The words of Agur, son of Jakeh the Massai

The pronouncement of mortal man: “I am weary, O God;

I am weary, O God, and I am exhausted.

I am more brute than human being,

without even human intelligence;

Neither have I learned wisdom,

nor have I the knowledge of the Holy One.

Who has gone up to heaven and come down again—

who has cupped the wind in the hollow of the hand?

Who has bound up the waters in a cloak—

who has established all the ends of the earth?

What is that person’s name, or the name of his son?”^*

Every word of God is tested;

he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.

Add nothing to his words,

lest he reprimand you, and you be proved a liar.

Two things I ask of you,

do not deny them to me before I die:

Put falsehood and lying far from me,

give me neither poverty nor riches;

provide me only with the food I need;

Lest, being full, I deny you,

saying, “Who is the LORD?”

Or, being in want, I steal,

and profane the name of my God.

Do not criticize servants to their master,

lest they curse you, and you have to pay the penalty.

There are some who curse their fathers,

and do not bless their mothers.

There are some pure in their own eyes,

yet not cleansed of their filth.

There are some—how haughty their eyes!

how overbearing their glance!

There are some—their teeth are swords,

their teeth are knives,

Devouring the needy from the earth,

and the poor from the human race.

The leech has two daughters:

“Give,” and “Give.”

Three things never get their fill,

four never say, “Enough!”

Sheol, a barren womb,

land that never gets its fill of water,

and fire, which never says, “Enough!”

The eye that mocks a father,

or scorns the homage due a mother,

Will be plucked out by brook ravens;

devoured by a brood of vultures.

Three things are too wonderful for me,

yes, four I cannot understand:

The way of an eagle in the sky,

the way of a serpent upon a rock,

The way of a ship on the high seas,

and the way of a man with a woman.

This is the way of an adulterous woman:

she eats, wipes her mouth,

and says, “I have done no wrong.”

Under three things the earth trembles,

yes, under four it cannot bear up:

Under a slave who becomes king,

and a fool who is glutted with food;^e

Under an unloved woman who is wed,

and a maidservant who displaces her mistress.

Four things are among the smallest on the earth,

and yet are exceedingly wise:

Ants—a species not strong,

yet they store up their food in the summer;

Badgers—a species not mighty,

yet they make their home in the crags;

Locusts—they have no king,

yet they march forth in formation;

Lizards—you can catch them with your hands,

yet they find their way into kings’ palaces.

Three things are stately in their stride,

yes, four are stately in their carriage:

The lion, mightiest of beasts,

retreats before nothing;

The strutting cock, and the he-goat,

and the king at the head of his people.

If you have foolishly been proud

or presumptuous—put your hand on your mouth;

For as the churning of milk produces curds,

and the pressing of the nose produces blood,

the churning of anger produces strife.

June 29, 1920.

Vandals. Colorado Civil War Memorial and the Zeitgeist

Before it was toppled, the monument to the men of Colorado who served in the Civil War

It is hard not to write this and not be angry.

This past week vandals, and that's all that they are, toppled the monument to the men from Colorado who died in the Civil War.

I posted on that monument long ago on one of our companion threads.  That post appears here; Some Gave All: Colorado Civil War Memorial, Denver Colorado:.  Now the photos serve themselves as a monument to what the memorial looked like prior to idiots, or perhaps more accurately the historically ignorant invested with self righteousness in their idiocy, forever damaged it.  They've been arrested and should receive jail time, but in the current atmosphere, combined with the fact that Denver Colorado itself is a self unaware mess, they likely won't.  Their actions are a type of monument to the disintegration of the country and what will become the replacement of a culture that's grown too anemic and too focused on itself to survive.

That no doubt sounds harsh, but it's warranted.

The protests started off, as everyone who is following the news would likely know, ostensibly with the death at the hands of Minneapolis police of George Floyd.  But that's no longer what these protests are even about.  Indeed, as Black Entertainment Television founder noted the other day in regard to the attack on monuments, these attacks are instead representative of anarchy and blacks "laugh" (his words, not mine) in what amounts to derision at the co-opting of what started off as protests in their support.  Indeed, at this point, the protesters are overwhelmingly of the WASP demographic, a declining sections of the nation's population even among those who are divided into "white and black", even though genetically and culturally no such divide actually exists.*

What is going on now is not aiming to help African Americans in any real sense, nor is it actually aimed to address their concerns.  Rather, this is an ongoing part of a movement that stretches back to the 1920s and which seeks to reinterpret American history in a propagandized fashion.  A propagandized attack that's every bit as false as the Lost Cause Myth that caused monuments to treasonous Confederate figures to go up in the first half of the 20th Century (and even later, for that matter).  In its most modern form, ironically, it flared up with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, but is origin goes back much longer than that.

It was apparently this panel, which lists Sand Creek as an engagement, which resulted in the claim of virtue on the part of the vandals  It's there, and Sand Creek was a horrific massacre that was completely unjustified, but that's one single item the monument that goes far beyond that.  Indeed, most of the engagements listed are ones that were Civil War battles.

The United States has had a "liberal" or "progressive" set of political ideals that has coexisted with conservative ones since the founding of the nation.  The concepts of the Revolution themselves were radical in nature.  While those howling in the streets point out that the founders of the Republic were flawed men, that doesn't mean that their expressed ideals weren't to be grasped and celebrated.  All of the significant Virginians no doubt were slaveholders or supported the maintenance of slavery in their colony, but that doesn't mean that the idealized it and indeed in some instances their expressions of ideals condemned it.

It's usually the ideals of people that intelligent men and women celebrate, not the actual person's themselves so much.  Indeed, it's pretty hard to find a person, outside of some astounding saints, who are admirable from birth until death, and the truth of the matter there is that most people who rant and rave about the sins of our forefathers run from the examples of saints.  St. Padre Pio, for example, would give us an example of a saintly man who was from birth.  But his sanctity took him right into the Priesthood as soon as he could do it.  He provides an example of a man who took the narrow road.  Most protesters are off the road in their personal conduct and just hoping that action takes them to a secular Heaven.

