Review: Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Brings His Legacy to the Badlands

I always thought that the reason museums west of the Mississippi and inland from California didn’t have top Old Masters and Impressionists and Picassos and Matisses was that they got into the acquisitions game much later than we New Englanders and museums in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. It’s true to an extent, but, having never been to the Great Plains or the Mountain States until this past summer, I hadn’t seen — in the flesh, so to speak — that people there live among such stunning grandeur. A Bierstadt, Church, or Cole would seem superfluous.

I thought about this when I visited the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library a few days before it opened in July. It’s in Medora in southwestern North Dakota. The Badlands — the Lakota longtimers and French trappers agreed they were bad places to visit, and, no, you wouldn’t want to live there — have an extraterrestrial look and palette I didn’t expect. That endless sweep of ravines and wind-sculpted, squat sandstone and clay buttes with rust, shadow blue, pastel pink, coal, and pale yellow. All awesome. And it’s the view from the new complex honoring and explaining and, for many, humanizing Roosevelt (1858–1919). The site shares billing with the man and, as Teddy himself said, he wouldn’t have been president were it not for his time there as a young widower in the mid-1880s.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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I always thought that the reason museums west of the Mississippi and inland from California didn’t have top Old Masters and Impressionists and Picassos and Matisses was that they got into the acquisitions game much later than we New Englanders and museums in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. It’s true to an extent, but, having never been to the Great Plains or the Mountain States until this past summer, I hadn’t seen — in the flesh, so to speak — that people there live among such stunning grandeur. A Bierstadt, Church, or Cole would seem superfluous.

I thought about this when I visited the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library a few days before it opened in July. It’s in Medora in southwestern North Dakota. The Badlands — the Lakota longtimers and French trappers agreed they were bad places to visit, and, no, you wouldn’t want to live there — have an extraterrestrial look and palette I didn’t expect. That endless sweep of ravines and wind-sculpted, squat sandstone and clay buttes with rust, shadow blue, pastel pink, coal, and pale yellow. All awesome. And it’s the view from the new complex honoring and explaining and, for many, humanizing Roosevelt (1858–1919). The site shares billing with the man and, as Teddy himself said, he wouldn’t have been president were it not for his time there as a young widower in the mid-1880s.