Tonight, the world's largest sculpture...
a shrine of democracy.
How did it get there?
The story behind the towering faces.
Mount Rushmore...
(explosion)
On American Experience.
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NARRATOR: Deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota
stands one of the biggest and unlikeliest monuments
on the face of the earth--
a feat of modern engineering
that relied on the ingenuity of the ancient Greeks--
a carving of surprising delicacy,
fashioned with jackhammers and dynamite,
a work of public art
that began without a whisper of public support.
Its size, its remote location, its compelling oddness
begs the question, how'd it get there?
The answer begins with one man:
an excitable, erratic and gifted sculptor
named Gutzon Borglum.
MAN: When he was angry, he was furious.
When he was generous, he was overwhelming.
When he was being petty, he was penurious.
He was a hyperactive man
who traveled in the middle of a self-generated whirlwind.
WOMAN: But he was so full of energy.
I mean, it was a vital force within him, burning within him.
He could charm anybody to do anything
if he really put his mind to it.
And he could also raise a terrible fuss if you didn't.
The dimensions of Washington's head
would permit the Sphinx of Egypt
to lie between the end of the nose and the eyebrows.
NARRATOR: Gutzon Borglum was an egomaniacal genius
and a fetching blowhard,
a bullish patriot and a wifty dreamer.
When he began Mount Rushmore,
he still believed that one man could change the world.
(explosion)
A 16-year struggle with the mountain--
through withering criticism, lack of trained workers,
constant delay and crushing debt--
would test that plain, rock-hard,
American-made conviction.
NARRATOR: On October 1, 1925,
a few hundred souls made their way up a rough mountain pass
toward a seldom seen peak in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
That day, at the base of Mount Rushmore,
Gutzon Borglum announced his intent
to create the great American memorial.
In the mountain granite, he would carve a monument
befitting the world's newest power:
statues of four American presidents,
more than 30 stories tall.
Gutzon Borglum's monument would dwarf the Statue of Liberty,
the Sphinx of Egypt, the Colossus of Rhodes.
WOMAN: If you start way back when we first came here,
my father was looked upon as a weirdo and a crank.
They thought he was really just very peculiar
and he had big ideas that would go nowhere.
MAN: This is a crazy idea
in a society that is so recently removed from the frontier
that everything had to be utilitarian.
It had to have a purpose.
And of what good were faces carved on a mountain
even if you could do it, and who knew if you could do it?
MAN: First he told the Rapid City businessmen supposedly
that he didn't need financial support from them.
Then after that very first dedication ceremony
in, uh, I believe in October of 1925,
when he had dinner with them afterward,
he said he really needed that $50,000 now.
This is the sort of thing
that angered the people of South Dakota,
who began to become very skeptical about him.
NARRATOR: In 1925, Gutzon Borglum wasn't much concerned
with what the locals thought of him.
His critics, he said, were mere horseflies.
If South Dakotans were too thick
to seize the opportunity in this magnificent work of art,
then they didn't deserve Gutzon Borglum.
That's the way Borglum saw it,
and that's all that mattered to him.
All his life, John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum
was hard-headed and self-absorbed.
As a child, he decided
he would make himself someone extraordinary
and he spent his life in that effort,
fueled by anger, energy and ego.
The son of Danish immigrants, Gutzon was born in Idaho in 1867
and raised in the West.
His father had been part of the Mormon migration west;
his mother he barely knew.
MAN: Borglum was a child of polygamy.
His father had two wives when he lived in Idaho--
Borglum's birth mother and his mother's sister.
His father decided he didn't want to be a Mormon anymore
and decided to go back to Omaha, where polygamy was taboo.
It was decided
that Gutzon's mother would be discarded from the family
and never spoken of again.
There were eight children in the family
and there had been two wives at one time,
and one, Gutzon's mother, actually left the family
and they were raised by the stepmother.
He ran away from home because he was unhappy and at that...
he started, I think, when he was only five years old,
and he finally built up a confidence within himself
that he could do what he desired to do.
MAN: He had a deep sense of his own abilities, I think.
He ran away from home a number of times to become an artist
and, uh, wound up in California at a very early age studying art
and, uh, he even said he was going to be famous
before he was 30.
NARRATOR: In his 20s, Gutzon moved from northern California
to London to Paris, painting landscapes and portraits,
trying on different styles,
supporting himself and his first wife with marginal success.
