Our nation’s capital is a city of symbols. Its obelisks and colonnades, its statues and inscriptions, are meant to sign forth the best of our history — to be honorific of the men and women who shaped our national identity and who speak, in stone and bronze, of the best of who we are. Arlington National Cemetery is perhaps the most solemn of these symbols: row upon row of white markers standing sentinel over those who died to preserve, in Lincoln’s words, a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal — e pluribus unum, one out of many.
The Washington Post’s report this week — quickly picked up as a top story on CNN’s Anderson Cooper program — broke the news that Arlington’s own signage has been quietly altered. It is into this sacred ground that the Department of Defense now intends to return the Confederate Memorial, the 32-foot bronze monument sculpted by Moses Ezekiel, commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and unveiled in 1914. The statue is not a simple obelisk or a soldier at rest. It is an elaborate piece of Lost Cause iconography: at its base, an enslaved woman is depicted carrying the infant child of a white Confederate officer, and an enslaved man is shown following his master off to war — figures the sculptor intended, and the Daughters of the Confederacy celebrated, as proof of the enslaved’s contentment with and loyalty to the system that held them in bondage. It is, in short, a monument that took the great crime of American slavery and dressed it in the clothing of devotion.
That is precisely why it was removed. In 2023, a bipartisan congressional Naming Commission — one of whose members, a retired Army brigadier general, called it the most egregious example of racism he had encountered on any public land in America — ordered the statue taken down. The removal was not an act of historical erasure but an act of historical honesty. The Confederacy, and the “Lost Cause” mythology this monument enshrines, was and remains the antithesis of everything Arlington signifies. It was rooted in the conviction that some persons were not worthy of the dignity and the rights for which the men and women buried at Arlington actually fought and died. Rightly, the statue came down.
Now word comes that the Pentagon intends to put it back — and, more troubling still, that it has quietly stripped from the cemetery’s own signage the language that once told visitors the truth about what they were looking at: that the monument mythologized the Confederacy and sanitized slavery. The plaque that used to name the wound now only points toward a restoration date. This is not curation. It is concealment. It is a lie.
Notice, too, how the announcement itself was made. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared on social media that “Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’ — will be rightfully returned to Arlington National Cemetery,” adding that it “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings” and that “unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.” Observe what is missing from that sentence: the words “Confederate” and “Confederacy” appear nowhere in it. A statue whose entire purpose was to commemorate the Confederate dead and romanticize their cause is rebranded, euphemistically, as a monument to “reconciliation” — as though the true scandal here were sectional estrangement rather than slavery itself. This is not honoring history; it is renaming it so the honor can be extended without ever having to say what, exactly, is being honored. A man who will not name the thing he is restoring has already conceded, by his own silence, how indefensible that thing is.
Picture what its return will mean. Arlington’s high ground overlooks the Potomac and, across the river, the Washington and Lincoln Monuments — the two men who, more than any others, gave this nation its founding proposition and then its terrible, necessary reckoning with the sin of slavery. To reinstall this statue within view of those monuments is to stage a kind of visual argument the cemetery must never be made to make: that the men who took up arms to preserve human bondage belong in the same sightline, honored in the same manner, as Washington and Lincoln — and that the enslaved themselves are fit subjects not for lament but for decoration. It symbols forth a betrayal of all those who lie buried at Arlington in defense of a very different vision of America.
It is, in a word, disgraceful.
I do not say this lightly, nor do I say it as a matter of partisan reflex. As a priest who has spent a lifetime thinking about how sacred space forms the souls of those who inhabit it, I know that what a nation chooses to enshrine, it teaches its children to revere. A cemetery’s silence is never empty; it speaks. Arlington already speaks — in its long white rows — of sacrifice offered for the whole of the nation, not for the half of it that would have kept the other half in chains. To place this statue back on that hill is not to add one more voice to that chorus. It is to shamefully contradict it.
Monsignor Arthur Holquin, S.T.L.
No comments:
Post a Comment