Incidentally, a couple of days ago we had stated sardonically that, the way things were going, efforts soon might be made to rip away the faces of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson from Mt. Rushmore, giving blank space to supplant them with others, perhaps enabling, after proper speeches of martyrdom suffered for the cause have been made, the right-wing to achieve its dream of placing the busts of Ronald Reagan and Dee Jay Trump up there—only to hear the next day that the Republican Governor of South Dakota was concerned about the prospect of efforts to deface the monument and was taking steps to ensure, along with cooperation from the National Park Service which oversees the monument, that it would be protected.

To what extent this effort is anticipating a non-threat to try to gin up political support in an election year we do not know. But, apparently, the greatest perceived such threat is from Native American groups, who have expressed displeasure over the monument for decades, objecting primarily to its position on Lakota land in the Black Hills, beautiful, unblemished country, ostensibly promised in perpetuity to the Lakota under the Treaty of Fort Laramie executed in 1868. The monument to Crazy Horse, begun through the collaboration of the Lakota with a Polish sculptor in 1940, who had worked on the original Mt. Rushmore monument with Gutzon Borglum, has proceeded since that time through private funding, with permission for the project having been granted in 1940 by the U.S. Forestry Service which controls the land on which the Crazy Horse monument sits, though the Lakota eschewed any government funding in support of the project.

In looking more closely at those Native American objections to the Rushmore monument, we found, to our surprise, that apparently a popularized version of the objection, though not necessarily having official voice behind it, beyond the Black Hills grant by treaty argument—upheld in 1980 by the Supreme Court insofar as grounds for compensation and interest thereon for a Fifth Amendment "taking" by the Government in 1877—, extends also to the personages represented by the monument, with objections to all four former Presidents, including Presidents Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the latter especially surprising, having been an early Twentieth Century President who had been the principal original government force behind the preservation of Federal lands in the West as national parks and forests, and thus, by extension, having been, at least arguably, a deceased force behind the Administration of cousin FDR granting the Lakota permission in 1940 to erect the monument to Crazy Horse on Federally-controlled land.

But, in researching the objection to TR, we found that he had made a controversial statement in a speech to the Young Men's Institute on the Bowery in New York City in January, 1886, when he was but 27 and had already served one two-year term in the New York State Assembly and was preparing to run in the 1886 mayoral election in New York City, an election in which he would run third, though having been found a shoo-in by the New York Times less than a month prior to that election. The entirety of the statement, though presumably abstracted from a longer address, may be read in a newspaper account, the provided St Louis Post-Dispatch rendition presented under the header "The Cowboy" and treated to inside-page placement, circulated by wire in the same version across the country at the time and widely published, sometimes on front pages, most controversially having stated, in contrasting the sometimes roistering but generally heroic cowboy of the Western plains with the Indians, that he should be ashamed to say that he had adopted the Western view of the Indian, did not subscribe to the notion that "the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe that nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

While obviously crossing swords with viewpoints held by most sensitive, educated Americans of all races since at least the latter 1960's, the words also have to be placed in the context of their times and the place and before whom they were uttered, assuming, as an initial issue, that they were accurately set down in the newspaper report in an age before radio and recording equipment, reliant entirely on shorthand notes of reporters for verbatim quotes. Mr. Roosevelt was speaking to young boys on the Bowery, who, undoubtedly, were eager to hear of his exploits as a "cowboy" in the West, and, only ten years after the brutal massacre of General Custer and his men at the Little Bighorn, would not have been very receptive to an account of that massacre which related it as a response in part to gentle Cheyenne having been, themselves, including women and children, massacred at the Washita River in the Oklahoma Territory by General Custer's 7th Cavalry eight years earlier, in 1868, in response to reports of Indian attacks on white settlers in Kansas, Texas and the Colorado Territory.

To what extent there was any editorial comment on TR's remarks at the time, we have not researched, as we regard the matter as a tempest in a teapot, unworthy of expenditure of a large block of time, as it occurred 134 years ago in a context of history in this country only two decades after the Civil War and has to be placed within that historical perspective, with all of its attendant circumstances, beliefs, attitudes and mores wholly intact, against a backdrop of a society only beginning to emerge from the frontier, prior to the coming of most of the modern trappings of modern society, when the horse and buggy or steam train or steamboat were still the only means of transportation to and fro, dim gas lighting was the means of seeing by night in the cities, the fireplace provided the heat in winter, and the telephone had only just been patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, with the telegraph wire still the only long-range means of communication in a country thus largely cut off from itself and not well-traveled across the hinterlands of the West.

