From Subject People to Subjugated Continents: Africa and America in Presidential Imagery from Washington to Roosevelt

James Earle Fraser’s huge equestrian monument to Theodore Roosevelt, erected in 1940 outside the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, has in recent years been challenged for its inclusion of two subsidiary (but still larger-than-life) standing figures of a Native American and an African. In the narrowest interpretation the figures, holding guns, seem to assist Roosevelt as Great White Hunter, and make reference to Roosevelt’s travels in the American West and East Africa. This paper, however, will link Fraser’s imagery to a famous presidential monument of exactly a century earlier: Horatio Greenough’s half-nude, enthroned, white marble statue of George Washington. In its completed state, a Native American appears on one of the corners of the throne, across from an image of Columbus, but Greenough’s plan (until quite late in the work’s execution) was for a figure of a “negro” to complement the Native American. (None other than Charles Sumner, later a leading white abolitionist, talked him out of this plan.) The complex motivations behind these two strangely parallel sets of imagery will be explored, and the earlier history of European allegorical images of the United States and George Washington accompanied by paired figures of Africans and Native Americans will be traced.