Howard Clifford Rushmore (July 2, 1913 – January 3, 1958) was an American journalist, nationally known for investigative reporting. As a communist, he reported for The Daily Worker; later, he became anti-communist and wrote for publications including the New York Journal-American and Confidential magazine. Rushmore killed himself and his wife in a murder-suicide in 1958. Background Howard Rushmore was born in Mitchell, South Dakota, the only child to Clifford Glen Rushmore (1877–1947) and Rosa Lee Rushmore (née Palmer; 1882–1955). He was a tenth-generation American whose father's New England ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. His mother's ancestors "came to the dark and bloody ground" of the Great Plains "with Daniel Boone from the East." Ancestors of both parents were among the first American settlers of Missouri Territory. One of Rushmore's grandfathers fought for the Confederate Army. Rushmore described his own inauspicious beginnings: "When I was eight, my father lost his job in the railroad yards of Sheridan, Wyoming and took advantage of the government homestead offers to 'prove up' a 320-acre claim. We had no irrigation, no modern machinery; a flat-bed wagon was our only means of transportation." He worked from dawn to dusk, seven days a week, while his mother milked the cows and slopped the hogs and tended a large garden. His father, now "a fifteen-hour-a-day farmer pitted two hundred pounds of muscle and bone against the black gumbo (local soil) and finally lost." Rushmore's parents worked hard for very little in return. "They grew old before my eyes," he would write. Rushmore and his parents returned to his mother's hometown of Mexico, Missouri, sometime during the mid-1920s, where they settled temporarily at her nearby family's house. Rushmore's father found work as a brickyard worker but the family was hit hard economically by the Great Depression, which started Rushmore's lifelong interest in politics. He grew up in poverty in Mexico, and his family moved constantly from house to house. A defeated man, Rushmore's father was apolitical, but his wife was an optimistic Democrat and strong supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt, which influenced her son's early political outlook. In appearance, Rushmore was usually described as an gangly, 6'5" teenager. Political columnist and friend George Sokolsky would later describe Rushmore as "at heart a hillbilly, proud of his colonial ancestry ... he himself was an enormous disappointment to himself ... a sad mountain boy, morose, looking for something he could