Table of Contents
Introduction: From Shrine of Democracy to Contested Landscape
For millions, the first glimpse of Mount Rushmore, whether on a postcard or in person, inspires a sense of awe.
The colossal, 60-foot faces of four American presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln—are etched into the granite of South Dakota’s Black Hills, a testament to a nation’s ambition and ideals.
The official narrative, curated and promoted by the National Park Service, presents the monument as a “Shrine of Democracy”.1
Each president was chosen to represent a cornerstone of the American story: Washington for the nation’s
birth, Jefferson for its growth, Roosevelt for its development, and Lincoln for its preservation.3
It is a simple, powerful, and deeply patriotic story.
For years, this was the only story I knew.
It was a clean narrative of greatness, a physical embodiment of the American experiment’s triumphs.
Yet, fragments of a different, more complicated story began to surface—murmurs of a land dispute, of a sculptor with a shadowed past, of the presidents themselves having legacies far more complex than the one-word summaries assigned to them.
The pristine image began to crack.
The awe gave way to a profound cognitive dissonance.
How could a Shrine of Democracy exist on land that many Native Americans consider illegally occupied and desecrated?6 How could a monument to freedom be conceived by a man with ties to the Ku Klux Klan?8
The struggle to reconcile these two narratives led to an epiphany: Mount Rushmore is not a single, unified object to be understood.
It is a palimpsest—a text where one story has been violently carved over another, and another over that, with the faint traces of the original still visible beneath.
To truly understand “who is on Mount Rushmore and why,” one cannot simply read the top layer.
One must become an archaeologist of memory, excavating the layers of myth, controversy, and historical complexity.
This report is the result of that excavation.
It argues that Mount Rushmore is far more than a patriotic monument; it is a deeply contested semiotic landscape.
Its granite faces tell not one story, but multiple, conflicting narratives about American history, power, and identity.
To comprehend its meaning, we must begin not with the carving, but with the stone itself.
Part I: The Stone – A Sacred and Stolen Foundation
The story of Mount Rushmore does not begin in 1923 with a state historian’s idea to boost tourism.4
It begins thousands of years earlier, with the land itself.
The granite that forms the monument is not a blank canvas; it is a foundational text, and its history is one of sacredness, solemn promises, and profound betrayal.
Paha Sapa, The Heart of Everything That Is
Long before it was named for a New York lawyer in 1885 8, the mountain range known as the Black Hills was, and remains, a place of immense spiritual significance to the Lakota (Sioux) Nation and other regional tribes like the Cheyenne and Arapaho.8
The Lakota call this land
Paha Sapa, the “hills that are black”.12
For them, it is not merely a geographic feature but the
axis mundi, the sacred center of the world.8
It is the site of their creation story, where their ancestors first emerged from Wind Cave to take human form.11
It is a place for prayer, vision quests, and gathering medicinal plants, a sanctuary the Lakota refer to as “The Heart of Everything That Is”.7
The specific peak that would become Mount Rushmore held its own sacred name: Tunkasila Sakpe Paha, or Six Grandfathers Mountain.8
This name derives from a vision of the Lakota holy man Nicholas Black Elk, who saw the six sacred directions—West, East, North, South, Above, and Below—represented as ancestral spirits, or Grandfathers, embodying wisdom and love.4
The mountain was, in essence, a church, a place of deep devotion.
A Treaty Made, A Treaty Broken
Following a period of intense conflict known as Red Cloud’s War, the U.S. government sought to establish a lasting peace on the Northern Plains.14
The result was the
Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, a binding legal agreement between the United States and the Lakota Nation.12
The treaty explicitly recognized the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, set aside for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation of the Indians”.15
The U.S. government promised that this land would be protected “forever” from American settlement.12
This solemn promise lasted only six years.
