Theodore Roosevelt: Back to the Badlands
https://www.nysun.com/editorials/theodore-roosevelt-back-to-the-badlands/91960/
This is the week in which the statue of Theodore Roosevelt begins its journey to the Badlands from its pedestal in front of the American Museum of Natural History. Let us just say that New York’s loss will be North Dakota’s gain. The statue had come under fire as “a racist work of public art,” as a mayoral advisory commission described it. It’s hardly a “Square Deal” for TR, who did more than most in his day for racial equality.
When the statue was unveiled in 1940, a New York Times editorial applauded Roosevelt’s taking “his place in enduring bronze among the monuments of this city that he loved.” The Times predicted “few, passing the newly dedicated statue and noting the firm, up-tilted chin and the eyes fixed on a far distance, will doubt” TR “would have met present problems face-forward, with high courage and clear decision.”
Eighty years later, “present problems” have dictated a change of plans. The museum recently lumped the statue among other “powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism” subjected to scrutiny amid “the movement for racial justice that emerged after the murder of George Floyd.” Evicting Roosevelt is a symbol of “progress toward an inclusive and equitable community,” the museum claimed.
As of this week, the statue is on the way to the planned Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, population just north of 130. The journey parallels Roosevelt’s own trek to hunt bison in the Dakota Territory. That was in 1883, when “he was a skinny, young, spectacled dude from New York,” as the National Park Service puts it. His stint in the Badlands was transformative for the future president.
Roosevelt in the statue is on horseback flanked by two standing figures. Some members of the mayor’s commission saw the figures as “allegorical, representing the continents of the Americas and Africa,” reflecting “Roosevelt’s belief in the unity of the races.” The sculptor, James Earle Fraser, intended the standing figures to be seen as “guides” and “if you choose may stand for Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races.”
Yet one NYU professor calls the ensemble “a very stark illustration not of racial unity but of racial hierarchy.” Some on the commission said “progressive-sounding language” in TR’s time merely reflected a “culture of ‘separate but equal,’ ‘Manifest Destiny,’ and a belief in the superiority of Western civilization.” Such insinuations — echoing cancel culture — make no effort to consider Roosevelt’s own life and views.
TR himself tried harder than many to do the right thing amid the racial politics of his era. In 1901, he famously invited Booker T. Washington, an ex-slave and a towering figure in our country, to dinner at the White House. The move — which Southern racists saw as an attempt to promote social equality between blacks and whites — “aroused a violent storm” in the South, The New York Sun reported.
Roosevelt sought Booker T. Washington’s input when appointing black Republicans to federal positions in Southern states. Faced with opposition in the Senate, TR used in 1902 a recess appointment to place an African-American physician, William Demosthenes Crum, as the customs collector at Charleston, South Carolina. The appointment upended Jim Crow by placing a black man in a position of authority.
Today’s woke activists know that Roosevelt and his sculptor were no racists. They have a larger, more Marxist agenda, and the museum is all for it. It’s not that the statue had become unworthy of the museum. It’s that the museum had become unworthy of the statue. The hero of San Juan Hill will have truer friends in the Dakotas than he did at the Museum and a better place to enjoy the glory of our natural history.
Comments are closed.
