Short History Of... - Mount Rushmore

Episode Date: June 2, 2024

Designed to be a shrine of democracy, Mount Rushmore was one of the most ambitious building projects of the 20th century, and is still visited by millions of tourists each year. But for many, its history is complicated. Carved into a site believed to be sacred for the Lakota Sioux tribe, the monument serves as a bitter reminder of the injustices and crimes committed against the Native American people. So how did this remote, hallowed spot come to be transformed into a monument intended to last as long as the pyramids? What drove the man who created it? And how is it seen today - by America, tourists, and descendants of the first tribes who lived on the Black Hills? This is a Short History Of Mount Rushmore. A Noiser production, written by Kate Harrison. With thanks to Dr Lindsay M Chervinsky, a presidential historian and author of books on the topic, including Making the Presidency. Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is early morning in mid-October 1927. In the dense forests of the Black Hills of South Dakota, a former miner is climbing hundreds of wooden steps up a steep mountainside. As he stops to catch his breath, a shaft of light from the rising sun illuminates the rugged landscape, but he has no time to admire the view. The pressure is on to make progress before winter sets in. He is one of 400 recruited to help create the most ambitious sculpture of the 20th century. This imposing peak is about to have the faces of four American presidents carved into its granite face. The operation is starting with the blowing up of sections of the stone to create a canvas.

As a member of the explosives team, known as the Powder Men, the worker is glad of a job. But while many handled dynamite working in the gold mines it's very different when you are suspended from a cliff face about 400 feet from the ground at the summit the powder man straps himself into a leather boson chair, testing the buckles before attaching the steel cable that'll stop him from falling. He adds the belt where he's stashed a dozen dynamite charges, each just half an inch long. Finally, he checks a cable tethering the jackhammer that will be sent down beside him. It's time to go.

sent down beside him. It's time to go. Luring himself off the clifftop, he pushes his booted feet against the slippery rock, trying to get purchase. Once he's steady, he nods at the call boy, the teenager whose job it is to relay information to the winchman out of sight in a hut further along the mountain edge. The message that he's ready is passed along, and only then does the cable start to unwind. The Powder Man's legs kick instinctively. He'll never get used to the first moments of dangling in thin air. Half a dozen men descend alongside him, forming a row along the face. The wind drowns out their voices, so they use hand gestures to decide where to place each charge.

Now the jackhammer is lowered. The powder man takes hold of it and braces it against his body as he starts work. He struggles to dent the rock, but eventually creates an indentation big enough to hold the dynamite and the copper detonator cap. Teeth gritted, he attaches an electrical wire. It's a tense moment. One false move and the charge could go off early, taking him with it. But it's okay.

He exhales and pushes on to the next. When all the dynamite sticks are in place, he waits his turn as the men are winched back up one by one. He scrambles over the edge to see the sculptor Gudson Borglum in his woolen coat, his extravagant moustache twitching with excitement. It's this man's vision to transform the face of the mountain. Finally, the head of the team orders everyone to a safe distance before he presses the switch to send the electrical charge to the detonators.

The mountain seems to shatter, the sound wave reaching them just as they register the scale of the explosion. The boulder blown off the cliff is far bigger than it's meant to be, almost 200 feet of solid rock plunging down. Pieces smash against the tramway that transports materials. As the granite shatters below, the powder man does a quick headcount. Miraculously, all his friends are still standing. Borglum is already cursing, his anger every bit as unpredictable as the dynamite. But though he is furious that the destruction will force him to change his design yet again,

there is no doubt that what he is doing here will leave its mark. Though this land is still remote and unfamiliar to most, soon people the world over will know the name of Mount Rushmore. over will know the name of Mount Rushmore. Though Borglum promises his project will take no more than five years to complete, it will actually be under construction for fourteen. Eventually, millions will visit the memorial that its founders call the Shrine of Democracy. But others will boycott it as an outrage against native people. Because the mountain it's carved into is a sacred site for the Lakota Sioux.

For them, the vast carving is the bitterest reminder of the injustices and crimes committed against the original inhabitants of what became the United States of America. original inhabitants of what became the United States of America. So how did this remote, hallowed spot come to be transformed into a monument intended to last as long as the pyramids? What drove the man who created it? And how did his troubling affiliations influence which faces he chose to memorialize in granite? And how is it seen today? By America at large, by tourists, and by the descendants of the first tribes who lived on the Black Hills?

