SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
When I was driving cross-country about 20 years ago, I stopped at the Black Hills of South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. It's quite a sight - the heads of four U.S. presidents, each about 60 feet tall, carved into stone. But I hadn't known the history of that national monument until I read a new book called, "A Biography Of A Mountain: The Making And Meaning Of Mount Rushmore." Its release is timed to the sculpture's 100th anniversary this year. And its author, Matthew Davis, explained to me why four famous faces ended up being carved into a mountain in South Dakota.
MATTHEW DAVIS: This is actually my favorite part of the Rushmore story because the initial idea for Mount Rushmore came from a state historian named Doane Robinson, who was very concerned about the state's economy in the 1920s. Basically, after World War I, the South Dakota agricultural commodities markets crashed, and the state historian was looking for a way to diversify the state's economy. So he landed on this idea of tourism, of attracting the car tourists that were driving around the Midwest to come into the Black Hills of South Dakota for a tourist attraction, and that tourist attraction was what he wanted to sculpt into the Black Hills. His idea was to have figures of the American West, like the great Lakota leader Red Cloud, Sacagawea, Lewis and Clark, Custer be carved into the pinnacles of the Black Hills to attract tourism to that part of South Dakota.
PFEIFFER: And the vision of what should be carved into that mountain changed over time. So how did we end up from his vision, the state historian's vision, to four U.S. presidents being in that rock?
DAVIS: When Doane Robinson hired Gutzon Borglum to do the sculpture, that's when the vision began to change. And Gutzon Borglum wanted to create a memorial to American empire, to American exceptionalism. And he had the idea of carving four presidents into Mount Rushmore. And those four presidents, of course, are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, and each represented a certain segment of that idea of American empire.
PFEIFFER: And it took more than a decade to carve those faces in the mountain - I think 1927 to 1941. Why so long?
DAVIS: Well, there were a lot of reasons, and one of them at the beginning especially was funding. There were fits and starts in terms of how much money was available to carve the memorial. And then later on, it was really a very detailed process. You can only work in the summer months 'cause it got very cold in South Dakota in the wintertime. And it was a process that today would seem kind of absurd. I mean, there was no technological laser scanning, for example. There were very little environmental reports put forward beforehand about how the memorial should be carved. And so Gutzon Borglum really took it on an act of faith that the memorial would appear, the sculpture would appear as he had envisioned it to. And so it was a work in progress and still is a work in progress, as the memorial is not fully complete.
PFEIFFER: Which part of it is incomplete?
DAVIS: Borglum's original vision was to include the torsos of the presidents, not just the faces. And that, of course, is not the case at Mount Rushmore. And I think even more interesting to me is that if you look at the memorial, you'll see rubble at the bottom of the faces, granite boulders that were blown off the mountain by dynamite. And those were initially going to be removed but the memorial ran out of money, so they could not remove those.
PFEIFFER: Matthew Davis, you write in your book how the land where Mount Rushmore is was sacred Indian land that was taken by the United States, and the Lakota Nation later won a Supreme Court ruling that ordered the U.S. to pay them more than $100 million for land theft. But the Lakota continue to refuse to take that money because they say they just want their land back. How likely is that ever to happen?
DAVIS: I don't think it's that likely to happen. The United States would need to give that land back to the Lakota, and that encompasses a large amount of land, including all of present-day western South Dakota. I mean, there has been some discussion over what it might look like to have land that is currently owned by the federal government co-jointly stewarded with the Lakota. But I think those options are probably not the most likely scenario for what will happen to the land. I think what will happen to the land is that there will not be much change in terms of ownership, but that doesn't mean that many Lakota people don't want the land back. There is a big rallying cry amongst many in the Black Hills to have the land returned to the Lakota, as it was taken illegally, as the Supreme Court said, by the United States.
PFEIFFER: By the way, you have visited Rushmore in every season. Which season is your favorite to visit?
DAVIS: It's the fall. I love Mount Rushmore, I love the Black Hills in October when it is beautiful. The weather is perfect. The skies are blue. The air is crisp. The crowds are not as many as they are in summertime. It's a perfect time of year to be there, and it's - actually, in October, October 1, 1925, was the first dedication of Mount Rushmore. So at that time, Gutzon Borglum probably knew that he was doing this the best in the fall as well.
PFEIFFER: The original vision to make Rushmore a tourist attraction that would help the economy, I assume it's been quite successful in that way for South Dakota.
DAVIS: It has been quite successful. I mean, Doane Robinson, of course, who had the initial idea, if he were alive today and recognized and understood that over 2 million people visit Mount Rushmore every year, he would have been overjoyed with that result. Those visitors generate millions of dollars for the local economy. And they also - a lot of those visitors then go visit other towns, other memorials, other national parks that are in South Dakota. And so, you know, Doane Robinson was really quite a visionary. And he had this idea to have Rushmore be a tourist attraction, and it really has. You have to drive out of your way to go see Mount Rushmore, and as I said, millions of people do every year.
PFEIFFER: That's Matthew Davis. He's the author of "A Biography Of A Mountain: The Making And Meaning Of Mount Rushmore." Matthew, thank you.
DAVIS: Sacha, thank you so much for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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