Can you say "slavery"?

Why does this absurd version of the Civil War still exist in the South? The war was about slavery. At the time, the Southern states fully admitted it.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with "economic freedom".

The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.

Laying the cornerstone in 1912.

Coming at a particularly odd time, given the resurgence of the type of views that the monument represents¹, the Federal Government is removing the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.

A massive allegorical work, the monument by Moses Jacob Ezekiel² portrays the Southern cause heroically, and includes a slave in the "mammy" role, saddened by the departure of her soldier owner.

Probably always offensive, the work was part of the rise of the Lost Cause myth in the early 20th Century, which is when many of these monuments date from.  It's being removed and will be relocated at a park dedicated to Confederate monuments.

This process has been going on for a while. Under President Biden, military posts named for Confederate generals have been renamed, but even before that, monuments in Southern states started coming down on a local basis.  Interestingly, right now the Southern cause is strongly in mind as Donald Trump tacks closer and closer to the secessionist's view of the nation that brought the war about and which preserved racial segregation for a century thereafter.

The monument itself was located in the Confederate Section of Arlington, which was created in 1900 at the request of those who felt that Confederate dead in the cemetery should be located together.  Ironically, the move was opposed by some in the South, who felt that they should be relocated to "Southern soil".  Laying of the cornerstone of the monument came in 1912, and it was dedicated, Woodrow Wilson in attendance, in 1914.

Wilson at dedication of the monument in 1914.

Things like this are particularly problematic in various ways. For one thing, the monument is a work of art, and as such it has its own merits, no matter how dramatically flawed its image of the Southern cause was.  And they have, interestingly, an image of the South which was, while false, sort of bizarrely aspirational in that it depicted, as many such monuments of that period for that cause do, a South which was a yeoman state, when in reality the South was controlled by strong large scale economic interest to the detriment of the Southern yeoman, and certainly to the massive detriment of Southern blacks.

And they also reflect a period of American history, lasting roughly from the end of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era, when the nation as a whole adopted a false view of itself, or at least a large portion of itself.  They reflect, therefore, the zeitgeist of that time and our own.  Removing the monuments is understandable, but it doesn't cure the massive defect of past racism and slavery.  It does serve to help us forget how racist we once were, and not only in the 1776 to 1865 time frame, but the 1865 to mid 1970s time frame as well.

Footnotes:

1.  Just this past week Donald Trump, whose acolytes sometimes brandish the Confederate battle flat at his events, or in support of him in general, spoke of immigrants "poisoning" the blood of Americans, much like Southern Americans sometimes did in regard to desegregation in the 1960s.  The Nazi allegory has come up frequently, but to my ear, perhaps because I'm old enough to remember the tail end of that era, it sounds more the Southern view of the 60s or even 70s.

2.  This work is by far Ezekiel's best known one.  Interestingly, another major one is an allegorical monument from the 1870s dedicated to and entitled Religious Liberty.

Last Prior Edition:

Lame. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 52nd Edition.

Takeaways, so far, from the 2022 General Election.

Early takeaways.

1.  Poll models are existentially wrong.

There is no longer any reason to pretend otherwise.

For weeks prior to elections, we read of poll results. They were wrong in 2022, wrong in 2020, and wrong in 2016.

They're wrong.

Something is amiss in them, one thing simply being that younger generations don't really care to talk to pollsters.

This might be, overall, a good thing.

2.  Conservatism retains a strong appeal, but Trump doesn't.

Edmund Burke.

Trump caused the Republicans to lose the House and Senate in 2018.  He lost the Presidency in 2020, and never secured the popular vote in the first place ever.

The midterm election always sees a return of the party of power, something that may be a good thing, democratically, or not, but it's a fact.  This year there's real doubt that will happen, and Trump is the number one reason why.