In 1874, Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer led a military expedition into the Black Hills, ostensibly to scout a location for a new fort but with geologists and miners in tow.4
When the expedition confirmed the presence of gold in French Creek, the news sparked a massive, illegal rush of thousands of white prospectors and settlers into the heart of the Great Sioux Reservation.9
The U.S. government, which was treaty-bound to prevent such incursions, did little to stop them and soon began pressuring the Lakota to cede the very land it had promised to protect.7
The Great Sioux War and the Confiscation of 1877
The flagrant violation of the 1868 treaty led directly to the Great Sioux War of 1876-1877, also known as the Black Hills War.12
This was not a spontaneous conflict but a war of resistance fought by the Lakota and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies to defend their sacred land from invasion.17
While the Native forces achieved a famous victory over Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June 1876, the U.S. military’s superior resources and relentless campaigning ultimately prevailed.13
Following the war, the U.S. government abandoned all pretense of honoring the treaty.
In an 1877 act of Congress, often referred to as the “steal the Black Hills act,” the government unilaterally seized the land, redrew the reservation boundaries, and forced the Lakota onto smaller, more manageable parcels.4
This act of confiscation was a direct violation of the government’s own legal framework.
“The Black Hills Are Not for Sale”: A Century of Legal Resistance
The Lakota never accepted the legitimacy of the 1877 confiscation and began what would become one of the longest legal battles in U.S. history.12
The fight culminated over a century later in the landmark 1980 Supreme Court case,
United States v.
Sioux Nation of Indians.
In a stunning decision, the nation’s highest court ruled that the Black Hills had been taken illegally.
The court’s majority opinion did not mince words, stating, “A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history”.9
The Court awarded the Sioux Nation a financial settlement of over $100 million as compensation.7
In a powerful act of principle, the Sioux Nation refused the payment.
They declared that their sacred land had never been for sale and that they would accept nothing less than its return.9
That money, now valued at over $1.4 billion with interest, remains untouched in a government account, a testament to an unresolved injustice.11
This history is not merely a backdrop to the monument; it is the very foundation upon which it is built.
The carving of Mount Rushmore did not take place on neutral ground but on stolen land—land recognized as stolen by the U.S. legal system itself.
The monument is therefore not just on contested land; it is an active and enduring symbol of that contestation.
Its very existence serves as a permanent, daily re-enactment of the original treaty violation, a celebration of conquest carved into the heart of a sacred landscape.
It is what has led critics to label it not a “Shrine of Democracy,” but a “Shrine of Hypocrisy”.4
Part II: The Sculptor – The Hand of Manifest Destiny
To understand the message carved into the mountain, one must first understand the man who held the chisel.
Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore, was not a dispassionate artist hired for a job.
He was a man of immense ambition, towering ego, and a specific, driving ideology.
His personal history and political vision are not incidental footnotes; they are embedded in the granite, shaping the monument’s intended meaning as much as any hammer or stick of dynamite.
Mount Rushmore is as much a monument to Borglum’s vision of America as it is to the four presidents.
From Stone Mountain to Mount Rushmore
Before Borglum ever set foot in the Black Hills, he was deeply involved in another monumental mountain carving: the Confederate Memorial on Stone Mountain, Georgia.9
In 1915, he was approached by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), a group dedicated to promoting the “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War, to create a massive relief of Confederate heroes.9
Borglum’s involvement went beyond mere artistry; he became associated with the newly reborn Ku Klux Klan, which was a major financial backer of the project.8
The president of the UDC, Helen Plane, wrote to Borglum expressing her hope that the monument would feature a KKK altar, feeling it was “due to the KKK that saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain”.9
Borglum’s work on this shrine to the Confederacy, though he would ultimately leave the project after a dispute, established his reputation as a man who could tame mountains.19
It was this experience that brought him to the attention of Doane Robinson, the South Dakota historian looking for an artist to create a tourist attraction.4
The ideological through-line from a monument celebrating regional white supremacy to one celebrating national expansion is direct and unmistakable.
