Factory Engraved! You can’t get that today.

UPI:

In 1910, President Theodore Roosevelt became the first U.S. president to take flight in an airplane. Piloted by Arch Hoxsey, Roosevelt would stay aloft for 4 minutes in a Wright brothers-built plane at Kinloch Field in St. Louis, Mo.

The gutless, brainless nincompoop eunuchs who have by some unaccountable disaster been placed in charge of the Museum of Natural History in New York, in characteristically cowardly fashion, arranged to have the noble equestrian statue of Teddy Roosevelt removed from in front of the Museum in the middle of the night. (WSJ)

A statue of Theodore Roosevelt that stood in front of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for decades was removed, the result of years of debate over a monument that critics said glorified colonialism.

A crane lifted the bronze portion of the statue up from the museum’s Central Park West entrance overnight Wednesday, according to the museum and images and videos of the removal process.

The statue, by James Earle Fraser, shows the 26th U.S. president on horseback flanked by a Native American man and African man on foot. Named the “Equestrian Statue of Theodore Roosevelt,” it was commissioned in 1925 and unveiled in 1940 at the museum, which his father had helped found.

The museum requested the statue be removed in June 2020 as the movement for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis prompted many institutions to re-examine monuments. Owned by New York City, the statue sat on public parkland. The New York City Public Design Commission approved its removal unanimously in June 2021.
The statue, by James Earle Fraser, shows the 26th U.S. president on horseback flanked by a Native American man and African man on foot.

The statue was designed to celebrate Mr. Roosevelt as a devoted naturalist, according to the museum. “At the same time, the statue itself communicates a racial hierarchy that the Museum and members of the public have long found disturbing,” the museum says on its website.

The ironies are almost limitless. Theodore Roosevelt was a war-time hero, a Naturalist and Explorer personally intimately involved in the building of the Natural History Museum’s collections, and one of the most popular presidents in American history. On top of which, Teddy (gifted, as Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, with “a first-class temperament and a second-class intellect) went all Bolshie part-way through his presidency and became a Progressive (!). Teddy qualifies as a hero and role-model to both political sides, but even that does not save his memory from the demented fanaticism and racial obsessions of the radical Left, to whom our elite Establishment misses no opportunity to grovel.

The statue is actually not in the least uncomplimentary to President Roosevelt’s native guides who are depicted, just as idealized and heroic, striding beside him into the Wilderness. Its cancellation and exile to North Dakota is simply an insane expression of the neurotic racial hypersensitivities and treasonous oikophobia of the demoniacs and crackpots making up the revolutionary Left.

How can it be, one exclaims in frustration, that today’s world is run by utter nincompoops so cowardly that they will not, and cannot, simply reject out of hand the insolent, obnoxious, and just plain stupid complaints and demands of crazy people who are addled and deranged by perverse and contemptible ideas?

The icing on the cake in all of this is the recorded and widely publicized endorsement of the statue’s removal and exile by none other than the great man’s namesake and descendant Theodore Roosevelt V.

Somewhere in Valhalla, Teddy is throwing up in the street as he contemplates what’s become of the American Aristocracy and his own bloodline.

Theodore Roosevelt V.

A nice article in Sporting Classics by Roger Pinckney recounts how it was the Wild American West that made Theodore Roosevelt into the man who could become president.

“I have always said I would not have been president had it not been for my experience in North Dakota, for it was there that the romance of my life began . . . There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears, mean horses, and gunfighters; but by acting if I were not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid.”

It was wild country, alright, absolutely no fences. General Sherman said the Badlands looked like hell with the fires burned out. He was more right than he knew. The Little Missouri cut through lignite coal veins and lightning strikes set them afire. They were still burning when Roosevelt saw them and they are burning today, 50,000 years after they first lit up.

Buttes, canyons, coulees, draws, shelter from the winter wind, water running from the rocks and the bluestem and buffalo grass grew stirrup high everywhere. A perfect place to winter cattle, and America was hungry for beef. Roosevelt drew on his inheritance and bought additional cows in several installments, pastured them on two spreads, the Maltese Cross and the Elkhorn.

“My home ranch lies on both sides of the Little Missouri,” he wrote of the Elkhorn. “The nearest ranch above me being about twelve, and the nearest below me about ten miles distant. The story-high house of hewn logs is clean and neat with many rooms, so that one can be alone if one wishes to. The house is situated where the summer sun never hits the porch and one may enjoy a smoke in a rocking chair. Rough board shelves hold a number of books, without which some of the evenings would be long indeed.”

