A gentle reminder that "Mount Rushmore" was carved by a KKK-associated white supremacist as a deliberate defacement of a sacred Lakota site, much as the same chud defaced Stone Mountain in Georgia to create a tribute to the Confederacy and white supremacy washingtonpost.com 1/x
www.washingtonpost.com
Fox at Mount Rushmore: They just said there is severe weather on the way. In fact, they said hail could be coming and they are urging everybody to get inside. We're going to get to shelter.
Yes, I am deadly serious--the same person who defaced the Six Grandfathers (Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe in the original Lakota) was also the same person who defaced Stone Mountain. Here's what the Six Grandfathers looked like BEFORE defacement: blog.nativehope.org 2/x
Gordon Borglum, the defacer of the Six Grandfathers (at the solicitation of the governor of South Dakota, who was himself a notorious racist) was controversial even at the time the Mt. Rushmore project was commissioned; it appears he was solicited based on a PRIOR defacement of a mountain. 3/x You see, Borglum...well, he was born as a Latter-Day Saint back in the day where polygamy was still a thing (and the LDS were much more like the *FLDS* in that period--including setting up a religious theocracy known as Deseret in what is now Utah). He left in the 1880s to go to art school. 4/x This was a period of history where...there was a fair amount of obsession by "traditional" artists with subjects of nationalism (as much as people joke that Adolf Hitler would have been better off as a failed artist, it's *entirely* likely he could have been partially influenced VIA the art) 5/x From the 1880s really until *now*, there's been a bit of a brewing "culture war" facet involving modern artists (and modern art, and even some forms of modern art that border on performance art) with left-wing sentiment, and "traditional" artists that have swung more conservative. 6/x Even to this day, where Christian Nationalists have even condemned modern art movements (where there's emphasis on experimentation, non-literal depictions, and occasionally even poking fun at the art scene itself) and pointed to the likes of Thomas Kincade as "art", this divide exists. 7/x Which meant that the young Mr. Borglum got *quite* the fascination with nationalistic art and nationalistic subjects, and seeing old monuments from Egyptian and Greek and Roman cultures...he got a serious bee in his bonnet that White America should have these kinds of monuments too 8/x So after he came back from 20 years in Europe, he spent some time as a middling sculptor of some renown--including, notably, a commissioned bust of Abraham Lincoln for Teddy Roosevelt that now is in the Capitol Rotunda. Shortly thereafter, Klan Revisionism went into full swing in the US. 9/x Unreconstructed Confederates--especially under the guise of "memorial associations" like the Sons of Confederate Veterans and *especially* the United Daughters of the Confederacy--started pushing a historical revisionism narrative almost from the time that Reconstruction failed 10/x This was an era where Jefferson Davis (who somehow did NOT get hanged) got to write the equivalent of OJ Simpson's infamous "If I Did It" quasi-confession; the Lost Cause historical-revisionist narrative took root...and this culminated in full-on revisionism of the 1st KKK itself. 11/x The 1st KKK, along with the Night Riders and Redshirts and a number of other paramilitaries, heavily targeted not just recently liberated African-Americans but perceived Union sympathizers, and people merely coming from "up north"; their insurgency is a lot of why Reconstruction failed 12/x One of the final attempts to deal with the Confederacy's equivalent of Werwulf insurgencies (including the 1st KKK) was via the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act meant to snuff out the 1st KKK's terrorism campaign--even giving the President authority to bring in troops en.wikipedia.org 13/x
en.wikipedia.org
And the KKK Act *WORKED* for a time, until Confederates aligned with the "Southern Democratic Party" did a hostile takeover of the national party from within (yes, Confederates have pulled the Southern Strategy at least twice, with both of the major political parties in the US). 14/x But the hijacking happened, the UDC's campaign of Confederacy Historical Revisionism went into full swing starting in the 1880s, and by 1905 you had full-on KKK Revisionism via a certain book series by one Thomas Dixon Jr. dedicated to promoting Lost Cause historical revisionism. 15/x And that book series was just part of a LOT of books coming out pushing Lost Causeism/Confederacy Historical Revisionism, but one book in the series--"The Clansman"--was full on KKK revisionism, and became *wildly* popular in the US--and even THEN was being called out as revisionist. 16/x And right as a certain Mr. Borglum got a commission offer, that bit of tripe called "The Clansman" had actually been made into a silent movie called "The Birth Of A Nation"...that turned out to be the first motion picture blockbuster. It also resulted in the birth of the 2nd KKK. 17/x This steady stream of historical revisionism (all to an end of "The Confederacy Did Nothing Wrong") resulted in groups as far afield as California and Indiana starting up *new* KKK chapters--the Indiana KKK chapter in particular being *directly* linked to modern Christian Nationalism. 18/x And this in turn led to things as disparate as the KKK (in full white robes and hoods, yet!) being given keys to the city and included in Fourth of July parades in some parts of the US, and violence against African-Americans ramping up leading to pogroms like the Tulsa Race Massacre. 19/x (And no, I'm not kidding about the 2nd KKK and Christian Nationalism having a direct lineage. The co-founder of the Indiana KKK--effectively the heart of the 2nd KKK--recruited one William Branham to both the KKK *and* his traveling-preacher circuit targeting KKK-linked churches. 20/x (Branham in turn started his "Latter Rain" movement, which (after Branham was finally forced to step down in light of a fraud scandal) evolved into the Manifest Sons of God movement, and MSoG-descent Christian Nationalism including the New Apostolic Reformation. Yes, I'm quite serious.) 