Producing Patriotic Inspiration at Mount Rushmore

American Academy of Religion

Producing Patriotic Inspiration at Mount RushmoreAuthor(s): Matthew GlassSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), pp.265-283Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465267 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 06:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press and American Academy of Religion are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.199 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 06:40:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465267?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Journal of the American Academy of Religion LXII/2

Producing Patriotic

Inspiration at Mount

Rushmore Matthew Glass

IN AN UNCHARACTERISTIC moment, Mircea Eliade once nod- ded towards the contentiousness, or better still, the politics, that necessarily shapes the formation of religious landscapes. As an aside in one of his many discussions of sacred space he noted:

An unknown, foreign, and unoccupied territory (which often means, "unoccupied by our own people") still shares in the fluid and larval modality of chaos. By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos through a ritual repetition of cosmogony. (31)

Eliade's parenthetical comment provides an important clue for viewing how Americans have gone about investing their lands with sacred significance. "Unoccupied by our own people" suggests that sacred space is a field marked by potential disagreement about the character and contours of the sacred, and that there is a human cost in deciding how to characterize a given place as sacred. It suggests that "our people" will see the landscape differently than "their people." Possession being nine-tenths of the law, it raises the possibility that our people will struggle with their people over the symbolic ownership of place. And if our people are going to see it in a new and different way than their people did, then we are going to have to work diligently, "occupying" and "settling," in order, as Emile Durkheim might have put it, to make ourselves readily visible on the landscape.'

Matthew Glass is Associate Professor in the Philosophy and Religion Department, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD 57007-1097.

1Eliade's comment also serves as a good summation of more recent work done on sacred space by writers such as J.Z. Smith (1978, 1987), David Chidester, David Carrasco, and Edward Linenthal.

265



266 Journal of the American Academy of Religion

This article provides a gloss on Eliade's comments. In particular I want to examine the process of symbolic appropriation that began with the hard work done by the carvers of Mount Rushmore, America's "Shrine of Democracy" and South Dakota's leading tourist attraction, focusing specifically on the production of patriotic inspiration at the memorial. But the efforts of some Americans to view Mount Rushmore as democracy's shrine has given rise to counter-tendencies. As might be concluded from Eliade's sugges- tion about religion serving to legitimate one group taking the land from another, long-running symbolic battles have been fought at Mount Rushmore over its meaning. In conclusion therefore I will juxtapose the production of patriotism with two episodes from the history of symbolic resistance at Mount Rushmore.2

I

Since work stopped on the memorial in 1991, the National Park Service (NPS) has sought to excite the curiosity, wonder, and inspiration of the memorial's visitors. Two themes in particular stand out as focal concerns for the interpretive programs run by the NPS: the historical panorama symbolized by the four presidential faces, and the story of the memorial's creation. Together they have ena- bled many Americans to both commemorate the past and to discover links between the spiritual resources which inspired the lives of their great leaders, and those which are necessary for the con- duct of their own lives.

As has become clear through the work on civil religion by Linenthal and Zelinksy, defining the American landscape itself has been central to the formation of nationalism. But unlike battlefield sites, which usually gain an obvious sort of sacred status through the sacrificial spilling of blood, Mount Rushmore has always been subject to some interpretive ambiguity. Just what is it supposed to do? This question surfaced frequently throughout the fourteen years of construction at the memorial, as when Associate Director of the NPS, A.E. Demaray, appearing before the House Appropria- tions Committee in 1935, said he really did not know what the project portrayed (Fite:167).

2For a narrative history of the memorial's development see Fite and R. Smith (1985).



Glass: Patriotism and Mt. Rushmore 267

Sculptor Gutzon Borglum provided the mountain with its initial interpretation, dramatically acknowledging his first view of Rushmore by announcing "American history shall march along that skyline" (R. Smith:33). As a shrine, part of the memorial's aura of sacredness results from condensing the temporal process of American history into a single place. But this itself presents an interpretive problem in an age in which nationalizing forces require the mobilization of diverse populations and public formation of collective memory. As George Lipsitz has put it, history remains contentious in American life because "what we choose to remember about the past, where we begin and end our retrospec- tive accounts, and who we include and exclude from them-these do a lot to determine how we live and what decisions we make in the present" (34). What should the content of public memory be at Mount Rushmore?

