Book Review: Why The Stony Face?

An engrossing look at how Rushmore came to a head

By Stuart Wade

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

A recent headline in the popular newspaper-parody The Onion: “Family Not Appreciably Enriched by Trip to Mount Rushmore.” 

Well, maybe. Conceived during Jazz Age euphoria and dedicated weeks before Pearl Harbor, Mount Rushmore may or may not enrich a minivan pilgrimage, but the humongous carving remains an enduring symbol of American fortitude. 

There may not be a father or daughter alive who’s unfamiliar with the enormous presidential busts rising out of a 50-story granite slab in the Black Hills of South Dakota. But while we may have all seen the images of the maintenance workers scratching Washington’s ear or rappelling Lincoln’s imposing schnoz, to really get inside the head of the man who built Rushmore, some expertise is required. 

Enter writer John Taliaferro, who splits his time between Austin and Montana. His new book, “Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore,” provides the necessary face time with Rushmore and its true subject: Gutzon Borglum, a wildly talented artist whose racism and big-scale ego would earn him as much trouble as his supersized quartet will deliver him immortality. 

As with his previous book on Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, Taliaferro has cobbled together as complete an account as exists regarding the creator, and creation, of a 20th-century icon. And Taliaferro’s reporting is impossible not to enjoy. The former Newsweek editor deliciously reduces one of our nation’s largest and more bizarre artistic undertakings to its most valuable and entertaining details. 

For example, “Fathers” tells how a mistake on Jefferson’s face, originally located at the viewer’s left of Washington, required the sculptors to blast away the original image and move Jefferson to the right of George W. Or if you prefer, Taliaferro also reveals how Cher — an icon in her own right — once believed Mount Rushmore to be a natural formation (it’s a sculpture, hon). 

One thing the author etches in stone: Without Gutzon Borglum, there’d have been no Rushmore to simultaneously inspire (and unsettle) families from all over this great land. Described by the author as “congenitally unable to leave well enough alone,” Borglum liked to pop off in public about how other contemporary art, and artists, lacked talent in equal measure to his own. He alienated everyone from presidents to granite workers — but he was also uniquely equipped for his large-scale master achievement, Taliaferro notes. In fact, it was Borglum who expanded the original concept for a South Dakota attraction consisting of carvings of western folk heroes such as Kit Carson. 

Before he won the commission to create Mount Rushmore in 1925, Borglum was dismissed from another colossus, Stone Mountain, the 1,200-foot Georgia monolith dedicated to the Confederate States of America. The reason? He insisted on putting a civilian’s hat on Robert E. Lee, an idea that drew the wrath of his employer, the Daughters of the Confederacy, Taliaferro tells us. So Borglum did what any self-respecting, Idaho-raised, Danish-American gargantuan-scale sculptor would: He smashed his models and high-tailed it to South Dakota. 

There, tourism-starved historian Doane Robinson harbored a heroic roadside-attraction fantasy of his own. Robinson enthusiastically signed on the Zelig-like Borglum, who had already witnessed early Wright Brothers flights, was acquainted with Woodrow Wilson, had campaigned for his friend Teddy Roosevelt and had even supported Ku Klux Klan presidential hopefuls. 

How was the bombastic sculpture created? Working on such a large scale, hugging a cliff, made perspective difficult. Borglum adapted a “pointing” system with scale models fashioned after methods used by the ancient Greeks. 

How was so much public money found to carve a really big rock during the Depression? After all, $2 million wasn’t chump change in 1925. Consummate PR man Borglum, already the creator of a pair of highly regarded Lincoln sculptures, induced charisma-challenged Calvin Coolidge to push through a bill authorizing federal money to match private donations, Taliaferro reports. 

Borglum later persuaded a president worthy of Rushmore, Franklin Roosevelt, to rally private and public support by presiding at separate dedications of the Washington and Jefferson busts. 

Borglum’s unrealized goal for the mountainside was something called “the entablature” — intended to be a massive, vertical summary of U.S. history (in the shape of the Louisiana Purchase, no less) beside the Abe Lincoln bust, its inscription penned by Coolidge. But after Borglum altered Coolidge’s first draft and released it to reporters, the taciturn commander-in 

-chief abandoned the sculptor. 

Borglum (who would die a few months before Mount Rushmore’s dedication) handed over the project to his artfully named son, Lincoln, in 1938. Supervising the day-to-day work, he wisely scrapped his father’s original vision of carving his subjects down to their waists and declared the memorial ready. Lincoln Borglum’s decision proved particularly wise a month after the budget-strapped memorial’s ribbon cutting — when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. 

“Great White Fathers” is an engaging tale well told. Taliaferro positions the bigness of Borglum alongside the subtler cracks and shadings of his super-size legacy. This book is an insightful period piece, appreciably enriching — and no minivan required. 

Frequent Books contributor Stuart Wade’s essay on less popular bars is included in the Harper Perennial anthology “More Mirth of a Nation.”

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