Like a Rock

James Panero reads “Like a Rock,” his Letter from Plymouth in the November 2020 issue of The New Criterion.

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2020

Like a rock

On the four-hundredth anniversary of the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock.

There is nothing particularly impressive about Plymouth Rock. As far as famous rocks go, the seaside boulder on which the Pilgrims may have first set foot in the New World is notably underwhelming. It has not helped that this ten-ton glacial errant, an Ice Age deposit of granite on the morainal coastline of Cape Cod Bay, has been moved and abused, venerated and desecrated many times since the storied passengers of Mayflower set down roots here four hundred years ago, in December 1620. And yet it is precisely the Rock’s humble appearance that can still evoke the greatest awe. The pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth proved to be the moonshot of the seventeenth century—odds-breaking, death-defying, and ultimately world-shattering. The Rock remains the manifestation of the first step of these spiritual wanderers, not just from ship to shore but also heaven to earth. For the nation’s celestial origins, Plymouth Rock is our moonstone.

It took over a century for the Rock to be recognized for its historical relevance, after a Plymouth elder recalled a folktale of the landing. Its importance then grew alongside a burgeoning sense of the central role of the Pilgrims in our national story. In the War of Independence, the stone came to symbolize the endurance of the Pilgrims’ separatist faith crystallized in the cause of national liberty. In 1775, the people of Plymouth joined Colonel Theophilus Cotton to “consecrate the rock . . . to the shrine of liberty.” In attempting to move the stone from the shoreline, however, the townspeople split it in two, a portent of the coming Revolutionary break. Leaving one half behind in the sand, they relocated the other to “liberty pole square” by the Plymouth meetinghouse. On July 4, 1834, that part of the rock was moved again, this time to the front of Plymouth Hall. Other pieces went farther astray. Two chunks came to reside in Brooklyn, one at the abolitionist Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims and the other at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Smaller fragments went the way of the souvenir hunters. Meanwhile the original seaside stone came to be buried in sand and port development.

Hammat Billings’s baldachin, which housed Plymouth Rock from 1867–1920.

In 1867, an elegant Beaux-Arts baldachin designed by Hammatt Billings resurrected the beach half, which was soon rejoined by the other Plymouth rock of Plymouth Rock as “1620” was etched in the stone. Finally, in 1920, for the tercentenary of the Pilgrims’ landing, McKim, Mead & White designed the portico that stands over Plymouth Rock today. The understated design, built into an esplanade and replacing the Billings monument, invites viewers to look down onto the Rock, now again on the sandy beach. At spring tide, through iron grilles in the pavilion’s open foundation, the waters of the cold Atlantic can once again lap over the worn stone.

The present portico over Plymouth Rock, built by McKim, Mead & White in 1920.

The treatment of Plymouth Rock has reflected the ebbs and flows of our own national conscience. In 1820, at the bicentennial of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster proclaimed, “We have come to this Rock to record here our homage for our Pilgrim Fathers; our sympathy in their sufferings; our gratitude for their labors; our admiration of their virtues; our veneration for their piety; and our attachment to those principles of civil and religious liberty.” Pledging “upon the Rock of Plymouth,” he also called on Americans to “extirpate and destroy” the slave trade.

By 1835, Tocqueville came to observe how “this Rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen bits of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not this sufficiently show that all human power and greatness is in the soul of man? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it is treasured by a great nation, its very dust is shared as a relic.”

The pilgrims John Alden and Mary Chilton landing at Plymouth.

This year’s quadricentenary of the Pilgrim landing has not been so felicitous for Plymouth or its Rock. The pandemic has destroyed the town’s tourist trade and canceled many festivities on what should have been its most eventful year. A million visitors a year usually come to Plymouth Rock. This year that number may be less than half. Chinese, British, and German tourists, all precluded from international travel, are otherwise particularly drawn to the attraction. As I am told, the Chinese come for the American history, the British for the English, and the Germans for the indigenous. In other years, faith-based visitors are also regulars here, making their own pilgrimage to a site of America’s Christian origins. This year, even at the height of tourist season, the glasses at the Pillory Pub are half empty, the John Alden curio shop is in want of the curious, and the on-street parking is abundant.

