WASHINGTON (OSV News) — The National Park Service announced Aug. 4 that it will restore and reinstall a statue of a senior Confederate officer in the nation’s capital that was toppled during riots following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
The statue depicting Albert Pike, a Confederate general and Freemason, will be returned to a location near Judiciary Square, a section of Washington occupied by various federal and municipal courthouses and office buildings.
“The restoration aligns with federal responsibilities under historic preservation law as well as recent executive orders to beautify the nation’s capital and re-instate pre-existing statues,” NPS said in a press release.
The release said the statue, originally authorized by Congress in 1898 and dedicated in 1901, “honors Pike’s leadership in Freemasonry, including his 32 years as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient Rite of Scottish Freemasonry.”
Freemason ties
Stephen A. West, an associate professor of history at The Catholic University of America in Washington, told OSV News, “Sometimes, you hear people say that we need to leave up monuments of figures whom we don’t revere or whom the public doesn’t — in some cases — even know about, because to tear them down, to take them down, would be to destroy or erase our history. And I don’t agree with that point of view.”
“I don’t think the Pike statue should have been torn off its pedestal by protesters, because I don’t think any public property should be treated that way,” he added. “But I don’t, as a general matter, have a problem with the idea that public opinions, who we regard as heroes from the past, our attitudes and as our values change as we change, we choose to commemorate different parts of the past than people did 100, 150 years ago.”
Freemasons were behind the erection of the statue, which was, prior to its removal, the only statue honoring a Confederate official in the nation’s capital outside of a museum, although he is depicted as a Masonic leader in civilian dress.
The church maintains that Freemasonry is incompatible with being Catholic. It considers Masonry a “heresy,” in part because it defines the Supreme Being as “the Great Architect of the Universe” and denies the divinity of Christ.
“The statue has been in secure storage since its removal and is currently undergoing restoration by the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Training Center,” the NPS release added.
Confederate statue controversy
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, said in a statement, “I’ve long believed Confederate statues should be placed in museums as historical artifacts, not remain in parks and locations that imply honor.”
“The decision to honor Albert Pike by reinstalling the Pike statue is as odd and indefensible as it is morally objectionable,” Norton said. “Pike served dishonorably. He took up arms against the United States, misappropriated funds, and was ultimately captured and imprisoned by his own troops. He resigned in disgrace after committing a war crime and dishonoring even his own Confederate military service. Even those who want Confederate statues to remain standing would have to justify awarding Pike any honor, considering his history.”
“Given the NPS announcement that it will reinstall the statue, I plan to reintroduce my bill to remove the Pike statue and authorize the Secretary of the Interior to donate the statue to a museum or a similar entity,” she added. “A statue honoring a racist and a traitor has no place on the streets of D.C.”
Anti-Catholicism
But some also pointed to a record of anti-Catholicism from Pike.
The CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, a project of the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock that seeks to document the state history of Arkansas, said in an article about Pike that his “anti-Catholicism led him to join the Know-Nothing Party upon its creation,” a nativist, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political movement.
Pike attended the party’s 1856 national convention, but “joined other Southern delegates in walking out of the convention” when it did not “adopt a strong pro-slavery platform,” according to the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
West explained that for those who shared Pike’s politics in that era, “the anti-Catholicism is not the main point of participation in this political party, but they’re perfectly happy to be in league with it.”
Some historians say Pike went on to join the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War, but others, including the Freemasons dispute that claim. However, chapters of the KKK were named after him in multiple states.
Historical impact
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, argued in a written statement to OSV News, “It was wrong to take down the statue of Albert Pike in 2020, and it is wrong to object to reinstalling it now.”
“Yes, he was an anti-Catholic — and that should not be ignored — but attempts to whitewash American history are not only offensive, they reek of phoniness. Who is going to pass the test of modern-day purists who judge history by today’s standards?” he said.
Asked about the statue’s restoration, Grant Jones, executive director of the Knights of Peter Claver, said the organization does not typically comment on politically sensitive topics, but expressed concern about “the direction in which the country is heading,” as one that is “very unfortunate and antithetical to the church’s teachings.”
West told OSV News that he takes his students on walking tours around Washington, “and what I tell them is that when you pass a memorial, the thing to know about the memorial is that it actually tells you about the people who put it up more than it tells you about the person that it seems to be memorializing.”
“And so with Albert Pike, he’s a Confederate, he’s a Know Nothing. He’s a Mason. He’s a number of different things, but it’s the Masons who put up the statue to him. That’s how they wanted to memorialize him,” he said, adding that it also shows the Masons had the “money and power” to get the land to do so at the turn of the 20th century.
“I’ve taken them on tours where we’ve looked at the empty pedestal,” West said of his students. “Part of what I’ll tell them is the history of why the statue went up, why it was taken down and why it was put back up.”
“Because I don’t think the government officials who were putting it back up have a particular knowledge of who Albert Pike is, or why he deserves to be memorialized,” West said, adding, “I would think they would be hard pressed to tell you why this is somebody that we should sort of honor and commemorate in the United States in 2025.”
Kate Scanlon is a national reporter for OSV News covering Washington. Follow her on X @kgscanlon.
