Removing the Confederate Monument from Arlington National Cemetery wasn’t ‘cancel culture’, it was the right thing to do

 The U.S. Army’s December 2023 decision to remove a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery generated quite a bit of controversy, particular from 40 Republicans from the House of Representatives who claimed that the monument “does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy: the memorial commemorates reconciliation and national unity.” Some groups, like Defend Arlington and Save Southern Heritage Florida, even went to court to block the removal, claiming that doing so violated the National Environmental Policy Act and that the army had failed to take care of grave sites around the memorial during the memorial.

On December 19, 2023, US District Judge Ronnie D. Alston ruled that the removal could proceed after finding that the groups who tried to halt it had failed to prove that keeping the monument was in the public’s best interest. The judge’s order said that the ‘Plaintiff’s complaints regarding the removal efforts being likely to damage the gravesites are misinformed or misleading.”

This is not the first time that groups sympathetic to the Confederate cause have used misleading arguments to block removal of Confederate names and symbols from US military property. The efforts to rename army posts named for Confederate generals were resisted and called efforts to ‘cancel culture,’ or to ‘disparage American heritage and tradition.’ Those efforts, in the case of posts in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas, failed, and it’s right that the effort to maintain the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery failed as well.

Arlington National Cemetery was established in 1864 on the grounds of the plantation belonging to the family of Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s wife. The cemetery was established as a place for Union Civil War dead. Because of the inability to distinguish Union from Confederate among the many full or partial remains found unburied within a 35-mile radius of Washington, DC, they were all buried together. Other Confederate battlefield dead were buried there and by April 1865, several hundred of the more than 16,000 graves at Arlington contained Confederate dead.

Initially, the federal government banned the decoration of Confederate graves. Cemetery officials refused to allow the erection of any monument to Confederate dead and did not permit any new Confederate burials. In 1898, after the Spanish-American War, President McKinley, touring the Deep ‘south to promote Senate ratification of the Treaty of Paris and racial harmony, announced that Confederate graves at Arlington would be cared for. This opened the door for former Confederates and Confederate sympathizers to try for more. A former Confederate, Samuel Lewis, for example, was angered that Confederate gravestones were similar to the gravestones of Black people interred there, and petitioned for a ‘Confederate section’, which McKinley approved. Among those opposing this move, and wanting to move Confederate graves ‘south,’ was the United Daughters of the Confederacy UDC).

Once the section was approved and laid out though, and Confederate groups noticed that space had been left for a memorial, although a memorial was not mentioned in the authorizing documents, they began discussing constructing one. Among the groups pushing for this: the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They asked the War Department for permission in 1902, 1903, and 1905, but were turned down. Despite the refusals, the group began raising money and in 1906, Secretary of War William Howard Taft finally granted permission, reserving the War Department’s right to approve the design and inscriptions.

Supposedly representing not only the ‘valor’ of southern soldiers and the losses suffered by the south, two figures on the memorial are especially controversial. One is of a uniformed black enslaved person following his master to war, representing, according to the UDC, ‘a faithful Negro body-servant following his young master.’ The other shows a military officer kissing his infant child held in the arms of a weeping black woman (a black mammy, or enslaved nursemaid), while another child clings to her skirts. These ‘faithful black servants’ were purposely included by the sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, a former Confederate who specialized in Confederate art, to undermine what he called the lies about slavery and the south in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He wished to rewrite history to show black slaves’ support for the Confederate cause.

At this point I’d like to stress the importance of the foregoing paragraph, especially for those who decry the removal of this and other Confederate symbols from our military and federal facilities as ‘cancel culture’ or denigration of our history and heritage. Don’t forget that at the time of the dedication of this memorial, as well as the appendage of Confederate names to military bases and the proliferation of other Confederate symbols, we were in the midst of the Jim Crow era which saw a hardening of segregation, especially in the south, with laws and practices designed to keep the formerly enslaved in their place legally. The military and the federal government were segregated as well, and the forces of repression and segregation were in firm control in the Deep South.

The military was desegregated by executive order from President Truman in 1949, but when I joined the army in 1962, many of the attitudes of the old segregated military were still present, and the rest of society and the government still followed local practices. For example, in the 1960s, the US State Department’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI0 in Arlington, Virginia, followed Virginia law and did not allow Black Foreign Service personnel to eat in the same cafeteria as the White employees.

