Friday, July 25, 2025

My response to Steve Sailer's question, "who should be in the garden of American heroes?"

By A Longtime Reader



By A Longtime Reader
sent: friday, july 18, 2025 at 12:07:11 p.m. edt

My response to Steve Sailer's question, "who should be in the garden of American heroes?"


to: Steve Sailer's substack <reply+2secqb&28sdci&&b1ba46321ed75ae696329b85f93a1e6e08e7e4bd1812f42241061ea0561695a9@mg1.substack.com>
Sent: Friday, july 18, 2025 at 08:25:47 a.m. edt
Subject: "who should be in the national garden of American heroes? 

Forget about this so-called National Garden of American Heroes. I'd be happy if, rather than erecting any more monuments, we restored all the ones taken down and destroyed during the past decade or so. I want to see Theodore Roosevelt with his negro and indian companions back at the American Museum of Natural History; Robert E. Lee returned to Charlottesville, Richmond, and New Orleans; Stonewall Jackson and other Southern heroes returned to Monument Avenue, Richmond; and the same for the more than 150 other monuments that have been removed--including the memorial to Confederate soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery that was destroyed as recently as December 2023.

By the way, in an article about the majestic statue of Lee in Richmond installed in 1890 and removed in 2021, wikipedia notes, "After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the controversial monument was vandalized in graffiti, and many activists had called for its removal.

Naturally there is no [sic] after the word "murder" in that sentence from wokepedia.

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On Friday, July 18, 2025 at 04:46:55 AM PDT, Steve Sailer's Substack <stevesailer@substack.com> wrote:


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Donald Trump has wanted since the George Floyd era to build a National Garden of American Heroes as a response to the Taliban-style statue-toppling of 2020.

Europe is full of statues of national heroes, many of whom I've never heard of, so something similar in America seems reasonable.

Should it be outdoors or indoors? Seems like it would depend upon where it's located. If it's in Florida, a big tourist destination, outdoors makes sense: warm weather and lots of land. If it's in New York, indoors.

The National Mall in DC sounds ideal.

Here's the first Trump Administration's 2020 second cut at a list of 244 heroes:

(b) Section 3(c)(i) of Executive Order 13934 is amended to read as follows: "The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of 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, and Lorenzo de Zavala."

From the Washington Post:

What do you think? Who'd you add and subtract?

One way is to look at names and see if you can think of anybody of the same type who'd be a better choice.

I think Humphrey Bogart's wife Lauren Bacall is in a little over her head. Why not Clark Gable's wife Carole Lombard who died in a plane crash on a War Bonds tour? Roberto Clemente makes the list for roughly the same reason: he died flying emergency aid to Nicaragua after an earthquake.

Is there a better Puerto Rican hero? Nope.

So, yes to Clemente, no to Bacall.





 



 



9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm for people who furthered our country--not brought it down. Eliminates 99% of the politicians of the last 63 years.

--GRA

Anonymous said...

The list is so insane, commenting seems pointless. Actors are "heroes"? Why not just say "Great Americans"?

I started skimming about halfway through, but I didn't see D.W. Griffith in there- wonder why?

Some of the "Americans" are British by birth- Hitchcock, Bob Hope...

Kobe Bryant? Harper Lee? ALAN GINSBURG??? Shoot me now!

This is the kind of thing only Steve Sailer could take seriously. Typical Trump idiocy while the world goes to hell in a handcart.

-RM

PS- Why not Hank Patterson, Strother Martin, Ross Elliott, J. Carrol Naish, Dwight Frye, Burt Mustin....

Anonymous said...

OK, I'm hooked on this thing now (slow night)- and it's hard to read since the right side is cut off-

WHITNEY HOUSTON??? Does dying early from drug addiction make you an "American hero"? (And her singing was HORRIBLE!) Maybe Kushner made up this list. Aretha Franklin- another screeching horror! Pandering garbage-

How many commies in there? Besides the predictable MLK, there's Murrow and probably a few others. Joe McCarthy should be listed- THAT'S an American hero!

And here's the old Vdare article debunking Harriet Tubman- her "heroism" was promoted by, guess who, the American Communists!

https://vdare.com/articles/the-fulford-file-harriet-tubman-gun-toting-republican-delusional-narcoleptic-and-or-creation-of-communist-propaganda

-RM

Nicholas said...

Sorry, RM, and everyone else! I forgot that I'd re-posted something from substack. I'd stopped doing that, because its fruit salad code is completely incompatible with google blogger. I just went through it and changed the widths. Hopefully, you can see it all now.

AbolishTenure said...

No, no, no, a thousand times no. Even if it's privately funded. Buy your own land and put it next to disneyworld or mar-a-lago or a bucees on I-40, not in bleephole West Prince George's County. Impossible to do it right in an incohesive incoherent nation that let go of any notion of a common culture decades ago and proved that it can't respect and protect the statues it had. Guaranteed lots of bad choices will be included. A vandalism protest magnet for envirofreaks, etc. in a country that lost its sense of crime and punishment. And some works will be done by talentless hacks like the one who did the infamous Lucy statue. No, no, not the big black bronze oaf in NYC. The botched ugly statue of Lucille Ball in southwestern NY state, that's the one I mean.

Anonymous said...

Being famous does not make a person a hero. What did Frank Sinatra, for example, do that was heroic? Maybe Mafia connections makes one heroic? And I don't consider the communists on the list to be heroes--they are villains.

Anonymous said...

Old joke from a stand-up comic: "Hey, Frank Sinatra saved my life once! Three guys were beating me in an alley and Frank said, 'Okay fellas, that's enough!' "

-RM

Anonymous said...

Like a bad traffic accident, it's hard to look away- almost ashamed to admit I looked at this thing again-

ALEX TREBEK?????

I think the committee that came up with this should have their names made public- AND THEN BANISH THEM TO THE FUNNY FARM!

-RM

Anonymous said...

My guess:The committee names will be made public and declared "heroes"--by themselves



--GRA