Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made it official on Tuesday: “The Reconciliation Monument,” a controversial Confederate-era statue by Moses Ezekiel, will be returning to its longtime home at Arlington National Cemetery. Hegseth didn’t sugarcoat the announcement. Posting on X, he called the statue “beautiful and historic” and slammed the Pentagon’s 2023 decision to remove it, blaming “woke lemmings” for what he described as a politically motivated erasure of American history.
And he’s not alone.
Conservatives have long argued that the statue — originally unveiled in 1914 by President Woodrow Wilson — wasn’t about glorifying the Confederacy but rather commemorating national unity and healing. That’s why it was placed at Arlington in the first place, just steps from where Ezekiel himself, a Jewish Confederate veteran turned sculptor, is buried with honors.
Let’s back up.
The statue’s removal in 2023 came during a sweeping push by the Pentagon to rename military bases and remove monuments tied to the Confederacy. That campaign reached into cemeteries, town squares, and even classrooms, with the stated goal of distancing American institutions from anything perceived to “honor” the Confederacy.
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
But critics saw the move as something else: a scorched-earth cultural purge that steamrolled nuance in favor of political posturing. The monument, they argued, wasn’t a Confederate rallying cry — it was a symbol of reconciliation, literally commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy after Congress authorized the reburial of Confederate dead at Arlington.
Ezekiel, the sculptor, is a complicated figure in his own right. A Jewish-American who served in the Confederate army, he went on to study anatomy, sculpt internationally, and earn accolades from both Northern and Southern figures. His work has been featured by the Smithsonian and celebrated in artistic circles for over a century.
Now, with Trump’s Pentagon taking a sledgehammer to woke-era policies, Hegseth says it’s time to bring the statue home. “We don’t believe in erasing American history,” he wrote. “We honor it.”
