Mt. Rushmore Myth

[Kevin_Kennedy]

Two million people travel annually to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore. The imposing sculptures of Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln have become a symbol of the American spirit. The artist in charge of the project, Gutzon Borglum, intended his work to be a summary of the first 150 years of American history, but the choice of figures has helped create a lasting problem in American history: who owns the founding tradition? Borglum has led many Americans to believe that Lincoln and Roosevelt constitute the bridge between the founding generation and the modern era. While there were certainly times Lincoln and Roosevelt could rhetorically sound like the Founders, their actions do not mesh with the principles of that generation. Lincoln and Roosevelt helped create a "new" United States, perverted the founding documents and ruined the founding principles of limited government and state sovereignty.

The true expositors of the founding tradition are not the sectional president, Lincoln, or the first progressive president, Roosevelt; they are two Unionists who are often classified as Southern extremists: John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia. These men were on the cusp of the founding generation. Calhoun was born in 1782 and Randolph in 1773. They were too young to participate in first events of the early republic but knew many of the participants. Most importantly, they understood what the founding generation meant by "union."

Mt. Rushmore Myth by Brion McClanahan

 

[editec]

I suspect you give people way too much credit when you posit that

Borglum has led many Americans to believe that Lincoln and Roosevelt constitute the bridge between the founding generation and the modern era.

I sincerely doubt the concept of a bridge between the founding gneration and modern era isn't on the minds of the viewers.

What's probably going on is probably more something like the following

"Holy shit they're big, aren't they darlin? Say, where's the bathrooms? That coffee's going through me like shit through a goose. Hey, who are these guys, again? Presidents or something, aren't they? I'm bored now. Let's go have lunch."

 

[midcan5]

A truly odd selection, particularly Calhoun, while he can be an interesting thinker, reading him is a bit much to our modern worldview. His is Disquisition is fascinating, his view on slavery abhorrent.

"...that constitution of our nature which makes us feel more intensely what affects us directly than what affects us indirectly through others, necessarily leads to conflict between individuals. Each, in consequence, has a greater regard for his own safety or happiness, than for the safety or happiness of others; and, where these come in opposition, is ready to sacrifice the interests of others to his own. And hence, the tendency to a universal state of conflict, between individual and individual; accompanied by the connected passions of suspicion, jealousy, anger and revenge — followed by insolence, fraud and cruelty — and, if not prevented by some controlling power, ending in a state of universal discord and confusion, destructive of the social state and the ends for which it is ordained. This controlling power, wherever vested, or by whomsoever exercised, is GOVERNMENT."

John C. Calhoun: Disquisition on Government

John C. Calhoun's Speech: Slavery, a Positive Good

"But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good - a positive good. I feel myself called upon to speak freely upon the subject where the honor and interests of those I represent are involved. I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other."

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

A truly odd selection, particularly Calhoun, while he can be an interesting thinker, reading him is a bit much to our modern worldview. His is Disquisition is fascinating, his view on slavery abhorrent.

"...that constitution of our nature which makes us feel more intensely what affects us directly than what affects us indirectly through others, necessarily leads to conflict between individuals. Each, in consequence, has a greater regard for his own safety or happiness, than for the safety or happiness of others; and, where these come in opposition, is ready to sacrifice the interests of others to his own. And hence, the tendency to a universal state of conflict, between individual and individual; accompanied by the connected passions of suspicion, jealousy, anger and revenge — followed by insolence, fraud and cruelty — and, if not prevented by some controlling power, ending in a state of universal discord and confusion, destructive of the social state and the ends for which it is ordained. This controlling power, wherever vested, or by whomsoever exercised, is GOVERNMENT."

John C. Calhoun: Disquisition on Government

John C. Calhoun's Speech: Slavery, a Positive Good

"But I take higher ground. I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good - a positive good. I feel myself called upon to speak freely upon the subject where the honor and interests of those I represent are involved. I hold then, that there never has yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other."

Calhoun was a supporter of slavery, but if you're disqualifying people for consideration based on their racial views Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln would have to be removed from Mt. Rushmore.

 

[editec]

I presumed that the choices were based on some vague sense of which presidents would most appeal to the public.

Neither Calhoun nor Randoloph were presidents.

I doubt one in ten citizens, then or now, could tell you who they were or what they did.

Not so with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln or T. Roosevelt

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

I presumed that the choices were based on some vague sense of which presidents would most appeal to the public.

Neither Calhoun nor Randoloph were presidents.

I doubt one in ten citizens, then or now, could tell you who they were or what they did.

Not so with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln or T. Roosevelt

I'm sure you're correct. However, the author was simply making the point that by choosing Lincoln and Roosevelt people may have begun to think that they embody the founding principles, when they were very clearly opposed to those principles.