American Experience (1988–…): Season 14, Episode 6 - Mount Rushmore - full transcript
NARRATOR:
Deep in the Black Hills
of South Dakota
stands one of the biggest
and unlikeliest monuments
on the face of the earth--
a feat of modern engineering
that relied on the ingenuity
of the ancient Greeks--
a carving of
surprising delicacy,
fashioned with jackhammers
and dynamite,
a work of public art
that began without a whisper
of public support.
Its size, its remote location,
its compelling oddness
begs the question,
how'd it get there?
The answer begins with one man:
an excitable, erratic
and gifted sculptor
named Gutzon Borglum.
MAN:
When he was angry,
he was furious.
When he was generous,
he was overwhelming.
When he was being petty,
he was penurious.
He was a hyperactive man
who traveled in the middle
of a self-generated whirlwind.
WOMAN:
But he was so full of energy.
I mean, it was a vital force
within him, burning within him.
He could charm anybody
to do anything
if he really put his mind to it.
And he could also raise
a terrible fuss if you didn't.
The dimensions of
Washington's head
would permit the
Sphinx of Egypt
to lie between
the end of the nose
and the eyebrows.
NARRATOR:
Gutzon Borglum was
an egomaniacal genius
and a fetching blowhard,
a bullish patriot
and a wifty dreamer.
When he began Mount Rushmore,
he still believed that one man
could change the world.
(explosion)
A 16-year struggle
with the mountain--
through withering criticism,
lack of trained workers,
constant delay
and crushing debt--
would test that plain,
rock-hard,
American-made conviction.
NARRATOR:
On October 1, 1925,
a few hundred souls made their
way up a rough mountain pass
toward a seldom seen peak in
the Black Hills of South Dakota.
That day, at the base
of Mount Rushmore,
Gutzon Borglum announced
his intent
to create
the great American memorial.
In the mountain granite,
he would carve a monument
befitting the world's
newest power:
statues of four
American presidents,
more than 30 stories tall.
Gutzon Borglum's monument would
dwarf the Statue of Liberty,
the Sphinx of Egypt,
the Colossus of Rhodes.
WOMAN:
If you start way back
when we first came here,
my father was looked upon
as a weirdo and a crank.
They thought he was really
just very peculiar
and he had big ideas
that would go nowhere.
MAN:
This is a crazy idea
in a society that is so recently
removed from the frontier
that everything
had to be utilitarian.
It had to have a purpose.
And of what good were faces
carved on a mountain
even if you could do it, and
who knew if you could do it?
MAN:
First he told the Rapid City
businessmen supposedly
that he didn't need
financial support from them.
Then after that very first
dedication ceremony
in, uh, I believe
in October of 1925,
when he had dinner
with them afterward,
he said he really needed
that $50,000 now.
This is the sort of thing
that angered the people
of South Dakota,
who began to become
very skeptical about him.
NARRATOR:
In 1925, Gutzon Borglum
wasn't much concerned
with what the locals
thought of him.
His critics, he said,
were mere horseflies.
If South Dakotans were too thick
to seize the opportunity
in this magnificent work of art,
then they didn't deserve
Gutzon Borglum.
That's the way Borglum saw it,
and that's all
that mattered to him.
All his life,
John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum
was hard-headed
and self-absorbed.
As a child, he decided
he would make himself
someone extraordinary
and he spent his life
in that effort,
fueled by anger, energy and ego.
The son of Danish immigrants,
Gutzon was born in Idaho in 1867
and raised in the West.
His father had been part
of the Mormon migration west;
his mother he barely knew.
MAN:
Borglum was a child of polygamy.
His father had two wives
when he lived in Idaho--
Borglum's birth mother
and his mother's sister.
His father decided he didn't
want to be a Mormon anymore
and decided to go back to Omaha,
where polygamy was taboo.
It was decided
that Gutzon's mother would
be discarded from the family
and never spoken of again.
There were eight children
in the family
and there had been two wives
at one time,
and one, Gutzon's mother,
actually left the family
and they were raised
by the stepmother.
He ran away from home because
he was unhappy and at that...
he started, I think,
when he was only five years old,
and he finally built up
a confidence within himself
that he could do
what he desired to do.
MAN:
He had a deep sense of
his own abilities, I think.
He ran away from home a number
of times to become an artist
and, uh, wound up in California
at a very early age studying art
and, uh, he even said
he was going to be famous
before he was 30.
NARRATOR:
In his 20s, Gutzon moved
from northern California
to London to Paris, painting
landscapes and portraits,
trying on different styles,
supporting himself and his first
wife with marginal success.
As he passed 30, Borglum was
near broke, failing at marriage,
and worse, unknown.
CARTER:
He was very distraught
when he was in Europe
and he didn't feel
like he was making money,
he didn't feel like
he had a name for himself.
He wasn't happy,
and he wanted
to change all that.
He wanted to be...
be recognized.
NARRATOR:
While in Paris, Borglum found
his pole star, Auguste Rodin.
Rodin's work
was sculpture cast anew--
modern, evocative
and talked about.
In the glow that surrounded
the great artist,
Borglum saw a reflection
of his own future.
CARTER:
In 1901, when he came back
to the United States,
he just burst into New York City
sort of determined to become
a very successful sculptor.
And within
those first ten years,
he designed over a hundred
pieces for St. John the Divine
in New York City,
he'd sold the marble Lincoln
for the Rotunda,
he'd sold the Mares of Diomedes
to the Metropolitan.
He'd done the Mackay statue
in Reno, Nevada.
He'd done Sheridan
in Washington, D.C.
I mean, in the first ten years,
he was doing all these things.
HOUSER:
Every really great artist has
something in their personality
that they're able to impart
into their work
that is unique
and is only them.
With Borglum,
I see the personality.
When I touch those surfaces
a lot of time,
I often expect almost to feel
a little glaze of electricity
that's traversing
across the form.
There's a life to it,
there's a sense of movement.
And I think they were done
generally very quickly
and very fast.
My father said that
oftentimes he would come in
and do something just like this
and then it'd be done.
Sometimes he would even have
his suit on and his Stetson,
wearing his Stetson hat, you
know, and he would come in
and model for 15 minutes and he
would say, "Cast it,"you know,
and he'd walk out.
NARRATOR:
Gutzon Borglum's most gripping
creation was Gutzon Borglum.
From an obscure
frontier boyhood,
he'd made himself literate,
continental, magnetic,
a friend to the rich and famous,
lord of a 500-acre estate
in Connecticut.
He was also rough around
the edges, sharp in places
and apt to injure.
His politics could be crude:
anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant
and racist.
Borglum lived a series of poses,
each meant to call attention,
and he found that nothing drew
attention like a public scrap.
He skirmished with the rector
of St. John the Divine,
the mayor of New York,
President Woodrow Wilson.
"He was no mute, shrinking
artist,"said one friend.
"He knew how to answer back.
And the press loved him."
Gutzon's harshest attacks
were aimed at other artists.
He called one
a "pinhead sculptor"
and claimed that most of
the nation's public monuments
were worthless
and should be dynamited.
This was America's
Colossal Age, he said,
and American artists
should celebrate it.
HOUSER:
An artist has a great many
elements to work with
to create something aesthetic.
You have the warmth
and the coldness of color.
You have the smoothness
and the roughness of texture.
You have the contrast
from light and dark.
You also have,
when you get to scale,
you find that scale is an
aesthetic quality in itself.
In other words, when you see
something extremely large,
it has an impact on you
just because it's big.
NARRATOR:
Borglum understood that most
Americans could not be moved
by beauty alone.
"Sheer mass is emotional,"
he once wrote.
"There is something in sheer
volume that awes and terrifies,
lifts us out of ourselves."
In 1915, the sculptor
staked his reputation
on the conviction
that America demanded scale.
That year, at a mountain
in Georgia,
he made bold to promise
the eighth wonder of the world:
a 400-foot-high,
1,500-foot-wide monument
to the Confederacy.
HOUSER:
When Borglum was called down
to Stone Mountain originally,
he was invited
to do a small bust of Lee
and put it on top
of the mountain.
And he told the Daughters
of the Confederacy, he said,
"Putting a bust of Lee
on top of that mountain
would be like pasting
a postage stamp on a barn door."
You know, "It's incongruous.
"If you're going to talk
about a mountain that size,
"you have to talk
about a piece of sculpture
that's commensurate
in one way or another."
That sort of opened the door,
I think, to him
for mountain carving.
VHAY:
Stone Mountain was
the dream of Atlanta
and the southerners
that were down there,
to have a
commemorative memorial to Lee.
But they didn't have any money.
So he mortgaged
the place in Connecticut
for a tremendous sum of money
to get it started.
NARRATOR:
By then, Borglum was
a new father,
and he liked to keep
his family close.
So with his second wife, Mary,
and their two small children,
Lincoln and Mary Ellis,
Borglum set up
a second household in Georgia.
