Trump's Confederacy rises again
The Lost Cause doesn't seem all that lost anymore.
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Last Friday, Donald Trump responded to a grim jobs report by firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A few days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that a statue commemorating the Confederacy would be returned to Arlington National Cemetery, after its removal in 2023.
One is not merely a distraction from the other — both are in fact an indelible part of Trump’s fascist impulse to rewrite history.
“I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’ — will be rightfully returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth crowed on social media. “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”
There is a critical difference between acknowledging the nation’s history and celebrating its worst moments. In Germany, they don’t erase their shameful Nazi past, but that doesn’t mean they’re erecting hagiographic statues commemorating Nazi war criminals.
While on the subject of war criminals, the National Park Service announced on Monday that the statue of Albert Pike, a northerner who fought for the Confederacy as a brigadier general, would return to its position of honor just a mile away from the White House.
Pike’s statue was toppled, defaced, and burned on June 19, 2020, which is also Juneteenth, the day that commemorates the end of slavery in the US. That was also the year when many Confederate memorials — and even Trump, himself a living Confederate monument — were finally removed from positions of prominence. George Floyd’s murder had triggered a supposed long overdue “racial reckoning,” but this proved short lived. As Richard Pryor once said, “Remember the revolution, brother? We lost.”
Five years later, Trump is back in power and he’s rolling back decades of hard-fought progress for all minorities. These Confederate memorials are the most obvious and glaring symbol of what the United States of MAGA truly values. It’s even worse when you unpack their true history and what it means for today.
The Lost Cause endures
Tellingly, Hegseth didn’t refer to Arlington Nation Cemetery’s Confederate Memorial by name. Instead, he claimed that Confederate soldier Moses Ezekiel’s sculpture was “often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument.’” This is untrue. Ezekiel was a proponent of the Lost Cause myth, which argued that the Confederacy’s motivation and goals were noble, heroic, and not at all centered on keeping human beings in bondage. Ezekiel insisted he “never fought for slavery, but for states' rights and for free trade.”
The Confederate Memorial was a project spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a fact Hegseth fails to mention. The UDC strongly pushed the Lost Cause narrative, which included historical revisionism regarding the horrors of slavery. As recently as 2018, the UDC website claimed that “slaves for the most part were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters.” Ezekiel’s statue features a stereotypical image of a Black woman handing a baby over to a Confederate soldier. Anyone with a passing awareness of antebellum history understands how offensive that is.
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The memorial’s intent was to lionize the Confederate dead. Rather than traitors who waged war against the United States, they were recast as patriots who defended their way of life. If the British had successfully held off the American revolution, it’s almost laughable to imagine “nice try, old chap” memorials for George Washington or Alexander Hamilton in Trafalgar Square, just a mile from Buckingham Palace. But that’s effectively what Confederate apologists have pulled off.
When President Woodrow Wilson unveiled the Confederate Memorial in June 1914, the date chosen was intentionally the 106th anniversary of the birth of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. If the Confederate Memorial promoted any actual “reconciliation,” it primarily involved white Americans from the northern and southern states putting the past behind them, even as the former Confederacy robbed Black citizens of their futures through oppressive Jim Crow laws.
The statue of Albert Pike in DC depicts him in civilian clothing, and the statue’s engraved words read, “AUTHOR, POET, SCHOLAR, SOLDIER, JURIST, ORATOR, PHILANTHROPIST and PHILOSOPHER." This buries the lede, as Pike was also a Confederate general, but not a particularly distinguished one.
A founding member of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party, Pike was an enslaver and white supremacist who wanted free Black people expelled from Arkansas, where he lived. He signed a circular along with 11 other men declaring that "the evil is the existence among us of a class of free colored persons,” as this threatened the hold enslavers had on their human property.
Pike didn’t serve in the Confederate Army for long before resigning in July 1862 after he was accused of committing war crimes against Union soldiers. He was later charged with insubordination and treason, but successfully appealed to President Andrew Johnson for a pardon in 1865. He said he’d “pursue the arts of peace, to practice my profession, to live among my books, and to labour to benefit my fellows and my race by other than political courses.” Pike mostly kept his word, although scholars believe he wrote the Klu Klux Klan poem “The Wolf Is On the Desert.”
These aren’t shocking revelations. This history was part of the public debate about Confederate memorials back in 2020, and most Americans agreed that we shouldn’t honor racist traitors. According to a 2022 survey, almost 75 percent of Americans said Confederate monuments “should not remain as they are but should either be contextualized in place with historical information, moved to a museum or destroyed.”
The Trump administration is hardly a champion of democracy or data integrity, so naturally, the removal of Confederate monuments is spun as the work of “woke lemmings” who seek to “erase history” rather than the people’s will or even as just the right thing to do. Meanwhile, Trump is imposing his own twisted reality.
Whose history is it?
More than 50 tributes to the Confederacy were removed, relocated, or renamed in 2021, the same year as Trump’s own attempted insurrection against the US government.
During the Biden administration, military bases named after Confederate traitors were retitled to honor service members who were women and minorities. Hegseth dismissed these changes as “DEI” — MAGA shorthand for any effort that acknowledges the country’s complicated history or recognizes the contributions of Americans who weren’t heterosexual white men.