As he passed 30, Borglum was near broke, failing at marriage,
and worse, unknown.
CARTER: He was very distraught when he was in Europe
and he didn't feel like he was making money,
he didn't feel like he had a name for himself.
He wasn't happy,
and he wanted to change all that.
He wanted to be... be recognized.
NARRATOR: While in Paris, Borglum found his pole star, Auguste Rodin.
Rodin's work was sculpture cast anew--
modern, evocative and talked about.
In the glow that surrounded the great artist,
Borglum saw a reflection of his own future.
CARTER: In 1901, when he came back to the United States,
he just burst into New York City
sort of determined to become a very successful sculptor.
And within those first ten years,
he designed over a hundred pieces for St. John the Divine
in New York City,
he'd sold the marble Lincoln for the Rotunda,
he'd sold the Mares of Diomedes to the Metropolitan.
He'd done the Mackay statue in Reno, Nevada.
He'd done Sheridan in Washington, D.C.
I mean, in the first ten years, he was doing all these things.
HOUSER: Every really great artist has something in their personality
that they're able to impart into their work
that is unique and is only them.
With Borglum, I see the personality.
When I touch those surfaces a lot of time,
I often expect almost to feel a little glaze of electricity
that's traversing across the form.
There's a life to it, there's a sense of movement.
And I think they were done generally very quickly
and very fast.
My father said that oftentimes he would come in
and do something just like this and then it'd be done.
Sometimes he would even have his suit on and his Stetson,
wearing his Stetson hat, you know, and he would come in
and model for 15 minutes and he would say, "Cast it," you know,
and he'd walk out.
NARRATOR: Gutzon Borglum's most gripping creation was Gutzon Borglum.
From an obscure frontier boyhood,
he'd made himself literate, continental, magnetic,
a friend to the rich and famous,
lord of a 500-acre estate in Connecticut.
He was also rough around the edges, sharp in places
and apt to injure.
His politics could be crude:
anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant and racist.
Borglum lived a series of poses, each meant to call attention,
and he found that nothing drew attention like a public scrap.
He skirmished with the rector of St. John the Divine,
the mayor of New York, President Woodrow Wilson.
"He was no mute, shrinking artist," said one friend.
"He knew how to answer back.
And the press loved him."
Gutzon's harshest attacks were aimed at other artists.
He called one a "pinhead sculptor"
and claimed that most of the nation's public monuments
were worthless and should be dynamited.
This was America's Colossal Age, he said,
and American artists should celebrate it.
HOUSER: An artist has a great many elements to work with
to create something aesthetic.
You have the warmth and the coldness of color.
You have the smoothness and the roughness of texture.
You have the contrast from light and dark.
You also have, when you get to scale,
you find that scale is an aesthetic quality in itself.
In other words, when you see something extremely large,
it has an impact on you just because it's big.
NARRATOR: Borglum understood that most Americans could not be moved
by beauty alone.
"Sheer mass is emotional," he once wrote.
"There is something in sheer volume that awes and terrifies,
lifts us out of ourselves."
In 1915, the sculptor staked his reputation
on the conviction that America demanded scale.
That year, at a mountain in Georgia,
he made bold to promise the eighth wonder of the world:
a 400-foot-high, 1,500-foot-wide monument
to the Confederacy.
HOUSER: When Borglum was called down to Stone Mountain originally,
he was invited to do a small bust of Lee
and put it on top of the mountain.
And he told the Daughters of the Confederacy, he said,
"Putting a bust of Lee on top of that mountain
would be like pasting a postage stamp on a barn door."
You know, "It's incongruous.
"If you're going to talk about a mountain that size,
"you have to talk about a piece of sculpture
that's commensurate in one way or another."
That sort of opened the door, I think, to him
for mountain carving.
VHAY: Stone Mountain was the dream of Atlanta
and the southerners that were down there,
to have a commemorative memorial to Lee.
But they didn't have any money.
So he mortgaged the place in Connecticut
for a tremendous sum of money to get it started.
NARRATOR: By then, Borglum was a new father,
and he liked to keep his family close.
So with his second wife, Mary, and their two small children,
Lincoln and Mary Ellis,
Borglum set up a second household in Georgia.
