This fall, the city of New York decided they were going to remove the statue of Theodore Roosevelt from the front of the Museum of Natural History and send it off to North Dakota.
Well, they finally did it.
Natalie O’Neill reports at the New York Post:
Theodore Roosevelt statue removed from American Museum of Natural HistoryRoosevelt went on a rough ride.A statue of Theodore Roosevelt that has stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan for more than 80 years was hauled away Wednesday, photos show.The bronze monument depicting the nation’s 26th president on a horse flanked by an African man and a Native American man — which has sparked protests for glorifying colonialism and racism — was yanked out with a crane just after midnight, leaving behind only its concrete pedestal.The controversial effigy will be sent to a library in North Dakota on a long-term loan, officials have said.The $2 million removal, carried out by the museum and the city, comes after the New York City Public Design Commission voted in June to relocate the monument.Last month, the museum covered the 10-foot-tall statue with an orange tarp ahead of its shipment to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota.
One of Roosevelt’s living descendants apparently approves of this, but I imagine there are millions of Americans who do not agree.
You can see a video of the removal below:
This is not an obscure figure from history or a Confederate general, it’s the 26th President of the United States. His face is on Mount Rushmore. If they can do this to Roosevelt, they can do it to anyone.
It’s also important to remember that this is not an isolated incident.
Roger Kimball recently wrote at the Spectator:
Everywhere one turns, America’s past is being dismantled. Just last month, a statue of Thomas Jefferson that had graced New York’s City Hall for 187 year was removed. At schools and colleges across the country, images are being covered or removed, buildings renamed, history rewritten. It’s open season on the past.Back in June 2020, I wrote about the decision to remove the statue of Roosevelt from in front of the institution he help to found. The piece seems as pertinent now as when it was first written, so I offer it unaltered to mark this melancholy consummation of the barbaric forces of political correctness.So now they have come for Teddy Roosevelt. The large bronze statue of TR on horseback, flanked by a black man and an American Indian, will be removed from the spot it has graced since 1940 in front of New York’s Museum of Natural History. Why? According to Warren Wilhelm Jr. — known to some as Bill de Blasio — the statue is being moved (to where no one yet knows) “because it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.”Does it? I don’t think so. I think both flanking figures exude strength and dignity. I also think they stand in solidarity with the jovially commanding figure of Roosevelt. But then my hermeneutical antennae have not be trained to discern the whole world through the scrim of endless racial and ethnic outrage.
This is not about righting wrongs of the past. It’s about the erasure of American history and it’s dangerous.
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