21/x Anyways, at the same time as this massive push towards Confederacy Historical Revisionism was taking place...the United Daughters of the Confederacy was throwing up statues all over the place to dead traitors, often *explicitly* labeling them as memorials to the cause of white supremacy. 22/x And it's at THIS point, when the KKK was somehow seen as *respectable* again in white American society (and Woodrow Wilson himself was infamously racist)...that the UDC branch in Georgia came to Borglum and asked "Wanna carve a bunch of dead traitors into a mountainside outside of Atlanta?" 23/x And as it turned out, Borglum started designing his FIRST mountain defacement RIGHT as "Birth of a Nation" came out and chapters of the 2nd KKK ended up being *MAJOR* funders of the defacement of Stone Mountain. Including box office receipts from "Birth of a Nation" itself. 24/x And the one area where the UDC and Borglum came into conflict is that the UDC wanted a bit more KKK rep in the defacement and Borglum was "but my VISION" (he wanted to concentrate on traitors who would show their faces) They compromised...with a KKK altar at the base of Stone Mountain. 25/x At the same time, Borglum was hanging out a LOT with members of Georgia's KKK branch, got *very* involved in KKK politics re Stone Mountain, and actually got very involved in the 2nd KKK itself becoming a major political force (by the 20s the KKK had all but taken over Indiana's state govt) 26/x Borglum was at KKK rallies (and not at the side counter-protesting; counter-protests against the Klan were not yet a Thing). He was on KKK committees. He actively served as a mediator when KKK groups threatened to split into different factions (as happened in Indiana). And it got worse 27/x Remember how I noted "Hitler sticking with art wouldn't have necessarily helped" about twenty posts ago? Borglum actually was racist as hell even BEFORE he joined the KKK. He referred to immigrants as "skippered assassins". Claimed American immigration made the US an "alien scrap heap". 28/x Borglum was part of a long tradition of self-hating descendants of immigrants (he was ultimately of Danish descent) who wanted to bar the door shut--and right at the time the 2nd KKK was making its rise and the Confederacy Denial Movement was in swing, the US was becoming less welcoming 29/x There had been (from really the beginnings of the US) anti-immigrant sentiment to some extent or another, but by the 1880s you started having actual movements to restrict immigration from non-traditionally-Anglo-Saxon, non-traditionally-Nordic parts of the world and to shut the "golden door". 30/x This was the era of the court case of whether Wong Kim Ark was a US citizen under the 14th Amendment (it was ruled he was), which led to laws against naturalization of Asian-Americans; this was an era where the doors *did* shut in the 20s to Eastern European Jews with horrific consequences 31/x And even in the 1880s to 1900s in Europe, a lot of the nationalist movements had taken a decidedly racist direction (Fascism, Falangism and the Nazi party had precedents as far back as the 1880s), so to say that Borglum was almost the *perfect* 2nd KKK recruit isn't too far from the truth. 32/x As insane as it sounds, there's even a letter on record where Borglum *literally tried to recruit a friend in New Jersey to the KKK* back in the early 20s--by which time Borglum was almost certainly more than "Klan-curious". And it got worse. CONSIDERABLY worse, as it turns out. 33/x It turns out that Borglum was besties with the Grand Dragon of Indiana's KKK (the most influential 2nd KKK group in the nation, and the one with links to Branham and by descent the NAR). He even at one point ranted about some, uh, decidedly UNUSUAL views on slavery and why it was bad 34/x Specifically, Borglum thought "slavery was bad" NOT because, you know, chattel slavery is a grave human rights violation...but because having slaves let non-white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants in and thus interfered with the purity of America being a Whites Only Country. Yes, I am serious. 35/x
So Borglum also had. A definite Reputation of being An Artiste (in the general sense of a Kanye West sort, which is to say "I am an arrogant bastard that will have Fits and also have an Ego that has its own gravity attraction well") and exhausted the patience of the UDF, who sacked him. 36/x And so in a fit of Rage, Borglum destroyed all his models for his *first* defacement of a mountain and hecked right out of Atlanta before he could be busted for destroying private property By that point, he'd picked up ANOTHER job--this time in South Dakota for the state historian. 37/x And while that state historian STILL wanted to deface a sacred site (because white folks in the 20s), his ORIGINAL concept was vaguely more inclusive--he'd have included Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea and made it more of a tribute to the West Borglum was "NO. ALL WHITE PRESIDENTS". 38/x And not *just* "All white Presidents", but two of them explicitly as slaveholders, and pretty much each and every one well recognized First Nations peoples as Presidents that were racist as Hell He couldn't have made more of an absolute "fuck you & all you stand for" to the Lakota if he tried 39/x Now, this is NOT the kind of stuff the NPS would tell you about the making of Mount Rushmore, and honestly at this point in the nation's history it'd probably be flatly ILLEGAL for the NPS to go into that detail. The Smithsonian does: smithsonianmag.com 40/x
www.smithsonianmag.com
(Note: I am pleasantly surprised the article above hasn't been expurgated. Then again, I'm pleasantly surprised that the Dysadministration hasn't forced Great Smokies National Park to remove the Cherokee name of Kuwohi or "Mulberry place" from the highest peak in the park.) 41/x So, well, TFG wanting to deface the Six Grandfathers further does (unfortunately) play to trope. I will state that I think that the mountain looked better when it was known as the Six Grandfathers. Kind of like how I think the highest peak in the Smokies sounds better as "Kuwohi". 42/end