Gutzon Borglum- A Stupid Racist With a Silly Name

Doane Robinson had a problem.

You see, in the 1920’s, Doane Robinson was working as a state historian for South Dakota, and he was worried about tourism.  Why a historian would be concerned with tourism is beyond me, you’d think that would be more of the State Tourism Board’s bailiwick, but whatever.  The man was born “Jonah LeRoy”, but decided he’d rather go by “Doane”, who am I to question his cowboy logic?  In any case, Robinson wanted to find a way to boast the South Dakota tourist population.  The problem was, why the hell would anyone want to go to South Dakota in the first place?

I mean, sure, I’m going to go to South Dakota, because it has some extremely important fossil finds, and I’m writing a book about digging up dinosaurs.  But that’s just me.  Why would anyone (who isn’t obsessed with dinosaurs) want to go to South Dakota?  And Robinson knew it was a problem.  But tourist parks and nature enthusiasm had become a thing that existed, and Robinson wondered if he couldn’t manufacture a way to get tourists to drive out to the middle of Fucking Nowhere, South Dakota, and pay for the privilege.

After learning of the massive mountain defacement bas-relief work on Stone Mountain in Georgia, then under construction, Robinson wondered if something similar could be done in his neighborhood.  After surveying the countryside, he wondered if the natural pillars called the Needles could be used as a site to build a statue of “heroic proportions.”  He attempted to contact famed Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft to work on the project, but Taft was ill at the time and couldn’t be reached.  So, instead, Robinson hired his second choice, Gutzon Borglum.

This fucking guy.  Gutzon Borglum.  Have you ever heard the saying, “If you think everyone around you is an asshole, then the asshole might really be you”?  You know who never heard that in his life?  GUTZON BORGLUM.  He was the worst kind of temperamental artist; he was paranoid; he welched on debts; oh, and yeah, he was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan.  He thought of himself as a misunderstood genius, but he was more than likely a narcissistic egotist.  Who hated black people and Jews. 

I mean, just look at that moustache, right?

Like so many dysfunctional men throughout history, Borglum was obsessed with size.  This had led him to be the first designer of the Stone Mountain monument; Borglum himself had made the first cut into the mountain.  But two years into the project he’d managed to piss off everyone else involved and was fired, an act for which Borglum swore vengeance against the entire state of Georgia (I’m mostly not joking).

Immediately upon accepting the job from Robinson, Borglum basically said “fuck all this” and changed everything.  Robinson had wanted the project to feature western heroes like Buffalo Bill Cody and Red Cloud, but Borglum thought cowboys and Indians were smelly, so he decided to make the statue about expansionist presidents instead.  He also changed the location of the project to one you’re probably more familiar with- Mount Rushmore.

Here’s something you may not know about Mount Rushmore: Borglum did a shitty job designing it.  Now, I realize that the project was audacious (and completely insane), but check it, this is what it’s supposed to look like:

You may have noticed that is not at all what it looks like in real life.

Now, ignoring the fact that they changed their minds and cut everyone off at the head, none of the dead presidents have any ears.  I’m not sure what the deal is with that.  Also, Borglum and his team fucked up the mountain so much making Washington that they couldn’t put Jefferson where they wanted, shifting things over.  Jefferson looks stoned, Washington is biting his lip, and why is Teddy Roosevelt starring so hard at Lincoln’s nose?  Hell, why is Teddy Roosevelt even here? (Because he was a badass, and also Borglum knew him IRL.)

Also, can we talk about what a massive “fuck you!” the whole operation actually was to Native Americans in general?  What we call Mount Rushmore was seized Lakota tribe land that we took during the Great Sioux War of 1876, land that the United States government had guaranteed to them 8 years previously in the Treaty of Fort Laramie.  There’s a reason the American Indian Movement attempted a seize of the tourist location in 1971, they consider it their sacred land.

So basically, we promised we’d never take their sacred mountain.  Then we stole it anyway, and we hired some racist asshole to carve it up and turn it into a monument to how great Manifest Destiny was for white people.  Not that Borglum had a problem with that, because he was way into racism and nativism:  America is great, and fuck everyone else. 

Mountain Rushmore is a big, stupid tourist trap created by a big, stupid racist.  So, I guess if that’s your thing, great for you?  But maybe if more people knew about its origins, 2,000,000 people wouldn’t be visiting it every year.