The other D.C. takeover

Resurrecting the Lost Cause at the Smithsonian Institution and Arlington National Cemetery

Today, Thursday, August 14, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll be speaking with messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio. Watch on desktop at The Ink or join from a phone or tablet with the Substack app. To participate in our conversations, become a supporting subscriber today.

We’ve talked already this week about the federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., and the outrage over the deployment of the National Guard to the capital on the thinnest of pretexts. It’s a blow to democracy, and Donald Trump’s ever-expanding ginned-up tale of an out-of-control urban American is part of an ongoing battle for control of the American story.

There’s another big takeover happening right now in D.C., and it needs to be seen in a similar light: this week’s letter calling for a “comprehensive review” of the collections at the Smithsonian Institution, the country’s preeminent repository of cultural memory, is part of that fight to rewrite the story.

Museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials.

That’s a big shift for an institution originally tasked with “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” But what, exactly, might “constructive descriptions” look like? The letter follows on Donald Trump’s March executive order on “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which has a few clues:

Museums in our Nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn — not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.

But practice can be more revealing than theory, and until we see exactly what’s in store for the Smithsonian, it’s worth looking across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery for some insight into how the regime thinks about what might “distort our shared history.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced this past week that the government would be spending $10 million to restore the sculpture commonly referred to as the “Confederate Memorial,” removed from Arlington in 2023 as part of a larger effort to remove Confederate references from U.S. military installations.

But according to Hegseth, the sculpture “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”

Now, there’s hardly a more divisive concept in American history than slavery; the central story of the Civil War, but the supposed “reconciliation monument” in question had little to do with reconciliation and everything to do with burying that divisive concept in favor of a very different story of the Confederacy.

The monument was built between 1912 and 1914; the artist behind it, Moses Ezekiel, was a staunch advocate of the Lost Cause — the recasting of the Confederacy as a noble endeavor, concealing the central role of slavery in an invented tale about the break with the Union as a tragedy based in honor, tradition, and a last-ditch effort to defend the notion of “states’ rights.”

The movement that grew up to advance the Lost Cause — “Redemption” — was at the height of its influence during the Woodrow Wilson administration, a period which saw the mainstreaming of white supremacy, the segregation of the federal workforce, and also the beginnings of the modern Civil Rights movement as Black communities pushed back. The majority of Confederate monuments in the U.S. are artifacts of this time, built in the first two decades of the 20th century, and not really about “history” at all. Monuments like Moses Ezekiel’s installation at Arlington were not so much memorials to the Civil War dead as advertisements for the Jim Crow order:

"Most of the people who were involved in erecting the monuments were not necessarily erecting a monument to the past," said Jane Dailey, an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago."But were rather, erecting them toward a white supremacist future."

Ezekiel’s living descendants, incidentally, were among those who called for the removal of the monument at Arlington.

And that’s the “American history” Hegseth asks us to honor, and the “truth and sanity” Trump’s executive order calls for — a story that’s already an invention, cooked up to conceal some of America’s worst sins. There’s a long history of “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” And the rebuilding of monuments, renaming of ships, and shadow restoration of Confederate military base names, and Vice President JD Vance’s embrace of the notion of “Heritage Americans” are all part of that very ideological distortion field.

The reason those military bases were named after Confederates in the first place? Lost Cause lobbying efforts.

[M]any of the posts were established around the time of World War I — about 50 years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The country needed camps to house and train troops. Southern towns feverishly lobbied for them and for the economic benefits they would bring.

The military officials in charge of naming the posts, including Brig. Gen. Joseph E. Kuhn, set only the vaguest of rules: The names should honor officers who had a connection to the region and who were “not unpopular” in the area, and they should be short, to save “clerical labor.” Beyond that, the Army seemed not to have cared much. In some cases, officials actively sought to name camps after Confederate commanders if Southern divisions were to be housed there.

At that time, nostalgia for the “Lost Cause” glories of the antebellum South was at its height. Statues and memorials to Confederate leaders were being erected. The film “Birth of a Nation,” a virulently racist glorification of Ku Klux Klan vigilantes, was released in 1915.

This early 20th-century white supremacist movement, as author Isabel Wilkerson told us, did more than build monuments. International nationalism might seem confusing, but it’s happened before — the defenders of the Lost Cause informed and inspired the Nazis:

The idea that German eugenicists actually were in dialogue with American eugenicists in the years leading up to the Third Reich. There were American eugenicists who were writing books, and those books were big sellers in Germany.

Of course the Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate, but they actually sent researchers to the United States to study the Jim Crow laws and anti-miscegenation laws so that they could see how the United States subjugated the African-Americans and then actually debated those laws as they were forming what would ultimately become the Nuremberg Laws. It's just stunning.

The point of calling any of this out now isn’t to reveal hypocrisy — in this day and age, that isn’t likely to convince anyone of anything. But it’s still important to understand that the very “history” in question here for Hegseth, Trump, Vance, and their allies is already something invented. It’s a resurrection of the mythology of the Lost Cause, which was an attempt at erasing history in the first place.

Understanding that is essential, for anyone who doesn’t believe in erasing American history — and does believe in honoring it, with all its faults.

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Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images