Beyond just the closures, the Pilgrims’ progress, like the American project itself, has been cast in doubt. For most of our history, the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving meal of 1621 has represented the Providence of America and the amity of its native peoples—after Samoset, Tisquantum (Squanto), and Massasoit’s tribe of Wampanoag saved the new arrivals from starvation. In giving thanks for their salvation, George Washington codified the Pilgrims’ holiday into civic religion.

Until recently, the story of this first Thanksgiving was central to our civic education, from elementary-school assemblies to Peanuts television specials. Now, a “National Day of Mourning,” a protest march against Thanksgiving first organized by Native American activists, can draw crowds larger than the Mayflower Society’s own Pilgrim Progress procession held in town the same day. The Plymouth Rock monument has also been the site of attacks and desecrations. So far this year, the Rock has been splattered and sprayed with paint on two separate occasions. Meanwhile, the Pilgrims have been castigated along with Christopher Columbus for the usurpation of native lands and the murder of native peoples. If children are now taught anything about the Pilgrims, the settlers are more than likely to be denounced as a colonizing force—one that never really originated Thanksgiving, never conveyed the spirit of liberty as represented in their “Mayflower Compact,” and never even landed at Plymouth Rock.

The evidence at Plymouth suggests a more nuanced understanding. In Europe, the Pilgrims had drifted around as the backwash of the Reformation. Since taxation also meant supporting the ministers to a false faith, the Pilgrims’ separatist beliefs put them at odds with the monarch and the inseparable church of England. “The king is a mortal man, and not God,” declared the Puritan Thomas Helwys in his challenge to King James I, and “therefore hath no power over the immortal souls of his subjects.” Like others, Helwys was imprisoned and died for his beliefs. From England to Amsterdam, and then to Leiden, the Pilgrims attempted to resettle. In Holland, they found the labors unforgiving and the temptations undermining. Here was a faith that knew more what it stood against than for. A group of Pilgrims struck a deal with the London Company to resettle their families around what became New York. They eventually hired Mayflower, a reconfigured merchant ship, for the late fall passage. Their decision to leave the land of Rembrandt—who was then a student just a block from their Leiden church—for lands unknown was propelled by a desperation for religious liberty. “England hath seen her best days,” Thomas Hooker, the Puritan founder of Connecticut, later preached, “and now evil days are befalling us: God is packing up his gospel.”

Plimoth Plantation today.

“Founding a colony was just about the most foolish thing a congregation or any other group of Europeans could do.” So writes John G. Turner in They Knew They Were Pilgrims, his new history of Plymouth.1 What powered these early settlers, especially through the misery of their first winter, was their separatist conviction. “They knew they were pilgrims . . . and quieted their spirits,” explained Plymouth’s Governor William Bradford. Blown off course, and after exploring the area of what became Provincetown (where there is now another Pilgrim monument), the settlers arrived in the protected natural harbor of Plymouth Bay. Regardless of where they took their first actual steps, the Pilgrims “walked into a disaster,” Turner writes. “The poor nutrition during the crossing left their health fragile, and they lacked sufficient food for the months ahead. Exposure to bitter-cold weather and wading in water did not help matters.” Barely half of Mayflower’s passengers survived the crossing and the first winter. “The living were scarce able to bury the dead,” Bradford wrote the next fall.

Just down the road from Plymouth Rock, Plimoth Plantation recreates some of these privations. In the 1940s, the museum’s founder, a gentleman archaeologist named Henry (Harry) Hornblower II, announced that “we had by-passed the era of putting a fence and canopy above a rock or some artifacts in a glass case . . . my idea was to create a living museum.” He tore down his family’s estate and converted it into a life-size diorama of the Pilgrims’ first village. Later on, the staff in period costume began to take on period roles. Now as soon as you set foot out of the reconstructed fort and walk down the village road, the Plantation offers its visitors an immersive experience. This year as you come upon Governor Bradford reading English law in his home with Mistress Winslow, the face masks are the only concessions to our present moment.

