by John Seymour, a long-time resident of Arlington, Virginia
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced that a monument commemorating the Confederacy will be returned to Arlington National Cemetery. The monument was removed from the Cemetery several years ago in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and in compliance with the recommendations of a bi-partisan government commission. In ordering the monument’s return to Arlington, Hegseth said that it never should have been removed and that, “unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing history — we honor it.”
Hegseth is correct that the monument seeks to create an enduring historical record, but it is a record that was intentionally fabricated to distort and ultimately deny the truth. Hilary Herbert, a former Confederate soldier and staunch opponent of civil rights as a Congressman from Alabama, chaired the Executive Committee of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association. He admitted that “one leading purpose of the United Daughters of the Confederacy” (which commissioned the Memorial) was simply “to correct history.” As Herbert put it, “our sculptor (Moses Ezekiel) is writing history in bronze.”
Among the pseudo-historical images of the “sons and daughters of the South” depicted on the monument are nostalgic and highly sanitized depictions of slavery — a faithful black servant following his young master to battle and a Confederate officer kissing his child held in the arms of a loyal old black “mammy.” An accompanying inscription in Latin praises the South’s secession and the War itself as a noble “Lost Cause.”
Herbert insisted that “there is no allegory” in Ezekiel’s images but rather “a faithful picture of real things — things that actually happened.” The narrative penned in metal and stone was intended to “illustrate the kindly relations that existed all over the South between the master and the slave — a story that cannot be too often repeated to generations in which ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ survives and is still manufacturing false ideas as to the South and slavery.”
President Trump’s interest in and understanding of American history is, at best, notional. But he is likely aware of George Orwell’s most famous aphorism — its meaning if not its source. Orwell warned that “those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.”
Hegseth’s decision to return the monument to Arlington was reached in compliance with Trump’s Executive Order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Pursuant to that Executive Order, Trump directed the removal of public monuments that, in his view, perpetuated a false reconstruction of American history.
The removal of Confederate monuments is only one part of a nation-wide initiative conducted by the Trump Administration to replace scholarship, rigorous research, and careful and balanced factual presentations with a simple paean to American exceptionalism — the belief that America is uniquely virtuous and praise-worthy. For the President and other right-wing culture warriors, the truth is the enemy because knowledge of true history will help both the current and future generations confront the reality of America’s checkered past and advocate for social and economic change.
If the President can, however, absolve the Confederacy of the sins of slavery, he can whitewash or erase entirely other events in America’s complicated and often fraught 250-year history. He can, for example, justify the pardons and praise showered on the insurrectionists who invaded the Capitol on January 6th, and even transform into “very fine people” the white supremacists who carried torches and chanted racist and anti-Semitic epithets at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in August 2017.
If both the distant and near past can be so easily colored, Botoxed, and perfumed, then the prospects for real racial reconciliation and healing, and for the survival of truth itself, are dim indeed.
