Prescott: "Why (Some) Monuments Get Removed"
The removal of historical monuments and memorials has made headlines in recent years as, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and similar publicized moments of racial injustice, the nation has reexamined long-standing debates over interpretating the past. What does it mean to praise equality on the other hand, while on the other venerating its opponents in stone and bronze? The Monument Avenue equestrian Lee, the University of North Carolina’s “Silent Sam,” the roadside marker that labeled the Colfax Massacre “the end of carpetbag misrule in the South”: these and many other long-standing memorials have come down. In this essay, Cynthia C. Prescott examines another set of controversial memorials: monuments to western pioneers who not only braved the “wilds” and advanced the nation’s fortunes, but also took part in a continental-scale displacement of people. Prescott offers insight into why some monuments attract public attention, while others—at least to date—have faced little organized opposition.
Cynthia Prescott is Professor of History at the University of North Dakota.
We welcome essays that apply the stories and methodologies of our allied fields to the issues that currently affect our daily lives. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Adrienne Petty at ampetty@wm.edu or Drew Swanson at drew.swanson@wright.edu. This post should be cited as: Cynthia Prescott, “Why (Some) Monuments get Removed,” The Short Rows, 3 June 2022. https://www.aghistorysociety.org/ahs-blog/prescott-why-some-monuments-get-removed
Figure 1. James Earle Fraser, Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt. Erected 1939. “Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall entrance (detail),” photo by edwardhblake. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Theodore_Roosevelt_Memorial_Hall_entrance_(detail).jpg
In January 2022, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) quietly removed a controversial equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt flanked by men of African and Native American descent. The statue was commissioned in 1925 to honor the twenty-sixth US president and his father, one of the museum’s founders.[1] In the 1920s it was intended to celebrate Roosevelt as a friend to minority groups; a century later, an anti-racist movement emboldened by the police killing of George Floyd intensified concerns among activists, museum staff, and even Roosevelt’s descendants about its portrayal of race relations, leading to its removal. The statue was shipped to North Dakota, where it will be displayed at the new Theodore Roosevelt presidential library slated to open in Medora in 2026.
Figure 2. Alexander Phimister Proctor, Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider. Erected 1922. Photo by author, 2013.
The multiyear process that culminated in that statue’s removal followed the toppling of another equestrian TR statue (without supporting characters representing other races) in Portland, Oregon, during Columbus Day protests in 2020. Protesters also toppled monuments to generic pioneer men and women on the University of Oregon campus about 100 miles away. Meanwhile, protesters in Denver targeted a monument that had long been controversial for including the Sand Creek Massacre in a list of Civil War battles[2] and a statue of Christopher Columbus, and threatened a statue of western explorer and Indian fighter Kit Carson that topped the city’s Pioneer Monument, inspiring the city to remove it like AMNH chose to remove its Roosevelt monument.
But other equestrian statues of Theodore Roosevelt, including copies of Portland’s equestrian statue in Oyster Bay, New York, and Mandan and Minot, North Dakota, have proven far less controversial. A wide variety of other western-themed statues, particularly hundreds of statues to generic pioneer men and women, remain in place across the country, and many of those have gone unchallenged. Why do some monuments get toppled, while others remain steadfastly in place in public spaces? Several factors affect the fate of these monuments, including the monument’s physical and cultural prominence, how explicitly it portrays ideas of racial hierarchies, and the extent of local activism challenging the statue.
Figure 3. Empty plinth for Alexander Phimister Proctor, Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider. Statue toppled by protesters, 2020. Photo by author, 2021.
A statue’s physical and cultural prominence can either shield it from criticism or make it a powerful target. A century ago, American towns and cities erected hundreds of public statues to commemorate significant events, honor local heroes, instruct their residents in desired values and behaviors, and to reinforce existing power structures.[3] Some—like Richmond, Virginia’s Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue, and Ponca City, Oklahoma’s Pioneer Woman—stood in prominent locations and became frequently visited symbols of their respective communities. Ponca City’s Pioneer Woman became both a lucrative tourist destination and a popular symbol of the state, even appearing on the Oklahoma state quarter, and criticism of it has been quite muted.[4] But when activists draw attention to a particularly prominent statue, such as Richmond’s equestrian Lee, it becomes easier to direct public and media attention toward seeking its removal. New York City’s Theodore Roosevelt statue stood in a highly visible location, making it highly recognizable and thus an easier target for protests. That the statue seemed out of place in front of a natural history museum and that it depicted a White man towering over more primitive peoples of color made it an even more likely subject of protest.
Figure 4. Bryant Baker, Pioneer Woman, Ponca City, Oklahoma. Erected in 1929. Photo by author, 2008.
Such explicit visual depictions of racial hierarchy have been particularly controversial nationwide. Concerns about the New York Roosevelt’s position towering over shirtless men of color drove much of the public call to remove that statue. Similar concerns about depictions of Whites looming over Indigenous figures led to the removal of a Kalamazoo, Michigan, fountain and the San Francisco Pioneer Monument’s “Early Days” bronze grouping.
