The Trump administration censored language criticizing a monument to the Confederacy that previously stood at Arlington National Cemetery, removing a reference to the memorial’s “nostalgic, mythologized vision.”
The bronze statue depicting Confederate soldiers alongside enslaved people stood for more than a century before being removed in 2023 as part of a congressional mandate to remove symbols honoring the Confederacy on U.S. military property. The cemetery’s website described the memorial as showing “a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.”
That language, along with further explanation of how history has “denied the horrors of slavery,” has been scrubbed ahead of a planned reinstallment next year. A marker at the former memorial site has also been replaced, with the new version missing any mention of slavery.
“Our website serves to provide facts for all visitors regarding monuments and memorials. Arlington National Cemetery’s decision to update website language and signage at Section 16 was made to ensure it was succinct, factual, current and objective,” a cemetery spokesperson said.
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Historian Karen Cox said the language removed from the website was “absolutely accurate” historical context around the statue, which plays into the false idea that the South didn’t fight the Civil War to keep slavery but rather to protect states’ rights.
“Built into that narrative are lies,” she said. “It’s an attempt by the South to justify the confederacy, justify its role in the war and provide this gauzy haze over the Old South and slavery.”
Cox said the statue has been drawn into the GOP culture war as the Trump administration pushes back on what it calls “woke history” and attacks the discipline as a whole.
Last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a social media post announcing the return of the statue that it should never have been taken down. He referred to it as “The Reconciliation Monument.”
“Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it,” he wrote.
President Donald Trump has ordered the revision of multiple exhibits and descriptions of slavery and racism since his return to the White House as part of an effort to remove references to “corrosive ideology.” From Boston’s Bunker Hill to Washington’s Smithsonian institutions, discussions of race have been altered, removed or censored.
The debate over Confederate statues heated up in 2015 after a shooting killed nine congregation members at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina. After protests across the U.S., some cities began removing statues that honored Confederate soldiers and generals. Almost 150 statues were removed between 2015 and 2020.
Trump has worked to replace some of them, including a sculpture of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that stood in D.C.’s Judiciary Square until 2020 when protestors tore it down and set it on fire. The statue was re-erected last year, and is the only outdoor monument in D.C. to honor a Confederate general.
This story was updated with a comment from an Arlington National Cemetery spokesperson.
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