21: Mount Rushmore: Awesome and Awful (Finale)

An Old Timey Podcast

True Crime, History, Comedy

4.9 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2024

⏱️ 105 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the finale of our Mount Rushmore series, Mount Rushmore National Memorial gets finished. But the final product isn’t quite what Gutzon Borglum envisioned. The presidents aren’t sculpted down to their waists. There is no entablature. There is no true hall of records. There isn’t a message, written in three languages, in the hope that it’ll one day become Rosetta Stone 2: Electric Boogaloo.

And yet? It’s there! Despite the odds, four 60-foot tall faces of iconic American presidents are carved into a stolen, sacred mountain. Every year, millions of tourists make the trek to take a look.

So… how do we feel about that? Welp, as Normie C likes to say, “two things can be true!” It’s awful and awesome, beautiful and hideous, exciting and saddening.

Remember, kids, history hoes always cite their sources! For this episode, Kristin pulled from:
The book, “The Carving of Mount Rushmore,” by Rex Alan Smith
The documentary, “Mount Rushmore”
“The Sordid History of Mount Rushmore,” by Matthew Shaer for Smithsonian Magazine
“Biography: Gutzon Borglum,” PBS.org
“The heartbreaking, controversial history of Mount Rushmore,” by Amy McKeever for National Geographic
“Why Native Americans Have Protested Mount Rushmore,” by Jodi Rave for History.com
“Are treaties perpetual? United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians,” by Reid Benson for teachingamericanhistory.org
The video, “The dark history of Mount Rushmore,” for TedEd.com
“BIOGRAPHY: Native Americans and Mount Rushmore,” PBS.org
“United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians,” Encyclopedia of the Great Plains
“Who speaks for Crazy Horse,” by Brooke Jarvis for The New Yorker

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hear ye, hear ye. You are listening to an old-timey podcast. I'm Kristen Caruso.
0:07.8	And I'm learning something new every episode. Norman Caruso!
0:12.3	And on this episode, Mount Rushmore gets done.
0:16.0	Done?
0:17.0	Done?
0:18.0	Done!
0:19.0	Finally, it only took them four years.
0:22.0	Yeah, that's all it took. Yeah. Remember in episode one when I was like
0:27.0	oh it should only take like 12 guys four years? Yeah you were really optimistic, weren't you?
0:32.9	I was, and then the more I learned,
0:35.7	the more I realized how wrong I was.
0:38.8	Norm, I want you to think about how long
0:40.3	it's taking us to get a shower in our house.
0:44.0	That's true.
0:45.0	And then think about what it would take to carve four faces into a mountain.
0:49.0	Or four faces into our shower.
0:51.0	Another great idea. Yeah. It's going to take even longer now.
0:55.4	Normally, see, I'm anxiously awaiting your Patreon plug.
1:00.3	Kristen, it's been a wild three weeks. What a whirlwind time it's been.
1:07.0	Okay.
1:08.0	You were a contestant on a hit new game show. We had Judge Judy stopped by the studio. She sure did. And then Dr.
1:15.6	Hubert Montgomery gave us a very generous valuation of our Patreon. Handsome
	...

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