The magazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education • Saturday May 19, 2012

By Brent Laurenz
Published: May 25, 2011

RALEIGH - Mount Rushmore opened for visitors in 1941, 152 years after George Washington took the oath of office as the nation’s first president. 

Washington’s face is carved into the mountains of South Dakota along with former presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.  Construction on the Mount Rushmore memorial began in 1927 and it took more than 10 years to complete the 60-foot heads that draw around two million people to the site each year.

It has been 84 years since construction began on Mount Rushmore, so is it time to update the iconic memorial?  Should we add another president or two, or carve an entirely new crop of presidents into rock somewhere else?  America has changed so much since 1927 that the time has come to update the sculpture for the modern world.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt represent the nation’s first 150 years and are all deserving of being on the monument. But Roosevelt, the most recent of the four presidents enshrined on Rushmore, left office in 1909. As such, we need to add a few new presidents that represent the tremendous growth and progress of America’s past 100 years.

Do we want to carve up a whole new mountain to make way for the new faces?  Maybe in North Dakota, to help with their inferiority complex?  Or maybe we can just squeeze in a few more presidents on the existing Mount Rushmore? 

I vote for a new mountain.  And this time, let’s leave room to chisel in a new president every 50 years or so as America continues to prosper and, hopefully, yield great presidents.

So we’ve decided to carve a new Rushmore in North Dakota. Now, who do we put on it?  That’s a tough call.  To have any hope of securing federal funding for this project it will have to be bipartisan. 

That shouldn’t be too tough since the last century has been pretty momentous; we won World War I, beat the Nazis in World War II, climbed out of a devastating depression, finally granted full rights to minorities, landed on the moon, stood up to the Soviet Union and won the Cold War, raced into the modern era as the world’s strongest superpower and even elected the first African-American president. 

But who gets to be immortalized in stone?

One obvious choice is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our 32nd president (1933-1945) and the only to be elected more than twice to the Oval Office.  Some of his policies were controversial, like the “court-packing” plan, but in the end he helped bring the nation out of the Great Depression and rallied the country toward victory in World War II.  Two of his major programs that survive to this day are Social Security and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Like Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, FDR has already been honored with a memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., so he seems ready for a spot on the mountain.

A second choice is Dwight "Ike" Eisenhower, president from 1953-1961.  This pick may seem unconventional, but as president, Eisenhower helped lead the post-World War II economic boom in the U.S., modernized our transportation infrastructure with the Interstate Highway System, made progress on civil rights and brought Alaska and Hawaii into the Union.  Eisenhower was also a World War II hero and so beloved by the country that both the Democratic and Republican parties tried to get him to run as their respective candidate in the 1952 election.  And like FDR, Ike will soon be getting his own memorial on the National Mall, which is scheduled for completion in 2015 and likely to be the last presidential memorial featured on the Mall.

If we’re looking at mythic figures in American history, then we have to include Ronald Reagan on the mountain as well.  He may be controversial in some corners, but the imprint he left on American politics is undeniable.  Serving from 1981-1989, Reagan won 525 electoral votes and 49 states for his reelection in 1984 -- the most of any candidate in U.S. history. While president, Reagan took a tough stance on foreign policy and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Much as FDR ushered in a new era of Democratic politics and policies, Reagan served as a catalyst and inspiration for the current Republican Party.  What's more, a recent poll found that Reagan beats out FDR, Lincoln and Clinton as the former president that North Carolina voters would most want back in office today.

The fourth and final spot is a difficult choice, but I am picking John F. Kennedy to round out Mount Rushmore 2.0.  Kennedy brought hope and optimism to the country and signaled a new generation of leadership for America.  He successfully diffused the Cuban Missile Crisis, started the Peace Corps and declared that an American would walk on the moon by the end of the 1960s.  After his assassination in 1963 Kennedy took on a mythic status that continues to this day. 

So there it is, our new Mount Rushmore.  We can agree or disagree on the choices, but I hope we can all agree that the 20th century had an interesting cast of characters serve as president.  Some of the more compelling ones -- LBJ, Nixon and Clinton -- were in the discussion for our new mountain, but in the end each of them were too flawed.  I am satisfied with the four chosen above, and I’m confident that if this were to actually happen today we could reach a consensus on those four being worthy.

I think as we sculpt this new monument somewhere in the hills of North Dakota we need to leave room for a few more heads.  We still have several decades until America’s tercentennial celebration, which means plenty of time for more great presidents to come along and help mold the modern United States.  After that celebration, we can reset the clock and start thinking about Mount Rushmore 3.0. 

Somewhere in Montana, maybe?