St. Matt Talbott.  Few who claim virtue are willing to really follow a virtuous example.

Indeed, even the examples of the Saints show us not that men and women of the past lack flaws, but rather that they strove to overcome them.  With some, their overcoming of that internal struggle is what made them saints.  St. Matt Talbot is a saint not because he never drank a drop in his life, but because he was a dedicated alcoholic who even stole to support his addiction until he overcame his addiction and lead what was essentially a monastic life.  St. Augustine of Hippo had lead a fairly worldly life prior to his conversion.  St. Francis of Assisi had to an extent at well.  Maximilian Kolbe took his convictions right into his execution.  Very few of the woke folks running around now who are making blanket acts of ethnic apology, let alone acts of violence, are going to dedicate their lives in that fashion to those they are "apologizing" to.  Indeed, my guess is that none will whatsoever.

Edmund Burke was a liberal English parliamentarian who defended the radical American Revolution in parliament.  He also felt that religion and manners were the underpinnings of a just society and wrote a book on that topic entitled A Vindication of Natural Society: or, a View of the Miseries and Evils arising to Mankind from every Species of Artificial Society.

At any rate, American liberalism mixed in some ways with conservatism and was grounded in the same reality that all men are flawed.  Early conservatives tended to despair of addressing societal flaws and so simply urged accepting them and slow improvement upon them.  Liberals or progressives, as those terms then were used, didn't disagree with human frailty existing, but they sought to take action quickly and where they could to address it.  They tended to find the motivation for their actions outside of themselves and in something greater.  It's no surprise that the abolitionist hymn that went on to become a Union Army battle song, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, was termed that, a hymn.

Even before Howe's hymn was published there were a competing strain of liberalism, however, one born not of acknowledgment of something greater but a narcissist one that sought to destroy anything that didn't meet its definition of the prefect.  Indeed, that radical ideology came about only shortly after the radical ideology that gave birth to the United States in the 1770s, and saw its first expression in France in the 1790s.  Where as the first radical liberalism gave birth to the successful (at least so far) American Revolution, the second gave rise to the unsuccessful and malignant French Revolution.

Maximilien Robespierre who was one of the chief architects of the terror, but who saw himself as a champion of democracy.  A victim of the forces he brought about, he was executed in 1794.

The French Revolutionaries saw nothing greater than themselves and imagined themselves to represent all mankind, which was to think exactly like them or suffer teh consequences.  Taking advantage of a desperate urban French population it co-opted what was effectively a series of bread riots, seeking nothing  more than food for the table, into a narcisitic vainglorious spasm that sought to remake the physical and destroy the metaphysical to fit an imagined world of the philospher's mind.  It could not and did not succeed, but like all of its progency it resorted to terror and violence in an effort to make men compliaint to what it wanted men to be like, their nature's nto withstanding.  Coming to an end, as all of its decendants have, in teh rule of a self serving strong man who claimed to rule in the name of the people nad revolutionary ideals, it ultimately collapsed but not before doing so much damage to its own nation that its never really recovered, somethign that has been true of all of its progeny.

Rural French commoners defending a church against French revolutionary forces.  While not well recalled now, the French Revolution was very unpopular in the countryside and there was armed resistance to it.

The mob lead to Napoleon and he lead the country into dictatorship until he fell at the hands of the collection of nations he made war upon.  Not much of an example, seemingly, but one that has been followed by one set of "progressives" ever since.

Alexander Kerensky, the Socialist Minister Chairman of the Provisional Government of Russia who was deposed by the Bolsheviks.

That set gave the world the coup that deposed the elected Russian government that had deposed Czar Nicholas II and which was going down, haltingly, the same path that the American revolutionaries had in 1776 when it declared the revolt against King George III.  The coup in turn gave Russia a titanic civil war costing the lives of millions of people and a government that under successive strong men would kill millions more.  Even as that occured, however, progressives who had in 1912 sought to elect Theodore Roosevelt as President began, in part, to go over to a progressivism that admired the radial red left in Russia.  In the 1920s and 1930s the liberal and progressive wing of American politics expressed both the traditional liberalism that had prospered in the United States and in the United Kingdom (where it had existed even at the time of the Revolution) and the new radical progressivism that sought to remake the world to fit a text of their own origin.  Much smaller, it nonetheless was present, forming a smaller and often theoretical base inside the larger American liberalism that came to power during the Great Depression.

The Depression brought traditional American liberalism to the forefront in a long and lasting way.  It had certainly been in power before, however.  Lincoln was a liberal President.  Theodore Roosevelt was as well.  So, in his highly flawed way, was Woodrow Wilson. And Franklin Roosevelt clearly was.  Indeed, following FDR, Presidents Kennedy and Obama were certainly liberals who were of the traditional American type, although they certainly can be criticized in  numerous ways.

Of note, once again, before we go on, all of these liberal icons, now co-opted to some degree by other movements, had their flaws.  Wilson most of all, as he was heavily racist, for which he cannot be excused.  FDR had at least one long running affair in his background.  Kennedy, lionized today by the left, had legions of affairs and a casual treatment of life and death and meddled in the affairs of other nations.  Obama is subject to the least personal criticism and generally lead and leads an admirable personal life, but much like Wilson he tended to confuse talk with action.

The liberals of the 1960s lead the country into war in 1965 and that caused the radical left to reemerge by 1968.  Following the revelations of the 1940s that Stalin was a butcher on a par with Hitler, real radicalism had gone underground and had in fact conducted a highly successful rear guard action to disguise its complicity with the Soviet Union in the 30s and 40s.  With that behind it, in the 1960s it came back out in force once again and it's never left.  Gaining ground in the turmoil of the 1960s, Richard Nixon's paranoia combined to rise their fortunes further.  Their fortunes reversed, however, with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, which brought William F. Buckley's conservatism, a new type of conservatism that had emerged since World War Two, into the Oval Office for the first time.

