Borglum first saw Rushmore a year after receiving Robinson’s letter. In August 1925, in search of a location for his sculpture, Borglum was being guided on horseback through the Black Hills when he was shown a gnarled, knobby shelf of granite almost 2 billion years old. Native communities called the mountain Igmu Tanka Paha, Cougar Mountain, and Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, the Six Grandfathers. But when Borglum first saw the mountain, it had been renamed after New York City lawyer Charles Rushmore, who had been representing tin-mine investors when he rode around the mountain in 1885 and provided its eponym.
Borglum dismounted from his horse, climbed up the mountain face in an ascot, golf pants, and cowboy hat, and began to transform Rushmore into the political monument we know today. “A group of Empire makers,” he wrote in his journal that night. “Jefferson = Lincoln = Roosevelt.” George Washington, though omitted from this equation, had always been present in Borglum’s vision of a sculpture that would represent the manifest destiny that had shaped the United States. Borglum believed the American political system was the apotheosis of human civilization, and he wanted his sculpture to stand alongside the Parthenon and pyramids as testaments to grand civilizations and cultures.
It is this vision of American history and identity that Trump’s second administration has championed in its early weeks. Trump has advocated for expansionist American policies both abroad and in outer space, renamed nature to fit his nationalist vision, and promoted a distinctive view of American history, culture, and identity. In many ways, the idea of including Trump among this group makes a certain kind of historical sense. It certainly reflects the memorial’s thorny origins as a monument to “Empire makers.”
But as I’ve learned while researching my upcoming history of the memorial, Mount Rushmore has come to mean something different in the 100 years since Gutzon Borglum’s hike. Placing Trump on Mount Rushmore would add even more conflict to the memorial’s already contentious existence, would reduce its audience, and would narrow our historical narratives.
