Who Really Are The 250 Greatest Americans?
(ANALYSIS) President Donald Trump had a really interesting idea. Let’s identify the 250 greatest Americans of all time on this 250th anniversary of the United States.
There could have been a lively nationwide discussion, perhaps with a festival of varied experts and online balloting. Instead, some unknown process produced Trump’s personal designation of 192 men and 52 women to be honored, 11 clergymen and nuns among them.
The winners are named in Trump’s executive order and to be memorialized in a $40 million National Garden of Heroes at the National Mall. This project has provoked far less fuss than his East Wing demolition for a $400 million ballroom (plus $1 billion for security) and, imitating Paris, the 25-story Triumphal Arch between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, costing perhaps $100 million.
READ: 5 Things We Learned From The ‘Rededicate 250’ Rally
The garden’s public funding was slipped into the 887 pages of last year’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” Sculptors will create life-size statutes in stone or metal at up to $200,000 apiece. The site is supervised by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with a task force of other officials. Vince Haley, a Trump speechwriter who now chairs the Domestic Policy Council, will confirm Trump’s honorees and add others for a total of 250.
Regarding religion, one can sympathize with the president’s plight since it’s impossible to recognize the nation’s many faiths. For instance, no single rabbi could represent Judaism’s branches, yet it’s troublesome that only Christian clergy are chosen. They should at least add ethnic Jews like the first on the Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis, or musicians Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin or Benny Goodman, or even an Hollywood mogul. Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are too new to have produced teachers with the required nationwide impact.
Catholicism dominates with nine religious leaders: John Carroll (the first U.S. bishop), John Neumann (bishop recognized as a saint), Fulton Sheen (bishop and famed TV preacher), Sister Katharine Drexel (the second American saint), Thomas Merton (monk and author), Junipero Serra (missionary friar), Sister Elizabeth Ann Seton (school pioneer and saint), Kateri Tekakwitha (first Native American saint) and Augustus Tolton (first African-American priest). Notably, no cardinals made the cut. (Trump’s debating partner, Pope Leo XIV, seems assured of added Garden placement down the road).
Protestantism dominated American culture for centuries, but got only two of the 11: Colonial theologian Jonathan Edwards and uber-evangelist Billy Graham. Haley could consider Bishop Francis Asbury, Methodists’ frontier “circuit rider”; Bishop Richard Allen, founder of the first Black denomination (African Methodist Episcopal Church); Baptists Adoniram and Ann Judson, entering Burma in 1812 as America’s first foreign missionaries; Lewis Tappan, evangelical abolitionist and Sunday School founder; Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake, first American to lead the World Council of Churches; or theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.
Others on Trump's list were devout but esteemed for special reasons. The peerless example is Martin Luther King, Jr., a civil rights champion, though simultaneously a local Baptist pastor. The president also honors his wife, Coretta.
Other such honorees include:
— William Bradford, leader of the Mayflower’s separatist Pilgrims and Plymouth colony’s founding governor.
— Dorothy Day, co-founder of the left-wing Catholic Worker movement.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Unitarian minister turned Transcendentalist philosopher.
— Julia Ward Howe, women’s suffragist and abolitionist, who wrote the lyrics of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
— William Penn, a principled Quaker pacifist, founded Pennsylvania.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, a prominent pastor’s daughter, whose 1852 novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” sparked anti-slavery fervor.
— Sojourner Truth, escaped slave, evangelist and abolitionist.
— Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a deeply Christian, pioneering African-American journalist.
— Roger Williams, a dissenting Baptist who advocated the separation of church and state, founded Rhode Island.
— John Winthrop, Puritan founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Also, the “Four Chaplains,” whose deaths inspired Americans during World War II: George Fox (Methodist), Alexander Goode (Jewish), Clark Poling (Dutch Reformed) and John Washington (Catholic). When a German torpedo demolished their battleship, they prayed with and comforted the 902 who died and gave away their life jackets to save four of the 230 who survived.
Trump’s non-religious choices are thin on Hispanic and Asian Americans, stronger on women, Blacks and Native Americans. Despite controversy, he honors Christopher Columbus and President Andrew Jackson of “Trail of Tears” infamy. The eclectic list spans basketball star Kobe Bryant and immigrant genius Albert Einstein; “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek and Thomas Edison of 1,093 patents; football’s Vince Lombardi and polio vanquisher Jonas Salk, 9/11 hero Todd Beamer and first moon walker Neil Armstrong; cookbook author Julia Child and Mark Twain, Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill.
Politics inevitably enters. Eight Republican presidents are named, but only four Democrats since the Civil War. There’s a conservative who’s-who of William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, Milton Friedman, Barry Goldwater, Russell Kirk, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Clare Boothe Luce, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Antonin Scalia, John Wayne and right-to-life marcher Nellie Gray. Still, liberals get Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and union founder Samuel Gompers.
Expect chatter about omissions. America First’s Charles Lindbergh is understandable, but it’s astonishing to skip John Marshall, whose 34 years as chief justice established the Supreme Court’s constitutional review of laws. Naturally, Trump vetoes John Peter Zenger, colonial America's freedom of the press pioneer. The president may chair the renamed Trump Kennedy Center, but neglects the fine arts. Drop John Philip Sousa despite 129 spirited marches? Philo Farnsworth (who?) is ignored once again.
Celebrate Billie Holiday, but not Ella Fitzgerald? Shirley Temple, not Elizabeth Taylor? Humphrey Bogart, but not Cary Grant? Bob Hope and not Charlie Chaplin?
Indeed, difficult choices must be made with America’s lavish array of talent.
Richard N. Ostling was a longtime religion writer with The Associated Press and with Time magazine, where he produced 23 cover stories, as well as a Time senior correspondent providing field reportage for dozens of major articles. He is a recipient of the Religion News Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. He has interviewed such personalities as Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI); ranking rabbis and Muslim leaders; and authorities on other faiths; as well as numerous ordinary believers. He writes a bi-weekly column for Religion Unplugged.