Mount Rushmore National Memorial / A monument commemorating the conception, preservation, and growth of the great American republic

by Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society of the Black Hills

Mount Rushmore
NATIONAL MEMORIAL

A MONUMENT COMMEMORATING THE CONCEPTION, PRESERVATION, AND GROWTH OF THE GREAT AMERICAN REPUBLIC

PUBLISHED BY THE
Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society of Black Hills
1948

GUTZON BORGLUM

CONTENTS

[Foreword] 1 [The Mighty Works of Borglum] 5 [From the Beginning] 9 [The Role of the National Park Service] 16 [Wind Cave National Park] 17 [Badlands National Monument] 17 [Jewel Cave National Monument] 17 [Devils Tower National Monument] 17 [The Antiquity of Mount Rushmore] 18 [The Hall of Records and Great Stairway] 20 [George Washington] 22 [Thomas Jefferson] 24 [Abraham Lincoln] 26 [Theodore Roosevelt] 28 [As Great Men Saw It] 30 [Mount Rushmore National Memorial Society of Black Hills] 31

FOREWORD

A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated. We are not here trying to carve an epic, portray a moonlight scene, or write a sonnet; neither are we dealing with mystery or tragedy, but rather the constructive and the dramatic moments or crises in our amazing history. We are cool-headedly, clear-mindedly setting down a few crucial, epochal facts regarding the accomplishments of the Old World radicals who shook the shackles of oppression from their light feet and fled despotism to people a continent: who built an empire and rewrote the philosophy of freedom and compelled the world to accept its wiser, happier forms of government.