Roosevelt, already an accomplished horseman, took right to the cowboy life, though his ranch hands noted he never mastered the lariat. He wore silver spurs, chaps, a slouch hat, a handmade buckskin outfit, a skinning blade from Tiffany’s, and a lavishly engraved .45 Colt Peacemaker. But he worked daylight to dark— “can’t-see to can’t-see”—right alongside his men. He kicked together driftwood fires and slept on the ground and was covered with dirt, soot and plastered with manure at branding time. He arrested desperadoes at gunpoint and hauled them to justice.

He had an 1876 Winchester lever gun in .45-75 for hunting in the mountains, a tight-choked 10-bore hammer shotgun for ducks and geese, an open-choked 12 for grouse. When just knocking around, he kept an over-under 16-bore and .45-70 combination gun close to hand in his saddle scabbard. He kept himself, his hands and neighbors well supplied with game and was appointed to the local cattleman’s association. He volunteered for vigilante posse duty, but was turned down as “his face was too well known.”

But there was big trouble coming. The white man had been in the Badlands only a few dozen years, too short a time to fully gauge the potential of Dakota weather, which can be ruthless in the extreme. The summer of 1886 was dry, the high ground pastures played out early, and there was no hay to be made. Indeed, there was scant machinery to even make hay. Ranchers had never needed hay before, as the cattle wintered just fine in the grassy coulees, draws and gulches. When the moisture finally came, it was snow, not rain.

Cowmen in the Badlands still speak of it today, “the Great Die Off.” One blizzard after another buried what was left of the grazing land, and cattle were found frozen to death where they stood at minus 40. Tougher animals survived long enough to eat the tarpaper off ranch houses. Others were found dead in cottonwood trees along the river bottoms after the snow melted, having climbed massive snowdrifts to reach edible twigs before expiring 20 feet off the ground. Tens of thousands of cattle died, around 80 percent of the herd.

“If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble,” Roosevelt later wrote, “you wouldn’t sit for a month.”

Roosevelt lost a million in today’s money, almost half his net worth. And he did not sit down; he fled back East, got to know his young daughter, married a childhood friend, Edith Kermit Carow, ran for mayor of New York City and lost. But this was not the man New Yorkers knew before.

“His voice which would not even raise an echo in Albany,” one reporter noted, “is now strong enough to drive oxen.”

RTWT

NBC News:

NBC News special correspondent and former “NBC Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw apologized Sunday evening for remarks he made on “Meet the Press” earlier in the day about Hispanic assimilation, after the comments triggered backlash.

During a panel discussion about the fight for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, Brokaw said: “On the Republican side, a lot of people see the rise of an extraordinary, important new constituent in American politics, Hispanics, who will come here and all be Democrats.”

He continued, “Also, I hear, when I push people a little harder, ‘Well, I don’t know whether I want brown grandbabies.’ I mean, that’s also a part of it. It’s the intermarriage that is going on and the cultures that are conflicting with each other.” He did not explain who had told him this.

Brokaw went on to say: “I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities. And that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.”

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America in the course of the last century has become a country of cowards, opportunists, and trimmers.

112 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt put it a lot more bluntly:

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”

And Teddy did not apologize.

John Singer Sargent, Theodore Roosevelt, 1903, White House.

The Art of John Singer Sargent in the White House:

The commission for the painting was arranged in 1902, likely at the behest of architect Charles McKim, who was then under Roosevelt’s direction. Sargent was living in London at the time, but expected to return to the United States to continue work he had undertaken for the Boston Public Library. When Sargent agreed in May 1902 to paint the president’s picture, Roosevelt wrote to him that “it seems to me eminently fitting that an American President should have you paint his picture. I cordially thank you.”

Sargent arrived in the United States in January 1903 and came to live in the White House the following month. At first, the personalities of the two men made progress difficult. Sargent was especially picky about the location where he would ask the president to pose, and Roosevelt was notoriously prickly and impatient with directives. According to one account the president was leading the artist upstairs when the two got into an argument. Roosevelt accused Sargent of not knowing what he wanted, and the artist retorted that the president did not know how to pose. Furious, Roosevelt turned around, grabbed the newel-post with his right hand and yelled “Don’t I!”—at which Sargent told him to hold his pose right there. Sargent completed his portrait on February 19 after several sessions. The president’s refusal to pose for more than half an hour at a time annoyed the painter, but Roosevelt was delighted with the results, professing to “like his picture enormously.”

