Tuesday, September 11, 2018

For the Record: It's Complicated



Dinesh asking the big questions:


One of the things that make him look especially stupid here is the apparent belief that there's some kind of open competition going on—as if, from some point in time or other in history, people had been inspired every few years to put another head on the rock, debated it, and gotten to work, and as if there might still be some room up there. Guess who else is that stupid:
[Rep. Kristi] Noem, who is also running for governor of South Dakota, relayed a conversation she had with the president during her first visit to the Oval Office soon after he took office in January 2017. Speaking with Vermillion resident Mitchell Olson during the filming of a carpool karaoke show, Noem described her first brush with the concept of "Mount Trumpmore" being erected atop the 77-year-old Keystone, South Dakota, landmark.
"He said, 'Kristi, come on over here. Shake my hand,'" Noem said, according to an Argus Leaderreport. "I shook his hand, and I said, 'Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.' And he goes, 'Do you know it's my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?'"
Noem recalled that only one of them thought it was a joke. “I started laughing,” said the state’s lone U.S. representative. “He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious.”
But Maureen McGee-Ballinger, public information officer at Mount Rushmore, said it’s not possible to add Trump’s facial carving into Mount Rushmore to join George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
"There is no more carvable space up on the sculpture," McGee-Ballinger told the Argus Leader.... (Benjamin Fearnow, Newsweek) 

In fact, as everybody but Donald Trump used to know, the monument was the project principally of a single mind, that of the American sculptor John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum (1867-1941), building on an idea from the South Dakota politician Doane Robinson, whose (terrible) idea had been to sculpt the Black Hills monoliths known as The Needles into the likenesses of famous South Dakotans.

The Needles. Photo by Doug Knuth, 2012, via Wikipedia.
He consulted Borglum, who was getting famous for his monumental ideas at the time (mid-1920s), and who persuaded him that Mount Rushmore was a more spectacular site, and that he should broaden the subject to encompass America itself, with the four enormous heads that would match the scale of the mountain, and Borglum who chose the presidents. So what does the absence of Democrats say?
Not sure I want to stand by that, actually, that Borglum picked an overbalance of Republicans to gratify the administration, though they did need Coolidge's greenlight to get to work on the thing, on federal land. It seems to me that you could make a kind of allegory of the party system out of the first three choices—Jefferson representing the Democrats' ideal as Lincoln represented that of the Republicans, and Washington the higher ideal of nonpartisanship—and perhaps Borglum might have thought of Teddy Roosevelt not as a Republican but as a representative of the new party he'd started in 1912 in a temper tantrum with his ex–vice president W.H. Taft, the Progressive or Bull Moose party (though he had in fact returned to the Republicans, after a temper tantrum with Wisconsin's Robert LaFollette, in the 1918 midterms, shortly before his death), and Coolidge had no reason to love him. Why not brave General Grant for another Republican, or stuffed-shirt handsome Major McKinley?

Another thought is that maybe Roosevelt functioned as a representative of the West, of the Dakotas, where he had the famous ranch (North, not South) and found himself as a man, or at least written his first popular books (check it out). Maybe it was Doane Robinson's idea.

And finally, Borglum kind of owed Roosevelt, who had made a point of praising his 1908 equestrian statue of General Philip Sheridan in Sheridan Circler in Washington, and exhibited another piece of his, a head of Lincoln carved from a six-ton block of marble, also 1908, in the White House before it went to its ultimate home in the US Capitol Crypt. He might have felt like putting Roosevelt's head on Mount Rushmore as a way of returning the favor.

It was clear, on the other hand, that Borglum didn't have any specific objections to Democrats, at least if they were relatively similar in terms of racism, attachment to eugenics policy, and Progressivism (because, outside the childlike partisan certainties of D'Souza's world, it's complicated) as Teddy was:
That was the cool thing. As if he'd wanted to make sure any future critic wouldn't make the mistake D'Souza made.

But I need to acknowledge that it's not that simple, because Borglum was also a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a knight of the Imperial Koncilium in 1923, and one of his first gigantic projects was a plan for a monument to the heroes of the Confederacy on the face of Stone Mountain, Georgia, eventually a frieze depicting Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and "Stonewall" Jackson riding around the mountain at the head of an artillery unit, with
a Ku Klux Klan altar in his plans for the memorial to acknowledge a request of Helen Plane in 1915, who wrote to him: "I feel it is due to the KKK that saved us from Negro domination and carpetbag rule, that it be immortalized on Stone Mountain"
Though he fought relentlessly with everybody involved through two years of on-site work and finally dumped them all and left Georgia for South Dakota in 1925.

But I wonder what D'Souza might say with his well-known certainty on the one hand that the Second Klan (along with the First and Third) was entirely an outfit of the Democratic Party and on the other hand that Borglum's masterpiece is a masterpiece because it cuts the Democrats out of the picture. I guess he'd probably change the subject; anything, rather than acknowledge that it's complicated.
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