President Trump on Monday announced the names of more than 200 statues to be built as part of his plan for a new “National Garden of American Heroes,” which he says will vanquish a “reckless attempt to erase our heroes” that swept the country surrounding last year’s racial justice protests.
The list is bookended by photographer Ansel Adams and Lorenzo de Zavala, a supporter of Texas’ independence from Mexico, with military, political, civil rights, science, sports and entertainment figures filling it out.
Actor Jimmy Stewart and abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe both made Mr. Trump’s list, as did baseball great Roberto Clemente and explorer Christopher Columbus.
“In the peace and harmony of this vast outdoor park, visitors will come and learn the amazing stories of some of the greatest Americans who have ever lived,” Mr. Trump said in a new executive order released on the holiday celebrating the life of Martin Luther King Jr.
King and his wife, Coretta Scott King, both made Mr. Trump’s list.
Mr. Trump did not include himself on his list, although several people did nominate him as part of the selection process, government officials said last year.
The inclusion of Columbus sparked a renewed round of criticism online, with the explorer’s role in opening the Western Hemisphere to exploration and exploitation making him a favorite target for American Indian activists.
The fact that he was an Italian and sailed for Spain, and died even before the lands were dubbed “America” also drew scorn.
Likewise, some online critics wondered about the relevance of Alex Trebek, a game show host who was Canadian by birth, although he became an American citizen in 1997.
Mr. Trump, in his executive order, said he was aiming to celebrate people “who made substantive contributions to America’s public life or otherwise had a substantive effect on America’s history.”
That included both Houstons — Whitney, the singer, and Sam, the Texas independence leader.
It also included Dr. Seuss, Charlton Heston and Elvis Presley.
The outgoing president first announced the history garden in July, a month after Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the nation and swept away statues that had stood for decades but which were deemed out of step with the times.
Statues of figures with links to the Confederacy were the chief targets, but Mr. Trump said monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington were also snared in the zeitgeist.
Mr. Trump’s idea is to erect new statues — “a roll call of heroes” — in an outdoor park run by the federal government as a counter to that.
No site has been chosen.
The fate of the idea will soon rest in the hands of President-elect Joseph R. Biden, who could wipe it away with a stroke of the pen, or could alter it through his own executive orders, adding or subtracting names as he sees fit.
Mr. Trump’s initial list, written into his first executive order on the subject in July, was 31 names long. Critics called it too limited, too white and heavily male.
The new list runs much further afield, with American Indian figures alongside civil rights leaders, and women far more represented.
They include actress Lauren Bacall, authors Harper Lee and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in Congress — and, decades later, the only lawmaker to vote against declaring war in 1941 after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor.
Here’s the full list included in the executive order:
Ansel Adams
John Adams
Samuel Adams
Muhammad Ali
Luis Walter Alvarez
Susan B. Anthony
Hannah Arendt
Louis Armstrong
Neil Armstrong
Crispus Attucks
John James Audubon
Lauren Bacall
Clara Barton
Todd Beamer
Alexander Graham Bell
Roy Benavidez
Ingrid Bergman
Irving Berlin
Humphrey Bogart
Daniel Boone
Norman Borlaug
William Bradford
Herb Brooks
Kobe Bryant
William F. Buckley Jr.
Sitting Bull
Frank Capra
Andrew Carnegie
Charles Carroll
John Carroll
George Washington Carver
Johnny Cash
Joshua Chamberlain
Whittaker Chambers
Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman
Ray Charles
Julia Child
Gordon Chung-Hoon
William Clark
Henry Clay
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
Roberto Clemente
Grover Cleveland
Red Cloud
William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody
Nat King Cole
Samuel Colt
Christopher Columbus
Calvin Coolidge
James Fenimore Cooper
Davy Crockett
Benjamin O. Davis Jr.
