sculpture, Taliaferro said in a phone interview. The plan conflicted with Borglum’s greater vision, and publicly the artist claimed he didn’t want to hurt his patron’s feelings, so he agreed to add a Klan altar for the base of Stone Mountain.

“He never came out and said he was a member of the Klan,” Taliaferro said. “But he sure was at the table with them a lot.”

Throughout his work on Stone Mountain, from 1915 until 1923, Borglum became intensely involved in Klan politics related to Stone Mountain, and on a national scale as well.

He attended Klan rallies, served on Klan committees and tried to play peacemaker in several Klan leadership disputes, Taliaferro writes.

“On a strictly mercenary level, he saw the Klan’s burgeoning, highly organized network throughout the South and the Midwest as a source of funds for his expensive undertaking. More than that, however, he came to view the Klan as a promising grass-roots movement with the potential to reshape the political map of the nation,” according to “Great White Fathers.”

Borglum was a racist long before arriving in Atlanta. The sculptor referred to immigrants as “slippered assassins" and warned that America was becoming an alien “scrap heap.” But the Klan might have hardened Borglum’s existing prejudices, Taliaferro writes.

In a letter to a friend in New Jersey in the early 1920s, Borglum asked, “Is it true you joined the Ku Klux Klan? I hope so. They’re a fine lot of fellows as far as I can learn and if they elect the next President, by gosh I’m going to join ‘em.”

The artist became close friends with the Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana, Klansman David “Steve” Stephenson of Indianapolis. In one letter to Stephenson, Borglum wrote, “While Anglo-Saxons have themselves sinned grievously against the principle of pure nationalism by illicit slave and alien servant traffic, it has been the character of the cargo that has eaten into the very moral fiber of our race character, rather than the moral depravity of Anglo-Saxon traders,” according to “Great White Fathers.”

But by 1924, work on Stone Mountain had stalled. In addition, the Daughters of the Confederacy and the committee backing the project became tired of dealing with the mercurial sculptor. By February 1925, the committee accused him of faults including “disloyalty, offensive egotism and delusions of grandeur” as well as an excessive concern for money and notoriety.

After 10 years of work, Borglum was fired from the project. In a fit of rage, he destroyed all of his models for the monument and raced out of Atlanta before police could charge him with destroying private property.

He already had a new project waiting for him. A few months earlier, he’d been contacted by South Dakota’s state historian, Doane Robinson, who wanted him to sculpt a tribute to the American West in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Robinson had originally planned to include American frontiersmen like Lewis and Clark and Native Americans, including Sacagawea. But Borglum, eyeing an opportunity to make a national statement, dissuaded the historian. Instead they settled on the four American presidents, two of them slaveholders and all of them viewed by Native Americans as racist.

“Lakota see the faces of men who lied, cheated and murdered innocent people whose only crime was living on land they wanted to steal," said Harold Frazier, chairman of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, who called for the removal of the monument earlier this week.

Native Americans have always contended that the Black Hills of South Dakota belong to them, and that the sacred land was stolen after gold was discovered there. In 1980, the Supreme Court agreed, ordering the federal government to compensate eight tribes for the seizure of Native land.

From 1927 until his death in 1941, Borglum and his team of 400 workers dynamited more than 450,000 tons of granite to carve the Mount Rushmore memorial. For many Americans, it remains a stirring tribute to democracy.

“We want our stories of America to be simple,” Taliaferro said. “We want Mount Rushmore to be shorthand for everything that’s great about America.”


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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1  seeder  JohnRussell    4 years ago

If Bill Clinton or George Bush went to Mt Rushmore, we would look at it differently than we do when Donald Trump goes there.  He is appealing to the attitudes exhibited by the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. 

 
 
 
Greg Jones
Professor Participates
1.1  Greg Jones  replied to  JohnRussell @1    4 years ago

I doubt if Trump knows or cares who sculpted the monument or what their views were. Probably 98% of the American people don't know or care either.

What's with this recent obsession with all things racist?

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1.1.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Greg Jones @1.1    4 years ago
Borglum wrote, “While Anglo-Saxons have themselves sinned grievously against the principle of pure nationalism by illicit slave and alien servant traffic, it has been the character of the cargo that has eaten into the very moral fiber of our race character, rather than the moral depravity of Anglo-Saxon traders,”

That is, by any standard, a racist statement.  It makes you wonder what was the real motivation to make this colossal statue. 

 
 
 
Greg Jones
Professor Participates
1.1.2  Greg Jones  replied to  JohnRussell @1.1.1    4 years ago

The Trump connection to Mt. Rushmore, other than his brief visit there, doesn't exist.

Trump is not a racist.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1.1.3  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Greg Jones @1.1.2    4 years ago

this article isnt really about trump. it is about mt rushmore

 
 
 
Greg Jones
Professor Participates
1.1.4  Greg Jones  replied to  JohnRussell @1.1.3    4 years ago

You're about the only one who seems to care about this bit of trivia.

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1.1.5  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Greg Jones @1.1.4    4 years ago

I doubt it. The Washington Post and New York Times both had articles about it in the past few days. 

 
 
 
Nerm_L
Professor Expert
1.1.7  Nerm_L  replied to    4 years ago
A long overdue reckoning with our past in trying to reconcile the words upon which we founded in juxtaposition to the egregious acts and deeds that run counter to the ideal put forward. 

So, get rid of the United States.  There isn't anything about the United States worth saving.  Last guy out turns off the lights.

 
 
 
Jeremy Retired in NC
Professor Expert
1.1.8  Jeremy Retired in NC  replied to  Greg Jones @1.1    4 years ago
I doubt if Trump knows or cares who sculpted the monument or what their views were. Probably 98% of the American people don't know or care either.

Didn't know.  Don't care.  

