Local opinion: Here's the history lesson that Trump, Hegseth obviously need

Starting on Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, President Trump and Secretary of Defense (War) Hegseth began to distort, misinterpret or delete the precious thread that unites us, the history of our great nation.

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which takes aim at the Smithsonian Institution’s displays he finds divisive” or “anti-American” while calling for the restoration of monuments and statues he feels were inappropriately removed.

Almost immediately, Hegseth started deleting parts of our history he deemed unfit, including the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the brave African American pilots who defended US bomber squadrons from the Luftwaffe. He also deleted a picture of the B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay, mistakenly thinking it was pro-LBGTQ propaganda and not the airplane that dropped the first nuclear bomb in world history. These two inexcusable errors were later corrected, but Trump and Hegseth were off to the races, erasing all things DEI from military websites and service academy libraries while retaining the military accomplishments of straight white men.

Secretary Hegseth next ordered the restoration of two Confederate monuments to Arlington National Cemetery. The Albert Pike Statue honors a pro-slavery, anti-Catholic general who quit the Confederate Army in 1862 after disgracing himself in combat by forgetting to prepare for a Union counterattack during an unimportant skirmish.

The “Reconciliation Monument” was described by a nonpartisan Congressional commission as a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including sanitized depictions of slavery.” This abominable ode to slavery also depicts a slave following his master into war and a female slave sculpted as a “mammy” holding the child of a white officer while words in English and Latin allude to the nobility of the Southern cause.

At this juncture, I offer the Dynamic Duo of Historical Revisionism a brief history lesson.

After four unimaginably brutal years, the American Civil War ended and was quickly followed by the Reconstruction, a government program meant to bring the Southern states back into the Union and to protect the civil rights of the former slaves.

With its hasty termination in 1877, the Jim Crow Era began in earnest. This period, which lasted into the 1960s, was filled with murder and mayhem directed against African Americans. The Equal Justice Initiative has documented over 4,400 cases of lynching of Blacks, some of which were advertised in local newspapers, making them public spectacles where people sometimes bid on the victim’s body parts to be taken as souvenirs.

Night riders, white equestrian mobs, added to the terror by assaulting, torturing, raping, and murdering thousands of African Americans in their homes. Simultaneously, the myth of “The Lost Cause” was taking hold. Its ideology included the beliefs that the Antebellum South was an idyllic period (for whites) that was lost over a righteous conflict to defend states’ rights, and slavery was a benevolent Christian institution that brought true religion to an inferior people. It is this time, 1900-20, when we see the tremendous rise in statues and monuments to the Confederacy. Instead of looking at its war leaders as immoral defenders of slavery, they were looked upon as noble heroes and protectors of a halcyon way of life. It was as if the South had actually won the war, the white race reigned supreme, and the African Americans were subjugated to near-slave status.

Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth need to learn that when groups of people secede from their own country and unsuccessfully take up arms against it to preserve the immoral institution of slavery, the losers are not permitted to erect monuments to honor their leaders and other participants.

The statues they built were not erected to honor the heroism of their people but to reassert their perceived superiority and dominance over African Americans. These monuments should be preserved in historical buildings so we can learn not only about the people and time they lived in, but also when and for what reason they were built. And these two gentlemen should learn to rejoice in the accomplishments of all our people, not delete parts of it in the name of literally whitewashing our past.