HT: Bercik.

The Guardian reported last Fall that they were already protesting in New York to get rid of Teddy Roosevelt (and to rename Columbus Day).

Hundreds of activists gathered at the American Museum of Natural History on Monday to take down the “racist” statue of Theodore Roosevelt and an urgent call to rename Columbus Day.

More than 200 people cheered outside the museum as activists covered the statue of Roosevelt on horseback flanked by an African American and Native American on either side and demanded it be ultimately removed.

“A stark embodiment of the white supremacy that Roosevelt himself espoused and promoted,” the group explained in a statement. “The statue is seen as an affront to all who pass it on entering the museum, but especially to African and Native Americans.”

Activists from the groups NYC Stands with Standing Rock and Decolonize This Place organized the protest to draw attention to the museum’s encouragement of racist tropes, and implored New York City to rename Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day.

RTWT

Theodore Roosevelt Reading

Intellectual Takeout tells us that the LA Times recently asked The Donald what he was currently reading. Trump identified a book about Hillary, whose title he could not remember, which he was obviously reading for purposes of opposition research, and another book, whose author and title he couldn’t name, that he’s reading presumably in search of a role model.

I’m reading the Ed Klein book on Hillary Clinton,” Trump answered, without specifying which one — Klein has written two, “The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President” and “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary.”

Trump then said that he’s reading a book about Richard Nixon, but was unable to recall the title or author, telling Wolff, ‘[W]ell, I’ll get you the exact information on it.’”

Politico asked Hillary the same question back in 2014, and Hillary had a perfectly-considered list all ready, one belle-lettres title establishing her intellectual cred, one PC title demonstrating her attention to diversity authors, and one best-seller thriller assuring the common people that she reads trash, too, just like them, as well:

‘The Goldfinch’ by Donna Tartt; ‘Mom & Me & Mom’ by Maya Angelou; and ‘Missing You’ by Harlan Coben.”

To see how far the American leadership class declined in a just over a century, compare the reading list Teddy Roosevelt shared with Columbia President Nicholas Murray Butler in 1903:

The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides
The Histories Herodotus
The Histories Polybius
Plutarch’s Lives Plutarch
Oresteia Trilogy Aeschylus
Seven Against Thebes Aeschylus
Hippolytus Euripides
The Bacchae Euripides
Frogs Aristophones
Politics Aristotle
Early Age of Greece William Ridgeway
Alexander the Great Benjamin Ide Wheeler
History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria Gaston Maspero
Chronicles Froissart
The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot Baron de Marbot
Charles XII and the Collapse of the Swedish Empire Robert Nisbet Bain
Types of Naval Officers AT Mahan
Critical and Historical Essays Thomas Macaulay
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon
The Life of Prince Eugene Prince Eugene of Savoy
Life of Lieut.-Admiral De Ruyter G Grinnell-Milne
Life of Sobieski John Sobieski
Frederick the Great Thomas Carlyle
Abraham Lincoln: A History Hay and Nicolay
Speeches and Writings Abraham Lincoln
The Essays Francis Bacon
Macbeth Shakespeare
Twelfth Night Shakespeare
Henry IV Shakespeare
Henry the Fifth Shakespeare
Richard II Shakespeare
Paradise Lost John Milton
Poems Michael Drayton
Nibelungenlied Anonymous
Inferno Dante (prose translastion by Carlyle)
Beowulf (Samuel H. Church translation)
Heimskringla: Lives of the Norse Kings Snorri Sturluson
The Story of Burnt Njal (George Dasent translation)
Gisli the Outlaw (George Dasent translation)
Cuchulain of Muirthemne (Lady Gregory translation)
The Affected Young Ladies Moliere
The Barber of Seville Gioachino Rossini
The Kingis Quair James I of Scotland
Over the Teacups Oliver Wendell Holmes
Shakespeare and Voltaire Thomas Lounsbury
Sevastopol Sketches Leo Tolstoy
The Cossacks Leo Tolstoy
With Fire and Sword Henryk Sienkiewicz
Guy Mannering Sir Walter Scott
The Antiquary Sir Walter Scott
Rob Roy Sir Walter Scott
Waverly Sir Walter Scott
Quentin Durward Sir Walter Scott
Marmion Sir Walter Scott
The Lay of the Last Minstrel Sir Walter Scott
The Pilot James Fenimore Cooper
Tom Sawyer Mark Twain
The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens
Nicholas Nickleby Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
The History of Pendennis William Makepeace Thackeray
The Newcomes William Makepeace Thackeray
The Adventures of Philip William Makepeace Thackeray
The White Company Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Charles O’Malley Charles Lever
Poems John Keats
Poems Robert Browning
Poems Edgar Allan Poe
Poems Lord Alfred Tennyson
Poems Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Poems Rudyard Kipling
Poems Bliss Carman
Tales Edgard Allan Poe
Essays James Russell Lowell
Complete Stories Robert Louis Stevenson
British Ballads William Allingham
The Simple Life Charles Wagner
The Rose and the Ring William Makepeace Thackeray
Fairy Tales Hans Andersen
Grimm’s Fairy Tales Grimm Bros
The Story of King Arthur Howard Pyle
Complete Tales of Uncle Remus Joel Chandler Harris
The Woman Who Toils Bessie Van Vorst
The Golden Age Kenneth Grahame
All on the Irish Shore Somerville & Ross
Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. Somerville & Ross
Asia and Europe Meredith Townsend
Youth: A Narrative Joseph Conrad
Works Artemus Ward
Stories of a Western Town Octave Thanet
My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War Ben Viljoen
Through the Subarctic Forest Warburton Pike
Cross Country with Horse and Hound Frank Sherman Peer
Ways of Nature John Burroughs
The Real Malay Frank Swettenham
Gallops David Gray
Napoleon Jackson Ruth Stuart
The Passing of Thomas Thomas Janvier
The Benefactress Elizabeth von Arnim
People of the Whirlpool Mabel Osgood Wright
Call of the Wild Jack London
The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come John Fox
The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop Hamlin Garland
The Gentleman from Indiana Booth Tarkington
The Crisis Winston Churchill
John Ermine of the Yellowstone Frederic Remington
The Virginian Owen Wister
Red Men and White Owen Wister
Philosophy 4 Owen Wister
Lin McLean Owen Wister
The Blazed Trail Stewart Edward White
Conjuror’s House Stewart Edward White
The Claim Jumpers Stewart Edward White
American Revolution George Otto Trevelyan