Other history of Mr. Roosevelt followed, both before and during his Presidency, which places him in a much better light with regard to Native Americans, and room for growth for anyone has to be accorded historically when viewing individuals in that light of the dim past, always cognizant of the operations of the times and collective opinions then extant on anyone of a given age, especially political leaders who are required, under ideal conditions, to respond both to the attitudes of their constituents for the purpose of establishing leadership while also having the responsibility to educate and lead them, in the best of the noblesse oblige tradition, away from such atavistic beliefs, especially true of someone of the socio-economic status and background of Mr. Roosevelt. Yet, few can be expected to rise above the virtual entirety of outraged public opinion, fueled by sensational reports of the time, anent Indian raids in the Western states and territories, and even continuing those long, bitter "memories", occasioned from reading the stories in print and occasionally brought up again and maintained in vicarious memory by subsequent stories read in print, into the time when TR was President, between 1901 and 1909, preceding radio and television or even the convention of newsreels played in fledgling movie theaters, which did not really begin to catch on in the public mind until around 1915 with the popularity of "The Birth of a Nation", its widespread acceptance as an entertainment and its potency as a stimulator of riots and resurgence of the largely moribund Klan in the country being a good indicator of where the mass mind was at that time in the nation's history, a mass mind which was inclining fast from that collective opinion by the time of the Depression and the coming of FDR to the national stage as President in 1933. It should not be forgotten also that changing attitudes toward Native Americans can be gleaned from the fact that Senator Charles Curtis of Kansas, who was elected Vice-President under President Herbert Hoover, was half Native American and that widely beloved comedian and armchair philosopher Will Rogers was part Native American, a fact well-known during his period of popularity.

Times change and attitudes change along with them, and those who study history, especially younger people who are neophytes in the effort, need to be aware of that social process in societies generally across time and that the way to foster and continue those positive changes is not to go off half-cocked after reading a report contemporaneously of something which occurred a century or more earlier and take action on that basis, entering then the "Twilight Zone" of complete irrationality when so doing, perhaps in response to some offhand outrageous remark made by some individual in a moment of pique or stuck in that same twilight zone of irrationality, trying to join again old battles after reading about them in some popular book or watching a half-baked television program or movie on the subject, dramatizing it either fictionally or non-fictionally, still, even with diligent research and the most skillful of presentation, only presenting a small part of the overall picture of any given life or time, and that usually soaked in treacle, as actually living through the time with an accurate memory preserved of it is the only way fully to understand any such set of attitudes and beliefs and expressions of same.

One has to maintain awareness that every human being has to suffer certain darker realities of life, including death of loved ones, whether by natural causes or by the treachery of nature or other human beings, and that, because of peculiar circumstances attendant such darker events, including the age at which the loss is suffered, some are harder to understand and bear than others, but also are usually offset in some manner by extra sympathy being accorded the younger sufferer. Such was, in part, undoubtedly motivating TR in his address to the young boys on the Bowery in New York in 1886, seeking to regale them with stories of the wild West which he had experienced, while also being, for the time and the particular audience, humorous in his approach to the subject, humor which escapes us in present times.

Once, when we were headed to the Little Bighorn Battlefield in Montana, many years ago, driving a nice car, about six years old, on a sunny afternoon on an otherwise virtually deserted two-lane roadway, a pickup truck approached and suddenly swerved into our path in a clear attempt to intimidate, plainly not accidental. The truck appeared to be driven by a young Native American male, probably in his late teens. We were approaching that truck, not following, and had done nothing which should have prompted any concern by that individual. Yet, there was a reaction which communicated hatred, undoubtedly provoked by the type of vehicle we were driving, a sports car, while he was stuck in an older truck. We had encountered that same sort of reaction on occasion in the North Carolina hill country among the whites, and so did not allow it to bother us or to cause in reaction a generalized feeling of antipathy toward Native Americans, around whom we had been from the earliest age of remembrance without problem or incident. We drove on to the Little Bighorn, visiting the battlefield for the second time, the first having occurred two years earlier, by serendipitous happenstance, as we have recounted before, 101 years to the day from the last day of the battle.

