On Monday, February 16, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast:The renaming of the Kennedy Center to include PresidentDonald Trumphas sparked debate about presidential memorials and what they represent. James E. Young, professor emeritus of English and Judaic & Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, joins USA TODAY's The Excerpt to dig into what presidential memorials reveal about both our past and present.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Dana Taylor:
The fight over renaming the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts has led to a reckoning about the meaning attached to presidential memorials and arguments about who we are. From marble monuments to cultural institutions, what do presidential memorials tell us about not only our past, but our present? For Presidents Day, we decided to dig into that.
Hello, and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, February 16th, 2026. I'm now joined by one of the nation's leading voices on memory and memorials, James E. Young, distinguished university Professor Emeritus of English and Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. James, thanks so much for joining me on The Excerpt.
James E. Young:
Oh, thank you for having me.
Dana Taylor:
I want to dive into the turmoil surrounding the renaming of the Kennedy Center, but first it might help to get an understanding of how presidential memorials come to be. Are we talking about something set by law, or is this a fluid process?
James E. Young:
All of the above. It ends up being very fluid, but there really has been a tradition and traditional protocols as well as laws. Most of the central memorials to former presidents and to deceased presidents ... which is also part of the tradition, very rare is the memorial to a living president, always deceased ... but there are customs such as families wanting to create organizations to remember the past loved one, like Ulysses S. Grant's Widow really initiated Grant's Tomb up in Upper Manhattan at 120 Second Street and Riverside Drive. Other presidents have also recommended shapes and sizes for their memorials and what they might be.
I think one of the most touching memorials to FDR was the one he described himself to his good friend, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. In his words, he said, "If any memorials are erected to me, I know exactly what I should like it to be. I should like it to consist of a block about the size of this," putting his hand on his desk, "and placed in the center of that green plot in front of the archive building. I don't care what is made of, whether limestone or granite or whatnot, but I want it to be plain, without any ornamentation, with a simple carving, `In memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.'"
Dana Taylor:
When we look at the timeline for the JFK Memorial, of course it's tightly tied to his assassination. President Lyndon Johnson renamed the yet-to-be-constructed National Cultural Center to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Why did it take a law to do that, and is it clear how President Trump was able to add his name without passing a new law?
James E. Young:
No, it's not clear. In fact, what I've heard, the official name cannot be changed without an act of Congress. In fact, Congress had to pass the law to create it, and it's a wonderful memorial, and this brings us back to both the origins of memorials and how and why they would be mandated. Now, in this case, the Kennedy Center is very much a way to commemorate JFK's and actually the First Lady's devotion to the arts during his administration, so that JFK would be remembered as a great supporter of the arts, the commitment his administration made to the arts, of course, Jackie's commitment to the arts as well.
And so this makes it maybe one of the most poignant and appropriate of all presidential memorials, I think. And then to have a new president come along, slash funding to the arts, defund the National Endowment for the Arts among many other arts agencies, and then insist single-handedly to add his name to the memorial. It's not just unprecedented, but it actually doesn't make any memorial sense.
Dana Taylor:
The Kennedy Center has functioned as a living memorial. What does that mean exactly, and how did it help the country heal following the horror of the assassination of JFK?
James E. Young:
The greatest memorials really are living memorials, spaces in which life continues, life and love, culture, love of culture. I hope in fact that when I am commemorated after I've gone, it'll be in some loving, festive way just like this, celebrating life, marking death with a celebration of life and the arts, in this case. And I think one of the most wonderful ways to remember somebody is to remember their love of life in the arts.
Dana Taylor:
Like most presidents, Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson were memorialized long after their deaths. They have enormous physical monuments. Do those towering structures help make the case that it's better to wait?
James E. Young:
And they took a long time, as you said, and were also fairly controversial at the same time, and that's a normal part of the memorial process. What I love to do with memorials is to restore their origins and how they came into being and what the debates were, as petty as they may have been or as substantive as they may have been, in order to enliven an otherwise pretty deadly edifice. A memorial without its own history attached can appear quite obsolete and foreign to subsequent generations. So by restoring how they came into being, we really can reanimate them with their origins and make them all living memorials that way.
Dana Taylor:
On the flip side, we have John Adams, who is inarguably eligible, but still lacks a major memorial. Has that ship sailed, or do you think that Adams will one day have a presidential memorial?
James E. Young:
I think he will have a presidential memorial, a national memorial, one day. The meanings and understandings of these past administrations and presidents really do evolve over time, and I think his time will come eventually. It could be maybe in the next administration, now that our attention is on presidential memorials once again.
Dana Taylor:
The Lincoln Memorial has been a backdrop for transformative moments like the 1963 March on Washington. Could a case be made that it is indeed a living memorial?
