Can someone explain to me, a non US person, what is bad with that?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"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?