Klan links tarnish Idaho Hall of Fame honoree — again

Idaho State Journal Editorial

The Idaho Hall of Fame folks have a tarnished record in selecting some of the people it chooses to honor. The private group based in Boise named U.S. Senator Larry Craig to its “Idaho Hall of Fame” roster in 2007, soon after his sex-sting arrest in a Minneapolis men’s room.
The organization appeared to be on safe ground this year in choosing Bear Lake County native Gutzon Borglum to its 2010 class of honorees. Borglum is the Mount Rushmore sculptor who created the likenesses of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt in the granite of South Dakota’s Black Hills.
Borglum’s birthplace was the village of St. Charles, which belatedly created a monument to him which is prominently displayed near the highway though town.
Borglum was chosen by the Hall of Fame board as part of its effort to honor people from all 44 Idaho counties. Dallas Cox, president, said Bear Lake County, where Borglum was born to Mormon pioneers in 1867, had not previously been represented.
But now it has been learned that Borglum had a relationship during the 1920s with the Ku Klux Klan, and was a friend of Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, a convicted murderer. Howard and Audrey Shaff, historians at the Gutzon Borglum Historical Center in South Dakota, wrote that Borglum’s immediate concern during the 1920s was securing millions of dollars to create the Confederate monument at Stone Mountain near Atlanta — “and the KKK was offering to help raise the money.”
There is no question that Borglum was talented. His education included studying with sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris, and some of his works were displayed at Windsor Castle for Queen Victoria, according to the National Park Service. His 1908 rough-cut marble bust of Abraham Lincoln is now in the U.S. Capitol crypt.
Cox is unperturbed by the  knowledge that Borglum once was involved with the KKK.
“Well, I’ll bet if we sat down and took every one of the inductees since 1995, you could find something on every one of them…. As far as I’m concerned, we are focusing on the accomplishments,” she said.
Twenty-three others are to be honored by the Hall of Fame this year, including Olympic gold-medal winning cyclist Kristin Armstrong and writer Ernest Hemingway, whose association with Sun Valley ended with his suicide there in 1961.
The Idaho Statesman chides the organization for its “apparent cluelessness” in failing to do adequate searches on its nominees. “It cheapens the honor for the rest of the class of 2010,” the paper observes.
So, who’s next for the Hall of Fame? Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations in north Idaho, or Claude Dallas, one of the state’s best-known outlaws who shot two Fish and Game officers to death and later escaped from the Idaho penitentiary before being recaptured? Of course not. But more due diligence on those who are selected would be appropriate.