MARCH 30, 1921 - The Final Chapter: Moses Ezekiel's Funeral at Arlington

Coming Home: Part 6 - The Funeral

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The Funeral

He died on March 27, 1917, in his studio in the Tower of Belisarius.

The Confederate battle flag was on the wall. The incomplete bronze of Francis Henney Smith stood in the corner. Outside the high windows, Rome went about its ancient business, indifferent to the passing of one more man, even a great one.

The New York Times dispatch from Rome reported that the death of Moses Ezekiel, the distinguished and greatly beloved American sculptor who had lived in Rome for more than forty years, caused universal regret. It was not an exaggeration. He had been part of the fabric of that city for a lifetime. Kings had honored him there. Composers had sat for their portraits there. Cardinals and presidents and painters had passed through those rooms and gone away with something they had not expected to find.

Now the rooms were quiet.

Among his effects they found the letter. He had written it against this moment, with the particular clarity of a man who has thought carefully about what matters. He wanted to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. At the foot of the Confederate Memorial. Among his Confederate brothers.

Secretary of War Newton Baker approved the request. The War Department granted his last wish.

Then the war intervened.

The Great War that had been consuming Europe when Moses died was not finished with the world yet. The submarines that prowled the Atlantic made the transport of remains impossible. For four years Moses Ezekiel lay in temporary entombment in Rome while the war ended and the world tried to put itself back together and the paperwork moved through the machinery of two governments at the pace that paperwork always moves.

Four years.

The body that had run barefoot across the Field of Lost Shoes, that had held Thomas Garland Jefferson through his last hours, that had worked for fifty years in the studios of Rome, lay waiting for permission to come home.

On February 27, 1921, the waiting ended.

His remains were shipped aboard the Duca degli Abruzzi from Naples, Italy. The ship that carried him was named for a prince of the House of Savoy, the Italian royal family that had knighted Moses Ezekiel and given him the titles Chevalier and Officer of the Crown of Italy. Even in death the Italian connection held. The ship crossed the Atlantic and brought him home to the country of his birth.

Late in life he had written of VMI, where every stone and blade of grass is dear to me, and the name of the cadet of the VMI, the proudest and most honored title I can ever possess.

He was coming home as a cadet of the VMI.

March 30, 1921.

The air had that particular chill that settles into wool and does not leave. The end of March in Washington is always that way. The trees along the paths of Arlington National Cemetery were still mostly bare. The grass had begun to green but had not committed to it. Winter was not quite done with Virginia.

It was the kind of morning that makes Arlington even more piercing than usual.

The new Memorial Amphitheater stood at the top of the hill, its marble columns white against the gray sky. It had been dedicated less than a year before, in May 1920. No funeral had ever been held in it. Moses Ezekiel's would be the first. He was the only man whose life had earned that particular distinction.

The procession formed in the chill of the morning.

Six distinguished men served as pallbearers. Edwin A. Alderman, President of the University of Virginia. Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, who would one day be Speaker of the House of Representatives, for whom the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill is named. C. Powell Minnigerode, Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Congressman R. Walton Moore of Virginia. Reed Williams, formerly Assistant Secretary of War in the Wilson Administration. George J. Zolnay, sculptor and President of the Washington Art Club.

Six men whose presence told the story of a life without a word of eulogy.

The casket they carried was draped in an American flag. It was covered in flowers provided by the Washington Daughters of the Confederacy, placed in memory of the late Colonel Hilary A. Herbert, chairman of the Arlington Confederate Memorial Association, the man who had first brought Moses Ezekiel and this commission together in Washington eleven years before.

Eight VMI cadets stood at attention along the walkway as the casket passed. Among them was a young cadet named Randolph McC. Pate, VMI class of 1921. He was twenty years old. He could not have known, standing at attention on that cold March morning, that he would one day become the twenty-first Commandant of the United States Marine Corps. He stood at rigid attention as his brother cadet came home.

The Masons of Washington Centennial Lodge No. 14, Free and Accepted Masons, processed in their dark coats and white aprons, carrying an enormous floral wreath. They walked with the solemnity of men who understood ritual and meant it. Moses Ezekiel had been one of them. Nearly all the men of Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalome had been Masons. It ran in his blood going back to his father Jacob and the Richmond congregation of his boyhood. It was fitting that they were here at the end.

