The depiction of four of America’s greatest presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt — has always been considered a grand tribute to the ideals of American democracy. That’s exactly what its mastermind, sculptor Gutzon Borglum, intended. Less well known: Borglum’s ties to the Ku Klux Klan.
Borglum was born the son of Danish Mormon polygamists in 1867 in Idaho. A talented artist, he spent his childhood on the Western frontier and plains, in Utah and Kansas until leaving for Europe in the early 1880s to study sculpture. There, Borglum became fascinated with art on a grand scale with nationalistic subjects, which suited what many described as his bombastic, egotistical personality.
“Borglum was imperious, he was cocky. He was prone to angry outbursts,” said John Taliaferro, author of the 2002 book “Great White Fathers: The Story Of The Obsessive Quest To Create Mount Rushmore.”
In Europe he was heavily influenced by ancient colossal sculpture from the Egyptians to the Greeks. The 66-foot Sphinx of Giza and the 70-foot carved guardians of Memnon’s Temple on the upper Nile became examples of the kinds of works he wanted to create in the United States.
Returning from Europe at the turn of the century, he set up shop in New York and then Connecticut and began to sculpt statues of statesmen and generals that memorialized American history, including a bust of Lincoln for Teddy Roosevelt’s White House that now sits in the Capitol Rotunda.
Then, in 1915, Helen Plane, the founder of the Atlanta chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, approached Borglum about a possible project.
After the Civil War, the North began an “orgy” of Civil War monument building, Taliaferro writes in his book. One of the primary missions of the Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in 1894, was to even the score, he wrote.
The group began erecting statues throughout the South, including many that are being removed today in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in the custody of Minneapolis police officers.
Plane asked Borglum whether he would be interested in working on the group’s biggest project ever: a monument to the Confederacy on Stone Mountain outside Atlanta.
Right away, Borglum was interested in sculpting on such a grand scale. After visiting the site, he saw the potential to build a colossus of his own, a tribute to what he considered great men. He immediately accepted and drew up a proposal featuring Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and J.E.B. Stewart riding in a cavalry carved in deep relief across a 1,200-foot-span of the mountain’s eastern face. The fathers of the confederacy would be 50-feet-tall, surrounded by stampeding horses and cavalrymen.