Nassau County Executive Laura Curran was right to announce that the bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside county headquarters in Mineola will “stay right where it is.”
So was the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan to decide to take down the bronze statue of Roosevelt on horseback, flanked by a Native American man and an African man at the entrance of the museum.
Why the difference? The statues.
The statue in front of the museum symbolized the supremacy of whites over blacks and Native Americans. The killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis has helped remove the scales from the eyes of many Americans who could not see this before.
“The world does not need statues, relics of another age, that reflect neither the values of the person they intend to honor nor the values of equality and justice,” Theodore Roosevelt IV, a great-grandson of the 26th president and a museum trustee, said in a statement.
Curran, meanwhile, pointed to the accomplishments of Roosevelt, who lived in the Village of Cove Neck in Nassau County, including the establishment of the United States as a world power, consumer protection, a national park system and environmental conservation.
Roosevelt, a Republican, was also the leader of the progressives at the time. Imagine that. He championed “Square Deal” policies, promising the average citizen fairness, the breakup of trusts, regulation of railroads, and pure food and drugs.
He even caused a scandal by becoming the first president to invite an African-American – Booker T. Washington – to dine at the White House in 1901.
This is worth pausing to think about for a moment. In 1901, Booker Washington was the first African-American invited to dine at the White House, more than 125 years after its founding.
Roosevelt, who gained fame for his bravery in charging up San Juan Hill in Cuba, never invited another African-American to dine at the White House after the Booker Washington visit was severely criticized.
The Washington visit notwithstanding, Roosevelt was also what would now be considered a racist, describing whites as superior to blacks – although saying whites had an obligation to lift up what he described as inferior races. In his later years, Roosevelt’s racism became more overt as he endorsed sterilization of the poor and the intellectually disabled.
But, sadly, Roosevelt was far from alone among his countrymen – or presidents.
This week we are celebrating the signing of the Declaration of Independence in which Thomas Jefferson, who would become our third president, wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among them are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
At the time, one-fifth of the population of the 13 colonies were slaves. Jefferson owned 130 slaves and George Washington, our first president, owned 300 slaves. In fact, eight of the first 10 presidents of the United States owned slaves.
What does that mean?
“Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. it was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children,” wrote Nikole-Hannah Jones in her Pulitzer Prize-winning account in The New York Times. “Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently.”
Slaves could be beaten, raped and killed. And often were.
Blacks began receiving the rights of citizenship during the period of Reconstruction following the Civil War, thanks to first General and then President Ulysses S. Grant.
But those protections quickly vanished in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency, agreed to pull federal troops from the South.
With the troops gone, white Southerners went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction with the systematic suppression of black life known as Jim Crow. That era of government-sanctioned discrimination against blacks would not end until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The unsanctioned discrimination continues to this day even here on Long Island – one of the most segregated suburbs in America.
A Newsday study published in November found that half of Long Island’s black population lives in just 11 of the Island’s 291 communities, and 90 percent live in just 62 of them, according to 2017 census estimates.
The study found this was the result of zoning regulations, mortgage redlining, the boundaries of 124 school districts, housing prices and racial steering that continues to this day.
As president, Roosevelt did little to undo Jim Crow practices that denied black people political power, social equality and basic equality.
These practices included terrorist acts such as lynching, segregation and voter suppression. It also included the construction of statues of Confederate generals who committed treason by taking up arms against the United States to protect slavery.
Think about that. The construction of statues for generals who took up arms against the United States. And lost.
Did we erect statues for the enemy in any other war? Was there a statue ever erected for Erwin Rommel, who served as field marshal in the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany during World War II?
Not that the Nazis didn’t have supporters in the United States, including Long Island.
Camp Siegfried, a summer camp which taught Nazi ideology, was located in Yaphank. It was owned by the German American Bund, an American Nazi organization devoted to promoting a favorable view of Nazi Germany,
Nearby streets were named after Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and other leaders of Nazi-era Germany.
But no statues were built of Nazi-era leaders in the United States. In fact, no statues of Nazi-era leaders were even built in Germany, which accepted the wrong that had been done there. Germany, instead, built monuments to remind people of the evil that had been perpetrated by their countrymen.
We believe the decision to remove a statue should be lawful. But just how long do you think a statue of a Nazi leader would stay up in the United States?
Roosevelt was no worse than most presidents of his time when it came to race relations and in some cases better if only by default.
For instance, Princeton University just announced that it was removing the name of Woodrow Wilson, a former president of the college and the United States, for actively segregating blacks in the federal government.
Washington Post columnist Max Boot seems to have struck a reasonable balance in evaluating people we elevate as symbols for Americans to follow.
They should be people, he said, who contributed a great deal to the development of our country “however flawed they were as human beings.”
“When we celebrate Confederates, we do so because of their racism,” Boot concluded. “By contrast when we celebrate other great Americans, from Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt, we do so despite their racism. That’s a crucial distinction that should not be lost in the heat of the moment.”
We agree but would add two caveats.
The first is that there should be an honest accounting in history books used in schools of how blacks have been treated in this country.
The second is that Americans must engage in an open, honest discussion of how blacks have been and continue to be treated in this country, based on the facts.
The Fourth of July would be a great day to start.
