The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) just announced a grant competition soliciting proposals for statues of "Iconic Americans" for the "National Garden of American Heroes." The press release states that the garden:
will feature life-size statues of 250 great individuals from America's past who have contributed to our cultural, scientific, economic, and political heritage. The National Garden, which will be constructed for the 2026 semiquincentennial and located at a site to be determined, will create a public space where Americans can gather to learn about and honor American heroes . . .
The idea was first proposed by Trump on January 21, 2021, via Executive Order 13978, as a reaction against folks who had been protesting monuments that celebrated and revered Confederate leaders who fought to keep African Americans subjugated. In his Executive Order, Trump whined that the "greatness and goodness of America" had "come under attack" by "a dangerous anti-American extremism that seeks to dismantle our country's history, institutions, and very identity." Nevermind that a brand new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center reveals that more than 2,000 Confederate symbols—including 685 monuments—are still standing in public spaces across the United States in government building, schools, military bases, and on street and highway names.
The Executive Order stated that America will respond to "the tragic toppling of monuments to our founding generation and the giants of our past" through a new national project, the "National Garden," which will instead focus on "their restoration, veneration, and celebration." It goes on:
In the peace and harmony of this vast outdoor park, visitors will come and learn the amazing stories of some of the greatest Americans who have ever lived. The National Garden will feature a roll call of heroes who deserve honor, recognition, and lasting tribute because of the battles they won, the ideas they championed, the diseases they cured, the lives they saved, the heights they achieved, and the hope they passed down to all of us — that united as one American people trusting in God, there is no challenge that cannot be overcome and no dream that is beyond our reach.
Now, just over four years later, it's apparently time to start designing and creating these sculptures. According to the press release, the "National Garden of American Heroes: Statues" grant program will award up to $200,000 per statue "for the design and creation of up to three statues per recipient of famous American statesmen, visionaries, and innovators for inclusion in the National Garden." You can't propose just any old American "hero," though, you have to choose from the list laid out in the Executive Order, including folks whose racist and colonialist thoughts and actions are well-documented historically, like Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, and Henry Ford.
The garden is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities' larger effort, "A More Perfect Union," which, according to its website, is funding humanities projects that:
*Engage the public in American history
*Preserve and provide access to the nation's heritage
*Build secure and sustainable cultural resources for future generations
*Strengthen teaching and learning about American history
*Advance scholarly research on American history
*Leverage technology to explore America's past
Since its launch in 2019, NEH has awarded more than $85 million to "support scholarly research, educational resources, and public humanities."
Under the Trump administration, however, which is attempting to slash and burn anything they believe to be even remotely related to "DEI," it's certain that these efforts will have a particular, shall we say, slant to them.
Dr. Tad Stoermer, author of the forthcoming book A Resistance History of the United States, Film and Digital Media Editor of The Public Historian, and lecturer of public history in the Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies Graduate Programs at Johns Hopkins University's Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, recently posted an awesome critique of the new NEH call, which perfectly sums up its nationalist leanings and whitewashed historical perspectives. I've transcribed it, below, but you can also watch it on Instagram, here:
Hey folks, welcome to your new Nationalist Endowment for the Humanities! Where the currency isn't insight but obedience. Where statues speak louder than scholarship, where more than 400 million dollars in federal cultural funding is being siphoned away from honest inquiry and repurposed to build a marbled fantasy of what America never was.
This is your new Nationalist Endowment for the Humanities and Nationalist Endowment for the Arts.
So, this new announcement, which just came wrapped in the language of honor, legacy, and celebration, confirms what many of us have seen coming: This is no longer an agency, no longer an organization that supports public engagement with the complexity of the past. It's a contractor now for this regime's mythology, the kind of mythology that every authoritarian regime relies on to maintain and attain greater power.
So, in this new "partnership" with the NEA, the new NEH has committed $34 million dollars to sculpt the "National Garden of American Heroes." So, it's a monument park to be filled with hand-picked figures of national virtue, drawn from this pre-approved list issued by executive order. You can imagine who's coming up with this stuff. And the statues are gonna be carved in stone. The same kind of statues that after the collapse of the Soviet Union were being hauled away—they're now gonna be put up.
So the message is just gonna be carved in ideology. So it's not about history, of course, it's about control of the narrative. And it's just the beginning, because the funding isn't coming from nowhere. There were a lot of people who were handwringing about gutting the cultural budget, but no no no, it's still there, it's now just being redirected. That's over 400 million dollars that's still allocated to the NEH, NEA, and another 200-some million dollars to the IMLS [Institute of Museum and Library Services]. And all of this associated "America 250" programming, and then channeled into propaganda and pageantry and performative patriotism of just the right kind and just the right shade.
So, under this euphemism of "A More Perfect Union," the nationalist regime is using the 250th anniversary of American independence as a launchpad to harden and whitewash memory into physical form, and maybe digital infrastructure after everything else gets erased, and educational mandates, if you've read any of the FIVE executive orders that were signed last night.
The implications are real. Public history being nationalized not as a field of critical inquiry but as a delivery system for state-approved mythology. Institutions being conscripted—the NEH and NEA now answer directly to Task Force 250, alongside the Department of Defense. So they're not funding cultural work, they're enforcing cultural conformity. And truth is being monetized and excluded, while community-based projects, reparative history, critical engagement are defunded, disqualified, left on their own, orphaned away by these new executive restrictions–projects that celebrate heroes and suppress cultural critique are fully backed, elevated, amplified. This is the culture war institutionalized on behalf of an authoritarian regime. It's not subtle, it's not slow, it's happening now under the guise of celebration.
So what do we call the this new version of the NEH? Not a public agency—it's not a partner.
It's the Nationalist Endowment for Heritage. It doesn't fund the humanities. It actually funds forgetting.
So 2026? It's not gonna be a commemoration. It's probably gonna be a coronation.
