Roosevelt Statue Removed from Natural-History Museum for Glorifying Colonialism
wsj.com
wsj.com
Picture of it: https://i2.wp.com/hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/...
He should never have been celebrated in the 1st place but drug fortunes buy great PR.
I see a President standing United with an Indian and a black man. This seems like just the sort of thing that should be celebrated no?
It's ickier still when you contemplate the historical context of Roosevelt's "Triumph", coming as it did in the age of the Gatling Gun.
There's much more to be said for The End of the Trail as an important work of art than of this pretty-creepy Roosevelt structure. Not that Teddy should be melted down or anything, but it doesn't make sense to give it a place of honor.
Roosevelt was a long time champion for the Natural History Museum and the research it did in the natural world. He funded the museum heavily, and then himself led a huge expedition into the Amazon to discover and map one of the main tributaries to the Amazon river, deep in uncharted south american jungle.
This statue was commissioned to represent that specific expedition, and the people next to him represent the people that HELPED his expedition. The creator wanted to INCLUDE them in the historical narrative.
It was a peaceful expedition. They found the tributary and mapped it, despite all nearly dying and contracting malaria. It's actually a famous book describing the expedition called The River or Doubt.
A good way to make a case in favor of the Equestrian Teddy is to cite artistic analysis that precedes the controversy over the sculpture's removal, when it became a culture war football. That way, you're less likely to accidentally retcon the work into something it isn't.
Prove it
The online exhibit is an interesting deeper look at the statue and controversy.
https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/addressing-the-theodore-roo...
Westerners should have just ignored this stuff when they encountered it. The world would definitely be a better, more equitable place.
I, for one, am glad we decided cultures like Nazism are not valid or worth preserving.
It's unfortunate that only Western cultures are allowed to be viewed with a critical eye.
>Westerners should have just ignored this stuff when they encountered it.
That's odd because most of the cannabalism on the planet took place in Europe. The euro-anti-cannabalism stance is barely a century old.
Remember, food scarcity wasn't an issue in much of the rest of the world and unlike Europe, the non-European world had enough medical/scientific knowledge to understand human meat cured no illnesses.
So why dont we have many more Egyptain mummies? Because Europeans literally ate tens of thousands of them.
The savages aren't who you think they are.
Instances of cannibalism for reasons other than desperation or individual criminality are basically non existent in western culture after the 15th century, and were certainly not a staple of culture. This is even more true for things like human sacrifice. It's also completely false that cannibalism was more rampant in Europe than anywhere else. That's laughable. It was prolific in Africa, the Americas, Australia & New Zealand pre-colonialism, some parts of East Asia.
Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of human sacrifice annually were taking place among native Americans. Cannibalism was and is a regular part of many African cultures, and also was widespread among native Americans.
Some cultures are better than others. That's just a fact. And it's not just Nazis that are bad.
It's hard not to economically progress when one robs and sabotages all the largest economies in the world. Using deception and fraud in a time where honorable men were revered is an edge, I agree.
You are pointing out rituals in the rest of the world but those were occassional ceremonies. In Europe, eating humans was "just lunch" or "just a meat pie", not a once in a year religious event. Same for European human blood drinking, which was very popular as medicine and a thirst quencher for more than 1000 years.
>basically non existent in western culture after the 15th century
Wrong, European medicine was primitive at best until the mid 19th century, colonisation is how Europeans gathered most of the valid medical knowledge from the world (indegenous herb and plant medicine knoweledge plays an outsized role in what we consider modern pharma).
Europeans also ate most of the mummies in existence.
Are you claiming Europeans ate all of the mummies they did eat before the 15th century? Before the major European excavations in Egypt occurred? Nonsense, the trade started much later and continued well into the 1900s. This is historical fact.
---
"Mummy was still sold as medicine in a German medical catalog at the beginning of the 20th century. And in 1908, a last known attempt was made in Germany to swallow blood at the scaffold.
"Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians, reveal that for several hundred years, peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans, including royalty, priests and scientists, routinely ingested remedies containing human bones, blood and fat as medicine for everything from headaches to epilepsy"
“...the poor, who couldn’t always afford the processed compounds sold in apothecaries, could gain the benefits of cannibal medicine by standing by at executions, paying a small amount for a cup of the still-warm blood of the condemned.The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...
I repeat... >The savages arent who you think they are.
You mean what literally every society and culture was doing for all of human history? Native tribes across the globe were in perpetual war. Why do you think it was called the Aztec Empire as just one example? Every primitive culture would have done the same thing if they had the technology. Deception is a recurring theme in The Art of War and similar strategic works across time. Ancient Greece, ancient Rome, China, Persia, Islamic empires, etc.
>You are pointing out rituals in the rest of the world but these were occassional ceremonies.
lol no they weren't, human sacrifice happened dozens of times a day every day in Mayan and Aztec civilization. Cannibalism was a regular staple in many native American and African tribes.
All your comments on cannibalism are complete bullshit. The mummy eating stuff was basically over by the 17th century, except in rare instances.
Eating mummies is also completely different from literally killing someone for the purpose of eating them, or decapitating/ripping the heart out of someone for human sacrifice.
For someone claiming objective facts you certainly don't have any.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_canniba...
>basically over by the 17th century
It went from 15th century to 17th century? I like that you are admitting you dont know basic European history and based on your factually deficient response, you still have a lot to catch up on.
I will leave you to do that.
Europeans did both. Everything I stated is factual and didnt require alteration or retraction. You on the other hand, have been proven wrong over and over again and that anecdata from a wikipedia page as a source is laughable.
Re-read the thread and quotes, perhaps you missed the part where you lost this argument. We need to argue using facts and citations, not feelings. You, for one, being off by 2-3 centuries is not trivial in a discussion of recent history.
Luckily, debate is for the observer, not bad faith historical revisionists with anti Western indoctrination.
According to the sculptor.
What may they represent guides for? Perhaps some prominent expeditions Roosevelt was famous for that were critical in establishing the museum?
When we look at the photo, the American and African natives have a downcast glance, as if they're subservient. However, the statue was originally placed on high. The photo loses that. From the proper viewing angle, the two natives are meeting the gaze of the viewer. That conveys a completely different message.
They are on foot to make it clear that they are acting as guides, which wouldn't be clear if they were on horseback. Roosevelt is elevated on horseback because Roosevelt is the focus of the work. There is nothing wrong with that.
Roosevelt's gaze goes off to the horizon to convey the fact that he's the explorer here. There is nothing wrong with that.
The controversy is due to woke, self-righteousness, and anti-Western nihilism. If such sentiment is allowed to continue to metastasize, it will destroy civilization. Decent people need to push back.
When it comes both to the American frontier west and the continent of Africa, the word “explore” is doing a lot of interesting work.
What is your basis for saying this? q1w2 gave their basis for saying that it was about the Amazon expedition; what is your basis for saying that it isn't? Just "no it's not" doesn't work well as a refutation of an argument that had more than that.
Later
Someone even replied to that comment with a cite directly from Fraser. I don't think this is so much in contention. The figures are not Roosevelt's helpers on the Amazon expedition.
I guess my perspective is that if the actual guide’s names and likeness that Roosevelt used were lost to history but as a sculptor but you still wanted to honor them…why wouldn’t you generically represent the cultures and races of those that helped him if they were important to the expeditions? That somehow seems less offensive to me than representing them as culturally generic…or not at all.
Roosevelt was a long time champion for the Natural History Museum and the research it did in the natural world. He funded expeditions for the museum heavily, and then himself led a huge expedition into the Amazon to discover and map one of the main tributaries to the Amazon river, deep in the uncharted South American jungle.