Yet even this quaint settlement does not fully convey the true extremis of the Pilgrims’ first year, as husbands lost wives and mothers lost children. The Plantation’s research and reconstruction of historic Patuxet, an equally fascinating section of the living museum, goes further in explaining how these privations were overcome. Then as now, a disease had reduced the population passing through Plymouth. An “extraordinary plague,” Samoset informed the new arrivals, had recently killed the people who had lived there. The Pilgrims arrived in the land of the Wampanoag just as the weakened tribe faced off against the neighboring and untouched Narragansetts. By the 1620s, Europeans were no strangers to American Indians. Traders had been sailing the New England waters for a century. What was new was the arrival of European families. In the early years, the Pilgrim and native populations gave thanks together for their mutual support. Twice as many Wampanoags as Pilgrims joined the first Thanksgiving dinner. Recent excavations have also suggested that the two peoples chose to live and trade next to each other.

This summer, after completing a three-year rebuilding at Connecticut’s Mystic Seaport, Mayflower II, a faithful 1956 replica of the Pilgrims’ faith-conveying ship, returned to Plymouth under her own sail power. Plimoth Plantation is once again scheduling tours of the ship, tied up within sight of Plymouth Rock. Four hundred years after the original landing, the craft speaks to the hardships, endurance, and desperation of the settlers who have defined America in myth and memory. Entering the open hold of this tiny replica vessel, where 102 passengers would have endured the Atlantic passage together, reveals much about the death and disease they encountered that first winter in Cape Cod Bay.

The Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth, completed in 1889.

Just up the hill from Plymouth Rock, now buried among the trees and residential development, the Monument to the Forefathers offers a final statement on the combination of forces that came to the Pilgrims’ salvation. Hammatt Billings began designing this eight-story-tall granite carving in the 1850s. His brother, Joseph, working with local carvers, completed it in 1889. The monumental site, which now also includes scalloped fragments from Billings’s original Plymouth Rock pavilion, might appear grandiloquent did it not commemorate such an extraordinary event. In addition to relief images from Pilgrim history, the monument is buttressed by the personifications of Morality, Law, Education, and Liberty. Rising above them, facing England to the east, is the colossus of Faith. “Erected by a grateful people,” reads the front inscription, “in remembrance of their labors, sacrifices and sufferings for the cause of civil and religious liberty.” Stone by stone, the monument recalls the Providence of Plymouth Rock. Through sacrifices and sufferings, its blessings continue to land on the country the Pilgrims helped define.

1They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty, by John G. Turner; Yale University Press, 464 pages, $30.

Flowing Color, Billowing Canvas

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, August 20, 2020

Flowing Color, Billowing Canvas

Sam Gilliam’s innovative, loosely draped work is a light and luminous addition to the galleries at Dia Beacon.

Beacon, N.Y.

It’s not always easy to see the light at Dia Beacon. This 240,000-square-foot cathedral of Minimalism, Conceptualism and related art movements of the 1960s and ’70s has next to no artificial lighting, which can make it hard to come to grips with the works on display. Instead the sprawling museum in a repurposed Nabisco box-printing plant relies on factory windows and 34,000 square feet of skylights for illumination. So the mood of the museum, a little over an hour’s car or train ride up the Hudson River from New York City, is muted and indirect. The seasons, the weather, and the time of day all color and shade what you see and feel.

And about that feeling: puzzling, contemplative, perhaps at times reverential, but, until recently, not necessarily uplifting. Minimalist art, of rusted metal and broken glass, can be menacing. Conceptual art, of dry ideas and arid humor, can be deadening. The heady art of the 1960s and ’70s takes itself seriously—perhaps too seriously. All that weight is meant to be profound.

Which is why Sam Gilliam’s light and luminous addition to this display is so welcome. A color-rich, spirit-filled installation of two of his sculptural canvas works—the draping, loose “Double Merge” (1968) and the tightly fitted “Spread” (1973)—arrived here last fall on long-term loan. With the museum newly reopened by appointment, finally this assembly returns to view.

Sam Gilliam’s ‘Spread’ (1973) PHOTO: SAM GILLIAM/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY/ BILL JACOBSON (PHOTO)

Taken together, these works feel like the baldachin and tabernacle in the heart of the gothic gloom. Although Mr. Gilliam appeared in the American Pavilion of the 1972 Venice Biennale—the first Black American to receive the honor—the 86-year-old artist has been often considered peripheral to the movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Now he is right where he should be, in dialogue with his contemporaries and front and center in his own time and place.