One answer to this appears in the interpretive displays at the Rushmore visitors center, currently being remodeled to accommo- date the memorial's 2.5 million visitors more comfortably. A door- way inside the center leads people into a room furnished with large-screen TV monitors and comfortable family-sized benches from which to view the screens. Visitors entering the room see the memorial itself through twenty-foot high floor-to-ceiling windows. As either prelude or postlude to moving outside they can gather before the monitors to watch a video replaying on demand. Tom Brokaw, NBC news anchor and native South Dakotan, begins his narration:

It was, critics said, a preposterous idea, an outrage against South Dakota's Black Hills. "What arrogant stone carver could possibly intrude upon God's mountain sculpture?" But as the faces of the great men sprang outright from the mountain, Rushmore simply overwhelmed its critics, and dazzled the world, just as the republi- can ideals it honors had inspired and dazzled mankind in 1776.

Cameras panning the memorial from the air, recording the play of light and clouds from dawn to sunset, and the brilliant illumina- tion at night all give visitors a chance to extend their temporal view of the memorial beyond the generally brief visits demanded by busy vacation schedules. Interpretive displays of the workers' equipment and photographs of the construction process enable visitors to deepen their experience at Mount Rushmore. Combined with Brokaw's narrative and half-hour talks by rangers, visitors can




encounter the testimony of the men who carved Rushmore, anec- dotes of their efforts, and an interpretation of its meaning.

Brokaw concludes by saying: In both its conception and realization Rushmore is uniquely Amer- ican, proclaiming bold ideals and big aspirations, celebrating the spirit of our people and the sweep of our civilization, reminding us of the hope a democratic society offers the future. It is a monument no less to the men who working together transformed a lofty dream into a colossal reality, a work of art for the ages.

It is worth noting that Brokaw's narrative seems directly geared towards providing the visitor with a useable, inspirational past, rather than an account of the memorial's development. For instance, the narrative proceeds by regarding the memorial as an accomplished fact, enabling Brokaw to deride the historically out- of-step nay-sayers, those who thought at the time that such a project was a waste and an abomination. In fact there were many, both locally and nationally, who did want to know "what arrogant stone carver could possibly intrude upon God's mountain sculpture?"

Promethean arrogance, denounced in 1925 by South Dakotans basically leery of being saddled with an obligation to provide front money (Fite:55), was a key mythic element in the project, at least for sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Borglum blended a heady mixture of organic evolutionism, Anglo-Saxon nativism, and Whig historiog- raphy to lay out the possibilities facing America as a result of his skyline vision. In a piece circulated by the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission in 1931 Borglum contrasted the rise and fall of other civilizations with the promethean quality of America's birth.

Strangely enough, by some humor of nature, out of confusion there grew and developed a small tribe of independent, self-reliant souls, in whose veins flowed the blood of Europe, of Greece, of Rome, of England. ... They were long enough removed from the trials of their forefathers to think too much of their past, but the hot blood boiled again, and mind and heart got together-and America, a nation, was conceived and born, sired by aeons of upward struggle out of hair and leaves, out of mud and fear, out of slavery in galleys and cells, out of bigotry, out of injustice into fair play. The right of each in his own way to be happy was written by them across the sky, firmly there, where a world could read it. (1931:15)




Borglum's version of the American cosmogony bears little resem- blance to pious accounts of providential working. Born into a family that was by turns Mormon, Catholic, and finally given to embracing movements such as new thought and theosophy (Shaff and Shaff), Borglum had little truck with Protestant piety. He tells of America as "conceived and born" out of "hot blood" boiling, "sired" by "upward struggle out of hair and leaves." The American people themselves took on the task of storming heaven, though apparently Borglum saw divine purpose in this. Borglum, carrier of a hefty ego, saw his own production of collosal public sculpture as giving material form to this Promethean spirit, and it is proba- bly not stretching it too far to claim that the carving itself satisfies Eliade's concern for the ritual repetition of cosmogony. He spoke of his "lifting our accomplishments into the heavens and engraving there in the sun our records away from the meddling fingers of ignorance and avarice" (Borglum 1931:16).

