In part one I established that the Confederate Memorial page of the Arlington National Cemetery (ANC) website was rewritten early in 2020 and the new page was published on May 10, 2020. This new page is consistent with the current politics and language associated with the Confederacy.

The date of this change is important because it shows the Naming Commission stole from this page. A Congressional Commission is calling for the destruction of the Confederate Memorial based on what was copied from US Federal Government webpage.

What follows is where the exact wording from the ANC website appears in the Naming Report with a single footnote giving attribution to the ANC website. The ANC website does not cite any of its claims.

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).

In 1906, with…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.

…offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.

…a bronze, classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, represents the American South.

The monument’s pedestal features 14 shields, engraved with the coats of arms of the…

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.”

The Naming Commission copied 250 words from the ANC website and provided a single footnote at the end of one paragraph. I went to college a long time ago. Then, a single footnote at the end of a paragraph meant that the idea(s) in the paragraph came from someone other than the author. If something in the paragraph was copied from something else, it required quotation marks with a footnote at the end the quotation.

The Naming Commission plagiarized from the Arlington National Cemetery website. More tomorrow.