I'm John Hopkins from the Noiser Network. This is a short history of Mount Rushmore. The Black Hills of South Dakota were formed around 70 million years ago, though their granite rock dates back 2 billion years. The dramatic landscape is craggy, with ridged grey stone that sometimes resembles an elephant's skin. It's often described as the island in the plains, and though the ponderosa pines that grow there are actually dark green, their denseness makes the hills appear black, giving the range its name.

Wild animals, including elks, coyotes and white-tailed deer, roam the terrain. But humans have also made this region their home for 11,000 years. The first people here are nomadic, but over time tribes settle along the rivers. To these Native Americans, this land will always be sacred. For the Lakota Sioux, one of their most precious places is the rock formation known as Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, or Six Grandfathers Mountain. To them, these six shapes along the ridge represent South, North, East, West, the sky above, and the earth below. Dr. Lindsay M. Chavinsky is a presidential historian and author of books on the topic, including Making the Presidency. The Native nations that we are familiar with really started to establish this location win a definitive victory over the Cheyenne, and they established the Black Hills as one of their holy sites, one of their family territories, and one of the spaces where they convened with their ancestors.

So it really does have enormous emotional significance to them, and it is a place that they fought over valiantly and bravely. And the battles aren't just between different native peoples. In 1783, the American Revolutionary War ends and the colonies win independence from the British Empire. Following the victory, white settlers move west across America looking for new places to live. This expansion brings violent clashes with the indigenous people whose land is threatened, and in 1868, the U.S. government meets with tribal leaders

to try to achieve peace. The result is the Treaty of Fort Laramie, which establishes the Great Sioux Reservation, protecting the Black Hills from white settlement forever. But just six years later, the discovery of gold in the region changes everything. George Armstrong Custer's Black Hill expedition brought in a lot of soldiers

that enabled miners to come into the area and mine for gold relatively safely without fearing native retribution. Needless to say, that did stir up a lot of conflict. And over the next several years, there were the last of what are called the Indian Wars in the Plains area. In 1876 was the last one. And the Lakota, the Cheyenne, and the Arapaho people were forced onto a series of smaller plantations and the government seized

the Black Hill area to use for mining and to use for settlement. So it really was a travesty for the Native peoples. It was a very sad moment in American government history because the American government had very much gone back on its word.

Workers flock to the area from all over America and from Europe to mine gold, silver, and other minerals and to exploit logging opportunities. But the area declines after World War I as commodity prices fall and drought hits agriculture. Yet the US as a whole is becoming more prosperous. More people are enjoying leisure time. During the 1920s, Americans will buy nearly 26 million cars, and motor tourism booms.

The rise of driving holidays signals a rich vein of income for beauty spots, but there's plenty of competition for the holidaymakers' hard-earned dollars. Though South Dakota's landscape is undoubtedly spectacular, it's too far off the beaten track to be much of a draw on a national level. That's until South Dakota's state historian, Robinson, has an idea. He's read about areas displaying sculpture and spectacles on a grand scale to attract visitors, like the 48-foot Eternal Indian sculpture in Oregon, and a gigantic frieze being carved into a mountain in Georgia. He believes that the needles, a series of naturally formed spires in the Black Hills,

could be carved into sculptures representing heroic historical figures. He had originally hoped that a monument could be built to the American West, could feature some of the great figures like Lewis and Clark or Sacagawea or Chief Red Cloud or Buffalo Bill Cody or the Lakota Chief Crazy Horse. Though some officials are skeptical, and there are early objections from Native Americans, Robinson presses on. In 1924, he gets the go-ahead from the state to find a sculptor, someone with the vision to put South Dakota on the tourist map. The first person Robertson approaches can't help, but the second is more positive. Goodson Borglum was born in 1867 in the Idaho Territory. He is the son of Danish Mormon immigrants to the United States.

