Borglum was a talented sculptor with bold ideas and controversial views. He had aligned himself with the Ku Klux Klan as the first sculptor of the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial in Atlanta. Months after being fired by the KKK because of monetary disputes, Borglum went to work at Mount Rushmore. There, he wanted to create an homage to American empire and to its political system, which he believed was the apotheosis of Western civilization.
His goal, as he expressed to Robinson, was to make “American history march along that skyline.” He wanted to carve the images of four American “empire makers” as they faced south in the abundant South Dakota sunlight.
Borglum respected Native Americans, their cultures, and their histories. After he toured the Pine Ridge reservation in October 1931, incensed with the federal government’s feeble response to deep poverty on reservations, he organized drives to donate food, clothing, and blankets, even contributing five head of cattle from his own ranch. In response, the Lakota named Borglum an honorary member of the tribe and gave him the name Stone Eagle. But neither he nor anyone else affiliated with the Rushmore project ever considered whether they should build an homage to American empire on the sacred lands of people whose territory the U.S. had brutally stolen.
Borglum died in March 1941, and though the memorial is still technically incomplete, work finished on October 31, just weeks before Pearl Harbor. Over the course of its construction, the homage to empire evolved into what the first president of the Mount Rushmore National Commission called the “Shrine of Democracy,” one funded and championed by the federal government. America’s victory in World War II and the subsequent Cold War firmly entrenched Mount Rushmore as a symbol of democracy, liberty, and freedom. This idea went largely unchallenged until Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest in 1959, when the British director created a film about the impermeability of identity and set its climax on the four faces of Rushmore, the first nod that perhaps Rushmore wasn’t as it seemed.
The meaning of Mount Rushmore was further interrogated as the U.S. began to reckon with the sins of the American push West, as political consciousness and power grew within Native American communities. In the 1970s, the American Indian Movement, a pan-tribal activist and advocate organization that originated in Minneapolis, held protests at the memorial that drew attention to the broken 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The actions were designed to highlight historical wrongs while shining a spotlight on their contemporary ramifications—poverty, alcoholism, discrimination, and displacement.