Those wanting to experience the incongruous spectacle of astatuarypark populated by Whitney Houston, Antonin Scalia, and Davey Crockett first-hand are out of luck. TheTrumpadministration’sproposedNational Garden of American Heroes was, as anticipated, nixed viaexecutive orderlate last week byPresident Joe Biden.
Trump’slast-ditch decreeordering the formation of a special task force to oversee the creation of the sculpture park came on January 18, just two days before his term expired. Anearlier executive orderthatfirst announced the gardenwas released several months prior on July 3. Congress never approved funding for the project and a site was never selected, although some Republican governors didenthusiastically offer up their statesas potential locations.
Whatwasestablished was an aggressively random list of 244 American-born noted notables (and a substantial number of naturalized U.S. citizens and outright non-Americans a la Christopher Columbus) that would have graced the garden in statue form. Although the earlier order stated that all statues within the proposed garden had to be “lifelike or realistic” and that “abstract or modernist” likenesses would be forbidden, that language never made it into the final EO.
Aspreviously reported, the finalized January 18 list, decidedly more diverse in nature than the initial list of 31 statues released over the summer (although still predominately male), included a modest handful of dead architects and planners including Frank Lloyd Wright, Cass Gilbert, Henry Hobson Richardson, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, and John Russell Pope. (Frederick Law Olmsted and Louis Sullivan were two notable omissions.) The list, which also included Helen Keller, Miles Davis, Alexander Hamilton, Steve Jobs, Rosa Parks, Shirley Temple, Kobe Bryant, and Emily Dickinson to name just a few, was extensive and extensively bizarre.
Not surprisingly, the grab bag-y nature of the proposed park was met with widespread ridicule by historians and online commenters. As presidential historianMichael Beschlossrelayed toAxios:“Many of the people on this list of ‘heroes’ would be embarrassed to be singled out by someone like Donald Trump.”
Said to be curated largely byTrump himself,花园——“一个巨大的户外featur公园e the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live”—was conservative cultural grievance-borne and dreamt up in direct response to the toppling, vandalism, and coordinated removal of numerous problematic statues andmonumentsacross the country last summer as part of the larger, Black Lives Matter-led protests against racial injustice and police brutality. Most of these statues were Jim Crow-era relics of Confederate leaders as well as historical figures associated with bigotry, bondage, and oppression. The order referred to the removal of these racist monuments as “dangerous anti-American extremism;” the National Garden of American Heroes was envisioned by Trump as “America’s answer to this reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values, and entire way of life.”
从去年7月一起取消这两个订单and this January related to the National Garden of American Heroes, Biden put the kibosh onanother Trump executive orderthat both directed the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of individuals who vandalized Confederate monuments and halted federal funding to local and states governments that the previous administration felt had failed to protect monuments and statues defaced during last summer’s widespread protests. Biden also revoked three non-monument-related Trump-era executive orders last Friday, including one that required immigrants to prove they would be covered by specific health insurance plans within 30 days of entering the country.
In late February, President Biden alsoabolishedTrump’scontroversialDecember 21“Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” executive order, which decreed that all new federal buildings constructed in Washington, D.C., along with all federal courthouses and federal agency buildings outside of Washington with costs exceeding $50 million, be designed in the neoclassical style.
