Unlike the left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it. — Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, after announcing last month the return of a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery.
The memorial to “honor” as history is a statue sculpted by Moses Ezekiel — unveiled in 1914 — commemorating soldiers of the Confederate States of America. The statue was removed in 2023 because it features sentimental images of Confederate soldiers and “loyal” Black slaves. Its removal was part of the Biden administration’s decision to no longer glorify the Confederacy or slavery. Hegseth plans to return the statue, which he has described as “beautiful and historic,” to Arlington.
Hegseth is confusing memory and history. Memory is a subjective, selective, and personal recollection of the past. It is group-oriented and often emotional in its content and purposes. Memory focuses frequently on objects and monuments. History is a critical and analytical interpretation of the past. It aims at objectivity. History is written or exhibited by sifting through evidence, which can be letters, contemporaneously published documents, archaeological findings, oral recollections, art, and the like. History is revised through debate and the uncovering of new evidence or new ways — guided by changing mores and historical developments — of looking at old evidence. (For example: In the 19th century, most people believed in innate intellectual differences among the races and accepted the biblical justifications for slavery. Today, most people do not believe in intrinsic racial differences and most do not interpret the Bible literally. Those changes alter how society views slavery and, hence, the causes of the Civil War.)
Memory is how a society chooses to remember the past. As the late historian Arno Mayer observed, memory “is unequivocal and uncontested, [while] history is polyphonic and open to debate.” Memory, Mayer added, “tends to rigidify over time, while history calls for revision.” Confederate statues — such as the Ezekiel memorial — are memory, not history.
The removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, did not erase the Confederate general from history. The removal simply reflected a societal decision that a man who led a rebellion that killed hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the military that Hegseth now leads should not be memorialized. As an American who believes slavery is our nation’s “original sin” and insurrection is treason, I applauded the tearing down of the statue of a treasonous enslaver. As a student of history, I have a biography of Lee on my bookshelf. Why? Because Lee was an important player in American history. He should be studied. But not honored nor memorialized.
Memory often distorts history. Take Lee, around whom many myths swirl, as an example. Lee is often portrayed as a brilliant military strategist. Yet, he sent thousands of Confederate soldiers to be mowed down in Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg, It was a futile attack opposed by James Longstreet, a high-ranking Confederate general. Lee persisted in fighting a conventional war against a more densely populated and industrialized adversary, rather than adopting guerrilla tactics or other unconventional modes of warfare. Another myth portrays Lee as a kindly enslaver (an oxymoron if ever there were one); the truth is Lee was not shy in using the whip or other tools of coercion. Memory does not include the ugly truths about Lee and the Confederacy; history does.
The Ezekiel statue is just one of several attempts by the Trump regime to revive memory of the Confederacy. The revival reflects the regime’s appeal to far-right MAGA elements who view the United States as a white Christian nation and have antipathy to the civil rights laws of the last half century as well as disdain for people of color. Accordingly, Hegseth’s Pentagon is restoring to the West Point library a portrait of Lee that had been removed three years ago. The portrait shows a slave guiding the general’s horse in the background. The Pentagon is reinstating the names of Confederate generals on military bases in defiance of a congressionally mandated law — enacted over President Donald Trump’s veto during his first term — requiring the removal of those names. The Defense Department is engaging in subterfuge to skirt the law; for example, Fort Bragg supposedly now takes its name from an Army paratrooper who served during World War II rather from General Braxton Bragg, the Confederate general for whom the fort was originally named. No one is fooled. Then again, the Pentagon is probably not trying to fool anyone.
There is much irony in the citing of history by Hegseth for all this, given that he is part of a regime that is sanitizing the history that it does not like. Trump has attacked Smithsonian museums as “OUT OF CONTROL,” and the regime has announced plans to replace “divisive” and “ideological” exhibits with those it calls “historical” and “constructive.” Offending items, according to the regime, include programs and artwork highlighting Black, Latino, and LGBTQ+ perspectives and an exhibit depicting, rightly, that Benjamin Franklin was an enslaver. On the list of Trump’s complaints: Exhibits showing “how bad Slavery was.” It is hard to imagine that — in 2025 — anyone, let alone the president, questions the odiousness of slavery. But, then again, the Trump regime is not interested in analytical interpretations of history. It is, rather, engaging in propaganda, which may be defined as memory at the behest of the governing powers.
Sometimes history buttresses, even encourages, the development of society’s memory of the past. In the American experience, something like this happened after the end of Reconstruction with the myth of the “Lost Cause,” the memory of how the nation remembered the Civil War and its causes. The “Lost Cause” depicted the antebellum South as a noble society composed of kindly, for the most part, enslavers and happily enslaved Blacks incapable of enjoying and benefitting from freedom. The Civil War, according to the myth, occurred because a small cadre of single-minded abolitionists in the North willingly endangered the Union in pursuit of emancipating the enslaved. The South fought, not to preserve slavery, but to maintain its “way of life” and to protect states’ rights.
It is often true that history is written by the winners. But, after the Civil War, that aphorism was upended by the influx into the historical profession of Northerners interested in promoting national reconciliation and white Southerners. The prevailing view of Reconstruction that emerged in the early 20th century typified the white pro-Southern viewpoint. The so-called “Dunning school,” named for William Dunning who taught at Columbia University, held that white Southerners accepted military defeat and emancipation, but were unduly and harshly punished by vindictive Radical Republicans in Congress, who imposed military rule on the South. With the Union army in control, the South was governed by a corrupt alliance of “ignorant” former slaves, Northern “carpetbaggers,” and Southern “scalawags.” Southern “Redeemers,” aided by Northerners weary of Civil War and Reconstruction, overthrew the last military governments in 1877, putting into power in the South the same class — often the big pre-War plantation owners — who led the South into rebellion. This view of the past took root when history fused with memory.
In the last half of the 20th century, encouraged by the Civil Rights movement, historians took a fresh look at the American past, revisited the evidence, and revised their interpretations of the Civil War and Reconstruction. First and foremost, it became clear that slavery was the casus belli of the Civil War and the brutality of enslavement was stressed. Reconstruction is now interpreted as a noble attempt to create a biracial society that fell short.
This is the history that the Trump regime wants to undermine and replace with a selective memory of the past that honors the Confederacy. That the nation would be debating these issues 160 years after the end of the Civil War was unimaginable only a few years ago. But here we are, with a regime in control of the national government that idolizes the “Lost Cause” and those who led a rebellion against the United States. That, of course, is not so surprising when we remember January 6, 2021. Nor is it surprising when we contemplate a future in which the Trump regime may stage an internal coup — an insurrection — aimed at remaining in power,
Posted September 5, 2025
Judah's reminder about the distinction between "history" and "memory" is a useful and very helpful one in 2025.