Roosevelt's Complex Legacy

The Washington Dinner and Brownsville

In October 1901, Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, drawing furious Southern backlash. In November 1906, he discharged 167 Black soldiers of the 25th Infantry without trial after shots were fired in Brownsville, Texas.

Assimilation, Allotment, and Land

Roosevelt supported the Indian boarding school system, which removed Native children from their families, and the allotment policy that broke tribal lands into individual parcels. His conservation record also came in part at the cost of Indigenous lands.

The Philippines, the Corollary, and Panama

Roosevelt championed the annexation of the Philippines and defended the war that followed, which cost some 200,000 lives. His Roosevelt Corollary claimed a police power over Latin America, and in 1903 American warships backed Panama’s secession from Colombia to secure the canal.

“Race Suicide” and Pseudo-Science

Roosevelt warned of falling birth rates among the native-born, praised “good breeding stock,” and supported sterilization of people with serious hereditary conditions and disabilities — views historians identify as part of the era’s eugenic thinking.

A Monument Reconsidered

Dedicated in 1940 at the American Museum of Natural History, James Earle Fraser’s statue placed Roosevelt on horseback above a Native American man and an African man on foot. It was removed in January 2022 and relocated on long-term loan to the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota.