US defense secretary reverted to Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, but the men they honor aren’t role models
James Risen at The Guardian:
Since Donald Trump returned to office this year, his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has ripped the new names off a series of US army bases and brought back their old traitorous Confederate names. His actions have angered Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress, prompting a rare rebuke of the Trump administration by the Republican-controlled Congress last Tuesday. The GOP-led House of Representatives armed services committee voted on 15 July to block Hegseth from renaming the bases after Confederates. Two Republicans voted with the Democrats on the committee to pass the measure, which was an amendment to the Pentagon’s budget bill.
“What this administration is doing, particularly this secretary of defense, is sticking his finger in the eye of Congress,” said Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican representative who voted to stop Hegseth. Hegseth’s move elicited bipartisan anger because it flouted the law; Congress passed legislation in January 2021 to create a commission to choose new names for the bases named for Confederates and mandated that its recommendations be implemented by the Pentagon. That law was passed over a veto by Trump in the final days of his first term, and the name changes were later implemented by the Pentagon during the Biden administration.
The law is still on the books, and so in order to return to the old Confederate names, Hegseth has openly played games with their namesakes. The secretary claims he has renamed the bases after American soldiers from throughout US history who were not Confederates. But they all conveniently have the same last names as the original Confederate namesakes of the bases. For example, Fort Bragg is now supposedly named for Roland Bragg, who was an army paratrooper in the second world war; Fort Benning is now supposedly named for Fred Benning, a soldier who served in the army in the first world war.
Before the House vote, Hegseth’s efforts to skirt the law were also challenged in the Senate. In a hearing in June, Angus King, a senator from Maine, told Hegseth that he was returning the bases to the names of “people who took up arms against their country on behalf of slavery”. Hegseth insisted that the Pentagon had found non-Confederates with the same names to stay within “the limits of what Congress allowed us to do”. But during the same hearing, Hegseth briefly dropped the pretense that he wasn’t returning to the original Confederate names. He argued that “there is a legacy, a connection” for veterans with the old names. [...]
By the 21st century, there were still 10 army bases that were named for Confederates, and the Pentagon repeatedly resisted efforts to change their names, arguing that tradition outweighed the fact that the bases were named for traitors who had fought to preserve slavery. The Confederate base names were finally changed after the 2020 George Floyd protests; Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty, while Fort Benning became Fort Moore, named for the Vietnam war hero Hal Moore and his wife, Julia Moore. (Mel Gibson played Hal Moore and Madeleine Stowe played Julia Moore in the 2002 movie We Were Soldiers.) But those new names didn’t survive Trump’s return to office.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth skirts the spirit and intent of the law in order to bring back Confederate names of army bases, albeit named after different people with the same surname removed.