He gave up his smaller,
more personal work--
pipe dreams, he'd called them--
and went to work at a scale
no American artist
had ever attempted.
The Confederate monument
turned out
to be an exhilarating fight...
and nearly disastrous.
After a decade of planning,
fund-raising and work,
Borglum had completed less than
a tenth of the carving.
The Stone Mountain Association
fired Borglum,
accusing him
of "wasteful expenditures"
and an "ungovernable temper."
In a fit of anger, Borglum
destroyed his working models.
The association, claiming
ownership of those models,
swore out a warrant
for his arrest.
So at the beginning of 1925,
Gutzon Borglum
was a 57-year-old fugitive,
rheumatic, exhausted,
publicly humiliated
and deeper in debt by the day.
VHAY:
After Stone Mountain fell apart,
it was very hardscrabble
a lot of the time,
but Mother was the one
that kept payments up
and did the things
that had to be done
and cut corners
when it was possible.
CARTER:
Mary's letters would be,
"How are we going to divide up
this hundred dollars?
"Who needs to be paid this week?
"Who's not going to be paid?
And when is the next amount
of money coming in?"
So they were down
to the very nitty-gritty.
NARRATOR:
Gutzon raced from Washington
to North Carolina to Texas
trying to drum up
new commissions,
but the best offer fell
from the sky.
South Dakota's state historian,
Doane Robinson,
had seen newspaper accounts
of people driving to Georgia
just to see Gutzon's
Stone Mountain carving.
Robinson's far-off,
nearly forgotten state
was in dire need
of roadside attraction,
and he thought
this mountain-carving business
might be just the ticket.
So Robinson wrote Borglum
and asked him to consider a new
project in the Black Hills,
maybe statues
of Lewis and Clark,
Buffalo Bill, Chief Red Cloud--
something to draw the tourists.
Borglum took Robinson's
suggestion and ran.
"Western figures are
too parochial,"he announced.
He would carve national heroes.
The first three
were no-brainers:
George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln.
The fourth would be Borglum's
great personal friend
and political hero,
Teddy Roosevelt.
And Borglum said
he would carve his presidents
on Mount Rushmore, a site
he chose for its broad face
and a southeastern exposure
that guaranteed
the most dramatic light.
To his 12-year-old son, Lincoln,
he confided:
"Nothing but the Almighty
can stop me
from completing this task."
TALIAFERRO:
When he got the call
to come to Mount Rushmore,
this was a great chance
to redeem himself,
to do all the things
he had ever wanted to do
in a much larger scale
than he'd even dare think about
until that point.
He could taste it
from the second he got off
the train in Rapid City.
VHAY:
He had expected Stone Mountain
to be the crowning achievement
in his career,
and here he was presented
with a bigger crown.
It was going to be
bigger, larger.
And all he needed to do
was to get a million dollars,
or whatever, to do it.
NARRATOR:
Doane Robinson was thrilled
and happy to let Borglum have
his way with the planning.
"After all,"he said,
"God only makes a Michelangelo
"or a Gutzon Borglum
once every thousand years."
The remainder of the state
was less enthusiastic.
That Mount Rushmore stood
on ground sacred
to the Lakota Sioux
wasn't even the big problem.
In the 1920s, South Dakotans
simply didn't have
a lot of spare cash
for public monuments.
A year after Borglum's plea
for $50,000 seed money,
locals had raised only $5,000.
And the proposed project
hadn't exactly brought honor
to the state.
In fact, Mount Rushmore
was a bit of a knee-slapper
around the country.
"Borglum is about to destroy
another mountain,"
wrote one newspaper back east.
"Thank God it's in South Dakota,
where no one will ever see it."
The sculptor had
only one solid asset:
South Dakota senator
Peter Norbeck.
Peter Norbeck was the son
of Norwegian immigrants,
born in a sod dugout
and raised poor
on the South Dakota plains.
He was stout, plainspoken,
and quietly ambitious.
As a young man, he'd made
a fortune drilling wells
and then moved to politics.
WEGNER:
Grandpa Norbeck
has been described
as as rough
as the Norwegian northern pines,
but also with the soul
of an artist.
His formal education
was very limited,
but somewhere in there,
he found the interest to pursue
these more intellectual
and artistic endeavors.
VHAY:
He supported Dad in everything.
He got very cross with him
at times,
when Dad would demand more money
and had to have more money.
But also, I think that
Senator Norbeck was a bridge
between Dad
and the local people.
WEGNER:
He saw this as an opportunity to
bring people to the Black Hills.
Any tourists, any people
we could bring into South Dakota
from the outside
brought their wallet,
their dollars with them.
And any outside dollars
in this state
that could be brought in
were desperately needed.
NARRATOR:
What Norbeck did first
was convince
President Calvin Coolidge
to spend the summer
in the Black Hills,
maybe take in
the mountain scenery,
do a little fishing.
Even before Coolidge
got to town,
Rapid City was fevered
with Babbitt-like boosterism.
And the Rapid City Commercial
Club renewed its drive
to raise cash
for Senator Norbeck's carving.
By the time
the president arrived,
the Rushmore Association
had $42,000 in the bank,
and Borglum was
in a lather, too,
planning a second, and more
extravagant, dedication,
one the president could attend,
with the national press in tow.
And on that August day,
Silent Cal made a speech
that surprised even Borglum.
He started out by saying,
"We have come here
to dedicate a cornerstone
laid by the hand
of the Almighty."
Further in the speech, he said,
"The people of South Dakota
had been bearing this burden
so far"-- which they had not--
and he thought the government
ought to help.
And this was the beginning
of getting government support.
NARRATOR:
With Coolidge's support,
Norbeck pushed a bill
through Congress
authorizing federal matching
funds for Mount Rushmore:
one government dollar
for every private dollar raised.
The problem was, in 1929,
there had been
only $50,000 raised.
Still, with less than ten
percent of his budget in hand,
Gutzon Borglum rushed ahead,
anxious to answer
the big question:
Could this colossal carving
be done?
It was 500 feet to the top
of Mount Rushmore.
Nobody could be sure how much
carvable granite existed
beneath the richly creviced
surface.
Long, frozen winters would make
work nearly impossible
four months a year.
Even more troubling to Borglum
was the pool of men available
to do the work.
Getting able bodies
wasn't the hard part.
Jobs were scarce
in the Black Hills in 1929,
and Mount Rushmore offered
some of the highest-paying work
around.
But as dozens of men
started to sign on,
Borglum realized he was going
to have to depend on locals--
the "untutored miners,"
he called them.
SMITH:
A lot of these guys were tough,
rough, brawling kind of guys.
They used to say, uh,
that the Keystone Boys' playpens
were fenced with barbed wire.
And that they only turned
the other cheek
when they were delivering
a left hook.
MAN:
It didn't take
too much training, say,
to drill holes and so forth
and run a jackhammer.
It just took a lot of guts,
you might say.
Some people went up there and
worked one day, I've been told,
and that was all they wanted.
They couldn't stand the heighth
and the dust and so forth.
MAN:
It was pretty tough for your
first time going over there
and hanging in a bosun chair
and trying to punch holes
in the granite.
It took a lot of practice.
And you didn't get much done
your first day,
I'll tell you that.
Most of the jackhammers weighed
40 or 50 pounds.
And then you had to carry
your steel with you, also.
So you had quite a load
going down there.
MAN:
The wind was always a-blowing,
and it'd be pretty gusty.
The wind always blew up there,
seemed like.
They was hanging
with a little 3/8-inch cable.
And that cable looked
pretty small to me,
to hold them guys up there.
And then they'd just
shake pieces out of them
when they'd turn them
jackhammers on.
NARRATOR:
Once the men had blasted
off the surface rock,
leaving a giant egg-shaped mass
where Washington's face
could be sculpted,
Borglum spent days watching
the light and shadow play
on the expanse,
then decided to rotate the face
20 degrees
from his original plan.
After that, the sculptor
and assistants like Ivan Houser
set to re-creating
the studio models
on the side of the mountain.
The commonly used methods
didn't apply.
The mountain was simply too big.
So Borglum turned the page back
to a technique
devised by the ancient Greeks.
HOUSER:
In doing a big piece
of sculpture,
one of the problems, of course,
is the enlarging.
You're trying to locate points
in space at one scale,
and then you try to locate
those same points in space
at another scale.
So what they did was, you have
a beam coming straight out
from a point
that turns on a swivel,
and you can note the degrees
at which it is turned.
And so, as you turn the one on
the little model and you can...
Say it's off 30 degrees,
off to the right,
and it's out
so many measurements,
and down so far
and then in so far,
and you can locate
a specific point
on Washington's cheek,
for instance.
So then you can do the same
thing up on the mountain.
CLIFFORD:
This is what they called
honeycombing.
This was the next to the last
step of finishing the faces.
And they would drill
these holes in.
The pointers or Mr. Borglum
would tell them
how deep to drill the holes.