The Vision: “America Will March Along That Skyline”
When Doane Robinson first conceived of a carving in the Black Hills, he envisioned regional heroes of the American West.
His proposed list included figures like the explorers Lewis and Clark, their guide Sacagawea, and even the great Lakota leaders Red Cloud and Crazy Horse.4
Borglum flatly rejected this vision.
He had no interest in a project of mere local significance; he wanted a national, and indeed, a nationalist subject.6
His choice of the four presidents was a deliberate ideological statement.
He selected Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt to tell a specific, linear story of American power and expansion.
By invoking Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and Roosevelt’s acquisition of the Panama Canal, the monument became a grand narrative of Manifest Destiny—the 19th-century doctrine that U.S. expansion across the continent was both justified and inevitable.19
When Borglum first saw the granite spires of the Black Hills, he declared, “America will march along that skyline”.21
This single sentence perfectly captures his imperial vision: the transformation of a natural, sacred landscape into a symbol of national conquest and progress.
A Man of “Thor’s Dimension”
Executing such a vision required a personality of commensurate scale.
Borglum was described as brash, temperamental, stubborn, and filled with an almost divine sense of purpose.19
He was a perfectionist who would fire his best workers in a fit of pique, only to have his son Lincoln hire them back.19
He saw himself as an artist operating on a plane above ordinary men.
In his journal, he wrote, “I must see, think, feel and draw in Thor’s dimension”.19
This colossal ego was precisely what was needed to conceive of and complete a project that men half his age would not attempt.22
But this same hubris reveals the profound arrogance at the heart of the enterprise.
It is the arrogance of one culture deciding it has the right to remake a landscape held sacred by another, transforming it into its own “tableau of prominent white men”.19
The connection between Borglum’s work at Stone Mountain and his masterpiece at Mount Rushmore suggests an ideological laundering.
He did not abandon the core principles of his Confederate patrons; he sublimated them.
He took the foundational idea of celebrating a dominant group’s conquest and swapped regional heroes for national ones.
The theme of Manifest Destiny that he championed for Rushmore is the national-level equivalent of the regional “Lost Cause” myth—both are narratives that justify the power of a white, Anglo-Saxon civilization over other peoples.
In this light, Mount Rushmore can be seen as a grander, more successful, and more subtly coded version of Stone Mountain, shifting the celebration from regional racial dominance to national imperial glory.
Part III: The Subjects – A Critical Re-examination of the Pantheon
The official justification for the four presidents on Mount Rushmore is a study in brevity: Birth, Growth, Development, Preservation.
This simple framework, however, obscures the deeply complex and often contradictory legacies of the men themselves.
When examined critically, the historical records reveal that these figures are not uncomplicated heroes but are profoundly entangled in the very issues of racial inequality and territorial expansion that make the monument’s location so contentious.
The selection of these men was not incidental; it was a curated choice that, when viewed through the lens of early 20th-century nationalism, constructed a seamless narrative of American Manifest Destiny.
The controversies surrounding them are not bugs in the system, but features of the very “accomplishments” being celebrated.
To understand the full story, one must deconstruct the official symbolism and confront the historical complexities of each figure.
| President | Official Symbolism (“The Why”) | Historical Complexities & Controversies | |
| George Washington | Birth of the Nation 2 | Lifelong enslaver of hundreds 23; aggressive policies of Indian dispossession earned him the Iroquois name “Town Destroyer”.7 | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Growth of the Nation (Louisiana Purchase) 2 | Enslaver of over 600 people 26; fathered children with the enslaved Sally Hemings 26; articulated racist theories in | Notes on the State of Virginia 29; architect of Indian Removal policies.7 |
| Abraham Lincoln | Preservation of the Nation 2 | Suspended habeas corpus, imprisoning thousands without trial 30; stated his primary goal was preserving the Union, “without freeing any slaves” if possible 33; held complex and evolving, but initially prejudiced, views on racial equality.30 | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | Development of the Nation (Panama Canal) 2 | Proponent of a racial hierarchy and eugenics 36; imperialist “Big Stick” foreign policy 38; held hostile views toward Native Americans, calling them “savages” 40 and stating “nine out of every 10” good Indians are dead Indians.7 |
George Washington – The Paradox of Liberty
George Washington is immortalized for representing the Birth of the United States.