Reagan was absolutely despised by the radical left turing his time in office, and it was during that time that the traditional left began to become weaker and weaker.  Remembered now as the impact of Reagan recruiting "conservative" element of the Democratic Party into the GOP, in reality the ongoing strife in the party contributed much to that.  Traditional liberal Democrats who had supported Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam found themselves out of favor with the newer left.  And while they were responsible for advancing the cause of civil rights within the Democratic Party, many found themselves out of sink with a party that was more and more going over to a host of "progressive" ideals that they did not support.  Issues like abortion, for example, started to split the party and drive members out.

Not out completely, of course, and it can legitimately be said that none of the "progressive" Democrats have been elected to the Presidency while there are certainly Democrats who have been.  Nonetheless, with that demographic making up the real traditional power base in party, that being white Americans of what was once referred to as the WASP demographic, progressive concepts have become more and more entrenched in the party.

This helped create the hard left/right split in politics that's emerged since Reagan, although it certainly isn't singularly responsible for it.  And at the same time, but not addressed in this already overlong post, Buckleyite conservatives had to contend with the rise of radical populist "conservatives" who were first given voice by Newt Gingrich and who have wide gulfs in their views with the Buckleyites.

In spite of that, the lingering success of Buckleyism in the GOP caused the Democrats to much modify their expressed views on things even while the progressives simmered in discontent.  That began to unravel, however, when President Obama was elected in 2008.  When that occurred a section of the GOP went into what might best be expressed as rage.

President Obama was a traditional liberal, not a progressive, and his policies were relatively mild in that context.  As already noted, he was fairly ineffectual in bringing them into fruition, with his confusing medical program being the half hearted signature of his administration.  Only very late in his administration, when it became very clear that conservatives would not give him credit for anything, did a more progressive set of leaning start to emerge, but even there he simply tended to follow trends rather than set them.

Be that as it may, the rage of the Obama years helped bring about the current Trump administration, although only part of that can be attributed to that fact.  More than that, declining economic fortunes in the industrial class, who were well aware that both parties had betrayed them for decades, brought about the Trump victory. But just as the Obama Presidency brought about a populist right wing rage, the election of Trump brought about an even greater progressive rage.

Over the last four years that rage has become so dominant in the Democratic party that its effectively buried traditional Democratic progressivism. While it appears at this point in time that the Democrats are set to elect a traditional liberal to the Oval Office, it's also clear that the aged Joe Biden will have to listen to the progressive wing of the party and there's reason to suspect that, given his advanced age and demeanor, he'll defer in large part to that now younger and much more vigorous wing of the party which has buried the liberal wing.  That likely means that a very "progressive" administration is about to take office.

Of course, you can't be a progressive unless you conceive of yourself as progressing towards something, and that's what really makes progressives distinct.  Lacking the concept of the metaphysical that liberals and Buckleyite conservatives have, they seek a perfect world of their own definition, never seeking to grasp that a person can't really define perfection internally.  Nonetheless, that concept, self defining perfection and then mandating its acceptance, and immediately, is their hallmark.  It has been since the 1790s.

And that is what is now being expressed in the streets.  Having co-opted a more traditional concern, justice for the accused and the rights of all minorities as men, they're condemning everyone in history as not meeting the current definition of perfection.  It's not just people who clearly stood for an evil cause, such as Confederate officers, but everyone who came before us.

All those who came before us failed to meet the progressive ideal of perfection, and being men, none of them were perfect in the first place.  They aren't honored for their imperfections, but for their ideals, but those in the streets would trample on those as well.

And so to the long dead Union veterans of Colorado.  Most of them served in the hopes of preserving the Union and by implication, if  not necessarily universally by expression, they served to free African Americans from slavery.  They also likely did not see European American domination of the Frontier as wrong.  Some of those men, those who served under Chivington at Sand Creek, participated in an atrocity. That doesn't condemn the rest who didn't.

At the end of the day, in this current tear it down zeitgeist moment, it's worth remembering that every single living human being is a descendant of colonist, murderers, and rapists. Every single one. We only imagine ourselves descendant from saints, but it isn't true, and we like to imagine that we can apologize for the misdeeds of our ancestors and it does something, but it doesn't. I'm reminded of this every time I practice law in a certain place populated by a disadvantaged class, which I do on occasion, and it's always the same handful of people working on the same problems from across the state.  I don't see the people tearing down monuments working on the problems of an affiliated underclass there.  I see a lot of workaday lawyers, men and women who represent plaintiffs and defendants, the criminally accused and the class itself there.  They're doing their jobs, but in doing them, they're a lot more "woke", in real terms, than people who attack monuments.  Lots of people express regret, but not too many people invest time in it in any ongoing way or are really willing to get their hands dirty.  Lots of people who do get their hands dirty are just doing their jobs and don't conceive of themselves as champions for anything in particular.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*This point has been made here before, but the entire concept of "race" is completely artificial.  This is all the more apparent when it the fact is considered that African Americans are one of the country's oldest demographics and are fully part of the American ethnicity, to the extent there is an American ethnicity.

Ethnicities are real, of course, but they're independent of superficialities such as skin color.  The persistence of racism, therefore, particularly in this context, is bizarre.

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June 27, 1920. Long Tours

The epic French annual sporting event, the bicycle Tour de France, commenced for 1920 on this day.



On the same day, British General Cuthbert Lucas, a veteran of the Boer War and World War One, was kidnapped by the Irish Republican Army along with two colonels. They were fishing at the time.  The colonels were released after one of them was wounded while trying to escape.

