Mount Rushmore as National Icon

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Mount Rushmore as National Icon

No matter how one looks at it, Mount Rushmore is an impressive sight. With each of the former politicians heads measuring sixty feet in height it would be hard for anyone to see the work as something other than massive in physical scope. However, in addition to the incredible physical dimensions of this megalithic monument to politicians past, Mount Rushmore has a greater, less corporeal, significance. Its image has been used for everything from representing the accomplishments of the USA to selling pizzas alongside Miss Piggy. Despite the more capitalistic nature of the latter case Mount Rushmore has continued to hold a special significance in Americana.

On its own Mount Rushmore is an impressive feat of art. Started in 1927 the entire work took only fourteen years to complete. Massive in scale and scope, it is the largest piece of sculpture in the world; Mount Rushmore is a triumph of vision. Simon Schama also points out what else Mount Rushmore meant for Gutzon Borglum, the designer and head of the sculpting, and for America

To date, all the memorials to great Americans had betrayed America’s singularity by being obviously derivative. What was the Washington Monument except “another Egyptian obelisk”; the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, Greco-Roman pseudo-temples? Only in the Black hills, on the very spine of the continent, could something be built that would celebrate America’s true experience: its territorial expansiveness. (395)

And indeed, Mount Rushmore represented something that was not just a work of ancient art redone. Mount Rushmore could stand as an example, a symbol, of America. Herein we find the reason that Mount Rushmore is a national icon: what it can stand to ...

... middle of paper ...

...these elements Mount Rushmore has a great deal of more ethereal meaning subscribed to it. Some of this meaning is good, as can be shown by the acts of those represented in it and the desire of people to have their own heroes incorporated in it; some of the meaning is negative as is shown in the acts and words of those same figures preserved in that rocky bed. In these ways Mount Rushmore has come to be an icon of America and is a physical reminder of its history and some of the elements that have come together to create a nation.

Works Cited:

Morwood, J.H.W. “Aeneas and Mount Atlas.” The Journal of Roman Studies Vol. 75

(1985): pages 51-9.

Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc, 1995.

“White Supremacists Who Once Occupied the White House.” The Journal of Blacks in

Higher Education No. 24 (Summer 1999): pages 76-7. J

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