He is the indispensable leader of the Revolution and the first president, the “Father of His Country”.2
Yet, this champion of liberty was a lifelong enslaver.
Washington inherited his first enslaved people at age eleven and continued to acquire, manage, and profit from the forced labor of hundreds of men, women, and children throughout his life at Mount Vernon.24
While his private views on slavery evolved, his actions often prioritized his economic interests.
As president, he actively circumvented a Pennsylvania law that would have freed his household slaves by rotating them out of the state before they could establish residency.42
He relentlessly pursued fugitives like Oney Judge, expressing outrage at her “ingratitude” for seeking her own freedom.43
Furthermore, his vision of national birth came at a great cost to Native Americans.
During the Revolution, he ordered a campaign against the Iroquois Confederacy that was so destructive it earned him the name Caunotaucarius, or “Town Destroyer”.7
His administration pursued policies that treated Native lands as territory to be acquired for the expanding republic, setting a precedent for the dispossession that would follow.
The paradox of Washington is the paradox of early America: a nation conceived in liberty while practicing enslavement and conquest.
Thomas Jefferson – An Empire of Liberty and Subjugation
Thomas Jefferson was chosen to symbolize the Growth of the nation, primarily for the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which doubled the country’s size.2
He is also revered as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, the man who penned the immortal words, “all men are created equal”.26
The contradiction between his words and his life is perhaps the most profound of the four figures.
Jefferson enslaved over 600 people during his lifetime.26
The historical and DNA evidence is now overwhelming that for decades, the widowed Jefferson maintained a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who was also his late wife’s half-sister.26
He fathered at least six of her children, all of whom were born into slavery and remained his legal property.26
Beyond his personal actions, Jefferson articulated some of the foundational racist theories of his era.
In his book
Notes on the State of Virginia, he speculated that Black people were inferior to whites “in the endowments both of body and mind”.29
He was also a key architect of what would become the Indian Removal policy, laying the intellectual groundwork for aggressively acquiring Native lands west of the Mississippi.7
His “empire of liberty” was built on a foundation of Black subjugation and Indigenous displacement.
Abraham Lincoln – The Great Emancipator and the Great Pragmatist
Abraham Lincoln’s place on the mountain is for the Preservation of the nation through the crucible of the Civil War.2
He is remembered as the “Great Emancipator,” the man who ended slavery.
This legacy, while powerful, is a simplification of a far more pragmatic and politically complex reality.
Lincoln’s primary and explicitly stated goal throughout the war was to save the Union, not to abolish slavery.33
In a famous 1862 letter, he wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it”.33
His landmark Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was a strategic military order, not a moral decree of universal freedom.
It deliberately applied only to states in rebellion, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states like Maryland and Kentucky.33
His personal views on race were also complicated.
While he always believed slavery was morally wrong, he held many of the prejudices of his time, supported the colonization of freed slaves outside the United States, and only cautiously and belatedly came to endorse Black suffrage.30
Furthermore, his presidency saw an unprecedented expansion of executive power, most controversially in his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, which allowed for the arrest and imprisonment of thousands of civilian dissenters without trial.30
Theodore Roosevelt – The Conservationist and the Colonialist
Theodore Roosevelt was selected to represent the Development of the United States, recognizing his role in ushering in a new era of American power on the world stage, symbolized by the construction of the Panama Canal.2
He is also celebrated as a pioneering conservationist who protected millions of acres of public land.40
This progressive image, however, coexisted with a deeply ingrained belief in a racial hierarchy.36
Roosevelt was a vocal proponent of eugenics, the pseudoscientific movement that advocated for selective breeding to improve the human race.37
His views on Native Americans were particularly hostile and reflective of the era’s social Darwinism.