A Washington-based artist born in Tupelo, Miss., Mr. Gilliam has a way of absorbing diverse influences and folding them into his own innovative work. Abstract Expressionism, Japanese tie-dying, Titian-esque color, and his own history as the son of a seamstress all spread and merge in a deeply felt sense for paint’s interaction with a canvas’s warp and weft.

In the 1960s, Mr. Gilliam followed other artists of the so-called Washington Color School, such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who had been inspired by Helen Frankenthaler to develop new approaches to abstraction. They experimented with new materials and techniques by staining unprimed canvas, unstretched and on the floor, with poured acrylic paints. Mr. Gilliam began adding aluminum powders, fluorescent paints, and resisting agents to his expanding palette. He also tucked and folded his wet canvases on the floor to create patterns in his free-flowing compositions.

He then went a step further. Working with ever-lengthening rolls of canvas, Mr. Gilliam developed new ways of presenting his widening work: hanging from the ceiling, nailed to the wall, draped over sawhorses, or tacked onto his own bevelled stretchers—pushing the boundaries of painting and sculpture.

Now at Dia Beacon, “Spread”—the first, smaller work on display (though still nearly six feet tall by 10 feet wide)—is a master-class in the art of the in-between. Abstract forms appear and reappear out of the folding of the canvas. Lines of white add structure, bringing the design to the surface, while symmetries of yellow and red created out of the folds hint at illusion and depth. Mr. Gilliam has long understood how his process of folding and unfurling creates a Rorschach test of abstract forms. Framing these dynamics, the canvas’s thick bevelled stretcher bars push the painting to the edge of sculpture while echoing the smoothed-out facets of its jewel-like composition.

After this taut introduction, ”Double Merge” appears all the more free-flowing. A combination of two huge works from 1968, both titled “Carousel II,” “Double Merge” is a new site-specific installation created by the artist of these two canvases, 66 and 71 feet wide, suspended from the ceiling and tacked to the wall.

Sam Gilliam’s ‘Double Merge’ (1968)PHOTO: SAM GILLIAM/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY/BILL JACOBSON (PHOTO)

Mr. Gilliam has attributed his suspensions or “drapes” to the vision of wash drying on the line. Flags, bunting, carousel rides, and the big top all come to mind. The two parts of “Double Merge” interact like a ballet pas de deux dancing off the wall. Despite their casual, even provisional appearance, the works are architectural studies in curves, masses and forces in space, coming within inches of the ground. Mr. Gilliam has described his affinity for banners arcing in the paintings of Albrecht Dürer. As he bundles and pins his canvases into catenary curves, “Double Merge” turns this appeal on its head. Painting itself becomes the banner.

Here the draping folds play off the folding that went into painting these compositions. In certain passages, Mr. Gilliam can overwork his studio sorcery. Elsewhere, his absorbing designs come together in celestial revelation. It’s as though the serendipity of soaking and folding can reveal heavenly clouds or the gas storms of Jupiter.

Daydream beside “Double Merge” and see for yourself. Once again, the work is ready to sway and inspire wonder as we come upon it. Like clothes on a line, these once-wet canvases hang loose in the light of a new day.

A Classical Illness

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2020

A Classical Illness

On the pathology of recent protests.

Read the adaptation of “A Classical Illness” in The Wall Street Journal of August 17.

James Panero, the Executive Editor of The New Criterion, discusses the pathology of recent protests and the impending demise of Teddy Roosevelt’s statue at the American Museum of Natural History.

Pandemics are not always biological. Sometimes they are ideological. This summer certainly saw a plague of ruin descend over the cultural landscape. Even more alarming, there was little immune response against it among the institutions designed to stop its spread. Political viruses do have a way of evolving from seemingly inert strains into superbugs. Suddenly, they seize the brain, boil the muscles, and silence dissenting voices.

A cultural pathologist might conclude that anarchic strands have been sloshing around the fringes for decades. Their symptoms appeared in the World Trade Organization protests of 1999, in the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011, and on sundry other occasions. Undoubtedly, this sickness shares genetic makeup with the May protests of the Soixante-huitards, the radical affinities of the 1930s, and the many other anti-civilizational outbreaks in recent history. Ideologues have been tinkering with the infective code for a long time. Now in 2020, this virus develops a new mutation and latches onto the country’s sympathetic racial conscience.

