Mount Rushmore Shouldn't Exist

I used to be a fan of Mount Rushmore, probably as a kid or a teenager. The idea of the human achievement involved in blasting and carving huge faces out of a cliff impressed me, I guess. The romantic story of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, as spun by the government PR machine, got me too: "Man vs. nature" and all that, as we were taught in school.

I'm from the East, so I never saw it in person until I moved to Minnesota and then not until well after arriving in the Midwest. I think it was in the late 1990s, while we were on a trip to Colorado, taking the South Dakota route. I remember not liking the jingoistic accoutrements that filled the public spaces where you have to stand to view the giant heads, but the memory is vague.

I don't know if I knew at the time that the mountain was sacred to the Lakota people, or that it was called the Six Grandfathers and looked like this:


I knew about the Crazy Horse monument, not far away, and we visited that as well. (That has its own problems and its completion is not a solution to balance out Mount Rushmore.)

Now when I hear people say things like, "We should add a woman to Mount Rushmore" (once we have a woman president), all I can do is shake my head. Mount Rushmore shouldn't exist, and adding a woman to it won't change that fact. It's a symbol of white supremacy, blasted into rock on unceded Lakota territory. And even if it wasn't, as this Guardian article recounts, Borglum was a member of the Klan. The presidents depicted and honored were enslavers and Indian-killers.

In some ways Mount Rushmore is a perfect symbol of this country: permanently defacing other people's sacred places, while thinking it's a way to honor the heroes who really matter. Creating a spectacle to visit while driving a polluting car so someone can make money via tourism. Hubris, once again, writ large.

This final observation is a small bit of comfort:

never realised how gross and sad mt rushmore looks when you can actually see the whole mountain:


@AndyAstruc

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Sidenote: In case you've ever wondered who it's named after, you won't be disappointed because the answer fits squarely with all the other ways the sculpture is a perfect symbol of this country. From the Wikipedia:

In 1885 Charles E. Rushmore came to the Black Hills of South Dakota to check the titles to properties for an eastern mining company owned by James Wilson, following the 1883 opening of the Etta tin mine. How Mount Rushmore came to be named after Charles is subject to contradictory recounting [two possibilities are listed in the footnotes], but the United States Board of Geographic Names officially recognized the name in June 1930, five years after Rushmore donated $5,000 (equivalent to $72,894 in 2019) towards Gutzon Borglum's sculpture.

So basically, Rushmore was a rich business guy who bought the naming rights.