Americans used to believe in heroes, great men and women who did great things and made our country the engine of progress in the world.
We had heroes, some worthy and some unworthy.
Those of the second sort were generally ones whose heroism was more mythic than real, more the result of good publicists than actual occurrences.
“In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue …”
Tomorrow is the celebration of what has to be our least significant holiday. We honor Christopher Columbus as the man who discovered America, even though we have learned in recent years that there were other “discoverers” from Europe and probably even Africa hundreds of years earlier.
Then there were the heroes of the Confederacy, people many have honored for actually trying to tear the country in half. It’s one thing to have differing opinions on people, but truly another to create heroes based on lies.
People can argue the heroism of a Huey Long. He was a good thing to some people and bad to others, but people who left the country for the purpose of maintaining chattel slavery can’t be heroes in the country they were trying to leave.
On the other hand, we as Americans have been evolving for several hundred years in the way we live our lives. We no longer place one race of people over another and we no longer consider women to be subservient to men.
But what we’re doing now is unconscionable. We’re taking men who were creatures of their time and judging them by modern-day standards. The 26th president is an excellent example of that.
Theodore Roosevelt was the first truly progressive president, both on economic issues and on the way he looked at the world. He was the first conservationist and essentially was reason we have a national park system.
There’s a statue of him outside the Museum of Natural History in New York. It has been vandalized twice in recent years as a sign of the racism of Roosevelt’s time, but no one ever seems to mention that Roosevelt was the first president ever to invite an African-American man to dine with him in the White House.
Yes, he had flaws.
Pretty much everyone has flaws. But a man who died 102 years ago ought to be given the respect of being judged by the standards of his own time, especially when he worked to change some of those standards.
Otherwise, the only statues we’ll have will be of cartoon characters.