Hegseth Is Honoring Confederate Lies, Not Actual History
Since Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has been working to put the names of various Confederates who tried to destroy the United States to preserve slavery back in positions of honor. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s most recent effort in this crusade is particularly egregious:
Hegseth’s post links to an opinion piece in The Blaze touting the Moses Ezekiel monument as a testament to the “national healing” between north and south that was taking place when it was built in 1914.
The monument is actually a prime example of an attempt to revise and sanitize the actual history of the Civil War. As Arlington National Cemetery’s own website explains (in text which may well soon be scrubbed by Hegseth’s commissars), it presents a “mythologized vision of the Confederacy”:
The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery. Standing on a 32-foot-tall pedestal, a bronze, classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, represents the American South. She holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet: “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks. …”
Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans. The image of the faithful slave, embodied in the two figures on the memorial, appeared widely in American popular culture during the 1910s through 1930s
Like so many of the memorials that were taken down during the period of racial reckoning after the George Floyd protests, the “Reconciliation Monument” was a project of the neo-Confederacy, the long and largely successful effort to revise the memory and meaning of the treasonous rebellion against the United States into a noble “Lost Cause,” full of glorious if misunderstood motives. Its immediate purpose was less about honoring Confederate heroes than celebrating their vindication in the South’s battle to overturn Reconstruction and build a racist Jim Crow society, which had been tacitly accepted by the North by the time all those monuments began going up in the early 20th century. It’s not “history,” but revisionist propaganda.
Many of these monuments to the Lost Cause were financed and promoted by militant white southern groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This group was behind the “Reconciliation Monument,” so when the movement to remove neo-Confederate symbols began in the last decade the Arlington statue was a natural target. Its removal was actually supported by a group of descendants of its Confederate veteran architect, Moses Ezekiel, as they explained in a 2017 letter to the Washington Post:
One of the most important memorials to the Confederacy is the statue at Arlington National Cemetery, unveiled in 1914. It was sculpted by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a former Confederate soldier and a prominent sculptor of his time. Ezekiel was our relative.
Like most such monuments, this statue intended to rewrite history to justify the Confederacy and the subsequent racist Jim Crow laws. It glorifies the fight to own human beings, and, in its portrayal of African Americans, implies their collusion. As proud as our family may be of Moses’s artistic prowess, we — some twenty Ezekiels — say remove that statue. Take it out of its honored spot in Arlington National Cemetery and put it in a museum that makes clear its oppressive history.
Nothing has happened to rebut that argument in the ensuring years. It makes you wonder if the real “lemmings” here are the people who want to engage with actual history or MAGA zealots like Hegseth, who want to spend $10 million in taxpayer dollars to continue whitewashing it.