There are complex stories behind those faces on Mount Rushmore that have been edited out of the guidebooks and textbooks. There is the story of how the land on which Rushmore stands was expropriated from the Lakota Sioux in 1877, abrogating a major treaty. There is the story of the sculpture’s creator and ideologue, Gutzon Borglum, a leader in the Ku Klux Klan, who saw in the expansion of European settlement across the American West the fulfillment of white racial destiny. Rushmore is prefigured in the story of Custer, who sealed the fate of the Black Hills when he discovered gold there in 1874. Larner traces the meaning and evolution of the Custer battle commemorations, and pursues the ways in which Custer's defeat, the killings at Wounded Knee, and Rushmore, are linked in the story of the Indians’ loss of the Black Hills. Mount Rushmore also traces modern political uses of the monument, from Cold War television broadcasts to Boy Scout conventions to political campaigns. It looks at Rushmore's semi-religious status as the national shrine of Democracy, and contrasts this with political restrictions on the practice of Indian religions in the Black Hills. Finally, Larner deals with previous works on Rushmore that have avoided its message of conquest, preferring to focus on a simplistic narrative of national glory. Even the tour guides at Rushmore understand little of its real history, or of the legal fact that the land from which it rises belongs to the Lakota.
We all know Mount Rushmore: the mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota into which a visionary artist, working by himself, carved the faces of four American presidents as a tribute to American democracy. As with most familiar stories, this one is a mixture of truth and legend. Gutzon Borglum, Rushmore's creator, was indeed a noted sculptor; he was also (briefly) a highly placed member of the Ku Klux Klan. But he did not work alone: a large crew of artisans did the actual face carving, working from a model Borglum created. And Mount Rushmore is a tribute to one version of American democracy; Borglum was a proponent of manifest destiny, an expansionist doctrine that called for the eradication of the American Indian (the Black Hills themselves were appropriated from the Lakota). In fact, Mount Rushmore, in many ways, was intended as a beacon of white superiority shining out from lands once owned by Indians. This eye-opening book will appeal to readers interested in American history as well as those concerned about the treatment of ethnic minorities. David Pitt
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The land, people, and history framing Mount Rushmore, situated in the Black Hills in South Dakota, not far from where Custer died, prove to be every bit as complex and fundamentally crazy-American as the presidents memorialized there. Larner finds that Sioux and Euro-Americans live out the Rushmore experience in predictably different yet unpredictably specific ways. Larner's jump-around meditations on Manifest Destiny and its discontents move from 1970s American Indian Movement activism to 1920s Ku Klux Klan backroom campaigning to 1870s gold-rushing. Unhindered by narrative linearity, Larner situates Crazy Horse the never-photographed mystic warrior and Gutzon Borglum the fantastical public sculptor as the ultimate stars of a multiethnic ensemble of the powerful, victimized, and honestly ambivalent and ties it all together with great ideological discipline and briskly paced prose. Appreciative readers of contemporary political-travel journalism can only hope Larner forgoes a career in academia his publisher identifies him as a graduate student in international relations and instead follows the freelancer's quest. An auspicious debut; recommended for libraries of all types. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll., PA
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