He gave up his smaller, more personal work--
pipe dreams, he'd called them--
and went to work at a scale
no American artist had ever attempted.
The Confederate monument turned out
to be an exhilarating fight...
and nearly disastrous.
After a decade of planning, fund-raising and work,
Borglum had completed less than a tenth of the carving.
The Stone Mountain Association fired Borglum,
accusing him of "wasteful expenditures"
and an "ungovernable temper."
In a fit of anger, Borglum destroyed his working models.
The association, claiming ownership of those models,
swore out a warrant for his arrest.
So at the beginning of 1925,
Gutzon Borglum was a 57-year-old fugitive,
rheumatic, exhausted, publicly humiliated
and deeper in debt by the day.
VHAY: After Stone Mountain fell apart,
it was very hardscrabble a lot of the time,
but Mother was the one that kept payments up
and did the things that had to be done
and cut corners when it was possible.
CARTER: Mary's letters would be,
"How are we going to divide up this hundred dollars?
"Who needs to be paid this week?
"Who's not going to be paid?
And when is the next amount of money coming in?"
So they were down to the very nitty-gritty.
NARRATOR: Gutzon raced from Washington to North Carolina to Texas
trying to drum up new commissions,
but the best offer fell from the sky.
South Dakota's state historian, Doane Robinson,
had seen newspaper accounts of people driving to Georgia
just to see Gutzon's Stone Mountain carving.
Robinson's far-off, nearly forgotten state
was in dire need of roadside attraction,
and he thought this mountain-carving business
might be just the ticket.
So Robinson wrote Borglum
and asked him to consider a new project in the Black Hills,
maybe statues of Lewis and Clark,
Buffalo Bill, Chief Red Cloud--
something to draw the tourists.
Borglum took Robinson's suggestion and ran.
"Western figures are too parochial," he announced.
He would carve national heroes.
The first three were no-brainers:
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln.
The fourth would be Borglum's great personal friend
and political hero, Teddy Roosevelt.
And Borglum said he would carve his presidents
on Mount Rushmore, a site he chose for its broad face
and a southeastern exposure
that guaranteed the most dramatic light.
To his 12-year-old son, Lincoln, he confided:
"Nothing but the Almighty can stop me
from completing this task."
TALIAFERRO: When he got the call to come to Mount Rushmore,
this was a great chance to redeem himself,
to do all the things he had ever wanted to do
in a much larger scale
than he'd even dare think about until that point.
He could taste it
from the second he got off the train in Rapid City.
VHAY: He had expected Stone Mountain
to be the crowning achievement in his career,
and here he was presented with a bigger crown.
It was going to be bigger, larger.
And all he needed to do
was to get a million dollars, or whatever, to do it.
NARRATOR: Doane Robinson was thrilled
and happy to let Borglum have his way with the planning.
"After all," he said, "God only makes a Michelangelo
"or a Gutzon Borglum
once every thousand years."
The remainder of the state was less enthusiastic.
That Mount Rushmore stood
on ground sacred to the Lakota Sioux
wasn't even the big problem.
In the 1920s, South Dakotans simply didn't have
a lot of spare cash for public monuments.
A year after Borglum's plea for $50,000 seed money,
locals had raised only $5,000.
And the proposed project
hadn't exactly brought honor to the state.
In fact, Mount Rushmore was a bit of a knee-slapper
around the country.
"Borglum is about to destroy another mountain,"
wrote one newspaper back east.
"Thank God it's in South Dakota, where no one will ever see it."
The sculptor had only one solid asset:
South Dakota senator Peter Norbeck.
Peter Norbeck was the son of Norwegian immigrants,
born in a sod dugout
and raised poor on the South Dakota plains.
He was stout, plainspoken, and quietly ambitious.
As a young man, he'd made a fortune drilling wells
and then moved to politics.
WEGNER: Grandpa Norbeck has been described
as as rough as the Norwegian northern pines,
but also with the soul of an artist.
His formal education was very limited,
but somewhere in there, he found the interest to pursue
these more intellectual and artistic endeavors.
VHAY: He supported Dad in everything.
He got very cross with him at times,
when Dad would demand more money
and had to have more money.
But also, I think that Senator Norbeck was a bridge
between Dad and the local people.
WEGNER: He saw this as an opportunity to bring people to the Black Hills.
Any tourists, any people
we could bring into South Dakota from the outside
brought their wallet, their dollars with them.
And any outside dollars in this state
that could be brought in were desperately needed.
NARRATOR: What Norbeck did first
was convince President Calvin Coolidge
to spend the summer in the Black Hills,
maybe take in the mountain scenery,
do a little fishing.
Even before Coolidge got to town,
Rapid City was fevered with Babbitt-like boosterism.
And the Rapid City Commercial Club renewed its drive
to raise cash for Senator Norbeck's carving.
By the time the president arrived,
the Rushmore Association had $42,000 in the bank,
and Borglum was in a lather, too,
planning a second, and more extravagant, dedication,
one the president could attend, with the national press in tow.
And on that August day, Silent Cal made a speech
that surprised even Borglum.
He started out by saying,
"We have come here to dedicate a cornerstone
laid by the hand of the Almighty."
Further in the speech, he said,
"The people of South Dakota
had been bearing this burden so far"-- which they had not--
and he thought the government ought to help.
And this was the beginning of getting government support.
NARRATOR: With Coolidge's support,
Norbeck pushed a bill through Congress
authorizing federal matching funds for Mount Rushmore:
one government dollar for every private dollar raised.
The problem was, in 1929,
there had been only $50,000 raised.
Still, with less than ten percent of his budget in hand,
Gutzon Borglum rushed ahead,
anxious to answer the big question:
Could this colossal carving be done?
It was 500 feet to the top of Mount Rushmore.
Nobody could be sure how much carvable granite existed
beneath the richly creviced surface.
Long, frozen winters would make work nearly impossible
four months a year.
Even more troubling to Borglum
was the pool of men available to do the work.
Getting able bodies wasn't the hard part.
Jobs were scarce in the Black Hills in 1929,
and Mount Rushmore offered
some of the highest-paying work around.
But as dozens of men started to sign on,
Borglum realized he was going to have to depend on locals--
the "untutored miners," he called them.
SMITH: A lot of these guys were tough, rough, brawling kind of guys.
They used to say, uh, that the Keystone Boys' playpens
were fenced with barbed wire.
And that they only turned the other cheek
when they were delivering a left hook.
MAN: It didn't take too much training, say,
to drill holes and so forth and run a jackhammer.
It just took a lot of guts, you might say.
Some people went up there and worked one day, I've been told,
and that was all they wanted.
They couldn't stand the heighth and the dust and so forth.
MAN: It was pretty tough for your first time going over there
and hanging in a bosun chair
and trying to punch holes in the granite.
It took a lot of practice.
And you didn't get much done your first day,
I'll tell you that.
Most of the jackhammers weighed 40 or 50 pounds.
And then you had to carry your steel with you, also.
So you had quite a load going down there.
MAN: The wind was always a-blowing, and it'd be pretty gusty.
The wind always blew up there, seemed like.
They was hanging with a little 3/8-inch cable.
And that cable looked pretty small to me,
to hold them guys up there.
And then they'd just shake pieces out of them
when they'd turn them jackhammers on.
NARRATOR: Once the men had blasted off the surface rock,
leaving a giant egg-shaped mass
where Washington's face could be sculpted,
Borglum spent days watching
the light and shadow play on the expanse,
then decided to rotate the face
20 degrees from his original plan.
After that, the sculptor and assistants like Ivan Houser
set to re-creating the studio models
on the side of the mountain.
The commonly used methods didn't apply.
The mountain was simply too big.
So Borglum turned the page back to a technique
devised by the ancient Greeks.
HOUSER: In doing a big piece of sculpture,
one of the problems, of course, is the enlarging.
You're trying to locate points in space at one scale,
and then you try to locate
those same points in space at another scale.
So what they did was, you have a beam coming straight out
from a point that turns on a swivel,
and you can note the degrees at which it is turned.
And so, as you turn the one on the little model and you can...
Say it's off 30 degrees, off to the right,
and it's out so many measurements,
and down so far and then in so far,
and you can locate a specific point
on Washington's cheek, for instance.
So then you can do the same thing up on the mountain.
CLIFFORD: This is what they called honeycombing.
This was the next to the last step of finishing the faces.
And they would drill these holes in.
The pointers or Mr. Borglum would tell them
how deep to drill the holes.
You can see they were taking off more rock down here
than they were up here.
And it was probably right close to the face,
maybe it was on, like, on a cheek
or something like that.
And they would take a sharp, pointed piece of steel
and they would hit in each one of these holes.
Eventually, this rock would pop off.
And then they would use a bumping hammer--
they called it bumping--
and that would smooth the rock up
just like it is today
that you see it on the mountain.
NARRATOR: Independence Day, 1930,
just more than a year from the day real work began,
Gutzon Borglum revealed to the world
the first great granite visage.
July 5, Mount Rushmore was a dateline
in papers across the country.
Through that summer, newsreels of the dedication played
at theaters nationwide.
Suddenly, Rushmore was a fixed point
in the American consciousness.
And as work on Washington continued,
tourists began making the trek
to see the strange sight in the Black Hills.
In the first year alone, 27,000 people visited Mount Rushmore,
now billed as "the shrine of democracy."
The early success confirmed Borglum's every plan.
Now his men could race to the finish.
The entire carving--
four figures, each complete to the waist--
would be done inside of four years, he figured.
He'd figured wrong.
Within weeks of the Washington dedication,
bad news began to pile up.
Borglum had spent so much on the dedication ceremony
that money ran out at the end of July,
and work on the mountain slowed to a crawl.
Rushmore's great champion, Senator Peter Norbeck,
was diagnosed with cancer.
The next year, things only got worse.
HOUSER: They were aware, of course,
that there were going to be faults and cracks in the rock.
Some of them were hard to detect.
In fact, they started Jefferson off to Washington's right,
and they found out there wasn't enough stone there.
The stone was too crumbly and it just wasn't of good quality.
CARTER: They had to blast that off after 18 months of work,
which must have been heartbreaking to do that.
As tight as money was, and then to blast off
what they'd spent all that time doing.
NARRATOR: By the end of 1931,
the Rushmore Association was $16,000 in the red,
with little hope of raising more private money.
WEGNER: They had this almost double whammy.
The entire country, in fact much of the world,
was wrapped up in this horrendous financial depression.
Then on top of that was the dust bowl days.
There was no rain; the farmers could raise no crops.
What little they could raise, it was almost impossible to market.
They were leaving the state in droves.
Those who stayed wondered why they were still here.
And in, uh, 1932,
the work at Rushmore had ground to a total halt.
And again there was the specter
of this whole thing just never being completed.
INTERVIEWER: When do you think this work
will be completed, Mr. Borglum?
I'm trying to finish it
so that the figures will be done by 1935 sufficiently...
VHAY: My father never wanted to admit any type of failure,
and certainly he didn't want to admit it.
He, I'm sure, did with... with Mother, but he didn't with us.
I mean, it was always going to be...
everything was going to be all right.
He didn't show any despair, even to Mary very much.
One letter that I found where he was in Washington for months
trying to get money for Rushmore.
It was a bad time, and he wrote to her and said,
"I'm just sick about what's happening,
but this is the time to be courageous."
And you know, I think his spirit just kept him going
and Mary kept him going.
I don't think he would have been able to carry on
if it hadn't been for my mother.
She was always there,
not driving him but building up his ego,
and making him aware that he was a great sculptor.
NARRATOR: Even in the darkest days of Rushmore,
Gutzon never lacked for ego.
People who held sway, he liked to keep them informed.
Congressmen, senators, oil tycoons,
William Randolph Hearst, the Duke of Windsor--
he wired them all, and often collect.
VHAY: He corresponded with anybody you could think of,
and I mean from the heads of state on down
to the... practically the garbage man.
Probably not the garbage man
because he probably hadn't paid them.
(laughs)
HAYES: He was coming across the state
and he stopped at a little station
and, uh, he wanted to fill up the car.
And, uh, the young station attendant, you know, says,
"Well, you know, I have to have money first."
He says, "Well, don't you know who I am?"
And the attendant said, "I know exactly who you are.
That's why I have to have the money first."
SMITH: He felt that he should have free gasoline if he wanted it,
he saw movies without paying,
and his personality was so powerful
they let him go ahead and do it.
As he said many times,
"I'm giving these people in the Black Hills an asset
"that'll bring in billions of dollars
and they're persecuting me over a piddling parcel of groceries."
NARRATOR: Where money was concerned, Gutzon was fearless.
He spent himself and his projects into the hole today,
convinced he could win more tomorrow.
WEGNER: Borglum had this tendency
to show up in Washington unannounced
and appear before committees
and attempt to schedule appointments with the president.
He would give one set of financial projections
to one committee or to one senator or to one congressman,
and within a matter of hours or days,
come up with another set of figures,
or he could say he could finish this project for $250,000,
when everybody sitting in the room knew
that there was no way
in which that entire project could be completed for $250,000.
HOUSER: A number of times my father and Borglum were in the Senate
seeking funding for Mount Rushmore.
So one time they were up in the balcony at the Senate,
and, uh, the bill was on the floor
and one of the senators stood up
and he was raging against Borglum, and he was calling,
"Why are we... why are we trying to appropriate funds
for this crazy genius?"
And then that triggered Borglum.
Borglum jumped to his feet, but before he could say anything
my dad grabbed him by the coattails and pulled him down,
and he said, "He called you a genius, didn't he?"
(laughs)
NARRATOR: It was Senator Norbeck who saved Mount Rushmore
with an assist from the deepening depression.
At the end of 1932, as the national economy slid downhill,
President Herbert Hoover started passing out relief money,
and Norbeck snared 100,000 federal dollars
for jobs on the mountain.
Then he convinced the National Park Service
to take over the project, guaranteeing more funding.
(explosion)
In the spring of 1933,
after nearly a year and a half of silence,
work on the mountain began again.
And the central crew was back:
Hoot Leach, Howdy Peterson and his brother Merle,
Jimmy Champion, Whiskey Art Johnson, Palooka Payne.
They all knew they'd be shut down again for some reason,
but they came back just the same.
SMITH: One of the great miracles of Rushmore
is the miracle of the men, those dedicated guys,
the Red Andersons, the Hoot Leaches,
the Peterson boys and so on
who came back and came back and came back and came back.
CLIFFORD: Had they not come back,
there would be no Mount Rushmore as we know it today
because Mr. Borglum,
it was impossible for him to train a new crew every year.
But these men were dedicated to the mountain.
When the mountain would shut down for lack of money
or in the wintertime, they'd all have to find another job.
But when the spring would come around
and they'd get the call to come back,
they'd quit what they were doing
and come back to work at the mountain.
SMITH: Red Anderson said, "At first it was just a job
and just a crazy kind of a job at that."
But as time went by, all of this started to change
and they developed a sense, came together, fused in a sense
that they were creating a great thing.
NARRATOR: The men stuck it out in spite of their boss--
the Chief, they called him, but only behind his back.
Borglum rarely talked to his men, except to give orders.
"He's a heck of a stone carver," said one,
"but he ain't no sweet talker."
BORGLUM: I'm not satisfied
with how it turns under there and comes against the collar.
You go on down now, Payne.
I want those points very carefully examined.
I'll be down there with you in a few minutes.
VHAY: Dad might get furious at them if they were stupid,
because he could not stand stupidity.
Anybody could make a mistake once,
but not two or three times,
and if they did two or three times
he would usually have them fired.
And that was another job that Lincoln had,
because if it was a good man,
Lincoln would have to talk him into coming back again.
And then Dad would be sort of surprised
to see him, and then he'd say,
"What have you been doing, Lincoln?"
NARRATOR: Lincoln Borglum, Gutzon's only son, was just 21 years old
when the men went to work on the new Jefferson head.
But despite Lincoln's youth,
Gutzon left his son in charge of the mountain
during his long and frequent absences.
CLIFFORD: He grew up with the mountain.
Working so close with his father,
it just had to be catchy.
I mean, he had a vision also
of what the mountain was going to be like.
You would never see him sitting down.
If you'd look up, why, Lincoln would be up on top looking down
or looking at the faces where the men were carving.
He was all over the mountain.
You never saw him get mad or chew anyone out.
You could laugh with Lincoln and... and have a great time.
When we went on our baseball trips, Lincoln would always go,
and if we did something good, why, he'd pat us on the back
and tell us what a good job we'd done.
And he was just a great guy.
NARRATOR: Lincoln had a calm, easy manner
his father relied on more than anything
to mend relationships Gutzon broke.
And throughout the mid-'30s,
Gutzon was more combative than ever.
The Jefferson head continued to vex.
The men blasted down 60 feet to find carvable rock,
but even then, huge fissures cut through the face.
And there was a mass of feldspar that had to be dug out,
leaving a gaping hole on the president's lip.
Using Borglum's concoction
of white lead, linseed oil and granite dust,
the men filled in the cracks and divots as best they could.
But it all took time and money.
And with the National Park Service
now overseeing the project,
it was up to a Rapid City farm implements dealer
named John Boland
to make sure money was spent according to federal guidelines
and not Gutzon's.
When Borglum needed money, he had to go to Boland and beg,
and the sculptor grew to resent it.
"I've got to go to Rapid City," he told Red Anderson one day,
"and punch a certain son of a bitch right in the nose."
Other days,
Borglum threatened to walk away from Mount Rushmore entirely,
leaving the unfinished monument like a scar on the Black Hills.
With so much at stake,
Senator Peter Norbeck's most critical job
was handling the explosive and unpredictable artist.
WEGNER: Grandpa Norbeck was the one person
whom Borglum respected enough
to accept his judgment and conclusion about things.
And in... in a number of his heated arguments and conflicts
with Boland in particular,
but by no means confined to John Boland,
Grandpa Norbeck was able to step in and resolve
or at least partially resolve some of the conflicts.
And then something would erupt all over again.
NARRATOR: By the end of 1934, Peter Norbeck had had his fill.
His four-year fight with cancer had drained his energy
and his good humor.
"I have lately come to feel that you will do something
that will prevent the completion of Rushmore,"
he wrote to Borglum.
"I have made over seven years of effort in this work.
"It's been a heavy drain on my strength and purse.
It keeps getting worse."
But even as cancer ate away at him
and took his ability to speak,
Peter Norbeck would not let the Rushmore project fall apart.
In 1935, he strode into the Senate one last time
and won a new $200,000 appropriation.
But he knew it would be his last big fight.
As the senator neared death, he was philosophical.
"A week after I am gone, they will start to forget me.
"A decade, and most people of South Dakota
will be unable to even recall my name."
It was Borglum's name, he thought, that would endure.
But in the summer of 1936,
Peter Norbeck was front and center
to see President Franklin Roosevelt dedicate
the hard-won Jefferson sculpture.
ROOSEVELT: There were two people
who told me about this in the early days.
One of them, Mr. Borglum.
And the other, Senator Norbeck.
(applause)
WEGNER: It was one of the supreme days of my grandfather's life.
I think for him, uh... I... at least I have wondered
if it didn't become a little like that of Borglum,
that this was one of the crowning accomplishments
of his life, to have made this possible.
As my grandfather had said
that Mount Rushmore is no longer a joke, it's no longer a dream.
It's real, it's there.
CLIFFORD: Mr. Borglum always complained
that people bothered him when he was doing his work
but he would always stop
and if someone wanted to ask a question or something like that,
he'd like to stop and talk to the people, too,
so he could explain what he was accomplishing.
He used to tell people, "The faces are in the mountain.
All I have to do is bring them out."
CARTER: He never gave up seeing it as great art.
And a lot of people would argue with that,
that it was more of an engineering project
than anything else, but he really saw it as art,
that he was going to bring
the life of those four people to the forefront,
just as you would if you were doing a small statue of them.
TALIAFERRO: As you get closer to Mount Rushmore,
you can almost see the thumbprint
of a sculptor's hand in clay.
Borglum would study it at different times of day,
in different kinds of light, and make adjustments
the way an artist would make adjustments
with a little knife or with a little chisel in the studio--
little fiddling things with the mountain
that I'm sure cannot be seen from the observation deck today,
but mattered only to Borglum.
NARRATOR: Even as he passed age 70,
Gutzon Borglum was still trying to find ways
to vivify his carving.
In 1938 and '39,
Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt
were rounding into recognizable form,
but the sculptor was still worrying every site and shading.
"Have to climb down over the face of Washington
and back up the face of Jefferson," he wrote.
"I ought to be getting tired of it all, but I'm not.
"I now see that I'll be able to make a real work of art
"of this big group.
"Back in my heart, that has been a doubt for many years.
"I really have no help in that.
In that, I'm absolutely alone."
It was an image he cultivated, this lonely fighter's posture,
but there were people whose contributions
even Gutzon could not deny.
Borglum may have devised the plan
to give a twinkle to the presidential eyes,
but it was the workmen who sculpted
the two-foot long shafts of granite
in the middle of each pupil,
so that sunlight bouncing off the exposed point
gave life to the eyes.
CARTER: Gutzon seemed to have complained a lot
about the unskilled workers that he was faced with,
but actually he was very proud of the men
and very proud of the fact
that he'd been able to train these people, who were miners
and who were just local,
who'd never worked on a mountain before,
didn't know anything about art,
and that he'd been able to take them and train them
into doing what he wanted done.
SMITH: There were things about him that bothered them very much,
but down underneath, they developed a loyalty.
It's amazing-- they developed a basic loyalty to Gutzon Borglum.
With all his flamboyance, unpredictability, irascibility,
there was some kind of a flame in the man--
a charisma, a something--
that inspired a deeper loyalty.
NARRATOR: By 1940, Gutzon Borglum had made himself
someone extraordinary.
He was the man who carved mountains
and he stood America's highest peak.
He'd achieved celebrity,
even pitching ads for Studebaker and Bromo Seltzer.
(explosion)
Still, Gutzon saw so much to be done on his mountain.
He meant to extend the sculptures down to the waist,
was at work on a Hall of Records--
a cavernous time capsule
for storing the important documents
of the American democracy.
But more than anything,
he was still trying to transform his mountain
into a work of art,
fighting the one thing he couldn't beat:
time itself.
At the beginning of 1941,
the coming world war overwhelmed Mount Rushmore.
After a dozen years,
Congress finally cut off funding for good.
A week later, Gutzon Borglum was dead,
suddenly and unexpectedly at age 73,
from complications following surgery.
WEGNER: Lincoln Borglum, of course,
had taken over after his father died.
By then, a major part of the work had been completed,
but there were still a fair amount
of trimming and cleaning up to do
around the faces and... and the collars and shoulders
of some of the figures.
And the great hall of records,
which was... had been another great ambition
and dream of Borglum's,
pretty much perished in the process.
The work at Rushmore just sort of gradually drew to a close.
NARRATOR: It took 14 years to carve Mount Rushmore.
Men removed half a million tons of granite,
driving 120 feet deep in places.
George Washington's face is 60 feet long, his nose 20,
and each eye is 11 feet wide.
Roosevelt's mustache is 20 feet across;
Lincoln's mole, 16 inches.
The carving cost $989,992.32,
almost all of it from the United States treasury.
For the money, America got the biggest and oddest monument
on the face of the earth,
and one of the most compelling.
Since 1930, more than 50 million people have made pilgrimage
to the remote cliffside shrine.
CARTER: I think in some ways,
Mount Rushmore was the worst legacy
that... that Gutzon Borglum could leave,
because he always will be known
as the sculptor who did Mount Rushmore.
And yet at the time that he started the mountain,
when he was 60 years old,
he was well known for being a sculptor
of beautiful monuments and beautiful pieces.
And he was probably on his way
to having a reputation as a great American sculptor.
I think that was really overshadowed by Rushmore.
CLIFFORD: I look up on the mountain
and I think of... of Mr. Borglum--
what a great man he was,
what a wonderful sculptor he was.
I think of Lincoln, who was a friend to all of the men.
And then I think of all the men that I worked with and knew,
and how dedicated these men were to the mountain,
and they're all gone now.
And...
And I have to stop now.
(chuckles)
(crickets chirping)
NARRATOR: Like its sculptor, Mount Rushmore is loud,
demanding of attention, and maddening.
To naturalists, the carving is an eyesore;
to Native Americans, a desecration.
It stands as a monument to energy and possibility,
to national pride,
and an often unbecoming national self-satisfaction.
And like the biggest and boldest creations in America,
Mount Rushmore was not built on good intentions alone.
It also stands as a monument
to the colossal, sometimes wounding,
and surprisingly contagious ambition of a single man.
BORGLUM: I am allowing an extra three inches
on all the features of the various presidents
in order to provide stone
for the wear and tear of the elements,
which cuts the granite down an inch
in a hundred thousand years.
Three inches would require 300,000 years
to bring the work down to the point
that I would like to finish it.
In other words, the work will not be done
for another 300,000 years as it should be.
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