The National Garden of American Heroes: Collapsing Historical Vision

Public sculpture gives symbolic form to ideologies and systems of belief. It transforms history into myth in which otherwise controversial or at least debatable ideas and beliefs become part of the nation’s physical environment. Emblems of the state, which is to say the ruling class or classes that control public spaces, they both proclaim and reinforce the state’s vision of its past, present, and future.

Statues of George Washington celebrate the heroism and belief in Constitutional government that marked the founding of the United States. In a similar vein, statues and monuments licensed by a newly-consolidated Eastern Establishment—e.g., Augustus St.-Gaudens Farragut Monument, the neoclassical Triumphal Arch in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza—celebrates the union’s heroic rebirth in the Civil War, its civilizing mission, and its imperial aspirations.

By contrast, Donald Trump’s Garden of American Heroes, if ever realized, reveals a collapse of historical vision. As I argue in this paper, the National Garden’s 250 “heroes,” represent an incoherent set of ideas and beliefs in which such figures as Abraham Lincoln, Humphrey Bogart, Tecumseh, Hannah Arendt, Jack Benny, Frederick Douglass, and Lucille Ball are reduced to celebrity status, inhabitants of an eternal American present in which past, present, and future add up to nothing more than a roster of bold-faced names. The Garden thus accords with the administration’s efforts to impose a one-dimensional “patriotic” history of the United States on educational institutions and the public at large.