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These fact checks of North Carolina politics are a collaboration between PolitiFact and WRAL. You can hear them Wednesdays on WFAE's Morning Edition.

Fact Check: NC GOP claims Democrats want to remove Mount Rushmore from textbooks

Mount Rushmore.
Brigitte Werner
/
Pixabay
Mount Rushmore.

Marshall Terry: It's time for a fact-check of North Carolina politics. This week, we're looking at a claim made by the state Republican Party regarding Mount Rushmore. In an email to potential donors last month, the party said, "The left is determined to erase Mount Rushmore from our history books." It added, "You need to act fast to support preserving and protecting Mount Rushmore for generations to come." To find out if it's true, we turn now to Paul Specht of WRAL.

OK, Paul. I'm sure most people at this point are at least familiar with Mount Rushmore, a big monument featuring the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt in South Dakota. Beyond that, though, will you give us a little history of it?

Paul Specht: Sure. And I sort of learned this in the course of reporting this Fact Check. I didn't know much about it either. It's completed in 1941 in the Black Hills mountains of South Dakota, and it's on land that was in dispute between the federal government and Native American tribes. In fact, at one point, our government signed away this land to those tribes and then seized it back. So there's that history that you hear people talk about sometimes. And then also the main sculptor, the main guy behind this design, Gutzon -- I apologize for not knowing how to pronounce his first name. But his last name is Borglum. He had ties to white supremacy groups, including the Ku Klux Klan -- that was even written about in Smithsonian magazine. So this history isn't exactly the stuff of fairy tales. I learned about it as I was researching this and just, sort of, wondering, like, OK, what is it people might have a problem with, with this national monument?

Terry: Well, all right. Now back to this claim by the North Carolina Republican Party — "The left is determined to erase Mount Rushmore from our history books." What did the GOP mean by that?

Specht: Well, we don't know exactly because the state party didn't get back to us. I emailed them on their main communications line. I even texted with their main spokesperson, and they never offered comment for this story. So we're left to speculate. And, you know, there has been a lot of debate, a lot of political rhetoric around books and what should be in them, what should be in our public libraries, what should be taught in schools. And so that's, sort of, where we went with this, was asking the state education department like, 'Hey, are you guys aware of anyone pushing to remove references of Mount Rushmore to education books, to history books for K-12 students?' And they said no. And then we reached out even to the federal education department, and they said anything to do with history books and the curriculum would be done at the local level. That sends us back to the states. Well, since the state (education) department didn't hold any effort, we reached out to even the Democratic Party, leaders in the Democratic Party, and said, 'Are you aware of any of your members, any of your legislators who want to remove references of Mount Rushmore from North Carolina's history books?' And they said no. In fact, one of them even searched on the legislature's website, references to Mount Rushmore dating back several years and couldn't find any proposed legislation that would remove any reference to Mount Rushmore or its four presidents from the state curriculum.

Terry: Have there been any efforts anywhere else in the country? You said you checked in the state of North Carolina and at the national level, but what about anything like this anywhere else in the country?

Specht: Now, there there are stories out there of people saying, hey, this monument is racist because of its history. There's an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times titled "Could the Racist Past of Mount Rushmore's Creator Bring Down the Monument?" And then there's a basketball commentator named Jalen Rose. He said we shouldn't talk about players being on the Mount Rushmore of basketball or the Mount Rushmore of football because of the monument's history, it's racist, we shouldn't say that. And in South Dakota, one of its congressmen filed a bill to protect the monument from destruction. But again, that's all about the monument itself and whether or not it should come down. And I should also add, there's not a serious threat to the monument right now. We could not find any. There are people who have floated the idea of bringing the monument down, but none of those have serious traction. Apart from that, we could not find any evidence whatsoever that anyone on the left that is in politics in North Carolina, or otherwise, wants to remove references of this monument in books specifically.

Terry: Well, how does this fit into the national debates that are raging right now about what history should be taught and how? Because this kind of plays into that a little bit.

Specht: It does. One reason that this stood out to me is that currently the political left is often accused of being woke, right? And there are various definitions of that, but often it involves teaching the ugly side of American history, right? And so the right is often accusing the left of teaching too much, if you will. I'm paraphrasing, I'm generalizing, of course. And this sort of runs contrary to that. It's going in the opposite direction. It's accusing the left of trying to suppress America's history. That's one reason it stood out to us is because of the unique nature of this claim -- that the same people who want to talk about America's ugly history, in this case, were being accused of trying to bury it altogether.

Terry: So how did you write this claim by the North Carolina GOP?

Specht: We rated this false. The Republican Party said the left, the political left, is determined to erase Mount Rushmore from our history books. With every Fact Check, the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. The party did not give us any proof. And then when we started searching around, and even emailing public institutions and political leaders. We found no proof.

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Marshall came to WFAE after graduating from Appalachian State University, where he worked at the campus radio station and earned a degree in communication. Outside of radio, he loves listening to music and going to see bands - preferably in small, dingy clubs.