Latest news with #GardenofAmericanHeroes
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
'National Garden of American Heroes' moving forward
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — The Black Hills could be the site of a new national monument that would honor great figures of America's history. South Dakota Governor Larry Rhoden sent a letter to President Trump Tuesday proposing a location near Mount Rushmore for what's being called the 'National Garden of American Heroes.' Trump actually talked about building this garden five years ago during his speech at Mount Rushmore during the 4th of July fireworks celebration. 'I am signing an executive order to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live,' Trump said. Rosie's Cafe to close after 41 years Governor Rhoden wrote this letter with today's date to President Trump indicating he would like to offer a plot of land in sight of Mount Rushmore that he says would be ideal for this effort. Former Governor Kristi Noem first offered the Black Hills as the site for this garden back in 2020. The family of late businessman Chuck Lien owns 40 acres of land in the Black Hills, which they are willing to donate to the project. Here are some drawings of what the national garden could look like when complete. 'It's the closest privately owned land to Mount Rushmore it's on that iconic tunnel that frames Mount Rushmore and most people probably don't even realize it's privately owned,'daughter Sam Brannan said. President Trump, late in his first term, even signed a series of executive orders to develop preliminary plans for the site. But Congress never funded it. President Joe Biden revoked the executive orders relating to the garden in May 2021 and it never got off the ground. Upon Trump's return to the presidency, he revoked Biden's executive order. So Governor Rhoden wrote in his letter 'although we were not able to get the project accomplished in your previous term, I am confident that we can work together to make it happen in the next four years.' And so is the Lien family. 'This is a time to look at National Garden of American Heroes, because we thought our dad was such an American hero and our mom was an American hero, so it fit with all nine of us so my generous siblings have agreed to this and wanted to offer it back in 2020 and we did, so we did it again now in 2025,' Brannan said. Governor Rhoden says American heroes like George Washington, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Babe Ruth, and other notables from all walks of life will be among those honored in the Garden with statues. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
South Dakota governor asks Trump to build promised statue garden and put it near Mount Rushmore
A conceptual drawing by Storyland Studios of a National Garden of American Heroes near Mount Rushmore. (Courtesy of South Dakota Governor's Office) South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden sent President Donald Trump an invitation Tuesday to fulfill a promise from five years ago: the creation of a 'National Garden of American Heroes.' And Rhoden wants Trump to put the statue garden in South Dakota's Black Hills. 'In fact, we have a plot of land available in sight of Mount Rushmore that would be ideal for this fantastic effort,' Rhoden wrote in a letter to Trump. That plot of land, according to Rhoden, is privately owned by the Lien family, which is willing to donate it. Members of the family own and operate Pete Lien & Sons Inc., a mining, construction aggregate, and concrete company based in Rapid City. Additional materials made public by the Governor's Office include a letter from the Lien family, which says the land 'straddles the iconic Doane Robinson tunnel,' although an attached map appears to depict the land as just north of the tunnel. Motorists frequently stop at the tunnel for a framed view of the mountain carving. The Lien family has worked with Storyland Development, of California, to produce conceptual drawings of the statue garden, which are included in the materials from the Governor's Office. The materials also include a 2020 letter from then-Gov. Kristi Noem, who proposed at the time that the statue garden should be built 'at Mount Rushmore National Memorial as an expansion of the Memorial site.' She went on to mention the bronze statues of presidents in downtown Rapid City and the statues of governors in Pierre and wrote, 'I am confident these organizations would be amenable to a short-term loan of statues to the National Garden.' Mount Rushmore is managed by the National Park Service, and much of the surrounding land is managed by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the Black Hills National Forest. Parcels of private land, many of them claimed during the gold rush era of the late 1800s, are scattered throughout the forest. Trump made his statue garden promise at a Mount Rushmore fireworks celebration on July 3, 2020. Rhoden has invited Trump back to Mount Rushmore next year for another fireworks display and a celebration of the nation's 250th birthday. The 2020 announcement came during a speech in which Trump said agents of 'cancel culture' were 'trying to tear down statues of our Founders' and 'deface our most sacred memorials.' George Floyd's murder by a Minneapolis police officer had occurred two months earlier, adding fuel to a reexamination of historic monuments and statues associated with racial injustice. That summer, numerous statues were vandalized, removed or both, including many that honored Confederate Civil War figures. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX Trump said in the 2020 speech that those efforts were 'erasing our heritage.' He called for Americans to 'speak up loudly and strongly and powerfully and defend the integrity of our country.' 'So today,' Trump said at the time, 'under the authority vested in me as president of the United States, I am announcing the creation of a new monument to the giants of our past. I am signing an executive order to establish the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.' Trump issued the executive order that day and another one on Jan. 18, 2021 — two days before he left office at the end of his first term — calling for the creation of the garden without identifying a site. The second order said the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities 'should target spending one-twelfth of the discretionary funds available to their agencies' on commissioning the statues. Each of those agencies received $207 million last year. One-12th of that amount would be $17.2 million apiece. The second order also included a list of about 250 people to be honored with statues, ranging from historical figures such as George Washington and Harriet Tubman to modern names including Kobe Bryant and Alex Trebek.
