Mt. Rushmore

When I was ten years old we passed through the Black Hills on vacation and stopped at Mt. Rushmore. I was happy to see it because there was a popular joke going around at the time about a guy who climbed to the top of the mountain and fell off. He grabbed on to George Washington's nose and as he hung there he shouted to his friends, "Look, I'm a booger."

A few years later I saw the Alfred Hitchcock movie, North by Northwest, on TV. The visitor center looked just as I remembered it and I wondered for years if there was really a house and an airstrip on top of the monument. I loved that house, by the way, even if it was a 1950's design, and if I had the money I'd try to buy it no matter where it's located. And speaking of acting, watch Cary Grant's eyes. He could say more with the expression on his face than most people could say with a thousand words. Oh, isn't there a saying about that? But I digress.

Last summer we took a family vacation to Mt. Rushmore. The visitor center has grown considerably from what I remembered 44 years earlier, and I was amazed at how many people travel to that out-of-the-way place every year just to see it. It was worth the trip to see the beautiful Black Hills and stand in awe under those huge busts of four of our greatest presidents carved out of a mountain side.

George Washington has the prominent place and rightly so. "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen." His character and integrity established a dignity to the office and his leadership helped a struggling Republic take its place among the community of nations and earned him the well-deserved title, "Father of Our Country." Simply put, without George Washington there would be no America.

Twentieth century revisionists have smirched and slandered his character, belittling his importance, robbing from generations of children a true hero, someone genuinely worth patterning their lives after. Richard Brookheiser, in a 1996 biography called "Founding Father," which I recommend to you, examined the works of earlier historians and the revisionists, and came to the conclusion that George Washington was the man we originally thought him to be. He was a vestryman in his parish church, quoted Scripture often, and lived by the highest moral principles. He forbad swearing and drunkenness in the Continental Army, and encouraged the troops to attend services. He often referred to Providence, a common reference to God at the time. Fully a third of his first Inaugural Address discussed the "providential agency" involved in founding the country. The cherry tree story may have been a myth, but the character it honored was every bit as true and honest in his life as was the little boy with the axe in the story. Brookheiser writes, "When he lived, Washington had the ability to give strength to debaters and to dying men. His life still has the power to inspire anyone who studies it."

Beside Washington to the right and slightly behind is the bust of Thomas Jefferson. It is a worthy position indicative of the role Jefferson played in the making of America. He was the author of the Declaration of Independence, and while he was in France serving as an ambassador during the Constitutional Convention, it was his influence through letters that led to the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. His term as president was a period of great expansion and discovery. In 1803 the United States doubled its size with the Louisiana Purchase from France and Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their epic journey to explore the new territory. What Jefferson most wanted to be remembered for, however, was that he was the founder of the University of Virginia. He was an educator as well as a statesman, and one of the great forces behind the founding of our great nation.

Next to Jefferson and a little deeper into the recess of the cliffside is Teddy Roosevelt. Separated from the Founders by a hundred years, his bullish attitude reinvigorated a nation reeling from the assassination of its president in 1901. He was a war hero having led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill in Cuba, and his motto, "Speak softly and carry a big stick," resonated with the people. Under his leadership America grew to become a major world power. He built the Panama Canal, an achievement that revolutionized trade and travel by sea, and built up the US Navy, sending thirteen state-of-the-art battleships (known as the Great White Fleet) on a world-wide good will tour in 1907. He was a man's man, an outdoorsman who loved to hunt, including lions in Africa after his presidency, and who proved his toughness by surviving an assassin's bullet later in life. He was an exciting character, never dull, a man who earned America great respect on the world stage, the man of the hour to lead the nation into the twentieth century.

Separated slightly to the right and looking back across the other three faces is the one many esteem as our greatest, or second greatest president next to Washington, Abraham Lincoln. The slight division in the rock face of the cliff seems poetically appropriate since he served as president during America's division in the Civil War. Lincoln gets a bad break from history. There can be no general consensus as to his accomplishments. Southerners still hate him and Northerners still love him. He's accused of overstepping his constitutional bounds, criticized for freeing the slaves as a political expediency rather than a conviction, and his character is often tarnished by those still fighting the Civil War. He was certainly an enigma. Lincoln grew up in the wilderness and never attended church, yet he knew the Bible well, quoted it often, and was known to be a man of great prayer. He was as meticulously honest as Washington, one time walking miles to return a borrowed nickel. His contemporaries thought he was unintelligent, General McClellan even called him a gorilla, but he led his administration with wisdom and skill, and it was his unbending will that held the country together through its deadliest war.

Lincoln's bust on Mt. Rushmore was uncompleted, the architect having died before the work was done. That also seems appropriate as Lincoln's life was cut short by an assassin before he could see the completion of the reconstruction of the nation he hoped for at his second inaugural. Lincoln's legacy is best described in his second Inaugural Address. "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." These are good words for today.

With all this in mind, when we get back to the States, I think I want to go visit Mt. Rushmore again.