On January 1, 2021, Congress enacted (over President Trump’s veto) a defense funding law that calls for renaming military bases that honored Confederate generals.
Samuel R. Staley, writing for the Independent Institute, gives an intriguing argument in favor of the renaming. His argument is not that Confederate generals were traitors, as some have claimed (and others have rejected). Rather, their names were used as a way of maintaining Jim Crow segregation.
First, says Staley, the generals honored were, mostly, not very good generals.
“Of the [ten] current bases bearing the names of confederate officers, eight had undistinguished and occasionally exceptionally poor military records. In fact, three—Braxton Bragg, George Pickett, and Leonidas Polk—could even be rated incompetent. Others, such as John Bell Hood, were known for being reckless and ineffective, particularly later in the war. The others, excepting Lee and Georgia’s John Brown Gordon, have mixed records according to historians.”
And Staley asks, “[W]hat qualifies these generals to rise above more than 380 brigadier generals, 88 major generals, 18 lieutenant generals, and five generals fighting for the southern cause?”
It is certainly an open question.
Second, the bases were named in two periods, five of the bases in 1917 and 1918 and the other five in 1941 and 1942. Both periods were at the start of world wars and both were part of the Jim Crow period that extended from the end of Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. In that long period, segregation and white supremacy dominated relationships between blacks and whites. Lynchings of African Americans continued into the 1940s.
Staley argues that the names were designed to frighten and thus control African American soldiers.
“As the U.S. geared up for global wars in the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of African Americans from around the nation would be trained at these facilities. Indeed, as Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s chronicles these threats in Brothers in Arms, an engaging history of distinguished 761st Tank Battalion in World War II, African American soldiers quickly learned that while the military might give lip service to equality, their lives were continuously in physical danger as they trained at these southern bases.
“Indeed, famed baseball player Jackie Robinson, a Captain in the U.S. Army, was infamously court martialed at Fort Hood in Texas. A white bus driver had him arrested for not moving to the back seat of his bus despite army regulations requiring equal treatment. He was ultimately acquitted. But the racism embedded in the arrest and early findings against him was palpable.”
So, were military bases named for Confederate generals to keep control of black soldiers?
Ten military bases were named for Confederate generals, but today there are 440 military bases in the country, so the percentage is small. Most of the generals had come from the states where the bases are located. Yes, it is puzzling that so many of the generals were not heroes at all, but I would want to know the process for naming those bases. That would take some more research.
Perhaps the naming had more to do with gaining the support of, and perhaps stirring up, the white people in the area. That would indirectly encourage white supremacy and perhaps even lynchings. Thus Staley’s result may be right, although the path there still seems murky to me. I would love some comment.
Republished from “Should Southern Military Bases Be Renamed?” by Jane Shaw Stroup on Janetakesonhistory blog (janetakesonhistory.org).
Image of Gen. Braxton Bragg by Allen Gathman is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .