One Summer: America, 1927

United Daughters of the Confederacy to let him carve a tableau 400 feet high and a quarter of a mile long into the face of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, to celebrate the heroism and bravery of the Confederacy. Stone Mountain had certain resonances. It was where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915. Borglum was a member of the Klan himself for a time. With financial support from the United Daughters, Borglum undertook a great deal of preparatory work, but eventually he fell into dispute with the women and departed abruptly in 1925, leaving behind stacks of interesting sketches and unpaid bills. The Daughters had him charged with malicious mischief and two counts of larceny, but by this time Borglum was already in South Dakota, where Doane Robinson had invited him to come and have a look at Rushmore.
    For Borglum, it was love at first sight. Rushmore had a noble profile and durable surface. Geologists estimated that it would erode at a rate of no more than one inch per one hundred thousand years. In fact, this estimate proved to be true only in parts; Borglum would have to resort to a great deal of ingenuity and adaptability to realize his dream.
    The budget was set at $400,000, which included a fee for Borglum of $78,000. In addition to the sculpture itself, Borglum envisioned a monumental ‘Hall of Records’ cut into the cliff behind the presidents’ heads, reachable by a grand staircase from below. It would hold the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
    Sculpting a mountainside was much more a matter ofengineering and pyrotechnics than of artful chiselling. Most of the features were magically blasted from the rock. Even the most delicate finishing work was done with pneumatic drills. The ambition was staggering. The four faces that greet the visitor today are each more than sixty feet high. The mouths are eighteen feet wide, the noses twenty feet long. You could insert a car lengthwise into each eye socket.
    The possibility of a miscalculated blast turning one of the presidents into a noseless sphinx kept interest high, and the fact that Borglum looked and acted at least slightly mad, and was always difficult to work with, ensured constant press attention. In fact, mistakes did happen. Jefferson’s nose developed an ominous crack, so the face had to be ‘reset’ at a different angle and many feet further into the stone. Finding sufficient runs of good stone was one of the biggest challenges. The orientations of the four heads – each looking in a different direction, Jefferson tucked almost impishly behind Washington – was dictated by the availability of workable stone. Most of Washington’s face is about thirty feet in from the original surface. Jefferson’s is twice that. Altogether, Borglum and his workers removed 400,000 tons of rock to create their heroic composition.
    The greatest problem was financing. The frugal legislature of South Dakota declined to appropriate a penny for the project. Private contributors proved only slightly more generous. In consequence, work often came to a standstill. In the end, most of the cost was borne by the federal government, but even so it took fourteen years to complete the job, about twice as long as necessary in terms of just getting the work done. Among those donating money was Charles Rushmore, now a wealthy lawyer in New York, who sent $5,000.
    For his subjects Borglum selected Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and – to widespread consternation – Theodore Roosevelt, who was chosen, it seems, not for his greatness but because he and Borglum had once been chums.
    On the day of the dedication, all this lay some way in the future. A road was now under construction but wasn’t anywhere near finished, which meant that the audience of about 1,500 people had to trek two miles up a steep track to attend the ceremonies. President Coolidge made that part of the trip on horseback. He was dressed in a business suit, but wore his cowboy hat and boots. Upon arriving, Mr Coolidge impressed everybody by drinking from a communal dipper. As part of the ceremonies, engineers laid explosives into the bases of trees lining his approach route and gave him a 21-stump salute. Speeches were made and a flag was raised, and then Borglum was lowered on a rope on to the face of Rushmore, where he bored some holes with a pneumatic drill. Borglum’s brief labours didn’t produce anything recognizable, but it did represent the symbolic beginning of work and everyone went away