In October 2020, during what was dubbed “Indigenous Peoples Day of Rage,” protesters toppled the Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt statues in Portland’s South Park Blocks.
Five years later, the monuments’ pedestals are still empty. The likenesses of the two long-revered American presidents, prominently featured downtown for decades, remain hidden from public view.
But the city, completing a public-engagement process aimed at determining how Portland’s monuments should be “contextualized for today’s audience and into the future,” has said it’s going to put both statues back in place, with “new interpretive signage.” The Lincoln monument is expected to go back up early in 2026, and the Roosevelt about a year or so later.
The potential problem – as the city is very much aware – is that one person’s contextualization is another’s propaganda, especially in this era of extreme political division.
This is one of the reasons the city, through Portland State University’s Regional Research Institute, held a symposium on the Lincoln, Roosevelt and other public monuments, including a George Washington statue in Northeast Portland that also was knocked down in 2020.
Those who attended the sessions were “strongly opinionated individuals” who generally fell into one of two camps, said Deb Elliott, a research professor at the Regional Research Institute. One group wanted to make sure the statues that were torn down, if returned to their pedestals, would now “provide a complete narrative around the impact of the historical figure,” she said. Those in the other camp “just wanted the monuments put back,” full stop.
It likely will prove impossible to satisfy both camps.
Based on the symposium report, those who just want the monuments put back in place appear to feel strongest about the Lincoln statue, and for obvious reasons. For millions of Americans – and especially those who went to school in the 20th century – it’s been a shock in recent years to see the 16th president called a racist. Unlike the enslavers Washington and Thomas Jefferson of the earlier Revolutionary era, Lincoln was always presented as a moralist for all times. The Great Emancipator – the very antithesis of a racist.
Needless to say, the real man was more complex than the legend.
In news reports from 2020, the reason usually given for that angry mob pulling down Portland’s Lincoln statue is that the Civil War president signed off on the death sentences of more than three-dozen Dakota Sioux, despite questionable evidence used against them over their alleged involvement in the 1862 “Dakota Conflict,” a series of battles over a six-week period that pitted the Dakota against the U.S. military and white settlers in Minnesota. (On the night the Portland statue was toppled, someone spray-painted “Dakota 38” on the monument’s base.)
Lincoln personally reviewed the cases of all 303 Indigenous men convicted in what he knew were largely unfair trials. He ultimately allowed 38 of the men found guilty of rape or “massacre” to be executed, and he commuted the sentences of the other 265.
He later explained that he was conscious of the tinderbox atmosphere in Minnesota and “anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak [of violence], on one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other.”
David Lewis, an Oregon State University anthropology professor and member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, who’s doing research for Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture for the statues’ new signage, sees this as a rationalization on Lincoln’s part.
“There could have been other ways to do it than to murder 38 people,” he told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “He could have imprisoned them for a while. There were other things he could have done. I think his way was just expedient.”
Does this complicated episode mean Lincoln – whose grandfather was killed by Native Americans on the Kentucky frontier in what Lincoln described as a “stealth” attack – held racist views of Indigenous people?
Eric Foner, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery,” would say that’s the wrong question.
“The first thing to bear in mind is that the hallmark of Lincoln’s greatness was his capacity for growth,” Foner wrote in a 2018 essay about Lincoln’s views on race. “It is fruitless to identify a single quotation, speech or letter as the real or quintessential Lincoln. At the time of his death, Lincoln occupied a very different place with regard to these issues than earlier in his life. Lincoln was a product of his time, yet able to transcend it, which is as good a definition of greatness as any.”
Most Portlanders appear to accept Foner’s point. A key “representative” participant in the city’s public-engagement process (participants are unnamed in the symposium report to the city) argued for the Lincoln statue to be restored to its pedestal:
“Abraham Lincoln had a huge role in ending slavery and moving this country forward in addressing racial injustices. Lincoln was by no means perfect, but it is wrong to dismiss him as not measuring up to current equity standards, ignoring historic context and his many dimensions.”
Theodore Roosevelt, however, is not getting the same benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t have the Civil War, in all its momentous, nation-defining tragedy, to protect him from the historical tides. And, to be sure, his statements about race are much more problematic than Lincoln’s. (Lewis, the Oregon State anthropology professor, said he’s found very little in the historical record about Lincoln’s views of Native people.)
When the sculptor Alexander Phimister Proctor’s monument of Roosevelt was unveiled in Portland in 1922, the then-recently deceased 26th president, Nobel Peace Prize winner and Spanish-American war hero was widely beloved across the country.
