Great White Fathers
Great White Fathers is a dandy book by John Taliaferro about the construction and the iconography of the presidential faces on Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The monument is an interesting symbol, not least because it is smack in the middle of a sacred area for the local Indians. Having a huge sculpture of the leaders' of their oppressors has rubbed the Indians the wrong way for years.The mountain was carved under the supervision of Gutzon Borglum, and the bulk of this book is his biography. He was an interesting cuss, to say the least. A man of huge ego (one would have to be to take on projects the scale he did) he led a fascinating and outrageous life. Taliaferro, in telling Borglum's story, goes off on tangents that are quite interesting, such as the history of public sculpture in America, the history of the Klu Klux Klan (Borglum was never a member, but was sympathetic to their cause, and almost included them in the monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia) and presidential politics, as Borglum was heavily involved with the candidacy of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. One is amazed that he found time to carve Mount Rushmore.
Beyond the exploits of Borglum, Taliaferro tells a larger tale of the legacy and meaning of the monument, and this is in basically two prongs: the tourism that has sprouted around it, and the feelings of the Indians. Borglum was adamant that he didn't want trinket shops to sully the grandeur of the thing, and that was a wish not granted. Nearby Keystone, South Dakota is full of all sorts of tourist traps that keep the economy afloat but demean whatever purpose the monument has. Of course, this is why the monument was built in the first place, as it was the idea of a South Dakota businessman. Automobile travel had become more available to the masses and people were starting to take driving vacations. He wanted a reason for people to come to South Dakota, and hit on this idea. And there is an interesting history of Indian acceptance and protest of the monument. One Indian, Ben Black Elk, was an unofficial greeter for years, and made a nice living posing for photographs. Other Indians have not been so happy about it, and have staged many protests over the years.
Then there is perhaps the even bigger question of whether taking a perfectly good mountain and artificially turning it into a tourist mecca a good thing. That's a question that is difficult to answer, I think.
You ever been?
ReplyDeleteI went there once, a few years ago. It's a lot different than I expected. For one thing, as far as I could tell, you can't really see the monument unless you're actually at the NPS site. I imagined it being something that was visible for miles around but that just isn't the case. You don't see it until you actually get there.
Another thing, which is probably a corollary to the first thing, it feels smaller than I imagined it would. Not that it's unimpressive or anything, but a lot of the pictures you see of it give you the wrong idea, IMO.
But it's still a cool thing to see, the politics of it aside. I was especially taken by the detail in the eyes, for some reason. The day we were there wasn't the best day to go - by the time we left, the entire monument was covered by fog - but very much worth the trip.
And yeah, Keystone is like a miniature rural version of Orlando.
Never been. My travels in the U.S. have been limited almost entirely to East of the Mississippi and Los Angeles and Las Vegas (and one-and-a-half years I lived in Houston as a kid). The bulk of the West has been unexplored by me.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I read, they redid the road in. Before that, it curved around and gave glimpses of the monument before you got there.
As for the eyes, that was something that Borglum came up with. Most sculptures have dead eyes, but he inserted a kind of wedge of stone in the pupil that would catch the light. He also managed to come up with a way that tricks the viewer into thinking that TR is wearing eyeglasses. Very clever man.
Did you go to the Crazy Horse memorial while you were there? It's about ten times the size of Rushmore, but who knows if it will ever be finished.
Uh, we did go to the Crazy Horse memorial, but said fog completely obscured it by the time we got there, so we did not catch so much as a glimpse of it.
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