Great White Fathers: The Story of the Obsessive Quest to Create Mount Rushmore

Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, hoped that ten thousand years from now, when archaeologists came upon the four sixty-foot presidential heads carved in the Black Hills of South Dakota, they would have a clear and graphic understanding of American civilization.

Borglum, the child of Mormon polygamists, had an almost Ahab-like obsession with Colossalism—a scale that matched his ego and the era. He learned how to be a celebrity from Auguste Rodin; how to be a p...