Men on Horses

Readers of these weekly letters know that one of the topics that I find the most challenging is the question of whether or not people can reasonably be expected personally to rise up over the prevailing morality of their own day.

At least in retrospect, the question sometimes seems relatively inconsequential. Do I really need to feel guilty now, after all these years, for having enjoyed going to movies as a boy that depicted Indians as bloodthirsty savages bent mostly on killing innocent white people who merely wanted to farm their own homesteads in peace? Was the eight-year-old me supposed to have noted that the land on which the settlers wished so ardently to live in peace had mostly been stolen from the native peoples of North America? Or wondered if the religions of native Americans were in real life as silly-looking and -sounding as they were invariably depicted as being on the screen? Or why the Indians were almost invariably depicted as being unable to communicate other than in the kind of broken English in which the only first-person pronoun in use was “me” and all verbs were declined with the enclitic suffix “um”? Me wantum wampum!

I would like to write about two events that occurred last week and ask in their regard a similar set of questions.

The first is the announcement by the American Museum of Natural History that it is going to remove a statue of our twenty-sixth president, Theodore Roosevelt, on horseback that has been in place on Central Park West since 1940 and in which Roosevelt is flanked by an African man on one side and a Native American man on the other. And the other was the unsuccessful effort of demonstrators in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., to tear down a statue of Andrew Jackson, our seventh president. The comparison both does and doesn’t work, because their stories are somehow similar and dissimilar at the same time. In some ways, Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt were entirely different types who left behind entirely different legacies. But they also did have some important things in common. Both are generally remembered as “strong” presidents, as national leaders who got things done. Both were war heroes, Roosevelt actually having resigned his cushy Washington job as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to form the First U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment (known then and still as the “Rough Riders”) and then to fight personally as its leader in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898, and Andrew Jackson, of course, being remembered as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans that basically wrapped up the War of 1812 (or would have done so had the war not actually been over by the time the battle was joined) and conclusively ended any British effort to play a military role in North America. And both harbored extremely negative attitudes towards non-white people.

History has been relatively kind to both of them. Jackson’s face looks up at us daily from the twenty-dollar bill. Roosevelt seems only slightly the odd man out on Mount Rushmore, where he looks out across the Black Hills of South Dakota alongside George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. So why then has their stock fallen so precipitously and so quickly? Is that loss of stature something to be applauded or regretted? Or, to ask the same question differently, are we being reasonable or unreasonable to base our opinion of men from one or two centuries in the past on whether or not they were able to step away from societal attitudes that they shared with countless other individuals of their day?

Let’s start with Jackson. That he was what modern Americans would call a racist goes almost without saying. He owned slaves personally, a fact so deeply embedded in his biography that the website of his plantation in Davidson County, Tennessee, called “The Hermitage,” presents visitors with a long, complicated apologia regarding the role Jackson’s slaves—by the time of his death, numbering about 150—played in the running of the place. (To take a look, click here.) And that detail frames the question I wish to ask in his regard. Of our first twelve presidents, only John Adams and John Quincy Adams never owned slaves. More to the point, perhaps, every single pre-Civil-War president of the United States who came from the South owned slaves. To people like ourselves to whom the idea of owning slaves is beyond abhorrent, it feels reasonable to ask how these people could possibly not have felt the same way. And yet…they appear not to have. And that list of slave-owning presidents includes the founders of our nation: George Washington (there were 317 slaves at Mount Vernon, 123 who were personally owned by Washington and emancipated upon his death and the rest part of his wife’s estate), Thomas Jefferson (who, after writing in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that he thought it self-evident “that all men are created equal,” wrote in his almost entirely forgotten 1787 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, that “the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind”), and James Monroe, whose solution to the slavery issue involved shipping the slaves back to Africa, which is why to this day the capital of Liberia is called Monrovia.

So Andrew Jackson, born in 1767, was a child of his time. He grew up in a slave-owning culture. He was taught from childhood on that black people exist to serve white masters, that the whole point of there being different races in the first place is to make it easily discernible, even to children, who is meant to serve whom. His almost unimaginably cruel policy towards native Americans is part of that ideational complex too: by personally leading the charge to buy up Indian lands in the Southeast and then by pushing through Congress the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that led directly to the forced uprooting of countless thousands of Native Americans and their forced participation on death marches to lands in today’s Oklahoma, Jackson was simply putting into deed his strongly-held opinion that whatever impediment affects adversely the ability of white people to flourish on whatever land they choose to settle is by definition something to be fought against and, if possible, removed.

So that’s Andrew Jackson.  But what of Theodore Roosevelt, whose statue is going to be removed from Central Park West as soon as the Natural History Museum can find a suitable new home for it?

Roosevelt was a different kind of racist, not one consumed by visceral hatred for non-white people but rather one possessed of the quasi-scientific conviction that people of color are simply inferior to white people and that there is nothing wrong in society reflecting that fact. In 1914, for example, Roosevelt came out in favor forcibly sterilizing criminals and mentally-challenged individuals to keep them negatively from influencing future gene pools, writing at one point that  “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind,” and that “someday, we will realize that the prime duty…of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world, and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.” And who were the citizens of the wrong type? Could they have been the black people whom Roosevelt once characterized as “ape-like naked savages”? This was the same man, after all, who characterized white people as “the forward race” and who warned that they would be committing “race suicide” if they failed to out-reproduce the less advanced races of the world.

So it’s the same issue here as with Jackson. Eugenics was a thing in Roosevelt’s day. The notion that the Nordic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples are genetically superior to other groups within the family of mankind was believed by many to be a simple, scientifically verifiable truth. Well-respected institutions like the Carnegie Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters at one point in their history all supported the concept of eugenics as a rational basis for public policy. Famous people were involved as well—people like Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood), Alexander Graham Bell, and Luther Burbank. So Theodore Roosevelt was simply signing onto what was widely perceived, not as prejudice or bigotry, but as science.

And so we come to the same question yet again. Should T.R. be held responsible for having believed in something that has in our day been totally debunked, but which in his was considered a branch of legitimate scientific inquiry? Should Andrew Jackson be condemned today for being a southerner of the 18^th and early 19^th centuries whose beliefs were fully in sync with the rest of the world from which he came? Should people be blamed for believing things that everybody in their day “just” knows? (Saying yes, of course, means that you are prepared to be similarly judged by your descendants in, say, the 22^nd or 23^rd centuries. Just saying!)

In terms of the “statues issue” that has surfaced in our own day, I recommend here a middle course. We can and should lionize the rare few who somehow managed to understand the error of their contemporaries’ attitudes and beliefs—the abolitionists, for example, who were Andrew Jackson’s contemporaries but who nonetheless had the insight and the courage to recognize a great evil when they saw it. On the other hand, I don’t know how reasonable it is to expect people to look past what their own experts tell them categorically to be true, what everybody believes to be true. Still, understanding people to be children of their day does not mean we have to erect statues to their glory in our public parks or honor their memory on our twenty-dollar bills. What do have to do is to own up to the fact that some of our past leaders were individuals who embraced beliefs that seem not only obnoxious to us because the mood of the public has shifted, but which seem deeply and essentially immoral. Those beliefs too are part of their legacy and need to be openly rejected and condemned at the same time we take national note of the good those same individuals accomplished.