During his captivity his wife gave birth, which he became aware of as she sent him a letter simply addressed "to the IRA" informing him of the news.  Following that, his captors allowed for an exchange of letters between the couple.  While he was threatened with execution, his captors relaxed his guard after some months to allow him to escape.  Upon being recovered by the British, he termed his captors "gentlemen" and "delightful people".

Stopping the Games

As unimaginable as it is, Sheridan and Gillette's community colleges have decided to completely eliminate their National Junior College Athletic Association Division I athletic programs.

Or rather they have. They did it yesterday.  Just wiped them out.

Both schools were part of the Northern Wyoming Community College District which announced that it took the step as part of a $3,960,000 budget cut.  The District attributed the move to the Coronavirus pandemic and funding cuts from the State.  While I certainly have no reason to question the reasons, I have to think it was more tied to the funding cuts than the virus.

This is a mistake.

Wyoming is facing a budget crisis, to be sure, and the two schools that made this move are in the epicenter of it to some extent.  Both Gillette and Sheridan, and Gillette in particular, are cities in the state's coal belt and they're well aware of what's going on in that industry.  Coal, as we've discussed here, is undergoing a century long decline and will continue to, absent a true technological revolution.  Be that as it may, coal enjoyed a major boom in Wyoming starting in the 1970s and the state became dependant upon it for funding.  Now the state's in economic trouble as the state's budget hasn't been adjusted to a post coal scenario.  Just recently the Governor, in light of grim economic news brought about by a price collapse in the oil industry and the Coronavirus Recession. ordered every publicly funded institution to find a way to cut back. So this is part of that response.

Now, it may seem odd as I'm not a big sports fan of any kind, but I don't think this is a good move.  Indeed, I don't think cuts in post K/12 education are a good idea at all. We continually hear how the state needs to economically diversify.  Cutting education works against that.  So does cutting college level sports.

The impact of this will be to drive the students away who were there as student athletes, and at the junior college level that's arguably a more representative title than than it is at the university level.  So those students will, to a large degree, depart the campus for other schools. 

Local college boosters, and there are always local college boosters, who are athletics focused, and there are always such boosters who are athletics focused, will lose interest in their local schools.  Interest in the schools in general will decline, and the schools are likely to decline as a result.  Not all at once, but not as slowly as might be imagined.  In the announcement a spokesman already stated that this move didn't represent that the schools were failing, an announcement that acknowledges that it gives that signal unintentionally.

Students that pick up on that vibe will go elsewhere, or in some cases they won't go to school at all.  Some will go to UW, but a lot of them won't.  Those that go elsewhere stand much less of a chance of staying and building the economy here than those that attend school locally.  It hurts the long range planning for the state.

Now, all that, it could be said, pretends that there's money where there isn't.  But the problem with across the board cuts is that they're across the board.  If you cut your own family budget that way, for example, you'd cut out something you didn't need and you'd cut out luxuries, probably.  But you'd cut out necessities as well.  Prioritizing budgets might make more sense. 

That might require the state to look at some things that its understandingly wished to avoid and likely still does.  Funding options are one, but in terms of cuts, it might be noted that the State has highly understandably taken over some enforcement tasks here and there which the Federal Government will undertake if the state's don't.  That wouldn't be great for the state, but none of this is.  And that's just one example that comes to mind.

Of course, I don't have to balance the state's budget, for which I'm quite glad.

June 26, 1920. Waters.

June 26, 1920, was a Saturday, and on that Saturday the Saturday Evening Post featured a female fly fisherman on its cover.

Women doing other activities associated with water and the outdoors would be busy on that day.

The ship the Colin H. Livingstone was launched June 26, 1920, at Virginia Shipbuilding Corporation, Alexandria, Virginia, where it was christened by daughter Clarice M. Livingstone.

The Canadian born Colin H. Livingstone was living at the time and was a railroad executive.  He was also the first president of the Boy Scouts of America, having occupied that position since 1910.  The Boy Scouts were very much a major institution at the time, as we've discussed here before.

The ship was sunk by a German submarine on August 28, 1940.

Further north, the torpedo destroyer USS Hopkins was launched.

Sarah Babbitt of Providence, Rhode Island, descendant of Esek Hopkins, commodore of the Continental Navy during the Revolution, served at the launching of the torpedo destroyer at New York Shipbuilding Corp., Camden, New Jersey.  The ship served all the way through World War Two during which it sustained a single combat casualty when it was hit by a kamikaze in 1945.  The hit was a glancing blow.  The USS Hopkins was scrapped in 1946.

Somewhat related, on this day in 1920, Charles W. Lindberg, who would serve in the Marine Corps in World War Two, and who was one of the Marines photographed raising the flag on Iwo Jima, was born.  He died in 2007.

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Military Installation Names. What they were, and are, and how they got there. Part 3.

We've just done two posts in this three part series on the naming of military posts, starting off with the controversy, although there doesn't seem to be that much of of a controversy, over the suggestion that military posts in the South named after Confederate generals ought to be renamed.

We eclectically started off our post on Southern Posts with this entry, which wasn't in the South.

Camp Cody, New Mexico. This camp was named after a figure associated with Wyoming, but not from Wyoming, Buffalo Bill Cody.  It operated from 1917 to 1919.

Why did we do that?

Well, at that time this series was conceived of as a single post.  But by the time we had all the text we were interested in posting, the post was so long, as Part 2 no doubt shows, that it no longer made much sense to do so. But it still makes sense to ask the questions we intended to, and those had to do with why posts were named what they were.

It probably shouldn't surprise anyone, but there are Army Regulations. . . now, for  naming posts. The more surprising things is that this hasn't always been the case.  The Army's Center For Military History sums up the story, which they likely are asked about a fair amount, particularly now, this way:

Naming Army Installations 

The naming of posts started as a tradition when the Army was young. In the Continental Army, many posts and camps were named by the commander or supervising engineer for high ranking officers, including those still living; for example, Fort Washington on the New York and Fort Lee on the New Jersey sides of the Hudson in 1776, Fort Putnam at West Point, or Fort Mifflin below Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware. Forts were also named for fallen heroes, such as Fort Mercer, built in 1777, on the New Jersey side of the Delaware opposite Fort Mifflin, named in honor of Brig. Gen. Hugh Mercer who fell at Princeton in January of that year. 