He referred to them as “savages” and wrote that their extermination was beneficial for the advance of civilization.40
In an 1886 speech, he made his infamous remark: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are”.7
This worldview directly informed his foreign policy.
The “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine asserted America’s right to act as an “international police power” in Latin America, justifying numerous military interventions.38
His “Big Stick” diplomacy was an unapologetic exercise in American imperialism, an extension of the same Manifest Destiny that had dispossessed the Lakota a generation earlier.
In selecting these four men, Gutzon Borglum was not merely choosing great presidents; he was curating a specific narrative.
Washington’s “Birth,” Jefferson’s “Growth,” Roosevelt’s “Development,” and Lincoln’s “Preservation” were the four acts in a grand play of American continental and hemispheric domination.
The very actions that now appear as controversies were, to the monument’s creator, the essential qualifications for inclusion.
Part IV: The Symbol – The Politics of National Memory
Having excavated the history of the land, the sculptor, and the subjects, the final layer to analyze is Mount Rushmore’s function as a cultural symbol.
The monument is not a passive historical artifact; it is an active agent in the creation and maintenance of national memory.
It operates as a powerful tool for myth-making, using the very landscape as a medium for a state-sponsored ideology.
Understanding its symbolic power requires examining what stories it tells, how it tells them, and, most importantly, what stories it silences.
Carving a National Myth
National myths are the inspiring, often simplified or idealized, narratives that nations tell about themselves to affirm a core set of values and create a shared identity.48
Mount Rushmore is a physical, granite incarnation of the American national myth of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
It is a masterclass in what scholars of memory call “mythmaking,” a process that presents a selective and often romanticized version of the past as historical truth.50
Political elites and state actors often erect monuments to promote these selective historical narratives, focusing on convenient events and individuals while deliberately obliterating what is discomforting or contradictory.51
Mount Rushmore performs this function perfectly.
It tells a triumphant story of four great leaders who built a nation.
It obliterates the discomforting truths: that this “birth” and “growth” was predicated on the violent conquest of Indigenous peoples and the brutal exploitation of enslaved Africans.
The monument sanitizes history, transforming a complex and bloody process of nation-building into a serene and heroic tableau.50
A Monument’s Many Meanings: Semiotics of the Stone
Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, provides a powerful lens for analyzing how monuments convey meaning and ideology.51
Monuments are not just stone and mortar; they are “built forms erected to confer dominant meanings on space”.52
Every aspect of Mount Rushmore’s design is a semiotic choice intended to communicate a specific message:
- Scale: The colossal size of the 60-foot faces is not arbitrary. It communicates power, permanence, and a god-like status for its subjects, elevating them from mere mortals to national deities.4 Borglum himself spoke of working in “Thor’s dimension,” reflecting this intent to create a work of divine, not human, scale.19
- Location: The choice to carve these faces into a mountain held sacred by the Lakota is the monument’s most profound and aggressive symbolic act. It is a literal and figurative overwriting of one culture’s sacred text with the political iconography of its conqueror. It is an assertion of cultural, political, and spiritual dominance.
- Material: The use of granite, a stone that erodes at an infinitesimal rate of just one inch every 10,000 years, was a deliberate choice.4 It imbues the monument’s message with a sense of permanence and eternity, suggesting that the version of American history it represents is an unchanging, natural, and inevitable truth.
However, meaning is never entirely controlled by the creator.
Once erected, monuments become social properties whose meanings are contested.51
The dominant narrative of Mount Rushmore has been actively resisted through acts of counter-semiotics.
