Final Army Base Naming Commission Report

[autigeremt 6,719]

The committee did a very good job of research. Personally I do not have a problem with any of it though I would have liked to have seen Ft. Bragg replaced with a true honoree. I like Ft. Liberty overall. Reminds me of Camp Liberty Bell in Korea. 

If this belongs in another area please move accordingly. 

 

I also ask that this thread is left out of any discriminatory or defaming rhetoric based on race. General Robert E. Lee was clear after the war that honoring leaders of the Confederacy would be acidic, and he was right.  I will abolish it otherwise. 

 

Naming_Commission_Final_Report_Part_I.pdf

Edited January 5, 2023 by autigeremt

[Son of A Tiger 561]

The attachment (report) won't open.

[CoffeeTiger 5,185]

11 minutes ago, Son of A Tiger said:

The attachment (report) won't open.

Here is the online versions of it. 

https://www.thenamingcommission.gov/report

 

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I have no problem with any of it and are glad they have been open and transparent about the process, the new names chosen, and even detailing/categorizing what other items, memorials, and base structures they'll be renaming or removing. 

 

[Son of A Tiger 561]

Having lived close to Ft. Benning for awhile it will always be Ft. Benning to me. Never knew who it was named after. Wonder why only bases names after Confederate guys are being renamed and not those of Union guys or bases named after Indian War folks?

[CoffeeTiger 5,185]

1 hour ago, Son of A Tiger said:

 Wonder why only bases names after Confederate guys are being renamed and not those of Union guys or bases named after Indian War folks?

 

Because the Confederacy fought against and killed members of the US military. The Same US military that controls these bases....

Why would the US military want it's bases named after Confederates? 

Edited January 5, 2023 by CoffeeTiger

[Son of A Tiger 561]

29 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

 

Because the Confederacy fought against and killed members of the US military. The Same US military that controls these bases....

Why would the US military want it's bases named after Confederates? 

Didn't the U.S. military give them their original names they have had all these years?

Edited January 5, 2023 by Son of A Tiger

[GoAU 1,603]

I’ve spent a lot of time at Ft Benning and Bragg, and can’t imagine I’ll ever get used to calling them anything different.   
 

on another note though, I have met Gen Moore and they guy is a true warrior and a great leader.  

[CoffeeTiger 5,185]

3 hours ago, Son of A Tiger said:

Didn't the U.S. military give them their original names they have had all these years?

Yeah, they let the people in the southern states these bases were built in and manned by help name them and Confederate generals/leases were chosen. Some say it was a compromise made because the military needed the land from these states to build the bases. 
During Jim Crow and reconstruction when many of these bases were being built and named a lot of Southerners still romanticized the ideals and goals of the Confederacy and the Civil war. 
 

Today, sentiment in both public and military circles regarding those periods of history and the have changed. 
 

 

 

[Son of A Tiger 561]

34 minutes ago, CoffeeTiger said:

Yeah, they let the people in the southern states these bases were built in and manned by help name them and Confederate generals/leases were chosen. Some say it was a compromise made because the military needed the land from these states to build the bases. 
During Jim Crow and reconstruction when many of these bases were being built and named a lot of Southerners still romanticized the ideals and goals of the Confederacy and the Civil war.  I don't think this was the case for Ft. Lee
 

Today, sentiment in both public and military circles regarding those periods of history and the have changed. Yep part of the effort to erase another part of our history. And, according to the report, it cost the taxpayer $21M not including the salaries of the commissioners, their staff, etc.
 

 

 

 

[AUDub 11,184]

Hear me out.

We get all our forts sponsored by huge corporations like we do bowl games. That will help cut the defense budget and probably even make some money, and then you get to be stationed at Fort San Diego County Credit Union brought to you by Sony Playstation 5.

Edited January 6, 2023 by AUDub

[CoffeeTiger 5,185]

Quote

Yep part of the effort to erase another part of our history.

 

It's not erasing any history. There are innumerable places, books, and museums where you can learn about the Civil War and Confederate Commanders. You already said you lived near Ft Benning yet didn't know who it was named after or why, but now you're concerned that renaming it is 'erasing' something important? That doesn't make any sense. 

 

Quote

 

And, according to the report, it cost the taxpayer $21M not including the salaries of the commissioners, their staff, etc.

 

That's 0.0013% of the 2022 DoD budget, and it was for a project that has never been done before in our nations history, not a reoccurring expense. 

 

[icanthearyou 4,463]

1 hour ago, AUDub said:

Hear me out.

We get all our forts sponsored by huge corporations like we do bowl games. That will help cut the defense budget and probably even make some money, and then you get to be stationed at Fort San Diego County Credit Union brought to you by Sony Playstation 5.

