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OUR MOUNTAINS
These are Stan's picks for the significant American women whose faces ought to be sculpted onto a mountainside like an all-female Mt. Rushmore.Top: Eleanor Roosevelt; Bottom row, from left: Rosa Parks, Betsy Ross, Katharine Hepburn. |
It's time for us to build
a female Mt. Rushmore
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
I think the idea first came to me in 1996 when a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt was dedicated at Riverside Park in Manhattan. A statue in New York City was pretty apt, I thought, but maybe the great lady deserved more than that.
Big thinker that I am, I said why not Mount Rushmore? We have four guys, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, but no woman attracting tourists to South Dakota. Methinks a woman should be up there as well and by the lights of many clear thinkers Eleanor Roosevelt was one of our greatest Americans.
I had fun with declaring myself the President of the “Eleanor Roosevelt Should Be Up On Mt. Rushmore” Society when I mentioned this a few times in some of my irreverent Newsday columns. I got some approving nods from right-thinking Americans.
I mentioned this anew recently with my friend, Dr. Bert Brown. He is also a big thinker, and he said, “That is a terrific idea, but I understand that they can’t put another face up on Rushmore; I have read the mountain is too fragile.”
That could have ended it, but Brown had a new thought: why not rival the four gents on Rushmore with four women on another mountain? Why not indeed?
Which women? I asked around and got some wonderful choices: besides Eleanor Roosevelt. Margaret Mead, Helen Keller, Ella Fitzgerald, Jane Addams, Dolly Madison, Abigail Adams. Susan B. Anthony, Betsy Ross, Georgia O’Keefe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rosa Parks, Hillary Clinton, Rachel Carson, Katharine Hepburn, Julia Child, and Billie Jean King.
In the course of my research of great women I came across a website, “The Women on the Web,” which, early this year, actually considered the women-on-Rushmore possibility. In addition to the above-named stalwarts, waggish respondents offered Olive Oyl, Marilyn Monroe, Oprah Winfrey, Annie Oakley, Lillian Hellman, Zasu Pitts, Aimee Semple McPherson, Brenda Starr, Mae West and Shirley Povich.
My research also revealed another Mt. Rushmore campaign, probably no more significant than my own. There are people who want to put Ronald Reagan’s image on Rushmore. Truly.
The idea started kicking around in 1999 when a conservative Republican congressman from Arizona, Matt Salmon, introduced a Reagan bill in Congress and that evolved into the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project whose goal is to have some memorial to Reagan established in all 3,067 United States counties. Truly.
The Rushmore project seems to have stalled but the group looks with pride on an aircraft carrier named for Reagan; his name on the former Washington National Airport and some high schools. . Reagan’s name also adorns a Florida state highway; a Commemorative Sourdough Roll; and he is cast in bronze at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. A Washington congresswoman, Jennifer Dunn, a Republican, named her son, Reagan.
A choice event was the opening in 2000 of the 92-mile Ronald Reagan Trail in Illinois. To celebrate the occasion a candy company erected a six-foot portrait of Reagan rendered entirely from jelly beans, Reagan’s favorite candy. It now stands in a museum in Reagan’s hometown of Dixon, Il. There is a nominal fee for entrance, I believe.
My favorite is the commemorative stamp issued by Granada. This is the little island country on which the U.S. under Reagan successfully invaded a golf course to overturn a pro-Castro administration in 1983. The administration flim-flammed the argument that Cubans were building an air field as part of an attempt to take over the island-or something. It turned out that a British construction company was extending the airstrip to allow larger commercial planes to land on the island.
Back to the women. It being my idea, I decided that the four woman to be enshrined on a mountain should be Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Katharine Hepburn and the flag woman, Betsy Ross. Objections will be considered.
As for Rushmore, it should be noted that the National Park Service maintains that the mountain is now too fragile to sustain another carving of a 60-foot profile into the 400-foot southeastern flank.
So the problem is to find a mountain worthy of our women. Or perhaps there is another means to honor these worthies. Say, a flag with their images to be placed on the platforms of school assemblies in those 3,067 counties in the United States.
Long may they wave, Eleanor Roosevelt,
Rosa Parks, Katharine Hepburn and, of course, Betsy Ross.
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My mean moment, or call me Scrooge:
The ceremonies surrounding the baseball All Star game included a survey naming the single best moment in Yankee Stadium history. Lou Gehrig’s farewell speech at the Stadium, July 4, 1939 was chosen as the most memorable moment.
My choice: as a confirmed New York National Leaguer (New York Giants, Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Mets fan) I settled on Elston Howard’s groundout to Pee Wee Reese to end the 1955 World Series, the only time the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the Series.
*EDITOR'S NOTE: Gee, we're sorry Mr. Povich. We thought you were a girl.
©2008 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted July 21, 2008.
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