Title

Great white fathers : the story of the obsessive quest to create Mount Rushmore

Description

The story of how Rushmore was conceived and built, and why controversy surrounded the project from the start. Great White Fathers is about the meaning of public art, the rise of automobile tourism, and the development of kitsch culture. At its center is Rushmore's feisty sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who waged an energetic campaign on behalf of his artistic vision and then carved the faces of four presidents into a mountainside.

Identifier

1054728

158648205X

Creator

Taliaferro, John

Source

Brian Lamb Booknotes Collection

Gift of Brian Lamb, 2011.

Catalog record

Language

eng

Date

2002

Program air date: December 15, 2002

Publisher

Public Affairs

George Mason University. Libraries. Special Collections & Archives

Text

Transcription of Annotations
Front and back endpapers contain biographical information on Gutzon Borglum, his Mormon family background, his Norse heritage of which he was very proud, and his admiration for the Greeks, references to people who influenced him, e.g. the sculptor Rodin, to his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan, the Nonpartisan League, and his views on Jews, Blacks and Catholics. Other notes refer to Stone Mountain in Georgia, the site of a Confederate monument that features statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, arguments with the National Park Service about which faces should be carved into Mount Rushmore, Borglum's promise to the Lakota Sioux that the face of an Indian Chief would be carved into the Eagle's nest on the mountain, and a proposal to have the face of Susan B. Anthony added to the faces on Mount Rushmore. Other notes concern the cost of the monument - nearly a million dollars, of which the Federal Government paid $836,000 - and explain that after Borglum's death in 1941, his son Lincoln took on this project. -- Annotations by Brian Lamb in the margins and underlining of pertinent phrases throughout the book. -- Examples: p. 299: ""My very dear wish," he wrote to one of Franklin Roosevelt's aides, "is that you could come here and see just what a ... real sculptor can do to a rotten old rock that has been making faces at the moon for millions and millions of years; wrinkled, worn, torn - scarred by ice and snow and wind from the northwest. I have rubbed all out."" - p. 317: "Mr. Borglum ... has given his word that adequate and noble recognition of woman's part in the development of American freedom and culture will be incorporated in his design and become part of the completed Memorial." ViFGM

Subject

"Borglum, Gutzon, 1867-1941."

Relation

Original Booknotes interview

Rights

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