The American Museum of Natural History will remove a prominent statue of Theodore Roosevelt from its entrance after years of objections that it symbolizes colonial expansion and racial discrimination, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday.
The bronze statue that has stood at the museum’s Central Park West entrance since 1940 depicts Roosevelt on horseback with a Native American man and an African man standing next to the horse.
“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,” de Blasio said in a written statement. “The City supports the Museum’s request. It is the right decision and the right time to remove this problematic statue.”
The museum’s president, Ellen Futter, told the New York Times that the museum’s “community has been profoundly moved by the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd.”
“We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” Futter told the Times.
Officials said it hasn’t been determined when the Roosevelt statue will be removed and where it will go.
“The composition of the Equestrian Statue does not reflect Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy,” Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the president, said in a statement to the Times. “It is time to move the statue and move forward.”
Futter said the museum objects to the statue but not to Roosevelt, a pioneering conservationist whose father was a founding member of the institution and who served as New York’s governor before becoming the 26th president. She said the museum is naming its Hall of Biodiversity for Roosevelt “in recognition of his conservation legacy.”
In 2017, protesters splashed red liquid on the statue’s base to represent blood and published a statement calling for its removal as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.”
(AP)
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6 Responses
In the timeline based on history (as opposed to the alternate history the Democrats have embraced), Teddy Roosevelt championed civil rights from Blacks, and was roundly denounced by the Democrats of that time period for his opposition to White supremacy. His very public decision to dine with a leader of the Black community horrified the Democrats. He supported inclusion of Blacks in civil services (which was largely rejected when the Democrats under New Jersey’s Woodrow Wilson came to power).
It does seem the Democrats seem more and more like the Taliban or Pol Pot (who were known, back in the 20th century) for their rewriting history to suit their revised standards of political correctness (and who became famous for reeducation camps and mass murder).
How can you tell that he’s African? They’re all the same color (even the horse).
Democrats are the Taliban and Pol Pot is just as bad as when people call the Republicans Nazis. Teddy Roosevelt was a great and complicated man. You may want to take a closer look at that statue, and the figures standing next to Teddy Roosevelt on his horse. It represents colonization for the indigenous people who were in America long before we were.
With all the problems that America is facing now I don’t think it is patriotic or wise for all sides to magnify issues that will sure to fan the flames. Democrats are not rewriting history, and the particular people who are advocating for the removal of the statue is not denying history. America doesn’t celebrate WWII victory by making statues depicting death of Germans or the Napalming of Japan. There are many ways to celebrate the finding of the country without celebrating subjugation of human beings.
Pol Pot and Taliban were murderers and propagandist. Really sad and poor analogy.
Mount Rushmore will be next.
Like I said Teddy Roosevelt was a complicated man. He believed in Eugenics. It was reflective of the times he lived in. I don’t hold it against him. I don’t call him names. People evolve. The statue hurts people. I don’t think Teddy Roosevelt would care. That we as a society allow people to polarize the issue and divide us just emboldens and rewards are enemies like Russia.
From The Outlook, January 3rd letter of 1913 [Source]
My dear Mr. Davenport:
I am greatly interested in the two memoirs you have sent me. They are very instructive, and, from the standpoint of our country, very ominous. You say that those people are not themselves responsible, that it is “society” that is responsible. I agree with you if you mean, as I supposed you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stock, physically and morally, while it encourages or connives at the cold selfishness or the twisted sentimentality as a result of which the men and women who ought to marry, and if married have large families, remain celebates or have no children or only one or two. Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world! and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.
Faithfully yours,
[signed Theodore Roosevelt]
All FDR statues should be destroyed, and anything named after FDR must be renamed, as the racist FDR wrongly imprisoned Japanese-Americans based on their race.
Oops, FDR is a Democrat.