Like most active viruses, we still do not fully understand it. A society in lockdown, a killing in a far-off state: the atmosphere was ripe for opportunistic infection. But an infection of what? In the pandemonium and the undermining of law and order, the summer riots could never have been about “black lives.” I doubt many know what they are spreading. I rather suspect they believe a new inquisitional disease, euphemistically called “cancel culture,” might be avoided if they first give the illness to others. They are wrong, of course; the revolution always eats its own as the choicest cuts of meat.

Still, there may be no other explanation for why figures and figureheads are being toppled in such violent manifestations. After all, online denunciations may require little, but it takes no small amount of energy to pull down a statue. In either case these are viral projections, a better you than me—and the yous are getting harder to find by the mes. That is why we keep seeing ever more fevered “canceling” and ever less regard for the “culture” these figures represent.

The spread of vandalism to just about every corner of the Western world might tell us something deeper about the pandemic we now face. This was never about Confederate monuments. That much is now clear. Statues of America’s Founding Fathers have been smashed and burned. More are on the chopping block. Christian iconography has been desecrated. Monuments to Gandhi and Churchill are under threat. Even memorials of the great emancipators and abolitionists—Lincoln, Grant, Matthias Baldwin, Hans Christian Heg, John Greenleaf Whittier, the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment—have been defaced. What should we make of the coroner’s inquest over this death of reverence?

These attacks at the hands of our own vingtards have paralleled the tearing down of words and opinions that have been accused of animus regardless of true meaning. For example, this summer, by executive order, the governor of Rhode Island removed “Providence Plantations” from the full name of the state on official documents. “We can’t ignore the image conjured by the word plantation,” the governor said, of a “phrase that’s so deeply associated with the ugliest time in our state and in our country’s history.” It matters little that the actual providential plantation Roger Williams founded in 1636 was one of the more progressive jurisdictions in the world and the first colony, on paper at least, to abolish slavery.

The Surrogates Court Building on Chambers Street, Manhattan. Photo: Todd Maisel.

It might be a fool’s errand to look for the patterns of the mob. Their targets are often arbitrary. Much of it is chaos for its own sake: glass to shatter, stores to loot, an attack on whatever is nailed down—an undermining of anything set in stone. In the sloshing, fluid dynamics of mob rule, the results are never static and never enough. Destruction leads to more destruction.

At the same time, while the figures have only become more disparate, the solid forms under assault have shown striking similarities. By and large, they are classical forms. In a way, their desecration is then an attack on the classical orders, and in particular the classical liberal order, they represent. This is not to suggest that today’s iconoclasts are dissident classicists. Nevertheless, the classical language of monuments and monumentality may remain more comprehensible to the attackers than the forgotten figures this language looks to honor. For the diseased spirit, classicism is a language calling out for cancelation.

Just look at the many recent images of vandalism. Classical plinths and pedestals have been covered in spray-paint. Classical order and law and order are conflated as the classical language of art and architecture is drowned out by anti-police slogans, epithets, and defilements. In downtown Manhattan, after they were allowed to settle into another encampment, vandals defaced the classical Municipal Building, the Tweed Courthouse, and the Surrogate Court Building—damage that Manhattan’s borough president said may now cost millions to clean. Meanwhile, New York’s radical mayor has cut the city’s anti-graffiti budget as he paints his own slogans across the avenues and appoints his wife, Chirlane McCray, to head his task force on racial redress.

As civilization from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment on to America’s founding has drawn on knowledge of the classical liberal world, the association of classical forms with an illegitimate order has long been a central tenet of anti-liberal ideology. Racism and whiteness have now been added to these accusations in an attempt to silence America’s classical language and to undermine the country’s classical inheritance. For example, “the primacy of Western (Greek, Roman) and Judeo-Christian tradition” is now considered one of the “aspects and assumptions of whiteness,” according to the Smithsonian’s own National Museum of African American History & Culture. In an astonishing display of racial bigotry, the museum adds the classical tradition to other “signs of whiteness” that include individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, rational linear thinking, decision-making, respect for authority, delayed gratification, punctuality, and being polite. Similarly, earlier this year, after the Trump administration proposed a classical mandate for the design of new Federal buildings in keeping with Washington’s classical vernacular, Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times associated the proposal with “authoritarian regimes of the past” and a style that “dredges up images of antebellum America.”