As with any divinely-inspired mission, Borglum saw his own, as well as that of the "Anglo-Saxon race," beset with trials and tribula- tions. In the midst of the project's serious financial difficulties he spoke of the completion of the memorial as a test of spirit.

If this monument fails to become the first of our great memorials to the Anglo-Saxon in the Western Hemisphere, recording the significance of their civilization in reshaping the philosophy of politics and government throughout the world-if this monument fails to interpret that record, it will be because we ourselves have failed, not only to appreciate our opportunity, but in our abilities to develop what great thought contains. (Borglum 1930:vii)

He maintained the spirits of those involved in the seventeen-year project largely because he remained convinced that American leaders were ripe for apotheosis. In remarks given at the unveiling of the Washington sculpture in 1930, as a gigantic American flag was rolled up to reveal the finished face, Borglum said

We believe a nation's memorial should, like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, have a serenity, a nobility, a power that reflects the gods who inspired them and the gods that they have become. Let us place there, carved high, as close to heaven as we can, the words of our leaders, their faces, to show posterity what manner of men they were. Then breathe a prayer that these records will endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away. (Bor- glum 1930:n.p.)




This recognition that American leaders had become gods was certainly not Borglum's alone. Doane Robinson, the South Dakota historian who proposed the idea of carving figures in the Black Hills, put this apotheosis to verse in a Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society brochure published in 1931 to commemorate the sculpting of Jefferson, second figure in the presidential quartet:

Some sons of God must stand upon the mountain tops, And there through all the deathless generations guard The continents and guide the gracious stars of fate: So God made mountains for thrones such as these. Upon this mountain top America enshrines Her sturdy sirs; exalts her noblest knight, Where children of the earth may lift appraising eye, And feel his virtue while his strength invests their souls. (Robinson 1931:8)

As has often been noted, apotheosis itself runs deep into American political history. Washington as Moses led the citizenry out of the wilderness and was then translated to the realm of light, as the popular paintings entitled "Apotheosis" by John Barralet (1802) or H. Weishaupt (c.1800) make clear. Lincoln, our own Christ, gave his life to bind up our wounds, as Doane Robinson noticed in a 1941 paean to the two "Greatest Democrats" (Robinson 1941:17). Roosevelt's place at the memorial has always been more of an interpretive problem. Borglum, who supported Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party, saw Roosevelt as the completer of Christopher Columbus's dream, achieved by cutting the Panama Canal (Borglum 1930:vii). And as Columbus's journals indicate, Columbus saw himself as Moses, led on to the terrestrial paradise by the hand of God.

II From the jaded perspectives of the post-Watergate generation it

may be hard to take seriously such ability to turn American politi- cians into gods. But studies suggest that many Americans do retain this willingness, if not for our contemporaries, then at least for the faces on the mountain (Zelinsky; Schwartz). However, overt political apathy and cynicism in the present does prompt the question of how Mount Rushmore works. If Rushmore remains a potent symbol, exactly how do Americans go about connecting with the power, wisdom or virtue they find there? What makes it possible for visitors to see their visit as "a moment of communion




with the very soul of America," as George Bush noted in his dedication in 1991 (Bush:887)? These questions can perhaps only be answered by undertaking an extensive random survey of visitor responses at the memorial. But an initial answer can be gleaned from considering the NPS "strategies" developed to produce the potential for Americans to connect with the sacred qualities carved into the mountain.3 There are at least three such strategies visible at Mount Rushmore: symbolic limitation, symbolic recentering, and the transference of virtrue.

There are at least three such strategies by which NPS staff at MR produce the potential for Americans to connect with the sacred qualities carved into the mountain. The first strategy is actually to qualify or limit the process of symbolic connection. While Gutzon Borglum could easily speak of the memorial being a witness to the achievements of the Anglo-Saxon race, its modern, federal, caretak- ers cannot.4 One important National Park Service goal since the heyday of the civil rights movement has been the commitment to present the public with a pluralistic reading of the American experience. The NPS has accomplished this by accepting responsibility for the preservation and interpretation of new historic monuments associated with non-Anglo racial and ethnic groups, and by providing culturally sensitive interpretive programs at all units.5 At Mount Rushmore it has also included a "toning-down" of the patriotic rhetoric common to the memorial's founders and original promoters.