This statue represented that specific expedition, and the people next to him represent those that HELPED his expedition. The creator wanted to INCLUDE them in the historical narrative. He's on a horse because they also wanted to capture a major part of his, unrelated, personal history as a member of a famous cavalry unity that had fought in the war against the Spanish.
It was a peaceful expedition of scientific exploration, not colonial exploitation. In the end, they found the tributary and mapped it, and brought back various nature samples to the museum for study - despite all nearly dying of starvation and contracting malaria.
There is actually a great book describing the expedition called The River or Doubt [1].
...but of course Twitter mobs know better based on their 3 second hot-take, and now we have to dumb-down history for everyone.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/River-Doubt-Theodore-Roosevelts-Darke...
Roosevelt's elevation above the lesser races and cultures, and by extension the elevation of Roosevelt's culture, was the intent of the sculpture. Fraser was by no account a virulent racist --- he'd spent time out in the frontier west, and was apparently deeply sympathetic towards Native Americans (he's also the designer of the Buffalo nickel!). But he's unmistakably building on the idea of Native Americans as members of a defeated culture, celebrated in their pacified decline and allowed to quietly vanish off the Earth.
Again: we don't so much have to guess about the ideas captured in this work; lots has been written about it. It's modeled after a Renaissance sculpture depicting a ruthless mercenary general. It depicts something like a Roman Triumph --- which, notably, Roosevelt actually held at his inauguration, with conquered Native American chiefs marching to celebrate his victory --- long before the Amazon expedition.
I think a problem you're running into here is that you're evaluating Roosevelt and not the statue. I'm sure there's someone who wants to get rid of the Equestrian Teddy because they hate Teddy, but for the most part, the problem is with the sculpture itself and what it's saying, not with some historical assessment of Roosevelt himself.
Without his difficult and challenging experiences in Dakota, Cuba, Amazon, etc, Roosevelt would have just been an ordinary Ivy League millionaire learning about common people and exotic lands from books in his Oyster Bay library. Instead he put himself out there due to whatever motivations he had, and it put him in touch with working people and nature, and these experienced directly impacted his career. He was considered a leader in worker's rights and natural preservation. His presidency prioritized conservation and established the national parks. As president he met with African American leaders even though his decision to host such people in the White House was incredibly unpopular in the racist press. He had survived Dakota and San Juan Hill, so he was not afraid to be an advocate and ruffle feathers.
In light of him not being an proponent of racism, I think the statue can fairly be interpreted as Roosevelt's greatness coming in large part due to his association with people of different races and classes. As a Progressive, he moves in the right direction thanks to his association with the others depicted in the statue. Of course the statue is more than a little crude in depicting this since it was made by people who didn't really experience Roosevelt's life or maybe care to consider it. I think keeping the statue in the public space can offer us the opportunity to discuss and debate its meaning, and Roosevelt's importance to the museum and to the United States. However, that opportunity is now gone since the statue will be moved into hiding.
>>I think the statue can fairly be interpreted as Roosevelt's greatness coming in large part due to his association with people of different races and classes
I don't see that at all. If it was maybe a stute where(for example) he is sitting down and they are both behind him holding him by the shoulder - sure. As-is the statue looks like he's above them.
Again, this is just how I felt seeing it for the first time. Maybe reading up on Roosevelt I'd see it differently, but I imagine lots of people coming into the Natural History museum don't know the details and that's the first thing they see. I'm generally against removal of any and all statues, but this one just feels sour in my mouth for some reason.
I think the statue was made by a largely colonial and white-dominated society, but I think it can help the inquisitive mind realize that Roosevelt's progressive nature came from his unique life experiences. How does a white man born into privilege and money become a leader for the working class and nature preservation? It's through his experiences, and we should all discuss them.
Addendum: this image of Roosevelt at Harvard is often used when discussing his inability to sit still https://i.imgur.com/qPO2H74.jpg. He can't wait for the picture to be done so he can go back to wrestling or whatever. He was constantly moving, and in my opinion he would not have become a noteworthy person had he not put himself in situations where he came into contact with people of different social status or races.
