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Friend,
Thanks to a bipartisan measure included in the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, all iconography glorifying the Confederacy at military installations in the U.S. – memorials, statues, building names and other symbols – must be removed by Jan. 1.
This requirement is federal law.
The military has already made progress toward its goal, changing the names of bases that honored traitors and recently planning to remove the Confederate memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
Now opponents of these changes are attempting to distort and misrepresent history, using propaganda that pro-Confederates have employed since the end of the Civil War. The most prominent and dangerous Confederate propaganda erases slavery as the Confederate cause and promotes the idea that the Confederacy somehow stands for “unity” in American memory.
In a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, Jim Webb, a former U.S. senator from Virginia and also a former U.S. Navy secretary, pulled out both tricks in his defense of Arlington’s Confederate memorial.
We must correct the historical record and reflect on the real sources of unity and division in our country.
False Unity
According to Webb, the memorial at Arlington was part of President William McKinley’s project of national unity, something he began, Webb claims, by appointing former Confederate Gen. Joseph Wheeler in the Spanish-American War.
It is true that McKinley appointed Wheeler. It is also true that during the war, while leading troops into battle, Wheeler – apparently forgetting where he was – cried, “Let’s go, boys! We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run again.”
So much for unity.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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