One might expect that Park Service personnel at Mount Rushmore would acknowledge their role as symbolic custodians and interpreters. But qualitative interviews with staff members at the memorial indicate the extent to which many of them wish to avoid this conclusion.6 Dan Wenk, park superintendent, doubts that his job has anything to do with protecting, or underscoring, particular symbolic interpretations of Mt. Rushmore. Instead, he

3Chidester argues for considering religious action as strategic. 4See Shaff and Shaff, particularly chapters 15, 21, and 22, for an account of Borglum's

important involvement in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan after WWI. 5Michael Kammen (444-481) presents the cultural tensions stemming from the federal gov-

ernment's increased role in funding and directing the preservation of collective memory during the late 1920s and the New Deal. Bodnar (169-205) focuses on the park service's role in forming a nationalized sense of public memory. For the impact of racial tensions on interpretive programs during the 1960s and 1970s, see Bodnar (198-200). 6Initial interviews were conducted with members of the interpretative staff by the author

during the summer of 1990.




sees himself as responsible for budgets, personnel, visitor safety, protection of resources, and mediating between constituencies and adversaries. Wenk does regard Mt. Rushmore as a contemplative place. He is quick to say that the NPS job is to preserve that contemplative quality, though without in any way influencing the direction of contemplation, or affecting the interpretations of visitors.

He notes that these interpretations depend primarily upon individual backgrounds:

Mount Rushmore has a different meaning for every person who visits it. [Take] the veteran from World War II who saw his friends perhaps lose their lives to preserve and maintain our country. Mt. Rushmore affects that person differently than the 16 year old who's never really known conflict, and never really known some of the sacrifices that many of our forefathers, or fathers or brothers have made. And so Mount Rushmore becomes very personal in terms of the history that individuals bring, and that affects them differently as they leave.7

For Wenk the personal response to the Memorial means that his duties as protector in no way limit the freedom of perspective held by the visitor. Thus he contends that the Park Service would not consider doing anything to counter derogatory interpretations offered by individuals such as the Lakota holy man John Fire Lame Deer, who saw in the faces merely a legacy of the conquest of his people by the United States.

At the same time, Wenk says that what is most crucial to his job here is to manage affairs in such a way that the visitor can feel a lump in the throat when looking at the mountain. Asked whether he ever gets lumps in his own throat, he responds:

At times. It depends upon the group you're dealing with. If you have a group up here and they're doing a program on the POWs and the MIAs, and you see how that mountain affects them, you can't help but be affected. If you have a group of bikers from the Sturgis rally8 and you follow them up the trail, and they're rowdy and not paying any attention, and they fall silent, and stand ten minutes and literally don't talk, just look at the mountain, and

7Personal interview, Mt. Rushmore National Memorial, 8/24/90. 8The Sturgis Rally, or the "Black Hills Motor Classic" is an annual summer event, and the

largest gathering of motorcyclists in the world. At its fiftieth celebration, in 1990, it drew over 350,000 people to the Hills.




then when they do talk they talk in hushed tones, you can't help but be affected. When you see the guy walk up that has lost a leg in Vietnam, or is in a wheel chair, you can't help but be affected. When you're here by yourself, and it's a full moon, with no artifi- cial light, you can't help but feel affected.

But he then goes on to say that not everyone is affected. This recognition of interpretative variety allows the memorial's

guardians to serve in some priestly capacities, such as preserving access and order. But at the same time, for Wenk it also distances the NPS from responsibility for the nitty-gritty tasks of symbolic production and control. For Wenk the NPS does not have to produce patriotic spirit or preserve collective memory.

This ambiguity of roles can be illustrated by considering another publication from the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society. Produced sometime during the early to mid 1960s, the commemorative magazine urges Americans to find strength to endure dark days.

There is a great need in every citizen of the United States to view the great memorials of their historic past, and through them to obtain a more thorough understanding and appreciation of their national heritage.

