The Face of the Naming Commission

As I predicted last month, the Naming Commission has recommended the removal of the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. The commission has been tasked with, “providing naming, renaming, and removal recommendations to Congress for all Department of Defense items that commemorate the Confederate States of America or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America.”

This final report has not yet been made available to the public, but it does bring the commission’s work to a close. From here, Congress and the military must make the final decisions about what to rename, remove, etc.

For many of you the, the face of the commission throughout this process has been Ty Seidule. Dr. Seidule is a retired army officer, who taught for a time at West Point before moving on to Hamilton College. His book, Robert E. Lee and Me, published in 2020, explores the author’s journey growing up revering the Lost Cause and all things Confederate and the challenge of finally coming to terms with it.

The book has sold tens of thousands of copies.

I first learned about Dr. Seidule back in 2015 with the release of a short video on the cause of the Civil War. In it he clearly lays explains how slavery led to secession and war in 1861. Nothing in the video was particularly controversial, but it quickly went viral, generating millions of views and heated debate. Interestingly, the video was produced by and posted to Prager University’s YouTube page. Prager is known for their 5-minute videos that offer a conservative perspective on a wide range of subjects.

Here was a man in military uniform not only laying out what every reputable historian recognizes as the standard history, but at the end offered the following: “As a soldier I am proud that the United States army, my army, defeated the Confederates. In its finest hour, soldiers, wearing this blue uniform, almost two hundred thousand of them, former slaves themselves, destroyed chattel slavery, freed 4 million men, women, and children from human bondage and saved the United States of America.”

At the time, the nation was still coming to terms with the murder of nine African-American churchgoers in Charleston, SC by a young man who embraced Confederate symbols. The Confederate flag had been removed in Columbia and other states were debating removing the flag from prominent public spaces.

Few people at the time had any clear sense of just how dramatically our monument landscape would change in the coming years.

Dr. Seidule is currently working on his next book, which I am very much looking forward to reading.