The Six Grandfathers
There’s been one of those non-controversies brewing in the conservative sports media scene. It all begins with a post by Jalen Rose, a former NBA player and current ESPN host. Here it is:
Pretty much everything Jalen says is true. Let’s do a not-so-quick history lesson to understand how the United States ended up with the land that Mount Rushmore is carved into. In 1868, the US entered into an agreement with several bands of Native Americans in what is known as the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868 edition). This established the Great Sioux Reservation, an area of land that is roughly the size of the western half of South Dakota. It also included parts of Nebraska. Here’s what it looked like:
Wikipedia
As you can see, that’s a pretty big chunk of land. Or it was. You see, the United States began violating the treaty almost immediately after signing it. Why? Greed, of course. Once gold was discovered in the Black Hills (where Mt. Rushmore is located) white folks started invading the sovereign land of native people. Now, the US government had promised to stop them but they didn’t. This led to conflict, naturally. Less than ten years after the treaty was signed and with several thousand dead Lakota, tribes were forced to surrender the western chunk you see on the map above. The land lost in 1889 (again, only two decades after signing a treaty) was taken as part of the Dawes Act, a law that established the separate reservations noted above (instead of one big one). Oh, and the land in the middle was stolen from the reservation so it could be sold to white Americans.
It is not debatable whether or not this land was unfairly taken from the Native bands who occupy what’s left of the reservation. This is a legal fact. In the landmark Supreme Court case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the court held that the land had been unjustly taken and without proper compensation. In fact, there is still an open judgment from 1980 against the federal government to the tune of more than $1,000,000,000. The Sioux Nation has refused to accept the money, saying instead that they want their land back, including the Black Hills where white folks carved into their sacred ground the faces of two enslavers (Washington and Jefferson), Lincoln, who openly said that whites were superior to Blacks, and one notorious “Indian killer” (Roosevelt). All of them have terrible histories when it comes to dealing with Native Americans. Here’s what Teddy Boy said about them in 1886:
I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian. Take three hundred low families of New York and New Jersey, support them, for fifty years, in vicious idleness, and you will have some idea of what the Indians are. Reckless, revengeful, fiendishly cruel.
Sounds like a cool dude! Definitely not a raging asshole. Americans at this time were so good at genocide that HITLER later used them as inspiration for how to “cleanse” Germany. Keep in mind that rough and tumble Teddy was a rich kid who grew up in NYC and went to Harvard. What is it about rich white dudes and play-acting as cowboys? George W. Bush did it too (although he grew up in Connecticut and went to Yale). Anyway, not the point.
The author and his wife, unimpressed.
I’ve visited Mt. Rushmore. Let me tell you: it kind of sucks. It’s waaaay smaller than you’d think. There’s a museum there and wouldn’t you know it, they whitewash A LOT of the history of the place? Imagine that. Wouldn’t want white people even accidentally learning something about our heritage and legacy. Nope. Best to just stick with the fairy tales.
Speaking of fairy tales, let’s talk about how the monument came about. It was conceived in 1923 as a way to promote tourism to South Dakota. Yep, that’s it. It’s the “World’s Largest Ball of Yarn” but for genocide. A sculptor named Gutzon Borglum was brought on board to design and begin crafting the attraction. In 1924 he visited the Black Hills, gazed upon the scene below, and thought “hmmm yes, this would look much better if I dynamited a bunch of faces into it.” Madness.
NPS
A few things to know about Gutzon. He was not a good dude. He was very much a white supremacist and held close ties to the KKK. In fact, one of the “interesting” artifacts contained within the museum is a letter to Mr. Borglum from D.C. Stephenson, who was the head of the Indiana Ku Klux Klan and a notorious rapist/murderer. In the video below you can learn about his best-known crime. It’s crazy. And this is a guy with whom Borglum routinely corresponded and talked about how the Nordic race was superior to all others. Sure, pal. Sure.
Quick side note about Stephenson. After he was convicted of murder, he pressured fellow Klansman and Governor of Indiana, Edward Jackson, for a pardon. When he was denied, he came ratted out all his Klan friends to the media. As it turned out, all the rumors and stories Black folks had been saying for years about the Klan being above the law was true! Seems like half of the government was on the KKK payroll. Man, if you can’t trust a guy in a white sheet with your racist secrets who can ya trust? Back to Rushmore.
Borglum was also involved in the creation of Stone Mountain, a Confederate monument. Do you remember the Confederacy? The people who wanted to destroy the United States because they didn’t want to give up slavery? Yeah, a monument to them. It was also part of Borglum’s design to include an altar to the KKK for saving America from Negroes. He was also a fan of the film The Birth of a Nation, which if you’ve never seen or heard of before is worth learning a little about.
Yikes.
To recap where are so far, we’ve got a monument to two slaveholders and an Indian butcher, built on stolen land, by a racist Klan-lover. It isn’t even a complete sculpture. It was supposed to include a lot more but it was never finished. Finally, in 1941, Borglum died and the desecration stopped. But not before the US government had wasted nearly $1 million (almost $20 million in today’s money). One tragic fact about Mt. Rushmore is that before its “completion”, a 1937 bill was authored in Congress to add the likeness of Susan B. Anthony. Surprise, surprise but the all-white, all-male (save for 8 women out of 536 members) didn’t go for that.