For much of the Army's history in the 19th Century, the naming of posts was still mainly a local prerogative. For example, War Department General Order Number 79, dated 8 November 1878, left the naming of installations to the commander of the regional Military Division in which the installation was located. Although not always, the names of installations usually reflected a local influence, such as Fort Apache in Arizona, established in 1871, and the Chickamauga Post in Georgia, established in 1902. In the 1890s, the then Quartermaster General, Maj. Gen. Richard N. Batchelder, recommended that the War Department assume responsibility for naming installations, but that did not become policy until World War I when the massive general mobilization saw the establishment of numerous installations of various sizes and functions. The names usually, but not always, reflected some regional connection to its location, and usually with a historic military figure significant to the area: for example, Camp Lee near Richmond, Virginia, and changing the name of the Chickamauga Post in Georgia to Fort Oglethorpe. 

In the years between the World Wars, it became the common practice for the War Department to entertain recommended names for posts from installation commanders, corps and branch commanders, and the Historical Section Army War College, as well as from outside the Army. Public opinion and political Influence sometime weighed heavily on the decisions. For an example of the latter, when in 1928 the Army renamed Fort George G. Meade in Maryland as Fort Leonard Wood, the Pennsylvania delegation in Congress held up the Army's appropriation bill until the service agreed to restore the name of the Pennsylvania-born general. The regional connection, however, cannot be overemphasized. Fort Monmouth in New Jersey, for example, was originally named Camp Alfred Vail, in honor of the Army's then chief Signal Officer, when the installation was established as a Signal Corps training facility in 1917, but changed to Fort Monmouth, for the 1778 battle fought nearby, when it became a permanent installation in the 1920s. 

The War Department better defined the criteria when it established the policy for "naming military reservations in honor of deceased distinguished officers regardless of the arm or service in which they have served" in a memorandum dated 20 November 1939. 

Shortly after World War II, in 1946, the Army established the Army Memorialization Board. Governed by Army Regulation (AR) 15-190, Boards, Commissions, and Committees: Department of the Army Memorialization Board, it assumed responsibility for deciding on the names of posts and other memorial programs and the criteria for naming them. The regulation stated that all those individuals memorialized must be deceased and fall within one of five categories: 

(1) a national hero of absolute preeminence by virtue of high position,
(2) an individual who held a position of high and extensive responsibility (Army and above) and whose death was a result of battle wounds,
(3) an individual who held a position of high and extensive responsibility and whose death was not a result of battle wounds,
(4) an individual who performed an act of heroism or who held a position of high responsibility and whose death was a result of battle wounds, and
(5) an individual who performed an act of heroism or who held a position of high responsibility and whose death was not a result of battle wounds.

On 8 December 1958 , AR 1-30, Administration: Department of the Army Memorialization Program superseded AR 15-190 , and removed responsibility for naming installations from the Memorialization Board and transferred it to Headquarters, Department of the Army. In turn, AR 1-33, Administration: Memorial Programs superseded AR 1-30 on 1 February 1972. This revision retained the same memorialization criteria and categories as the previous regulation, but added a list of appropriate memorialization projects for each category. For example, it would be appropriate to name a large military installation after a person in category two, while it would be appropriate to name a building or a street after a person in category five. The final decision on naming a post was still made by the Headquarters, Department of the Army. The 15 January 1981 revision of AR 1-33 named the Army Chief of Staff as the responsible individual for the naming of installations. 

The current AR 1-33 became effective on 30 June 2006, and redefined and expanded the categories of individuals to be memorialized, and listed appropriate memorialization programs for each category. The naming of installations is now the responsibility of the Assistant Secretary of Army (Manpower and Reserve Affairs). The Director of the Installation Management Agency is responsible for the naming of streets, buildings, and facilities on all military installations except medical installations, where the Commander of the U.S. Army Medical Command has the approval authority, and on the United States Military Academy, where the Superintendent of the United States Military Academy has the approval authority.

This post here, of course, started off with the topic of the Confederate named posts, and the Congressional Research Service recently issued this short synopsis of the Confederate posts and military installation names in general, about which it must have been receiving inquiries from members of Congress.

Confederate Names and Military Installations  

Updated June 16, 2020  

On June 8, 2020, an Army spokesperson made a statement that the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and the Secretary of the Army Ryan D. McCarthy are “open to a bi-partisan discussion” on renaming the Army's 10 installations named after Confederate leaders. This statement follows the Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger’s message (MARADMIN 331/20) on June 5, 2020, instructing commanders to “identify and remove” displays of the Confederate battle flag on Marine bases. Gen. Berger's order was signed following a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on February 11 regarding the rise of white supremacy in the ranks. A 2019 Military Times survey found that “36 percent of troops who responded have seen evidence of white supremacist and racist ideologies in the military, a significant rise from the year before, when only 22 percent reported the same in the 2018 poll.” In addition to some Department of Defense (DOD) officials, certain Members of Congress have expressed interest in renaming military installations named after Confederate leaders. There is also interest in the DOD’s selection and approval process for naming military installations.  

U.S. Military Bases Named in Honor of Confederate Military Leaders  

There are 10 major military installations named after Confederate Civil War commanders located in the former states of the Confederacy. These installations are all owned by the U.S. Army. They are: Fort Rucker (after Col. Edmund W. Rucker, who was given the honorary title of “General”) in Alabama; Fort Benning (Brig. Gen. Henry L. Benning) and Fort Gordon (Maj. Gen. John Brown Gordon) in Georgia; Camp Beauregard (Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant “P.G.T.” Beauregard) and Fort Polk (Gen. Leonidas Polk) in Louisiana; Fort Bragg (Gen. Braxton Bragg) in North Carolina; Fort Hood (Lt. Gen. John Bell Hood) in Texas; and Fort A.P. Hill (Lt. Gen. Ambrose Powell “A.P.” Hill), Fort Lee (Gen. Robert E. Lee) and Fort Pickett (Maj. Gen. George Edward Pickett) in Virginia. 

Naming Policy by Military Service  

Currently, DOD does not have a department-wide review process to evaluate the naming of military installations. Each military service has its own naming criteria and approval process summarized below.  

Army 

In general, the naming of Army installations is the responsibility of the Assistant Secretary of Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs (ASA (M&RA)), However, the Secretary of the Army retains final approval authority for the Army Memorial Program—a program that oversees the naming of all Army real property. For the Army, the naming of a U.S. Army installation after a deceased individual is considered a memorialization, while naming an installation after a living individual is termed a dedication. The Army maintains separate criteria for memorialization and dedication of Army real property. The regulation that sets these criteria is Army Regulation (AR) 1-33, The Army Memorial Program (October 2018). In addition to dedicating and memorializing installations after people, the Army can also name an installation after an event. AR 1-33 provides a separate set of criteria for this “naming” and is defined as “the non-permanent naming of Army real property after famous battles and events.”  

Navy

OPNAV INSTRUCTION 5030.12H(October 2017) explains the U.S. Navy’s policy and procedures for the naming of streets, facilities and structures. According to this instruction, “names selected should honor deceased members of the Navy.” It may also be appropriate to honor deceased persons other than Navy personnel who have made significant contributions to the benefit of the Navy. This instruction is applicable to naming a structure or building that is identified by a real property unique identifier or a street. Naming designations of internal portions of buildings or spaces can be assigned at the discretion of the local installation commander. The spokesman for the Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday announced on June 9, that Adm. Gilday directed his staff to draft an order that will ban the Confederate battle flag from all public spaces and work areas on Navy bases, ships, subs, and aircraft.  

Marine Corps 

The Manual for the Marine Corps Historical Program addresses the Commemorative Naming Program and specifies that “property may be named for individuals highly regarded within the Marine Corps and/or local communities. Names of deceased Marines, or members of other military organizations who died while serving with or in support of Marine Corps units, will be considered first.”A Marine Corps Installations Command Policy Letter 3-15 offers guidance for Marine Corps Installations Command. 

Air Force Air Force

 Manual 36-2806, Awards and Memorialization Program (2019), sets Air Force policy for the Air Force’s memorialization program. The manual states “The memorialization program is designed to provide enduring honor and tribute to living and deceased military members and civilians with records of outstanding and honorable service through the naming of Air Force installations, streets, buildings, and interior spaces of buildings.” Chapter 4 of the manual provides naming criteria and approval authorities for Air Force installations, and states: “When naming an Air Force installation ensure only the most deserving individuals are selected for memorialization. Selections should bring honor to the Air Force and reflect the goodwill of the local community.”  

Author Information 

Barbara Salazar Torreon Senior Research Librarian

Well, there you have it. From that you can take it to be the case that the Army wouldn't be naming any posts after Confederate rebels today as they wouldn't meet the first two criteria.  I.e., no Confederate figure is a "national hero", in spite of what some in the South may have viewed over the last century about figures like Robert E. Lee, and in spite of the treatment those same figures were given by the Army in the early and mid 20th Century, and the second criteria implicitly presumes that they were in the U.S. service, which none of the Confederate figures was at the time of their famous or infamous service.

Camp Wheeler, Georgia, named after Joseph Wheeler and which was used in World War One and World War Two.  The land was returned to its owners following the Second World War.  Camp Wheeler is arguably the only former military post that would meet the current rules, as while Wheeler had been a Confederate General in the Civil War, he was also a Maj. Gen. in the U.S. Army during the Spanish American War.  Wheeler is associated with Georgia, but was actually from Connecticut.

None of which means that the post would be, or should be, renamed, although we addressed that topic in our first post in which we concluded that they  largely should be.

As the Army's Center for Military History item notes, early on posts were named as a matter of local prerogative.  When we looked at the Wyoming posts names, an interesting added part of the picture comes to light.  When the U.S. first established any military presence in Wyoming at all, it was acquiring existing facilities and simply keeping their names. Ft. Laramie was the first permanent U.S. post in what would become Wyoming and the Army simply bought Ft. Laramie and kept the name.  Jaques LaRamy wasn't an American military figure and wasn't an American at all.   This didn't seem to figure into the Army's naming conventions at all at the time.  Other forts occupied prior to the Civil War went the same way, in part.

Having said that, on some occasions the office establishing a camp was naming it after himself, or in quite a few instances, a commander who was up his chain of command.  A person can look at that more than one way, rather obviously, but both were common.

When the Civil War hit, in Wyoming, the 11th Ohio and 11th Kansas came into the state, and they established the practice of occupying established "stations" of a civilian nature and building posts at them.  Sometimes they observed the pre war naming convention, but more often they simply named the station after where they were.  

The Civil War was a great national shock and following it hte officer corps of the Army was made up of veterans of that war, many of whom had held much higher ranks during the ar than they did after it.  Even as the war was raging the Army started to name new posts after U.S. Army senior officer who had lost their lives during the war or, in some cases, very soon after it.  Wyoming posts like Ft. Buford and Ft. Sanders (the same post) or Ft. Phil Kearny provide such examples.

During the Civil War the Indian Wars heated up massively as Indians tribes, either intentionally or due to circumstances engaged non Indians with increasing frequency.  At the time, and for many years thereafter, this was attributed to Indian opportunism but a careful look at the era would lead a person to question that.*  The war resulted in the withdrawal of the Army from the Frontier to a large extent, although it should be noted that the military presence on the Frontier was very small to start with and the distance between the prewar Frontier forts was massive in extent, so the extent to which that alone was responsible for the uptick in conflicts, as some have asserted, is questionable.

