Why Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt?
Of all the questions visitors ask at the mountain, the most common may be the simplest. Why these four? The faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt look out over the Black Hills together, and the grouping is neither obvious nor accidental. It was the work of the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who chose the presidents to tell a particular story about the United States.
The carving had begun with a different idea entirely. The state historian Doane Robinson had imagined figures from Western history, explorers and frontier heroes, carved into the granite to draw travelers to South Dakota. Borglum rejected that regional theme as too small. He wanted a national subject, one that would speak to the whole country and to the future, and he settled on a sequence of presidents chosen to represent not four men so much as four chapters in the life of the republic.
The four chapters
Washington was the founding. As the leader of the Revolution and the first president, he stood for the birth of the nation itself, the establishment of the republic where there had been none. Borglum placed him most prominently, the first face completed and the one given the greatest presence, fitting for the man cast as the father of the country.
Jefferson represented growth and the spread of the nation across the continent. The author of the Declaration of Independence had set down the founding statement of the country’s purpose, and as president he had doubled the size of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, the vast acquisition that eventually brought the Black Hills themselves within the country’s claimed bounds. He stood, in Borglum’s scheme, for expansion and for the ideals on which the nation was built.
Lincoln stood for preservation. Borglum chose him for holding the union together through the Civil War and for the end of slavery, the great test of whether the republic Washington founded would endure. His was the era when the nation came closest to breaking apart, and his place on the mountain marked its survival.
Roosevelt was the most contested choice and the most recent. He represented the nation’s emergence into the modern world and onto the world stage, associated with the building of the Panama Canal, the conservation of public lands, and the assertion of the United States as a power among nations. Borglum, who had known Roosevelt and admired him, included him over objections that he was too close in time to judge, and the choice has been questioned ever since. To Borglum he completed the arc, carrying the story from the founding through expansion and preservation into the twentieth century.
A chosen story, and what it leaves out
Taken together, the four were meant to chart the development of the country across its first century and a half, from birth to growth to the survival of the union to its arrival as a modern nation. That is the explanation Borglum gave and the one set down for the future in the documents placed in the unfinished Hall of Records behind the faces. It is a coherent story, and it bears the stamp of one man’s reading of American history in the 1920s and 1930s.
It is also a story told from a particular vantage, and it is worth saying plainly what it leaves out. The mountain itself sits on land guaranteed to the Lakota by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and then taken in 1877 against that treaty’s terms. The four presidents who narrate the rise of the nation are carved into ground that the nation’s own courts would later acknowledge was wrongfully taken. The expansion Jefferson represents, and the continental reach Roosevelt embodies, came at the direct expense of the people for whom these hills were sacred. The faces tell one version of the American story with great force. The rock they are cut into carries another, and the two have never been reconciled.