The National Gazette, which Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton called “an incendiary and pernicious publication,” first appeared October 31 in Philadelphia. Hamilton claimed the semiweekly’s sole purpose was to “vilify and depreciate the government of the United States,” but in fact it was the inspiration of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to challenge John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, in which Hamilton, under various psuedonyms, was attacking Jeffersonian republican positions.

For editor of the National Gazette, Madison chose the poet and mariner Philip Freneau, his classmate at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), who, after a stormy and peripatetic career, allowed himself to be lured from New York City to the new capital of Philadelphia. He was employed part-time by Secretary of State Jefferson as “clerk for foreign languages,” but his chief reason for leaving New York, where he had worked at the Daily Advertiser, was to edit the new journal.

Jefferson saw the paper as a forum to “give free place to pieces written against the aristocratical and monarchical principles.” Even President Washington, he feared, was not sufficiently on his guard against those who wanted a monarchy.

Although Jefferson probably never wrote explicitly for the National Gazette, he did provide it with information not available to other editors. Madison was a vigorous contributor, writing as “Brutus” to criticize the Federalist line. The Gazette’s enemies were the “monied aristocracy,” or “monocrats,” it proclaimed: “an irredeemable debt … is hereditary monarchy in another shape. It creates an influence in the executive part of the government, which will soon render it an overmatch for the legislature. It is the worst species of king’s evil.”

Freneau proved unrestrainable on certain subjects. He routinely attacked Hamilton and was doctrinaire in his support of France’s bloody revolutionaries. Hamilton countercharged that the Gazette was “a news paper instituted by a public officer, and the Editor of it regularly pensioned with the public money. …” Freneau responded that Hamilton’s paper’s editor, Fenno, was a “vile sycophant” whose principles were “utterly subversive” to republican government.

President Washington finally spoke to Secretary of State Jefferson about his battle by proxy with Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton. He asked Jefferson to rein in the editor, perhaps by firing him from his government post. Jefferson refused, but not without distancing himself a bit from the paper’s ad hominem tone. “My expectations looked only to the chastisement of the aristocratical and monarchical writers,” he insisted, “and not to any criticisms on the proceedings of the government.”

Freneau’s attacks on the government lost readers in the end, and he may have alienated the last of them through his humorous treatment of the devastating 1793 plague.

Freneau finally resigned his government position October 11, 1793, and two weeks later, two years after it had begun, his National Gazette went under.

On October 31, fourteen years after construction began, the last men came off Mount Rushmore, and the project reached a quiet end. The four tremendous heads sculpted from the mountainside were left without a final dedication ceremony, because federal money was being husbanded for defense in case the nation entered the spreading war in Europe. Gutzon Borglum, the man who had, in his own words, “released” the giant busts of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt from the South Dakota mountain, died six months before the last of the work ended.

The idea of carving American heroes into the Black Hills had originated with a Western history writer named Doane Robinson. He had heard of a huge equestrian relief of Robert E. Lee being cut by Borglum from Georgia’s Stone Mountain and invited the sculptor to South Dakota to scout possible sites in Custer State Park for a “massive sculpture.” Borglum was happy to abandon the Lee project, with its legal and monetary entanglements, for something even grander. However, rather than the frontier icons that Robinson envisioned, the sculptor first proposed twin busts of Washington and Lincoln, then found a larger granite surface out of which four great heads might emerge. The mountain they chose was named for Charles E. Rushmore, a New York lawyer who had come to know the area while researching the land claims of miners in the 188Os. In 1927 he gave Borglum his first check for the project, for five thousand dollars. The cliff face the sculptor had chosen was five hundred feet across and four hundred feet high, a “veritable Garden of the Gods,” said Borglum.

“Mr. Borglum was very businesslike,” remembers Gerald Snedigar, who worked as a “call boy” on the mountain during his college summers of 1938 and 1939, riding a tethered cage to relay messages between the drillers and blasters on the cliff. When Calvin Coolidge visited on his 1927 vacation, Snedigar helped clean out nearby streams where the President would fish, and then carried in buckets of trout to pour in upriver. President Coolidge dedicated the mountain August 10, 1927. Borglum’s men began work the same day with dynamite and pneumatic drills, blasting to specifications, then picking away and smoothing the rock.

Most of the 360 men who worked for Borglum over the fourteen years were miners from Keystone or Rapid City, South Dakota. Borglum “knew what he was doing, knew what he wanted,” according to Don Clifford, a native of Keystone whom the sculptor hired when he was seventeen. He worked off and on below the chins of Presidents Roosevelt and Lincoln as a driller, winchman, and rough carver for three years. “A lot of the time he’d go someplace to eat and get up, wouldn’t pay,” Clifford recalls of his fanatical boss. “He figured he was bringing in so many tourists, why should he?”

The state of South Dakota gave nothing to the project; the federal government allotted $836,000 of the $989,992 it ultimately cost. The dogged task of raising money was as troublesome as any peculiarities in the rock. Washington’s head took shape and was dedicated with new funds in 1930; Jefferson was dedicated in 1936, followed by Lincoln in 1937. Roosevelt, the final portrait, was completed in 1939. Lack of money and the coming of the war kept Borglum from carving each portrait down to the waist, as originally planned.

“Most of us guys were just rough carvers,” says Clifford, “so when it came down to Lincoln’s nose or eye or something, these finish carvers would come in.” The finish carvers smoothed the granite skin of the Presidents with four-pronged “bumpers.” Respirators were optional on the mountain, and some of the men developed silicosis from years of breathing granite dust.

After fourteen years of supervising and drumming up money, Borglum suffered a fatal blood clot following standard prostate surgery. His son, Lincoln, who had first looked across at the clean face of Rushmore as a twelve-year-old hiking with his father, led his crew to the end of the job, a little more than a month before Pearl Harbor.

Mount Rushmore finally received a formal dedication last July 3, with President Bush, the popular musician Huey Lewis, and a few surviving members of Borglum’s crew in attendance. Don Clifford went up on the mountain twice for television interviews, the first time he had gone up in fifty-one years. “I’d go again if they’d ask me tomorrow or even this afternoon,” he says. “I don’t think any of us that are left will ever forget it. It was something, really something.” While he was standing in his old place under Roosevelt, Clifford reached out to touch the president’s face and admired the work of the finish carvers. “There were no bumps, it was just smooth.”