Trump's curious Garden of American Heroes
Lessons from Central Park
Sophie Simon’s life changed suddenly when her father died in 1886. Still in high school, the 16-year-old had to take a part-time job clerking in a store to help her mother and five younger siblings. The family had emigrated from Russia to the U.S. in 1876, settling in a town near Pittsburgh.
Sophie wound up marrying the store owner, Ansel Loeb. She took his name and kept it, even after their divorce, when she moved to New York City in 1910 and began work as a reporter for the New York World.
“Loeb interviewed widowed women who, unlike her own mother, had been forced to place their children in orphanages,” wrote Marjorie N. Feld. “These interviews inspired her to work for the allocation of public funds for ‘widows pensions.’”
Sophie Simon Loeb’s work as a writer, activist and civic leader helped bring about a revolution in child welfare policy, keeping families together as the movement spread to 42 states and around the world.
Today she is remembered with a monument in a playground at New York’s Central Park. It doesn’t bear Loeb’s image but shows 13 characters from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass” — among them, the White Rabbit, Cheshire Cat, Queen of Hearts and of course Alice.
The Sophie Loeb Fountain is one of more than 140 sculptures and monuments in Central Park, which is “the world’s largest outdoor art museum,” according to former New York City parks commissioner Mitchell J. Silver.
The park’s monument collection would be outdone, at least in quantity, if President Donald Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes is built. Under orders from Trump, the National Endowment for the Humanities is now seeking sculptors interested in depicting 250 “heroes,” ranging, alphabetically, from photographer Ansel Adams to Texas Republic vice president Lorenzo de Zavala, for display at an undetermined site. The ambitious goal is to open the garden by the 250th birthday of the U.S. on July 4, 2026.
First-term holdover
Trump originally floated the idea in his first term, positioning it as a reaction to the racial reckoning that followed the killing of George Floyd.
“Across this Nation,” he said in a January 18, 2021 executive order, “belief in the greatness and goodness of America has come under attack in recent months and years by a dangerous anti-American extremism that seeks to dismantle our country’s history, institutions, and very identity. The heroes of 1776 have been desecrated, with statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin vandalized and toppled.”
That order (revoked by President Joe Biden and now reinstated by Trump) dictated that Washington, Jefferson and Franklin should be included, along with more than 240 others. They include Muhammad Ali, Alexander Graham Bell, Emily Dickinson, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, Douglas MacArthur, Christa McAuliffe, Edward Murrow, Herman Melville, Rosa Parks, Elvis Presley, Paul Revere, John Singer Sargent, Antonin Scalia, Jimmy Stewart, Henry David Thoreau and Alex Trebek, just to name a few.
Sophie Loeb is not among them. As an immigrant and journalist, she has two strikes against her in Trump’s book. But to be fair, the criteria for inclusion in the Trump list haven’t been disclosed, and there are immigrants and journalists among the chosen. Still, Loeb’s omission points up some of the failings of the Garden of Heroes concept.
Trump envisions only one way to honor great achievers: “All statues must be life-size and made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass.” The selected artists would be paid up to $200,000 per sculpture, with a maximum per-artist stipend of $600,000. As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Trump has also directed that subjects be depicted in a ‘realistic’ manner, with no modernist or abstract designs allowed.”
Even if Sophie Loeb were included, she couldn’t be honored whimsically, as she is in New York with an array of Alice in Wonderland characters.
Trump’s missing monument
We don’t know whether Trump has visited the Loeb Fountain, which is a 22-minute walk, or six-minute limo ride, up Fifth Avenue from Trump Tower.
Surely he passed by the statues of Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, Cuban freedom fighter José Martí and Venezuelan leader Simón Bolívar in 1986, when New York City mayor Ed Koch accepted Trump’s offer to renovate the park’s Wollman Rink.
Trump sought to one-up Koch by showing he could finish a project the city had botched, and he succeeded. But as Michael D’Antonio noted in his Trump biography “Never Enough,” the bitter rivalry between the developer and the mayor ensured that, despite Trump’s hopes, the facility wouldn’t be renamed as a monument to its renovator.
A different conception
The designers of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, didn’t envision filling it with works of art. They sought to reintroduce nature into a rapidly growing urban environment — or at least the illusion of nature, since there was nothing natural about moving “nearly 5 million cubic yards of stone, earth and topsoil” or planting “500,000 trees, shrubs and vines” to create the charming vistas that draw tens of millions of visitors each year.
“Angel of the Waters” at the Bethesda Terrace was planned at the park’s inception, though not completed until 1873. The rest of the statues came after the park’s opening, as wealthy and politically influential residents lobbied the city to approve them. The Sophie Loeb fountain was funded by mining and real estate magnate August Heckscher, who shared her advocacy for building playgrounds and pushed to honor Loeb after she died of cancer at 52.