But that “Early Days” statue was not always controversial. Persistent and widespread local activism ultimately enabled its removal. San Franciscans celebrated the dedication of their city’s 800-ton Pioneer Monument in 1894, and then forgot it for decades, until the city decided to redevelop the site on which it had stood for 100 years. That early 1990s redevelopment plan happened to coincide with growing public concerns about colonialism and settler colonialism in the region, including contestation over how to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Western Hemisphere and historiographical debates about life in the California missions. Debates over relocating San Francisco’s Pioneer Monument or preserving it in its historic location soon morphed into protests against its celebration of European conquest, and particularly its portrayal of a Spanish missionary towering over a seated Native man he seeks to convert. The city responded by erecting an interpretive plaque explaining the history of Native Californians. Twenty years later, as Confederate monuments made headlines, Native activists finally succeeded in having “Early Days” removed.[5]
Only a handful of public monuments have been torn down by protesters. The national press has tended to represent these clearly illegal actions as rogue acts by overzealous protesters. It is undoubtedly true that attacks on one statue made it seem more permissible to attack others that might otherwise not seem particularly problematic. For example, anti-colonialist protests in San Francisco initially targeting California mission founder Junipero Serra spilled over to toppling statues of Francis Scott Key (the lyricist of the US national anthem who opposed abolition) and Ulysses S. Grant (who briefly held enslaved persons, but is better known for helping the Union to defeat the Confederacy, and who as president fought the rise of the Ku Klux Klan). But activism targeting one monument can highlight problematic aspects of other monuments. The University of Oregon’s Pioneer Mother lacked overt depictions of racial violence, but once activist researchers uncovered archival evidence that the nearby and better-known “Pioneer Father” statue was intended to celebrate White dominance of Indigenous peoples, they turned their attention to Pioneer Mother‘s tacit endorsement of settler colonialism.
Figure 5. “Early Days.” Detail of Frank Happersberger, Pioneer Monument, San Francisco, California. Erected 1894. Photo by author, 2018. “Early Days” grouping was removed two months after this photo was taken.
Relocating New York City’s Roosevelt statue from its prominent location in front of one of the city’s iconic museums to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, likely will reduce the statue’s overall visibility. But will the relocation reduce or increase the statue’s symbolic power? Many who walked past the statue in front of AMNH viewed it as a discordant note on the streets of the bustling city, despite Roosevelt’s political ties to New York State. That discordance likely caught some people’s attention, but it made others more likely to overlook it. In contrast, many visitors to the Roosevelt library will be seeking to learn more about the former president, and may be inclined to celebrate him, as do many in North Dakota today.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library promises to recontextualize the statue at its new facility near the site of Roosevelt’s Dakota Territory ranch, where Roosevelt famously developed a vision for environmental conservation, and carefully remade his political image into one of muscular masculinity.[6] But I wonder how aggressively the presidential library will examine these issues—particularly given that the new library is being built in Medora. Nearby is Theodore Roosevelt National Park—whose interpretation celebrates Roosevelt’s conservation vision but does not engage with his more mixed legacy on racial issues.[7] Medora is best known for its “pitchfork fondue” (steaks pierced onto a pitchfork and cooked in giant vats of hot oil) and the Medora Musical, a hodge-podge of Old West mythology descended from late-nineteenth-century Wild West shows.
The entire state of North Dakota proudly claims Roosevelt as its own, though his connection to the place was brief, and he wisely returned home to New York during the northern Plains’ long, bitterly cold winters. Roosevelt’s rugged masculinity, military prowess, and passion for conserving wide open spaces all fit well with local conservative politics. It is not surprising, then, that Mandan’s and Minot’s copies of Portland’s Theodore Roosevelt, Rough Rider statue still stand proudly. So far, the Three Affiliated Tribes native to the region have not challenged the placement of New York’s Roosevelt statue in Medora. But protests against the Dakota Access oil pipeline at the nearby Standing Rock Sioux Reservation attracted national media attention and drew protesters from across the United States in 2016. Whether protests will follow New York’s Roosevelt statue to Medora remains to be seen, and likely will be shaped by how the new presidential library chooses to present that statue and by how persistent anti-colonial activism proves to be in the region.
Citations
[1] Rachel Treisman, “New York City’s Natural History Museum Has Removed a Theodore Roosevelt Statue,” NPR, January 20, 2022, sec. Race, https://www.npr.org/2022/01/20/1074394869/roosevelt-statue-removed-natural-history-museum.
[2] Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674503786.
[3] David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).
[4] Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).
[5] Prescott.
[6] Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
[7] Robert Earle Howells, “Revisiting the Complex Legacy of North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park,” National Geographic, August 27, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/theodore-roosevelt-national-park-examining-a-complicated-legacy.