Trump Requests Smithsonian to Install George Washington Statue and Create Center for American Heroes

The takes

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  Adam Smith

  1723–1790, Scotland (the Scottish Enlightenment: Kirkcaldy, Glasgow, Edinburgh)

  Heroes, Statues, and the Price of Public Flattery

  A president’s demand that a national museum swap a modern sculpture for a towering Washington and a “Center for American Heroes” is not only an aesthetic question, but a test of how a commercial republic remembers itself without selling its judgment to its own rulers.

  That a nation should honour George Washington, especially as the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth approaches, is neither surprising nor blameworthy. I am told that a great museum of American history is urged to remove a “strange modernist sculpture” from its grounds, to set in its place an eleven-foot Washington from a recent race spectacle, and to construct within a “Center for American Heroes” telling edifying tales of founders and patriots. The request is pressed in imperious tones and on a very short deadline, as if public memory were a regiment to be wheeled about at the word of command. When political authority discovers an urgent taste in the fine arts, prudence bids us examine whose taste, and at whose expense, is truly in question.

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  John Locke

  1632–1704, England (writing amid the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution)

  A President Is Not the Nation’s Curator

  When the executive gives a museum “days” to replace a sculpture with his preferred hero, the question is not taste but trust: by what right does one man command the nation’s memory?

  I begin with the bare facts as they are reported, for in politics, as in medicine, one must know the case before prescribing. A public ruler has publicly demanded that the Smithsonian, a national museum, remove a “strange modernist sculpture” called “Infinity,” which has stood outside the Museum of American History since 1967, because it “says nothing about America.” He has urged that it be replaced with an eleven‑foot statue of George Washington, previously shown at a motor race, and has pressed for a long exhibit and even a “Center for American Heroes,” with only “days” allowed for the museum to submit. Taste is one question; power is another. I am concerned with the latter.

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  Niccolò Machiavelli

  1469–1527, Florence (republican secretary and diplomat, then exile, amid the Italian Wars)

  Why a Statue of Washington Is a Weapon, Not a Decoration

  When a ruler orders heroes into marble and rivals out of sight, he is not curating taste but fortifying his position in the state’s imagination.

  A ruler does not quarrel with a sculpture because he has suddenly discovered his eye for beauty. When a leader gives a great museum only days to remove a “strange modernist” piece and demands in its place an 11‑foot George Washington, taken from a spectacle of racing and flags, we are not in the realm of art criticism. We are in the struggle over what may stand at the center of a nation’s house of memory, and who has the right to rearrange that furniture. The command to install Washington in Flag Hall and to let him dominate the entrance is an attempt to seize the vestibule of the American imagination.

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