Architectural plan from the 2013 renovation of Roosevelt Hall, American Museum of Natural History, front view. Photo: Roche Dinkeloo.

There have always been diseased notions and crazed actors. What is new is the abdication of leadership and the collapse of institutional vitality that have permitted their fevered actions to spread. Those at the top of our institutions are the first to sacrifice their cultural charge in order to protect their salaries and status. Curators and writers, students and teachers, the art on the wall and the architecture around it—everyone else and everything else is up for grabs.

This sad fact recently came into sharp relief at a dénouement on the steps of the American Museum of Natural History. File this under “closing soon”: as of this writing, there may be little time remaining to see the equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt. Located since 1940 in front of this New York institution, the statue serves as the focal point of the official state memorial to the naturalist, president, author, and statesman. In late June, museum leadership caved to protesters and requested that the city send the sculpture to pasture. Before politics runs roughshod over the Rough Rider, the work deserves another look in situ.

This sculpture by James Earle Fraser is based on Verrocchio’s grand equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni, finished in 1495 and located in Venice’s Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Fraser’s work completes the classical arch designed by John Russell Pope that is both the museum’s entrance and another key part of the memorial program. The addition of the dignified American Indian and African guides that flank Roosevelt, now considered the most offending elements of the sculpture, were intended to symbolize the “continents of Africa and America, and if you choose may stand for Roosevelt’s friendliness to all races,” according to Fraser. Together the three figures lead a triumphal procession out of the arch, trailed this time not by the spoils of war but rather by the knowledge contained in the institution behind it. In his memorial proposal of 1928, Pope was right to consider the trio together as a “heroic group,” one that should be considered ahead of its time for including two non-Western people now guiding the equestrian figure. Without this sculpture at its center, the monument will be akin to the Lincoln Memorial without Daniel Chester French’s statue of Lincoln or the Jefferson Memorial (another Pope masterpiece) without Rudulph Evans’s statue of Jefferson.

Architectural plan from the 2013 renovation of Roosevelt Hall, American Museum of Natural History, side view. Photo: Roche Dinkeloo.

For years activists have targeted Pope’s grand classical monument to Roosevelt. In 2017 protestors stormed the museum’s Roosevelt Rotunda, designed by Pope as a hallowed Roman space on the other side of the arch. They denounced the memorial as an emblem of “patriarchy, white supremacy and settler-colonialism.” Vandals also defaced the statue’s granite pedestal with blood-red paint and labeled it a “monument to racial conquest.” Despite these episodes, in that year the city’s own commission tasked to investigate the statue’s history and iconography for racial offense chose not to recommend its removal. The commission even questioned the ethics, and legality, of altering this central part of Roosevelt’s official state memorial, which is closely tied to the history and forms of the entire museum.

These judgments ultimately meant little to Ellen Futter, the museum’s current president, and her trustees. Futter used the summer riots as an opportunity to rid herself of a problem at her doorstep while also handing an ideological victory to the mayor. “We have watched as the attention of the world and the country has increasingly turned to statues as powerful and hurtful symbols of systemic racism,” Futter said in a joint statement. To which the mayor added that the “problematic” statue “explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.”

“Every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.” So George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four. “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” The attack on history from a “museum of history” shows how this radical disease now infects the hearts of our institutions. Sometimes a plague is so deadly it dies of its own lethality. Something similar may happen to our own wave of viral politics. At the American Museum of Natural History, the institution’s own Theodore Roosevelt Rotunda tells the story of our twenty-sixth president in quotations and three monumental murals painted by William Andrew Mackay in 1935. One canvas depicts Roosevelt’s support for the then-controversial but ultimately correct theory that the mosquito, and not poor sanitation, was the cause of Yellow Fever in Panama.

Perhaps one day we will better identify and isolate the vectors of our own ideological pandemic. Until then, a quote by Roosevelt, also displayed in his Rotunda, might at least inspire some renewed resistance: “Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”