Atlantic
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
Goodbye Camelot, Hello MAGAlot
By anointing himself chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Napoleon-style, Donald Trump revealed a longing to seize one of America's most romantic and abiding myths: Camelot. Nothing would be better than to appropriate the elegant and sparkling aura of cultural influence that came to characterize John F. Kennedy 's administration—hopeful, attractive, even sexy. And if the liberal elites refuse to see Trump this way, his actions seem to be saying, then he'll just have to create his own version, MAGAlot. Trump's interests seem to flicker depending on the day—yesterday owning Gaza, today invading Canada —but when it comes to culture, he is all in. This is not a job to outsource to Elon Musk. He is most engaged when issuing executive orders calling for 'beautiful' and 'classical' architecture in federal buildings or reviving his idea for a National Garden of American Heroes (where the stony likenesses of Humphrey Bogart, Kobe Bryant, Antonin Scalia, and Shirley Temple will congregate for all eternity), and especially when promising to turn his showman's instincts toward transforming the Kennedy Center—to 'make art great again,' as the newly appointed interim president of the center put it. To the extent that Trump's cultural designs offer a coherent vision, it shares his larger ambition to restore the country to a 'golden age' (and a gilded one). In usurping control of Washington's premier cultural institution, the annual bestower of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors (the closest America has to knighthood), he appears set on rebuilding Camelot in his own image. But if Trump is trying to follow, or supplant, JFK, he is missing an important aspect of how the earlier president understood culture: not as a blunt instrument to be wielded for ideological or personal gain, but as a natural resource to tap for the long-term benefit of America's image. Just as Trump is discovering that imperialism is a bigger lift in the 21st century than it was in the 19th, he is bound to learn that the unruly organism of American culture exists to be propagated, not tamed. Even Camelot was only Camelot in the rearview mirror: King Arthur's legendary medieval court was first invoked by Jackie Kennedy in the days after her husband's assassination, as a way to begin shaping his legacy. In an interview with Life magazine, she paraphrased from the then-popular Alan Jay Lerner musical: 'Don't let it be forgot, that for one brief, shining moment there was a Camelot.' There was some substance behind the grieving widow's spin. The Kennedys had brought the executive branch not only glamour but also a renewed emphasis on the arts. Robert Frost became the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration when he recited ' The Gift Outright ' on the day JFK took the oath of office. Musicians, writers, and artists were frequently, and very publicly, invited to the White House, and the historic legacy of the house itself, its art and architecture, was the subject of Jackie Kennedy's meticulous attention. The president sent out Duke Ellington as a 'jazz ambassador' on international tours. In 1963, Kennedy proposed creating a federal advisory council on the arts, an idea that would find its expression in the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965. He was emphatic about the value of cultural patronage, saying in a speech after the death of Frost that he envisioned an America 'which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.' Camelot had its borders, of course, and the aesthetic vision of the Kennedys, for all their youth, was still a patrician one that excluded the more jagged and challenging forms of expression emerging in the 1960s (as for his personal taste, Jackie once joked that her husband's favorite piece of music was 'Hail to the Chief'). When James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and a group of other Black artists met with Attorney General (and brother of the president) Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 to express their exasperation with the slow pace of desegregation, the conversation was famously tense, leaving RFK annoyed and Baldwin confirmed in his feeling that the quasi-royal family was out of touch. But Kennedy's Camelot at least tried to elevate idealism, intellectualism, and the modern elegance of a pillbox hat. What might MAGAlot bring us? The jokes about Hulk Hogan becoming a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honors were tired even before they were made. When, a week into the new regime, the comedian W. Kamau Bell wondered from the stage of the Kennedy Center, 'How many times can you give Kid Rock the Mark Twain award?' he elicited audible groans. Trump hasn't provided too many clues about his vision for programming beyond that it should stop being 'wokey,' as he put it in a call to the new board. 