This was published 4 years ago
Trump orders 244 statues for 'Garden of Heroes', some surprising names
By Chris Sommerfeldt
New York: Woody Guthrie is on a list of Americans who will have statues built in their honour on President Donald Trump’s orders – even though the late folk music legend wrote a seething song decades ago about the Trump family’s allegedly racist business practices in New York City.
The Guthrie statue will be among 244 to be constructed as part of a “National Garden of American Heroes”, alongside an eclectic selection of identities ranging from Abraham Lincoln and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Kobe Bryant, Whitney Houston and Walt Disney.
In one of his final acts as President, Trump issued an executive order for their commemoration.
US President Donald Trump orders 244 statues for his Garden of HeroesCredit: AP
“Each individual has been chosen for embodying the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love,” Trump said in the statement. “Astounding the world by the sheer power of their example, each one of them has contributed indispensably to America’s noble history, the best chapters of which are still to come.”
A White House spokesman did not return a request for comment on Trump’s thinking behind picking Guthrie, who died in 1967.
Known for his left-wing sensibilities and influential style of songwriting, Guthrie penned Old Man Trump in 1950 after moving into the Beach Haven apartment complex in Gravesend, Brooklyn.
Woody Guthrie hated Donald Trump's father and sang about his racist rental policies.
The complex was owned and operated by Trump’s late father, Fred Trump, and Guthrie said the real estate tycoon discriminated against black New Yorkers by segregating his units along a “colour line”.
“I suppose Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate he stirred up in the bloodpot of human hearts, when he drawed [sic] that colour line here at his Beach Haven family project,” reads the verse of the Guthrie tune.
Most of the other individuals on Trump’s list of “American heroes” are conservative stalwarts, such as late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Barry Goldwater. There are also some Founding Fathers on the list, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
But there are some other eyebrow-raising picks beyond Guthrie.
There were several entertainers, including Louis Armstrong, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Bob Hope, Elvis Presley and the host of game show Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek, who died in November 2020.
Also on the list: political theorist Hannah Arendt, whose 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism enjoyed renewed sales in 2017 after Trump became President.
The site for Trump’s requested sculpture garden has yet to be determined.
When he first announced plans for the garden last northern summer, Trump painted it as a response to Black Lives Matter protesters, whom he claimed were waging a “merciless” war against “our national heritage” by tearing down some monuments honouring leaders of confederacy.
“These statues are not ours alone, to be discarded at the whim of those inflamed by fashionable political passions; they belong to generations that have come before us and to generations yet unborn,” Trump said in his statement about his original executive order on July 3. “My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory. In the face of such acts of destruction, it is our responsibility as Americans to stand strong against this violence, and to peacefully transmit our great national story to future generations through newly commissioned monuments to American heroes.”
Here is the complete list:
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
New York Daily News