Roosevelt statue to be removed from N.Y. museum

For decades, a hulking bronze statue of President Theodore Roosevelt atop a horse, flanked by Native American and African men on foot, has greeted visitors at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The roles of the two nameless men have provoked debate and protests for years, as critics said they appeared subservient to the powerful white man, creating an unmistakable portrait of racial hierarchy and colonialism.

Now, the museum said the time has come to take down the statue of the 26th president.

On Sunday, the museum announced it had the permission of New York City — along with the blessing of Roosevelt’s great-grandson — to remove the Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, as it’s formally known. New York City owns the statue and the property on which it was built in 1940.

“The American Museum of Natural History has asked to remove the Theodore Roosevelt statue because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior,” Mayor Bill de Blasio, a Democrat, said in a statement. “The City supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”

President Donald Trump, though, called the move “ridiculous” on Twitter early Monday morning, pleading, “Don’t do it!”

The museum’s leadership said in a statement it was “profoundly moved” by the national reckoning over racial injustice following the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in police custody and has “watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues and monuments as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism.”

The museum’s leadership made clear it is not specifically targeting Roosevelt but rather the overall makeup of the statue, saying “many of us find its depictions of the Native American and African figures and their placement in the monument racist.”

Roosevelt’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, who sits on the museum’s board of trustees, said the statue’s composition conflicts with his great-grandfather’s legacy. “The world does not need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice,” Roosevelt, who is the managing director at Barclays Capital, said in a statement. “The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy. It is time to move the Statue and move forward.”

Critics of the statue have pointed to Roosevelt’s views on race — a complicated legacy. He was the first president to invite an African American, Booker T. Washington, to dine at the White House. He pushed for a “square deal” for people of all races and classes, supporting unions while cracking down on monopolies. Yet he also believed in the superiority of white, Western culture and supported the eugenics movement — as did the American Museum of Natural History in the 1920s and 1930s, when it held two international eugenics conferences.

Philip Deloria, a Harvard history professor of Dakota descent, said in the exhibit he would not consider Roosevelt a “friend of the Indian.” Although Roosevelt was celebrated for his conservationism, the lands he conserved had often belonged to Native Americans, Deloria said, causing “devastating consequences for Indian people.”

Before becoming president, Roosevelt wrote enthusiastically of conquering the “squalid savages” on the Western frontier, saying the settlers and pioneers “have justice on their side,” in his 1889 book, The Winning of the West.