James E. Young:
Absolutely, and fortunately, we have it on sound and on film and on tape. That I Have a Dream speech, probably I think our greatest national memorial, in fact, ever. It raises the bar, actually, to remind us, using the Lincoln Memorial in the steps as a background, which is also really, really special. People ask what makes the Lincoln Memorial so special, and it's really the quietude and the Emancipation Proclamation in the background that brings it to life, and that solemnity, that gentleness, the stillness inside, that makes that memorial work so well.
Dana Taylor:
We live in a time when memorials and monuments are being reevaluated based on more open conversations about when some of them were built and by whom. How have you approached those conversations?
James E. Young:
I like to keep in mind, again, how these memorials come into being, that there really can't be a prescription. There have been prescriptions, and autocratic regimes love prescribing what these memorials will be, but memorials that can remain open to debate, to the issues of the moment as they come into being, so that they reflect both the past that they would be commemorating on the one hand, but they must also reflect the moment in which they're being conceived. And for a memorial to do both openly creates a conversation between us in the present moment and the object of memory in the past, that they say the past is never really past as long as we're thinking about it in this present moment. So as long as that dialogue remains alive, I think these memorials work,
Dana Taylor:
We're talking primarily about U.S. monuments and memorials here, but more broadly, how have memorials helped societies move forward, whether that be following the loss of a beloved figure or grappling with wars and other atrocities?
James E. Young:
It would probably be hard to say that the same thing occurs everywhere. Every nation, every culture, really has its own reasons for commemorating the past. In some cases it's a way to come to terms with the past, the way the German government did when it decided to create a national memorial to Europe's murdered Jews there in Berlin, or what it's called the Denkmal, but it instituted a process. It had a large competition, but it always knew exactly why it was doing it, and it wasn't to put the past behind, as many people suspected. It was really to bring the past forward into the present moment, so that we understand why we are where we are, that we can't live truly in the present moment without acknowledging the reality of how we got here, and the Germans were very good about that.
There are places which I think would commemorate huge events like the Holocaust as a way to put it behind, as a way to move forward, as a way to unshackle oneself from responsibility for the Holocaust in order to move forward. And there's a way in which every nation's reasons for doing what they do creates a foundation for these memorials. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum, for example, and the Days of Remembrance, were really established around the memory of American soldiers liberating camps at Dachau and at Buchenwald. So it was really about commemorating American experience or creating that space to begin, and then to understand and in a way to repeat and relive our own reasons for being as liberators, and as a blend of immigrants and rescuers. So a lot of it is always repeating and reinstating the myths by which we understand our own reasons for being, national reasons for being.
Dana Taylor:
For Americans, what would you say is the grand purpose? Why should we care about these memorials?
James E. Young:
I think remembering where we came from, both the dark places and the inspired places, is the only way we can make sense of where we are. We can't possibly understand who we are as a nation of immigrants without acknowledging the anti-immigrant animus of maybe the turn of the 19th into the 20th century, and the backlash in the 1920s. We can't possibly acknowledge and begin to repair injustice in this country without understanding our origins as a slaveholding country. There's just no way we can do that.
That memorials and the memorial arc is now tending toward justice and accountability I think is a great advent, due to the great work of Bryan Stevenson at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. I do believe that that is our greatest 21st century national memorial, the National Memorial to Justice and Peace, otherwise also known as the Lynching Memorial. And I think that the inspiration of turning memory into accountability and justice will become the new model for memorial-making in this country.
Reasons for memorials have evolved, 250 years ago, 300 years ago until today, and we're in a very, very different place today, and I think that they will continue evolving. It's going to be very difficult to say what a memorial like this is even going to mean in another 50 or 100 years, but it will be just as important then as it is now, with very different meanings.
Dana Taylor:
And that Indigenous nations are brought into this important conversation.
James E. Young:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Dana Taylor:
So finally, is it ultimately up to future generations of Americans to decide how today's living Presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, are memorialized?
James E. Young:
It will be. We're in an age where everything gets documented, for better or worse. There's going to be a lot of sorting out to do for all these presidents. FDR was of an age where it was much, I would say, easier to curate one's presentation, public presentation. The public presentations of the last four or five presidents are very, very well documented. And as we go through and try to make sense and paint the pictures of what's memorable, what needs to be remembered and maybe what needs to be minimized, again it will reflect the values and the preoccupations of the future generations.
Dana Taylor:
James, thank you so much for sharing your insights and for joining me on The Excerpt.
James E. Young:
Thank you very much, Dana, for having me. Happy President's Day.
Dana Taylor:
Happy President's Day. Thanks to our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to podcasts@usatoday.com. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. I'll be back tomorrow morning with another episode of USA Today's The Excerpt.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:The fight over renaming the Kennedy Center
On Monday, February 16, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast:The renaming of the Kennedy Center to include PresidentDona...
