The verbal gymnastics by our Protection secretary every time he orders a Accomplice monument to return up is actually Olympian.
To wit, Secretary Pete Hegseth just ordered the army to refurbish a 1914 Arlington Confederate Monument to the tune of $10 million and restore it by 2027. Hegseth referred to as it a “reconciliation monument … taken down by woke lemmings.”
In his announcement, Hegseth avoids the precise title of the monument, “The Arlington Accomplice Monument.” Actually, nothing in his assertion mentions the Confederacy in any respect. There’s a motive for that: Congress handed a regulation in 2019 stopping the Division of Protection from naming or renaming something after the Confederacy. Therefore, “reconciliation monument.”
I examine Accomplice commemoration. This construction is one the cruelest, most racist monuments within the nation, and its location on the sacred floor of Arlington Nationwide Cemetery makes it much more offensive. The monument clearly commemorates the Confederacy and its goal — chattel slavery.
It depicts a tearful, obese enslaved lady, a “mammy,” cradling the kid of her Accomplice enslaver, supporting him as he departs for warfare. The monument portrays devoted slaves and type white masters, a historic lie. Slavery featured authorized rape, torture and promoting husband from spouse, baby from mom.
The monument got here down as a result of Congress, with a Republican-controlled Senate, handed a regulation directing the Pentagon “to take away all names, symbols, shows, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Accomplice States of America.” President Trump vetoed the $800 billion protection invoice as a result of it required the altering of 9 base names like Fort Lee and Fort Benning that honored Confederates. These bases had been named throughout World Battle I and World Battle II, when the Military and the American South had been segregated and few Black southerners may vote. Congress overturned Trump’s veto with a supermajority.
To execute that order, Congress created a Naming Fee on which I served as vice chair. We had been no “woke lemmings.” The eight commissioners appointed by Congress and the secretary of Protection included three Republicans, one Democrat, and 4 retired flag officers.
When the fee members visited the Accomplice monument in 2022, we had been shocked by its overt racist imagery and anti U.S. sentiments. We voted unanimously to suggest removing.
Hegseth and neo-Accomplice teams argue that the Fee sought to “erase historical past.” Not fairly. Lessons nonetheless examine the Civil Battle, slavery, the Confederacy, and Jim Crow. Eradicating the names of bases named after accomplice generals or racist monuments modified who and the way we commemorate, our remit from Congress, not historical past.
Hegseth additional declares that the monument was completed within the spirit of reconciliation. He will get his historical past grossly mistaken. Reunion had already occurred in 1868 when President Andrew Johnson magnanimously granted amnesty for treason to all Confederates. By 1877, all the previous rebelling states had full political rights and illustration.
In 1914, the Arlington Monument celebrated not reconciliation, however the victory of white supremacy. Earlier than 1877, over 2,000 Black males held elective workplace, together with a Black U.S. senator from Mississippi. By 1914, though Mississippi and South Carolina had been majority Black, nearly no certainly one of coloration may vote, a lot much less maintain workplace. Jim Crow triumphed.
Reconciliation didn’t embody 9 million African Individuals within the South who lived in a racial police state with out voting rights enforced by a terror marketing campaign of lynching. In 1914, the NAACP’s Disaster journal counted 55 African Individuals lynched. In Louisiana, three Black males had been burned alive on the stake. One other mob doused a Texas man with gasoline and positioned him in an “oil-soaked, dry-goods field” and set him on fireplace. Not one of the perpetrators had been ever dropped at justice.
Commemoration ought to encourage us. Who we commemorate ought to mirror our values. As an alternative of spending $10 million to revive that monument, we should always commemorate the 1,800 United States Coloured Troops and hundreds of different U.S. Military Civil Battle troopers buried in Arlington who helped destroy chattel slavery, freed 4 million males, girls and youngsters from human bondage, protected democracy and the saved the USA of America.
By ordering the monument again, Hegseth is subverting Congress and the desire of the American individuals. He’s telling us that the values of 1914, white supremacy, and Jim Crow are this nation’s — and the Military’s — values. This monument has every little thing to do with racism and nothing to do with reconciliation. Suggesting in any other case is a perversion of U.S. historical past and an insult to everybody buried in Arlington Cemetery.
Brigadier Common Ty Seidule, U.S. Military (Retired) served because the Vice Chair of the Naming Fee. His is the Hinchcliff Professor of Historical past at Hamilton Faculty and his forthcoming ebook with Connor Williams is A Promise Delivered: Ten American Heroes and the Battle to Rename Our Nation’s Army Bases.