Walt Disney, Frank Capra, Whitney Houston, Billie Holiday, Johnny Cash and Alex Trebek are among the entertainment industry figures who have been added as proposed honorees in the National Garden of American Heroes monument project unveiled by President Donald Trump in July.
As he began his final 48 hours as President, Trump issued an amended executive order Monday that added dozens of names slated to be honored in the the planned statuary park. The location for the park has yet to be determined. Trump first announced the plan on July 3 during his speech at Mt. Rushmore.
Among the entertainment-related names making the cut are Louis Armstrong, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Irving Berlin, Humphrey Bogart, Kobe Bryant, Frank Capra, Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin, Woody Guthrie, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Bob Hope, Elvis Presley and Jimmy Stewart. The monument will honor those deemed to be “historically significant” which is defined as “an individual who made substantive contributions to America’s public life or otherwise had a substantive effect on America’s history.”
One controversial choice among entertainment names is Elia Kazan, the famed director whose legacy was clouded by his willingness to testify against his Hollywood colleagues in 1952 amid the anti-Communist witch hunt mounted in Congress by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Trump launched the National Garden initiative amid the social unrest of last summer as outrage built over police shootings of unarmed Black men. A number of statues and monuments to figures from the Confederacy and those with racist legacies were vandalized or destroyed, which led to a backlash and added to the sense of cultural polarization that has defined Trump’s time in office.
“These statues are not ours alone, to be discarded at the whim of those inflamed by fashionable political passions; they belong to generations that have come before us and to generations yet unborn,” Trump said in his July 3 executive order. “My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory. In the face of such acts of destruction, it is our responsibility as Americans to stand strong against this violence, and to peacefully transmit our great national story to future generations through newly commissioned monuments to American heroes.”
The initial announcement featured a shorter list of historical figures as honorees, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton as well as Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson and Amelia Earhart.
Here is a complete list of honorees:
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
Lorenzo de Zavala
(Pictured: Whitney Houston)
