A minor source of amusement for us is the fact that the Mount Rushmore National Wonder in Sid Meier’s Civilization IV requires players to first research the Fascism technology before building it. It is unclear if the designers were either aware of Gutzon Borglum’s sordid history or if the two concepts were originally separate and the designers simply paired this wonder with Fascism as a bonus for belligerent players (since both the technology and the wonder’s −25% war weariness effect are very useful for their play style).
In any event, whether Firaxis Games knew it or not, we do have at least one link between Borglum and fascism (if his numerous affiliations with the Ku Klux Klan did not already suffice). Quoting Albert Boime’s The Unveiling of the National Icons, page 157:
Borglum’s penchant for “can-do” leaders and obsession with territorial aggrandizement predisposed him to feel most at home with robber barons like railroad tycoon Collis P. Huntington and newspaper czar William Randolph Hearst.
Despite his respect for the two Roosevelts, he always considered a railroad magnate like Huntington to be the greater man. His need for a dominant authority to maintain social order is seen in his 1931 letter to his dear friend Lester B. Barlow, the eccentric inventor and founder of the Nonpartisan League of America, who considered Hoover a “robot.”
Borglum complained that America lacked someone with “guts” who could “take over the Presidency and put the company in order.” He found his model in Europe: “There is only one man in all Europe with vision and courage and who fortunately has the power to carry it out, that’s Mussolini.”⁵¹
[Citation]
[Library of Congress, Manuscript Division], letter from Borglum to Lester Barlow, August 29, 1931. Barlow’s reference to Hoover is in an undated New York Times clipping in the Borglum Papers, “Barlow Looks to Young Business Men for Help.”
The entirety of chapter three in The Unveiling of the National Icons is worth reading for more on Borglum. I could end this little exposé here, but I found even more clues that strongly imply a respect for Fascism. Pages 175–7:
Borglum’s Anglo-Saxon militancy shows up in his racial attitudes, which again throw light on the creative wellsprings of Mount Rushmore. His strident anti-Semitism gave pause even to authors who otherwise admired him.⁹¹ […] A revealing letter of 1923 to his friend D. C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Northern Realm of the Ku Klux Klan, […] gives us an almost hysterical Borglum, sounding suspiciously like a member of Hitler’s inner circle:
If you cross a thorough-bred with a jackass you get a mule. If you cross a pure bred with a mongrel dog you get a mongrel. So in races. […] If you cross any of the others with each other it is curious that the lowest race in civilization is the strongest physically and breeding (crossed) is always down. A [black] and Jew will produce [black], but Hindu and Jew — Jew; Chinese and Jew, offspring Jew; Italian and Jew, offspring Jew; any European race and Jew, offspring Jew.⁹³
Borglum assumed an isolationist position on the eve of American involvement in World War II, claiming that “we don’t want to get mixed up with Europe, any of us, men nor women nor governments.”⁹⁴ In a letter written to his friend Amy Bassett on September 6, 1939, he wrote that “we will not get into the war” because we are “utterly sick of it and no combination of Jews, Communists, and [John L.] Lewis et al., can force us into it, or drag us into it.”⁹⁵
His hatred of progressive and collective dissent in the 1930s was especially unleashed on the Jews. Borglum fiercely followed the line of the leading anti-Semites of his day, such as Gerald L. K. Smith and Father Charles Coughlin, that there was an international conspiracy of predominantly Jewish bankers. He espoused the doctrine that Jews possessed biological characteristics that predisposed them to venality and antisocial behavior except within their own community.
In an unpublished manuscript entitled “The Jewish Question,” Borglum wrote that “Jews refuse to enter the mainstream of civilization, to become producing members of the world community. They do not share or create, but choose instead to clannishly hold onto their ways and with mere money buy and sell the efforts of others.”⁹⁶ We can only imagine the audience for which this paper was written.
Certainly, the stereotype could hardly have held true in his own experience, because he received critical help for his projects from people like Jacob Schiff, of the Kuhn, Loeb and Company; Samuel Colt, founder of the United States Rubber Company; Julius Rosenwald; and Eugene Meyer, who purchased Borglum’s early head of Lincoln and presented it as a gift to the government for permanent display in the Capitol. Yet when Schiff died and a Jewish philanthropic society offered his friend Borglum the commission for his portrait, Borglum praised Schiff, but concluded that “as a Christian I must decline.”⁹⁷
[…]
Borglum also opposed the labor unions, particularly the United Mine Workers of America under the leadership of John L. Lewis, and his sympathies were with management when auto workers struck in 1937.¹⁰¹ Although he had backed some prolabor policies in the past, his earlier reformist position was predicated on his paternalistic and benevolent disposition.
He had no use for militant labor unions, especially as he became an entrepreneur himself. He paid his own nonunionized workers for their high-risk tasks a pitiful fifty cents to a dollar an hour, depending on the skills involved.¹⁰² When Roosevelt backed the unions, Borglum became an outspoken critic of the administration.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
