Arlington National Cemetery was famously Robert E. Lee's estate before the war. So exactly when was this monument ever in the cemetery, and why did it get in in the first place?
In 1900, Congress authorized Confederate remains to be reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery, which designated a special section for them (in what is now Section 16). The Confederate Memorial was erected there in 1914.
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However, to understand more fully why Confederate graves are at a former Union cemetery, and to interpret the memorial’s symbolism, it is necessary to delve more deeply into historical context. By the turn of the twentieth century, Arlington had become a truly national cemetery, a transformation that occurred amidst reconciliation between North and South, enduring racial inequality, and a new war. Reconstruction — the U.S. government’s efforts to reunify the nation and transform the South’s former slavery-based society — effectively ended in 1877. That year, President Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from Southern states, allowing for sectional reconciliation but also the systemic disenfranchisement of African Americans, enforced by white violence and racial segregation in the South. In 1898, mobilization for war against Spain, and the United States’ expanding global power, reinforced a sense of national unity — at least among many white Americans.
In this context, the U.S. government reassessed its policies on Confederate burials.
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President William McKinley kicked off his “Peace Jubilee” nationwide tour with a speech in Atlanta in which he proclaimed, “in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers…. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories.”
Notably, this “spirit of fraternity” did not include African Americans. In 1871, a group of black soldiers had petitioned the War Department to relocate the graves of hundreds of United States Colored Troops (USCT) from the “Lower Cemetery,” where they were buried alongside former slaves and poor whites, to the main cemetery near Arlington House, where white Civil War veterans lay at rest. The War Department denied the petition. Arlington National Cemetery would remain segregated until 1948, when President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order.
Meanwhile, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) identified Confederate graves around the Washington, D.C. area and successfully petitioned the government to have those remains transferred to Arlington. On June 6, 1900, Congress appropriated $2,500 for the removal and reinterment of Confederate remains. By 1902, 262 Confederate bodies were interred in a specially designated section, Section 16. Unlike the orderly rows in the rest of the cemetery, graves in the Confederate section were arranged in concentric rings. Their headstones also looked different: while having the same dimensions as regular government headstones, the Confederate headstones featured pointed tops. The cemetery added more Confederate graves over the years, eventually totaling more than 400.
On June 7, 1903, the first Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies were held in Arlington's Confederate section. President Theodore Roosevelt sent a floral arrangement, beginning a tradition continued by nearly every U.S. president. In 2009, President Barack Obama modified the tradition, sending two wreaths: one to the Confederate Memorial, the other to Washington, D.C.’s African American Civil War Memorial, in honor of U.S. Colored Troops.
In 1906, with Secretary of War William Howard Taft’s approval, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (a hereditary organization of Southern women) began raising funds to erect a memorial in the Confederate section. Through such voluntary civic organizations, women led many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to commemorate wars and to mourn the dead — and, in so doing, women gained influence in public life even before they won the right to vote. (In another example of women’s commemorative efforts, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America was responsible for creating the Spanish-American War Memorial.)
Unveiled in 1914, the Confederate Memorial was designed by noted American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of Virginia Military Institute. The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery. Standing on a 32-foot-tall pedestal, a bronze, classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, represents the American South. She holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet: "They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks." The statue stands on a pedestal with four cinerary urns, one for each year of the war, and is supported by a frieze with 14 shields, one for each of the 11 Confederate states and the border states of Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. Thirty-two life-sized figures depict mythical gods alongside Southern soldiers and civilians.
Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans. The image of the faithful slave, embodied in the two figures on the memorial, appeared widely in American popular culture during the 1910s through 1930s, perhaps most famously in the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind.”
I just started watching gone with the wind and 15 minutes in I am already revolted by the depiction of a little girl fanning the 'ladies' while these get a nap.
