Are there no Democrats on Mount Rushmore?

On May 22, 2023, the official Republican Party Twitter account tweeted that “there is not a single Democrat on Mount Rushmore”.

This claim, with varying wording, is often repeated on social media, including in meme form, such as this Twitter example posted in April 2023, which read “Have you ever wondered why there is no Democrats on Mount Rushmore? Yeah, me neither…”:

The claim is true, even if the implication that the absence of Democratic presidents is anything but coincidental is a purely partisan game.

The party affiliations of the four presidents depicted on the monument are as follows:

Two of the faces, Roosevelt’s and Lincoln’s, belong to members of the Republican Party. Another belongs to Jefferson, who was in the Democratic-Republican Party (considered a precursor to the Democratic Party), and the fourth belongs to Washington, who did not belong to any political party.

According to the National Park Service, the chairs were selected by Mount Rushmore’s chief sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, whose criteria were as follows:

Borglum himself chose the presidents for the memorial, to reflect the nation’s first 150 years of history and to make the project a national rather than a regional one. The original plans only included George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Borglum chose George Washington as the father of the new country because he was a leader of the American Revolution, the first president of the United States, and the man who laid the foundations of American democracy. Abraham Lincoln was chosen for the preservation of the Union during the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. As the project progressed, Borglum added Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt. Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, began America’s westward expansion by purchasing the territory of Louisiana from France in 1803, which doubled the size of the country, adding all or part of the current 15 states. Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States and hugely popular in the early 20th century, connected east and west through the construction of the Panama Canal and was known as a “trust breaker”, fighting monopolies in large companies and defending the worker. .

Mount Rushmore was completed in 1941, during the third term of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat.

In previous articles, Snopes assessed claims that Mount Rushmore’s history was steeped in racism, that Donald Trump suggested his likeness be added to the monument, and that plans were made to add Barack Obama’s likeness to it. .

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