amazingly Senate panel voted to remove the names. We’ll know which GOP senators voted for it when Trump bashes them on twitter.
The thing that gets me about the Confederate named bases is how Trump is thinking about it. Remember when Trump said of John McCain, “I like people who weren’t captured”? It seems that he is okay with liking ‘Generals who don’t win’.
Yeah, even if you restrict the naming pool to Southerners. How 'bout the first African-American general in the US military, Benjamin Oliver Davis?
By the way, is it coinkydink that just a couple of days agot the Senate confirmed the first black service chief in the history of the US military, Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Q. Brown? Come to think of it, it probably is.
The answer to the claim that this fort or that monument is just a historical statement and we cannot forget history is to suggest that you rename it fort Benedict Arnold. He was a historical figure as worthy as any other traitorl
Looks like some in the GOP want the names changes as well…
*The Senate Armed Services Committee has approved a proposal to strip Confederate names from military bases and other Defense Department facilities within the next three years, setting up a possible clash with President Donald Trump on the issue.
While a number of Republicans, including committee Chairman Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, expressed some concerns about the way the changes would be implemented, the proposal passed by voice vote Wednesday with only a handful of dissenters.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., offered the proposal as an amendment to the massive National Defense Authorization Act, which authorizes funds and sets policies for the military every year; the broader bill was approved by the committee in a 25-2 vote. If the language survives the floor vote and is also included in the House version of the package, the president would have to veto the entire bill in order to prevent the names from changing.*
Way to go, Liz!
Bragg- Ok, he was a genuine hero before the CSA. And, like Jubilation T Cornpone, he was one of the best Generals the Union had- in the CSA. Ok, leave it.
Fort Benning- named for a notorious slavery backer. Change it.
Fort Pickett- asshole murdered unarmed Union prisoners. Change it.
Fort Polk- change it.
Ft Hood- Notorious racist. Change it.
Ft Gordon- KKK member or sympathizer. Change It.
Fort A.P. Hill- served honorably and notably pre CSA. Maybe
Camp Beauregard – P.G.T. Beauregard- noted racist. Change.
Fort Rucker – Edmund Rucker.KKK member or sympathizer. Change It.
Camp Wheeler,Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler , he fought long and honorable post Civil war, especially during the Spanish American war. leave it.
I favor Fort Jane Fonda and Fort Iva Toguri D’Aquino
Or Stand Watie, even.
Charles Henry Lee, Robert Howe ,Lachlan McIntosh, Peter Muhlenberg - all revolutionary war general from the South.
Joseph Stilwell, Omar Bradley,Lucius D. Clay,Anthony McAuliffe- all heroes and Southern.
If the Rangers could weather changing the black beret to a tan beret, the Army can certainly handle removing traitorous names from its military installations.
People really don’t appreciate that it’s fairly common for posts to be stood up, stood down, renamed, moved, abandoned, reoccupied, etc. It’s the Army. It moves and adapts.
The Navy had the better normal practice, just naming the base/station after the place it’s at, but they had the advantage that usually there was already a place to name it after by the time they got there. Meanwhile the Army for its first hundred years had to be setting camps and forts out in the middle of nowhere, or in a moving frontier, and then after 1900 had to go set up large training posts where back then was out in the sticks and there was cheap land and lots of room for practicing blowing things up (these being often the camps given “favorite son” names).
And heck, that is how come we are left with a high share of unsavory post names. The posts in places with expensive land/housing and bad weather kept getting shut down and more and more commands relocated to the places with room to grow.
From McSweeney’s:
I now demand for the word “humor” to be removed from this webpage as well. It dishonors the name.
Strongly disagree. That piece was hilarious.
As one of his first acts, President Biden should rename whichever base is closest to Mar-A-Lago “Fort McCain”.
No forts near Palm Beach but there is a Navy station AUTEC which is not named for a person so that would be good since McCain was a Navy vet.
It could reasonably be named after all the McCains.
That’s pretty much it. If you do a little research, you’ll notice that each general that the bases are named after hailed from that particular state. Braxton Bragg was from North Carolina… where Ft. Bragg is. Henry Benning was from Georgia… where Ft. Benning is. John Bell Hood was from Texas, where Ft. Hood is. Leonidas Polk was from Louisiana, where Louisiana was.
It was totally a political move to sweeten the pot for the locals by naming it after local generals, not necessarily Civil War ones- look at Ft. Stewart in Georgia- named after a local Revolutionary War era general.
Very well, Fort Sherman it is!
Explain USS Stonewall Jacksonthen.
Or USS Robert E Lee.
At least the many USS Buchanan were named after a man with significant prewar USN service.
Yeah, that idea that it was the Army naming the bases in sort of a vacuum of named places is pretty wrong. If you look at WHEN the bases were named, the pre-WWI ones were mostly named after contemporary generals, presidents and deceased personnel. That’s how we got places like Fort Shafter, Fort Bliss, Fort Eustis, etc…
It was the WWI and WWII rapid expansions that generated the bases named after former Confederates. And even at that, the names were a sort of crazy quilt of names- you had Camp Wolters in Texas (one of the big WWI/WWII basic training bases) named after a local National Guard general, you had Camp Logan in Houston in 1917, named after a Union general, you had Forts Bragg and Benning, and you had several others.
I’m not sure that it was some kind of orchestrated effort to name bases after famous Confederates, as much as it was a need to come up with base namesakes, and someone probably got the “bright” idea to name after former Confederate generals.