The war directly caused a big upswing in European migration on the transcontinental trails across the West which arrived at the same time in which Indians tribes noticed and became increasingly concerned over the character of European American presence in the upper West.  Prior European Americans had been small in number and were often fairly feral in their nature.  The new migrants were largely passing through but they were also largely of the yeomanry class whose view of hte land was markedly different, and they were also descendant in large numbers of prior American populations that had a history of conflict with Indians.  Simultaneously miners began to penetrate the West in numbers for the first time. Towns, and even cities, began to be built which was a notable and dangerous new development for Indians and finally the railroad began to penetrate as well.  All of this made an already touchy situation explosive.

As did events like the Sand Creek Massacre on November 29, 1864 during which Colorado militia attacked a Cheyenne band with no real cause. This put the Cheyenne to flight and also to war, with that war spreading north very rapidly into Wyoming.  In turn, Sioux bands allied with the Cheyenne could not help but note was occurring generally.

All of this meant that even as the Civil War was being fought the Plains Indians Wars were igniting, meaning that as early as 1865, if not earlier, the Army was naming posts after Army figures who had been killed in combat with Indians.  Ft. Caspar was one of the first such examples, but it would soon be joined by Ft. Fetterman and Ft. Brown.  Civil War figures were not replaced by Indian War figures, however, with the seminal name of Abraham Lincoln being given to the post of that name in 1872.**

This loose practice kept up as the Army approached World War One.  Camp Cody, featured above, was named for example at the time of the Punitive Expedition.  Other posts incorporated varied names.

Camp Furlong, Columbus, New Mexico.  1916.  I don't know who this post was named for, as there's little easy to find information on that.  However, it's worth noting that this post in 1912 was established at time at which Wesley J. Furlong, a black recipient of the Medal of Honor from the Civil War, was still living.

Camp Stewart, not Stuart.  I'm not sure which military figure this post was named for, but it was not J. E. B. Stuart. It may have been named for Brig. Gen. Daniel Stewart, whom Ft. Stewart, Georgia, was also named for. That Stewat was a general in the Revolutionary War. Of note, teh Amy chose not to retain this name with this post 

When the US ran up to entry in the Great War, the naming conventions, but not regulations, tighted up considerable.  As the CMH item notes, the practice became to name military posts after generals of historical importance and preferentially with a connection to the region of the post.  Unnamed as a policy, it very clearly became the practice to name Southern posts after Confederate generals even to the extent of naming some after figures of some infamy or who were even of questionable military competence.***

The fact that even figures who were not only rebels, but in some occasions associated with the worst of the Confederate cause and also those who were not bright shining military lights really tells us something about the extent to which the Lost Cause mythology had seized and altered the common historical understanding of the Civil War.  It also says something about the extent to which the Army, faced with the largest war it had been in since the Civil War, looked back on that war for guidance.  Seemingly it was also the only thing that compared to what it was now in.

It was the only thing that it had been in for nearly eighty years in which Southern military figures, save for Joseph Wheeler, had really shined in an obvious fashion. There's been a lot of notable figures of the Indian Wars since 1865 and the Spanish American War contributed additional names to the Army's heroic list. These names were not forgotten, but the policy of local attribution meant that they largely were absent from the South. They were used, and sometimes more than once.  Frederick Funston, only recently departed and expected to have lead the American Army in France if war came, was a hero of the Spanish American War who died shortly before the war. Two Camp Funston's were named for him thereafter, for example.

Camp Funston, Leon Springs, Texas.

Camp Funston, Kansas.

In Michigan, which was his home, George Armstrong Custer of Little Big Horn fame, or infamy, found his name attached to the World War One training post there, Camp Custer, which survives today as Ft. Custer, a Michigan National Guard training range.

Camp Custer, 1918.  This post remained in service after the war and was designated a permanent base and therefore a "fort" in 1940.  After World War Two it went into use as a Marine Corps and Navy Reserve post but reverted to the Army at the start of the Korean War.  It was turned over to the state of Michigan as a National Guard training range in 1968, but interestingly it still sees some Navy Reserve use.

So the naming conventions remained loose during the Great War but there was obviously an unofficial policy of naming posts after a military figure with a local connection, and in the case of the South, that meant, in the minds of Army leaders, picking Confederate generals' names.  To put it fairly, however, they didn't seem to be under any mental reservation about that.  Indeed, during the war the widow of at least one Confederate general, and one of the problematic ones at that, was honored, and therefore the general himself vicariously honored, at the post.

The 82nd Division  honoring the widow of John Brown Gordon at the first Camp Gordon.

What black soldiers thought of this seems unrecorded, or at least I haven't run across their thoughts. They were obviously aware of it and indeed as many black soldiers hailed from the South they saw service in some of these posts.  Indeed, it's worth noting that black combat soldiers were more likely, as a class, to see combat in World War One than World War Two.  While the services were segregated at the time, save for the Marine Corps which didn't allow blacks to enter their service at all until mid World War Two, the Great War did not see an effort to preclude black troops from the front lines to the same extent that was done in the Second World War and there were a variety of black National Guard units that saw service in the war.****  Some of those units would have trained at these posts.

National Guardsmen of the 370th Infantry of Illinois, which had black officers and enlisted men.  Black officers were very unusual, but once again this was a feature of a few such units in World War One.  The 370th had an all black officer corps, the only such unit to have that feature.

It should have been noted that there were ways around naming posts after Confederate officers, if the Army had chosen to do them.  For one thing, they could simply have been named for their locations, which would have been easy enough. As has been already pointed out in Part 2 of this series, that's exactly how Wyoming's two National Guard training ranges were named, even though by the time the second one, Camp Guernsey, was being established, there was clearly a Wyoming personality, Jay L. Torrey, whose name was available for use.*****Another option, in some instances, would have been to use the names of Southern figures from the Revolution or the War of 1812, although that would have perhaps simply served to remind Southerners that names of Confederate generals were being excluded.  Finally, while it would be controversial today, names of Indian War figures were available, but that would have had to have been done without regard to their place of origin and, as odd as it may seem, the Plains Indian Wars were closer in time to World War One for the most part than the Civil War such that many of the participants in those wars remained alive, with some Army officers, such as Pershing, having served in them.

Whatever the situation may have been during World War One, it's harder to justify the ongoing practice of naming Southern posts after Confederate figures after 1918.  By that time, the new war had produced more than its share of well known national heroic figures.  Nonetheless, the practice continued all the way through World War Two. The reason it did is truly an example of institutional racism.  By that time, no matter what the majority view of the country may have been, the Army basically accepted the Lost Cause thesis and had made up, in its mind, with the rebellious Southern officers of the 1860s and accepted them as their own.  Indeed, as an example of that, John J. Pershing and his aid, George Marshall, visited the tomb of J. E. B. Stuart at VMI in 1920, honoring the rebel cavalryman by their presence.  During the same time frame the Army actually became more prejudiced in its view towards its black soldiers, not less, and when the Second World War Came the Army acted to exclude existing black Regular Army formations from combat in spite of their World War One examples.  Half of the Army posts now subject to controversial Confederate names were named during the Second World War, not the First.

Segregation in the Army came to an end in the Truman Administration and it was Missouri born Truman who first used the Regular Army in support of desegregation in the South.  Blacks were conscripted in a fashion roughly analogous with whites during the Korean War and combat units in that war were desegregated.  This has been true, of course, ever since.  Also under Truman, official naming conventions in the Army, already set out above, but repeated here, came into existance in 1946, providing:

(1) a national hero of absolute preeminence by virtue of high position,(2) an individual who held a position of high and extensive responsibility (Army and above) and whose death was a result of battle wounds,(3) an individual who held a position of high and extensive responsibility and whose death was not a result of battle wounds,(4) an individual who performed an act of heroism or who held a position of high responsibility and whose death was a result of battle wounds, and(5) an individual who performed an act of heroism or who held a position of high responsibility and whose death was not a result of battle wounds.

And that is where we are now.

As noted above, none of the Southern posts named after Confederates would meet these criteria now, but then not all of the remaining posts named after others would as well.  At least Michigan's Fort Custer is probably named after an individual who is as despised by a significant number of Americans as the Southern posts are.  So renaming them merely because they don't meet the current criteria likely wouldn't be in order.  Renaming them because of who they are named after, however, very well might be.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Prior posts in this series:

Military Installation Names. What they were, and are, and how they got there. Part 1. Named for Confederate Generals

Military Installation Names. What they were, and are, and how they got there. Part 2. Posts in Wyoming

*I'm not saying that such a careful look has in fact taken place.

**Ft. Abraham Lincoln, North Dakota, was the location from which the 7th Cavalry dispatched in 1876 in their message to gather the Sioux from the plains. The campaign would result in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

***The universal military quality of Southern officers is a myth of the Lost Cause Era.  In truth, the South has an inordinate number of marginal or even incompetent officers.

****The story of segregation in the Armed Forces is a little more complicated than it might at first seem, and has been dealt with here in earlier posts, specifically:

Blacks in the Army. Segregation and Desegregation

That post deals with the Army and the Navy, in spite of its caption.

As noted in that post, during the Revolution blacks were actually common in the Continental Army and it wasn't until after the Revolution that Congress banned their entry into the Army.  Even with an official prohibition, actually enforcing the ban seems to have been loosely enforced at first.  Only as the 19th Century progressed towards the Civil War were blacks actually excluded from the Army, but that day did arrive. During the Civil War the ban was reversed and the segregated Army came in, which remained all the way until just prior to the Korean War.

The Navy in contrast wasn't segregated until the late 19th Century, reflecting the fact that the Navy recruited from ports in the wood and sail era.  During that time it was more concerned about bringing in experienced sailors than anything else and it accordingly disregarded race and even nationality in recruiting enlisted men.  Only when the steel Navy came in post Civil War did that change and the Navy officially segregated in 1893, although officially enforcing that policy on a preexisting structure also took some time.  This change reflected a change in recruitment in which mechanical and technical skills now took precedence over sailing skills, and the Navy was now recruiting largely from the interior of the country.

The Marine Corps had barred entry of blacks from the very beginning as it strictly limited its recruiting to whites.  This was for a peculiar reason, however.  The logic of its first commanders was focused on the mutiny suppression role that Marines fulfilled and they therefore tried to make the makeup of the Marine Corps reflect the largest national demographic out of a fear that allowing in minorities would cause conflicts in loyalties should mutinies occur.  Interestingly enough, the one real mutiny, although it is not called that, which the Navy experienced didn't occur until the early 1970s at which time the black commanding officer of the vessel had to be ordered to stand down in his plan to arm his Marines and storm the parts of the ship held by protesting black sailors so, while the event occured two centuries later, ethnic loyalties did't play a part in that event when it really came.  The Marine Corps allowed blacks into the service during World War Two and was integrated along with the Army and Navy in 1948. The Air Force had already taken the step in 1946 upon its coming into existence and was never officially segregated, although as it was formed out of the segregated Army, it took it until 1949 to really desegregate.

*****Torrey was a legislator and rancher who had lead the formation and recruitment of the 2nd Volunteer Cavalry during the Spanish American War.  That unit failed to see action, but it was sufficiently well remembered that a Rough Rider was adopted as the unit patch for Wyoming National Guardsmen at some point and while different patches have come in, in recent years, for some units, it's still the default patch for the Wyoming Army National Guard.  It's fairly surprising that Camp Guernsey wasn't named Camp Torrey.