The Statues of Central Park, a 2018 book by writer June Eding and photographer Catarina Astrom, explores the history of the monuments. As the book notes, businessman Gordon Webster Burnham was responsible for two of the park’s statues, including its oldest, the stark 1863 image of eagles preying upon a goat, and the lifelike “Liberty and Union” memorial to Daniel Webster.
The park’s statue of Alexander Hamilton was given to the city by a Hamilton descendant in 1880. A self-portrait of Danish artist Albert Thorvaldsen was a gift from Americans of Danish descent in 1894.
The American Italian community donated a bust of Guiseppe Mazzini. The Polish government provided a statue of the 15th century Polish King Wladyslw II Jagiello. New York’s German Americans gave a statue of playwright Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller. You get the idea.
A charming stroll
The charm of Central Park’s monuments is their serendipity. Strolling through the park’s 843 acres, you might come across Ludwig von Beethoven, the now obscure writer Fitz-Greene Halleck, a puckish Mother Goose, a contemplative Robert Burns, or the celebrated rescue dog Balto, credited for pulling a sled carrying life-saving medications to Nome, Alaska, during a diphtheria outbreak in 1925. (Balto himself was present at the dedication of his monument, Eding notes.)
More recent additions to the park include Strawberry Fields’ Imagine Mosaic honoring John Lennon, along with statues of Frederick Douglass, Duke Ellington, “Women’s Rights Pioneers” Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and New York City Marathon founder Fred Lebow.
The heroes garden
The designers of Trump’s garden have a high bar to create an experience comparable to what Central Park’s monuments offer.
Rather than build a a commemorative landmark over generations, reflecting shifting perspectives on history and evolving artistic styles, they are tasked with an instant accounting of U.S. heroes, as viewed from the standpoint of one moment of time, the 2020s, drawn up by one part of America’s very divided political universe. Their challenge is to give vibrancy to a venue that could well have the aura of a cemetery.
The venture comes against a backdrop of Trump’s self-regarding appropriation of history, with his acolytes in Congress proposing that his visage be carved on Mount Rushmore, and with the U.S. Army planning a military parade in Washington on Trump’s birthday, June 14, which happens to be the 250th anniversary of the Army.
On March 27, Trump issued an executive order aimed at “revisionist” history and noted, “Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
He called out an exhibition at the Smithsonian: “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” for suggesting that societies “including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.” Trump objected to the exhibition’s statements that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and that “race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’” Which is exactly what race is.
In an essay for Foreign Policy, historian David M. Perry wrote that Trump’s executive orders “strongly suggest that the Trump administration will bleach the story of American history in a way that tries to claim legitimacy for our current post-constitutional order.” The 250th anniversary is an opportunity for “the new authoritarians controlling any and all official narratives in ways that emphasize not the rebellion against a British king, but a submission to the new American one,” Perry noted.
Follow the money
Complicating the picture is the controversial source of the funding for the Garden of Heroes. The National Endowment for the Humanities plans to build the project with money from grants it cancelled to libraries, museums and archives.
As historians Jennifer Tucker and Peter Rutland, who are professors at Wesleyan University, wrote, “It’s going to be paid for with funds that had been previously allotted to tell stories about people and places that may be less familiar than the proposed figures for Trump’s garden. But they’re nonetheless meaningful to countless communities across the nation.”
Even though Trump dedicated his 2016 campaign to the “forgotten man and woman,” Tucker and Rutland noted, “the proposed statue garden of famous figures cuts out the common people from America’s story — not just as subjects of history, but as its stewards for future generations.”
“With funds slashed from organizations dedicated to local history, we wonder how many more stories will go untold.”
Forgetting
Other stories that were once told may gradually be forgotten if we stop supporting museums and libraries.
When Sophie Loeb died in 1929, more than 1,000 people attended her funeral. Prior to Loeb’s work as a reporter, wrote Keren Ben-Horin in March for the New York Historical society, “poor mothers were seen as unfit to care for their children and many of the social safety-nets that are in place today did not exist. Loeb researched the conditions and finances behind the city’s orphan asylums and found that the city would actually save money if it paid mothers directly instead of separating children from their families and placing them in rundown orphanages … Her advocacy led to the 1915 passage of the Widow’s Pension Law, which prevented the separation of families after the loss of a breadwinning parent, a law that is still in place.”
In its 1929 obituary of Sophie Loeb, the New York Times summed up her influence:
Loeb’s work “has been a blessing to untold thousands of the fatherless in the land to which she herself came as an immigrant child, and also to children of other lands.”
Elvis? Antonin Scalia? Alex Trebek? Can Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan be far behind? We can just imagine how this list will be re-formed as the project gets closer. I can imagine Trump -- who once used his family charity to buy a huge painting of himself to put on a golf course wall -- to be adjusting his list as we move forward, including putting a statute of himself in there. And the cost, coming at a time when he's cutting funding for community art across America? Yikes! See my column today on that one: "He's Not Cutting Waste. He's Trashing Our Culture."