His father married polygamously to two sisters. When the family moved to Nebraska, Goodson lost contact with his mother and was raised by his father's other wife. He was trained as an engineer, and then in 1890, he was sent to France for a couple of years where he studied abroad at the Académie Julienne and the École des Beaux-Arts. And he studied with the French sculptor Rodin while he was there. And that really shaped his idea about art and sculpture and the power of a physical object to convey certain messages and values. He also, while he was there, had the opportunity to see some of the pieces that European empires had brought back from their global adventures. So he developed this obsession with the Greeks and the Egyptian empires and the enormous things they built on huge scale. And so that

really shaped his thinking and his personality and his vision of the world. In 1924, Borglum is 57 years old, married for the second time with three children. He's ambitious and well-connected, a member of the Freemasons and close friends with former President Theodore Roosevelt. a member of the Freemasons and close friends with former President Theodore Roosevelt. Borglum's talents as an artist are already well known. His work appears in museums and cathedrals, and his huge marble sculpture of Abraham Lincoln has been exhibited in the White House. His reputation is dazzling, but it comes at a cost.

His ego and his talents and his personality were of the same scale of a lot of the projects that he developed. He could be incredibly passionate. He also had a lot of trouble getting along with people, so he had a tendency to get into fights with whoever he was working with. One of his friends said at one point that he was happiest when he was in like six wars all at once because he just thrived on conflict. So he tended to start projects and not necessarily always complete them because he did tend to get into conflict with those who he was in partnership with, especially in a professional capacity. And that's exactly what's happening when he is approached by Robinson about the Black Hills project. Borglum is working at Stone Mountain, 1,500 miles away in Georgia. Here, he's creating a freeze showing heroes from the Confederate states who broke away from the U.S. over slavery.

His design is enormous in scale and ambition. It'll be nearly 200 feet long and 90 feet high. It's a huge technical challenge. He even develops a giant magic lantern that projects his design onto the mountain for his carvers to replicate. But his backers for the project are people with a shocking agenda. It was really a shrine to the Confederacy and it included a shrine for the Ku Klux Klan at the base. It was largely funded by the Ku Klux Klan. Although it's not clear that Borglum ever joined the organization, he certainly had very close ties and he had very close emotional ties.

Borglum was absolutely a white supremacist. He believed in a lot of the racist ideology and was very sympathetic emotional ties. Borglum was absolutely a white supremacist. He believed in a lot of the racist ideology and was very sympathetic to that. So initially it was a very close-knit partnership. This is a time when, in the Southern states, the Ku Klux Klan are enforcing racist laws which limit where Black people can live, where they can sit on buses and trains,

and which stores and restaurants they can use. Those who don't follow the rules face extreme violence, including lynching. Though Borglum is never directly involved in these actions, he does oppose immigration, despite being from an immigrant family himself. But while he shares some views with his sponsors, the project is far from plain sailing. They were ideologically on the same page, but there began to be disagreements over the vision of the project, over the budget for the project. This was a constant theme in his life. And the disagreement is becoming more and more bitter.

The Stone Mountain project has fallen behind and into debt, and Borglum claims he's owed over $40,000. So when he's approached by Robinson, Borglum welcomes the venture. Not only does it fit his grand ambitions, but it also maybe offers a way to escape the problems in Georgia. He responds to the telegram from Robinson immediately, full of enthusiasm. But he doesn't think the idea of featuring heroes from the American West will be ambitious enough to pull tourists in from across the nation. His ideas, as always, are on a different scale.

He wants to celebrate what the entire country stands for. At the turn of the 20th century, it was clear that the United States was a growing power, was probably going to be among the superpowers in the next couple of decades. It was a time of real opulence when we think of the Gilded Age. It's called Gilded for a reason. And so there was a lot of wealth, a lot of concentrated wealth. And it really the turn of the century represented a possibility for what the new nation might be. And there was a very clear sense of among several Americans about the importance of thinking about that intentionally and consciously and trying to think about the American legacy and the American brand. And so I think that this effort to create this monument was partly an effort to remember the nation's history, but also to put forward an intentional set of values for the century that was unfolding.

In January 1925, a bill passes in the House of Representatives authorizing the creation of a national memorial in the forest featuring heroic figures. But while it's all go for South Dakota, on Stone Mountain, things have gone from bad to worse. In February, Borglum is sacked for offensive egotism and delusions of grandeur, and banned from the site But he's in his studio, destroying his models of the design with an axe, before his former employers can stop him They file a damages suit, and have a warrant issued for his arrest But Borglum drives off off and makes it across state lines before the sheriff can catch him.

