The Sordid History of Mount Rushmore
by Matthew Shear/Smithsonianmag.com October 2016
Each year, two million visitors walk or roll from the entrance of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, in South Dakota, to the Avenue of Flags, to peer up at the 60-foot visages of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. Dedicated 75 years ago this month, Mount Rushmore was intended by its creator, Gutzon Borglum, to be a celebration of not only these four presidents but also the nation’s unprecedented greatness. “This colossus is our mark,” he wrote with typical bombast. Yet Borglum’s own sordid story shows that this beloved site is also a testament to the ego and ugly ambition that undergird even our best-known triumphs.
In 1914, Borglum was a sculptor in Connecticut of modest acclaim when he received an inquiry from the elderly president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, C. Helen Plane, about building a “shrine to the South” near Atlanta. When he first glimpsed “the virgin stone” of his canvas, a quartz hump called Stone Mountain, Borglum later recalled, “I saw the thing I had been dreaming of all my life.” He sketched out a vast sculpture of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, and was hired.
Carol graduated from Riverside White Cross School of Nursing in Columbus, Ohio and received her diploma as a registered nurse. She attended Bowling Green State University where she received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History and Literature. She attended the University of Toledo, College of Nursing, and received a Master’s of Nursing Science Degree as an Educator.
She has traveled extensively, is a photographer, and writes on medical issues. Carol has three children RJ, Katherine, and Stephen – one daughter-in-law; Katie – two granddaughters; Isabella Marianna and Zoe Olivia – and one grandson, Alexander Paul. She also shares her life with her husband Gordon Duff, many cats, and two rescues.
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There is no mistaking an all out assault on the Indigenous people that ramped up once Trump got in, but was already nearly non-stop for hundreds of years.
The first thing he did was ram that pipe in and show military brutality to peaceful protestors at Standing Rock.
Then they drove the herd of new evangelical converts from Guatemala north and sorted them into preferred piles of useful labor, prisons and adoption networks for assimilation.
Now he returns to Lakota to claim a victory, and ceremony. It will not end well for Trump. This is evangelical mischief and they think they can perform magic. It is very transparent and childish.
I should also add, the dysfunctional persecution complex combined with declining money, has created an alliance that has been coming for some time between the Vatican and the evangelicals. Barr has made this very clear. This is religious domination playing out in front of our eyes. As well as the continued erasure of history, and cultural genocide of great people.
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