Miles Davis
Dorothy Day
Joseph H. De Castro
Emily Dickinson
Walt Disney
William “Wild Bill” Donovan
Jimmy Doolittle
Desmond Doss
Frederick Douglass
Herbert Henry Dow
Katharine Drexel
Peter Drucker
Amelia Earhart
Thomas Edison
Jonathan Edwards
Albert Einstein
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Duke Ellington
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Medgar Evers
David Farragut
the Marquis de La Fayette
Mary Fields
Henry Ford
George Fox
Aretha Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Milton Friedman
Robert Frost
Gabby Gabreski
Bernardo de Gálvez
Lou Gehrig
Theodor Seuss Geisel
Cass Gilbert
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
John Glenn
Barry Goldwater
Samuel Gompers
Alexander Goode
Carl Gorman
Billy Graham
Ulysses S. Grant
Nellie Gray
Nathanael Greene
Woody Guthrie
Nathan Hale
William Frederick “Bull” Halsey Jr.
Alexander Hamilton
Ira Hayes
Hans Christian Heg
Ernest Hemingway
Patrick Henry
Charlton Heston
Alfred Hitchcock
Billie Holiday
Bob Hope
Johns Hopkins
Grace Hopper
Sam Houston
Whitney Houston
Julia Ward Howe
Edwin Hubble
Daniel Inouye
Andrew Jackson
Robert H. Jackson
Mary Jackson
John Jay
Thomas Jefferson
Steve Jobs
Katherine Johnson
Barbara Jordan
Chief Joseph
Elia Kazan
Helen Keller
John F. Kennedy
Francis Scott Key
Coretta Scott King
Martin Luther King Jr.
Russell Kirk
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Henry Knox
Tadeusz Kościuszko
Harper Lee
Pierre Charles L’Enfant
Meriwether Lewis
Abraham Lincoln
Vince Lombardi
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Clare Boothe Luce
Douglas MacArthur
Dolley Madison
James Madison
George Marshall
Thurgood Marshall
William Mayo
Christa McAuliffe
William McKinley
Louise McManus
Herman Melville
Thomas Merton
George P. Mitchell
Maria Mitchell
William “Billy” Mitchell
Samuel Morse
Lucretia Mott
John Muir
Audie Murphy
Edward Murrow
John Neumann
Annie Oakley
Jesse Owens
Rosa Parks
George S. Patton Jr.
Charles Willson Peale
William Penn
Oliver Hazard Perry
John J. Pershing
Edgar Allan Poe
Clark Poling
John Russell Pope
Elvis Presley
Jeannette Rankin
Ronald Reagan
Walter Reed
William Rehnquist
Paul Revere
Henry Hobson Richardson
Hyman Rickover
Sally Ride
Matthew Ridgway
Jackie Robinson
Norman Rockwell
Caesar Rodney
Eleanor Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Betsy Ross
Babe Ruth
Sacagawea
Jonas Salk
John Singer Sargent
Antonin Scalia
Norman Schwarzkopf
Junípero Serra
Elizabeth Ann Seton
Robert Gould Shaw
Fulton Sheen
Alan Shepard
Frank Sinatra
Margaret Chase Smith
Bessie Smith
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Jimmy Stewart
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gilbert Stuart
Anne Sullivan
William Howard Taft
Maria Tallchief
Maxwell Taylor
Tecumseh
Kateri Tekakwitha
Shirley Temple
Nikola Tesla
Jefferson Thomas
Henry David Thoreau
Jim Thorpe
Augustus Tolton
Alex Trebek
Harry S. Truman
Sojourner Truth
Harriet Tubman
Dorothy Vaughan
C. T. Vivian
John von Neumann
Thomas Ustick Walter
Sam Walton
Booker T. Washington
George Washington
John Washington
John Wayne
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
Phillis Wheatley
Walt Whitman
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Roger Williams
John Winthrop
Frank Lloyd Wright
Orville Wright
Wilbur Wright
Alvin C. York
Cy Young
Lorenzo de Zavala.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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