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 Then it fell out of date, new inductees were not inducted, and The Hall of Fame for Great Americans was ignored and forgotten, as were many of the names on the busts.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.”