President Donald Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Tuesday that he is proud to have the Moses Ezekiel sculpture, known as ‘The Reconciliation Monument,’ returned to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Hegeth said: “It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”
[Note: Hegseth was himself accused of “erasing American history” in March when he ordered the military to remove content from the Pentagon database that highlights diversity efforts in its ranks. Approximately 26,000 photos — a vast majority of them featuring women and minorities — were flagged for removal.]
According to conservative news site Blaze Media, ‘The Reconciliation Monument’ was “initially swept up in the moral fervor of the early 2020s — but mistakenly so, because the story it tells is exactly the kind of story Americans needed to hear in those angry years.”
In December 2023, the Confederate Memorial was removed from the Cemetery and stored in a secure Department of Defense facility in Virginia.
I’m proud to announce that Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture — often referred to as “The Reconciliation Monument” — will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site.
It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike…
— Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (@SecDef) August 5, 2025
At the time of the removal, according to the Arlington National Cemetery, the monument offered “a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.” Two of these figures portrayed in the sculpture are African American: “an enslaved woman depicted as a ‘Mammy,’ holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.”
The ANC also said the monument “romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans.”
Ezekiel, a White Confederate veteran, designed the monument which was unveiled in 1914. He was buried near the base of the sculpture in 1921. The Arlington National Cemetery would remain segregated until 1948, when President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order.
Note: The Blaze reported: “It will take an estimated two years to reassemble the 32-foot sculpture, restore it, and prepare it for display in 2027 alongside interpretive panels that will explain the complicated history around America’s Civil War and the slow path to reconciliation.”