On July 3, Donald Trump signed an executive order to create the National Garden of American Heroes. In reality, the order is a piercing rebuke of the demonstrations by the Black Lives Matter movement as it relates to removal of offensive monuments.
The order goes on to say that the “anarchists” are “inflamed by fashionable political passions.” Instead of listening to those “passions,” Trump declared he will “not abide an assault on our collective national memory.”
In other words, it is Trump who will define what is in our “collective national memory,” despite the fact that he is clueless about history and never picks up a book. By the stroke of his Sharpie he gets to define and select the “American Heroes.”
Top on his list of heroes are Christopher Columbus, Junipero Serra, and the Marquis de La Fayette because they discovered, developed, and contributed to the independence of America, respectively. Trump does not care that those “heroes” killed, exploited, and displaced Native Americans in the process.
While the definition of “historically significant American” includes a wide variety of people, the order gives priority to former presidents, individuals, and events relating to the discovery of America, the founding of the United States, and the abolition of slavery. It is heartening to see “abolition of slavery” as a priority, but that seems to conflict with Trump’s public sympathy toward the Confederate flag and monuments. It makes me wonder whether he read the executive order from beginning to end.
To achieve the “great retelling of the great national story to future generations,” Trump has selected thirty “heroes” to seed the garden: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Betsy Ross, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, James Madison, Dolley Madison, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Henry Clay, Susan B. Anthony, Booker T. Washington, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Amelia Earhart, Jackie Robinson, George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Audie Murphy, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King, Ronald Reagan, Christa McAuliffe, and Antonin Scalia.
A quick study of the individuals on Trump’s list reveals a clear misapprehension of history as it relates to his priority to address the abolition of slavery. Seven people on the list were slave owners (Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, James and Dolley Madison, Daniel Boone, and Henry Clay).
There is no such thing as a slaveholding abolitionist. It is an oxymoron. It is time to stop putting blinders on about our all-white founders and early politicians. They swept the issue of slavery under the rug in the spirit of compromise and created a lingering and festering wound that has yet to be healed. Trump is just throwing salt on the wound with his attempt to retell the “great national story.”
Trump’s version of the “great national story” includes 18 white men, eight women (one of whom is Black), and five African Americans. Surely he could have better reflected the broad diversity of this melting pot of a country. No Native Americans or Latinx are on the list, for instance.
Of the representatives from the 20th century, Trump includes a general who was mentally unhinged and anti-Semitic (Patton), a soldier turned movie star whom no one remembers (Murphy), a movie star turned politician (Reagan), and one of the most conservative justices on the United States Supreme Court (Scalia). I suspect he included Christa McAuliffe because he was about to make a campaign stop in Portsmouth before Tropical Storm Fay scared him away. Imagine the applause when he read her name to the New Hampshire audience.
In order to create a thriving garden, one must be cognizant of what grows companionably with one another. When plants can feed off each other’s diverse strengths, they can successfully battle the threat of invasive plants and bugs intent on destroying the gardener’s hard work. Success depends on careful research and planning.
Trump’s attempt to create a Garden of American Heroes reveals a serious lack of research, planning, and foresight. Sadly the controversial seeds he’s selected will only serve to deepen the wounds inflicted by the advent of slavery instead of providing a salve that could promote healing and cultivate a thriving and diverse garden. We need a leader who will sow the seeds of reconciliation, not polarization, and that is definitely not Trump.
(Susannah Colt lives in Whitefield. She can be reached at susannahbcolt@gmail.com.)