TR and the American Museum of Natural History

Gosh, have you ever stood outside the main entrance to the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West just to take the measure of this incredibly imposing edifice and to stare at Theodore Roosevelt atop a giant steed, accompanied by two striding companions, one a Native American in traditional dress and the other an African, almost completely naked? Here is mythmaking in stone and brass. So obvious and simplistic in some ways and yet so seductive, too. I mean, really, what are they up to? Are we to accept TR as the great white father astride an immense horse, leading these benighted men into a more enlightened future? Or should we see this tableau as more of a team effort? And if so, why does Teddy get to ride and the other guys have to walk? Silly question, I guess. Imagine the sense of entitlement that the rich still reserve for themselves today, and then consider how thick and unexamined that entitlement was in TR's time. Enough to make you gag and yet...I think we must also readily acknowledge that without that sense of entitlement, without that noblesse oblige, without the unrestricted accumulation of immense wealth, and without some version of the white man's burden, New York as we know it could not exist today. Teddy represented all of those things at their worst and at their best, which is why I find myself returning to him again and again as one of the key New York archetypes.

Along the wall that extends down the block at the entrance to the museum on Central Park West, there are the following words carved in stone. They look something like this but in a single continuous line:

RANGER SCHOLAR EXPLORER SCIENTIST CONSERVATIONIST NATURALIST STATESMAN
AUTHOR HISTORIAN HUMANITARIAN PATRIOT

They are, of course, the roles that TR actually played in his life, and as I suggested in an earlier post, he was no dilettante; he didn't dabble in these things. He worked hard at them, practicing and laboring until he mastered them, every last one. Could he have accomplished so much without his family's considerable wealth? Probably not. Could he have done it without that sense that he was entitled to do these things, and that if he didn't do them, no one else would be able to do them as well or as honorably? Almost certainly not. And yet, we are left with the fact that no person of his time, despite the fact that many were far wealthier and more entitled, was able to achieve so much and at such a high level. TR was by turns exasperating, arrogant, belligerent, insufferable, naive, bigoted, and misguided. But in the totality of his accomplishments and the sweep of his vision, few of any time have ever rivaled him.