the declaration of independence
The horrors perpetrated by the founding fathers
Gutzon Borglum, Mount Rushmore National Memorial (1927–41)
Many of the most famous public sculptures are overtly concerned with mythologizing the past. Because they’re often funded by the government, and because they’re theoretically available to all, they can function as propaganda, offering a state-approved draft of history that every loyal citizen needs to know.
If this sounds harsh, consider sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s jingoistic masterpiece: the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Begun shortly after the end of World War I and completed on the eve of America’s entry into its successor, the 60-foot-tall, four-headed sculpture was first authorized by Congress during the Coolidge administration, a mere six years after the death of one of the work’s eventual subjects, Theodore Roosevelt. Borglum selected Teddy, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln not simply because of their greatness, but because of their roles in the country’s expansion.
A franker way to put this: If all American presidents have either enabled or directly participated in the theft of Native American lands, these four were the kleptomaniacs of the bunch. Mount Rushmore itself was stolen at gunpoint from the Lakota tribe during the Great Sioux War of 1876, the same year the U.S. was busy celebrating its centennial. The Mount Rushmore National Monument itself says nothing at all about these crimes, of course; instead, four (literally) granite-jawed men stare off into the distance, denying their country’s past as they seem to contemplate its glorious future. In 1970, Native American activists occupied the monument and gave it a new name, in honor of a general who gave his life to fight the U.S. Army: Crazy Horse Mountain.
... Plantation wives in the slave-era South resorted to willful blindness when their husbands conscripted black women as sexual servants and filled the household with mixed-race children who inevitably resembled the master. Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha, was several years dead when he set off on this path, fathering at least six children with Martha’s enslaved black half sister, Sally Hemings. ...