“You certainly do,” conceded Miss Bates.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SHRINE OF DEMOCRACY
A monument’s dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events memorialized.—Gutzon Borglum.
Back to the mountains came the boy who had felt kinship for them more than half a century before, to put into form a dream that was as yet nebulous and disturbed. Vaguely he felt that he was going to preserve forever some symbol of a great national ideal. The trouble was that he did not yet have an inkling of what the symbol looked like or how he was going to keep it intact for future generations to look at. And he had the granite—the living rock of the mountains—that would turn the weather as it had been turning it for thousands of years. It would keep what he carved on it down through time to the rim of eternity.
It sprang from the Stone Mountain conception, this project. But it wouldn’t be the same thing. There would be no army of horsemen riding across the white face of a cliff. For this, as he knew but found it hard to express, must provide a quick glance at the history of the whole republic, and not until he had accomplished it did he find the words. He said:
The Shrine of Democracy, carved on Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota, is the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps in the world. It is a memorial to the conception and organization of this great government. Monuments have almost never been built deliberately to make note of the intellectual or political acts of a people. The great memorials of China, Angkor, India, Egypt and Greece were incidental to the life and religion of the nations. None, I believe, was deliberately so conceived, so designed and so located that it would remain an understandable message to posterity ten thousand, a hundred thousand, or, if the material survived, a million years hence.
Each succeeding race destroys or buries its predecessor, appropriates what it can and throws the rest to the winds. Only the most enlightened of human beings revere the remains of others. So it was thoughts of this sort regarding the failure of mankind to make suitable, indestructible records of its attainments that led me to carve our national record on a cliff, on rocks that are of communally useless material. Therefore our sons will not pull them down.
Gutzon Borglum arrived for the first time in Rapid City, accompanied by his son Lincoln, then 12 years old, on September 25, 1924. He was met by State Historian Doane Robinson, who had invited him on behalf of the Black Hills and Yellowstone Park Association, and was taken to the Harney Peak region by a group of citizens including Dr. Cleophas C. O’Harra, president of the South Dakota School of Mines. The road led into a region of rising plateaus, then past rocky spars that were called the Needles, and to the Sylvan Lake, where they spent the night The next day they climbed Harney Peak. Gutzon observed several locations suitable for carving, and he said so. But there was nothing so fine in that area as the Stone Mountain cliff. He reserved decision pending further inspection and went back East.
The result of this short visit was that Mr. Robinson proceeded to get the permission of the government to undertake the carving in the Harney Forest area, which was federal property, and to try to get an appropriation from the South Dakota state legislature. There was no difficulty about his first effort. He got his governmental permission through the Congressional delegates from South Dakota, led by Senator Peter Norbeck and Congressman William Williamson, whose support and interest were valuable assets. Mr. Robinson almost as quickly discovered something that is undeniably true about mountain-carving projects: They cost a lot and it is almost impossible to get anybody to donate money toward them. The state authorized the formation of the Mount Harney Memorial Association, but could find no money. The state of South Dakota, as an organization, never did find any.