Today this need is greater than at any other time in our history. Subjected to the unrelenting threats and tensions of an uncertain world, Americans are being drawn in increasing numbers to reest- ablish contact with the nation's past. From this contact with the past they seek and are able to find the reassurance that through the centuries the United States has weathered every manner of upheaval. From the Revolutionary War, and internal strife during the Civil War, through two world wars and continuing cold war, it lives on today-strong and steadfast. (Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society)

On the one hand the publications of the memorial's support society, staffed by volunteers, can be said to not reflect the official agency line; visitors remain free to purchase commemorative items or not. But on the other hand, as a federal agency, the NPS wields the national power which the memorial legitimates. This becomes awkward when staff members might be personally inclined to support or attack the politically controversial agendas of other agen- cies. So the official response to brochures urging Americans to find strength to face the Cold War becomes an expression of neu- trality, or lack of jurisdiction. Given the awkwardness of symbolic




control in a society protecting freedom of religion and expression, NPS employees are justifiably uneasy about serving as the shrine of democracy's priests.

The second strategy for the production of patriotic inspiration operating at Mount Rushmore is perhaps too obvious to mention: one of recentering. Politics has always been a suspicious activity in American eyes. But in the post-Watergate era it is especially dirty business, and the space in which politics is done has become profane space, even polluted. The symbolic trajectories of this particular monument to American nationalism extend along different lines than the great monuments in the national capital. South Dakota carries something of a reputation as "the end of the world," and was even left out of the 1989 Rand MacNally atlas. But this same marginality from the centers of American power might also serve to promote patriotic connections. As one publication from the 1960s put it, Mount Rushmore is "located practically in the center of the North American continent" (Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society). This geographical centering increases the symbolic power of Mount Rushmore. Its location in the continent's heartland suggests its purifying distance from the actual centers of political power. It is far removed from the world of cor- ruption and scandal.

In addition, unlike those memorials in Washington D.C., it appears to be rooted into place, a sculpture that has not been transformed completely from nature to culture. This fact impressed Gutzon Borglum himself, who often told visitors that the faces had always been there. They were not being carved into the mountain, they were being brought out. The excess stone was simply being "relieved .... from the head" (Fite:80). Mount Rushmore repre- sents the ambiguity facing "nature's nation." Does the monument grow naturally out the ground, or is it a coralling and dominating of the mute earth's forces by inspired human will?

Interpreters and promoters also stress the importance of its rootedness in the earth by linking Mount Rushmore's status as sacred space to the fact that Lakotas and other native, typically more "natural," people themselves saw the Black Hills as sacred. As the Rapid City Journal editorialized in 1935 in the wake of appropriations for carving Lincoln:

Years and years ago, according to old Indian legends, the Black Hills were held sacred by the Indians ... Its mild climate and the scenic beauty appealed to the hidden religious beliefs of the




savages. ... Now, that the Black Hills have come into the hands of the white men, their value is becoming known more and more. As they served the Indians, so will they serve the folk of modern times. Many persons will find solace and comfort there after the stirring struggles of commerce. (Rapid City Journal 5/13/35)

More recently this connection between Lakota and white sacred space was made by the operatic singer White Eagle, whose ances- try is part Lakota and part German. Speaking and singing at the memorial's dedication July 3, 1991, he said that on his mother's Lakota side he had to view the mountain with pain. But then on his father's, German, side he hoped that all Americans might find their unity by connecting with the symbolic power of Mount Rushmore (South Dakota Public Television). His extension of wel- come to all carries on the longstanding American tradition of per- ceiving Indian nobility and hospitality in the exchange of lands. His linking of Indian and white experience, as did the earlier edito- rial, provides the memorial with a meaningful past-a key problem faced by the American park movement.

The third strategy for producing patriotic inspiration at the mountain depends upon the transfer of virtue, and also stems from the staff's uneasy regard for the mountain's symbolic power. NPS employees interviewed by the author focus their programs more on the memorial's aesthetic qualities than on patriotic significance. Their public talks describe it as primarily a piece of sculpture, and only incidently a symbol of American nationalism. They highlight the "human" dimension-telling stories of the risks taken, the tools used, and the conditions faced by the men who worked on the mountain for fourteen years.

