Idaho group honors Mount Rushmore sculptor, Ku Klux Klan member

BOISE — A private group that drew attention in 2007 by naming Republican Sen. Larry Craig to its "Idaho's Hall of Fame" list amid furor over his sex-sting arrest has elevated Mount Rushmore sculptor and one-time Ku Klux Klan member Gutzon Borglum to its 2010 class of honorees.

Borglum, born in Idaho Territory in 1867, chiseled the monumental heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt in the granite of South Dakota's Black Hills.

In the mid-1920s, Borglum was also in the Klan.

Some historians speculate that Borglum, by most accounts a complex, ambitious and difficult figure, joined the KKK to secure financing for a Confederate monument at Georgia's Stone Mountain that he never completed. Others say he was a "prairie populist" with anti-Semitic tendencies who hoped the KKK would help advance his political aspirations.

Dallas Cox, Idaho Hall of Fame president, said she knew only that Borglum was the man whose labors in South Dakota today draw two million visitors annually.

Borglum was chosen by the group's volunteer board of directors, including Idaho state controller Donna Jones, as part of its effort to honor people from all 44 Idaho counties. Cox said Bear Lake County, where Borglum was born to Mormon pioneers, wasn't yet represented.

"Oh, my gosh. You're kidding," Cox told The Associated Press upon learning of Borglum's KKK ties. "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. That's not our goal. It's to be able to recognize the person for their accomplishments."

In October 2007, Cox's nonprofit group, which isn't affiliated with Idaho state government, drew attention when it added Craig amid his arrest and guilty plea in Minnesota.

Naming Borglum this year — with 23 others, including Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist Kristin Armstrong and writer Ernest Hemingway, whose association with Sun Valley, Idaho, ended with his suicide there in 1961 — likely won't draw the frenzy that accompanied Craig.

Still, honoring a former Ku Klux Klan member in Idaho, until 2001 home to the Aryan Nations white supremacist group, might raise a few eyebrows.

Borglum's past has raised those on occasion in Keystone, S.D., site of the Gutzon Borglum Historical Center, a private museum where picketers marched in 2003 with anti-Klan signs.

"The police asked them to move out to the sidewalk," said Laura Jones, the museum manager.