Theodore Roosevelt statue removed from outside New York's Museum of Natural History

[modrepub]

33. It's Not Forgetting

it's context. TR was the ultimate male chauvinist, America First, white privilege poster boy. No getting around it. But in his day that was just accepted as normal. Woman's suffrage was decades away. TR and America were living in the shadow of the Civil War (and Jim Crow). You'd be hard pressed to find very many "progressives" in Victorian America. So for his time, the attitudes he expressed and actions he took were pretty much universally accepted at least by those with power.

History often repeats itself but with subtle differences. Hopefully we struggle, evolve and progress. But that "progress" isn't guaranteed by any means. New generations will have new ways of looking at things and the old ones and old ways will fade into history.