Honor T.R.? Okay, but not this way
Gen. Robert E. Lee. Stonewall Jackson. George Custer. These are just some of the controversial historical figures who have statues honoring them across the United States. After white supremacists marched on Charlottesville to defend one such monument, cities and towns have been rethinking them, and in some cases pulling them down.
This week the panel Mayor de Blasio formed to review our memorials, and identify New York’s “symbols of hate,” gathered to start its work.
Of course, the commission will consider the perennially perplexing question of whether and how to commemorate Christopher Columbus. Some think him a hero; others, a perpetrator of genocide.
But there’s another sculpture that should also sit near the top of the list: Teddy Roosevelt’s, on the front steps of the American Museum of Natural History.
Roosevelt was a great President. He busted the trusts. He strengthened America in the world. And he was one of the museum’s most important early supporters. Roosevelt merits the multitude of memorials across the country that honor him.
This statue should not be among them. Roosevelt was also a white supremacist, and it’s that part of his legacy that the T.R. on horseback effectively celebrates.
Erected in 1940, it depicts the former President, armed and heroic, on horseback — followed humbly by a Native American and an African American on either side. This expresses the former President’s belief that white Americans were the “forward race” who should dominate society for everyone’s betterment.
In a 1905 speech, Roosevelt told New York City Republicans that the “backward races” should be grateful for their domination by whites. In 1895, he wrote that “The negro has been kept down by lack of intellectual development.” It was Roosevelt who quipped in 1896, also during a speech in New York, that nine out of 10 good Indians are dead Indians, “and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
Even T.R.’s admirers, like Professor Max Skidmore of the University of Missouri, acknowledge that he was a white supremacist: “He believed some cultures had achieved more and as a white man he was interested in keeping it that way.”
Of course, Roosevelt could have been worse, Skidmore said in an interview. Unlike the Confederate generals’, Roosevelt’s racism was not the most important thing about him. Nor did Roosevelt believe, like Hitler, that racial superiority or inferiority were rooted in genetics. In that 1905 speech, he also said that colored people could “rise” — if whites helped them up.
This statue doesn’t even try to convey these nuances. Its purpose is not to promote understanding, but to perpetuate the bankrupt notion that white people have been a boon to people of color. The Parks Department says the statue was intended to depict Roosevelt “symbolically uniting the races of America.” Hogwash.
Charlottesville reminded us that outdated public memorials can prolong the life of toxic ideas. In this case, New York is fortunate to have the power to take a bad statue down, because the city owns it and the land it stands on.
The museum should be relieved to see it go. After all, it’s a piece of propaganda, contradicting this world-class institution’s stated mission: “To discover, interpret and disseminate — through scientific research and education — knowledge about the natural world, and the universe.”
Some will try to defend this particular memorial by arguing that it makes no sense to apply contemporary values to historical figures, and that by doing so we scorch our cultural common ground.
But we can and should celebrate Roosevelt’s achievements without absolving him of the sin of racism. Indeed, the museum does this very thing inside, where a rugged bronze Roosevelt sits on a bench in hiking gear.
The statue on the steps is so big, and has been in such a prominent place for so long, that it’s hard to imagine our beloved museum without it. But an institution dedicated to knowledge should want to evolve. When scientists realized the T-Rex stood not upright, but more like a bird, for example, the museum adjusted its iconic model accordingly.
Appearances to the contrary, dinosaur fossils aren’t set in stone; neither are statues, and neither are we.