You can see they were taking off
more rock down here
than they were up here.
And it was probably
right close to the face,
maybe it was on, like,
on a cheek
or something like that.
And they would take
a sharp, pointed piece of steel
and they would hit
in each one of these holes.
Eventually,
this rock would pop off.
And then they would use
a bumping hammer--
they called it bumping--
and that would
smooth the rock up
just like it is today
that you see it on the mountain.
NARRATOR:
Independence Day, 1930,
just more than a year
from the day real work began,
Gutzon Borglum revealed
to the world
the first great granite visage.
July 5, Mount Rushmore
was a dateline
in papers across the country.
Through that summer, newsreels
of the dedication played
at theaters nationwide.
Suddenly, Rushmore
was a fixed point
in the American consciousness.
And as work
on Washington continued,
tourists began making the trek
to see the strange sight
in the Black Hills.
In the first year alone, 27,000
people visited Mount Rushmore,
now billed as
"the shrine of democracy."
The early success confirmed
Borglum's every plan.
Now his men could race
to the finish.
The entire carving--
four figures, each complete
to the waist--
would be done inside
of four years, he figured.
He'd figured wrong.
Within weeks
of the Washington dedication,
bad news began to pile up.
Borglum had spent so much
on the dedication ceremony
that money ran out
at the end of July,
and work on the mountain
slowed to a crawl.
Rushmore's great champion,
Senator Peter Norbeck,
was diagnosed with cancer.
The next year,
things only got worse.
HOUSER:
They were aware, of course,
that there were going to be
faults and cracks in the rock.
Some of them
were hard to detect.
In fact, they started Jefferson
off to Washington's right,
and they found out there
wasn't enough stone there.
The stone was too crumbly and
it just wasn't of good quality.
CARTER:
They had to blast that off
after 18 months of work,
which must have been
heartbreaking to do that.
As tight as money was,
and then to blast off
what they'd spent
all that time doing.
NARRATOR:
By the end of 1931,
the Rushmore Association
was $16,000 in the red,
with little hope
of raising more private money.
WEGNER:
They had this
almost double whammy.
The entire country,
in fact much of the world,
was wrapped up in this
horrendous financial depression.
Then on top of that
was the dust bowl days.
There was no rain; the farmers
could raise no crops.
What little they could raise, it
was almost impossible to market.
They were leaving the state
in droves.
Those who stayed wondered
why they were still here.
And in, uh, 1932,
the work at Rushmore
had ground to a total halt.
And again there was the specter
of this whole thing
just never being completed.
INTERVIEWER:
When do you think
this work
will be completed,
Mr. Borglum?
I'm trying to finish it
so that the figures will be done
by 1935 sufficiently...
VHAY:
My father never wanted to admit
any type of failure,
and certainly he didn't want
to admit it.
He, I'm sure, did with... with
Mother, but he didn't with us.
I mean, it was always
going to be...
everything was going to be
all right.
He didn't show any despair,
even to Mary very much.
One letter that I found where
he was in Washington for months
trying to get money
for Rushmore.
It was a bad time,
and he wrote to her and said,
"I'm just sick
about what's happening,
but this is the time
to be courageous."
And you know, I think his spirit
just kept him going
and Mary kept him going.
I don't think he would have been
able to carry on
if it hadn't been for my mother.
She was always there,
not driving him
but building up his ego,
and making him aware
that he was a great sculptor.
NARRATOR:
Even in the darkest days
of Rushmore,
Gutzon never lacked for ego.
People who held sway,
he liked to keep them informed.
Congressmen, senators,
oil tycoons,
William Randolph Hearst,
the Duke of Windsor--
he wired them all,
and often collect.
VHAY:
He corresponded with anybody
you could think of,
and I mean from
the heads of state on down
to the... practically
the garbage man.
Probably not the garbage man
because he probably
hadn't paid them.
(laughs)
HAYES:
He was coming across the state
and he stopped
at a little station
and, uh, he wanted
to fill up the car.
And, uh, the young station
attendant, you know, says,
"Well, you know,
I have to have money first."
He says, "Well, don't you know
who I am?"
And the attendant said,
"I know exactly who you are.
That's why I have to have
the money first."
SMITH:
He felt that he should have
free gasoline if he wanted it,
he saw movies without paying,
and his personality
was so powerful
they let him go ahead and do it.
As he said many times,
"I'm giving these people
in the Black Hills an asset
"that'll bring in
billions of dollars
and they're persecuting me over
a piddling parcel of groceries."
NARRATOR:
Where money was concerned,
Gutzon was fearless.
He spent himself and his
projects into the hole today,
convinced he could win
more tomorrow.
WEGNER:
Borglum had this tendency
to show up in Washington
unannounced
and appear before committees
and attempt to schedule
appointments with the president.
He would give one set
of financial projections
to one committee or to one
senator or to one congressman,
and within a matter
of hours or days,
come up with another set
of figures,
or he could say he could finish
this project for $250,000,
when everybody sitting
in the room knew
that there was no way
in which that entire project
could be completed for $250,000.
HOUSER:
A number of times my father
and Borglum were in the Senate
seeking funding
for Mount Rushmore.
So one time they were up
in the balcony at the Senate,
and, uh, the bill
was on the floor
and one of the senators stood up
and he was raging against
Borglum, and he was calling,
"Why are we... why are we trying
to appropriate funds
for this crazy genius?"
And then that triggered Borglum.
Borglum jumped to his feet,
but before he could say anything
my dad grabbed him by the
coattails and pulled him down,
and he said, "He called
you a genius, didn't he?"
(laughs)
NARRATOR:
It was Senator Norbeck
who saved Mount Rushmore
with an assist
from the deepening depression.
At the end of 1932, as the
national economy slid downhill,
President Herbert Hoover started
passing out relief money,
and Norbeck snared 100,000
federal dollars
for jobs on the mountain.
Then he convinced
the National Park Service
to take over the project,
guaranteeing more funding.
(explosion)
In the spring of 1933,
after nearly a year and a half
of silence,
work on the mountain
began again.
And the central crew was back:
Hoot Leach, Howdy Peterson
and his brother Merle,
Jimmy Champion, Whiskey Art
Johnson, Palooka Payne.
They all knew they'd be shut
down again for some reason,
but they came back
just the same.
SMITH:
One of the great miracles
of Rushmore
is the miracle of the men,
those dedicated guys,
the Red Andersons,
the Hoot Leaches,
the Peterson boys and so on
who came back and came back
and came back and came back.
CLIFFORD:
Had they not come back,
there would be no Mount Rushmore
as we know it today
because Mr. Borglum,
it was impossible for him
to train a new crew every year.
But these men were dedicated
to the mountain.
When the mountain would
shut down for lack of money
or in the wintertime, they'd
all have to find another job.
But when the spring
would come around
and they'd get the call
to come back,
they'd quit what they were doing
and come back to work
at the mountain.
SMITH:
Red Anderson said,
"At first it was just a job
and just a crazy kind
of a job at that."
But as time went by,
all of this started to change
and they developed a sense,
came together, fused in a sense
that they were creating
a great thing.
NARRATOR:
The men stuck it out
in spite of their boss--
the Chief, they called him,
but only behind his back.
Borglum rarely talked to his
men, except to give orders.
"He's a heck of a stone carver,"
said one,
"but he ain't no sweet talker."
BORGLUM:
I'm not satisfied
with how it turns under there
and comes against the collar.
You go on down now, Payne.
I want
those points very
carefully examined.
I'll be down there with you
in a few minutes.
VHAY:
Dad might get furious at them
if they were stupid,
because he could not stand
stupidity.
Anybody could make
a mistake once,
but not two
or three times,
and if they did
two or three times
he would usually
have them fired.
And that was another
job that Lincoln had,
because if it
was a good man,
Lincoln would have
to talk him into
coming back again.
And then Dad would
be sort of surprised
to see him,
and then he'd say,
"What have you
been doing, Lincoln?"
NARRATOR:
Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon's only
son, was just 21 years old
when the men went to work
on the new Jefferson head.
But despite Lincoln's youth,
Gutzon left his son in charge
of the mountain
during his long
and frequent absences.
CLIFFORD:
He grew up with the mountain.
Working so close
with his father,
it just had to be catchy.
I mean, he had a vision also
of what the mountain
was going to be like.
You would never see him
sitting down.
If you'd look up, why, Lincoln
would be up on top looking down
or looking at the faces
where the men were carving.
He was all over the mountain.
You never saw him get mad
or chew anyone out.
You could laugh with Lincoln
and... and have a great time.
When we went on our baseball
trips, Lincoln would always go,
and if we did something good,
why, he'd pat us on the back
and tell us
what a good job we'd done.
And he was just a great guy.
NARRATOR:
Lincoln had a calm, easy manner
his father relied on
more than anything
to mend relationships
Gutzon broke.
And throughout the mid-'30s,
Gutzon was more combative
than ever.
