The most striking additions, given the Trump administration’s later turns on racial justice, are the wealth of civil rights heroes. Obvious choices like Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Frederick Douglass are honored. So too are C.T. Vivian, a founding figure in the Black fraternity movement, and founding-era writer Phillis Wheatley. Civil rights activist Medgar Evers, Nixon impeachment leader Barbara Jordan, three Black NASA scientists depicted in the film Hidden Figures, and multiple prominent Black artists would get statues.
The choices for sailors and soldiers are also better than one might expect. The Trump administration has previously paid tribute to Confederate rebels and restored honors to nineteenth-century U.S. troops who committed war crimes. No such flaws can be found here. The list ranges from celebrated generals of America’s major wars before 1945 to underrepresented figures like Prince Estabrook, a free Black man who fought at Lexington and Concord, and Grace Hopper, a Navy admiral and pioneering computer programmer. More than a few Union Army heroes are honored, while Robert E. Lee was rightfully skipped.
Some choices, on the other hand, likely reflect the quirks and ideological vision of the White House aides who presumably drafted the original list. A few picks, for example, appear tilted toward honoring a particular vision of twentieth-century American conservatism. Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley Jr., Russell Kirk, and Clare Boothe Luce get statues, as do House Un-American Activities Committee witnesses Whittaker Chambers and Elia Kazan.
Anti-abortion activist Nellie Gray is honored for founding the annual March for Life. Milton Friedman somehow gets a statue, as well. Jeane Kirkpatrick, a Reagan-era diplomat who often criticized the United Nations, is among the more obscure choices. In fairness, a Democratic White House that drafted such a list would likely make choices that conservatives probably wouldn’t. William Rehnquist would be swapped out for Earl Warren in a heartbeat, for example.
There is also a predilection for twentieth-century pop-culture figures that feels strangely selective on its own terms and ill fitting for the project in general. Among the Hollywood figures who would be recognized are Shirley Temple, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlton Heston, and Frank Capra. They are accomplished actors and directors, to be sure, but one gets the impression that Trump was just naming to staffers his personal favorites from when he was a young man.
In other cases, Trump’s lack of personal attention is keenly felt. Of the more than a dozen American religious figures on the list, at least eight of them are Catholic saints and clergy. Some are recognizable names like Junipero Serra, a Spanish missionary who played a major role in California’s history, or Elizabeth Ann Seton, a founding-era leader of Catholic education who became the first American saint. Others are fairly esoteric, like a Native American saint named Kateri Tekakwitha, who died roughly two hundred years before the Declaration of Independence was signed.