ARLINGTON, Virginia — The Army has removed the Confederate Memorial at the nation’s most prominent military cemetery, capping a Defense Department effort to rid its property of rebel imagery.
The removal from Arlington National Cemetery came on Dec. 20 after a federal judge lifted a temporary injunction that briefly kept in place the towering 1914 monument. At 32 feet tall, the memorial featured a bronze, classical figure crowned with olive leaves, representing the South.
THE POLITICAL SEX SCANDALS THAT ROCKED WASHINGTON IN 2023
U.S. District Judge Rossie Alston had granted a temporary injunction after the group Defend Arlington, an affiliate of Save Southern Heritage Florida, filed a lawsuit and sought the restraining order. The group had argued the removal of the monument was disturbing gravesites.
The judge’s decision to move ahead with the removal led to the dismantling of one of the most prominent Confederate monuments in the nation. More than 160 monuments and memorials to the Confederate States of America have been removed since about 2015, spurred at first by the shooting that year at a predominantly black church in Charleston, South Carolina, which claimed nine lives. Some have been removed by state and local governments, while others have been torn down by protesters.
The change at Arlington National Cemetery, with 400,000 gravesites and administered by the Army, is the final act of an effort ordered by the bipartisan Naming Commission. The panel was established by Congress and President Joe Biden in 2021 after nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd while in custody of Minneapolis, Minnesota, police. The commission was given a mandate to remove vestiges of the Confederacy from the military and recommend name changes.
It identified nine Army bases for name changes, including Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort Pickett in Virginia, Fort Benning in Georgia, and Fort Hood in Texas. It also identified Navy ships, buildings, street names, and memorials at military locations across the country to be changed.
The removal at Arlington National Cemetery, a 20-minute walk from Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood on a nice day, leaves a wide round dirt hole in the ground. The former Confederate Memorial site is a short stroll down from the eternal flame at the gravesite of slain President John F. Kennedy and his family, along with lesser-known Arlington burial sites, such as the graves of the late President William Howard Taft and Robert Todd Lincoln, son of assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. The younger Lincoln was a prominent Gilded Age lawyer, businessman, and sometimes official in Republican administrations.
“All bronze elements of the memorial will be relocated,” Arlington National Cemetery says on its website. “The granite base and foundation will remain in place to avoid disturbing surrounding graves.”
Controversies Over the Civil War’s Legacy
Defend Arlington sued the Defense Department in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, arguing the Pentagon had rushed its decision to remove the monument and that it did not prepare an environmental impact statement, as required by federal law. But the judge brushed aside those claims.
Around the same time in December, 44 House Republican lawmakers wrote to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, demanding Confederate monument efforts be halted until fiscal 2024 federal spending bills have become law — since some GOP lawmakers have included proposals in them that would reverse the Naming Commission’s decisions about Confederate monikers on U.S. military property.
“As you well know, in 1898, following the Spanish-American War, where Union and Confederate veterans fought side-by-side under one flag, President William McKinley declared in the heart of the South, Atlanta, Georgia, that the U.S. government would commit to sharing in the burden of honoring and properly burying the Confederate dead, stating, ‘Sectional feelings no longer holds back the love we feel for each other. The old flag waves over us in peace with new glories,’” wrote the GOP lawmakers, mostly from deep red districts.
One electoral exception is Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, who faces a possibly strong 2024 Democratic challenge from former federal prosecutor Will Rollins in the southern Riverside suburbs to Palm Springs 41st Congressional District. Another signatory with a possibly competitive House race, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT), is in his second House stint after being interior secretary in former President Donald Trump’s administration for nearly its first two years. Zinke faces a rematch in 2024 from Democratic rival Monica Tranel, an attorney and former Olympic rower, in the western Montana 2nd Congressional District.
Austin and Pentagon brass ignored the letter, and the removal process moved ahead. Meanwhile, around the same time, about 703 miles south in Jacksonville, Florida, the Confederate monument matter bubbled up after a period of relative quiet in localities.
Democratic Jacksonville Mayor Donna Deegan announced, after the fact, that the “Tribute to the Women of the Southern Confederacy” statue in the city had been removed.
The statue had been in place at Springfield Park in Jacksonville since 1915. Deegan, who was elected to the mayor’s office earlier in 2023, said in a statement that the removal was not to “erase history” but rather to “show that we’ve learned from it.”
“Symbols matter. They tell the world what we stand for and what we aspire to be. By removing the Confederate monument from Springfield Park, we signal a belief in our shared humanity. That we are all created equal. The same flesh and bones. The same blood running through our veins. The same heart and soul,” Deegan said.
“This is not in any way an attempt to erase history but to show that we’ve learned from it. That when we know better, we do better by and for each other. My prayer today is for our beautiful city to continue embracing unity and bending the arc of history towards justice. Let’s keep lifting as we climb,” she added.
The removal sparked outrage from some Republicans, including state Rep. Dean Black, who represents a neighboring district to Jacksonville. Black accused Deegan of an “abuse of power” by removing the statue without the Republican-controlled city council ever moving on a proposal to do so.
The events coincided with a brewing controversy faced by 2024 Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley over her comments in response to a question from an attendee at a town hall in New Hampshire about the Civil War’s cause.
Haley, South Carolina governor from 2011-17, followed by nearly two years as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in the Trump administration, said the Civil War was about government interfering in people’s freedoms.
“I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run. The freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do,” Haley said on Dec. 27 in a visit to Berlin, New Hampshire, the first of a series of events in the Granite State in her attempt to close the gap with Republican front-runner Trump ahead of the Jan. 23 primary.
Her answer, though, drew condemnation far and wide due to her omission of slavery as the war’s driving cause. Critics said the answer was simple — that the Civil War featured one side with a righteous cause and one side with a lost cause that defended a fundamentally evil system.
Haley and her campaign quickly tried to walk back the Civil War remarks.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“Of course, the Civil War was about slavery,” Haley told radio host Jack Heath the next morning.
“But what’s the lesson in all of that?” she continued. “That we need to make sure that every person has freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom to do and be anything they want to be without anyone or government getting in the way. That was the goal of what that was at. Yes, I know it was about slavery. I’m from the South, of course, I know it’s about slavery.”
