As part of a Trump administration effort to restore “truth and sanity” to American history, national parks visitors are now encouraged to report “inappropriate” markers and displays. Most comments from the public have praised the parks, complimented the rangers or urged reversal of Trump’s funding cuts. Among the few negative reports, one Yellowstone visitor complained that the bison had “delayed traffic.”
I have a report to make about two inappropriate, if not anti-American, displays planned for our public spaces — by the Trump administration itself.
The first concerns the National Park Service’s plan to install the statue of a traitorous American who fought for an enemy country in a war against the U.S. that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers. His name is Albert Pike, a Confederate army general whose outdoor statue in Washington D.C. was toppled during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
By levying war against the U.S. government and aiding and abetting its enemies, Pike’s behavior fits the constitutional definition of treason. And, according to historian Allen W. Trelease in “White Terror,” Pike “may well have been affiliated” with the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan, the most savage domestic terrorist organization in American history.
The second is even worse: Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is planning to restore a monument that celebrates slavery to Arlington National Cemetery — which, while not a national park, is considered the nation’s “most hallowed” ground.
“The Reconciliation Monument,” as it is formally known, was unveiled in 1914. It includes grotesque imagery: an enslaved Black man following his owner and an enslaved woman cradling the baby of a Confederate officer (described on the cemetery’s website as a “mammy”).
In 2023, the bipartisan Naming Commission established by Congress ordered the removal of the monument. Retired Army Brigadier General Ty Seidule, the commission’s vice chair, called it “the cruelest I’ve ever seen because it’s a pro-slavery, pro-segregation, anti-United States monument meant to say that the white South was right and the United States of America was wrong.”
Hegseth defended returning the monument by saying “we’re proud of our history.” That includes American slavery, apparently. Hegseth recently reposted on social media a seven-minute news clip about the self-described Christian nationalist co-founder of his church denomination. Among many other controversial things the pastor says in the clip, he doubles down on an assertion he made decades earlier, that slave owners and slaves had “a mutually affectionate relationship.”
Shouldn’t a secretary of Defense know something about American history, especially the Civil War and the barbarity of slavery, which is nothing to be proud of?
The monument bears an inscription that describes the Civil War as the “Lost Cause,” the revisionist myth — call it “Confederate woke” — that the South’s enslaved were happy and content and that the war was fought not over slavery, but over states’ rights. In fact, Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederate States of America, declared at the war’s outset that the Confederacy was founded upon “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
By restoring a pro-slavery monument to Arlington, Hegseth is not honoring our history but dishonoring the Union soldiers buried in the cemetery. It became necessary to create Arlington in 1864 because by then Northern cemeteries were running out of room for dead Union soldiers. But their sacrifice ended slavery in the U.S.
The Civil War, in which as many as three-quarters of a million men died, was not fought over an abstract theory of federalism. The Confederacy cannot be separated from the cause for which it fought. “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong,” as Lincoln said.
When you visit our parks and shrines, please report anti-American messaging such as this.
Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of “Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia.”