The Jefferson head
continued to vex.
The men blasted down 60 feet
to find carvable rock,
but even then, huge fissures
cut through the face.
And there was a mass of feldspar
that had to be dug out,
leaving a gaping hole
on the president's lip.
Using Borglum's concoction
of white lead, linseed oil
and granite dust,
the men filled in the cracks
and divots as best they could.
But it all took time and money.
And with
the National Park Service
now overseeing the project,
it was up to a Rapid City
farm implements dealer
named John Boland
to make sure money was spent
according to federal guidelines
and not Gutzon's.
When Borglum needed money,
he had to go to Boland and beg,
and the sculptor
grew to resent it.
"I've got to go to Rapid City,"
he told Red Anderson one day,
"and punch a certain son of
a bitch right in the nose."
Other days,
Borglum threatened to walk away
from Mount Rushmore entirely,
leaving the unfinished monument
like a scar on the Black Hills.
With so much at stake,
Senator Peter Norbeck's
most critical job
was handling the explosive
and unpredictable artist.
WEGNER:
Grandpa Norbeck
was the one person
whom Borglum respected enough
to accept his judgment
and conclusion about things.
And in... in a number of his
heated arguments and conflicts
with Boland in particular,
but by no means confined
to John Boland,
Grandpa Norbeck was able
to step in and resolve
or at least partially resolve
some of the conflicts.
And then something
would erupt all over again.
NARRATOR:
By the end of 1934,
Peter Norbeck had had his fill.
His four-year fight with cancer
had drained his energy
and his good humor.
"I have lately come to feel
that you will do something
that will prevent
the completion of Rushmore,"
he wrote to Borglum.
"I have made over seven years
of effort in this work.
"It's been a heavy drain
on my strength and purse.
It keeps getting worse."
But even as cancer
ate away at him
and took his ability to speak,
Peter Norbeck would not let
the Rushmore project fall apart.
In 1935, he strode into
the Senate one last time
and won a new
$200,000 appropriation.
But he knew it would be
his last big fight.
As the senator neared death,
he was philosophical.
"A week after I am gone,
they will start to forget me.
"A decade, and most people
of South Dakota
will be unable
to even recall my name."
It was Borglum's name,
he thought, that would endure.
But in the summer of 1936,
Peter Norbeck
was front and center
to see President
Franklin Roosevelt dedicate
the hard-won
Jefferson sculpture.
ROOSEVELT:
There were two people
who told me about this
in the early days.
One of them, Mr. Borglum.
And the other, Senator Norbeck.
(applause)
WEGNER:
It was one of the supreme days
of my grandfather's life.
I think for him, uh...
I... at least I have wondered
if it didn't become
a little like that of Borglum,
that this was one of
the crowning accomplishments
of his life,
to have made this possible.
As my grandfather had said
that Mount Rushmore is no longer
a joke, it's no longer a dream.
It's real, it's there.
CLIFFORD:
Mr. Borglum always complained
that people bothered him
when he was doing his work
but he would always stop
and if someone wanted to ask a
question or something like that,
he'd like to stop
and talk to the people, too,
so he could explain
what he was accomplishing.
He used to tell people,
"The faces are in the mountain.
All I have to do
is bring them out."
CARTER:
He never gave up
seeing it as great art.
And a lot of people
would argue with that,
that it was more of
an engineering project
than anything else,
but he really saw it as art,
that he was going to bring
the life of those four people
to the forefront,
just as you would if you were
doing a small statue of them.
TALIAFERRO:
As you get closer
to Mount Rushmore,
you can almost
see the thumbprint
of a sculptor's hand in clay.
Borglum would study it
at different times of day,
in different kinds of light,
and make adjustments
the way an artist
would make adjustments
with a little knife or with
a little chisel in the studio--
little fiddling things
with the mountain
that I'm sure cannot be seen
from the observation deck today,
but mattered only to Borglum.
NARRATOR:
Even as he passed age 70,
Gutzon Borglum was still
trying to find ways
to vivify his carving.
In 1938 and '39,
Abraham Lincoln
and Teddy Roosevelt
were rounding into
recognizable form,
but the sculptor was still
worrying every site and shading.
"Have to climb down
over the face of Washington
and back up the face
of Jefferson,"he wrote.
"I ought to be getting tired
of it all, but I'm not.
"I now see that I'll be able
to make a real work of art
"of this big group.
"Back in my heart, that has been
a doubt for many years.
"I really have no help in that.
In that, I'm absolutely alone."
It was an image he cultivated,
this lonely fighter's posture,
but there were people
whose contributions
even Gutzon could not deny.
Borglum may have
devised the plan
to give a twinkle
to the presidential eyes,
but it was the workmen
who sculpted
the two-foot long
shafts of granite
in the middle of each pupil,
so that sunlight bouncing off
the exposed point
gave life to the eyes.
CARTER:
Gutzon seemed to have
complained a lot
about the unskilled workers
that he was faced with,
but actually he was
very proud of the men
and very proud of the fact
that he'd been able to train
these people, who were miners
and who were just local,
who'd never worked
on a mountain before,
didn't know
anything about art,
and that he'd been able
to take them and train them
into doing
what he wanted done.
SMITH:
There were things about him
that bothered them very much,
but down underneath,
they developed a loyalty.
It's amazing-- they developed a
basic loyalty to Gutzon Borglum.
With all his flamboyance,
unpredictability, irascibility,
there was some kind of
a flame in the man--
a charisma, a something--
that inspired a deeper loyalty.
NARRATOR:
By 1940, Gutzon Borglum
had made himself
someone extraordinary.
He was the man
who carved mountains
and he stood
America's highest peak.
He'd achieved celebrity,
even pitching ads for
Studebaker and Bromo Seltzer.
(explosion)
Still, Gutzon saw so much
to be done on his mountain.
He meant to extend the
sculptures down to the waist,
was at work
on a Hall of Records--
a cavernous time capsule
for storing
the important documents
of the American democracy.
But more than anything,
he was still trying
to transform his mountain
into a work of art,
fighting the one thing
he couldn't beat:
time itself.
At the beginning of 1941,
the coming world war
overwhelmed Mount Rushmore.
After a dozen years,
Congress finally
cut off funding for good.
A week later,
Gutzon Borglum was dead,
suddenly and unexpectedly
at age 73,
from complications
following surgery.
WEGNER:
Lincoln Borglum, of course,
had taken over
after his father died.
By then, a major part of
the work had been completed,
but there were still
a fair amount
of trimming and cleaning up
to do
around the faces and...
and the collars and shoulders
of some of the figures.
And the great hall of records,
which was... had been
another great ambition
and dream of Borglum's,
pretty much perished
in the process.
The work at Rushmore just sort
of gradually drew to a close.
NARRATOR:
It took 14 years
to carve Mount Rushmore.
Men removed half a million tons
of granite,
driving 120 feet deep in places.
George Washington's face
is 60 feet long, his nose 20,
and each eye
is 11 feet wide.
Roosevelt's mustache
is 20 feet across;
Lincoln's mole, 16 inches.
The carving cost $989,992.32,
almost all of it
from the United States treasury.
For the money, America got
the biggest and oddest monument
on the face of the earth,
and one of the most compelling.
Since 1930, more than 50 million
people have made pilgrimage
to the remote cliffside shrine.
CARTER:
I think in some ways,
Mount Rushmore
was the worst legacy
that... that Gutzon Borglum
could leave,
because he always will be known
as the sculptor
who did Mount Rushmore.
And yet at the time
that he started the mountain,
when he was 60 years old,
he was well known
for being a sculptor
of beautiful monuments
and beautiful pieces.
And he was probably on his way
to having a reputation
as a great American sculptor.
I think that was really
overshadowed by Rushmore.
CLIFFORD:
I look up on the mountain
and I think of...
of Mr. Borglum--
what a great man he was,
what a wonderful sculptor
he was.
I think of Lincoln, who was
a friend to all of the men.
And then I think of all the men
that I worked with and knew,
and how dedicated these men were
to the mountain,
and they're all gone now.
And...
And I have to stop now.
(chuckles)
(crickets chirping)
NARRATOR:
Like its sculptor,
Mount Rushmore is loud,
demanding of attention,
and maddening.
To naturalists,
the carving is an eyesore;
to Native Americans,
a desecration.
It stands as a monument
to energy and possibility,
to national pride,
and an often unbecoming
national self-satisfaction.
And like the biggest and boldest
creations in America,
Mount Rushmore was not built
on good intentions alone.
It also stands as a monument
to the colossal,
sometimes wounding,
and surprisingly contagious
ambition of a single man.
BORGLUM:
I am allowing
an extra three inches
on all the features
of the various presidents
in order to provide stone
for the wear and tear
of the elements,
which cuts the granite
down an inch
in a hundred thousand years.
Three inches would require
300,000 years
to bring the work
down to the point
that I would like to finish it.
In other words,
the work will not be done
for another 300,000 years
as it should be.
Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.
Deep in the Black Hills
of South Dakota
stands one of the biggest
and unlikeliest monuments
on the face of the earth--
a feat of modern engineering
that relied on the ingenuity
of the ancient Greeks--
a carving of
surprising delicacy,
fashioned with jackhammers
and dynamite,
a work of public art
that began without a whisper
of public support.
Its size, its remote location,
its compelling oddness
begs the question,
how'd it get there?
The answer begins with one man:
an excitable, erratic
and gifted sculptor
named Gutzon Borglum.
MAN:
When he was angry,
he was furious.
When he was generous,
he was overwhelming.
When he was being petty,
he was penurious.
He was a hyperactive man
who traveled in the middle
of a self-generated whirlwind.
WOMAN:
But he was so full of energy.
I mean, it was a vital force
within him, burning within him.
He could charm anybody
to do anything
if he really put his mind to it.
And he could also raise
a terrible fuss if you didn't.
The dimensions of
Washington's head
would permit the
Sphinx of Egypt
to lie between
the end of the nose
and the eyebrows.
NARRATOR:
Gutzon Borglum was
an egomaniacal genius
and a fetching blowhard,
a bullish patriot
and a wifty dreamer.
When he began Mount Rushmore,
he still believed that one man
could change the world.
(explosion)
A 16-year struggle
with the mountain--
through withering criticism,
lack of trained workers,
constant delay
and crushing debt--
would test that plain,
rock-hard,
American-made conviction.
NARRATOR:
On October 1, 1925,
a few hundred souls made their
way up a rough mountain pass
toward a seldom seen peak in
the Black Hills of South Dakota.
That day, at the base
of Mount Rushmore,
Gutzon Borglum announced
his intent
to create
the great American memorial.
In the mountain granite,
he would carve a monument
befitting the world's
newest power:
statues of four
American presidents,
more than 30 stories tall.
Gutzon Borglum's monument would
dwarf the Statue of Liberty,
the Sphinx of Egypt,
the Colossus of Rhodes.
WOMAN:
If you start way back
when we first came here,
my father was looked upon
as a weirdo and a crank.
They thought he was really
just very peculiar
and he had big ideas
that would go nowhere.
MAN:
This is a crazy idea
in a society that is so recently
removed from the frontier
that everything
had to be utilitarian.
It had to have a purpose.
And of what good were faces
carved on a mountain
even if you could do it, and
who knew if you could do it?
MAN:
First he told the Rapid City
businessmen supposedly
that he didn't need
financial support from them.
Then after that very first
dedication ceremony
in, uh, I believe
in October of 1925,
when he had dinner
with them afterward,
he said he really needed
that $50,000 now.
This is the sort of thing
that angered the people
of South Dakota,
who began to become
very skeptical about him.
NARRATOR:
In 1925, Gutzon Borglum
wasn't much concerned
with what the locals
thought of him.
His critics, he said,
were mere horseflies.
If South Dakotans were too thick
to seize the opportunity
in this magnificent work of art,
then they didn't deserve
Gutzon Borglum.
That's the way Borglum saw it,
and that's all
that mattered to him.
All his life,
John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum
was hard-headed
and self-absorbed.
As a child, he decided
he would make himself
someone extraordinary
and he spent his life
in that effort,
fueled by anger, energy and ego.
The son of Danish immigrants,
Gutzon was born in Idaho in 1867
and raised in the West.
His father had been part
of the Mormon migration west;
his mother he barely knew.
MAN:
Borglum was a child of polygamy.
His father had two wives
when he lived in Idaho--
Borglum's birth mother
and his mother's sister.
His father decided he didn't
want to be a Mormon anymore
and decided to go back to Omaha,
where polygamy was taboo.
It was decided
that Gutzon's mother would
be discarded from the family
and never spoken of again.
There were eight children
in the family
and there had been two wives
at one time,
and one, Gutzon's mother,
actually left the family
and they were raised
by the stepmother.
He ran away from home because
he was unhappy and at that...
he started, I think,
when he was only five years old,
and he finally built up
a confidence within himself
that he could do
what he desired to do.
MAN:
He had a deep sense of
his own abilities, I think.
He ran away from home a number
of times to become an artist
and, uh, wound up in California
at a very early age studying art
and, uh, he even said
he was going to be famous
before he was 30.
NARRATOR:
In his 20s, Gutzon moved
from northern California
to London to Paris, painting
landscapes and portraits,
trying on different styles,
supporting himself and his first
wife with marginal success.
As he passed 30, Borglum was
near broke, failing at marriage,
and worse, unknown.
CARTER:
He was very distraught
when he was in Europe
and he didn't feel
like he was making money,
he didn't feel like
he had a name for himself.
He wasn't happy,
and he wanted
to change all that.
He wanted to be...
be recognized.
NARRATOR:
While in Paris, Borglum found
his pole star, Auguste Rodin.
Rodin's work
was sculpture cast anew--
modern, evocative
and talked about.
In the glow that surrounded
the great artist,
Borglum saw a reflection
of his own future.
CARTER:
In 1901, when he came back
to the United States,
he just burst into New York City
sort of determined to become
a very successful sculptor.
And within
those first ten years,
he designed over a hundred
pieces for St. John the Divine
in New York City,
he'd sold the marble Lincoln
for the Rotunda,
he'd sold the Mares of Diomedes
to the Metropolitan.
He'd done the Mackay statue
in Reno, Nevada.
He'd done Sheridan
in Washington, D.C.
I mean, in the first ten years,
he was doing all these things.
HOUSER:
Every really great artist has
something in their personality
that they're able to impart
into their work
that is unique
and is only them.
With Borglum,
I see the personality.
When I touch those surfaces
a lot of time,
I often expect almost to feel
a little glaze of electricity
that's traversing
across the form.
There's a life to it,
there's a sense of movement.
And I think they were done
generally very quickly
and very fast.
My father said that
oftentimes he would come in
and do something just like this
and then it'd be done.
Sometimes he would even have
his suit on and his Stetson,
wearing his Stetson hat, you
know, and he would come in
and model for 15 minutes and he
would say, "Cast it,"you know,
and he'd walk out.
NARRATOR:
Gutzon Borglum's most gripping
creation was Gutzon Borglum.
From an obscure
frontier boyhood,
he'd made himself literate,
continental, magnetic,
a friend to the rich and famous,
lord of a 500-acre estate
in Connecticut.
He was also rough around
the edges, sharp in places
and apt to injure.
His politics could be crude:
anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant
and racist.
Borglum lived a series of poses,
each meant to call attention,
and he found that nothing drew
attention like a public scrap.
He skirmished with the rector
of St. John the Divine,
the mayor of New York,
President Woodrow Wilson.
"He was no mute, shrinking
artist,"said one friend.
"He knew how to answer back.
And the press loved him."
Gutzon's harshest attacks
were aimed at other artists.
He called one
a "pinhead sculptor"
and claimed that most of
the nation's public monuments
were worthless
and should be dynamited.
This was America's
Colossal Age, he said,
and American artists
should celebrate it.
HOUSER:
An artist has a great many
elements to work with
to create something aesthetic.
You have the warmth
and the coldness of color.
You have the smoothness
and the roughness of texture.
You have the contrast
from light and dark.
You also have,
when you get to scale,
you find that scale is an
aesthetic quality in itself.
In other words, when you see
something extremely large,
it has an impact on you
just because it's big.
NARRATOR:
Borglum understood that most
Americans could not be moved
by beauty alone.
"Sheer mass is emotional,"
he once wrote.
"There is something in sheer
volume that awes and terrifies,
lifts us out of ourselves."
In 1915, the sculptor
staked his reputation
on the conviction
that America demanded scale.
That year, at a mountain
in Georgia,
he made bold to promise
the eighth wonder of the world:
a 400-foot-high,
1,500-foot-wide monument
to the Confederacy.
HOUSER:
When Borglum was called down
to Stone Mountain originally,
he was invited
to do a small bust of Lee
and put it on top
of the mountain.
And he told the Daughters
of the Confederacy, he said,
"Putting a bust of Lee
on top of that mountain
would be like pasting
a postage stamp on a barn door."
You know, "It's incongruous.
"If you're going to talk
about a mountain that size,
"you have to talk
about a piece of sculpture
that's commensurate
in one way or another."
That sort of opened the door,
I think, to him
for mountain carving.
VHAY:
Stone Mountain was
the dream of Atlanta
and the southerners
that were down there,
to have a
commemorative memorial to Lee.
But they didn't have any money.
So he mortgaged
the place in Connecticut
for a tremendous sum of money
to get it started.
NARRATOR:
By then, Borglum was
a new father,
and he liked to keep
his family close.
So with his second wife, Mary,
and their two small children,
Lincoln and Mary Ellis,
Borglum set up
a second household in Georgia.
He gave up his smaller,
more personal work--
pipe dreams, he'd called them--
and went to work at a scale
no American artist
had ever attempted.
