After 100 years of Mount Rushmore, its biographer says the landmark is incomplete

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Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2026

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Next year marks the 100th anniversary of the first drilling at Mount Rushmore, the iconic American landmark in South Dakota. But Matthew Davis, author of the new book A Biography of a Mountain, says the project is actually unfinished. In today’s episode, he joins NPR’s Sacha Pfeiffer for a conversation about the original vision for Mount Rushmore, which was intended to diversify a struggling South Dakota economy after World War I.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong.
0:05.5	If I asked you, what is your Mount Rushmore of romance movies?
0:09.5	Or your Mount Rushmore of 70s rock bands?
0:12.0	Or your Mount Rushmore of authors?
0:14.7	You generally know what I'm asking, right?
0:17.0	Top four of your choosing.
0:19.0	It could be your personal favorites or the ones you deem most
0:22.0	culturally relevant or historically important. But when it comes to the actual Mount Rushmore,
0:28.7	the selection process was a bit more complicated. Matthew Davis is the author of a new book
0:34.0	about the landmark titled A Biography of a Mountain, the Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore.
0:39.3	And in this interview with NPR Sasha Pfeiffer, he talks about how Rushmore is still, to this day, incomplete.
0:46.8	That's coming up.
0:48.7	When I was driving cross-country about 20 years ago, I stopped at the Black Hills of South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore.
0:56.4	It's quite a sight. The heads of four U.S. presidents, each about 60 feet tall, carved into stone.
1:03.9	But I hadn't known the history of that National Monument until I read a new book called A Biography
1:09.2	of a Mountain, The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore.
1:12.6	Its release is time to the sculpture's 100th anniversary this year.
1:16.6	And its author, Matthew Davis, explained to me why four famous faces ended up being carved into a mountain in South Dakota.
1:24.3	This is actually my favorite part of the Rushmore story because the initial
1:28.4	idea from Mount Rushmore came from a state historian named Donne Robinson, who was very
1:33.9	concerned about the state's economy in the 1920s. Basically, after World War I, the South Dakota
1:41.2	agricultural commodities markets crashed, and the state historian was looking for a way to diversify the state's economy.
	...

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