Gutzon Borglum involved in the strife. Later, he stated, "I am not a member of the Kloncilium, nor a knight of the KKK," but Howard Shaff and Audrey Karl Shaff add that "that was for public consumption." The museum at Mount Rushmore displays a letter to Borglum from D. C. Stephenson, the infamous Klan Grand Dragon who was later convicted of the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer. The 8x10 foot portrait contains the inscription "To my good friend Gutzon Borglum, with the greatest respect." Correspondence from Borglum to Stephenson during the 1920s detailed a deep racist conviction in Nordic moral superiority
Joan W. Patten Joan W. Patten Joan Wholey Patten (1924–2005) was an American sculptor and scholar of Mayan art. Patten was born in New York City on June 5, 1924. She was one of two children of Willam Francis and Elsa Brainin Wholey who ran an office furnishings business in New York City and maintained an upper-class standard of living. She attended the Fox Hollow School for girls in Lenox, Massachusetts, as well as The Hewitt School in New York City. At age ten, a friend of her parents, the American sculptor Gutzon Borglum, suggested she study with the American sculptor Harriet Whitney