We recommend the same attitude, to move on, to the protesters in the streets in these times who wish to communicate their frustration with the society by ripping down statues and stomping on the heads of same, in a public display of rue, indistinguishable in great part from the type of emotion exhibited by lynchmobs of a hundred years ago and more in the South, undertaking vigilante "justice" for perceived crimes to ignorant, illiterate white folk, sometimes led in the effort by the slightly more advantaged, who had to have some scapegoat to blame for their condition, surely not caused by their God whom they revered with all their might, someone whom they could readily perceive as inferior by their past conditioning in a particular community, below their own superior station in life.

We have felt that rue ourselves against racism and ethnicism, the same which the statue removers exhibit by action against Jackson, Andy and Stonewall, though of very different stripes, and others perceived "wrong" on race in the past, but we have chosen to express it peacefully, through dedicated scholarship, rather than through violence or vandalism, wholly emotive and completely irrational when reasoned to the premises. A peaceful approach to the subject, even if sometimes communicated with harsh words placed in their historical perspective, is much more conducive to fostering better human relations into the future, which ought be the overriding object, not obtaining 15 minutes of fame on the television by illegally ripping down a statue which does nothing concrete for anyone, makes enemies of most who are mature and sober, for the illegality of the act and its tawdry resemblance to a drunken fraternity or sorority party gone completely off the rails. When the statue is ripped down that way, with no official imprimatur, or coerced away in like fashion, it does nothing to communicate a change of attitude by the community; it only generates antipathy within the community and across the nation for the lawless conduct transacted with ostensible impunity. ("Why, if I did that, they'd put me under the jail. Look at these crazy kids getting away with it...")

People will not be forced to adopt positive attitudes, and, today, in most cases, the only people resistant to the insistence of equal opportunity legally, economically and socially in the society are those whose attitudes and beliefs will only be hardened by such illegal actions, not improved. For the rest, it is condescension or rank insult, only harming progress, to imply that the broad mass of white culture in 2020 is systemically racist. While that argument might have been made with some probity as late as the 1980's, the society has since consistently improved as a generation born more than a hundred years ago, which grew up with segregation and racial stereotypes abounding, has gradually died away, at least outside certain small pockets of the country here and there where the past of a hundred years ago and more is still celebrated to the point of trying to recreate it in the present, replete with all of its negative attitudes and stereotypes, a form of hiding from modern times. Symbolic gestures, use of "Black" instead of "black" in print, and other such ephemeral changes constitute other forms of hiding from the times, will do nothing to improve matters, are simply a quick-hand form of apologetics for the renderer to try to show something which ought be communicated consistently by the substance of what they say, not requiring the cute window-dressing, sops for the saps. Limitations on speech and forms of expression of ideas, implied by convention or otherwise, are not what we want, are not appropriate under the First Amendment in any event, and will only result ultimately in street violence after suppression drives the sentiments underground where they can be nurtured in small, angry groups without gradual vent in controlled settings.

Street demonstrations of a brief nature make a point, perhaps, but extended demonstrations interrupting the lives and livelihoods of people across the country, especially in a country already suffering through a health and concomitant economic crisis not seen in a hundred years, become heartless in a way which will only set back human relations in an already divided country politically and accomplish nothing positive and lasting in moving the ball down the field toward more convivial community relations. The latter, and only the latter, should be the object. No one needs to yell and scream the slogan "black lives matter" to convince the broad populace of goodwill in the country of the point, a point accepted by most Americans since the mid-1960's, believe it or not, even if incidents of occasional individual action or statements, whether by police or others, might suggest the contrary, incidents given wider circulation than ever before by the proliferation of smart phones at the ready and the means instantly to upload content to the internet via social media, sometimes a good thing in the most egregious of circumstances but also leading too much of the time to snap judgments compromising deliberative justice for the video only telling a portion of the story, and in circumstances where only words are used, tending only to chill speech and suppress freedom of expression, a bad thing for society in general. Those are only individuals acting and speaking as such, and cannot be taken as generalized indicators of attitudes, lest the individual action or statement be empowered far beyond its normal reach, sometimes to the delight of the individual, sometimes to their chagrin and dismay for it having occurred in a moment of weakness, of unphotographed or edited out physical or verbal provocation, or simple exhaustion.