'I think we're going to make it hot,' he told the group, now packed with loyalists. 'And we made the presidency hot, so this should be easy.' The new chairman had not only declined to attend the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term; he recently admitted that he hadn't been to a single performance there. What he doesn't want is much clearer to discern: drag shows. 'Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth—THIS WILL STOP,' he posted on February 7. He seemed to be referring to a couple of drag-based events at the center that represent a minuscule fraction of programming (the institution puts on roughly 2,000 events a year). As for what he would add to the schedule, the suggestions coming from Trump world sound like one-offs that would serve the sole purpose of giving Washington's liberal establishment the finger. Steven Bannon wants to see the J6 Prison Choir, made up of men who had been jailed for attacking the Capitol on January 6, perform on opening night. Trump does have his own neo-Baroque aesthetic: The Village People, Luciano Pavarotti, the grand chandelier he envisions hanging from the ceiling of the Oval Office. But these personal flourishes—like his desire to pave the Rose Garden to more closely resemble his patio at Mar-a-Lago—seem to have little chance of trickling down into the culture at large. Trump's effect on the culture cannot be easily sussed out from a programming guide or a glance at the gold figurine recently screwed into a molding at the White House. He has been more effective at glorifying and encouraging a style of meanness, which appears in unlikely places but is easy to hear if you're listening for it. Even Kendrick Lamar flaunted this style by making a diss track the focus and theme of his Super Bowl halftime show. Read: Trump takes over the Kennedy Center The most recent president to attempt the Camelot thing was Barack Obama, who elevated American art forms like jazz and hip-hop in ways meant to show that inclusiveness and excellence were not mutually exclusive. Stevie Wonder and Lin-Manuel Miranda would drop by the White House. Philip Roth was given a National Humanities Medal. And Barack and Michelle would happily bop to Springsteen at the Kennedy Center Honors. But how much did this presidential boosterism influence the culture and the artists who make it? Obama's regular book picks and Spotify playlists have come to seem, in his post-presidency, slightly self-indulgent and cringey. The overall effect is of professional curation designed to be respectfully broad (a little country, a little indie rock), while not veering toward blandness. The Obamas have always understood the potency of culture, which helps explain their move, in recent years, toward making it themselves; but despite the occasional Netflix documentary production credit, it's harder to say that they have set an enduring agenda. MAGAlot seems even less likely to shift the culture of the arts in any concrete way. This might be, in part, because Trump's ambition misses what made Camelot matter: The Kennedy administration's true legacy was the advancement of American soft power in service of real global policy goals. Just as Kennedy created USAID and the Peace Corps in part to showcase American abundance and goodwill, he deployed cultural influence to demonstrate, during the most intense period of the Cold War, that the U.S.-led vision of the world was just cooler than the rest. At one point, in 1962, he even sent Robert Frost to the Soviet Union, where he met with other poets, gave readings, and had a tête-à-tête with Nikita Khrushchev. Cultivating attractive, dynamic American arts, whether spaghetti Westerns or Broadway musicals, accrued long-term strategic benefits to the United States—and it still does. But reaping those benefits requires supporting people who make culture without dictating what that culture should look like. Trump would find this hard. His zero-sum view of the world affords little patience for the churn and friction and provocation that actually makes for good art. He wants to be the minister of culture mostly because it's the quickest way to upset his detractors, to pave over the rose gardens of generations past—and because, I imagine, the thought of a North Korean–style glorification of his rule pleases him. But after the drag shows are banned and the J6 chorus has had a chance to sing its 'Justice for All' at the Kennedy Center, he may well discover what other aspiring authoritarian leaders have in the past—that culture is not easily bent. And when it is, it usually snaps back with force.
