Harriet F. Senie's "Monumental Controversies"

Harriet F. Senie is a professor emerita of art history at the City College of New York and at the CUNY Graduate Center. She co-founded Public Art Dialogue, an international organization, and its journal, Public Art Dialogue. Senie is the coeditor of Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversy and author of Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11, among other books.

Senie applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Monumental Controversies: Mount Rushmore, Four Presidents, and the Quest for National Unity, and reported the following:

Page 99 starts Chapter 9: Theodore Roosevelt’s Problematic Memorials. It introduces two key works: the equestrian statue by James Earle Fraser that was until recently in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Theodore Roosevelt Island National Memorial in a remote site in Washington DC.

Page 99 only gives a good sense of the four chapters in the book which discuss key memorials for each of the Rushmore presidents. It omits reference to the four chapters which discuss each of their problematic policy with regard to Native Americans and Blacks. There is no sense of the book’s first two chapters. Chapter 1: The Land of the Lakota Sioux addresses the culture of the Lakota Sioux on whose land Mount Rushmore sits illegally, while Chapter 2: Gutzon Borglum’s Mount Rushmore discusses the sculptor who was responsible for the selection and depiction of the four presidents based on their furthering of American expansion.

Although the focus of this book is on Mount Rushmore, its underlying purpose is to address the ongoing problem of national unity which continues to plague the country in alarming ways. We seem mired in divisive thinking in terms of “or” rather than “and,” as in Teddy Roosevelt was a good guy or a bad guy. In fact, he was both, contributing to major labor reforms and conservation, the latter at the expense of Native Americans. He was also known for his imperialist policies based on beliefs in white supremacy. The Rushmore presidents faced some of the most contentious times in our history but while they acknowledged the prevalent dissention they championed the Union, held together by accepting opposing opinions For them this was one of the basic premises of democracy: in this they thought in terms of “and” rather than “or.”

Visit Harriet F. Senie's website.

The Page 99 Test: Memorials to Shattered Myths.

--Marshal Zeringue