I WAS almost disappointed in Mount Rushmore. Not in its magnificence, scale or sheer size, but in its shameless lack of tackiness. Unlike other heavily trafficked landmarks — from Niagara Falls to Miami Beach — the quartet of Presidents wasn’t penned in by a raft of cheap motels and souvenir stalls.
It was all rather elegant and restrained: The visitors’ area, spruced up in the 1990s, includes a minimalist granite plaza complete with an avenue of state flags, and an outdoor auditorium, at capacity after dark when the evening lighting ceremony takes place. Moving rather than mawkish, it includes a narration of the presidents’ achievements and then a trembling voiced national anthem, all piped in through outdoor speakers as the soft light on the four faces slowly flickers to life.
Spending an entire day here would be easy, and it costs just $10 for an entire car’s annual pass; another 10 bucks will buy a signed book from 88-year-old Don “Nick” Clifford, a still-hardy holdout from the original mining team who worked on the sculpture.
He sits quietly in the corner of the bookstore here with a sign pasted to the table begging “No photos, please — flashbulbs hurt my eyes.” It’s Clifford’s cash that paid for the plaza’s splashy marbled plaque on which the names of every Rushmore worker is inscribed. (Clearly, at least one person is making a healthy living here.)
Clifford’s masterwork, that manmade World Wonder, is South Dakota’s largest tourist lure. But it’s also a tip-off to the state’s obsession, either the first symptom or prime cause of an affliction that’s best dubbed presidentitis. That’s because, despite never having produced a White Houser, South Dakota is obsessed with the POTUS.
Sure, a few have had links here: Calvin Coolidge used a lodge at Custer State Park in the Black Hills as his summer home and Teddy Roosevelt’s love of the landscape — which spurred his creation of National Monuments, starting with Devil’s Tower just across the border in Wyoming — was honed in times spent nearby. But what the locals lack in presidential experience, they make up for in enthusiasm.
Take Rapid City. Its population of just over 60,000 makes it the second largest of South Dakota’s towns (Sioux Falls, in the southeast, has double that). Wander round Rapid City’s pioneer-era downtown, and there’s a strange distraction at the intersections: four statues, one on each corner.
This so-called City of Presidents is a decade-long project involving five local artists whose work is funded by private donations, each statue costing around $50,000. Four fresh presidents have been added each year since 1999; a quartet including Lincoln arrives next month, while a year from now, the final four missing monuments — Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama and poor, forgotten Chester Arthur — will complete the 44-strong set.
The statues’ artistic merits are debatable, but their attention-catching corner perches turn driving round downtown into a game of presidential “I Spy” (pick up more info at the special gift shop and information center on the corner of 7th and Main streets)
Presidentitis has spread throughout South Dakota, though — just two hours from Rapid City sits the onetime bad boy of mining towns, Deadwood. The place still clings to the louche reputation it earned in prospecting times — after Las Vegas and Atlantic City, this was the third site in America to legalize gambling — but it, too, has a prim, presidential side.
The neighborhood of Engleside is gridded with streets named after presidents. “Washington and Monroe intersect at the old jail site,” stage-whispers one resident.
Each new POTUS is usually commemorated with some new road or drag, but the gulch in which the town sits limits its expansion much further.
“There’s no room to add any more, so they’re trying to carve out a space for Obama. Maybe he’ll get a cul de sac,” our local grins.
Barack’s already been immortalized at the Presidents’ Park, a privately run oddity that sits on a sprawling site a few miles outside Deadwood.
Dotted around the grounds amid the pine trees sit twenty-foot high busts of each president, made from Portland concrete; they’re sparklingly whitewashed to stand out against the dark greenery. Obama’s bust was unveiled with much fanfare at a ceremony on July 4th, and now the gift shop is studded with Barack-related finery, including a gold-painted miniature bust ($599) sporting a jaunty sombrero.
“We don’t want any of those Obama things — bookmarks, postcards. We’re Republicans,” one woman sniffs, her loud voice echoing around the cavernous café-cum-gift shop, then turns to her husband, “Come on honey — let’s go get a photo with Nixon.”
But though the set-up may sound kitschy and dangerously partisan, the park is neither. It’s educational and intriguing, the bios posted in front of each bust scrupulously fair, and crammed with illuminating anecdotes (President Harrison was seen as so aloof that wags joked he’d bleed ice water if cut; Frances Cleveland was a Jackie O-level style icon in her time).
Visitors play favorites, spotting presidents like Nixon for photo ops, Madame Tussauds-style; Democrats and Republicans are equally popular. The fact that the park’s owner chose to dub a clearing the Watergate Memorial Picnic Area, of all presidential events in history, might be a nod to his particular sympathies.
The only thing that’s lacking amid South Dakota’s chronic case of presidentitis, though, is much acknowledgement of the state’s original inhabitants, the Lakota and Sioux Indians. Certainly, next year marks the 20th anniversary of South Dakota becoming the first (and so far only) state to rebadge Columbus Day as Native American Day. But otherwise, the original inhabitants are strangely absent — at least, other than in the bizarre Crazy Horse monument a short drive away from Mount Rushmore.
A visit to Crazy Horse only underscores the understated, underpriced elegance of Mount Rushmore; this is a scam masquerading as cultural enrichment, charging $10 per person for admission to view a barely begun project. The hefty fee supposedly funds the blasting work here since the Polish family who began it long refused to accept federal funds; it’s an extra $4 to ride the bus to get close enough to see much.
On a warm September day, the site is throbbing with people, each forking over $10 for the right to photograph little more than a nose carved out of rock from afar. With attendance this healthy, there’s little incentive to actually finish the project. The fact that there is no authenticated photograph of Crazy Horse, making any sculptural likeness specious, is glossed over entirely.
Arriving here, visitors are funneled through an endless warren of knick-knack-selling rooms like a Native American-inflected duty-free shop, rather than Rushmore’s elegant granite entranceway and book-crammed souvenir alcove.
The entire experience would leave anyone longing for another case of presidentitis.
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