Young Republicans rally to save Roosevelt statue: 'I've never heard of a free society that wants to erase the past'

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New York club rallies in front of Teddy Roosevelt’s statue, says their movement is part of a larger call to save all national monuments

The New York Young Republican Club held a rally this week in front of the American Natural History Museum to rebuke the museum's call to remove the 26th president's statue.

On Sunday, the New York Young Republican Club rallied around the statue of Theodore Roosevelt to defend the 26th president of the United States outside of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

“You'll never be able to make a better future if you erase our past. And that's something that happens in tyrannical regimes,” Gavin Wax, president of the New York Young Republican Club told Fox News. “I’ve never heard of a free society that wants to erase the past.”

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Wax says it's about more than just Roosevelt's statue, or any of the statues that have been taken down or defaced by riots and protesters.

“They're trying to judge people, premodern people, by postmodern standards of morality and by that rate we'll have no future because we'll have to erase all of human history,” Wax said. “You have to look at the good people did. No one's perfect. No one's a saint. And you could find some flaws, especially in people from the past. But that should be no excuse to erase that, we need to learn from the past.”

The museum declined Fox News' request for an interview, but on June 21 it posted a press release on its website asking for the removal of the statue.

“The statue has long been controversial because of the hierarchical composition that places one figure on horseback and the others walking alongside.” The release went on to say, “Many of us find its depictions of the Native American and African figures and their placement in the monument racist ... We recognize that more work is needed to better understand not only the statue but our own history.”

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Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive ahead of his time. He was a colonel in the U.S. Army who led the Rough Riders at the Battle of San Juan Hill. He fought against large corporate monopolies and was the first president to have a black man, Booker T. Washington, dine with him at the White House.

Roosevelt also established an entirely black cabinet of advisers, something no other president repeated until his cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, organized a similar cabinet to help African-Americans during the Great Depression. Teddy Roosevelt also established 230 million acres of public land, including five national parks and 18 national monuments.