The Confederate monument
turned out
to be an exhilarating fight...
and nearly disastrous.
After a decade of planning,
fund-raising and work,
Borglum had completed less than
a tenth of the carving.
The Stone Mountain Association
fired Borglum,
accusing him
of "wasteful expenditures"
and an "ungovernable temper."
In a fit of anger, Borglum
destroyed his working models.
The association, claiming
ownership of those models,
swore out a warrant
for his arrest.
So at the beginning of 1925,
Gutzon Borglum
was a 57-year-old fugitive,
rheumatic, exhausted,
publicly humiliated
and deeper in debt by the day.
VHAY:
After Stone Mountain fell apart,
it was very hardscrabble
a lot of the time,
but Mother was the one
that kept payments up
and did the things
that had to be done
and cut corners
when it was possible.
CARTER:
Mary's letters would be,
"How are we going to divide up
this hundred dollars?
"Who needs to be paid this week?
"Who's not going to be paid?
And when is the next amount
of money coming in?"
So they were down
to the very nitty-gritty.
NARRATOR:
Gutzon raced from Washington
to North Carolina to Texas
trying to drum up
new commissions,
but the best offer fell
from the sky.
South Dakota's state historian,
Doane Robinson,
had seen newspaper accounts
of people driving to Georgia
just to see Gutzon's
Stone Mountain carving.
Robinson's far-off,
nearly forgotten state
was in dire need
of roadside attraction,
and he thought
this mountain-carving business
might be just the ticket.
So Robinson wrote Borglum
and asked him to consider a new
project in the Black Hills,
maybe statues
of Lewis and Clark,
Buffalo Bill, Chief Red Cloud--
something to draw the tourists.
Borglum took Robinson's
suggestion and ran.
"Western figures are
too parochial,"he announced.
He would carve national heroes.
The first three
were no-brainers:
George Washington, Thomas
Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln.
The fourth would be Borglum's
great personal friend
and political hero,
Teddy Roosevelt.
And Borglum said
he would carve his presidents
on Mount Rushmore, a site
he chose for its broad face
and a southeastern exposure
that guaranteed
the most dramatic light.
To his 12-year-old son, Lincoln,
he confided:
"Nothing but the Almighty
can stop me
from completing this task."
TALIAFERRO:
When he got the call
to come to Mount Rushmore,
this was a great chance
to redeem himself,
to do all the things
he had ever wanted to do
in a much larger scale
than he'd even dare think about
until that point.
He could taste it
from the second he got off
the train in Rapid City.
VHAY:
He had expected Stone Mountain
to be the crowning achievement
in his career,
and here he was presented
with a bigger crown.
It was going to be
bigger, larger.
And all he needed to do
was to get a million dollars,
or whatever, to do it.
NARRATOR:
Doane Robinson was thrilled
and happy to let Borglum have
his way with the planning.
"After all,"he said,
"God only makes a Michelangelo
"or a Gutzon Borglum
once every thousand years."
The remainder of the state
was less enthusiastic.
That Mount Rushmore stood
on ground sacred
to the Lakota Sioux
wasn't even the big problem.
In the 1920s, South Dakotans
simply didn't have
a lot of spare cash
for public monuments.
A year after Borglum's plea
for $50,000 seed money,
locals had raised only $5,000.
And the proposed project
hadn't exactly brought honor
to the state.
In fact, Mount Rushmore
was a bit of a knee-slapper
around the country.
"Borglum is about to destroy
another mountain,"
wrote one newspaper back east.
"Thank God it's in South Dakota,
where no one will ever see it."
The sculptor had
only one solid asset:
South Dakota senator
Peter Norbeck.
Peter Norbeck was the son
of Norwegian immigrants,
born in a sod dugout
and raised poor
on the South Dakota plains.
He was stout, plainspoken,
and quietly ambitious.
As a young man, he'd made
a fortune drilling wells
and then moved to politics.
WEGNER:
Grandpa Norbeck
has been described
as as rough
as the Norwegian northern pines,
but also with the soul
of an artist.
His formal education
was very limited,
but somewhere in there,
he found the interest to pursue
these more intellectual
and artistic endeavors.
VHAY:
He supported Dad in everything.
He got very cross with him
at times,
when Dad would demand more money
and had to have more money.
But also, I think that
Senator Norbeck was a bridge
between Dad
and the local people.
WEGNER:
He saw this as an opportunity to
bring people to the Black Hills.
Any tourists, any people
we could bring into South Dakota
from the outside
brought their wallet,
their dollars with them.
And any outside dollars
in this state
that could be brought in
were desperately needed.
NARRATOR:
What Norbeck did first
was convince
President Calvin Coolidge
to spend the summer
in the Black Hills,
maybe take in
the mountain scenery,
do a little fishing.
Even before Coolidge
got to town,
Rapid City was fevered
with Babbitt-like boosterism.
And the Rapid City Commercial
Club renewed its drive
to raise cash
for Senator Norbeck's carving.
By the time
the president arrived,
the Rushmore Association
had $42,000 in the bank,
and Borglum was
in a lather, too,
planning a second, and more
extravagant, dedication,
one the president could attend,
with the national press in tow.
And on that August day,
Silent Cal made a speech
that surprised even Borglum.
He started out by saying,
"We have come here
to dedicate a cornerstone
laid by the hand
of the Almighty."
Further in the speech, he said,
"The people of South Dakota
had been bearing this burden
so far"-- which they had not--
and he thought the government
ought to help.
And this was the beginning
of getting government support.
NARRATOR:
With Coolidge's support,
Norbeck pushed a bill
through Congress
authorizing federal matching
funds for Mount Rushmore:
one government dollar
for every private dollar raised.
The problem was, in 1929,
there had been
only $50,000 raised.
Still, with less than ten
percent of his budget in hand,
Gutzon Borglum rushed ahead,
anxious to answer
the big question:
Could this colossal carving
be done?
It was 500 feet to the top
of Mount Rushmore.
Nobody could be sure how much
carvable granite existed
beneath the richly creviced
surface.
Long, frozen winters would make
work nearly impossible
four months a year.
Even more troubling to Borglum
was the pool of men available
to do the work.
Getting able bodies
wasn't the hard part.
Jobs were scarce
in the Black Hills in 1929,
and Mount Rushmore offered
some of the highest-paying work
around.
But as dozens of men
started to sign on,
Borglum realized he was going
to have to depend on locals--
the "untutored miners,"
he called them.
SMITH:
A lot of these guys were tough,
rough, brawling kind of guys.
They used to say, uh,
that the Keystone Boys' playpens
were fenced with barbed wire.
And that they only turned
the other cheek
when they were delivering
a left hook.
MAN:
It didn't take
too much training, say,
to drill holes and so forth
and run a jackhammer.
It just took a lot of guts,
you might say.
Some people went up there and
worked one day, I've been told,
and that was all they wanted.
They couldn't stand the heighth
and the dust and so forth.
MAN:
It was pretty tough for your
first time going over there
and hanging in a bosun chair
and trying to punch holes
in the granite.
It took a lot of practice.
And you didn't get much done
your first day,
I'll tell you that.
Most of the jackhammers weighed
40 or 50 pounds.
And then you had to carry
your steel with you, also.
So you had quite a load
going down there.
MAN:
The wind was always a-blowing,
and it'd be pretty gusty.
The wind always blew up there,
seemed like.
They was hanging
with a little 3/8-inch cable.
And that cable looked
pretty small to me,
to hold them guys up there.
And then they'd just
shake pieces out of them
when they'd turn them
jackhammers on.
NARRATOR:
Once the men had blasted
off the surface rock,
leaving a giant egg-shaped mass
where Washington's face
could be sculpted,
Borglum spent days watching
the light and shadow play
on the expanse,
then decided to rotate the face
20 degrees
from his original plan.
After that, the sculptor
and assistants like Ivan Houser
set to re-creating
the studio models
on the side of the mountain.
The commonly used methods
didn't apply.
The mountain was simply too big.
So Borglum turned the page back
to a technique
devised by the ancient Greeks.
HOUSER:
In doing a big piece
of sculpture,
one of the problems, of course,
is the enlarging.
You're trying to locate points
in space at one scale,
and then you try to locate
those same points in space
at another scale.
So what they did was, you have
a beam coming straight out
from a point
that turns on a swivel,
and you can note the degrees
at which it is turned.
And so, as you turn the one on
the little model and you can...
Say it's off 30 degrees,
off to the right,
and it's out
so many measurements,
and down so far
and then in so far,
and you can locate
a specific point
on Washington's cheek,
for instance.
So then you can do the same
thing up on the mountain.
CLIFFORD:
This is what they called
honeycombing.
This was the next to the last
step of finishing the faces.
And they would drill
these holes in.
The pointers or Mr. Borglum
would tell them
how deep to drill the holes.
You can see they were taking off
more rock down here
than they were up here.
And it was probably
right close to the face,
maybe it was on, like,
on a cheek
or something like that.
And they would take
a sharp, pointed piece of steel
and they would hit
in each one of these holes.
Eventually,
this rock would pop off.
And then they would use
a bumping hammer--
they called it bumping--
and that would
smooth the rock up
just like it is today
that you see it on the mountain.
NARRATOR:
Independence Day, 1930,
just more than a year
from the day real work began,
Gutzon Borglum revealed
to the world
the first great granite visage.
July 5, Mount Rushmore
was a dateline
in papers across the country.
Through that summer, newsreels
of the dedication played
at theaters nationwide.
Suddenly, Rushmore
was a fixed point
in the American consciousness.
And as work
on Washington continued,
tourists began making the trek
to see the strange sight
in the Black Hills.
In the first year alone, 27,000
people visited Mount Rushmore,
now billed as
"the shrine of democracy."
The early success confirmed
Borglum's every plan.
Now his men could race
to the finish.
The entire carving--
four figures, each complete
to the waist--
would be done inside
of four years, he figured.
He'd figured wrong.
Within weeks
of the Washington dedication,
bad news began to pile up.
Borglum had spent so much
on the dedication ceremony
that money ran out
at the end of July,
and work on the mountain
slowed to a crawl.
Rushmore's great champion,
Senator Peter Norbeck,
was diagnosed with cancer.
The next year,
things only got worse.
HOUSER:
They were aware, of course,
that there were going to be
faults and cracks in the rock.
Some of them
were hard to detect.
In fact, they started Jefferson
off to Washington's right,
and they found out there
wasn't enough stone there.
The stone was too crumbly and
it just wasn't of good quality.
CARTER:
They had to blast that off
after 18 months of work,
which must have been
heartbreaking to do that.
As tight as money was,
and then to blast off
what they'd spent
all that time doing.
NARRATOR:
By the end of 1931,
the Rushmore Association
was $16,000 in the red,
with little hope
of raising more private money.
WEGNER:
They had this
almost double whammy.
The entire country,
in fact much of the world,
was wrapped up in this
horrendous financial depression.
Then on top of that
was the dust bowl days.
There was no rain; the farmers
could raise no crops.
What little they could raise, it
was almost impossible to market.
They were leaving the state
in droves.
Those who stayed wondered
why they were still here.
And in, uh, 1932,
the work at Rushmore
had ground to a total halt.
And again there was the specter
of this whole thing
just never being completed.
INTERVIEWER:
When do you think
this work
will be completed,
Mr. Borglum?
I'm trying to finish it
so that the figures will be done
by 1935 sufficiently...
VHAY:
My father never wanted to admit
any type of failure,
and certainly he didn't want
to admit it.
He, I'm sure, did with... with
Mother, but he didn't with us.
I mean, it was always
going to be...
everything was going to be
all right.
He didn't show any despair,
even to Mary very much.
One letter that I found where
he was in Washington for months
trying to get money
for Rushmore.
It was a bad time,
and he wrote to her and said,
"I'm just sick
about what's happening,
but this is the time
to be courageous."
And you know, I think his spirit
just kept him going
and Mary kept him going.
I don't think he would have been
able to carry on
if it hadn't been for my mother.
She was always there,
not driving him
but building up his ego,
and making him aware
that he was a great sculptor.
NARRATOR:
Even in the darkest days
of Rushmore,
Gutzon never lacked for ego.
People who held sway,
he liked to keep them informed.
Congressmen, senators,
oil tycoons,
William Randolph Hearst,
the Duke of Windsor--
he wired them all,
and often collect.
VHAY:
He corresponded with anybody
you could think of,
and I mean from
the heads of state on down
to the... practically
the garbage man.
Probably not the garbage man
because he probably
hadn't paid them.
(laughs)
HAYES:
He was coming across the state
and he stopped
at a little station
and, uh, he wanted
to fill up the car.
And, uh, the young station
attendant, you know, says,
"Well, you know,
I have to have money first."
He says, "Well, don't you know
who I am?"
And the attendant said,
"I know exactly who you are.
That's why I have to have
the money first."
SMITH:
He felt that he should have
free gasoline if he wanted it,
he saw movies without paying,
and his personality
was so powerful
they let him go ahead and do it.
As he said many times,
"I'm giving these people
in the Black Hills an asset
"that'll bring in
billions of dollars
and they're persecuting me over
a piddling parcel of groceries."
NARRATOR:
Where money was concerned,
Gutzon was fearless.
He spent himself and his
projects into the hole today,
convinced he could win
more tomorrow.
WEGNER:
Borglum had this tendency
to show up in Washington
unannounced
and appear before committees
and attempt to schedule
appointments with the president.
He would give one set
of financial projections
to one committee or to one
senator or to one congressman,
and within a matter
of hours or days,
come up with another set
of figures,
or he could say he could finish
this project for $250,000,
when everybody sitting
in the room knew
that there was no way
in which that entire project
could be completed for $250,000.
HOUSER:
A number of times my father
and Borglum were in the Senate
seeking funding
for Mount Rushmore.
So one time they were up
in the balcony at the Senate,
and, uh, the bill
was on the floor
and one of the senators stood up
and he was raging against
Borglum, and he was calling,
"Why are we... why are we trying
to appropriate funds
for this crazy genius?"
And then that triggered Borglum.
Borglum jumped to his feet,
but before he could say anything
my dad grabbed him by the
coattails and pulled him down,
and he said, "He called
you a genius, didn't he?"
(laughs)
NARRATOR:
It was Senator Norbeck
who saved Mount Rushmore
with an assist
from the deepening depression.
At the end of 1932, as the
national economy slid downhill,
President Herbert Hoover started
passing out relief money,
and Norbeck snared 100,000
federal dollars
for jobs on the mountain.
Then he convinced
the National Park Service
to take over the project,
guaranteeing more funding.
(explosion)
In the spring of 1933,
after nearly a year and a half
of silence,
work on the mountain
began again.
And the central crew was back:
Hoot Leach, Howdy Peterson
and his brother Merle,
Jimmy Champion, Whiskey Art
Johnson, Palooka Payne.
They all knew they'd be shut
down again for some reason,
but they came back
just the same.
SMITH:
One of the great miracles
of Rushmore
is the miracle of the men,
those dedicated guys,
the Red Andersons,
the Hoot Leaches,
the Peterson boys and so on
who came back and came back
and came back and came back.
CLIFFORD:
Had they not come back,
there would be no Mount Rushmore
as we know it today
because Mr. Borglum,
it was impossible for him
to train a new crew every year.
But these men were dedicated
to the mountain.
When the mountain would
shut down for lack of money
or in the wintertime, they'd
all have to find another job.
But when the spring
would come around
and they'd get the call
to come back,
they'd quit what they were doing
and come back to work
at the mountain.
SMITH:
Red Anderson said,
"At first it was just a job
and just a crazy kind
of a job at that."
But as time went by,
all of this started to change
and they developed a sense,
came together, fused in a sense
that they were creating
a great thing.
NARRATOR:
The men stuck it out
in spite of their boss--
the Chief, they called him,
but only behind his back.
Borglum rarely talked to his
men, except to give orders.
"He's a heck of a stone carver,"
said one,
"but he ain't no sweet talker."
BORGLUM:
I'm not satisfied
with how it turns under there
and comes against the collar.
You go on down now, Payne.
I want
those points very
carefully examined.
I'll be down there with you
in a few minutes.
VHAY:
Dad might get furious at them
if they were stupid,
because he could not stand
stupidity.
Anybody could make
a mistake once,
but not two
or three times,
and if they did
two or three times
he would usually
have them fired.
And that was another
job that Lincoln had,
because if it
was a good man,
Lincoln would have
to talk him into
coming back again.
And then Dad would
be sort of surprised
to see him,
and then he'd say,
"What have you
been doing, Lincoln?"
NARRATOR:
Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon's only
son, was just 21 years old
when the men went to work
on the new Jefferson head.
But despite Lincoln's youth,
Gutzon left his son in charge
of the mountain
during his long
and frequent absences.
CLIFFORD:
He grew up with the mountain.
Working so close
with his father,
it just had to be catchy.
I mean, he had a vision also
of what the mountain
was going to be like.
You would never see him
sitting down.
If you'd look up, why, Lincoln
would be up on top looking down
or looking at the faces
where the men were carving.
He was all over the mountain.
You never saw him get mad
or chew anyone out.
You could laugh with Lincoln
and... and have a great time.
When we went on our baseball
trips, Lincoln would always go,
and if we did something good,
why, he'd pat us on the back
and tell us
what a good job we'd done.
And he was just a great guy.
NARRATOR:
Lincoln had a calm, easy manner
his father relied on
more than anything
to mend relationships
Gutzon broke.
And throughout the mid-'30s,
Gutzon was more combative
than ever.
The Jefferson head
continued to vex.
