WASHINGTON — Two Washington, D.C.-area statues commemorating the Confederacy will be restored and replaced, in line with President Donald Trump’s pushback on recent efforts to reframe America’s historical narrative.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that a statue commemorating the Confederacy would be returned to Arlington National Cemetery. The statue, which Hegseth referred to as “The Reconciliation Monument,” was removed in 2023.
The National Park Service announced Monday that the statue of Albert Pike, a Confederate brigadier general and a revered figure among Freemasons, would resume its previous position in Washington’s Judiciary Square, a few blocks from the U.S. Capitol. It was the only outdoor statue of a Confederate military leader in the nation’s capital.
The statue was pulled down with ropes and chains on Juneteenth in 2020 as part of mass protests following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Confederate statues around the country were toppled by similar protests while several military bases named for Confederate leaders were renamed.
The Pike statue restoration, which is targeted for October, “aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and reinstate pre-existing statues,” the park service said in a statement.
On social media Tuesday, Hegseth said the Arlington statue “never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history — we honor it.”
In 2022, an independent commission recommended that the memorial be taken down, as part of its final report to Congress on renaming of military bases and assets that commemorate the Confederacy.
The statue, unveiled in 1914, features a bronze woman, crowned with olive leaves, standing on a 32-foot pedestal, and was designed to represent the American South. Some of the figures also on the statue include a Black woman depicted as “Mammy” holding what is said to be the child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.
In March, Trump issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It decried post-Floyd efforts to reinterpret American history, stating, “rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame.”
The order targeted the Smithsonian network of museums as having “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” It also instructed the Interior Department to restore any statue or display that was “removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”
Pike, who died in 1891, is more known for his decades-long stint as a senior leader of the Freemasons than for his Confederate military career. The Masons lobbied Congress for the right to erect the statue on NPS land in 1901 — provided that he be depicted in civilian, not military, garb.
But Pike did lead a regiment for the Confederacy during the Civil War. And as the only outdoor statue of a Confederate leader in Washington, D.C., it had been a source of controversy for decades. Even the brief Park Service page on the statue notes that it has “stirred opposition since it was first planned.”
The D.C. Council asked for its removal in 1992. In 2017, Mayor Muriel Bowser struck an agreement with congressional leaders to eventually remove it.
When protesters toppled the statue in 2020 while police officers looked on, Trump — then in his first term — called it “a disgrace to our Country” on social media and called for their immediate arrests.
Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington’s non-voting delegate in Congress, called the Park Service move “odd and indefensible” in a statement Monday. Norton said she would introduce legislation to remove the statue permanently and place it in a museum.
“I’ve long believed Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts,” she said, “not remain in parks and locations that imply honor.”