From Little Bighorn, we went to Mount Rushmore. There’s a bunch of guys there.
Then there’s this guy: John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (1867-1941), the sculptor of Mount Rushmore. Borglum was the son of Danish Mormon immigrants to the U.S. In addition to being a highly talented sculptor—he sculpted the statue of General Philip Sheridan that sits in Sheridan Circle in Washington, DC—he was also highly Ku Klux Klan-adjacent: if not an actual member of the Klan, which he claimed he was not, he nonetheless attended Klan rallies and sat on their committees. In fact, Borglum developed the techniques he used on Mount Rushmore by designing the Confederate monument Stone Mountain, although he left the project after disagreements with the Klan leaders who were backing the project before the work began. (The disagreements were over his perfectionism and authoritarianism on the site—and not, for example, because he was found to be insufficiently racist.1) The Klan Dragon D.C. Stephenson considered him “my good friend,” and their correspondence apparently detailed Borglum’s “deep racist conviction in Nordic moral superiority,” as one author describes it.
From Mount Rushmore, we went to the Crazy Horse Memorial. The sculptor, Korczak Ziolkowski, is his own story. An orphan and self-taught artist, Ziolkowski actually was an assistant to Borglum on the Mount Rushmore project. Wikipedia notes, “According to Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon’s son, [Ziolkowski] was unhappy, having expected to be made the primary assistant. Instead, Lincoln was the primary assistant, and when Ziolkowski argued about his orders, Borglum fired him by telegram. A fistfight between Lincoln and Ziolkowski had to be broken up.”
Based on Ziolkowski’s other accomplishments and his knowledge of the area, several Lakota chiefs asked him to create a memorial to Crazy Horse. (Apparently, they first wrote to Borglum, but Borglum—unsurprisingly—never answered.) The plan was to create a monument that would dwarf Mount Rushmore. Ziolkowski accepted the project, and in 1948, after serving in WWII, he began the work of carving the mountain. Ziolkowski refused to take government funding, and he only accepted donations from visitors to the site. According to the documentary shown at the visitor’s center, Ziolkowski largely worked alone for years until his children (10 in all) were old enough to join him. While I find this hard to believe, there clearly wasn’t much money for tools or staff: the slow going of the project is evidence of that. Current estimates place the completion date sometime in 2120.
While the Crazy Horse Memorial is part of a larger development that includes an educational and cultural center, including the Indian University of North America, the project has its detractors. According to some Sioux voices, the memorial
is a violation of the same spirituality that Crazy Horse fought so valiantly to defend. Some even point out that Sioux land is held in common by the people and any approval to build the memorial should have been decided upon by the “collective” voice of the people as a whole – not by the few that hope to make money from a tourist attraction. Lame Deer, a noted Lakota Sioux medicine man has postulated “that the whole idea of making a beautiful wild mountain into a statue of him is a pollution of the landscape – it is against the spirit of Crazy Horse.”
Moreover, Crazy Horse was famously adverse to being photographed. “Those of the Sioux Nation opposed to the Crazy Horse Memorial argue that a man so contrary to having his image captured on film would never agree to have it sprawled across the face of a mountain, and his undisclosed burial site would seem to indicate the same.”
- PBS’ American Experience article on Borglum questions whether he was drawn to the Klan during his work on Stone Mountain because of his racism or just because he wanted to play nice with his financial backers. “Frankly, Borglum had little time for anyone, white or black, who was not a Congressman or millionaire, or happened to be in his way. There is no indication, for example, that he treated his long-suffering black chauffeur Charlie Johnson any differently than any white employee — he owed him back pay just like everyone else.” ↩︎