National Garden of American Heroes

A National Garden of American Heroes was proposed by President Donald Trump in executive orders on July 3, 2020, and January 18, 2021, as a sculpture garden honoring "great figures of America's history". Trump first announced the idea at an Independence Day event at Mount Rushmore in Keystone, South Dakota. The sculpture garden idea was part of a series of executive orders issued by Trump in his final months in office to address conservative cultural grievances; the second of the two executive orders was issued two days before Trump's term expired. Congress never appropriated funding for such a garden, nor were concrete steps ever taken to construct such a site. President Joe Biden revoked the executive orders relating to the garden in May 2021.

Trump's vision for the garden included statues of notable Founding Fathers, activists, political figures, businesspeople, athletes, celebrities, and pop culture icons. The premise of the proposal and the selection of statues to be erected was questioned by historians and scholars, who described it as random and scattershot.

Trump executive orders
Trump's order said that the proposed garden would be managed by the Task Force for Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes, which would allocate funding from the Interior Department to establish the site. Members of the task force would include chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, the Administrator of General Services, the chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, and any additional "officers or employees of any executive department or agency" designated by the president. Trump described the garden as a response to the practice of removing monuments and memorials to Confederate figures and others; many such monuments were removed or destroyed in 2020 as part of a response to the George Floyd protests. In his Mount Rushmore speech announcing the proposal, Trump claimed that "Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities" and pledged to build "a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live."

Under Trump's Executive Order 13934, issued July 3, 2020, the task force was granted 60 days to develop preliminary plans for the site, including a potential location, and was to open before July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

The original executive order listed 31 historical figures as examples of those who would receive a statue in the Garden. On January 18, 2021&mdash;two days before leaving office&mdash;Trump signed a new executive order (Executive Order 13978) listing 244 historical figures, including all 31 previously named, of those who would receive statues. The revised list included 192 men and 52 women.

Reception by historians
Historians questioned the scattershot nature of Trump's proposal; James R. Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, said that "The choices vary from odd to probably inappropriate to provocative" and suggested that the proposal was an attempt by Trump "to seize on a cultural conflict to distract from other issues" during an election season, as suggested by the short (60-day) timetable that Trump set forth in his order. Historian Karen Cox described the executive order about the proposed monument as "random" and said that "Nothing about this suggests it's thoughtful." Historian Adam Domby noted Trump's initial list included no Native Americans, and included George Patton but omitted Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The premise of Trump's proposal was criticized by historian Michael Beschloss, who wrote that "No president of the United States or federal government has any business dictating to citizens who our historical heroes should be. This is not Stalin's Russia. Any American who loves democracy should make sure there is never some official, totalitarian-sounding 'National Garden of American Heroes,' with names forced upon us by the federal government."

Revocation of executive orders
The garden was considered highly unlikely to be built, and Congress never appropriated any funds for the project. On May 14, 2021, President Biden issued an executive order that revoked both of Trump's executive orders on the Garden, as well as various other Trump-issued executive orders.

Proposed statues
The original executive order listed 31 historical figures as examples of those who would receive a statue in the Garden. On January 18, 2021&mdash;two days before leaving office&mdash;Trump signed a new executive order listing 244 historical figures, including all 31 previously named, of those who would receive statues. The revised list included 192 men and 52 women. Names marked with an asterisk (*) were included in the original executive order.


 * Ansel Adams
 * Samuel Adams
 * John 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
 * Joseph H. De Castro
 * Joshua Chamberlain*
 * Whittaker Chambers
 * Johnny "Appleseed" Chapman
 * Ray Charles
 * Julia Child
 * Gordon Chung-Hoon
 * William Clark
 * Henry Clay*
 * 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
 * Emily Dickinson
 * Walt Disney
 * William J. 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
 * Mary Fields
 * Henry Ford
 * George L. 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 D. Goode
 * R. C. Gorman
 * Billy Graham*
 * Ulysses S. Grant
 * Nellie Gray
 * Nathanael Greene
 * Woody Guthrie
 * Nathan Hale
 * William 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
 * Martin Luther King Jr.*
 * Coretta Scott King
 * Russell Kirk
 * Jeane Kirkpatrick
 * Henry Knox
 * Tadeusz Kościuszko
 * Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette
 * 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
 * Billy Mitchell
 * George P. Mitchell
 * Maria Mitchell
 * Samuel Morse
 * Lucretia Mott
 * John Muir
 * Audie Murphy*
 * Edward R. Murrow
 * John Neumann
 * John von 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 V. 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
 * Bessie Smith
 * Margaret Chase 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*
 * Mark Twain
 * Dorothy Vaughan
 * C. T. Vivian
 * Thomas Ustick Walter
 * Sam Walton
 * John P. Washington
 * Booker T. Washington*
 * George 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