Manufactured Nationalism
with expansionistic tendencies, it clarifies just what that definition of American identity was in the mind of Gutzon Borglum.
Yet the monument itself is now complete, and well beyond the defense or motivations of its sculptor. Revisiting the Mount Rushmore memorial means also investigating how the memorial itself is presented to the American public by its current caretakers, the National Park Service. Since the civil rights movement gained social acceptance, the National Park Service's goal with Mount Rushmore has been to distance itself somewhat from the overtly patriotic rhetoric of the monument's founders. (Glass 1991: 271)
With the 2004 appointment of Gerard Baker as the park's first Native American superintendent, the park is now opening itself to allow for the presence of Native American exhibits within the park itself. Reactions to Heritage Village have been mixed, according to the Rapid City Journal, with some park visitors wondering why the Native Americans would even have a place at the "Shrine of Democracy", and some even expressing the opinion that inclusion of references to the Native Americans was essentially done as sheer appeasement or political correctness, but essentially baseless. (Rapid City Journal, 2008)
With the election of the nation's first African American president in 2008, a new brand of social attitudes born of the civil rights movement have arguably come to maturity, with race no longer an obstacle to inclusion within definitions of patriotism. As the United States continues to
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