The occupations by Native American activists from groups like the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1970 and 1971 were acts of symbolic warfare.4
By climbing the monument, setting up camp, and renaming it “Mount Crazy Horse,” they physically reclaimed the space and re-inscribed it with their own counter-narrative, challenging the state’s monopoly on its meaning.4
Mount Rushmore as National “Brand Storytelling”
In the modern context, the function of Mount Rushmore can be understood through the lens of nation branding.
Nation branding is the process by which a country tells a compelling story about itself to shape global perceptions and build a strong national identity.54
Mount Rushmore is arguably one of America’s most successful and enduring pieces of brand storytelling.
For decades, it has projected a powerful brand image of strength, democracy, historical grandeur, and freedom.
It is a key asset in the “brand” of American Exceptionalism.
This branding effort has been remarkably successful, drawing over two million visitors annually and becoming a globally recognized symbol of the United States.4
However, like any corporate brand, the national brand projected by Mount Rushmore is facing a crisis of authenticity.
Activists, historians, and Indigenous communities are acting as consumer watchdogs, pointing out the profound disconnect between the brand promise (a “Shrine of Democracy”) and the product’s actual history (conquest, racism, and broken treaties).
This dynamic mirrors the way modern companies like Patagonia engage with national monuments, leveraging their protection as part of their own values-based brand storytelling, demonstrating that these sites are active arenas for defining what a brand—or a nation—stands for.55
Ultimately, Mount Rushmore serves as a masterclass in the use of the physical landscape for political communication.
The U.S. government, through its agent Gutzon Borglum, physically transformed a mountain into a permanent broadcast channel for a singular, state-sponsored national myth.
By carving the faces of its leaders onto a sacred site, it created an unparalleled piece of propaganda that continuously transmits a story of its own legitimacy and glory, while simultaneously working to erase the history of those it displaced.
Conclusion: Toward a More Complete Story
The journey to answer the seemingly simple question of “who is on Mount Rushmore and why” leads not to a simple answer, but to a profound and unsettling understanding of the nature of history and memory in the United States.
The excavation of the monument’s many layers reveals a story far removed from the sanitized narrative of a “Shrine of Democracy.” It reveals a sacred land, Paha Sapa, that was guaranteed to the Lakota by a solemn treaty, only to be illegally seized when gold was discovered.
It reveals a sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, whose nationalist vision was forged in the fires of Confederate myth-making and an affinity for white supremacy.
It reveals four presidents whose legacies of “birth, growth, development, and preservation” are inextricably linked to the violent realities of Indigenous dispossession, African enslavement, and American imperialism.
And finally, it reveals a symbol—a national myth carved in granite—that has for decades successfully projected a story of American greatness while silencing the voices of those who paid the price for it.
Mount Rushmore is not merely a work of art; it is a political statement, a declaration of conquest, and a powerful instrument of national myth-making.
The challenge presented by such a powerful and beloved monument is not simple.
A call for its destruction would ignore the complex meaning it holds for millions of Americans and the reality of its permanence.
Rather, the path forward lies in a commitment to telling a more complete and honest story.
The National Park Service itself has acknowledged that its mandate includes stewarding “truths about the American past, even truths that complicate the easy narratives”.50
Fulfilling this mandate at Mount Rushmore requires moving beyond the one-dimensional story of the four presidents.
It requires placing the Lakota narrative of Paha Sapa and the broken treaty of 1868 at the forefront of the visitor experience.
It requires an honest accounting of Gutzon Borglum’s ideology.
It requires presenting the four presidents not as flawless icons, but as the complex, contradictory, and deeply flawed men they were.
It requires acknowledging that the monument itself is a symbol of a painful and ongoing conflict over land and memory.
Only by embracing this complexity can the site evolve.
Only by adding the silenced narratives to the dominant one can Mount Rushmore move from being a one-sided monument of conquest to a true and challenging forum for understanding the American story in all its pain, paradox, and possibility.
The stone has been carved, but the story is not over.
It is our responsibility to ensure all its chapters are told.
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