Kim Weiser, a Black Hills native working at the memorial, spoke about how she handles her interpretive programs. For Weiser the NPS functions to preserve

our sense of adventure, almost, the American sense of adventure. A lot of people don't get a chance to do it, you know so many people who live in cities never get a chance to put a backpack on and go out in the wilderness for a couple of days. And I think that even though we don't get a chance to do that, that it's something we want to do. You know, as far back as the 1800s when every- body started heading west, that was almost because of a sense of adventure, a restless feeling inside of them. And so I think that we Americans especially, I don't know why I say Americans espe-




cially, but it just seems that we do have a real need to get out and do something, and we need to have places to do those things in.9

Asked how she sees Mount Rushmore fitting in with this sense of adventure, she says "in maybe a sense that the whole idea of this place is pretty adventurous. You know the idea of climbing a sixty foot face on the mountain, and the idea of having a man hang over that mountain on a bosuns' chair, that's pretty adventurous."

This sense of adventure is what she tries to instill in the visitors she meets at Mount Rushmore. She does an entire program on fear, comparing the fears faced by the presidents themselves, the much more vivid fears of those who dangled on cables, burdened with jackhammers, chisels, and blasting caps, and the fears of her audience.10 While de-emphasizing her capabilities as an inspirational speaker, she says she tries to "put people who are at the talk in touch with their own fears" so that they might learn to keep their fears from directing their own lives. As she says, "there are things that people can be inspired to go out and do, [to] overcome their fears or create their dreams."

Superintendent Dan Wenk gets at the same inspirational quality when he says that Mount Rushmore is worth government protection because it is a testimony to "man's achievement." As he puts it: "not many people have ever carved a mountain. Borglum I think believed that if the mind's eye could conceive it, man could achieve it."

This focus on the construction as an achievement in and of itself suggests how virtues and other sacred qualities associated with the presidents are transferred to the memorial's visitors. The conquest of fear, the pursuit of adventure, the creation of dreams, these all become available to Americans through their encounters at the memorial. It may be that few Americans aspire any longer to the public actions of a Washington or a Jefferson, but the process of transference at the memorial does not require such lofty aspirations. Rather inspirational focus is much more concrete and tangi- ble, much more connected with everyday life.

In its inception, Mount Rushmore was a means of immortaliz- ing the great deeds that have shaped American society. As Bor-

9Personal interview, Mount Rushmore National Memorial, 8/24/90. 10See R. Smith (150-71) for a vivid account of the difficult conditions faced by the quarri-

ers and miners who did the carving. The project, as with many public efforts during the Depression, was regarded as good, steady work, attracting men from across the country.




glum put it the memorial would reflect "the gods who inspired them [the presidents] and the gods that they have become." The carving was to be an embodiment of their spirit. It has become the great deed in its own right however, the accomplishment of ordi- nary working-class Americans, the "unsung heroes" who did the drilling, jack-hammering and blasting that carved Mount Rushmore, but also built up the substance of twentieth-century America's infrastructure.

Consequently the virtues which Rushmore embodies most tan- gibly are not political virtues but rather productive, economic virtues. The memorial makes evident, perhaps as does no other artifact within our culture, the American imperative to give the landscape a human visage. The story detailing the memorial's carving provides Americans with a sanctification of the construc- tive processes by which they have transformed the landscape. The political virtues of the four "nation-builders," to use George Bush's phrase, are made available, incarnated, in the form of the building, constructing, producing done by the memorial's workers. Thus the memorial's material qualities present a model of what Ameri- cans have done through their own participation in the industrial economy.

These three strategies, symbolic limitation, transference of virtue, and recentering, may not be the only ones operating at Mount Rushmore. But they do suggest the complexity of a place that despisers of popular culture regard as simply a tourist trap. As attempts to provide an answer to the question of what Mount Rushmore means they remain only partially successful, however. The strategy of symbolic limitation would seem to account for this partial success, chalking it up to a harmonious pluralism at the heart of American civil religion. But recent decades have chal- lenged both the existence and the hope of national consensus or harmonious pluralism.

III

How well will the strategies for producing patriotic inspiration continue to function at Mount Rushmore? This question has a bearing on current developments; the park service recently began groundbreaking for new facilities, and by time of the memorial's dedication on 3 July 1991 the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society was well along in its $50 million fundraising drive for res-




toration of the sculpture and expansion of facilities. If the strategies of symbolic appropriation operating at MR are close to the ones presented here there may be some difficulties ahead in the production of patriotic inspiration.