What's with this recent obsession with all things racist?

They are looking for something to be offended by.  

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
1.1.9  Texan1211  replied to  Jeremy Retired in NC @1.1.8    4 years ago

bingo!!!

 
 
 
Tacos!
Professor Guide
1.2  Tacos!  replied to  JohnRussell @1    4 years ago
He is appealing to the attitudes exhibited by the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum.

You are giving Trump way too much credit, and you do it only when it's convenient. 6 days a week, he's the biggest moron to ever walk the Earth. But on the 7th day, he has deep, esoteric knowledge of obscure racists from the past that he is obsessed with elevating into the American consciousness - but only subliminally. 

Sorry, but it's just too convoluted to believe.

 
 
 
Nerm_L
Professor Expert
2  Nerm_L    4 years ago

So, dynamite the damned thing and get it over with.  No, need to keep peeing down your legs.

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
4  Sean Treacy    4 years ago

Who cares? 

I know it's  race uber alles  for the modern progressive, but what possible relevance is the fact that the sculptor like so many Democrats of the era, was sympathetic to the Klan?  The monument is not a monument to to the Klan, has no racial implications and no person who isn't racially obsessed would see it through racial terms.  

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
4.1  Sparty On  replied to  Sean Treacy @4    4 years ago

I think we need to do away with the Democrat party.     You know, since so many of them supported and propagated slavery back in the day.

Makes the same amount of sense as dumping Mt Rushmore for the reasons stated in this article.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
5  Vic Eldred    4 years ago

  Less well known: Borglum’s ties to     the Ku Klux Klan  .


Oh man, so the logic from the left dictates that Mt Rushmore is therefore "racist", the President's who spoke there are "racist" and the people who visit there are "racist!!!!"

The other day on this site we heard that all of Long Island NY was "racist"

All this division being generated by the haters to make sure Black Americans vote for their degenerate candidates!

 
 
 
devangelical
Professor Principal
5.1  devangelical  replied to  Vic Eldred @5    4 years ago

more bad things will happen to the anti-1st amendment faction than happened 250 years ago.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
5.1.1  Vic Eldred  replied to  devangelical @5.1    4 years ago

The liberal establishment is collapsing. They and their allies in the media, BLM & antifa have done everything they can to resist the will of the American people. Our grandchildren will one day look back in amazement at what we allowed for so long!

 
 
 
igknorantzrulz
PhD Quiet
5.1.2  igknorantzrulz  replied to  Vic Eldred @5.1.1    4 years ago

they sure will...how the fck were gramps and grandma that gullible, they'll be sayin

 
 
 
devangelical
Professor Principal
5.1.3  devangelical  replied to  Vic Eldred @5.1.1    4 years ago

bwah ha ha ha..... so fucking delusional.... the remnants of hypocrisy are being exposed and the defenders of the previous status quo are fading away. turning a blind eye to the past and acceptance of that hypocrisy with a wink and nod moving towards the future will no longer be tolerated by the younger generations of american leadership. the current generation of leaders had their chance to make right the wrongs of the past and have failed. time for old fools to step aside and let those with a clearer vision of american values take the wheel. evolution, adaptation, and change is the foundation of american ideals. america, love it or leave it.

in other words, a certain demographic should locate the nearest tar pit and lay down. they're all done in 4 months....

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
5.1.4  Sparty On  replied to  devangelical @5.1.3    4 years ago

This is not going to go the way you think it is.

Be prepared to reap the whirlwind pushing that narrative.

No doubt about it ...... none!

 
 
 
devangelical
Professor Principal
5.1.5  devangelical  replied to  Sparty On @5.1.4    4 years ago

right back atcha oath breaker. it won't be as simple as autocrats getting on a boat and sailing away or paroling white supremacists for a long walk home to regroup next time. hopefully the results of the revolutionary war and the civil war have taught patriotic Americans one lesson, some questions require a permanent answer. 

I hope trumpski continues to amp up his legion of morons to try and work out his frustrations on his way out the door.

 
 
 
The Magic 8 Ball
Masters Quiet
5.1.6  The Magic 8 Ball  replied to  devangelical @5.1.3    4 years ago
in other words, a certain demographic should locate the nearest tar pit and lay down. they're all done in 4 months

can we hold you to that when trump wins?

 
 
 
devangelical
Professor Principal
5.1.7  devangelical  replied to  The Magic 8 Ball @5.1.6    4 years ago

with covid super spreader in office and an ultra vulnerable base, you'd best check the math... buh bye...

 
 
 
Sparty On
Professor Principal
5.1.8  Sparty On  replied to  devangelical @5.1.7    4 years ago

You don’t have the slightest fucking idea what you’re talking about so you best pack a lunch ....

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
5.1.9  Vic Eldred  replied to  devangelical @5.1.3    4 years ago
a certain demographic

You singling out a certain demographic?  What a shock!

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
5.1.10  Vic Eldred  replied to  igknorantzrulz @5.1.2    4 years ago
they sure will.

Just like you believing that Trump would never make it through his first term. You were so convinced - you raised it to 6 months!

 
 
 
Texan1211
Professor Principal
5.1.11  Texan1211  replied to  devangelical @5.1.7    4 years ago

will this be like when people told us that Trump could not and would not win? Or that the GOP was dead, finished. wouldn't see the WH for a generation?

 
 
 
Paula Bartholomew
Professor Participates
5.2  Paula Bartholomew  replied to  Vic Eldred @5    4 years ago

You prefer that they vote for your degenerate candidate.

 
 
 
Vic Eldred
Professor Principal
5.2.1  Vic Eldred  replied to  Paula Bartholomew @5.2    4 years ago
You prefer that they vote for your degenerate candidate.

Don't feel threatened. He's just making some necessary changes.

 
 

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