The United States Marine Band played as the procession moved through the bare trees of Arlington. The music that drifted over the cemetery that morning was not a march. It was Liszt. Love's Dream. A composition by the man who had sat for his portrait bust in the Roman studio and called the sculptor a genius. Franz Liszt had been dead for thirty-five years. His music was alive on that path.

The amphitheater filled.

Newspapers from every state in the Union would cover the event. The Cincinnati Enquirer, where Moses had deep ties from his years in that city, would run the story on its front page the following morning under the headline Lesson of Americanism Drawn by Harding From Monument Marking Ezekiel's Grave. The Daily Sentinel in Rome, New York, covered it. Papers across the country covered it. The nation was watching.

The ceremony opened with the reading of President Warren G. Harding's letter. The President of the United States could not attend but he had written carefully and at length, and what he wrote deserves to be heard in full.

He turned his thoughts to his own country, Harding wrote, and as the final and finest product of his talents gave to us the monument that from this day will mark his resting place.

He called Moses Ezekiel a great Virginian, a great artist, a great American, and a great citizen of world fame.

He wrote: He served his state in the conflict that threatened to divide, and that at last served to unify our country. He accepted the verdict of the Civil War's arbitrament with all that fine generosity that has been characteristic of both the North and South.

And then Harding wrote the sentence that the Cincinnati Enquirer put in its headline. The sentence that tells you what that morning was really about.

It is the memorial of reunited America, the testimony to the tradition of an indissoluble union, the shrine to which are gathered today, and will gather through the years to come, those who would dedicate themselves to the ideal of unselfish, enlightened, upstanding Americanism as a force for our country's maintenance and all of humanity's betterment.

The letter was read by Mrs. Marion Butler, wife of former North Carolina Senator Marion Butler.

Secretary of War John W. Weeks gave the principal address.

Then Italian Ambassador Rolandi Ricci rose to speak.

He had come to this amphitheater, on this cold March morning in Washington, to speak for Italy. He addressed Moses Ezekiel as an adopted son of Italy. The man who had come to Rome as a young prize-winner with his Prix de Rome money in his pocket and stayed for forty years. The man who had flown a Confederate battle flag in his Roman studio for four decades. The man whose work had moved the Italian government to honor him with titles and medals and knighthood. Ambassador Ricci had also attended the evening Masonic service the night before, at the Scottish Rite Temple, and spoken there as well. He was not merely paying diplomatic courtesy. He was speaking for a nation that had genuinely claimed this man.

Then Colonel Robert E. Lee rose to speak.

He was the grandson of General Robert E. Lee. He spoke on Sir Moses Ezekiel as an American and as a Southerner. The grandson of the man who had told a young VMI cadet to become an artist, who had charged him to prove to the world that if they did not succeed in their struggle they were worthy of success, stood in the marble amphitheater at Arlington and bore witness to the fulfillment of that charge.

Moses Ezekiel had proved it.

Rabbi David Philipson of Cincinnati had charge of the religious ceremony. He was Ezekiel's rabbi, the man who had known him in Cincinnati in the years before Europe, who had maintained that connection across decades and an ocean. He gave a tribute and the closing prayer. He would write a monograph on Ezekiel the following year. He understood who this man was, all of him, and he said it in that amphitheater with the Confederate Memorial visible through the marble columns and the grave waiting just beyond.

Then the Masonic burial was conducted by Washington Centennial Lodge No. 14. The ancient rites of the brotherhood over the remains of their brother. The same brotherhood that had run through Kahal Kadosh Beth Shalome going back to Jacob Ezekiel and the Richmond of Moses's boyhood. The circle that had begun in that modest house on Old Market Street closed here in white marble and winter light.

The casket was carried from the amphitheater to Section 16.

The Confederate Memorial stood at the center of Jackson Circle exactly where it had stood since June 4, 1914. The woman representing the South faced southward, her laurel wreath extended, her pruning hook resting on the plow blade. The thirty-two figures wrapped around the base. The inscription at her feet. Not for fame or reward. Not for place or for rank. But in simple obedience to duty as they understood it.