Won't work.  We would end up paying for the use of the corporate names.  You know, like how the government has to pay the NFL for those displays of "patriotism".

[icanthearyou 4,463]

Southerners just can't help themselves.  We still want to glorify the legacy of treason and inhumanity.   We are truly ignorant of our "history".

There was NOTHING good about the confederacy.  Unless of course, you like treason, fascism, murder, rape, owning other human beings.

Showing the South deference was a monumental mistake.

[I_M4_AU 8,012]

1 hour ago, icanthearyou said:

Southerners just can't help themselves.  We still want to glorify the legacy of treason and inhumanity.   We are truly ignorant of our "history".

There was NOTHING good about the confederacy.  Unless of course, you like treason, fascism, murder, rape, owning other human beings.

Showing the South deference was a monumental mistake.

You need to lead a movement to remove all the Confederate Soldiers that are buried in the Arlington Cemetery.  I am sure that will bring the country together and finally satisfy your agenda.

[homersapien 11,461]

2 hours ago, I_M4_AU said:

You need to lead a movement to remove all the Confederate Soldiers that are buried in the Arlington Cemetery.  I am sure that will bring the country together and finally satisfy your agenda.

Don't necessarily need to remove them, but we do need to correctly "memorialize" why and how they got there and what they actually represented (compared to what is there now).

As it is now, that part of the cemetery is perpetuating the myth.  That's never good for history.

https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/Monuments-and-Memorials/Confederate-Memorial

Section 16

The history of the Confederate Memorial embodies the complex and contested legacy of the Civil War at Arlington National Cemetery, and in American culture generally.

In 1900, Congress authorized Confederate remains to be reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery, which designated a special section for them (in what is now Section 16). The Confederate Memorial was erected there in 1914. By the early 1900s, it had become tradition to establish a new section at Arlington for the dead from a particular war, followed by a commemorative monument. In Section 22, where many soldiers and sailors from the Spanish-American War are buried, the Spanish-American War Monument and the Rough Riders Monument memorialize that conflict. After fallen World War I service members were repatriated and buried in Sections 18 and 19, the Argonne Cross was dedicated in Section 18. In this sense, the creation of a Confederate section and memorial followed customary practice at Arlington.

However, to understand more fully why Confederate graves are at a former Union cemetery, and to interpret the memorial’s symbolism, it is necessary to delve more deeply into historical context. By the turn of the twentieth century, Arlington had become a truly national cemetery, a transformation that occurred amidst reconciliation between North and South, enduring racial inequality, and a new war. Reconstruction — the U.S. government’s efforts to reunify the nation and transform the South’s former slavery-based society — effectively ended in 1877. That year, President Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to withdraw federal troops from Southern states, allowing for sectional reconciliation but also the systemic disenfranchisement of African Americans, enforced by white violence and racial segregation in the South. In 1898, mobilization for war against Spain, and the United States’ expanding global power, reinforced a sense of national unity — at least among many white Americans.

In this context, the U.S. government reassessed its policies on Confederate burials. Although the Tomb of the Civil War Unknowns likely contained the remains of both Union and Confederate dead, Arlington had been a U.S. Army cemetery, and for years after the Civil War, Confederate veterans could not be buried there. However, on December 14, 1898 — four days after the Spanish-American War ended — President William McKinley kicked off his “Peace Jubilee” nationwide tour with a speech in Atlanta in which he proclaimed, “in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers…. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories.” 

Notably, this “spirit of fraternity” did not include African Americans. In 1871, a group of black soldiers had petitioned the War Department to relocate the graves of hundreds of United States Colored Troops (USCT) from the “Lower Cemetery,” where they were buried alongside former slaves and poor whites, to the main cemetery near Arlington House, where white Civil War veterans lay at rest. The War Department denied the petition. Arlington National Cemetery would remain segregated until 1948, when President Harry S. Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order.

Meanwhile, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) identified Confederate graves around the Washington, D.C. area and successfully petitioned the government to have those remains transferred to Arlington. On June 6, 1900, Congress appropriated $2,500 for the removal and reinterment of Confederate remains. By 1902, 262 Confederate bodies were interred in a specially designated section, Section 16. Unlike the orderly rows in the rest of the cemetery, graves in the Confederate section were arranged in concentric rings. Their headstones also looked different: while having the same dimensions as regular government headstones, the Confederate headstones featured pointed tops. The cemetery added more Confederate graves over the years, eventually totaling more than 400. 

On June 7, 1903, the first Confederate Memorial Day ceremonies were held in Arlington's Confederate section. President Theodore Roosevelt sent a floral arrangement, beginning a tradition continued by nearly every U.S. president. In 2009, President Barack Obama modified the tradition, sending two wreaths: one to the Confederate Memorial, the other to Washington, D.C.’s African American Civil War Memorial, in honor of U.S. Colored Troops.

