The Carving of Mount Rushmore

by Rex Alan Smith

service over the studio’s design. Nonetheless, he did have the satisfaction of knowing the studio was being built and soon would be available to replace the overcrowded and overpublic one about which he had been complaining for so long. Meanwhile, Borglum had brought the Roosevelt face to the point where by early summer it was ready for dedication—and in the process had scored another sculptural coup: the carving of Roosevelt’s spectacles. They consist only of a carved nosepiece and a small ridge, suggestive of a frame, striped lightly across each of Roosevelt’s upper cheeks. All the rest, in Borglum’s words, “is imagination.” But it is enough. To the monument viewer the spectacles are there, and they are complete. The dedication, which included a pageant written by Ziolkowski’s wife to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of South Dakota statehood, took place-on the evening of July 2. Like so many of Borglum’s previous dedications—beginning with the unveiling of Lee at Stone Mountain clear back in 1924—