Moses Ezekiel had spent four years of his life building this. He had spent five thousand dollars of his own money to finish it. He had called it New South. He had stood in the rain at its dedication and watched the President of the United States accept it on behalf of the American people. He had gone back to Rome and put the flag back on the wall.

Now he was home.

The casket was lowered into the ground at the foot of the memorial. Among his Confederate brothers in the concentric circles of Section 16. Among the men he had been trying to speak for since he ran across that field in the mud and smoke and watched his friends fall.

A small headstone was placed.

By his own instruction it said nothing about the knighthoods. Nothing about the Prix de Rome. Nothing about the two hundred works in bronze and marble scattered across two continents. Nothing about Liszt or Grant or the Emperor of Germany or the King of Italy. Nothing about the Confederate Memorial or any of the other monuments he had made.

It said this and only this.

Moses J. Ezekiel

Sergeant of Company C

Battalion of Cadets

Virginia Military Institute

That was enough for him.

That evening, the United Daughters of the Confederacy held a separate ceremony at the Scottish Rite Temple. The women who had raised the money, who had managed the commission, who had brought Moses Ezekiel to Arlington in 1910 and signed the contract that made the Confederate Memorial possible, gathered to say their own farewell. Ambassador Rolandi Ricci was there again. He spoke again on Ezekiel as an adopted son of Italy. A poem was read. Eulogies were given on Ezekiel as a Mason, as a sculptor, as an American, as a son of the South.

The Washington Daughters of the Confederacy had provided the flowers on his casket in memory of Hilary Herbert. Herbert had not lived to see this day. But the women who carried his cause forward had made sure his name was present.

In the subsequent years, except in Virginia and in academic circles, Moses Ezekiel's memory faded.

The art world had moved on. The classical style he had mastered with such dedication was no longer fashionable. The modernists had taken over and Moses had rejected them, had refused Rodin as pretentious, had kept working in the tradition he believed in until he died. Fame is a fickle thing and the world forgot him in stages, the way it forgets all men who refuse to change with it.

But the memorial stood.

For one hundred and nine years the Confederate Memorial stood at the center of Section 16 at Arlington National Cemetery. Presidents sent wreaths to it every Memorial Day for generations. Union and Confederate veterans had stood together at its dedication. Moses Ezekiel lay at its foot, identified on his headstone as nothing more and nothing less than a cadet of the Virginia Military Institute.

Then, between Hanukkah and Christmas in December 2023, the memorial was removed.

Eight hundred and twenty nine days ago as of today.

The man who built it still lies at its foot. His headstone is still there. The grave is still there. The inscription is still there. Sergeant of Company C. Battalion of Cadets. Virginia Military Institute.

They can remove the memorial. They cannot remove the man.

Moses Ezekiel carried three hundred years of survival in his blood. He survived New Market. He survived the death of his friend Thomas in his arms. He survived the burning of VMI and the end of the Confederacy and forty years as an expatriate in a foreign country. He survived the fashion of his era moving past him.

He survived.

He is irreducible.

March 30, 2026, one hundred and five years after they carried him home to Arlington, we bring him home again.

We say his name.

We tell his story.

We refuse to let him be erased.

Today marks 829 days since the Confederate Memorial was removed from Arlington National Cemetery.

Coming Home is a Six-Part Series on the Life, Death, and Funeral of Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel.

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A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

The Naming Commission was established by Congress in 2021 to rename Department of Defense assets bearing Confederate names. Its mandate was narrow. Its reach was not.

T

he Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery was not a base. Not a ship. Not a building named to honor the Confederacy. It was a grave marker for Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a man buried with full military honors at the foot of his own creation, by order of the Secretary of War of the United States.

President Warren G. Harding called it the memorial of reunited America. The Washington Post called it a memorial of heroic size, commemorating war, but dedicated to peace.

The Naming Commission called it racist.

They said it sanitized slavery. They recommended its removal. Congress approved it. Then they waited for their moment.

