President Trump, in a rousing Fourth of July speech Friday night at Mount Rushmore National Park in South Dakota, announced the creation of a new national monument, a statue garden that will pay homage to the “giants of our past.”
It will be a monument to salute the greatest Americans to ever live, live. The President authorized the building of the monument in an executive order.
“To destroy a monument is to desecrate our common inheritance. In recent weeks, in the midst of protests across America, many monuments have been vandalized or destroyed. Some local governments have responded by taking their monuments down,” the order reads.
“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. My Administration will not abide an assault on our collective national memory,” it adds.
The National Garden include statues of the following great Americans: John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright.
In recent weeks protesters advocating for racial justice have targeted statues without knowing their historical significance it seems. Oftentimes the statues in question were raised in honor of figures who fought for some of the same principles today’s protesters are fighting for, belying the claim that racial justice is the only agenda at play.
Photo by The White House