The Great American State Fair is over, and it can reasonably be declared a dud — one more item on a list of D.C.-based initiatives from President Donald Trump that were intended to gin up patriotic sentiment around America’s 250th but were instead greeted with a chorus of disdain. There’s the Reflecting Pool that turned green; the plans for a giant triumphal arch facing the Lincoln Memorial; the D.C. statues newly swathed in gold leafing. “Grandiosity without grandeur” is how Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz describes Trump’s efforts to beautify the city. Thus far, it’s fair to assume that most Americans have not been impressed.
And yet we’ve all gotten so used to rolling our eyes at Trump’s ham-handed civic ideas that we may have missed a key detail. Amid all the lame, garish, outre plans, there is one that actually holds some promise: Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes.
Yes, the origins of the concept are far from enlightened: Trump originally promoted it during his first term to troll the left over the removal of historical statues across the country. But at least in theory, the idea of a park containing statues of 250 American heroes is a worthy one. In fact, if executed correctly, it could help to solve an underappreciated national crisis: As our politics have grown absurdly polarized, we have lost any sense of a common historical narrative.
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On the campus of Bronx Community College in New York City sits an obscure, outdoor colonnade called the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Modeled on a similar project in Munich, it was built in 1900 and became a significant tourist site during the first half of the 20th century. For decades, a board consisting of distinguished Americans held votes to determine which historical figures would have a bust of their likeness placed in the colonnade.
Nearly 100 busts were created, before interest petered out in the 1970s and the Hall of Fame was essentially abandoned. In recent years, the site has deteriorated, though it briefly returned to the news in 2017, in the aftermath of the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville — when its existence was remembered just long enough for Gov. Andrew Cuomo to order busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson removed.
The Hall of Fame was the product of a very different era in the history of, well, history. It wasn’t so long ago that a broad historical consensus reigned in the way we understood our country’s past. Indeed, perhaps the dominant school of American history in the mid-20th century was dubbed “consensus history.” The general idea was that while the country had always been imperfect, what Americans had in common throughout history mattered far more than what divided them — and even those divisions were, in the words of historian Richard Hofstadter, “an affair of shifting groups and coalitions rather than a continuing struggle based on enduring sets of fixed classes.”
This consensus obviously contained massive blind spots. The role of slavery and racial discrimination was often minimized. As a result, during World War II, white soldiers from northern states who idolized Lincoln could fight for democracy alongside white soldiers from southern states who idolized Lee without ever challenging the racist reality that their units excluded Black Americans.
But while the narrative was deeply flawed, its mere existence served a purpose. Countries need a sense of shared history in order to function — and today, we no longer have one. At a moment when almost everything, from your preferred WNBA player to your brand of light beer, has become the subject of partisan conflict, it’s no surprise that interpretations of American history have met that exact fate.
The same forces that have polarized our understanding of current events, says University of Virginia history professor Alan Taylor, have also polarized our understanding of history. “I don’t see how we’re going to put the genie back in the bottle of going back to where you have essentially four television broadcast channels and a lot of metro dailies that are very well run and committed to some sort of objectivity,” he told me. “People are going to pick and choose what history they want to believe, just as they pick and choose what political take on reality they prefer to believe.”
On the left, people increasingly seem to reject the idea that any goodness is to be found in American history. The right, meanwhile, is awash in a sort of chauvinist two-dimensional patriotism that ignores the country’s flaws and treats the founding fathers as comic book figures. “You do have a kind of wokeness out there, which is very basically anti-American, and then you have a kind of Christian nationalism out there, which is hyper-patriotic in a very distorted way,” Wilentz told me. “One fears that everything else is getting hollowed out.”
But the good news, according to Wilentz, is that Americans don’t necessarily want to be locked into these reductive historical camps. “I still think that there’s a … desire for something more,” he told me. The problem? “There’s nobody to represent it … in the culture.”
Could an idea dreamed up by Donald Trump help? Taylor and Wilentz were understandably skeptical of all his patriotic efforts — including the garden of heroes. But put aside for a moment any caveats about Trump himself. And ignore, too, that the top-down, administration-driven selection process hardly inspires confidence.
What if the garden were to instead adopt and democratize the model used by the Hall of Fame for Great Americans (and so many other halls of fame)? Historical figures would be selected through regular elections — and all Americans could vote. Ballots could be cast once a year — maybe through an “American Idol”-style televised voting process or something more formal.
The goal would be to gamify history for an enlightened purpose: Just as sports talking heads bicker annually over who is a first ballot hall of famer — and just as those debates spill into social media and everyday life — political pundits and average citizens might suddenly find themselves debating U.S. history. Sure, opinions would range widely and the discussions might be heated, but at least, in the course of debating, we would all be talking about our collective past on some kind of common terrain. And implicit in all these discussions would be a principle that we can no longer take for granted: that American history should be celebrated, despite our country’s flaws and failings.
Every year, the process would culminate with new marble figures being unveiled in the garden — be it in Trump’s chosen spot in West Potomac Park or elsewhere. It would be, in the spirit of reality television, a shocking season finale — something Trump himself could surely appreciate — plus a moment where everyone could pause to celebrate those who made it, before quickly moving on to debate what it all means for next year’s election.
Far-fetched? Maybe. And as we know, broader interest in politics is not necessarily a solution to our problems: Voter turnout has soared in recent years, but few would say American politics has become healthier. Still, at a time when the civic discourse seems irreparably splintered, we should be willing to try just about anything to reclaim some collective understanding of history. A giant low-rent state fair and an algae-infested Reflecting Pool clearly aren’t going to do it. Why not give a bunch of marble statues a try?
Ben Jacobs is a reporter in Washington.
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