For one, if the memorial does work by conflating political with productive virtues, and if Americans have found their own individual stories written across the skyline, this is likely to be an increas- ingly difficult interpretive accomplishment in a post-industrial age. Paper-pushers, video terminal operators and motel service staffs, even if inclined to seek patriotic inspiration at Mount Rushmore, may have a harder time than their steel-working, ditch-digging, dragline or chainsaw-operating parents and grandparents. How do the burdens borne by thirtysomethings with overextended credit cards relate to the risks of those who scampered across Washing- ton's nose?

A second difficulty, interpretive conflict, may also stem from our post-industrial setting, which according to Lyotard (65) spawns an increased contentiousness over symbols which elites previously employed to promote social consensus. Certainly there have always been efforts at Mount Rushmore to delegitimate the dominant interpretations, and to offer others in their place. Dur- ing the years of construction some attacked the choice of figures. In 1935 Congresswoman Caroline O'Day, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others used their influence to place feminist leader Susan B. Anthony's visage on the mountain. Borglum took their complaints seriously enough to try dissuading them with a proposal to include her statue within the mountain's never-completed hall of records (Fite:167, 206).

In recent years, however, the politics of protest have led others to engage in more direct efforts to undercut the strategies of symbolic appropriation at Mount Rushmore. American Indian activists occupied the memorial during the summer of 1971, a time when AIM and the National Indian Youth Council were turning to re-occupation with some success at Alcatraz, the BIA offices in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere." Charges that AIM members planned to cart dynamite up the mountain or pour red paint down the faces remain somewhat apocryphal. However, having renamed Rushmore "Mount Crazy Horse," it is clear that the Native Ameri-

11For useful overviews of Native American political and religious resurgence, see Cornell and Hertzberg.




can activists sought to deflate and defile the sacralized course of American history which they saw marching across Rushmore's skyline (Argus Leader 1971).12

John Fire Lame Deer, the Lakota holy man who made the climb up to the top with the young AIM activists, grandmothers and children, expressed the ambiguity found at any sacred place, saying "one man's shrine is another man's cemetery" (93). In order to sever the harmonious connection which the memorial's promoters have cemented between the sacred space of Indians and whites, Lame Deer planted a prayer staff at the top, "in order to make the mountain sacred again." Lame Deer told a curious reporter he was "putting a blanket, or shroud, over the mountain by planting this staff, and the Presidents' faces shall remain dirty until the treaties concerning the Black Hills are fulfilled" (1972:94).

More recently, in October, 1987, Greenpeace and Earth First! activists climbed the memorial in order to drape a banner saying "We the people say no to acid rain" from George Washington's face (Argus Leader 1987). The symbolic action failed, those involved having wasted valuable time prior to their apprehension by the NPS in conflict over which to hang first, the hundred-foot banner or a gigantic gas mask (Scarce:166-172). While the action was incomplete, the banner itself indicates a different rationale for protest than was taken up by AIM. "We the people say no to acid rain" is not so much a defilement of the course of history enshrined at the memorial as an effort to drive an interpretive wedge between the democratic values embodied there and the productive capacity which created the mountain. The Greenpeace action, a symbolic revisioning, seemed to entail the strategic assumption that Ameri- cans would distinguish between democratic values and the post- war industrial growth which has generated acid rain. But this assumption remains questionable, since it is the productive capacity which seems to have given the memorial its power within Amer- ican culture.

12Defilement is a typical maneuvere employed to remove the claims of sacredness which a group attaches to a given place. Lame Deer told of a friend, "a Santee Indian who some years ago climbed up here one night a few years ago with a few friends just to pee down on the nose of one of those faces. He called it a 'symbolic gesture.' The way he told me it was quite a feat. They had to form a human chain just to make it possible for him to do it" (91). For other examples of efforts to both defile and contain the defilement of sacred places see in general Chidester and see Linenthal (68) for a strategy similar to Lame Deer's Santee friend, performed by rock singer Ozzy Ozbourne at the Alamo.




