ABSTRACT
Mount Rushmore contains gigantic sixty foot sculptures of the heads of four presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt carved out of a mountain. Jesse Larner's book, Mount Rushmore: An Icon Reconsidered suggests that Mount Rushmore is a monument celebrating their role in helping expand the United States and helping its political culture evolve. Mount Rushmore played an important role in the great Hitchcock film North by Northwest, in a more recent film National Treasure: Book of Secrets and also has been seen in a number of video games and comic books. Mount Rushmore can be seen as not only an example of hegemonic domination but also of the exercise of raw political power to set up what started off as a money-making tourist attraction but has metamorphosed into an iconic American patriotic symbol of great power and resonance.