He had used the “bully pulpit” – his coinage – like no president before him, dramatically raising the U.S.’s profile on the world stage. He attacked the era’s industrial monopolies, pioneered consumer protections and drove the conservation movement. He built the Panama Canal – essentially creating the Republic of Panama in the process.
And he spent the entirety of his long public life fighting official corruption, battling harder still when that effort put him crosswise with his fellow Republicans.
But in the public imagination, Roosevelt was even more important than all of that.
The gregarious, scholarly, always-hard-charging T.R. represented the American ideal. Americans could do anything, the myth went. All they needed was Roosevelt-like determination and vision.
“He was frail; he made himself a tower of strength,” the original plaque on the Portland statue’s base reads. “He was timid; he made himself a tower of courage. He was a dreamer; he became one of the great doers of all time.”
All of that is indisputable.
Born into wealth in 1858, Teddy Roosevelt was a sickly child at a time when that typically meant lifelong ill health and an early death. Instead, he willed himself to overcome his severe asthma and other childhood maladies, and he sought out dangerous, physically demanding experiences, heading into the wilds of the Dakota Territory’s “Badlands” as a young man and later becoming a soldier, the leader of the celebrated “Rough Riders.”
A man of traditional high ideals, he believed in the promise of democracy and felt called to help build a country that provided opportunities to people of dynamic talent regardless of their background.
In explaining the actions of those 2020 protesters who tore down the Roosevelt statue, The Oregonian/OregonLive at the time wrote: “Over the course of his life, Roosevelt expressed hostility toward Native Americans. ... He pushed policies that promoted assimilation into white culture including the allotment system, by which Native American land was allotted to those who became U.S. citizens and the remainder was made available to white settlers. The policy also weakened tribal governments, an effect reportedly cheered by Roosevelt.”
That, too, is indisputable, leading one participant in Portland’s public-engagement symposium to conclude that the Roosevelt statue and some other local monuments were hurtful to many Portlanders, “idolizing and highlighting people who are mainly white racist men who caused harm but were uplifted by the current colonial western demographic. They completely misrepresent the population as a whole and only push one perspective – the white one.”
Here’s where contextualization comes into play.
Like Lincoln, Roosevelt transcended his time in many ways. He was born into the ruling class but embraced real-life Horatio Alger stories. He was the first U.S. president to host a Black man (Booker T. Washington) for dinner at the White House, despite receiving threats and withering criticism over the invitation, with one Southern newspaper declaring the official event “worse than a crime.”
Yet at the same time, he embraced the idea of an American empire, accomplished by force, and believed that white men should rule the world – at least until other people were “civilized,” which to him meant they took on Western education and values.
In Roosevelt’s time, and particularly his youth, Native people were the enemy, presented in newspapers and political rhetoric as violent, bloodthirsty savages – propaganda that was effective. As a young rancher in the Dakota Territory, Roosevelt saw them as a direct threat to his livelihood and his very life.
Back in New York in 1886, the 28-year-old Roosevelt gave a racist speech about his experiences in the Wild West, saying: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are – and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
But, again like Lincoln before him, his views shifted over time.
Indigenous people were in Roosevelt’s Rough Riders regiment during the Spanish-American War, “and he was very proud of that,” noted Lewis. “He thought they were contributors to the nation, and so long as you were contributing to the mission of the nation, which for him was to take over more land and colonize, you’re fine.”
Lewis said his charge from Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture is “simply to write up the truth” – and that this will involve explaining why views of Lincoln, Roosevelt and other American icons have changed in recent years.
“There’s going to be sections in my narrative that say these people were great for certain things,” he said. “They did some great things for the nation. But they also did a lot of things that were very negative to minorities and Native people specifically.”
He expects that the work he turns in to the city will “go through some kind of committee procedure where they’ll decide on a reduced version of what I wrote.”
Those who ultimately will write and approve the new interpretive displays for the Lincoln and Roosevelt statues – and that responsibility falls to the Office of Arts & Culture – have a difficult task before them.
History is a shapeshifter, remade time and again over the generations, and not always for the better. David Hackett Fischer, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Washington’s Crossing,” once called his fellow historians (and himself) “failed scientists” who are “blundering about their business” in the dark.
He’d surely recognize that their goals would be even harder to achieve if, instead of a whole book in which to present the truth (whatever they determined that elusive target was), they had to fit it on signage in a public park.
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