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CelticSubM -> RE: Obama On Mt. Rushmore? (12/2/2009 1:42:19 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: rulemylife
quote:
ORIGINAL: CelticSubM
The connection is a very close one to Mt Rushmore....Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mt Rushmore, was originally commissioned for the Stone Mountain project. Borglum was a member of the KKK and a member of its Imperial Kloncilium.
Do you have a source for that?
Everything I have seen suggests he was never a member and his association with the Klan was based on their funding of the Stone Mountain project.
The standard biography of Borglum is Six Wars at a Time; The Life and Times of Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mount Rushmore , Shaff and Shaff, Center for Western Studies, St. Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 1985. The web site "Mt Rushmore Revisited," http://rushmore.wingfoot.org/, offers lots of background information on Borglum and on the project in general.
The museum at Mount Rushmore displays a letter to Borglum from Klan leader D. C. Stephenson. A few years later, Stephenson was sentenced to life in prison, after being convicted of rape and murder, under especially lurid circumstances. The scandal around Stephenson contributed greatly to the decline of the KKK's influence. It has been suggested that Borglum's association with the KKK was strictly opportunistic. It has also been suggested that his repudiation of it was strictly opportunistic. It's quite possible that both suggestions are true. All we can say for sure is that Borglum's nativist and nationalist views preceded his connection to the KKK and continued after it.
The KKK in that period was more a nativist than a racialist organization in many ways. It now seems ironical that Borglum, the son of Danish immigrants, would have been attracted to nativism and the KKK. Borglum was born in the U. S., of Nordic Protestant stock. He, along with many others of the time, believed that gave him a special superior status compared to darker-skinned or Catholic immigrants and their offspring.
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