The removal was carried out on December 20, 2023, while Congress was on Christmas recess and its members could not answer the millions of calls flooding their offices demanding it be stopped. Forty-four members of Congress sent a letter to the Department of Defense ordering a stand down. The Department ignored it. They were hellbent on the destruction of reconciliation and they moved when they calculated no one could stop them.

Southerners took note.

Moses Ezekiel knew Mary and Keziah and Lucy and Betty by name. He drew their faces from memory sixty years after he last saw them. He placed them in the bronze so that no one who ever stood before that memorial could pretend they had not existed. That is not sanitizing. That is the opposite of erasing.

The Commission erased him anyway.

They erased the first funeral ever held in the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater. They erased the President's letter calling him a great American and a great citizen of world fame. They erased the Italian Ambassador who wept for him. They erased the eight VMI cadets who stood at rigid attention as his flag-draped casket passed. They erased one hundred and nine years of American history in the name of correcting it.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has promised the memorial's return by 2027.

That is not good enough.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence falls on July 4, 2026. We cannot stand on the ground of Arlington National Cemetery and celebrate the founding of this nation while a piece of its history sits in a warehouse. We cannot speak of reconciliation while practicing erasure. We cannot honor the dead while disturbing their graves.

The American people do not erase history. They reckon with it. They preserve it. They argue about it. They carry it forward. That is what free people do.

Put it back.

Let all nations see what a free people does.

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-By Mindy Esposito / March 30, 2026 / Nashville, Tennessee

Mindy Esposito is an independent historian, writer, and Confederate heritage advocate based in Nashville, Tennessee. She has spent more than two decades in primary source research on nineteenth and twentieth century American history.

☆☆☆☆☆

COMING HOME: A Six-Part Series

Bibliography Part Six

Primary Sources

- Cincinnati Enquirer, March 31, 1921. "Lesson of Americanism Drawn by Harding From Monument Marking Ezekiel's Grave." Page 16.

- The Standard-Times (New Bedford, Massachusetts), March 30, 1921. "Buried in Arlington: Memorial Exercises Held for Sir Moses Ezekiel." Page 9.

- The American Israelite (Cincinnati, Ohio), March 31, 1921. "Burial of Sir Moses Ezekiel." Page 4.

- Harding, Warren G. Letter read at the funeral of Sir Moses Jacob Ezekiel, Arlington National Cemetery, March 30, 1921. As quoted in the Cincinnati Enquirer, March 31, 1921, and reproduced in Defend Arlington research summary, 2023.

- Defend Arlington. "Summary of Moses Ezekiel's Funeral/Interment as Described in the Cincinnati Enquirer Article." Research document provided by Lunelle Davis, March 2026.

- Ezekiel, Moses Jacob. Memoirs from the Baths of Diocletian. Edited by Joseph Gutmann and Stanley F. Chyet. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975.

- Moses J. Ezekiel Papers, Manuscript 0010. Virginia Military Institute Archives, Lexington, Virginia.

- New York Times. Dispatch from Rome reporting the death of Moses Ezekiel, March 1917. As cited in Jewish Virtual Library and VMI Archives sources.

Secondary Sources

- American Battlefield Trust. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel." Hallowed Ground Magazine, Summer 2010. battlefields.org.

- Arlington Cemetery. "Sir Moses Ezekiel." arlingtoncemetery.net.

- Arlington Memorial Amphitheater. Wikipedia. First funeral account and dedication history.

- Confederate Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery. Wikipedia. Removal date and reinstatement announcement.

- Gibson, Keith. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844-1917)." Encyclopedia Virginia, December 7, 2020.

- Jewish Virtual Library. "Moses Ezekiel." jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Funeral details, Sampson D. Oppenheim tribute.

- Nash, Peter Adam. Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor of the Gilded Age. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014.

- Sephardic Horizons. "Discovering Moses Ezekiel." Vol. 7, Issue 1-2.

- United Daughters of the Confederacy. Press release on removal of the Confederate Memorial. hqudc.org. 2023.

- VMI Archives. "Moses Jacob Ezekiel." vmi.edu. Biography, honor guard details, headstone inscription.Tower of Belisarius

COMING HOME: MOSES EZEKIEL'S FUNERAL AT ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY | The Funeral The Final Chapter