Teddy Roosevelt Pounds His Fist

Mount Vernon, New York

No one looks good when they're shouting. That message was lost on sculptor Vincenzo Miserendino, whose 1923 half-statue of the late President Teddy Roosevelt (he'd died in 1919) depicts him pounding a lectern with his fist while his face is frozen in mid-bellow. With squinted eyes and contorted mouth, bronze Teddy looks like a mustachioed baby screaming that his favorite toy has been taken away. "Aggressive fighting for the right," reads the statue's inscription, "is the noblest sport the world affords."

The sculpture's official title is "The Orator." Vincenzo was such a fan of Roosevelt that he sculpted him a half-dozen different times -- although never as unflatteringly as he did here -- and named his youngest son Theodore.