The cold open is given over to sponsor spots — the London Review of Books (offering a three-month free trial), BetterHelp's 2026 State of Stigma report on mental health, and Attio, an AI-native CRM platform. Once the ads clear, host Anita frames the episode with a striking image: President Trump posting an AI-generated photo of Mount Rushmore with his own face added to the existing four presidents. It's a perfect gateway into the episode's central argument — that Mount Rushmore is never simply a monument, but always a contested political act. Anita promises a journey through Native American wars, gold prospectors, and KKK connections, and welcomes guest Matthew Davis, author of *A Biography of a Mountain: The Making and Meaning of Mount Rushmore*.

Anita welcomes Matthew Davis, who has recently relocated from America to London, and frames the conversation around America's anniversary and the idea of understanding vast historical swathes through a single object. She poses the central question directly: is Mount Rushmore a shrine to democracy or 'a colossal act of imperial vandalism carved into stolen land'? Davis agrees that framing is accurate for many people and explains why Rushmore has become such a fascinating subject — it stands in for so many debates about American myth, history, and empire. He then describes visiting the monument in person, noting the counterintuitive experience: the 60-foot faces actually seem smaller than expected because they are overwhelmed by the billion-year-old granite and towering ponderosa pine trees of the surrounding Black Hills.

Matthew Davis lays out the Lakota cosmological and spiritual relationship with the Black Hills in vivid detail. The Lakota emergence story begins at Wind Cave, just a short drive from Mount Rushmore — now a national park in its own right — where they believe they emerged from the bowels of the earth. The hills provided food, shelter, medicine, and clothing, and remain a living site of vision quests and spiritual ceremony. The Lakota name for what Americans call the Black Hills translates as 'the heart of everything that is.' The mountain now blasted into a presidential monument was called the Six Grandfathers, named for the six sacred directions of Lakota cosmology: north, south, east, west, the sky above, and the earth below. Davis makes clear this is not a church or cathedral in the Western sense — it is a living, breathing spiritual landscape.

Anita contextualises the treaty within the broader post-Civil War westward push: a newly healing nation running into 'genuinely humiliating military resistance' from the Lakota. The 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty gave the Lakota the Great Sioux Reservation encompassing almost all of western South Dakota, and President Grant initially did a 'commendable job' of enforcing it. But in 1874 came the expedition that would change everything: George Armstrong Custer led his flamboyant 7th Cavalry — band playing their Irish drinking-song theme tune — through the hills on a pretext of finding a military fort. The real motivation, Davis makes clear, was gold: the US was deep in the depression following the 1873 panic, and Custer knew that finding gold would make his star rise. On French Creek at what is now Custer, South Dakota, they found traces. A messenger was sent galloping to Fort Laramie, and the news went out to the world.

Word of gold set off a massive rush that the US government could not stop. Thousands of miners poured into the hills, creating illegal settlements that form the backbone of western South Dakota today — Rapid City, Keystone, Custer, Deadwood. These are all gold-rush towns founded in defiance of a treaty signed just six years earlier. Faced with this unstoppable influx, the US government dropped any pretence of honouring the Fort Laramie Treaty and issued the Lakota a stark ultimatum: be on government-run reservations by the beginning of 1876 or, in Davis's words, be 'quote-unquote hunted down.' The stage was set for one of the most famous confrontations in American military history.

Custer attempted to surprise a massive Lakota and Northern Cheyenne encampment without waiting for reinforcements — his characteristic recklessness proved fatal. His 7th Cavalry was almost completely wiped out and Custer himself killed. It was an amazingly decisive Lakota military victory, as Davis puts it. But it was also a Pyrrhic one. News of Custer's death reached Philadelphia just as the country was celebrating the centennial of the Declaration of Independence. Americans were irate. Custer was painted as a Christian martyr killed by 'native savages,' and the United States, Davis explains, 'no longer has any interest in treaties, has no interest at all in diplomacy.' The process of seizing the Black Hills began in earnest — with direct implications for the mountain that would become Mount Rushmore.

The renaming of the Six Grandfathers was almost laughably trivial. In 1885, New York lawyer Charles Rushmore was in the Black Hills representing a tin mining company when he asked his guide what the mountains were called. The guide — apparently unenthusiastic about his client — jokingly replied they were called Mount Rushmore, and the name stuck. Years later, when the memorial project began and Rushmore received a call to contribute, he paid $5,000. For that sum, a gigantic national memorial was named after a random corporate lawyer. Davis coins a perfect phrase for it: 'the cheapest naming rights in American history.'

