Roosevelt's views on a number of matters such as racial equality and even eugenics are tough to read (you can read a few of them here: How Teddy Roosevelt's Belief in a Racial Hierarchy Shaped His Policies). Doing my best not to invoke Godwins Law, let's just say that if I translated them into German, you'd almost certainly pick the wrong author of the comments.
And based just on those comments, no reasonable person would want a statue of such a man erected anywhere.
The question is: Does the good he did excuse the views he held? Or do his views override the good? It's a tough call.
The views of a lot of past Americans on "racial equality" can be tough to read because bigotry is illogical.
For instance, I grew up giving Henry Ford credit for the his fair treatment of blacks during the thirties and forties. He offered blacks good jobs at equal pay in GM plants at a time few employers would. He set up black GM dealerships across the country. In my neighborhood, Henry Ford was a good guy. I was an adult before I learned of his anti-Semitism.
TR, as well, was complicated. While he believed that the white race was, as a group, a superior race, he accepted that individuals of other races could lift themselves up to deserve equality with whites.
Roosevelt “admired individual achievement above all things,” wrote biographer Edmund Morris—which is why he became the first president to invite an African American to dine at the White House when he broke bread with Tuskegee Institution founder Booker T. Washington just weeks after his inauguration. “The only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each Black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man, giving him no more and no less than he shows himself worthy to have,” Roosevelt wrote of his meeting.
Roosevelt also defended Minnie Cox, the country’s first African American female postmaster, after she was driven out of Indianola, Mississippi, because of the color of her skin. He appointed Black Americans to prominent positions, such as his nomination of Dr. William Crum as customs collector in Charleston, South Carolina, which drew considerable political opposition and this presidential response: “I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color.”
To me, that's more a function of believing in a hierarchy of cultures rather than physical race. In his day, that was a similar belief of black people as well. Although it's common for American cultural academics to set Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois against one another, both saw that the slave culture impressed upon black people was dysfunctional and black Americans needed to rise above it to general equality.
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