CONTESTED GROUNDS

U.S. President. Conservationist. Hunter. Explorer. History records the great deeds of Teddy Roosevelt. Artist James E. Fraser sculpted faithfully Roosevelt’s likeness as a patriotic warrior astride a sinewy steed emerging from the neo-classical triumphal designed by architect John Russell Pope for the new façade of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Fraser also placed two anonymous men, one a “savage” Native American and the other a “primitive” African, generic specimens of “Europe’s others” as theorist Denise Da Silva identifies, walking submissively behind Roosevelt’s confident stride. The Roosevelt statueLinks to an external site. was commissioned by the New York State legislature in 1925 amidst the rising popularity eugenics that asserted an idea Anglo-Saxon racial superiority over other inferior races and promoted the need to control the dysgenic immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and Negroes from the South migrating to the city. In 1921 the museum had hosted the Second International Congress on Eugenics. The completed bronze statue, which sits on city property, was unveiled in 1940 to critical acclaim for its aesthetic achievements. For the next eighty years to some the statue served as a symbol of a revered local son and national hero and to others it represented a painful racist history of colonization, dispossession, and imperialism that had not ended. The contested history of the Roosevelt Statue—after numerous protests, exhibitions, and public reviews—culminated in the removal of the statue in winter of 2022, in the wake of institutional reckonings after the murder of George Floyd. Nationally, the recent actions and vociferous debates about what Confederate monuments represent and whether they were erected to territorialize white supremacy has sparked profound questioning and retrenchment about the nature of rights, racism, democracy and public space. Globally, a report from a local South African preservation committee described the Cecil Rhodes StatueLinks to an external site. that towered over the University of Cape Town’s campus as a fine example of coat drapery rendered in bronze. In 2015 for UCT’s students, however, the likeness of Rhodes, a late 19th century colonialist figure who