Mount Rushmore (Should Obbama be Added?)

Source: www.speakup.combr, pages 32 e 33 Standard American Accent, level advanced, Edition 260

Four American presidents together stare out across mountain tops and forests towards the distant horizont. Mount Rushmore, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, is the site of one of America's most famous and most popular national monuments. almost three million visitors a year come to look up at the eighteen-metre-high heads carved into ancient granite.

SACRED LAND

The Black Hills have long been considered sacred by Native Americans, and the Lakota tribe already had their own name for Mount Rushmore. Six Grandfathers. In 1924 the sculptor Gutzon Borglum was invited to the Black Hills by Doane Robson, the South Dakota State Historian Robson's original idea was to carve a number of western heroes into the granites spires of the Needles rocks: famous figures like Buffalo Bill, Lewis and Clark, Chief Red Cloud. Borglum had other ideas. He wanted US presidents to be the figures for a national monument and he preffered Mount Rushmore  with its south-east face looking into the sun. "America will march along that skyline", he declared.

Ed Menard, interpretive ranger at Mount Rushmore National Memorial, takes up the story:

Ed Menard (American Accent standard)

Well (the) decision was Borglum himself. It wasn't the president, it wasn't the congress- Borglum was going to pick who he wanted to be up on the mountain. And he says, I want to start off with the birth of the nation, that is George Washington, hero of the Revolutinary war. Then he says we want to have an expansions period of our nation, that's Thomas Jefferson buy the Lousiana Territory, buying that from France. Then we have to have the dark times of our country, we got to get through that,  and that's Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president, who after the Civil war led the country all back together again, he preserved the Union. And then , he taking us into the new century, the modern development of our country Theodore Roosevelt, and that equals apporximately 150 years represented on the mountain.

CHANGING PLACES

Borglum began work on Mount Rushmore on 4th October 1927. Together with his team of 35-40 workers he used dynamite to blast the rocks and power tools to finish the surface. It was difficult and dangerous work. His tasks wasn't made any easier by the mountains: Thomas Jefferson was originally carved on the other side of George Washington, but Borglum hit bad rock and after eighteen months, had to blast Jefferson off the mountain and start him all over again in his present position. Even then, a crack in Jefferson's nose forced the sculptor to move president's face so that today his gaze looks higher than the eyes of the others. It's hard not to be drawn to the eyes of the carvings and, when visitors get close enough to the stony faces, they are surprised to find that the pupils of the eyes are actually shafts of stone.

NATIONAL SPIRIT 

With delays caused by bad weather, it took 14 hard years to complete the monument, funding was also a problem for the project, which had the misfortune to coincide with the Great Depression of the 1930s and outbreak of the Second World War. Yet once the sculpture was completed. It appealed as Borglum had rightly predicted to America's sense of national pride. Soon Mount Rushmore was labelled the "Shrine to Democracy".

NATIONAL SPIRIT

Gutzon Borglum never lived to see his dream completed. He died in March 1941 on his way to Washington to plead for more money. After his death it was  left to his son who had been named Lincoln, after one of the four Mount Rushmore presidents to complete the task:

Ed Menard:

Well, Borglum, he really wanted to finish the left side of Lincoln's face 'cause you look at the mountain, it's not finished, there's no ear, you see a start of a hand, lapel and collar, but back in April of 1941, Congress had notified Borglum a week before his death, appoximately that there's no more money for Mount Rushmore, due to World War II starting in Europe. We weren't sending troops yet, but we were sending a lot of money, a lot of supplies and they said "The funding for Mount Rushmore is, you know, nothing!"

So, Borglum died on March 6th, 1941. But his son Lincoln, who really doesn't get much....enough credit, he really held this wrote project together, Lincoln Borglum  did. He was well-trained in all aspects of the mountain. He more or less took over his father's work. He only had, you know several dollars left in the bank enogh to do Washington collar, toch up Washington's collar, a little worn on Jefferson's hair, and October 31st 1941, Lincoln declared Mount Rushmore completed.