Back to the Badlands? Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, Purged From Steps of Natural History Museum and Sent to North Dakota, Has Been Mothballed — With ‘No Plans’ To Display It

It sounds straight out of the “Night at the Museum”— a statue of Theodore Roosevelt, packed up and shipped off for political reasons, only to disappear into storage no one wants to name. Yet that’s exactly what happened to the famous statue of America’s 26th president, which now resides in “a safe and secure location in North Dakota,” according to its custodians. The bronze sculpture — which depicts Theodore Roosevelt astride a horse with a Native American and Black man, both in tribal garb, walking beside him — was removed in January 2022 after months of controversy following the death of George Floyd. At the time, many called for its removal, arguing that it was symbolic of systemic racism, while others — including The New York Sun — argued taking it down was a loss to liberalism, the American spirit, and history. The statue is now on long-term loan to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, set to open on July 4, 2026 — America’s 250th birthday — at North Dakota’s Badlands, an area the president credited as foundational to his life and presidency. At the time of its removal from New York, city representatives and descendants of the president said the statute’s relocation would allow it to be “appropriately contextualized,” but now the North Dakota library says it has no plans to display it publicly upon opening. “At this time, there are no plans yet developed for displaying the statue,” the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library director of programming, Robbie Lauf, tells the Sun. “The Library’s full slate of exhibits, programming, and displays are still being developed.”The statue is in “storage with the library,” Theodore Roosevelt’s great-great-grandson, Kermit Roosevelt III, a board member of the library, tells the Sun. “The construction on the library building has just started, so it’s not onsite; we don’t have the facilities to take care of it there,” he adds. The museum, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, has raised a combination of public and private funds. In 2019, the governor of North Dakota, Douglas Burgum, now a candidate for the GOP nomination for president, signed legislation that endowed $50 million in public funds for the library’s operations.Mr. Burgum has been a major proponent of the Roosevelt library project. He and his wife even donated $1 million toward the project. Yet he has been silent about the fate of the statue of the 26th president. Mr. Burgum’s representatives in his office as governor, as well as in his presidential campaign, failed to respond to repeated requests from the Sun for comment.The governor’s silence on the subject could be tied to opposition to the statue from North Dakota’s Native American community. Multiple tribes, according to Native News Online, reject the idea of putting Roosevelt’s monument in what they call the “ancestral homeland of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara” people.A tribal spokeswoman, Lovell Overlie, told Native News Online that Mr. Burgum “expressed his concerns” that the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara were “not previously contacted or informed about the matter.” The Sun sought to contact Ms. Overlie by email but so far without reply.Discussions about future plans for the statue have included how integration would work with the library’s vision and design, Mr. Roosevelt adds. “The building blends into the landscape and echoes a lot of the natural features,” he says, and “you couldn’t just stick a big statue of [Theodore Roosevelt] on horseback in there without disrupting the design.”It is “necessary to take some time to figure out how it might be integrated,” he says. Mr. Roosevelt tells the Sun that his great great grandfather never saw, or knew, about the statue. Mr. Roosevelt says that he himself is “not really a fan” of the statue. He says the statue does not reflect the 26th president well. “As people said at the time it was being removed, its composition strongly suggests a racial and cultural hierarchy. I can’t say that there’s no basis to associate that view with Theodore Roosevelt, but I can definitely say that’s not the aspect of his legacy I want to celebrate,” Mr. Roosevelt says. He adds that the president had many different aspects to his personality and achievements. “I think we have to acknowledge that he had flaws, as everyone does, but we can celebrate the virtues like energy and resilience and the accomplishments like the national parks or the Food and Drugs Act,” Mr. Roosevelt says. Statues exist to celebrate, not to educate, which is done in school through learning history, Mr. Roosevelt says. While the president is “worthy of honor and emulation,” it’s not in the ways this statue suggests, he says. “I’d prefer a different statue, or, as I think he said, let the national parks be his monument,” Mr. Roosevelt says. “If people look out at a beautiful open space of nature that’s been set aside and preserved for our common use and our shared future, and they think of Theodore Roosevelt then, that’s much better than looking up at a man on horseback.” Statues can be movable as discussions about the country’s cultural heritage take place, a history professor and Dickinson State University Theodore Roosevelt Studies chairman, Michael Patrick Cullinane, tells the Sun. At the time of its removal from New York, he says he “applauded it” because, he says he believes, it is what the president and his family would have wanted. “Theodore Roosevelt’s wife and his kids did not want him memorialized — definitely not on a horse, they said explicitly that there was to be no equestrian statues,” Mr. Cullinane says. “Believe it or not, despite his reputation, Theodore Roosevelt was a rather modest person when it comes to commemoration.”It’s better to think of statues as objects that can come up and down rather than be immovable, Mr. Cullinane adds. “We can have those debates about politics,” he says. “But it doesn’t make sense to have those debates about a statue that he didn’t want or like, and one that his family didn’t want or like.”In the wake of the statue’s relocation, Decolonize This Place, a far-left movement in New York City that led the charge to remove it, says it is still not enough. Relocating the statue is the city’s latest “garbage transfer,” the movement said in a statement, and the city is “outsourcing a toxic object to a faraway location.” The group — which also, among other causes, advocates for Palestinian nationalism and the destruction of the Jewish state and symbols — believes that even without the statue, New York’s museum is “itself a monument” to Theodore Roosevelt’s “imperial presidency.” Roosevelt was a pro-Zionist president.The group, which did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment, demands “a complete overhaul of its cultural halls, a respectful settlement regarding its display and holding of Indigenous artifacts, and the setting up of a decolonization commission to reconceive the original colonial purpose of the museum.” The group’s demands raise questions about whether, no matter what the Museum does, it will be appeased — or will up the ante until all traces of Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy, in both New York and North Dakota, are gone, even from the Badlands. The president once said, “I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota. It was here that the romance of my life began.” It could yet be that the Badlands is where the 26th president’s statue disappears.

Back to the Badlands? Statue of Theodore Roosevelt, Purged From Steps of Natural History Museum and Sent to North Dakota, Has Been Mothballed — With ‘No Plans’ To Display It

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