I understand the context of slavery, I sort of understand when they show the full force of the people picking cotton (which was disgusting as well) and I remember to myself, it's their own time, it already happened. I can sort of add a parallel and re contextualize it as if they are adult "workers", which they are not because I'm pretty sure lot of them were minors
When they show the woman having to serve these people for life, and worry about their kids as if they were hers, because her life depended on it, same thing, one can try to add a similar likeness to a "Nanny", which again she is not
But the little girl having her future just written since before birth that's absolutely disgusting. Why should she be denied of a future built by herself, just to serve these pampered wenches?
I mean son of a fuck
I'll keep watching but holy hell HBO'S warning message before the movie started was on point
Can we get a statue of a diapered 45 standing on a platform held up by the working class surrounded by the likes of people like Mike Johnson and bitch McConnell bending a knee to the fool.
There are 437 people who vote, some are bound to have other obligations. Also, Republicans consistently try to hold votes for their policies when they know democrats can't make it to vote. This was proven out when they tried to pass something horrible (as always) and a dude left the hospital so he could vote against it, which was followed by a chorus of republican crying because "he wasn't supposed to be there to vote against it!"
Republicans/Conservatives are the absolute worst people in history.
Congressmen are not completely stupid, with 3 or 5 notable exceptions. The GOP knew they were losing this vote. They didn't try to pass anything. Hell, many, maybe most, either don't care or don't even want the cursed thing back.
This is pure virtue signaling for their constituents. How many of the GOP "nay" votes do you figure are solid seats with no chance of getting primaried? How many "yea" voters were worried about being called out in a campaign ad? Be interesting to analyze.
As to what that says about GOP voters, go nuts in the comments and remember to like and subscribe.
I understand your sentiment but don't you think they would do the world more good in an exhibit or museum that explains the cultural context? Those who forget are doomed etc.
Personally that feels like a slippery slope to me. I agree destroying history just because it has become distasteful is not a good solution. At the same time museum context is not always as good as it should be. It is often written by someone who doesn't have any personal experience.
Generally I would say yes but a lot of confederate monuments were made after the war so aren't so much history but an attempt to rewrite it to make themselves look more favorable.
Robert E Lee statues exist despite Lee stating he believes no statues of the Confederacy should be built and all should be torn down, as historically he recognized that it only sows division and takes a country longer to heal from.
All such statues (especially of him) would clearly be an act to not allow the country to heal quickly.
It's federal property. I'm not saying you shouldn't. But you'll face federal consequences and not state.
It absolutely astounds me that the federal government, the government that defeated the Confederacy, has a statue to commemorate their enemy in the war.
It'd be like having an Osama Bin Laden statue in NYC.
Honestly, it's not as bad as I expected. It's one of those ones with a big angel on top, and then a bunch of scenes around the base, and I'm assuming the problematic bits are just among the scenes somewhere.
I'm not saying it should be restored, but it's not like it's a statue of only the bad stuff. I could see how someone who doesn't really care could look at the picture from afar and go "what!? They took down a commemorative grave monument? Sacrilege!"
I guess what I'm saying is that it's not like they necessarily voted to put up a big statue of a slave, they voted to put up a statue with many figures, including a slave in it somewhere. Still probably best to leave it gone, though.
Your analogy is good but sadly you're mistaken about "there would be no conversation to be had." There's a part of the Wrong Wing party that would fight for it.
When I was reading the description, this is the part that made me certain it needed to go:
This Latin phrase means: "The Victorious Cause was Pleasing to the Gods, But the Lost Cause Pleased Cato." It is a quotation from the poem Pharsalia by the ancient Roman poet Lucan. It refers to the attempt by the Roman Senator Pompey to prevent Julius Caesar from becoming dictator of Rome in 49 BC. Although he lost, Pompey's actions pleased the great philosopher and statesman Cato (who was noted for his moral integrity).
While the modern monotheistic God is thought of as inherently good and right, the Greek gods were frequently bad and immoral. I think the implication is that though fate or whatever powers that be made them lose, they were right and moral.
Oh that's right, I hadn't thought about the morals of the Greek gods being questionable, but it still implies that the creator saw slavery as being moral, which is pretty sick...