Charges are later dropped, and a new sculptor blasts all Borglum's work from the face of Stone Mountain before starting again from scratch. Soon the papers are full of wild headlines about the drama. By the time the news reaches South Dakota, the state senate is so rattled it votes against funding the Black Hills Project.

But Borglum's self-confidence hasn't been dented by the Stone Mountain Saga. He has no doubt at all that the money will flow as soon as his plans are finalized. With his eldest son, the sculptor drives to South Dakota to begin turning his dream into giant reality.

It is a muggy, overcast morning in mid-August 1925. World-famous sculptor Borglum and his son Lincoln finish their breakfasts, taking in the view of the Sylvan Lake Resort, where they're staying. Thirteen-year-old Lincoln watches as his father wipes the egg from his bushy moustache. They've both eaten enough to fuel them for a long, horseback trail through these spectacular black hills.

But this is no tourist trip. His dad is here to make history. Estate forester Theodore Sho, is already in the saddle, waiting outside the hotel with two more horses suited to the rugged, spectacular terrain. Lincoln climbs up and fits his feet into the stirrups, then follows his father and their guide into the mountains. The horses do the hard work, scrabbling along the stony paths and up so high that Lincoln's ears pop. The landscape, when he dares to look back, is astonishing. Sand-colored prairie, craggy mountains, forests so dense they make the scenery almost black

and white. Shoemaker takes them to the peaks his bosses have suggested might work for the great sculptor. First, old Baldy, next Sugarloaf. But Lincoln's father is unimpressed. Neither has the right shape or orientation, so they ride on. They pass an abandoned mine that Shoemaker tells them once employed hundreds. As temperatures rise, they stop for a drink of water. But in this stillness, Lincoln hears rustling. And the forester has noticed it too.

His dad had assured him that there are no bears here. So what might it be? An elk? A hungry mountain lion? It's definitely a large predator, and it's picking up speed. The forester reaches for his gun and Lincoln closes his eyes. The rustling stops and Lincoln holds his breath. But the animal, whatever it was, has run for cover. But the animal, whatever it was, has run for cover. Laughing, his father reseals his water canteen and takes up his reins once again.

It's time to go to the next mountain. As they approach, Shoemaker tells them this peak was known as Six Grandfathers by the Sioux. Squinting, Lincoln understands why. The natural shape of the mountain resembles a gathering of people. When he looks back, his father's eyes are sparkling with excitement. At that moment, the cloud lifts and sunlight hits the rock face. Borglum checks his compass. Southeast, he declares. Perfect.

Now he takes a sketchbook from his pack and digs around for a pencil. As he draws, his hands move across the page so fast, they blur. Once he's finished, Borglum wastes no time. They ride as fast as they can to Rapid City, where they're due to meet state officials. As they arrive at the best hotel in town, Lincoln follows his father into the bar where

the sculptor orders beers for the local reporters, leaving state historian Robinson to pick up the tab. He announces that he has found the location for the masterpiece that will be his legacy and put the Black Hills on the map. The sculptor and his son return at different times to survey the light and the stone and discover more about the site. The mountain itself was named Mount Rushmore

after a New York attorney named Charles E. Rushmore. He had come out in the 1880s to inspect the area and to do some legal work on behalf of a tin mine and to see what sort of rights needed to be secured for potential miners living in the area. He asked the miners if the mountain had a name, which it did, of course, among the Lakota peoples. But in white communities, it did not. And they said, we shall call it Mount Rushmore. And so that was how it acquired that name, at least in the English language. The next steps are to work out what might go on the stone and find the money to make it happen.

Borglum only gives the vaguest indications of how much his project might cost, partly because his ambitions keep growing, and partly because of the technical challenges posed by this remote, harsh environment. But the financial climate is harsher still. As this project really got started, the initial bank panics of the 1920s and then eventually the Great Depression did take hold and so the available funds were much more limited. So then Borglum and some of

his partners really looked for federal funding. He managed to entice President Calvin Coolidge to South Dakota for his summer vacation and took him around all of the spaces and then had the very savvy idea from a PR perspective to fly a plane over the lodge where Coolidge was staying and he dropped a wreath to invite him to the dedication ceremony. So again, not one for small gestures. Coolidge came, he was very impressed by the idea. was very impressed by the idea. Borglum estimates the monument will cost around $460,000 to build, a huge sum, considering that a new house costs around $6,000. Though the details of exactly what he's planning are still sketchy, he's a fantastic salesman. On presidential orders, he has offered full funding for the sculpture.

