Statues from the National Statuary Hall Collection from left: Nathanael Greene (Rhode Island), John Winthrop and Samuel Adams (Massachusetts), Sakakawea (North Dakota), Po’pay (New Mexico), Helen Keller (Alabama), Chief Standing Bear (Nebraska), Chief Washakie (Wyoming), and Mary McLeod Bethune (Florida).photographs from National Statuary Hall Collection; Illustration by Globe Staff
From the Boston Globe
If all goes as Donald Trump promises, the nation will mark its 250th birthday next summer with the unveiling of a National Garden of American Heroes, a brainchild of the president. The location of this collection of statues has yet to be announced, but we know its 250 honorees will range from George Washington to Lauren Bacall to Kobe Bryant.
If this is news to you, it may be because the $40 million earmarked for the project was buried in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, amid billions of dollars of cuts to health care, research, and education. It’s an ambitious project, especially on such a short timeline.
It’s also unnecessary.
We already have a national statue collection. Located inside the US Capitol, at no cost to the federal government, the existing collection is an evolving, dynamic product of a 161-year collaboration between Congress and the states. Several of its statues even surrounded Trump at his second inauguration, in the Capitol Rotunda.
The National Statuary Hall Collection consists of 100 bronze and marble statues of notable Americans. It was conceived in 1864 when Congress, hoping to unite a war-torn country, invited each state to send statues of two deceased, honored citizens to Statuary Hall, a chamber in the Capitol. States were to bear the burden and cost of selecting the subjects and creating and delivering these works. The collection would represent the nation by reflecting the values of each state.
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Remarkably, that’s what this project in democracy has done for well over a century, and continues to do. It reveals to us who we are.
The collection’s first statue, a marble sculpture of a Revolutionary War hero named Nathanael Greene, arrived from Rhode Island in 1870. Massachusetts made its contributions six years later: statues of its first governor, John Winthrop, who advocated participatory self-governance, and the revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. As the number of states grew, so did the number of statues. By the 1930s, 65 weighty statues crowded Statuary Hall, compromising its structure. Congress voted to spread the collection around the Capitol building.
Decades later, when the number of statues reached 100, people began to consider how well the collection represented the nation. More than 90 of the statues were of white men. Eleven depicted Confederate leaders. There were six statues of women, even fewer of people of color, and none was Black.
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In many states, people began to demand their statues be changed. They wanted to tell the history of their state, and thus their nation, in a more representative way. But they couldn’t. The 1864 law creating the collection, which President Abraham Lincoln signed nine months before his assassination, did not permit replacements.
In response to public demand, Congress passed a law in 2000 allowing states, by consent of their governors and legislatures, to replace their statues. Across the country, people got to work switching out statues, a complex and expensive process that often takes more than a decade.
Seventeen statues have been replaced since 2000. Patterns can be detected in the replacements. Four new statues are of presidents — Eisenhower, from Kansas, Ford (Michigan), Truman (Missouri), and Reagan (California) — who all stood by at Trump’s second inauguration.
Five new statues are of Native Americans. Po’pay, leader of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, arrived from New Mexico. Wyoming contributed the Shoshone Chief Washakie. Ponca Chief Standing Bear, whose 1879 lawsuit established the personhood of Native Americans, came from Nebraska. Nevada sent the Paiute author Sarah Winnemucca. And Sakakawea, who guided Lewis and Clark, arrived from North Dakota.
There are eight new statues of women, including Sakakawea and Winnemucca. In 2009, Alabama replaced a Confederate leader with Helen Keller, the only person in the collection depicted as a child. Most of the female statues have arrived since 2022. They depict author Willa Cather (Nebraska), aviator Amelia Earhart (Kansas), physician Martha Hughes Cannon (Utah), newspaper publisher Daisy Lee Gatson Bates (Arkansas), and activist Mary McLeod Bethune (Florida).
Bethune’s statue marked a first for the collection: She was Black. A teacher born in rural South Carolina in 1875 to formerly enslaved parents, Bethune devoted her life and career to the education of Black children. Her statue replaced one of a Confederate leader from Florida in 2022. Two years later, Bates, a key supporter of the integration of non-white students at Little Rock Central High School in 1957, became the second Black person represented in the collection.
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A third is scheduled to arrive soon. Virginia recently decided to remove its statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and replace him with a 20th-century freedom fighter named Barbara Rose Johns. In 1951, Johns, then just 16, led a school strike that contributed to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision desegregating schools.
Johns doesn’t appear on the president’s list of 250 American heroes, although some figures in the Capitol collection do. Among them are Sakakawea, Helen Keller, Nathanael Greene, and several presidents. Trump’s concept of American heroism also incorporates many figures of the television age, such as Walt Disney and Alex Trebek, and skews far more to the present than does the existing collection.
The beauty of the National Statuary Hall Collection is that it’s a work in progress. It still includes Confederate leaders, far more men than women, and few people of color, yet it continues to evolve, reflecting the changing values of millions of people in all the states. Like the nation for which it stands, the Capitol collection moves toward a more perfect union, surely more effectively than the brainchild of a single man.
Eve LaPlante, a biographer, recently coauthored the picture book Who Needs a Statue? Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
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