# Arlington Confederate Memorial A large bronze monument — known to its defenders as the **"Reconciliation Monument"** — that stood at Arlington National Cemetery from 1914 to 2023. It was commissioned by the [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]], sculpted by **Moses Ezekiel** (a Jewish American who had himself fought for the Confederacy), and unveiled by President [[Woodrow Wilson]] in 1914. The monument is a near-perfect specimen of [[The Lost Cause]] in bronze: it presents a nostalgic, mythologized Confederacy, including sanitized depictions of slavery — among them an enslaved man following his master to war and a "mammy" figure holding an officer's child — and ringed the base with the coats of arms of several non-Confederate states to inflate the rebellion's apparent reach. ## Removal (December 2023) The congressionally chartered Naming Commission — the same body that drove the [[Confederate-Named Military Bases]] renamings — recommended the monument's removal. It came down in **December 2023** and was moved to a Department of Defense storage facility in Virginia. The commission's report described the sculpture's vision of the Confederacy as historically false and its imagery of slavery as propaganda. ## The Return (2025– ) In **August 2025**, Defense Secretary [[Pete Hegseth]] announced the monument would be returned to Arlington, framing its removal as the work of "woke lemmings." The Army subsequently put the reinstallation cost at roughly **$10 million** with a refurbished monument expected back at the cemetery around **2027**. The reversal placed Arlington squarely inside the 2025– restoration wave alongside the [[Albert Pike Statue]] and the base renamings, and made it the most expensive single item in that wave. ## Why It Matters Here The Arlington memorial is the restoration wave's highest-prestige target: a monument on the nation's most sacred military ground, removed by a bipartisan commission process and slated to return by executive decision at eight-figure cost. It pairs with the Pike statue to show the wave operating across both Interior (Pike) and Defense (Arlington) jurisdictions. ## See Also - [[Contested Symbols Hub]] — the category map - [[Confederate Monuments]] — the phenomenon-level catalog - [[Albert Pike Statue]] — the parallel reinstallation, on Interior land - [[Confederate-Named Military Bases]] — the same commission, the same reversal - [[The Lost Cause]] · [[United Daughters of the Confederacy]]