The budget of the NEH is about $210 million, $65 million of which goes to state humanities councils that need this money to survive. The current move will cut the agency from 170 to 50 staff members, and it’s unclear how many, if any, grants it will fulfill going forward. From this dwindling budget, $17 million will be repurposed for the garden (another $17 million will come from the National Endowment for the Arts, which also faces cuts). Will this $34 million be enough seed money for the National Garden? At the meeting last Wednesday during which these changes were announced, the interim head of the NEH also estimated that each of the 250 statues would cost $100,000 to $200,000, bringing the total cost as high as $50 million. And this may have been a lowball figure. The recent bronze statue of Billy Graham erected in the Capitol reportedly cost its private funders $650,000. Adding insult to injury, the acting head also said that the remaining NEH staff could still prove useful by making signs for the garden’s statues.
The repurposing of these funds represents not only a change in priorities but a fundamental shift of values for the federal government. Where the NEH has supported inquiry, the National Garden of American Heroes demands reverence. Trump’s idea for an “unbelievable” “beautiful outdoor statue park” sounds a bit like Disneyland’s animatronic Hall of Presidents. Less amusingly, it also sounds like the Foro Mussolini, the massive neoclassical complex that the fascist dictator built in Rome, which is lined with statues of idealized athletes and features a 50-foot obelisk inscribed Mussolini Dux. You cannot ask questions of a statue. You can only stare and contemplate and then move on. This is a manner of codifying history and closing the books. The way Trump has described it makes it sound like a mausoleum of sorts, an American Pantheon. In February, he even joked about including Tiger Woods (“I was going to put Tiger in the garden”), before realizing it should be reserved for dead heroes.
The mention of Woods came at a Black History Month celebration at the White House, where Trump talked up the garden and the fact that it would include Black historical figures such as Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington. But his recitation of Black Americans’ names also revealed that they were heavily weighted toward athletes and performers like Jackie Robinson and Aretha Franklin (on a list that includes relatively obscure conservative white thinkers such as Whittaker Chambers and Clare Boothe Luce).