In case you haven’t heard the very bully news, the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library—which opens on July 4 in the tiny town of Medora, North Dakota—is a stunning architectural, archival, and multimedia achievement, a world-class memorial to a president who became the first great champion of American public lands and conservation.
It’s also a project with built-in controversies that can’t be ignored, including Roosevelt’s grim Manifest Destiny views about Indigenous people.
“The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman,” he wrote in The Winning of the West, a best-selling, four-volume epic that rolled out starting in 1889. “ … [I]t is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.” In the four volumes, he used “savages” or a close variant more than 300 times.
Another is this: The man who did as much as anyone to help the library reach its impressive scale—Doug Burgum, the current U.S. Secretary of the Interior—has overseen deep cuts in public-lands agencies for Donald Trump, the least conservation-minded president in modern history.
Burgum is not on the library’s board, but in 2018, when he was North Dakota’s governor, he led the way in amping up a set of relatively modest, pre-existing plans for a T.R. presidential library in the college town of Dickinson, moving the whole thing 35 miles west to Medora and making it much bigger and bolder. As Secretary of the Interior, he’s been a loyal foot soldier during every stage of Trump’s second administration, which has mounted relentless attacks on federal land-stewardship policies. The most recent example: Interior’s May 11 repeal of the Public Lands Rule, which had given conservation the same priority status as extractive uses like mining, grazing, and drilling.
“That’s the greatest conundrum with all this,” says Shannon Straight, executive director of the Badlands Conservation Alliance, a nonprofit that works to protect wild places in North Dakota. “Theodore Roosevelt understood the need to balance extractive industry with conservation, in order to leave something for future generations. It’s really ironic that Doug Burgum has been pushing for this library while filling a role where he’s unraveling T.R.’s conservation legacy right before our eyes.”