Gerard van der Leun of American Digest (who is normally our most kindred spirit blogger) disagrees with NYM on Trump. Yesterday, he responded indignantly in a comment to our quoting John Hawkins‘s negative opinion of Trump:

The enemy of my enemy is always my friend until he helps me to destroy my enemy. After that he becomes my enemy again.

That or adios supreme court for one or two generations.

I think myself that Mr. van der Leun is not looking properly at the big picture. He ought to consider the historical perspective proposed by National Review’s Avi Snyder, to begin with.

With the GOP looking at the possibility of an open convention — complete with floor fights, riots, and the threat that the party will tear itself in two — the best historical analogue seems clear: Donald Trump is Teddy Roosevelt, and this is 1912 all over again.

The 1912 Republican National Convention was a battle for the soul of the party.

Though President William Howard Taft had been Theodore Roosevelt’s chosen successor in 1908, by 1912, the increasingly radical Roosevelt was dissatisfied with Taft’s relative conservatism in office. In violation of an earlier pledge not to run for a second full term, Roosevelt chose to challenge the president for the Republican nomination.

Much like Donald Trump, the progressive Roosevelt was a post-constitutional candidate. There are parallels between Trump’s defense of eminent domain abuse and Roosevelt’s contempt for property rights, and Trump’s strongman tendencies have antecedents in TR’s impatience with the machinery of constitutional government.

In the early 20th century, only a handful of states held popular primaries to choose presidential nominees, and the results weren’t even binding. But Roosevelt was a popular figure, and he took advantage of these contests, carrying nine out of twelve primaries. President Taft, however, still controlled the machinery of the party, and in states where convention delegates were chosen by party regulars, Taft’s forces dominated.

