Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.
To put a final period on this fiasco, we should recall that Trump’s idea was tried before.
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was established in 1901. It was the country’s first hall of fame, inspiring the Cooperstown baseball hall and all the rest. For a while, it was a tourist attraction. Located at the uptown campus of New York University (now Bronx Community College), there were bronze busts of Presidents, generals, scientists, artists and scholars. Then it fell out of date, new inductees were not inducted, and The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was ignored and forgotten, as were many of the names on the busts. Who, for example, was Sidney Lanier?
There are 98 busts in the Hall. How many can you idientify? (And yes, Robert E. Lee is among them…)
John Adams
John Quincy Adams
Jane Addams
Louis Agassiz
Susan B. Anthony
John James Audubon
George Bancroft
Clara Barton
Henry Ward Beecher
Alexander Graham Bell
Daniel Boone
Edwin Booth
Louis Brandeis
Phillips Brooks
William Cullen Bryant
Luther Burbank
Andrew Carnegie
George Washington Carver
William Ellery Channing
Rufus Choate
Henry Clay
Grover Cleveland
James Fenimore Cooper
Peter Cooper
Charlotte Cushman
James Buchanan Eads
Thomas Edison
Jonathan Edwards
Ralph Waldo Emerson
David Farragut
Stephen Foster
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Fulton
Josiah Willard Gibbs
William C. Gorgas
Ulysses S. Grant
Asa Gray
Alexander Hamilton
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Joseph Henry
Patrick Henry
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Mark Hopkins (educator)
Elias Howe
Washington Irving
Andrew Jackson
Stonewall Jackson
Thomas Jefferson
John Paul Jones
James Kent
Sidney Lanier
Robert E. Lee
Abraham Lincoln
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
James Russell Lowell
Mary Lyon
Edward MacDowell
Horace Mann
John Marshall
Matthew Fontaine Maury
Albert A. Michelson
Maria Mitchell
James Monroe
Samuel Morse
William T. G. Morton
John Lothrop Motley
Simon Newcomb
Thomas Paine
Alice Freeman Palmer
Francis Parkman
George Peabody
William Penn
Edgar Allan Poe
Walter Reed
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
William Tecumseh Sherman
John Philip Sousa
Joseph Story
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Gilbert Stuart
Sylvanus Thayer
Henry David Thoreau ]
Lillian Wald
Booker T. Washington
George Washington
Daniel Webster
George Westinghouse
James Abbott McNeill Whistler
Walt Whitman
Eli Whitney
John Greenleaf Whittier
***
I rate this selection, despite being 125 years old, as far better than the proposed members of Trump’s “Garden of Heroes.”