Your feeling 'sour', that stems from a place of ignorance into the artist & Roosevelt's life, is popular enough, that they are hiding the statue. This obsession with not 'feeling' wrong will destroy everything, until nothing remains of learned interpretation.
I can see the future of Vonnegut's 'Harrison Bergeron' coming our way.
(It's interesting to read technical critique of Fraser's sculpture; Verrochio's sculpture is one of the major artistic works of the Renaissance, and exceeds Fraser's Equestrian in apparently a bunch of ways. This is not one of Fraser's best-loved pieces.)
To be clear I don't see much point in making character judgements of people who lived generations in the past, and in in circumstances radically different from our own. That said, it may be helpful to keep in mind some of the basic facts of Roosevelt's attitudes towards non-whites, as attested by these easily findable quotes:
“As a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites,” he confided to a friend in a 1906 letter. Ten years later, he told Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that “the great majority of Negroes in the South are wholly unfit for the suffrage” and that giving them voting rights could “reduce parts of the South to the level of Haiti.”
Roosevelt also believed that Black men made poor soldiers. He denigrated the efforts of the buffalo soldiers who fought alongside his men at San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War, falsely claiming that they ran away under fire. “Negro troops were shirkers in their duties and would only go as far as they were led by white officers,” he wrote. In reality, the buffalo soldiers served with distinction, and several men were officially recognized for their bravery. Twenty-six died on the slopes of San Juan Hill.
...
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are,” Roosevelt said during a January 1886 speech in New York. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.
See also:
However I think that given the very long hiding of usa skeletons in the closet regarding issues like colonialism, I think this is the unfortunate collateral consequence of confronting and uprooting said past even if I find the "importance " about a statue's existence to be eye rolling.
That whole back-left corner of the museum is fascinating anthropologically, but not exactly ideologically aligned nowadays.
There's a diorama right up front that they have deliberately kept in all its racist glory. They've annotated it with over a dozen signs explaining everything that's wrong with it, from the literally-identical Native American faces to their supplicating postures.
The signage explains how they're working on fixing that throughout the museum, but that it's going to take time.
List of Teddy’s accomplishments that come to mind:
1.Square deal 2.Trust motherfucking bust 3.Panama canal 4.preventing Spain from colonizing more of the Americas 5.gave us the idea that the natural world needs to be protected from us. 6.added regulations to railroads 7.added regulations to what we consume 8.served his country well
By doing this kind of thing we are teaching our children that people who think at all differently than we do are not to be tolerated in the least.
The statue hasn't been destroyed, it was moved to a different location. Islamic destruction of cultural artifacts for 'blasphemy' is a completely different reasoning because it disregards the value of cultural significance and instead creates an artificial 'metaphysical' reason to destroy something.
If for some reason you think we need a statue around that shows our 'mastery' over the natives and people we stole from their native lands to do work for free, then you are butt-hurt for the worst possible reason and only show your true color.
And if you think we need to teach children to be tolerant of slavery, then you are absolutely wrong for two reasons.
(PS: I think Teddy Roosevelt was a pretty cool guy and wasn't a racist beyond the norms of the time, so it's more a problem of what the statue represents at face value)
This is a man who literally, and almost single handedly organized a volunteer army, which included a significant number of native americans, and took them to war against the vestiges of a european colonial power (Spain).
Roosevelt was a great and exceptional man, and a leader others followed willingly, often at great risk to themselves, and other than maybe Martin Luther King, or George Patton, he's probably the best political leader America has ever produced. (I recommend his book on the Rough Riders) His original involvemnent in politics was as a crusader against corruption, and he used his wealth for the one thing it should afford, which is to be able to stand by his principles.
People are welcome to do what they want with their cities, but in removing this statue, it will become like all banned art, a symbol of the pettiness and contemptibility of the regime that removed it, and of the individual human greatness they fear most.