Knowing all of this, why should Mount Rushmore be a thing we celebrate, honor, and love? I mean this sincerely. If the man who made it was racist garbage and the people it memorializes weren’t very good, and it’s built on literally stolen land that’s been desecrated with the visages of Indian killers, why does it matter that we hold it in such high esteem? To me, there is only one answer to this question.
It may feel like Mt. Rushmore has been around forever and is some ancient relic but that simply isn’t true. There are people alive who were children when it was completed. In fact, the following people are actually OLDER than Mt. Rushmore: Chuck Norris, Ringo Starr, Al Pacino, Tom Jones, Smokey Robinson, Martin Sheen, Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Jane Fonda, Billy Dee Williams, Julie Andrews, Johnny Mathis, Tina Turner, Sir Ian McKellan. I could go on but I think you get my point.
I started this post by saying there was a minor non-controversy in sports media because of what Jalen said regarding the monument. Again, nothing he espoused is untrue. Oversimplified, maybe, but not untrue. I mean the dude is speaking from a boardwalk near a beach. It’s not his doctoral thesis. But of course, because a person of color pointed out a fact of American history and reasonably asked that people maybe rethink using the term “Mount Rushmore” when speaking about greatness, WHITE PEOPLE GOT VERY MAD!
I’m not sure what qualifies the US as the “greatest country the world has ever known”. Is it that 1 in 7 children live in poverty or that a full third of Americans live in poverty? That 1 in 5 children will go to bed hungry tonight? Is it our insanely high rates of incarceration? Or the number of mass shootings we experience? Is it the wealth gap not just between rich folks and poor folks but between whites and all other races? Is it our broken healthcare system that promises higher costs for less care? Maybe it’s our crumbling infrastructure or poisoned water? Oh, you know I bet it’s that our students rank dozens of spots lower than our contemporaries around the world in their knowledge of math, science, and reading? What exactly are we great at? I’ll tell you. And the answer is the same for why white people feel the way they do about Mt. Rushmore.
We are AMAZING at denying our past, creating a fictional alternative, and believing in that fiction with such conviction that when a sports host suggests coming up with something other than Mt. Rushmore to describe greatness, an actual Congressman puts forth a bill to protect it.
America excels at self-delusion and denial. We cling to a false moral superiority through our collective lies about our history. I was taught in grade school that, actually, slaveowners were pretty chill and nice to their slaves. Teachers used the analogy of hurting a cow you needed to plow a field. Wouldn’t make much sense to hurt the cow since you’d need it, right? Same with slaves.
To be clear, this isn’t about hating America or “canceling” Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. That’s a stupid term used by idiots. Besides, history will take care of them in due time. This is about holding America to account for what IT IS and has ALWAYS BEEN. It is convenient for white people to think Mt. Rushmore (among other atrocities) happened in some distant timeline, in a galaxy far, far away. But that’s not the truth. It was very recent in the grand scheme of things. It is only our inability to accept the truth of what a monument to slaveowners built on stolen land by a Klansman says about US.
Founding a nation (largely out of self-interest and the desire for wealth) does not make a person immune from judgment. If anything, it makes them even MORE accountable. If these are the paragons of morality we are supposed to admire should we not, at the very least, tell an honest and reflective narrative of who they were? Or shall we accept the fairy tales created by shame?
Many years ago I heard an expression that said “you know you’ve reached adulthood when you can hold two contradictory thoughts in your head and know they are both true”. We can say that Washington and Jefferson and the rest of them were great men because they led a nation away from a monarchy with the hopes of creating a democratic country. We can also point out they were pieces of shit for owning other human beings! Both are true!
What would happen if the United States ADMITTED it did something wrong? What if the US simply shut down Mount Rushmore and gave it back to the people whose land it rightfully and legally is? What if we lived up to not just our stated ideals but the laws we claim to hold dear? “Well,” you might say, “where would it end? Does that mean reparations for the descendants of slaves? Should we give places that are currently settled by people back to native tribes?” Yes. That’s what it would mean. I don’t remember white people wringing their hands about what would happen to the 60,000 Indigenous people who were marched off their lands in the dead of winter along the Trail of Tears. And listen, we won’t make the people living there walk barefoot in the snow. We’ll find them a new place to live! It’ll be nice. Maybe even with a yard and a citrus tree.
This is all part of the Land Back Movement. It’s been showing up in contemporary media for the last few years. Here’s a great video on it:
I’m going to try to stop saying “Mount Rushmore”. Not because I’m some woke commie lib (I mean, I AM) but because it doesn’t represent what I am trying to say. Mount Rushmore doesn’t represent the greatness of America. It memorializes the worst and most shameful parts of our history. Slavery. Genocide. The Klan. And I am not on board with any of that.
From now on, it’ll be The Six Grandfathers for me. And hey, you get two more spots now! That’s a win-win!
tl;dr video below: