Gutzon Borglum was 60 years old when he began to carve Mount Rushmore.
Fourteen years later he died and his son completed the finishing touches on his 'colossal achievement' - four Presidential portraits of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt carved in granite. Another
A lot of people shrink from Mt. Rushmore. They say it's too big, too schmaltzy. It's not politically or environmentally correct.
They don't experience the "little frisson of excitement and uncomplicated patriotism" that Judith Dobryznski did and writes about in A Monumental Achievement (Wall St Journal, subscribers only)
Borglum consented only to do something bigger. He wanted to create a monument to the American philosophy, a celebration of the American spirit. That, he said, could be done only by portraying the nation's greatest presidents, picked by him.
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Granite is a blunt medium, not given to nuance. Yet these portraits do seem to capture the essence of each man.
Less than a year before he died, Borglum talked of the pleasure he experienced at Rushmore. "This is the work I love most, this intimate contact with the four men," he told the New York Times in August 1940. "As I became engrossed in the features and personalities of each man, I felt myself growing in stature, just as they did when their characters grew and developed."
Borglum believed in the bigness of America -- in growth, dreams, abilities.
Peter Schramm, an Hungarian immigrant who now teaches American history to Americans at Ashland University, describes something similar to Borglum's intimacy with these men as he encounters the real words and meaning of the founding fathers.
Why had I put all of this effort into studying so much of European history and politics? There was nothing wrong with it, in itself. But these most important questions - What is freedom? What is justice? What is equality? -these were not answered in the history books I had been devouring. These were questions tackled by men like Jefferson, Madison, Washington and Lincoln and contemplated before by men like Plato, Aristotle, Locke, and many others. This is where I could get a true education. So I started anew.
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It was here that I began to see what it meant to try to establish a Novus Ordo Seclorum. I began to see that all governments previous to ours had been established on accident and force, and now these American Founders insisted on establishing one on universal principles applicable to all men at all times, one established on reflection and choice. In America, human beings could prove to the world that they had the capacity to govern themselves. The Founders, according to Lincoln, proclaimed equality and freedom to "the whole world of men." It was here that I came to understand what Lincoln meant by the Declaration of Independence being the "electric cord" that linked all of us together, as though we were "blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration." This is what it meant to be an American, and it wasn't all that far from being a man.
His piece Born American, but in the Wrong Place is a stellar piece of writing and a view of America you have not heard before.