Fifteen years after Little Bighorn, the US military was jumpy about the Ghost Dance — a spiritual movement spreading across the Great Plains that the American military feared was galvanising the Lakota. The 7th Cavalry, Custer's own regiment, was posted around Pine Ridge Reservation. In brutal December cold, a group of Lakota led by Spotted Elk were trying to reach the safety of Pine Ridge under Red Cloud's protection. They were mostly women, children, and unarmed men. Surrounded by the cavalry, as soldiers attempted to disarm the few who had weapons, a gun accidentally discharged and the massacre began. As many as 350 Lakota were killed. In the aftermath, the US Army awarded 20 soldiers Medals of Honor for their actions — awards that stood until the Biden administration revoked them, only for the Trump administration to re-award them. Davis characterises Wounded Knee as the transition from military conflict to cultural and historical conflict, marking the beginning of forced assimilation.

The origin of Mount Rushmore is, at root, an economic story. South Dakota in the early 1920s was experiencing its own Great Depression a decade before the rest of America: commodity prices had crashed after World War I, and the state's agrarian economy was floundering. Doane Robinson, the state's first historian — described by Davis as a bald, sparkling-eyed Renaissance man interested in everything from alfalfa farming to bridge construction — spotted an opportunity in the rise of the automobile. Middle-class families in the Roaring Twenties were driving across America for the first time, and Robinson wanted something iconic enough to make them stop in South Dakota. His original idea was to carve colossal figures into granite spires called the Needles — and his first instinct was not presidents but frontier heroes: Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, Buffalo Bill, and most prominently Red Cloud, the Lakota chief who had actually beaten the United States in war.

Robinson's first-choice sculptor turned him down, and he ended up with Gutzon Borglum — a name Anita gleefully compares to a Bond villain, and a personality to match. Born in 1867 in Idaho to Danish Mormon parents, Borglum's early life was defined by the trauma of having his biological mother cast aside when his polygamous father renounced Mormonism. Raised by his aunt and taught that the truth of his origins was 'something to hide,' Borglum carried that secretiveness into adulthood — a poignant parallel to the hidden history of the monument he would create. He arrived in Europe as a painter and left ten years later as a sculptor, transformed by his relationship with Rodin, who taught him to be an iconoclast and to challenge artistic systems. Back in the US permanently, he had already carved a marble Lincoln in the US Capitol and another in Newark, New Jersey. He refused to submit to artistic competitions, demanding to be hired directly — a reflection of the fierce, combative personality that everyone who worked with him found deeply challenging.

Two things happened in 1915 that would define how history judges Gutzon Borglum. First, he was invited to Atlanta to meet Helen Plain of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who wanted a portrait of Robert E. Lee carved into Stone Mountain — a granite mountain outside Atlanta that dwarfs Mount Rushmore. Borglum dismissed her proposal as 'putting a stamp on a barn door' and instead embraced the grander vision of a full Confederate memorial. Then, just months later, roughly 15 men climbed to the top of that same mountain after watching Birth of a Nation — the 1915 film that lionized the then-defunct Klan — burned a 16-foot cross, and relaunched the Ku Klux Klan as the Second KKK. The coincidence of time and place was not accidental: the Stone Mountain Confederate memorial project was deeply intertwined with the new Klan from its earliest days, with many members of the Stone Mountain Memorial Association being KKK members.

The question of whether Borglum was a white supremacist is one Davis handles with scholarly care. The letters are damning: virulent anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish rhetoric runs throughout. He was giving KKK leaders introductions to national politicians and advising on Klan policy. His friendship with D.C. Stevenson — the Grand Dragon of the Indiana Klan and the most powerful Klan figure in the US, later convicted of rape and murder — produced letters that Davis describes as 'terrible reading.' Davis's conclusion: Borglum was not an official KKK member and no evidence places him in a hood at a rally, but he was unquestionably sympathetic to the Klan's worldview and actively helped them achieve their political goals. Most damningly, his close relationship with Stevenson is entirely absent from Mount Rushmore's official narrative — as if those ten years of his life never existed.

