When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that he would return a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, he blamed “woke lemmings” for it having been taken down. Created by the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, the statue in question, which Hegseth described as “beautiful and historic,” features sentimental images of Confederate soldiers and loyal Black slaves. It was first installed in the cemetery in 1914 and was removed in late 2023, as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to remove memorials that glorified the Confederate cause and to rechristen bases whose names lionized traitors to the United States. The war against the Confederacy killed more than 300,000 members of the military that Hegseth leads—a grim fact that the defense secretary trivializes in his efforts to score political points against the left.
Hegseth’s move is one of several by the Trump administration to bring Confederate commemorations back. On Thursday, The New York Times reported that the Pentagon is returning a portrait of Robert E. Lee to West Point. The Pentagon has reinstated old base names—in defiance of a law, enacted in 2021 over Donald Trump’s veto, that required their removal—by identifying honorable but previously obscure veterans who share a surname with rebel generals such as Lee and George Pickett. A statue of the Confederate general Albert Pike, pulled down during the 2020 George Floyd protests, is being reinstalled in Washington, D.C., by the National Park Service.
“Unlike the left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it,” Hegseth said after announcing the return of the Ezekiel sculpture. That claim is hard to square with Trump’s recent complaint on Truth Social that the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL” because of its museums’ focus on “how bad Slavery was.”
At best, Hegseth is going out of his way to needle and mock Americans who rightly see the Confederacy for what it was—a treasonous, doomed effort to keep millions of Americans in bondage. At worst, he and the Trump administration are making common cause with apologists who believe that the wrong side won the Civil War. Many people who refuse to repudiate even Confederate leaders claim they are merely honoring battlefield sacrifices of common soldiers. Americans should reject this sophistry.
My family has a tradition of military service. When I was a U.S. Army artillery officer during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I thought about my immigrant grandfather, who had been an artilleryman during World War II. Despite my love and admiration for him, I sometimes found him scary when I was a child—he had a quick temper and a thick Sicilian accent that I often struggled to parse. Once I’d seen combat, I felt proud to have shared an experience with him and wrote to him to discuss it. That he died before my letter reached him in Los Angeles is one of my great regrets in life.
But my reverence for my grandfather didn’t change an important fact about his service: He had fought in Mussolini’s army. He and his comrades had tried to repel the American invasion of Sicily—the combat debut of the 82nd Airborne Division, the very unit in which I served as it moved toward Baghdad six decades later. Fortunately, my grandfather lost.
Many Americans have ancestors who took up for bad causes. My children are descendants, on their maternal side, of two great-grandfathers who fought in Normandy on D-Day. One landed on Utah Beach. The other was already present as a soldier in the German army. I hope my kids never feel obliged to make excuses for the latter’s cause.
As a military brat, I lived in Germany at a time when many people vividly remembered the war years. On weekends, my family and I used to hike through Bavarian fields that abutted small graveyards, where fresh flowers lay alongside crosses holding the pictures of young Wehrmacht soldiers. These families were mourning their sons, brothers, and fathers without glorifying Hitler or National Socialism.
Americans can similarly pay proper respect to military sacrifice while rejecting Confederate nostalgia. In small-town public squares across the South—a region in which I have spent much of my adult life—I have seen countless statues and monuments dedicated to local residents who did not return from the Civil War. Many of these solemnly recount the names of the dead without rhapsodizing about the Confederate cause.
Like many institutions, the Virginia Military Institute, my undergraduate alma mater, has struggled to balance the two impulses. The school was deeply enmeshed in the Confederate cause. In its graduation rituals every May, the school commemorates cadets who died for the Confederacy at the 1864 Battle of New Market. It also holds a huge commissioning ceremony to honor the newest officers from VMI, who are entering the Army those cadets were fighting.
The New Market commemoration includes the placement of wreaths on the graves of six VMI cadets who died. Looming over those graves is a statue called Virginia Mourning Her Dead, also by Ezekiel, the creator of the Arlington memorial. Before becoming a sculptor, Ezekiel was the first Jewish person to attend VMI, and he saw combat at New Market. One of his closest friends, a 17-year-old named Thomas G. Jefferson, was among the 10 cadets who died in the battle.
When I attended the school, a second Ezekiel statue stood on campus. It featured the Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, who had taught at VMI before the war. In 2021, VMI took down this statue and later relocated it to the New Market battlefield museum. The institute wasn’t erasing history; it was recognizing that an institution that educates officers for the U.S. military should not revere generals who helped lead wars against it. The school left in place the monument to the dead cadets, who, like their counterparts in countless other armies, were average teenagers, whipped up in the pursuit of adventure and eager to prove their manhood.
The Ezekiel work now set to be returned to Arlington—likely sometime in 2027, after a refurbishment—goes far beyond commemorating dead soldiers. It bears a Latin inscription that translates as “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause pleased Cato.” This quotation, from the poet Lucan, is widely interpreted as an observation that righteous efforts sometimes fail. But nothing was righteous about the rebellion against the United States, and paeans to it do not belong in a U.S. military cemetery.
I loved my grandfather who served in Mussolini’s army, and I am proud of my alma mater. But I am also proud to have held a commission in the Army that defeated them both.