In 1906, with President William Howard Taft’s approval, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (a hereditary organization of Southern women) began raising funds to erect a memorial in the Confederate section. Through such voluntary civic organizations, women led many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to commemorate wars and to mourn the dead — and, in so doing, women gained influence in public life even before they won the right to vote. (In another example of women’s commemorative efforts, the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America was responsible for creating the Spanish-American War Memorial.)

Unveiled in 1914, the Confederate Memorial was designed by noted American sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of Virginia Military Institute. The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery. Standing on a 32-foot-tall pedestal, a bronze, classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, represents the American South. She holds a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, with a Biblical inscription at her feet: "They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks." The monument’s pedestal features 14 shields, engraved with the coats of arms of the 13 Confederate states plus the border state of Maryland (which neither seceded from the Union nor joined the Confederacy). Thirty-two life-sized figures depict mythical gods alongside Southern soldiers and civilians.

Two of these figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a white officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war. An inscription of the Latin phrase “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Caton” (“The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato”) construes the South’s secession as a noble “Lost Cause.” This narrative of the Lost Cause, which romanticized the pre-Civil War South and denied the horrors of slavery, fueled white backlash against Reconstruction and the rights that the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments (1865-1870) had granted to African Americans. The image of the faithful slave, embodied in the two figures on the memorial, appeared widely in American popular culture during the 1910s through 1930s, perhaps most famously in the 1939 film “Gone with the Wind.”

Sculptor Moses Ezekiel was buried at the base of his creation in 1921, after being honored at the first funeral ceremony in the newly built Memorial Amphitheater. Three other Confederate soldiers lie next to him: Lt. Harry C. Marmaduke of the Confederate Navy, Capt. John M. Hickey of the Second Missouri Infantry and Brig. Gen. Marcus J. Wright, who commanded brigades at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga.

The Confederate Memorial offers an opportunity for visitors to reflect on the history and meanings of the Civil War, slavery, and the relationship between military service, citizenship and race in America. This memorial, along with the segregated United States Colored Troops graves in Section 27, invites us to understand how politics and culture have historically shaped how Americans have buried and commemorated the dead. Memorialization at a national cemetery became an important marker of citizenship — which, in the post-Reconstruction era, was granted to white Civil War veterans, Confederate or Union, but not to African American soldiers who had served their country. In such ways, the history of Arlington National Cemetery allows us to better understand the complex history of the United States.

 

Edited January 6, 2023 by homersapien

[autigeremt 6,719]

Confederate Memorials should never have existed in the first place. Ever! It took me entering into the US Army to figure that out. Graves are one thing....and even then there should be regulations when it's inside the gates of a federal or public cemetery. 

My opinion. 

Edited January 6, 2023 by autigeremt

[homersapien 11,461]

15 minutes ago, autigeremt said:

Confederate Memorials should never have existed in the first place. Ever! It took me entering into the US Army to figure that out. Graves are one thing....and even then there should be regulations when it's inside the gates of a federal or public cemetery. 

My opinion. 

That's an excellent take.

I don't mind the graves being there  - after all, they were Americans, even if they didn't want to be at the time. 

That section of Arlington should be used to highlight the actual history of our country and the tragedy of the war those graves represent - not to honor, or or glorify the cause they died for. 

Edited January 6, 2023 by homersapien

[I_M4_AU 8,012]

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

In this context, the U.S. government reassessed its policies on Confederate burials. Although the Tomb of the Civil War Unknowns likely contained the remains of both Union and Confederate dead, Arlington had been a U.S. Army cemetery, and for years after the Civil War, Confederate veterans could not be buried there.

The first two Confederate Soldiers were buried at Arlington on May 17th and 28th of 1864.

The first Confederate soldier buried at Arlington National Cemetery was private Thomas G. Holman, Company F, 4th Virginia Cavalry. Holman was buried on Tuesday, May 17, 1864, the fifth day of soldier burials on the Arlington Estate, home of Robert E. Lee and his family for thirty years before the Civil War. Holman was the 21st soldier, but the first Confederate soldier, buried at Arlington. Sometime between the end of the Civil War and 1900, Holman was exhumed and reinterred in a separate cemetery. Accordingly, Michael Quinn, of the 13th Mississippi Infantry Regiment, who was buried the day after Holman, is the remaining "first" official Confederate burial at Arlington National Cemetery. 1 Both Quinn and Holman fought under the command of General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Both were buried on their commanding officer's wife's Northern Virginia estate.

http://arlingtonhistoricalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/1989-7-Confederate.pdf

It appeared when Arlington was delinquent on taxes it was sold to be used at the discretion of the government:

The auction took place on January 11, 1864, a day so cold that blocks of ice stopped boat traffic on the Potomac. The sole bid came from the federal government, which offered $26,800, well under the estate's assessed value of $34,100. According to the certificate of sale, Arlington's new owner intended to reserve the property "for Government use, for war, military, charitable and educational purposes."

