Out of Rushmore's Shadow: The Luigi Del Bianco Story - An Italian Immigrant's Unsung Role as Chief Carver

— A cathartic journey of self-discovery and the righting of a seventy-five-year-old wrong —“I think we all want to know where we come from;we all have a desire to explore the lives and the stories that led to our existence.”For more than seventy-five years, millions have marveled at Gutzon Borglum’s massive Mt. Rushmore memorial, whose presidential faces have been chiseled into our collective conscience. Few, however, have the slightest inkling that it was Luigi Del Bianco’s “magic hands” that imbued the timeless soul into those iconic faces. Sadly, the Italian immigrant’s tireless and talented efforts were unacknowledged, like so much granite dust swirling around the dustbin of history. Out of Rushmore’s Shadow is the poignant story of how grandson Lou Del Bianco’s dogged determination and artistic talents helped right this seventy-five-year-old wrong. Ironically, however, Luigi Del Bianco’s fascinating story is not the story in Out of Rushmore’s Shadow. His grandson’s twenty-five-year odyssey of self-discovery and DNA-driven destiny unexpectedly proves even more compelling and captivating. It grabs hold of the reader and won’t let go, making us empathetic participants in Lou’s cathartic journey.— The one story the professional storyteller was always meant to tell —“After twenty-five years of developing my expertise as a storyteller, this was the storyI had always been working towards. This was the story I was meant to tell.” For the past thirty years, Lou Del Bianco has developed and refined his talents as a performer of educational one-man children’s shows combining storytelling, theater, and music. Ironically, it took him nearly as long to fully comprehend that his grandfather’s story was the one he was always meant to tell. This destiny had been foreshadowed years earlier, when as an eight-year-old, he’d told his classmates, “I wanna tell you about my grandpa. He was Luigi Del Bianco, the chief carver on Mt. Rushmore.” Little did the youngster know that he would spend more than twenty-five years in an effort to tell the world about his beloved grandpa. Making the grandfather and grandson’s stories in Out of Rushmore’s Shadow all the more interesting is their symbiosis and almost eerie parallelism. This leitmotif is first articulated in the grandfather’s words to his six-year-old grandson: “I am Luigi; you are Luigi.”— Passing the baton —“I was feeling the burden and privilege of defending my grandpa’s forgotten legacy.” To bring his artistic vision to fruition — to suffuse the presidential faces with soul, humanity, and “refinement of expression” — sculptor Gutzon Borglum needed the singular artistic talents of stone carver Luigi Del Bianco. Similarly, to bring his father’s story out of the shadows and assure his recognition as Mt. Rushmore’s chief carver, son Caesar Del Bianco needed his nephew Lou’s tenacity and unique storytelling abilities. As age and declining health exacted their inevitable toll on Gutzon Borglum and Caesar Del Bianco, both men passed the artistic baton, relying on the uniquely special talents of Luigi and Lou to finish their respective races.Both men passing the metaphysical baton could be headstrong and irascible, thereby threatening the completion of the very tasks they’d entrusted. Artistic differences between Borglum and Luigi often “erupted in chaos,” only to be “resolved into a mutual understanding” borne of the two artists’ respect for one another. In like fashion, differences in how best to unearth and disseminate Luigi’s story often resulted in hard feelings and disagreements between Caesar and Lou, which eventually receded because of their love for each other and the grandson’s respectful deference to the son’s wishes.— A painstaking process —“Well, I don’t give up easily. You’ll be hearing from us again and again until the right thing is done.” To carve the faces and instill them with humanity was a painstaking process taking many years, with battle after battle won one precious inch at a time. The dreaded pegmatite, an unstable mica and quartz-filled stone lurking in the mountain of granite, threatened to wipe out weeks or months of Luigi’s work in an instant. In addition to the daily and often dangerous struggles with his granite adversary, Luigi also had to endure long separations from his family, who for most of his time on the mountain, remained eighteen hundred miles away in Port Chester, New York. Making matters even more difficult, he had to fight the actions of the Rapid City office (the “local machine”), which undermined Borglum’s efforts to recognize the Italian immigrant’s special artistic talents in an appropriate monetary manner.Grandson Lou Del Bianco faced similarly daunting obstacles in telling his grandfather’s story and achieving the rightful recognition of his great contribution to the Mt. Rushmore Memorial. The personality of the lovable but prickly Caesar Del Bianco was the incarnation of the unpredictable pegmatite, with the uncle’s neuroses and bouts of manic depression often threatening the two descendants’ shared goal of bringing Luigi’s contributions to light. Ferreting out Luigi’s story, organizing the research into a cohesive narrative, and cultivating the countless contacts needed to win the acclaim rightfully due his grandfather proved every bit as tedious and painstaking as carving the presidential faces out of the granite mountain.While patiently chiseling away at the impediments preventing the acknowledgement of Luigi’s role as Mt. Rushmore’s chief carver, Lou also had to carve out the time required to develop his career as a children’s storyteller and to be a good husband to his patient wife Camille. While Luigi had to fight the Rapid City office’s narrow provincialism and discrimination in order to be paid a livable wage, Lou and his uncle Caesar faced an even more formidable and unyielding adversary, the National Park Service (NPS). It took fourteen years for Gutzon Borglum, Luigi Del Bianco, and four hundred workers to create the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial. It took grandson Lou Del Bianco almost twice as long to bring his grandfather’s contributions out of Mt. Rushmore’s shadow and into the light of public acclaim.— A consummate storyteller — It would be easy to lose the soul of Luigi and Lou’s respective journeys in a sea of sentimentality and to have their impact and raw emotion emasculated through overwrought hagiographical language. A consummate storyteller, Lou Del Bianco successfully resists this temptation, instead employing an economical, yet powerfully poignant style. When describing how silicosis (a lung disease caused by silica dust inhalation) eventually claimed his grandfather’s life, he captures the sad irony in but twelve words: “Luigi Del Bianco lived for his art. He also died for it.” When opining on his uncle Caesar’s failure to get to Mt. Rushmore, he skillfully conveys a myriad of emotions in a concise but tender paragraph: “He looked up at me from his bed and said, You’ve gotta take this over when I die. Then he called me something he hadn’t in a while — ‘My Nefoo.’ I looked down at those twinkling eyes and that twisted nose, and I smiled. Caesar passed away just two months later. I gotta get to Rushmore! This time, I bet he does.” And when the twenty-five-year battle to bring his grandpa out of the shadow of Mt. Rushmore had finally been won, Del Bianco deftly imbues the same degree of humanity into the unveiling of the bas-relief plaque as his grandfather did with Mt. Rushmore’s iconic presidential faces: “And Luigi? He’s been there all along. His spirit never left the mountain. I’m sure as Cam [Midwest Director of the National Parks, Cam Sholly] and I unveil that plaque, those long, sinewy arms will become young and strong again, helping us pull the sheet away as we change the historical record for good.”— Transformative for both grandfather and grandson — Luigi Del Bianco’s contributions to the Mt. Rushmore National Memorial and his struggles with the Rapid City Office were defining moments in his professional life. As he later remarked, “I’d do it again even knowing all the hardships involved. I would work at Mount Rushmore even without pay if necessary. It was a great privilege granted me.”Lou Del Bianco conveys the same satisfaction and accomplishment in his struggle to win the acclaim rightfully due his grandfather. In Out of Rushmore’s Shadow, he’s created an indelible impression of a proud and talented Italian immigrant using his gifts to make his adopted home a richer place for all of us. But perhaps more importantly, Lou’s nuanced portrait of his grandpa teaches us an important lesson about self-discovery.“We become better, fuller, richer people when we connect with the stories of our ancestors.”Scott ChristiansenIowa City, March, 2018