This didn’t stop Roosevelt from crying foul. “I believe in pure democracy,” he had proclaimed at the Ohio Constitutional Convention in February of that year. As the forces of his era’s Republican establishment stood arrayed against him, Roosevelt, in the words of historian Lewis Gould, remained “firm in his conviction that the nomination was being stolen from him.” One can almost imagine the outrage of Trump boosters, such as Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and others, at the notion that the “will of the people” could be so successfully thwarted by the party apparatus. Unlike Trump, Roosevelt didn’t promise riots if he failed to secure the nomination, but the convention organizers were prepared for them. A thousand policemen patrolled the aisles of the convention, and barbed wire was hidden beneath the bunting of the speaker’s platform in order to prevent assaults. For Roosevelt had cast his battle for the nomination in apocalyptic language, proclaiming to his followers that: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”

None of these protests stopped the conservative forces of President Taft from denying Roosevelt the nomination. Taft’s ally Elihu Root defeated Roosevelt’s chosen candidate for convention chairman. Roosevelt’s forces lost important votes on the floor, and the convention awarded contested delegates to Taft. Roosevelt had won more primaries and had entered the convention with a plurality of delegates, but Taft easily wrapped up the nomination on the first ballot.

Taft and Root knew that denying Roosevelt the nomination would likely lead him and his supporters to bolt the convention and run on a third-party ticket, splitting the GOP vote and virtually guaranteeing a Democratic victory in November. Of course, this is precisely what happened. Combined, Roosevelt and Taft won over 50 percent of the popular vote, but Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the election with just over 40 percent.

Why was the Republican establishment of the day so intent on denying Roosevelt the nomination? Didn’t they know that their dirty tricks would “hand the election to the Democrats?” Didn’t they know it was time to “come together as a party?” What Taft, Root, and their allies understood was that, as Root would later put it, “worse things can happen to a party than to be defeated.” In fact, as Root understood the situation before the party, “the result of the convention was more important than the question of the election.”

In 1912, America’s very system of constitutional government was under attack. Woodrow Wilson, the man who would become the Democratic candidate, had spent his prior academic career attacking the Constitution as outdated and dismissing the eternal truths of the Declaration of Independence as passé. Roosevelt’s progressivism led him to support a variety of radical measures — such as popular recall elections for judges and judicial decisions — that also threatened America’s constitutional order. Had Roosevelt captured the party in 1912, America would have been without a constitutionalist, conservative party.

Root and Taft insisted that the party of Lincoln should be maintained as “a nucleus about which the conservative people who are in favor of maintaining constitutional government can gather.” And even though they lost the election, ushering in Wilson’s disastrous presidency, history has proven their wisdom. It is hard to imagine a President Coolidge, a candidate Goldwater, or a “Reagan Revolution” had the Republican party become the vehicle for promoting Roosevelt’s proto-welfare state. In the face of defeat, the losers of the election of 1912 could rest in the knowledge that they had ensured constitutionalism would continue to find a home in one of America’s major parties.

The relevance of 1912 to the 2016 GOP primary race should be obvious.

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Of course, apart from such grand issues as preserving the alternative of a constitutionalist party, one needs to bear in mind that it likely to be better for the future of the country, and of the conservative cause, to see one’s adversaries elect a failed and disastrous presidency than to elect one of those supposedly representing your own party and your own principles.

I do not believe that Donald Trump shows any reasonable probability at all of winning, making America great, or making good decisions or appointments. I can easily picture Donald nominating his liberal sister and a few random poker buddies to the Supreme Court. I can picture Donald Trump taking a shot at reviving tariffs and Protectionism and instigating a world-wide trade war, dramatically deepening the economic bad times, and shaking the foundations of the world economic order.

I can picture Donald Trump bullying corporations, initiating his own series of New-Deal-style make-work federal programs, and adding some next larger entitlement to the Welfare State.

I think that four years of Donald Trump at the helm will produce results similar to Trump University’s or Trump steaks’, and that electing Donald Trump as a Republican will inevitably result in giving the radical democrat party a “One-Free-Presidency” coupon to be cashed for absolutely anyone.

Beyond these practical considerations, I think that we have a duty as citizens to respect our country and our institutions and to support for the chief magistracy only, in the words of John Adams’ prayer, “wise and honest men.”

It may be, this year, as in 2008 and other disastrous years, that Fate is against us. There is nothing we can do to win. We may not be able to command success, but we can, at least, conduct ourselves, and choose, in such a way as to deserve it.

Fellow Pennsylvanian Joe Veoni reports:

The big news in Clearfield was the Elk that took a plunge off the bridge.

This ~ 1,000 lb. bull elk jumped off of the Clearfield Bypass bridge near the mall this afternoon. Numerous crews including the Game Commission were called in to retrieve the bull from the water. It is unknown what caused him to jump. He died on impact.

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Pennsylvania’s elk descend from a herd of elk presented as a gift from President Theodore Roosevelt to PA Governor Gifford Pinchot.