By Owei Lakemfa
THE MOUNT Rushmore National Memorial, South Dakota, is a 1,278-acre or 517-hectare tract seized from the Sioux Nation of India. Into its mountain face are sculpted the 18-metre or 60-foot-high figures of four former United States (US) Presidents.
They feature founding President George Washington, main drafter of the July 4, 1776, Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, leader of the Union in the US Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, credited with developing the country. It is a monument dedicated to 150 years of the Declaration.
It took the sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, son of Danish Mormon immigrants, fourteen years, from 1927 to sculpt the figures.
However, controversy persists as the Sioux Indians, who rejected a 1980 Supreme Court compensation of $102 million, continue to insist that their confiscated ancestral land be returned to them. It was this monument President Donald Trump chose on the eve of the 250th Year of the Declaration to address the American public.
It was a blistering attack against those he considers enemies of the country who must be fought and conquered and should not be allowed any electoral victory. He told his audience: “We stand beneath the monument of these heroes, a true group of unbelievable people, and we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants…”
Trump warned his fellow citizens: “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success. We’re not going to let this happen.”
He added: “We resolve and swear for all to hear that the citizens of the United States of America will vanquish communism quickly … We will send them quickly away, and we will continue to build our country bigger and better, stronger than ever before. America will never be a communist country!”
Trump had, the week before, described progressives winning Democratic primaries in New York City and Colorado, and electoral contests in Texas, New Jersey, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania as “the greatest threat to our country since its founding.” In his Independence Eve speech, he told the electorate: “We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms.”
In the Independence Day speech, he presented the US as the greatest country ever in human history: “Americans lifted humanity into the skies and walked upon the surface of the Moon, planting our beautiful flag in ancient dust where no other nation had ever stood, as our gaze turned toward the galaxies beyond. The inventions of American minds — the telephone, the personal computer, the internet — knit the world together as never before.”
One of his predecessors, Bill Clinton, did not share Trump’s presentation of the current state of the US. Rather, he sees the country “amid another period of deep division, renewed questions about America’s future and role in the world, and serious threats to our own institutions and to our democracy itself.”
He regretted that: “The people in charge have unleashed masked agents on American communities to seize people from their homes, workplaces, and the street.” The Trump regime, he added, has “started an unconstitutional war on a whim, with no clear objectives or exit strategy, and zero regard for the consequences to the lives of millions of people around the world.”
Historian Professor Hasan Kwame Jeffries of Ohio State University posited that the Declaration had not meant liberation for all Americans: “Across history, there has never been a time when all people enjoyed equal rights, equal protection under the law, and equal political power.
Instead, the story of American democracy is one of restriction and resistance — long stretches when rights were denied punctuated by brief, hard-fought expansions led by those who refused to accept exclusion. Each expansion was met with backlash, and many gains were rolled back.”
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