Travels: Mount Rushmore

When I was in elementary school one of my pen pals sent me a postcard from her family vacation to Mount Rushmore. As I was already rather obsessed with the past, I was envious of her visit to this historical site. I wanted to go to Mount Rushmore this summer while it was still just a few hours of driving away and convinced my Canadian that it would be a fun mini-break as we couldn't swing a real vacation this summer due to my research trips and the move. 

On Wednesday morning we hit the road to Rapid City to stay the night and to spend a few hours at Mount Rushmore. We did stop at Wall Drug on our way, but I really can't talk about that, as I'm still having nightmares about the place where kitsch and chotchkies went to die....

As an adult and a professional historian, Rushmore proved to be both fascinating and disappointing. The site itself is awe-inspiring and I won't deny that it looked really spectacular when lit up at night. However, the devil is in the details. The informational plaques that visitors can read as they walk the trail and gain different vantage points of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln were truly odd. The quotes were ill-chosen and some of the information listed on them was rather misleading. For example, the Roosevelt plaque claimed that he was the first president to travel outside the US. While it was true that he was the first to travel outside the US as president, he was not the first to have foreign experience as an ambassador, etc. The Jefferson plaque made no mention of him as the author of the Declaration of Independence. Issues of slave-owning were entirely omitted. 

M. and I stayed for the evening lighting ceremony, during which we were treated to a 20 minute film proclaiming that America stands for freedom and democracy and has become the ideal republic. On the one hand, the film was narrated by Captain Sisko Avery Brooks, so that was good, and it did at least play lip service to the fact that there had been some struggles for freedom and liberties to reach the common man and non-whites. On the other hand, the film suggested that these struggles for equal rights and liberties finished playing out long ago. This is hardly true, and we need to have the integrity to admit this and to continue to work to achieve that ideal republic. America cannot be the land of the free and the home of the brave when it refuses to acknowledge the darker parts of its history or that many of its citizens still face discrimination. 

Some might think that kids need to be spared the complexities of their nation's past until they are older or that families don't need to be made uncomfortable by having to think about injustices while on their vacation, but I would argue that we could stand a bit more critical thinking and empathy and more rigorous history lessons if we want future generations of Americans to be aware of the benefits and obligations of living in a representative democracy - not to mention for them to be competitive in a global setting.