A country boy born in a small town named Porterdale just southeast of Atlanta became a man with a purpose. How does someone rise up from barely completing high school take on such a monumental task such as etching out three historical figures from the Civil War. I tell you how...a man that went above and beyond the vision that God gave him to work day and night and sometimes seven days a week until the job was finished.. My dad is a man who has been dedicated to everything he has come in contact with ...from helping his mother around the house as well enlisting into the Marine Corp to help provide financial support and then soon marrying my mom to start his own family. He knew that day on Jefferson Street when he was playing football and the ball struck my mom's ankle that she would one day be his wife and the mother of his children. Daddy loved the ocean so much that once a year in August he would take us on a family vacation to Daytona Beach and other trips he would go to Panama City to enjoy one of his favorite past times which was deep-sea fishing. He was so determined that he would never leave his boat until he was satified with his catch. A young man with many jobs starting out as a newspaper boy and moving onto a position as a welder never dreamed that one day he would be hired as the man to erect an outside 400-foot elevator that would ascend up the side of Stone Mountain. This man who fell in love with the mountain and became the Chief Carver of the Confederate Memorial is the same simple man that never took an art lesson in his life and believed that he had a purpose which soon became a historical monument that we all have come to love and enjoy."

A leading expert on the past, present, and future of public monuments in America. An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? Which ones should stay up and which should come down? Who should make these decisions, and how? Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles, brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She lays bare the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, from the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol, to the fervent Klansman fired from sculpting the world’s largest Confederate monument—who went on to carve Mount Rushmore. And she explores the surprising motivations behind contemporary flashpoints, including the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol, the question of who should be represented on the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, and the decision by a museum of African American culture to display a Confederate monument removed from a public park. Written with great verve and informed by a keen sense of American history, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental questions for rebuilding not only our public landscape but our nation as a whole: Whose voices must be heard, and whose pain must remain private?

A country boy born in a small town named Porterdale just southeast of Atlanta became a man with a purpose. How does someone rise up from barely completing high school take on such a monumental task such as etching out three historical figures from the Civil War. I tell you how...a man that went above and beyond the vision that God gave him to work day and night and sometimes seven days a week until the job was finished.. My dad is a man who has been dedicated to everything he has come in contact with ...from helping his mother around the house as well enlisting into the Marine Corp to help provide financial support and then soon marrying my mom to start his own family. He knew that day on Jefferson Street when he was playing football and the ball struck my mom's ankle that she would one day be his wife and the mother of his children. Daddy loved the ocean so much that once a year in August he would take us on a family vacation to Daytona Beach and other trips he would go to Panama City to enjoy one of his favorite past times which was deep-sea fishing. He was so determined that he would never leave his boat until he was satified with his catch. A young man with many jobs starting out as a newspaper boy and moving onto a position as a welder never dreamed that one day he would be hired as the man to erect an outside 400-foot elevator that would ascend up the side of Stone Mountain. This man who fell in love with the mountain and became the Chief Carver of the Confederate Memorial is the same simple man that never took an art lesson in his life and believed that he had a purpose which soon became a historical monument that we all have come to love and enjoy."

The first book to tell the complete story of Rushmore. "I had seen the photographs and the drawings of this great work. And yet, until about ten minutes ago I had no conception of its magnitude, its permanent beauty and its importance." —Franklin Delano Roosevelt, upon first viewing Mount Rushmore, August 30, 1936 Now in paperback, The Carving of Mount Rushmore tells the complete story of the largest and certainly the most spectacular sculpture in existence. More than 60 black-and-white photographs offer unique views of this gargantuan effort, and author Rex Alan Smith—a man born and raised within sight of Rushmore—recounts with the sensitivity of a native son the ongoing struggles of sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his workers.

Every traveler, on first viewing Stone Mountain, has stood in awe at the foot of the looming monolith. Seasoned tourists and Georgia school children are affected just as pioneer explorers were. The towering rock is so impressive that each individual feels he is making a great discovery. Questions arise. How did Stone Mountain come to be? How old is it, and how high? Exactly how large is this biggest carving in the world. How was it done? Who did it? Who first saw Stone Mountain? What effects has it had on the development of our country? Thus, this book. It is dedicated to those who care enough to see and study the wonders of their country, and who, in their travels, have had the unexplainable and unexpected thrill of discovering Stone Mountain.

Shares the accomplishments of Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor responsible for the creation of Mount Rushmore, revealing his motivations for constructing the monument and the response he received after its completion.

In 1912, a group of ambitious young men, including future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter and future journalistic giant Walter Lippmann, became disillusioned by the sluggish progress of change in the Taft Administration. The individuals started to band together informally, joined initially by their enthusiasm for Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign. They self-mockingly called the 19th Street row house in which they congregated the "House of Truth," playing off the lively dinner discussions with frequent guest (and neighbor) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. about life's verities. Lippmann and Frankfurter were house-mates, and their frequent guests included not merely Holmes but Louis Brandeis, Herbert Hoover, Herbert Croly - founder of the New Republic - and the sculptor (and sometime Klansman) Gutzon Borglum, later the creator of the Mount Rushmore monument. Weaving together the stories and trajectories of these varied, fascinating, combative, and sometimes contradictory figures, Brad Snyder shows how their thinking about government and policy shifted from a firm belief in progressivism - the belief that the government should protect its workers and regulate monopolies - into what we call liberalism - the belief that government can improve citizens' lives without abridging their civil liberties and, eventually, civil rights. Holmes replaced Roosevelt in their affections and aspirations. His famous dissents from 1919 onward showed how the Due Process clause could protect not just business but equality under the law, revealing how a generally conservative and reactionary Supreme Court might embrace, even initiate, political and social reform. Across the years, from 1912 until the start of the New Deal in 1933, the remarkable group of individuals associated with the House of Truth debated the future of America. They fought over Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence; the dangers of Communism; the role the United States should play the world after World War One; and thought dynamically about things like about minimum wage, child-welfare laws, banking insurance, and Social Security, notions they not only envisioned but worked to enact. American liberalism has no single source, but one was without question a row house in Dupont Circle and the lives that intertwined there at a crucial moment in the country's history.