But to the horror of state officials, he only accepts half the cost from government, boasting that private donors will clamor to provide the rest. So eventually Coolidge signed a bill authoring government matching funds up to $250,000, which is obviously much more in today's money and was an extraordinary sum, but it didn't really come close to actually covering the costs that were needed because the project took such a long time and really continued to grow in scope. To begin with, Borglum imagines an enormous tableau, recreating the most significant moments in American history. He also wants the site to be a repository for many key documents, including the original Declaration of Independence. When he's told that might be too ambitious, he agrees that the overall history could be told in carved inscriptions, and the sculpture itself will consist of four colossal sculpted figures. In his 1926 report to the Memorial Association,

he states that South Dakota lies by the providence of God in the center of this great union, in the center of America. So the monument will be, he says, of tremendous national significance. Washington was gonna be, he says, of tremendous national significance. Washington was going to be the first face. And then he was going to do Thomas Jefferson because Thomas Jefferson was especially celebrated at that time as the author of the Declaration of Independence. The third head was going to be Abraham Lincoln because Abraham Lincoln was the president of the United States when the Union won the Civil War over the Confederacy. So he was the savior of the Union and was a natural choice.

This might come as a surprise to Borglum's former patrons at Stone Mountain, who were supporters of the Confederacy. But this project is very much Borglum's own vision. He also picks a contemporary president, Theodore Roosevelt. So he was a little bit more controversial, He also picks a contemporary president, Theodore Roosevelt. So he was a little bit more controversial because he was definitely a very partisan figure and loved engaging in politics. But Borglum thought that he was kind of the coming of the modern Columbus because of his work with the Panama Canal and opening the entire continent and was this extraordinary figure. And they were also friends.

Now that at least some of the money is in place, a ceremony is held on the site in August 1927. Dignitaries bake under the summer sun as President Coolidge gives a speech about the meaning of the monument, though he fails to mention the Native Americans who see the site as sacred. Borglum himself is then lowered down the side of the mountain. He drills six holes in Mount Rushmore using a jackhammer as the official start of works. To replicate a complex design in stone, back in his studio he's created a 1 to 12 scale model in plaster. At 6 foot tall, every inch of a president's face on the model is equal to a foot on the mountain itself. But carving doesn't start in earnest until October. But carving doesn't start in earnest until October. More money needs to be raised for preparations to the site, including a power plant, hoists,

and a tram to move equipment up and down the summit. The men themselves will go on foot. While many of the workers hired are local miners, Borglum also brings in skilled craftsmen and sculptors from his abandoned project at Stone Mountain. Altogether, almost 400 people will work on the site, facing tough conditions all year round. They worked in summer and winter, so in very intense heat with no shelter from the sun on the mountain, and in very intense cold. If anyone has visited South Dakota

or North Dakota in the winter, it is absolutely freezing and there's a lot of snow. So these are not easy working conditions. They could be incredibly uncomfortable. And so for example, they refused to wear masks in the summer because the masks were hot and really uncomfortable to work with.

And so what that meant actually was a lot of the workers later in their life suffered from a form of cancer from inhaling the granite dust. Considering the dangers, it's a miracle no one actually dies during the work itself. Dynamite is used to remove large segments. Around 90% of the carving is done this way, with over half a million tons of rock blasted off. The plan is to remove it all at the end of the construction process, though entrepreneurial workers often sell small pieces to sightseers at $2 each. Next, the carvers get to work using a technique known as honeycombing.

They drill multiple closely spaced holes to weaken the stone so they can create fine shapes and lines. By the end of the project, the workers working on the mountain, even though most of them were not professionally trained and were really trained on site, were so good that they could really get within like a couple of inches of the final surface, which is really remarkable precision. Then the final efforts were done with hammer and chisel, and they would sort of smooth out the edges and refine out the details of the eyes and the nose and the lips to create the eventual face. But despite the workers' growing skill and innovation, the mountain doesn't always

cooperate. In the sculpture's original plans, innovation, the mountain doesn't always cooperate. In the sculptor's original plans, Thomas Jefferson is situated on one side of Washington, but the stone on that side is too unstable to carve, so Borglum redrafts to place him on the other side. But the mountain's geology continues to present big challenges. There was a black vein in the marble on his upper lip, and they had to blast out that section. And then they were worried, A, that that would look weird because he would have this chunk missing from his lip. But they had come up with a solution that they were going to patch in a new piece of stone. And they worried if they didn't get it right, one worker said that it might look like Jefferson had a cold sore.

if they didn't get it right when workers said that it might look like Jefferson had a cold sore. But they managed actually remarkably to measure exactly the giant chunk of granite that was going to go into the president's lip and to seal it in with a number of rods and basically hot tar as glue. Borglum is on site much of the time,

overseeing the work and getting his hands dirty himself. But despite the hard lessons he might have learned from his problems at Stone Mountain, he is still difficult and demanding. He falls out with his personnel. Later, one carver will claim he holds the record after being sacked and rehired by Borglum eight times. Robinson, who came up with the idea for the monument, helps keep the peace. As well as managing operations, he continues to raise funds and organize ceremonies to mark the completion of different stages of the project. As work progresses, Borglum's son, Lincoln, often supervises,

having turned down a college education to help his father. It's said that work goes more smoothly when the younger Borglum is in charge. The sculptor tells Robinson proudly that his son has become a remarkable executive. But Borglum Sr.'s exacting requirements help push the boundaries of what can be achieved. On Roosevelt's face, he creates the illusion of glasses, even though there are no lenses present. He also crafts a moustache measuring 20 feet across. One of the more beautiful elements, apparently, are Lincoln's eyeballs. Artists suggest that those are among the most realistic elements and are really quite impressive in terms of

their emotion and the depth that they convey on a giant mountain face. As the years pass it becomes clearer that the original budget won't cover all Borglum's ideas. The plan had been to include the president's torsos in the sculpture, but as the Second World War looms, it's scaled back to just their faces. Roosevelt's is the last to be carved. It is dedicated in a ceremony in July 1939. But when war is declared in Europe two months later,

Mount Rushmore's supporters fear the final stages of the project, including the enormous haul of records, will never be completed. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the funds needed to go for defensive preparations and the money just needed to be used in more wartime preparations. And so there just weren't the funds to continue this type of project. And some people started to feel like it was a vanity project in comparison, especially to war preparation. So the demands and the needs of the government overtook any additional artistic expansion. Borglum claws back enough to keep working, insisting that the monument will raise morale both at home and in embattled Europe. Work starts to excavate the vast chamber

in which Borglum hopes to store irreplaceable documents. But in early 1941, the project faces its greatest challenge. On March 6, Gudson Borglum dies of a heart attack in a Chicago hospital, aged 73. He had recently undergone surgery, but had been recovering well, so his death comes as a shock. It falls to Lincoln Borglum, now 29 years old,

to finish his father's monument and ready it for visitors. But with funds running out, the Hall of Records is abandoned, and only some of the rubble at the bottom of the mountain can be cleared. The project is finally declared complete on October 31, 1941, just as the United States enters World War II. Duane Robinson, who had the original idea, does live to see the project completed, after 14 years of construction work. It has cost nearly $990,000, over $20 million today, and most of that has come from the federal government.

The reception was mixed. One observer asked what arrogant stone carver could intrude upon God's mountain. And there was a sense, I think from the beginning, that this was a really beautiful natural site. And it was the epitome of human arrogance to assume that we could somehow improve it. Then there were others that felt like it was an incredible calling card for American principles and American democracy and a reminder of what we were trying to achieve in creating a more perfect union and a reminder to try and create it to be more perfect as future generations went forward.

Nearly 400,000 people visit the site in its first year, though numbers drop during the rest of the war. In the 1950s, a Lakota Sioux man, Ben Black Elk, starts posing for photographs of the monument, where he explains his people's tradition and history to tourists. He becomes known as the Fifth Face of Rushmore and greets visitors there for 27 years. Even so, the strong sense of injustice felt by the Lakota Sioux people doesn't diminish with the completion of the carving. For a time, many are too concerned with the economic hardships and discrimination they face in the present, rather than protesting about the past. But as the decades pass and a new generation reaches adulthood, the anger grows.