The Stone Mountain project collapsed in spectacular fashion. The US Treasury had actually minted a coin to honour the Confederacy, with proceeds meant for the memorial — but the KKK-dominated Stone Mountain Memorial Association wanted Borglum to take a set fee and let them pocket the rest. Effectively, they wanted him to let the US government fund the KKK, not the memorial. Borglum refused, was fired in February 1925, and in a fit of rage destroyed his Stone Mountain models. His response was as theatrical as the man himself: fleeing Atlanta at night in a car, chased by police and possibly gunshots, racing to cross state lines before he could be arrested. He made it — a fugitive from justice who had lost his project and made enemies of the Klan. And it was at that precise moment, Davis explains, that he began seriously considering Mount Rushmore. Six months after his Stone Mountain escape, he was standing atop the mountain for its first dedication.

Once in South Dakota, Borglum wasted no time asserting control. Robinson had wanted the Needles as the location, but Borglum dismissed them as too thin and vertical. He hiked with Robinson to the top of the Black Hills — then called Harney Peak — surveyed the range, and identified the Six Grandfathers as the canvas. His declaration, as quoted by Davis from Borglum's own writings: 'Here is the place American history shall march on the skyline.' The irony is blunt — American history marching on someone else's sacred mountain. He also overruled Robinson's frontier characters, choosing four presidents instead. And crucially, he was explicit about his reasoning: his journal entry describes them as 'a group of empire makers — Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington was already a foregone conclusion,' connecting each to a phase of American imperial expansion.

The construction of Mount Rushmore is one of the great engineering stories of 20th-century America. Around 90% of the rock removal was achieved through dynamite blasting. For the fine detail work, men hung from bosun chairs — essentially wooden garden seats suspended by cables hundreds of feet above the ground — wielding heavy drilling machinery to chisel presidential features into billion-year-old granite. The eye technique is particularly ingenious: Borglum carved a deep recess with a protruding stone that creates an illusion of light and life, giving the faces their uncanny sense of presence. Over 14 years with 400 workers, not one person was killed — one of the most remarkable safety records in American public-works history. There were near-misses, including a cable car brake failure that sent one worker to hospital with a broken bone. The longer-term toll was different: many workers later suffered lung disease from breathing siliceous granite dust.

Mount Rushmore is as much a monument to what was abandoned as to what was built. Jefferson was initially begun on Washington's right side before the team discovered there was not enough good granite and had to blast the half-finished face off and restart on the left. Washington's faint lapel outlines still hint at a grander plan for full torsos across all four presidents — a vision killed by perpetual funding shortfalls. Then there was the Hall of Records: Borglum's obsessive pet project, a grand chamber to be blasted into the rock behind the presidents' heads, housing original constitutional documents and smaller busts of Americans who had shaped the nation. Davis draws an ironic parallel to Trump's Garden of Heroes — the same patriotic instinct, a century apart. The Hall was never finished.

From around the time Rushmore was conceived, the Lakota had been pursuing a land claim against the US government for the theft of the Black Hills. In 1980, that claim found its fullest expression when the Supreme Court sided with a lower court ruling and found the 1877 seizure unconstitutional — 'a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings,' in the court's own extraordinary words. The award: $17.1 million at 1877 values plus 103 years of interest, totalling $105 million. The Lakota refused it. They refuse it today, even as the fund has grown to over $2 billion. Their reasoning is crystalline: taking the money would legally acknowledge that the Black Hills were sold. The Lakota's position, as Davis articulates it, is not that the hills went for a bad price — it's that they were never for sale. It is, Davis suggests, its own kind of monument: a monument to refusal.

Anita asks the obvious question: can Trump actually add his face? Most geologists say no — the mountain cannot support a fifth face. Davis speculates this would disappoint Trump, who is unlikely to settle for a smaller addition. But the deeper question is what the monument means now. Davis has arrived at a nuanced position: the physical material of Mount Rushmore is more solid than any single interpretation of it. Borglum had his meaning; Trump has his; the Lakota have theirs. Davis expresses concern that the upcoming July 4th fireworks at Rushmore will further narrow it into a MAGA backdrop, but insists the monument has the potential to be so much more if its full history is understood — a story of empire, stolen land, contested memory, and Indigenous resistance that makes it one of the most revealing objects in American history.

The episode closes warmly, with Anita expressing genuine enthusiasm for Davis's book and urging listeners to read it. She teases the forthcoming episode with Ken Burns — America's documentary historian — as a direct follow-on exploring whether Americans recognise empire as part of their own story. She closes with a plug for the Empire Club membership, offering early access, ad-free listening, a weekly newsletter, and the full reading list for every series.