Send Musk to audit them.
Send Musk to audit them.
In early February, President Trump announced plans to create a “National Garden of American Heroes” featuring statues of 250 of the “greatest Americans who ever lived.” While this initiative is new, the project of commemorating great Americans has long been a fraught one. For some time, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has been leading efforts to “transform” our monuments landscape.
The Mellon Foundation is the “nation’s largest supporter of the arts and the humanities,” and is evaluating historic monuments through the lens of power dynamics like critical theory.
For example, the foundation partnered with Monument Lab, another Philadelphia-based nonprofit, to produce a “National Monument Audit,” which laments that “[t]here are no US-born Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, or self-identified LGBTQ+ people” on the list of the top 50 individuals most often portrayed through our monuments. The Mellon Foundation also committed to giving $500 million to transform “the nation’s commemorative landscape to ensure our collective histories are more completely and accurately represented.”
The broader conflict over monuments doesn’t simply concern individual legacies (though we certainly owe gratitude to figures like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington). Rather, it highlights a more fundamental disagreement over how we should view America.
Is the ethos of America best represented by the equitable portrayal of identity characteristics? Or is it our unifying maxim enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, which points to our common human dignity and capacity for self-government? How we answer that question informs us and shapes how we evaluate our monuments.
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In early February, President Trump announced plans to create a “National Garden of American Heroes” featuring statues of 250 of the “greatest Americans who ever lived.” While this initiative is new, the project of commemorating great Americans has long been a fraught one. For some time, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has been leading efforts to “transform” our monuments landscape.
The Mellon Foundation is the “nation’s largest supporter of the arts and the humanities,” and is evaluating historic monuments through the lens of power dynamics like critical theory.
For example, the foundation partnered with Monument Lab, another Philadelphia-based nonprofit, to produce a “National Monument Audit,” which laments that “[t]here are no US-born Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, or self-identified LGBTQ+ people” on the list of the top 50 individuals most often portrayed through our monuments. The Mellon Foundation also committed to giving $500 million to transform “the nation’s commemorative landscape to ensure our collective histories are more completely and accurately represented.”
The broader conflict over monuments doesn’t simply concern individual legacies (though we certainly owe gratitude to figures like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington). Rather, it highlights a more fundamental disagreement over how we should view America.
Is the ethos of America best represented by the equitable portrayal of identity characteristics? Or is it our unifying maxim enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, which points to our common human dignity and capacity for self-government? How we answer that question informs us and shapes how we evaluate our monuments.
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