It's late afternoon on Saturday the 29th of August, 1970. A slow-moving line of hot cars carrying families sneaks towards the parking lot for one of America's biggest attractions. But the student driver of one camper van isn't here to look at Mount Rushmore. He's here to occupy it. Once he is parked, he makes his way towards the site. A crowd of children has formed a circle near the viewing platform. Over their heads, the student sees people he recognizes

from the American Indian Movement and the United Native Americans. Their long hair plaited past their shoulders, they're wearing traditional leather-fringed Anuk jackets and jewelry featuring feathers and glass beads. Across the site, there are maybe 150 Native people here, some singing and drumming, others giving speeches and holding banners. The park wardens tap their feet to the music and most visitors seem to see this as a harmless sideshow. But the student is determined they must understand why the carving that looms over them is both an insult and evidence of a terrible crime.

It's two years since the American Indian movement came into being, alongside other civil rights campaigns across the US. The student was a small child when government policy uprooted 100,000 people from the reservations into the cities. The relocated families face poor living conditions and police brutality. The next generation aren't standing for it anymore. They've already occupied Alcatraz, arguing that now the prison has closed, the island should be given to the Sioux people. Rushmore is next.

One of the most prominent campaigners, Russell Means, holds up a postcard bought in the gift shop. It's a photograph of the aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee, 80 years before, when almost 300 Lakota people were shot and killed by US Army soldiers. He demands the monument stop profiting from the suffering of his people. It's time to take direct action. At a signal, the student and dozens of others surge towards the side of the sculpture, the route they

planned. Without looking back, they run into fenced-off areas, leaving the stunned wardens in their wake. But it's a tough climb. The student is almost out of strength, when at last the land flattens before leading to an area enclosed by trees. The fresh scent of pine needles calms him as he dares to take a look at who else is here. Twenty or so protesters have made it up the mountain. A handful of rangers watch from the cavern below, behind the sculpture of Lincoln's head.

There's nothing they can do. Getting their breath back, the protesters prepare the statement they are going to send down to journalists. A demand for the return of the land plus a rap sheet or list of the crimes they believe were committed by the presidents memorialized here. Russell Means reads out the objections and the protesters cheer. As the last light fades, they set up camp and unpack their supplies. They have water and food, as well as cans of blood-red paint. There's a discussion about whether to empty it onto the granite faces below. Will it strengthen their case or weaken it?

But now Means walks towards the edge of the cliff. As the others follow, Means urinates off the side aiming for washington's head a louder cheer goes up after all their people have endured this small insult seems like a powerful way to show their contempt for those who stole their land Within a day of the protesters setting up camp, supporters are ferrying mail and water up and down the slope. And though officials keep watch round the clock, fearing paint will be poured over the monument,

the protesters actually use it to create banners on bedsheets. When they are unfurled down the rock face, they read, Sue Indian Power. Their press releases detail their objections to this use of the sacred land, but also to the individuals depicted. Washington is accused of killing Indians in battle, while he and Jefferson are criticized for their ownership of enslaved people. Jefferson also negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the U.S. and sped up white settlement and land grabs. Abraham Lincoln, of course, was anti-slavery, so he did not have some of those same issues, but he was very much a proponent of the Union and of federal power and the U.S. Army,

very much a proponent of the Union and of federal power and the U.S. Army. And so many of those same tools were used against Natives, both during the Civil War and after the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt was president at a time when many of these conflicts had, quote unquote, been resolved in terms of there were no longer really any Indian wars. And that was actually something he lamented. He wanted to have the opportunity to go fight Indians and to kill Indians using his language. They represented different elements of either government suppression or white supremacy. Many of the original protesters leave after 10 days to go back to college,

but others take their places. The last two will leave at the end of October, when the wintry weather arrives. But the effect of this protest, and a second attempted occupation in June the following year, will outlast the actual time spent camped next to the monument. I do think that that moment was a big shift in the public relations discussion around this territory, and it made future legal victories possible in a way that I don't think it would have been without that type of PR effort. The protests run alongside legal action being taken by displaced people. In 1980, the Sioux Nation of Indians

takes their case to the US Supreme Court. It ruled that indeed this territory had been taken illegally. It belonged to the Lakota people. It ordered the government pay remuneration for this seizure. And it was the initial basically offering price plus interest over time, which was in 1980 nearly $106 million. The Lakota refused those funds. They said, no, we don't want the money. We want the land back. And if we take the money,

it would allow the United States to justify the seizure of this land. allow the United States to justify the seizure of this land. Almost 45 years on, interest on the unclaimed money has brought the total to $1.2 billion. The Sioux still insist they will not accept the money, because the land is not for sale. Seventeen miles from Mount Rushmore, another monument is still under construction. Back in 1948, a few years after Rushmore was finished, an Oglala Lakota chief by the name of Henry Standing Bear began work on a statue depicting Lakota warrior Crazy Horse. The scale of the sculpture was even greater than Borglum's, with a planned height of 640 feet.