Sculptor Moses Ezekiel included the weeping figure of the loyal black mammy as a correction to what he and the UDC saw as lies about history perpetrated by the North.
Yep. Andrew Clyde is a fuckin asshole and always has been. He owns a gun store that he made look like a fortress and it's half the reason anyone even voted for him.
I have some weird rabbit hole ideas about Reddit doing what it did and when. I think all public spaces are being restricted if it can't be controlled as wanted by the powers that be, Reddit was outside that power and WB may be the biggest example and how stocks were played out there did not follow the designed path which was disliked by those who could restrict or stop it. I resisted leaving Reddit because I almost felt like it was designed to get us to leave the public space. But I was really spending too much time there and I feel a lot better by not arguing about issues instead of discussing them.
I've mentioned this two days ago. I didn't test it because I don't have an account there any more, but I'm predicting that they'll slowly remove functionality from old.reddit by redirecting it to the new one.
And, really, in another context getting rid of the old interface would be sensible. Because you expect the newer one to be improved. You got to be dumb as a snoo to do it like Reddit did, where the newer interface isn't just markedly different from the old one, but crappy.
(inb4 yes, the admin said "nooo we aren't removing old reddit lol". And my cat said that she wouldn't scratch my furnitures.)
haven't all UI changes in most product made things worse lately? The "2010s generation" of software solutions has been growing up on investment rather than profit for a long time and we've experienced a weird decade in which getting users was more important than getting money from them. Now we're seeing the other side in which squeezing profit form each user is more important than retention. All solutions are getting crappier because they not meant evolved for their intended purpose anymore.
It's understandably like this, though. The way to quickly iterate on features that we do with modern agile development is much harder to do if you start off with a payment model right off the bat. You won't retain as many users because they are paying for something unknown just like the Early Access shit we have in the games industry. And investors are easier to get if you already have many users.
But indeed, once you get investors, that's when the enshittification starts, I believe. And once you go public as a company, then it's nothing but free-fall into an endless shit pit.
I disagree, this has nothing to do with software development models, It's all about purpose. If your website must start making money quickly, then you can be sure it will have a payment model regardless of how things are developed. Social media business (and others) translated user growth into investment models: you give us this much money at this "completely made up valuation" and we'll use it to grow our user-base by this much.
This was possible because interest rates have been very low for the most of the 2010s. This meant that investors would be losing money if they held on to it so they just threw it at "the new tech" hoping something would stick. In the past few years, inflation has driven the interest rates very high and it means that money is not cheap anymore so all these businesses now have to transition to a money making model. That's all.
Right, but the reason why you employ an agile software development model in the first place is because you want to make money fast. The slow waterfall development models don't really lend themselves to fast bucks, do they.
what relevance would that have over the time span discussed here?
And no, whatever you read about agile, the development speed comes down to people not to procedure. That's true even if we disregard the fact that very few companies claiming to use agile actually understand what agile is
Well you seem very sure of yourself so everything you say must be correct. Whatever I read is false, whatever I've experienced myself is false, gonna take this dude's word for it. ✔️
Agile is of course a tool, and you use it to achieve your goals. And of course it comes down to the people using it. Just like a hammer is useless to a centipede. I'm just saying, I'm comparing agile to waterfall as the only changing variable factor.
you're attributing a state of fact to a cause that has nothing to do with it. I'm not nitpicking, i'm pointing out a fallacy: the effect doesn't prove the cause, it only works the other way around
Yeah, a contributing factor for sure. Just like whatever company produced the pencils used by Einstein was a contributing factor to the theory of relativity. Not a sole factor. No, not a sole factor but a factor. Yes
It’s crap. VPN login almost never works, and I have to disable my ad blocker and tracking protection to succeed.
It’s ridiculous. What, are you going to start requiring cash payments for successful login? It’s garbage. I strongly advise avoiding the use of Reddit wherever possible due to the obvious malicious intent.
They want to harvest as much data as they can and would rather you use the app, which is also garbage, meanwhile the chains continue to tighten around users who don’t leave.
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