The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.
Coming at a particularly odd time, given the resurgence of the type of views that the monument represents1, the Federal Government is removing the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.
A massive allegorical work, the monument by Moses Jacob Ezekiel2 portrays the Southern cause heroically, and includes a slave in the "mammy" role, saddened by the departure of her soldier owner.
Probably always offensive, the work was part of the rise of the Lost Cause myth in the early 20th Century, which is when many of these monuments date from. It's being removed and will be relocated at a park dedicated to Confederate monuments.
This process has been going on for a while. Under President Biden, military posts named for Confederate generals have been renamed, but even before that, monuments in Southern states started coming down on a local basis. Interestingly, right now the Southern cause is strongly in mind as Donald Trump tacks closer and closer to the secessionist's view of the nation that brought the war about and which preserved racial segregation for a century thereafter.
The monument itself was located in the Confederate Section of Arlington, which was created in 1900 at the request of those who felt that Confederate dead in the cemetery should be located together. Ironically, the move was opposed by some in the South, who felt that they should be relocated to "Southern soil". Laying of the cornerstone of the monument came in 1912, and it was dedicated, Woodrow Wilson in attendance, in 1914.
Things like this are particularly problematic in various ways. For one thing, the monument is a work of art, and as such it has its own merits, no matter how dramatically flawed its image of the Southern cause was. And they have, interestingly, an image of the South which was, while false, sort of bizarrely aspirational in that it depicted, as many such monuments of that period for that cause do, a South which was a yeoman state, when in reality the South was controlled by strong large scale economic interest to the detriment of the Southern yeoman, and certainly to the massive detriment of Southern blacks.
And they also reflect a period of American history, lasting roughly from the end of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era, when the nation as a whole adopted a false view of itself, or at least a large portion of itself. They reflect, therefore, the zeitgeist of that time and our own. Removing the monuments is understandable, but it doesn't cure the massive defect of past racism and slavery. It does serve to help us forget how racist we once were, and not only in the 1776 to 1865 time frame, but the 1865 to mid 1970s time frame as well.
Footnotes:
1. Just this past week Donald Trump, whose acolytes sometimes brandish the Confederate battle flat at his events, or in support of him in general, spoke of immigrants "poisoning" the blood of Americans, much like Southern Americans sometimes did in regard to desegregation in the 1960s. The Nazi allegory has come up frequently, but to my ear, perhaps because I'm old enough to remember the tail end of that era, it sounds more the Southern view of the 60s or even 70s.
2. This work is by far Ezekiel's best known one. Interestingly, another major one is an allegorical monument from the 1870s dedicated to and entitled Religious Liberty.
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