Who Would You Carve into Mt. Rushmore?
By G. William Whinnery

Overview

Imagine that it has been announced by the "Mt. Rushmore Society" that the face of another president will be added to those already carved into the cliffs of this world famous mountain in South Dakota.  It will be the task of each student to write an advocacy essay or persuasive speech to be presented to the "Society's" selection committee.  The students will explain why their choices should be approved.  This lesson could be a follow-up activity after viewing any or all of The American President shows.  It would be most appropriate for high school students who are taking U.S. history or American government.

Objectives

Students will:

  • Identify and define the qualities, characteristics, actions, and accomplishments of a great president
  • Analyze the lives and accomplishments of several presidents and decide which one best meets the standards of greatness
  • Write essays or speeches explaining the reasons for recommending that their choices be approved

Time Required

This lesson will require one to two hours of class time.

Materials

Initial Motivation

Show a photograph or slide of Mt. Rushmore. Discuss what the students know about the who, what, when, where, how and why of Mt. Rushmore. 

Procedures

    1. Put students into groups of four to six students each.

    2. Hand out the reading on "What Links These Six."  Using Sidey's piece, hold a discussion on what modern historians think of American presidents and the standards for evaluating presidents.

    3. Ask students to create several categories ranging from "great" to "failure" and list several examples for each category.

    4. When the groups have completed their assessments, hold a class discussion about the qualities that describe the nation's great presidents.

    5. Focus on the photograph or slide of Mt. Rushmore, and explain that the final task for each student is to write an essay or prepare a speech explaining why his/her choice of a great president should be added to the other faces on Mt. Rushmore.

Assessment

On the due date, conduct a poll of the class to see which presidents were chosen.  Discuss the results and what the students learned about defining presidential greatness.  In their essays, each student should include: (1) a persuasive argument in support of his/her choice; and (2) a discussion of the understanding of the relationship between his/her choice and the other presidents already memorialized on Mt. Rushmore.  Students should also discuss the standards employed, and provide thorough analyses of the evidence used to support their conclusions.

Additional Resources

The American President website biographies will help students with facts on the presidents they are researching.

Websites on the background of Mt. Rushmore: http://www.mtrushmore.net/

Bill Whinnery taught Advanced Placement government and U.S. history at Rowland High School in California.

 

The following is a reproduction of an article written by Hugh Sidey in his column "The Presidency" which appeared in Time magazine.  The article was originally published in Volume 137, Issue 15, dated April 15, 1991, page 35.

What Links These Six?
By Hugh Sidey

Ronald Reagan may still be a triumphant and beloved figure to the American people, but the historians who evaluate presidential performance have consigned him to the cellar. In the first significant measure of his standing, scholars have rated Reagan "below average"—down with five other mediocrities such as Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce. 

Nearly 500 of the nation's top history professors responded to the Murray-Blessing update survey on presidential performance.  They placed Reagan 28th on a list that includes 37 of the 40 U.S. Presidents.  William Henry Harrison, who died after a month in office, and James Garfield, assassinated after six months, were not ranked.  George Bush, still at work, is not eligible.

With six categories available, ranging from "great" (Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, F.D.R.) to "failure", (Andrew Johnson, Buchanan, Nixon, Grant, Harding), Reagan was placed in the next-to-last group.  Reagan was outranked by Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford ("average") and topped only Nixon of the modern presidents.

The rating of Presidents has been serious business since Harvard's Arthur Schlesinger Sr. made an informal tally among 50 colleagues in 1948.  In 1981 Robert Murray (now retired) and Tim Blessing of Pennsylvania State University took up where Schlesinger left off.  This week Blessing will walk bravely into a meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Louisville and deliver a paper on the new poll results.  Reagan partisans will start to climb the walls.

The historians gave Reagan low marks on nearly everything, from his mind (92% said he did not have the right intellect for the job) to Administration corruption (exceeded only by Nixon's government).  He got little credit for ushering in a new era of prosperity but received most of the blame for the deficits and the 1981–1982 recession.

On foreign affairs, the rating was mixed.  The scholars found Reagan's Middle East policy "a record of ineptitude" but applauded his handling of relations with the Soviet Union.  Oddly, the academics approved of Reagan's style of management and believed he had a rare knack for "getting people to follow him where he wanted to go."  Plainly, few of the professors liked where he went.

Such a harsh and inclusive indictment will raise further questions about the partisanship and competence of the historians as well as about Reagan.  Their judgments are strikingly out of phase with those of the electorate.  "A crushing 91.8% of historians believe that the American people have overestimated Mr. Reagan," writes Blessing.  Put another way, the scholars think that the plain folks did not quite understand what was going on.