This story is excerpted from Capitolized, a weekly newsletter featuring expert reporting, analysis and insight from the reporters and editors of Montana Free Press. Want to see Capitolized in your inbox every Thursday? Sign up here.

---

Call it a “monumental” decision.

The last thing on the U.S. House agenda before lawmakers left town June 15 for a week-long district work period, aka recess, was a three-day amendment slog ending in the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act. [H.R.8070]

Among the amendments to that act was No. 44, which rekindled a festering debate over a bronze Confederate memorial portraying a life-sized Black “Mammy” holding up a white child for a goodbye kiss from its war-bound father. A Black slave trailing his uniformed owner is also depicted as part of the “Reconciliation Memorial.”

The amendment “directs the Secretary of the Army to relocate the Reconciliation Memorial, also known as the Reconciliation Monument, to its original location in Arlington National Cemetery.”

The monument was removed from the federal cemetery in December 2023 after a flurry of legal challenges. 

Both Montana Reps. Matt Rosendale and Ryan Zinke voted for the measure proposed by Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican. Amendment 44 failed 198 to 230. It was opposed by just 24 House Republicans.

“As a policy, Zinke doesn’t support the removal of monuments and memorials,” chief of staff Heather Swift told Montana Free Press. “Give context and clarify if necessary, but erasing history is not the answer.”

A text to Rosendale’s deputy chief of staff didn’t get a response.

The NDAA is a must-pass bill setting funding levels for military spending. 

Congress has used the bill since 2015 to mandate the removal of Confederate references from government facilities. Confederate flags have come down and military bases named after Confederate officers have been renamed. Memorials, including the Reconciliation Monument, have been dismantled or relocated.

The public opinion tipping point that started the removal movement was the 2015 murder of nine Black patrons at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. States and cities followed the federal lead, including Helena, which removed its Confederate memorial from Hill Park in 2017.

The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis policeman in 2020 and ensuing protests added further momentum for the removal of Confederate monuments from public spaces — momentum that didn’t extend to the White House of Donald Trump.

Trump in 2020 vetoed that year’s NDAA in part because “I have been clear in my opposition to politically motivated attempts like this to wash away history and to dishonor the immense progress our country has fought for in realizing our founding principles,” according to his letter to Congress explaining the decision. 

Historically Montana has been slow to respond to matters of race. State government didn’t recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a state holiday until 1991, eight years after President Ronald Reagan signed the holiday into federal law. Montana was three states shy of being the last state to do so.

There are currently 19 states that don’t recognize Juneteenth as a paid holiday, Montana among them. In 2021, when the U.S. House created the holiday, which commemorates the end of slavery and the end of the Civil War, Rosendale was one of 14 lawmakers opposed to the bill.

After the vote, Rosendale tweeted that the establishment of Juneteenth was an attempt to subvert the Fourth of July holiday.

Both Montana representatives signed a letter in December opposing the removal of the Reconciliation Monument. The letter argued that the memorial was a gesture of unity to the South made in 1914. There are 200 Confederate soldiers buried around it.

Note: This story originally appeared on Montana Free Press. It is published under a Creative Commons license.