In a move that has sparked considerable controversy, the Department of Defense is set to remove the 109-year-old Reconciliation Monument, also known as the Confederate Memorial, from Arlington National Cemetery.
This action is part of a broader trend of reassessing and often removing historical markers that some perceive as glorifying a contentious past.
The Reconciliation Monument, approved in 1906 by Secretary of War William Taft, was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910. The monument was designed by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Jewish former Confederate soldier, and unveiled in Section 16 of the cemetery by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914.
The monument features a bronze female figure, crowned with olive leaves and standing atop a 32-foot pedestal. She holds a laurel wreath, a pruning hook, and a plow. The inscription at her feet reads, "They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks." Another Latin inscription on the memorial states, "The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato."
The monument was intended as a symbol of reconciliation following the Civil War. As the American Conservative noted, "some Confederate groups at the time opposed the statue and memorial precisely because they opposed the reconciliation that it symbolized. At the memorials dedication in 1914, President Wilson praised it as an 'emblem of a reunited people.'"
However, the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021, passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, mandated the removal of "all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate Sates of America (commonly referred to as the 'Confederacy') or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense."
In response to this mandate, an eight-member commission was established in 2021 to oversee the renaming of military assets. The commission recommended in its final report on Sept. 19, 2022, that Arlington National Cemetery "remove the 32 life-sized bronze statues from the top of the monument but not remove the entire monument because doing so might damage graves under the structure."
The impending removal of the monument has sparked bipartisan backlash. Former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) wrote in an August opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that the statue's removal would signify a "deteriorating society ... to erase the generosity of its past, in favor of bitterness and misunderstanding conjured by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying."
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) was among over 40 Republicans who criticized the initiative, calling on Defense Secretary Austin in a Dec. 11 letter to suspend all removal activities related to the Reconciliation Monument until Congress finalized the appropriations process for fiscal year 2024. Clyde argued that the memorial should be exempt from the removal requirement because it "does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and nation unity."
Despite these objections, Arlington National Cemetery announced that the monument had been fenced off and would be removed by no later than Dec. 22. All but the granite pedestal will be taken away. The cemetery stated that the removal is in compliance with both the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, and that no nearby graves or headstones would be damaged during the "deconstruction" process.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) plans to relocate the memorial to the New Market battlefield state historic park in Shenandoah Valley, according to the Military Times.
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