On this day 1927, President Calvin Coolidge arrived in Rapid City, South Dakota in preparation for the dedication of the Mount Rushmore monument. The next day, the visionary sculptor Gutzon Borglum began the work of carving the likenesses of presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and the just recently deceased Theodore Roosevelt into the face of the Black Hills. Borglum defended the massive scale of his work by asserting, "A monument's dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated. We are not here trying to carve an epic, portray a moonlight scene, or write a sonnet; neither are we dealing with mystery or tragedy, but rather the constructive and the dramatic moments or crises in our amazing history."
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