Crazy Horse's face would be a third larger than those of the president's. But even this is controversial among campaigners. In life, Crazy Horse was careful never to be photographed and was even buried in a secret location to prevent his resting place becoming a shrine. Over 75 years after it commenced, work on the sculpture continues, and as yet, there is no date for completion. And the debate about who should be honored on Rushmore itself is ongoing. While it was still under construction, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,

niece of Theodore, wrote to Borglum suggesting that a woman should be carved alongside the men. Her nomination was the female suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony. But the challenge with any monument is that there are going to be people who have different opinions. And while a lot of people really admire Susan B. Anthony's efforts to bring suffrage to women, there were others who felt like she sometimes expressed uncomfortable racial views. Susan B. Anthony was frustrated that Black men received the right to vote, sometimes at the expense of white women, and so expressed ideas that we would consider to be unpalatable in the 21st century. In 2008, when Barack Obama was asked during his presidency if he could imagine his face on Rushmore,

he said there wasn't enough granite to sculpt his ears. More recently, in 2020, President Donald Trump tweeted a photograph of himself in front of the monument. He denied suggesting the addition of his own face, but said it sounded like a good idea. Apart from trying to agree on who could be placed there, the controversy about the land, the limited space and high construction costs mean it's unlikely Rushmore will ever be expanded. At a time when there are so many other things that can be done with that money, sometimes it's hard to justify, especially because there do continue to be these ongoing conversations about should there be faces in the side of a mountain and is that really appropriate. This August, it will be 100 years since Robinson

contacted Goodson Borglum with his idea for a giant sculpture in the Black Hills. Since its completion, Mount Rushmore has remained one of America's most popular monuments, with visitor numbers now averaging 2.4 million each year. It does have a huge influx of visitors and tourists who come to see this space. It is also, it is iconic, it is featured in movies. One of the national treasure movies has a whole conspiracy about what's behind it. I think Alfred Hitchcock was the first to really kind of put it on film. I think Alfred Hitchcock was the first to really kind of put it on film.

So it does definitely have, I think, a larger-than-life symbolic presence in the American imagination. Most of the famous scenes in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, where Cary Grant is pursued on Rushmore, were actually filmed on a soundstage because officials disagreed with the script. Since then, the monument has featured in movies such as Team America, Mars Attacks, and numerous adverts, with new faces added for comedy, or the faces destroyed for drama. Looking to the future, though Rushmore's granite is very durable, eroding at a rate of an inch or so every 10,000 years officials are taking no chances

Independence Day firework displays have been paused after evidence the vibrations might worsen tiny fractures in the rock cracks are monitored and any blemishes are filled with a silicon sealant a 3d digital model of the sculpture has also been created as part of the preservation. When Gudson Borglum came up with his design, he believed he was blazing a trail, creating colossal sculptures of great men who would inspire observers to follow their examples. But the view of what great means changes over time, as do opinions of what Mount Rushmore means to the United States.

It is a deeply complex space, and it is one that I don't think anyone looks at with pure views. I don't know that it feels symbolic to a lot of Americans in the way that, for example, the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Monument feels, because it is this complex space. And because I think that there are a lot of Americans who feel that our national parks, our national spaces, are really one of our treasures

to be celebrated and shared with the world. And in some ways, this is defiling that beauty. And so it is, in some ways, the perfect embodiment of the deeply complex and deeply divided American story. Next time on Short History Of, we'll bring you a short history of the Taj Mahal. 95% of the people I have met in the Taj during my innumerable visits were Indians. All kinds of Indians, belonging to different regions, cultures, caste, communities. One could see the admiration they have for the monument.

And in this admiration and the reaction they have, there is hardly any sectarian element or any element of bigotry. And that really is what India is all about. Harmony, unity and diversity, and a belief that anything that is of national importance is their heritage, and it doesn't belong to any individual or group. That's next time.