The men blasted down 60 feet
to find carvable rock,
but even then, huge fissures
cut through the face.
And there was a mass of feldspar
that had to be dug out,
leaving a gaping hole
on the president's lip.
Using Borglum's concoction
of white lead, linseed oil
and granite dust,
the men filled in the cracks
and divots as best they could.
But it all took time and money.
And with
the National Park Service
now overseeing the project,
it was up to a Rapid City
farm implements dealer
named John Boland
to make sure money was spent
according to federal guidelines
and not Gutzon's.
When Borglum needed money,
he had to go to Boland and beg,
and the sculptor
grew to resent it.
"I've got to go to Rapid City,"
he told Red Anderson one day,
"and punch a certain son of
a bitch right in the nose."
Other days,
Borglum threatened to walk away
from Mount Rushmore entirely,
leaving the unfinished monument
like a scar on the Black Hills.
With so much at stake,
Senator Peter Norbeck's
most critical job
was handling the explosive
and unpredictable artist.
WEGNER:
Grandpa Norbeck
was the one person
whom Borglum respected enough
to accept his judgment
and conclusion about things.
And in... in a number of his
heated arguments and conflicts
with Boland in particular,
but by no means confined
to John Boland,
Grandpa Norbeck was able
to step in and resolve
or at least partially resolve
some of the conflicts.
And then something
would erupt all over again.
NARRATOR:
By the end of 1934,
Peter Norbeck had had his fill.
His four-year fight with cancer
had drained his energy
and his good humor.
"I have lately come to feel
that you will do something
that will prevent
the completion of Rushmore,"
he wrote to Borglum.
"I have made over seven years
of effort in this work.
"It's been a heavy drain
on my strength and purse.
It keeps getting worse."
But even as cancer
ate away at him
and took his ability to speak,
Peter Norbeck would not let
the Rushmore project fall apart.
In 1935, he strode into
the Senate one last time
and won a new
$200,000 appropriation.
But he knew it would be
his last big fight.
As the senator neared death,
he was philosophical.
"A week after I am gone,
they will start to forget me.
"A decade, and most people
of South Dakota
will be unable
to even recall my name."
It was Borglum's name,
he thought, that would endure.
But in the summer of 1936,
Peter Norbeck
was front and center
to see President
Franklin Roosevelt dedicate
the hard-won
Jefferson sculpture.
ROOSEVELT:
There were two people
who told me about this
in the early days.
One of them, Mr. Borglum.
And the other, Senator Norbeck.
(applause)
WEGNER:
It was one of the supreme days
of my grandfather's life.
I think for him, uh...
I... at least I have wondered
if it didn't become
a little like that of Borglum,
that this was one of
the crowning accomplishments
of his life,
to have made this possible.
As my grandfather had said
that Mount Rushmore is no longer
a joke, it's no longer a dream.
It's real, it's there.
CLIFFORD:
Mr. Borglum always complained
that people bothered him
when he was doing his work
but he would always stop
and if someone wanted to ask a
question or something like that,
he'd like to stop
and talk to the people, too,
so he could explain
what he was accomplishing.
He used to tell people,
"The faces are in the mountain.
All I have to do
is bring them out."
CARTER:
He never gave up
seeing it as great art.
And a lot of people
would argue with that,
that it was more of
an engineering project
than anything else,
but he really saw it as art,
that he was going to bring
the life of those four people
to the forefront,
just as you would if you were
doing a small statue of them.
TALIAFERRO:
As you get closer
to Mount Rushmore,
you can almost
see the thumbprint
of a sculptor's hand in clay.
Borglum would study it
at different times of day,
in different kinds of light,
and make adjustments
the way an artist
would make adjustments
with a little knife or with
a little chisel in the studio--
little fiddling things
with the mountain
that I'm sure cannot be seen
from the observation deck today,
but mattered only to Borglum.
NARRATOR:
Even as he passed age 70,
Gutzon Borglum was still
trying to find ways
to vivify his carving.
In 1938 and '39,
Abraham Lincoln
and Teddy Roosevelt
were rounding into
recognizable form,
but the sculptor was still
worrying every site and shading.
"Have to climb down
over the face of Washington
and back up the face
of Jefferson,"he wrote.
"I ought to be getting tired
of it all, but I'm not.
"I now see that I'll be able
to make a real work of art
"of this big group.
"Back in my heart, that has been
a doubt for many years.
"I really have no help in that.
In that, I'm absolutely alone."
It was an image he cultivated,
this lonely fighter's posture,
but there were people
whose contributions
even Gutzon could not deny.
Borglum may have
devised the plan
to give a twinkle
to the presidential eyes,
but it was the workmen
who sculpted
the two-foot long
shafts of granite
in the middle of each pupil,
so that sunlight bouncing off
the exposed point
gave life to the eyes.
CARTER:
Gutzon seemed to have
complained a lot
about the unskilled workers
that he was faced with,
but actually he was
very proud of the men
and very proud of the fact
that he'd been able to train
these people, who were miners
and who were just local,
who'd never worked
on a mountain before,
didn't know
anything about art,
and that he'd been able
to take them and train them
into doing
what he wanted done.
SMITH:
There were things about him
that bothered them very much,
but down underneath,
they developed a loyalty.
It's amazing-- they developed a
basic loyalty to Gutzon Borglum.
With all his flamboyance,
unpredictability, irascibility,
there was some kind of
a flame in the man--
a charisma, a something--
that inspired a deeper loyalty.
NARRATOR:
By 1940, Gutzon Borglum
had made himself
someone extraordinary.
He was the man
who carved mountains
and he stood
America's highest peak.
He'd achieved celebrity,
even pitching ads for
Studebaker and Bromo Seltzer.
(explosion)
Still, Gutzon saw so much
to be done on his mountain.
He meant to extend the
sculptures down to the waist,
was at work
on a Hall of Records--
a cavernous time capsule
for storing
the important documents
of the American democracy.
But more than anything,
he was still trying
to transform his mountain
into a work of art,
fighting the one thing
he couldn't beat:
time itself.
At the beginning of 1941,
the coming world war
overwhelmed Mount Rushmore.
After a dozen years,
Congress finally
cut off funding for good.
A week later,
Gutzon Borglum was dead,
suddenly and unexpectedly
at age 73,
from complications
following surgery.
WEGNER:
Lincoln Borglum, of course,
had taken over
after his father died.
By then, a major part of
the work had been completed,
but there were still
a fair amount
of trimming and cleaning up
to do
around the faces and...
and the collars and shoulders
of some of the figures.
And the great hall of records,
which was... had been
another great ambition
and dream of Borglum's,
pretty much perished
in the process.
The work at Rushmore just sort
of gradually drew to a close.
NARRATOR:
It took 14 years
to carve Mount Rushmore.
Men removed half a million tons
of granite,
driving 120 feet deep in places.
George Washington's face
is 60 feet long, his nose 20,
and each eye
is 11 feet wide.
Roosevelt's mustache
is 20 feet across;
Lincoln's mole, 16 inches.
The carving cost $989,992.32,
almost all of it
from the United States treasury.
For the money, America got
the biggest and oddest monument
on the face of the earth,
and one of the most compelling.
Since 1930, more than 50 million
people have made pilgrimage
to the remote cliffside shrine.
CARTER:
I think in some ways,
Mount Rushmore
was the worst legacy
that... that Gutzon Borglum
could leave,
because he always will be known
as the sculptor
who did Mount Rushmore.
And yet at the time
that he started the mountain,
when he was 60 years old,
he was well known
for being a sculptor
of beautiful monuments
and beautiful pieces.
And he was probably on his way
to having a reputation
as a great American sculptor.
I think that was really
overshadowed by Rushmore.
CLIFFORD:
I look up on the mountain
and I think of...
of Mr. Borglum--
what a great man he was,
what a wonderful sculptor
he was.
I think of Lincoln, who was
a friend to all of the men.
And then I think of all the men
that I worked with and knew,
and how dedicated these men were
to the mountain,
and they're all gone now.
And...
And I have to stop now.
(chuckles)
(crickets chirping)
NARRATOR:
Like its sculptor,
Mount Rushmore is loud,
demanding of attention,
and maddening.
To naturalists,
the carving is an eyesore;
to Native Americans,
a desecration.
It stands as a monument
to energy and possibility,
to national pride,
and an often unbecoming
national self-satisfaction.
And like the biggest and boldest
creations in America,
Mount Rushmore was not built
on good intentions alone.
It also stands as a monument
to the colossal,
sometimes wounding,
and surprisingly contagious
ambition of a single man.
BORGLUM:
I am allowing
an extra three inches
on all the features
of the various presidents
in order to provide stone
for the wear and tear
of the elements,
which cuts the granite
down an inch
in a hundred thousand years.
Three inches would require
300,000 years
to bring the work
down to the point
that I would like to finish it.
In other words,
the work will not be done
for another 300,000 years
as it should be.
Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
Public shouldn't leave reviews for lawyers.