I served my country for 50 years, 20 in military uniform and 30 as a diplomat, so I defend the right of groups like the UDC to have their distorted and self-serving take on history, but not to force it down the throats of everyone by putting it on display in facilities paid for by the American taxpayer, and most especially not in places that are intended to honor those who fought and died for this country. Arlington National Cemetery is a place to honor those who fought for the country, not against it. It is a place for patriots. To their sympathizers, Confederates might be considered patriots, but to me, the descendant of enslaved people, they’re either traitors to their country, or if you’re one of those people who say they were just exercising their ‘right’ to separate from a government they didn’t agree with, they’re foreign invaders who made war on the country.

There is, in my opinion, no middle ground.

So, removing the memorial from Arlington is not rewriting history, but correcting it. We no longer live in an age when those who were enemies of the country, Confederate soldiers or German POWs, are valued more highly than men and women of color who wore the country’s uniform and were willing to die for it. The heritage represented by that memorial is not an American heritage that I can support.

Removing it was the right thing to do.

 

History versus Heritage

While I usually only write here about books and writing, current events are such, and the debate so rancorous, I felt compelled to share my thoughts, especially on the issue of preserving Confederate generals’ names on some of our most important army bases, and the President’s childish petulance over bipartisan agreement that they should be removed. He talks about maintaining an American heritage. Is he talking about the heritage we should all want to preserve and pass on to our descendants? I hope not. Here’s what I had to say about that:

The United States is currently in a full-blown crisis; actually, two full-blown crises.

      In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has yet to run its course, we face the crisis of a rising awareness among a significant number of Americans that we need to take a long, hard look at how we treat our nation’s history, especially the history of race relations. The latter is playing out in an often-rancorous public debate about the status of symbols of the short-lived Confederate States of America, its flag, statues of its leaders, and the names of Confederate generals currently designating 10 army posts in the American south.

      Those opposed to removing these symbols from public display, including the President, argue that they are symbols of our American heritage, and removing them erases our history. Such arguments show a lack of understanding of the difference between heritage and history.

      Dictionaries define ‘history’ as an account and analysis of past events, while ‘heritage’ is defined as something that is handed down from the past that shows characteristics, culture, and tradition; in effect a nation’s birthright.

      I do not argue that these symbols illustrate a heritage, nor that they are not a part of this country’s history. But I do wonder if they illustrate the heritage that we wish to claim as a ‘birthright,’ or a history that we wish to celebrate.

      Leaders of the confederacy took up arms against the United States, and one of the motivations behind this act was the desire to preserve the peculiar institution of human slavery. Those military officers, many of them graduates of West Point, and active duty officers at the time, violated their oaths of office, and, in the words of some of our current serving and retired military officers, committed treason. There is no euphemistic way to put it. No matter how agonizing their decision to do so was, they committed treason.

      Is this the heritage we want our brave men and women in uniform to consider as their own? As a 20-year army veteran, my response to that question is an unequivocal NO. Our country deserves better; our young people deserve better. Our President should know better.

      I am not calling for history to be erased. These symbols are a part of our history, and they should be in museums or private collections where historical relics belong. They should not be on or in public institutions such as schools or federal military installations.

      Contrary to the President’s assertions, these symbols do not stand for Winning, Victory, and Freedom. For my ancestors, they stand for Slavery, and for the men and women of today’s military, whose mission is to Win wars, they stand for Betrayal and Loss, and in the case of some of those who have been honored by their names on our most famous posts, Incompetence and Recklessness. Is this the heritage we wish to bequeath to the younger generation, the history we wish to honor? I think not.

      Anyone who truly loves this country should wish to see it live up to the promises implied by our founding documents.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

      The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution describe the kind of heritage we should be striving for. Sure, many of the Founding Fathers, following the practice of the times, were slaveholders, but a deep dive into the background of the colonial independence movement indicates that most of them realized that the peculiar institution, as slavery was sometimes called, was at odds with what they were fighting for. They were looking toward the future, while today’s leadership seems fixated on looking at a romanticized and distorted past.

      History doesn’t stand still. Today’s events will be tomorrow’s history. We can delete or ignore the chronicles of historical events, but we can’t actually erase history. Those events have happened, and had an impact on those living at that time. We might try to forget them, but they will have happened, and nothing can change that.

       Heritage can also change, or perhaps it’s better to say that our idea of our heritage can evolve over time. As we look back on our past, we should try to understand our history, good and bad. The former to help us better understand our true heritage, the latter to avoid repeating our past mistakes.

      All Americans who love their country should commit themselves to preserving those elements of our history that portray our better angels, for those are t he elements that make up a heritage worth preserving. We should insist that our political leaders do the same, or elect ones who will.

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