The war, of course, dragged on far longer than anyone expected. By the spring of 1864, Washington's temporary hospitals were overflowing with sick and dying soldiers, who began to fill local cemeteries just as General Lee and the Union commander, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, began their blistering Forty Days' Campaign, exchanging blows from Virginia's Wilderness to Petersburg. The fighting produced some 82,000 casualties in just over a month. Meigs cast about for a new graveyard to accommodate the rising tide of bodies. His eye fell upon Arlington.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-arlington-national-cemetery-came-to-be-145147007/

Meigs evidently served under Lee before the war and was not fond of Lee resigning his commission to fight for Mother Virginia and wanted it permanently make Arlington uninhabitable so he started burying soldiers on the grounds.  It must have been hectic as both known Union and Confederate Soldiers were buried in the first few days.

I’m not disputing your articles just trying to clarify what happened.

 

[autigeremt 6,719]

2 hours ago, homersapien said:

That's an excellent take.

I don't mind the graves being there  - after all, they were Americans, even if they didn't want to be at the time. 

That section of Arlington should be used to highlight the actual history of our country and the tragedy of the war those graves represent - not to honor, or or glorify the cause they died for. 

And I say this having ancestors who fought and died in the war for the CSA. 

[SaltyTiger 7,870]

9 hours ago, icanthearyou said:

Southerners just can't help themselves.  We still want to glorify the legacy of treason and inhumanity.   We are truly ignorant of our "history".

There was NOTHING good about the confederacy.  Unless of course, you like treason, fascism, murder, rape, owning other human beings.

Showing the South deference was a monumental mistake.

Few care to “glorify” what you are speaking about ICHY. Few like what you mention. Do you expect people to go piss on their great great grandfathers grave? Disappointed in you again.

[SaltyTiger 7,870]

2 hours ago, autigeremt said:

And I say this having ancestors who fought and died in the war for the CSA. 

Visit old cemetery’s in the south and see lots of that. Love to hear their story.

[icanthearyou 4,463]

14 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

Few care to “glorify” what you are speaking about ICHY. Few like what you mention. Do you expect people to go piss on their great great grandfathers grave? Disappointed in you again.

Please.  I have watched that nonsense all of my life.  We should all be disappointed by our ancestors.  They were not good people.  Our grandparents who supported segregation were not good people.

When hate is the basis of your culture, you culture is stinks.  I am always happy when you are disappointed in me.  You aren't a bad person.  You are a far too typical person.  Be honest, without regard to tradition.

[icanthearyou 4,463]

14 hours ago, SaltyTiger said:

Visit old cemetery’s in the south and see lots of that. Love to hear their story.

You love their story?  Their story is tragic.  Most of those people fought for something they weren't invested in.  They were rallied by a false loyalty.  They were used.  They died for something immoral.

Their story is a tragedy.  The glorification IS false history.

Your romanticizing makes you a liar.

[SaltyTiger 7,870]

10 hours ago, icanthearyou said:

Please.  I have watched that nonsense all of my life.  We should all be disappointed by our ancestors.  They were not good people.  Our grandparents who supported segregation were not good people.

When hate is the basis of your culture, you culture is stinks.  I am always happy when you are disappointed in me.  You aren't a bad person.  You are a far too typical person.  Be honest, without regard to tradition.

The nonsense has been throughout civilization and I have no reason to be disappointed in my ancestors. Some lived through the ways and times of the world. Others in a transitional time. The transitional or (Jim Crow) era disturbs me more so than the war in ways.
 

My disappointment comes from your type. Constantly provoking in this type of conversation. Continually pointing out the errs of southerners ancestors. It is intentional. You guys are not genuine.

 

[SaltyTiger 7,870]

10 hours ago, icanthearyou said:

You love their story?  Their story is tragic.  Most of those people fought for something they weren't invested in.  They were rallied by a false loyalty.  They were used.  They died for something immoral.

Their story is a tragedy.  The glorification IS false history.

Your romanticizing makes you a liar.

Never said I “love their story.”Said I would love to hear it. 

In my younger days coached a lot of travel baseball. Found that most municipal parks had a cemetery close by. Between games spent a lot of time walking and touring old cemetery’s. No romanticism or glorying. Just a statement ICHY. 
 

What makes you guys so argumentative?