As an enthusiast of all things Mount Rushmore, I was looking forward to picking up and reading this book detailing the life of Mount Rushmore's Chief Carver, Luigi Del Bianco. If you read this book as a eulogy from a grandson to a grandfather, it gets the job done. Lou obviously venerates and adores his grandfather, that much is evident by the glowing language that is used to describe Luigi and his time carving Mount Rushmore National Memorial.However, as a history of the chief carver and his contributions to the carving of Mount Rushmore, the book is lopsided, inaccurate, and misleading. To begin with, Lou seems to--either intentionally or unintentionally--lead us to believe that work only got done on the memorial because of his grandfather. Luigi did hold the title of Chief Carver, after all, which must amount to something! Unfortunately Lou misleads the reader by neglecting to place Luigi's time and work on the mountain into the context of the larger timeline. Luigi Del Bianco came to Mount Rushmore and began working (as a carver, not the chief carver) in 1933--six years after carving started in 1927! Luigi was only promoted to chief carver in 1935, which Lou either forgot to mention or chooses to omit because near the end of the book he keeps saying that Luigi was chief carver from 1933-1940, which is plain inaccurate. On top of claiming that Luigi was chief carver for seven years, Lou also omits the fact that there are zero records (either in the Mount Rushmore archives or the Library of Congress) that show Luigi working at the memorial in 1937.One line bothered me near the end where Lou seemed to insinuate that Luigi did the refining work on Lincoln's eyes, eyes which were completed in the 1937 season when Luigi was not working at the memorial. I would love to see this inconsistency addressed in the future if Lou continues to write about his grandfather and his time at Mount Rushmore.Also near the end of the book Lou quotes a fellow Italian working at Rushmore in 1940 who says that Luigi was the only man working on the mountain. In the same chapter Lou returns to this remark and claims that Luigi was the only worker in 1940 and did the 'refinement of expression' on the faces. However I have seen records from the Rushmore archives that list seventy-five workers in total, including two other trained carvers Joe Bruner and Hugo Villa in the 1940 season.As far as feedback on the timeline goes, my only final remark would be to say that I wish Lou had included a total of the entire time Luigi worked on Rushmore. He never lists a total amount of time Luigi put into the faces, it's left vague. From the information in the book I estimated that Luigi worked on Rushmore for under two years total (since carving wouldn't have happened in the winters when he returned to Port Chester).Unfortunately I found some of the pictures worrisome in terms of establishing Lou's credibility as an author and historian. In one of the early chapters where Lou is describing the process of carving the faces to us, he shows us a beautiful picture of a worker standing on a platform drilling dozens of holes into the granite, a process Lou tells us is called 'honeycombing.' He makes the claim that the worker holding the drill is Luigi, but in fact that photo was taken by Lincoln Borglum (Gutzon's son) and the worker he identified in it is Merle Peterson, not Luigi Del Bianco. Much further on Lou tells us about how Luigi repaired a crack in Jefferson's lip, adding another photo where he claims that one of the two workers pictured is Luigi. Unfortunately the two workers pictured resemble Joe Bruner and Red Anderson, two workers that oral histories name as the workers who repaired the crack, not Luigi.Finally, Lou uses praise from Borglum himself to validate his argument that Luigi was an integral part of the entire 14 years of carving. When one looks at the whole of the letters and other letters from the same time, it becomes clear that an argument can also be made that Borglum isn't praising Luigi for the sake of praising Luigi (however much a classically-trained stone carver deserves praise), but arguing with "the office in Rapid City" and Congress for more money, and is simply using Luigi as an example of a worker he needs to pay more. Borglum also praises Hugo Villa, another skilled carver on the mountain, but Villa is largely glossed over in "Out of Rushmore's Shadow," as are Joe Bruner and Walter Long.It would be unfair to name only Lou as a lover of Luigi. The book is full of anecdotes and remembrances of Luigi from aunts, uncles, and siblings. The Del Bianco family is obviously a close and loving group, that much is evidenced by their adoration of their family's patriarch. "Out of Rushmore's Shadow" is a touching eulogy from grandson to grandfather a la 'I am Luigi, you are Luigi.'Unfortunately the inconsistencies and inaccuracies that I saw have tempered my enthusiasm for the book. I'm not sure if Lou did not know that he was making errors, but either way it leads me to question all other claims in the book and his credibility. That is why I can not rate this book highly.

Very educational. We have visited Mt. Rushmore several times. Did not know the "True" story. Well written.

The author’s voice is strong and clear. He tells the compelling tale of an impossible real life task that reads like a novel.The book is inspiring, entertaining and at the same time full of interesting information told in the truthful voice of a devoted grandson and a researcher of history. It portrays a journey of sheer tenacity and courage in the continuing quest to gain recognition for his grandfather, Luigi Del Bianco, who was the chief carver of Mount Rushmore. The text is interspersed with authentic documents and photos that bring the narrative alive.This is a story to love, especially today when we need to cherish and celebrate the immigrant, and say thank you to those who built and are building our beloved country.Bonuses from reading this book:1. You get a vibrant look at the history of the time, and the creation of Mt. Rushmore.2. You hear the story of a family from Port Chester, NY, experiencing the different culture of South Dakota, and yes, the subtle and not so subtle discrimination they faced.3. You see why and how the family forged bonds with the Native Americans.4. …and you can actually learn how to carve a mountain.

Had me on the edge of my seat. The author's pursuit of justice for recognition for his grandfather's contribution in the creation of an historic work of art is harrowing. Of course I'm biased. The Del Bianco family is from my home town, and our families are connected in several ways. But I still recommend it as a example of extreme patience and dogged persistence.

Libro molto interessante per chi come me sta effettuando una ricerca sugli antenati, nota dolente è solo in lingua originale il che limita la lettura dello stesso solo alle persone che masticano un po' di inglese (nessun problema per me)

Great book for those who love uncommon biographies and untold pieces of history.Both american and italian readers will enjoy this journey into Mr Del Bianco life.

Ottimo ma spero venga scritto anche in Italiano così tutti potranno essere partecipi di quello fatto da Luigi Del Bianco.