Typical for this lawless administration, Hegseth bypassed Congress to restore the former base names. He exploited loopholes in legislation and claims that Fort Bragg is now named after Roland Bragg, an army paratrooper in the second world war, and not Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Similarly, Fort Benning is now named after Fred Benning, who served in the first world war, and not Confederate Gen. Henry L. Benning.
This is all so cynical and petty, and yet it aligns perfectly with the Trump administration’s ongoing purge of programs, policies, and even people the administration condemns for advancing “diversity, equity and inclusion." Not even American heroes like Harriet Tubman and Jackie Robinson have been spared.
Trump’s fondness for the Confederacy has little to do with southern “heritage” — he’s a native New Yorker who never lived below the Mason-Dixie line until he became a permanent Mar-a-Lago resident in 2020. But he’s long sided with white supremacists of bygone eras. During his disastrous press conference after the 2017 Charlottesville rally, he claimed there were “very fine people, on both sides” and defended the protesters who opposed the removal of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s statue from a public park.
Virginia finally removed Lee’s statue in 2021, and Trump released a rambling statement that would’ve earned a failing grade in remedial American history.
“Robert E. Lee is considered by many Generals to be the greatest strategist of them all,” Trump said. “President Lincoln wanted him to command the North, in which case the war would have been over in one day. Robert E. Lee instead chose the other side because of his great love of Virginia, and except for Gettysburg, would have won the war.”
When it comes to absurdly missing the point, “Except for Gettysburg, Lee would have won the war” ranks up there with “But other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”
This embrace of Lost Cause propaganda is more than just a quirk. It’s MAGA policy. The perversion of Civil War history is of a piece with the Big Lie about the 2020 election, which Trump still insists he won, and the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
The straightforward explanation for Trump’s Confederacy fetish is that he’s a virulent racist who would’ve enslaved people himself. If you think that’s hyperbolic, just listen to what he said earlier this week. During a phone interview Tuesday on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Trump argued that undocumented farm workers, primarily of Hispanic descent, are “naturally” suited for backbreaking farm labor, contrasting them with “people that live in the inner city” (that is, Black people) who “are not doing that work.”
This rhetoric mirrors the white supremacist justification for slavery. (Mississippi’s declaration of succession declared that "by an impervious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.") It’s also quite the flip from Trump’s previous assertion on the campaign trail that illegal immigrants were taking “Black jobs.” That was meant to broaden “America first” to include Black Americans. Now, he lets the Klan flag fly and claims that Black people are either too lazy or incompetent for manual labor.
The Confederacy was an overtly white supremacist nation, but one that we might now consider an oligarchy. After all, a small minority of Southerners were enslavers, so the war effort required that many dirt poor white people fight for the interests of a wealthy, privileged few. This was achieved through promising a “way of life” where the poorest whites were always above Black people on the social hierarchy. MAGA does the same, though Trump now pits working class Americans of all races against immigrants and queer people.
Trump might see inspiration in the success of the Lost Cause myth. The Confederacy was not technically a cult of personality during the war, but post-war resentments transformed Robert E. Lee into a divine figure within Southern culture. An egomaniac like Trump can only hope to be remembered similarly in the states where a critical mass of the population worships him — many of them not coincidentally in the former Confederacy.
It’s an obvious lie when Hegseth claims that MAGA doesn’t believe in “erasing American history.” In fact, MAGA treats history like a “spoils system.” They won the last election, so they will actively erase any historical truths Trump finds offensive — including his own impeachments. Hegseth ordered the Navy to rename the ship that bore the name of gay rights icon Harvey Milk — during Pride Month. Washington DC’s Black Lives Matter mural was painted over as Trump threatens to seize “take over” the predominately Black city.
Restoring Confederate memorials is yet another way for Trump to assert his dominance and make clear whose lives and experiences he believes truly matter.
That’s it for today
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I'm surprised Rs don't erect monuments -- not "memorials', but 'monuments' - to other important figures in history we need to know about: the Rosenbergs, say. Or, more to their liking: Stalin, Hitler, Marx, Tojo. All people who had profound effects on Americans. And honestly - more in line with their policy views.
Stephen, your excellent piece is loaded with so much food for thought. As a born and bred Louisianian, early on I was indoctrinated about the nobility of the Confederacy's Lost Cause. I was told (not by my parents, mind you) that the Civil War was fought to preserve states rights not slavery. It was not too many years later that I figured out that was all BS and that the whole point of the war was to maintain the cruel enslavement of human beings to the enrichment of the upper class plantation owners (oligarchs). Quite some time ago, I came to the same conclusion that you did: erecting monuments to the Confederate insurrectionists and traitors of the USA is like Germany erecting monuments to glorify the murderous Nazi regime. On the parish courthouse grounds where I live, there was once a monument to honor the Confederates who died in the insurrection/rebellion but as providence would have it, it was blown off its pedestal during hurricane Laura in 2020 and it hasn't been replaced. Ah, poetic justice. Growing up, I frequently heard the chilling words that "The South shall rise again." With the help of the vapid Secretary of Defense and Cheeto-face, the epitaph is coming true before our very eyes.