It was Gutzon Borglum's prayer that the presidential faces would "endure until the wind and rain alone shall wear them away" (Borglum 1930:n.p.). For many of the memorial's interpreters this permanence has implied that the values enshrined there would provoke a consensus of interpretation, extending to far future generations. Gilbert Fite, for instance, concludes his widely- regarded history:

Regardless of the ultimate destiny of Western civilization, [Bor- glum's] sculpture would show succeeding generations of men that American society had reached an apex, a highpoint of material greatness. No one could doubt that a civilization which carved a mountain into the heroic likenesses of four men was one of power, audacity and importance. (238)

This brief look at the strategies used to appropriate the mountain as a symbol of American nationalism suggests that such strategies remain fragile, dependent upon social context, subject to political climate. Although the faces themselves will remain, there may be no such permanence of interpretation regarding the mountain's sacred status. The memorial's patriotic interpreters express hope that their sacred vision of America carved in stone will even endure beyond the decline of American institutions. But as Eliade suggests in his parenthetical equation of unoccupied land with "unoccupied by our own people" (31), the next occupiers may well be oblivious to what twentieth-century Americans saw as the sacred qualities of that vision.'3

REFERENCES

Argus Leader Sioux Falls, S.D. 6/7. 1971 1987 10/23.

Bodnar, John Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemora- 1991 tion, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century.

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

13Several people offered comments contributing to this essay. I thank Catherine Albanese, Tom Tweed, Bron Taylor, and Ed Linenthal. Errors, as always, remain my own.




Borglum, Gutzon "First Survey and the Development of the Memo- 1930 rial." In Mount Rushmore National Memorial: A

Monument Commemorating the Conception, Preser- vation and Growth of the Great American Republic. Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission. Peter Norbeck Papers, University of South Dakota Archives.

1931 "Colossal Sculpture: Its Value to Civilization." In Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Jefferson Number. Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society. Norbeck Papers.

Bush, George "Remarks on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Mount 1991 Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills of

South Dakota, 7/3/91." Weekly Compilation of Pres- idential Documents: Administration of George Bush. Vol. 27. Washington, DC: GPO.

Carrasco, David "Myth, Cosmic Terror, and the Templo Mayor." In 1987 The Great Temple of Tenotchtitlan, 124-162. Ed. by

Johanna Brody, David Carrasco, and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma. Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press.

Chidester, David Salvation by Suicide: An Interpretation of Jim Jones, 1988 the People Temple, and Jonestown. Bloomington:

University of Indiana Press.

Cornell, Stephen The Return of the Native: American Indian Political 1988 Resurgence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Eliade, Mircea The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. 1959 New York: Harper and Row.

Fite, Gilbert C. Mount Rushmore. Norman: University of 1952 Oklahoma Press.

Hertzberg, Hazel The Search for an American Indian Identity. Syra- W. cuse: Syracuse University Press.

1971

Kammen, Michael The Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation 1991 of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Alfred

A. Knopf.




Lame Deer, John Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions: The Life of a Sioux Fire, and Richard Medicine Man. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Erodes 1972

Linenthal, Edward Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields. 1991 Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Lipsitz, George "Precious and Communicable: History in an Age 1990 of Popular Culture." In Time Passages: Collective

Memory and American Popular Culture, 21-39. Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lyotard, Jean- The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Francois Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

1984

Mount Rushmore Mount Rushmore National Memorial: The Shrine of National Memorial Democracy. Norbeck Papers.

Society n.d.

Rapid City Journal Rapid City, S.D. 1935

Robinson, Doane "The History of the Memorial." In Mount Rushmore 1931 National Memorial: Jefferson Number. Mount

Rushmore National Memorial Society. Norbeck Papers.

1941 "The Greatest Democrats. In Mount Rushmore National Memorial: Shrine of Democracy. Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission. Norbeck Papers.

Scarce, Rik Eco-warriors: Understanding the Radical Environ- 1990 mental Movement. Chicago: Noble.

Schwartz, Barry George Washington: The Making of an American 1987 Symbol. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

Shaff, Howard, Six Wars at a Time: The Life and Times of Gutzon and Audrey Karl Borglum, Sculptor of Mount Rushmore. Sioux Falls:

1985 Center for Western Studies.




Smith, Jonathan Z. Map Is not Territory. The Hague: Leyden and Brill. 1978 1987 To Take a Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Rex Allen The Carving of Mount Rushmore. New York: Abbe- 1985 ville.

South Dakota "Mount Rushmore's Golden Anniversary." Public Television

1991

Zelinsky, Wilbur Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations 1988 of American Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University

of North Carolina Press.

