To write about towering scenes of wonder, or even mere colossi, in just a very few words is indeed a wondrous thing to do, or perhaps not so. That (de)feat, at least, was the task assumed by President Calvin Coolidge, famously “a man of frugal speech” (to borrow an exquisitely compressed poetic phrase), as he set out to cover a topic no less extensive and expansive than the history of the United States. The inditement [sic] presently to be wondered at was meant for the unrealized Entablature, a monumental, 24-meter-high and 36-meter-wide tablet, shaped like the Louisiana Territory, envisioned by the sculptor Gutzon Borglum as a pendant to the presidential visages carved on Mount Rushmore. For Borglum, the choice of the site in the Black Hills was foreordained by the course of American history.