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump's Empty and Expensive Plan To Build 250 Statues of 'American Heroes'
President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders since taking office three weeks ago, looking to reshape everything from global trade to women's collegiate sports. One order Trump signed would prioritize the construction of 250 statues of historical figures and a garden in which to put them. While this plan is less controversial than many of Trump's other orders, it still represents an unnecessary and costly project. "As we approach the [250th] anniversary…of our country's founding, I have signed an executive order to resume the process of creating a new national park full of statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived," Trump said last week at the National Prayer Breakfast. Trump's order, issued January 29, reinstated an order from his first term, titled "Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes." It called for the creation of "a statuary park named the National Garden of American Heroes," with statues of "historically significant Americans…who have contributed positively to America throughout our history." "Because the past is always at risk of being forgotten, monuments will always be needed to honor those who came before," proclaimed the original order, signed in July 2020. "These statues are silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal. They preserve the memory of our American story and stir in us a spirit of responsibility for the chapters yet unwritten." "The National Garden will be built to reflect the awesome splendor of our country's timeless exceptionalism," Trump added in a second order, issued just two days before he left office in January 2021. "On its grounds, the devastation and discord of the moment will be overcome with abiding love of country and lasting patriotism. This is the American way." The original order included 31 names of figures whose statues should be featured, while the second order brought the total to 244; to get the total to 250, the order Trump issued last month said a staffer would "recommend to the President additional historically significant Americans for inclusion in the National Garden of American Heroes." (Leaning into the theme of 250, the whole project is set to be concluded by July 4, 2026—the 250th anniversary of America's founding.) Given that the original order was issued at a time of civil unrest, as protesters tore down monuments and Trump threatened offenders with up to 10 years in federal prison, it was comforting that all the names on Trump's first list were fairly innocuous—figures like George Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., and Orville and Wilbur Wright. And while the second list was similarly uncontroversial, it did have a few odd and even downright peculiar inclusions. Along with beloved historical figures, the list also called for statues of several actors from class films, like Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart; Todd Beamer, a passenger on American Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11; Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died on the Space Shuttle Challenger; and Alex Trebek, the late and beloved (but famously Canadian) host of Jeopardy! Granted, it's understandable to want certain people from American history to get their due: Some, like Sojourner Truth and Medgar Evers, are belated but welcome inclusions. Others, like Andrew Jackson and William McKinley, are former presidents Trump seems to revere but who tend to rate poorly with the general public. And what Reason reader wouldn't enjoy seeing a statue of Milton Friedman sharing space with other historical greats? But creating a garden with 250 statues of historical figures—many of whom already have numerous statues, placards, and buildings named in their honor—all in 18 months, is an expensive empty gesture. "Building a national park with hundreds of statues is not a small undertaking," wrote Bloomberg's Kriston Capps. "The 4-acre Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, which opened in Washington, DC, in 2011, cost about $120 million" and "took four years to design, approve and build." "A more modestly scaled statue of evangelist Billy Graham, which was added to the National Statuary Hall at the US Capitol in May, cost about $650,000, suggesting that the price tag for a complete National Garden of American Heroes could easily rise to tens or hundreds of millions of dollars," Capps added. (Graham is on Trump's list for inclusion in the National Garden of American Heroes, and his original order from July 2020 included the possibility to "accept the donation or loan of statues," so perhaps that one could simply be transferred. One down, 249 to go!) Rather, if Trump wants these figures to be lionized in physical form, then he should take a page from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, which raised money from private donors for its construction. If people want to contribute to the cause of dozens of statues commemorating a grab bag of historical figures, they're free to do so. There's no need to drag the American taxpayer into it. "Given that bronze and stone replicas of fallible human beings seem incapable of serving any unifying purpose for people forced to pay taxes to erect them, it's time to get government out of the monument business," J.D. Tuccille wrote in Reason in 2020. "From now on, let private groups celebrate their fandom on their own dime, and on their own property." The post Trump's Empty and Expensive Plan To Build 250 Statues of 'American Heroes' appeared first on
