- The Washington Times - Monday, January 18, 2021

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.


DOCUMENT: Trump heroes


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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