# National Garden of American Heroes

The National Garden of American Heroes is a proposed sculpture garden honoring "great figures of America's history". The concept was first put forward by President Donald Trump in 2020 during an Independence Day event in Keystone, South Dakota. It was subsequently included in a series of executive orders issued by Trump in the final months of his first term in office that sought to address conservative cultural grievances. 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. Upon Trump's return to the presidency, he revoked Biden's executive order.
Trump's vision for the garden includes the creation of 250 statues depicting 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.

## History

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—two days before leaving office—Trump signed a new executive order listing 244 historical figures, including all 31 previously named, of those who would receive statues. That revised list included 192 men and 52 women.
In 2021, the garden was considered highly unlikely to ever be built, and Congress never appropriated any funds for the project. On May 14, 2021, President Joe 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.
On January 29, 2025, Trump revoked Biden's executive order related to the garden and called for six additional names to be added to the list of historical figures. The timeline of its construction was modified from July 4, 2026, to "as expeditiously as possible". During a 2025 Black History Month reception at the White House, Trump said a statue of Prince Estabrook, a Black Patriot, would be in the garden.

## Reception by historians

Historians questioned the 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 General George Patton but omitted President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

## Proposed statues

Names marked with an asterisk (*) were included in the original 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
* 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
* Prince Estabrook
* 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 C. 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 G. 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 Jr.
* Junípero Serra
* Elizabeth Ann Seton
* Robert Gould Shaw
* Fulton J. Sheen
* Alan Shepard
* Frank Sinatra
* Bessie Smith
* Margaret Chase Smith
* Elizabeth Cady Stanton
* James Stewart
* Harriet Beecher Stowe*
* Gilbert Stuart
* Anne Sullivan
* William Howard Taft
* Maria Tallchief
* Maxwell D. 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 York
* Cy Young
* Lorenzo de Zavala