In 2022, a 20-foot-high portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was yanked off the walls of the US Military Academy's library in West Point, New York, after seven decades and put into storage. The move came after a 2020 law under President Biden that scrubbed the names of Confederate generals from US military bases, followed by a mandate from a related commission that West Point remove displays that "commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy." Now, that Lee painting will head back to the library, under the Pentagon's orders, officials tell the New York Times.
The paper notes it's not clear how Lee's portrait—which shows the military leader in his gray Confederate uniform in front of a horse led by a slave—can be reinstated without breaching the original legislation. At MSNBC, Steve Benen writes that he, too, hasn't "the foggiest idea" how government officials plan to get around the legalities and suggests they may simply be ignored. Whatever the plan, the Trump administration seems confident. "At West Point, the United States Military Academy is prepared to restore historical names, artifacts, and assets to their original form and place," an Army spokeswoman tells the Times. "Under this administration, we honor our history and learn from it—we don't erase it."
Lee, a West Point grad, served as the academy's superintendent for three years in the 1850s; other portraits of him not wearing a Confederate uniform were permitted to remain. Both President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have vocalized their support for reverting to Confederate names, monuments, and other symbols that disappeared over the past few years. Per the Independent, Trump in June indicated he wanted to bring back military base names tied to the Confederacy, including Virginia's Fort Lee, which was temporarily changed to Fort Gregg-Adams in the Biden era.
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For the name changes they reverted to, however, Hegseth and his team circumvented the 2020 law by naming the bases after "obscure soldiers who served honorably and shared a last name with the Confederate generals," per the Times. In other words, the new Fort Lee is named not after Robert E., but after Pvt. Fitz Lee, a Black soldier who served in the Spanish-American War. Fort Bragg, meanwhile, lost its direct connection to Confederate leader Braxton Bragg and is now named for Pvt. Roland L. Bragg, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
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