The president has rightly recognized the narrow, almost exclusive concentration on victims in our culture of commemoration — and seeks to reverse it.
Y ou may be spying a few changes at our national parks in the near future. A New York Times article recently reported on the copious revisions underway. They are President Trump’s attempt to prune back the National Park Service’s fixation on American perpetrators and victims.
There is, naturally, furor from predictable quarters about the supposed impropriety. But Trump is right to push back against the ideology of victimhood and despair and to push instead for a celebration of greatness and heroism. The administration grasps the problem inherent in a culture fixated on victims: Role models of excellence and virtue are nowhere to be found. Images shape the will of a people. Historic monuments to heroes teach us the habits of virtue.
In March, Trump issued an executive order to excise from park plaques, such as those at national monuments, ideological interpretations that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” It presents a deadline of September 17, which is why park employees are now scurrying to flag overly negative content.
The president has rightly recognized the narrow, almost exclusive concentration on victims in our culture of commemoration. The executive order thus sets out to restore focus to “the achievements and progress of the American people,” in our federal “public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties.” The administration has also unfurled other plans to redirect attention to models of good and excellence. A National Garden of American Heroes is set to open next July — a field of 250 metal and stone creations.
Such directives bear distinct contrast to those of previous administrations. Two of the three commemorative national monuments President Biden created, like the Springfield 1908 Race Riot Monument in Illinois, recall injustice and remember the historically oppressed. Acknowledgement of evil is a necessary justice, to be sure, one of the objectives of commemoration. Still, the cultural focus on victimhood has reached a level of fixation that leaves little room for the important work of shaping the human conscience through imagination. Our narrow interest in validating the oppressed is itself morally limiting.
The move away from heroic ideals has been most visible recently in our public sculpture. Increasingly, monuments have little to do with personal deeds or character.
Membership in the right race, orientation, or gender has become a better pathway to getting a bronze in your likeness. The sculptor Thomas J. Price erected a twelve-foot effigy of an anonymous African-American woman in Times Square in April. Price explained to Time magazine that public sculpture should “embrace representations of those who have previously been stigmatized or invisible.” While memorials can be both inclusive and acclaim deeds (our statues of Frederick Douglass, for instance), race, orientation, and gender remain primary motivators of honor and commemoration. Artists and politicians seem more interested in honoring group identity than in recognizing accomplishment. The recent sculpture by Price, and Kehinde Wiley’s own Times Square contribution from 2019, depict ordinary African Americans, unencumbered by references to good works or achievement. In our culture of honor, identity is central.
The old idea of honor, honor that recalls deeds, is discounted — even suspect. One commentator complained that the recent Times Square statue should have been Condoleezza Rice, or another accomplished black woman. But this would have been a celebration of achievement. The social justice movement is not interested in heaping earned praise on an accomplished person. It is interested in redressing the exclusions of the past.
Dishonor is turned to honor, with or without deeds. In many places, Columbus Day was long ago replaced with Indigenous People’s Day. Achievement itself is also being reexamined. We have not all had the same opportunities, the same ancestors, so what fairness is there in the celebration of dead white men?
The new honor serves victims, not heroes. The shift is staggering. Artists have celebrated heroes for 2,000 years. In our current milieu, the highest deeds are dispensable objects of honor, easily replaced by paeans to the downtrodden.
Such disregard for our heroes is not without cost. Only focusing on victims neglects a key element of human progress and development: example. Whatever enters the memory makes us. In making one hero, we form the mold by which other men and women are made. Deed-based honor is essential to the flourishing of a country.
Celebrating heroes has ancient roots. Aristotle viewed honor as the reward of virtue, even virtue on the battlefield, calling it “the prize appointed for the noblest deeds.” Honor is the most appropriate response to military service or ultimate sacrifice. Celebrating the deeds of an Admiral Farragut or Nathan Hale is a moral duty. Fame is fitted for good deeds — a satisfying justice.
It is the paradox of honor that, intended for a single individual, public praise transforms us all. Humans are mimetic creatures. As the author Lanta Davis writes, the word “character” derives from the Greek kharaktēr, a stamp used to impress a soft silver coin with the head of the local potentate. Our desires and actions derive in some measure from others. Without the instruction of example, none of us could get dressed in the morning. It is no wonder artists have traditionally dedicated themselves to the task of acclaiming virtuous feats: Frederick MacMonnies’s famous 1893 bronze of Nathan Hale outside City Hall, New York, for instance, or Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.
The “encouragement of virtue” was parson Mason Locke Weems’s motivation to write The Life of George Washington. The book, published in 1800, relates, among other things, Washington’s now famous achievement on Christmas night in 1776. That’s when, as Weems writes, Washington’s Continental Army turned on its British pursuers, intending to surprise the camp at Trenton, N.J. Unaware that the dense ice had prevented his generals Ewing and Cadwalader from entering the water with their troops, Washington and his men crossed alone, plunging into the “roar of ice,” and “pelted by an incessant storm of hail and snow.” The victory at Trenton renewed morale, and led to a second victory the following year.
Weems’s book, with its tale of Washington’s crossing, eventually found its way to a young boy named Abraham Lincoln. No other revolutionary event, Lincoln later said to the New Jersey Senate, carved itself “upon my imagination so deeply. The crossing of the river . . . the great hardships . . . all fixed themselves on my memory.” As a boy, the president felt the tale made him privy to a relentless and transcendent hope, an inexpressible “something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.”
At the Senate chamber, in the wake of six state secessions, the new president expressed his desire to follow the example of Washington’s men. He hoped to be a “humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty . . . for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.” Far from opinion or oratory, it was deeds that had influenced Lincoln’s conviction. The march of the frostbitten soldiers had forged a faith. As president, he would fight for liberty because other men had done it.
Such is the power of deeds even to inspire belief. It is no accident that political movements tend to resemble their leaders: The people we honor are the people we become. If mainstream culture has lost faith in achievement, we need only look to the chains of influence embedded in our history to find reason to praise it again. The bureaucrats now scrambling to refurbish and reorient our national parks and memorials may resent and complain about Trump’s efforts. But a return to the ordinary acclamation of deeds is desperately needed. Fanfare for our most notable achievements directs the progress of a country. Images of greatness inscribe our memories and ensure that the sort of people who once made a nation great “shall not perish from the earth.”