Catholic University Professor Speaks Out Against Confederate Romanticization
Image courtesy of CNN.
By Paul Manetto
When making a regular visit to Arlington National Cemetery, Catholic University history professor Stephen West noticed something unusual. On the site of a former Confederate Memorial, erected in 1914 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and removed in 2023 under the Biden administration, the plaque placed as a marker, noting the “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy” alongside “highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” had been updated to remove any language regarding the offensive nature of the statue. This came after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced in 2025 that he would be reinstalling the statue to the Cemetery grounds.
While debate surrounds how modern society should respond to statues of Confederate soldiers, the Arlington memorial stood out as uniquely offensive in that it depicted two slaves: a female being handed a baby by a Confederate soldier and an unarmed male accompanying his enslaver to war. Dr. West soon found himself being interviewed by the Washington Post and, later in the week, on Jake Tapper’s The Lead, attempting to clarify the nature of the statue and speak against further romanticized images of the Confederacy.
The actual process of appearing on TV was fairly straightforward, according to Dr. West. Invited on because of the comments made for the Washington Post, he made his way to CNN’s DC studio (by Union Station), was brought in for hair and makeup, and then sent to wait in the green room, or backstage prep location, until being brought live onto Tapper’s set. Tapper asked West for context on the statue and aid in explaining particularly disturbing aspects of the monument. Dr. West also spoke on a broader trend of the Trump Administration removing aspects of African American history, namely in the military and defense arena. The Tower reached out to Dr. West, asking him to comment more broadly on the issue at large.
A graduate of Columbia University, Dr. West’s primary focus as a historian is the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. He chose this area of study because “it was a transformative period in American life. Americans literally battled each other over the fate of the country. If one side – the Confederacy – won, the Union would be destroyed. Instead, the Union was saved, and slavery was destroyed, at tremendous cost.” Particularly interesting to Dr. West is the way “the Civil War has been remembered and misremembered by Americans ever since,” citing monuments to leaders like Lincoln and Grant and to the Lost Cause (a historical term for Confederate romanticization) depictions of Confederate pride like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind.
To Dr. West, speaking publicly on the removal is part of his duty as a history teacher. “It’s important that we share that knowledge not just in the classroom and academic publications, but in the public arena when it’s relevant,” he told The Tower. “Monuments and memorials are really not a very good way to learn about the history of the people and events they depict. But memorials are a great way to learn about the time period when they went up and about the people who put them up.”
This memorial represents the ideas of the period of “Jim Crow, when Black southerners were systematically denied equal rights – voting rights, civil rights, equal access to schools, transportation, and other public facilities. That political agenda was supported by the myth of the Lost Cause – falsified ideas about the history of slavery and the Civil War that were reflected in the Confederate Memorial.”