Trump, whose appeal to anyone completely escapes me, loves Trump only the way that Trump and his acolytes can, and he's going to announce next week that he's running for the Oval Office.  In normal times, the GOP would send a delegation to Mar-a-Lago, invite Trump to go fishing and require Lindsey Graham to go along to listen to Trump's weird, weird diction in the same way that Uncle Colm is used by the girls to talk to the police in Derry Girls.  But these aren't normal times, so he's going to go ahead and run and the Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, will fall right in line.

An opportunity exists here for other Republicans to take advantage of this and push for the Presidency.  The problem with that, however, is Trump.

The ultimate irony here is that the elections from 2016 forward have demonstrated that there is a strong base for a conservative political party, including a conservative political party that includes populism.  People are, in many areas, voting culturally, and voting culturally for a return to Western values. There's nothing wrong with that, and the concept that these have been under attack by the left is correct.

But linking that movement, to Trump, will kill it.

3.  Wyoming has become the Post Reconstruction South.

Eh?

Bear with me.

In 1860, as we all know, the Southern states attempted to leave the United States and form their own country over the issue of slavery.

Most Southern whites, throughout the South, were yeomen.  Small independent farmers.  

The Civil War was about one issue and one issue only, race based slavery.  But slavery impacted everything in the South, most particularly its economy.

It's sometimes claimed, and indeed has been recently, that only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves prior to the Civil War.  I recall hearing that myself when in school, and even recently apparently somebody in the Internet claimed that only 1% of Southerners owned slaves in 1860.  A pretty detailed analysis of that shows that's actually incorrect, and a whopping 30.8% of free Southern families did, a pretty high number.  You can knock the percentage down by addressing only individuals, rather than families, but frankly that's unfair and inaccurate in an era prior to female suffrage.  And it's also been knocked down by including the entire Southern population, but you can't really count the enslaved in this analysis and have it make any sense.

At any rate, the reason that we note this is that about 69% of Southern families didn't own slaves, but that 30.8% that did dominated the culture and the region's economics.  Owning slaves was thought to be a necessity by planters, the large industrial farming class, just as serfs were in fact necessary to the feudal system.  The planter class absolutely dominated the economics and the politics of the South, even though the majority of Southerners were not in the class and in fact, as noted, were yeoman.

Not all yeoman were poor, as is sometimes claimed, and some of them owned slaves as well.  But the planters, who were the wealthy class in the South, completely dominated its economy and politics.  It would not be proper to take a Marxist view of this and assume that they dominated it simply because they were wealthy, but their wealth had the practical impact of making them the only really educated class and the only class that had time for leisure in the sense that Josef Pieper has written about.  This meant that their own self-interest became the interest of the entire region and were regarded as such.  When barefoot Southern farmers hit the road to fight against the North in the Civil War, they were pretty convinced that their interest and the planters were the same.

They were not.

That became pretty evident during Reconstruction, but the domination of the planter class actually never waned.  White Southern yeomanry had more in common, economically, with the recently freed slaves than they did with white planters. For a time it briefly looked like they'd act accordingly.  And during Reconstruction, they found themselves nearly violently at odds with the planter class.  Yeoman who had always made use, for example, of the woods as commons for the grazing of cattle and for hunting found themselves suddenly fenced and locked out, and nearly resorted to arms over it.

To a degree, what prevented that from really developing is that while the yeomanry did not feel itself aligned with the planters at first, planter propaganda, the nature of being occupied by the North, and the shared experience of the Civil War won them over against their own interests.  The monied and powerful classes of the South backed the concept of "The Lost Cause", a noble struggle for "Southern Rights", which wasn't about slavery at all, but about something else, never mind that it couldn't be rationally defined as it didn't exist.  All Southern officers were noble, all the enlisted men stalwart loyalists, sacrificing themselves to the cause.  The myth lasted so long that the dedication of Stone Mountain in the 1970s could still be regarded in the Oval Office as a noble thing, and not a monument to treason.  Southern yeoman remained in second class status and following Reconstruction were basically heavily marginalized along with Southern blacks.  The entire region declined into second class economic status as it clung to an old economy benefiting mostly the already wealthy.  Education became second rate. 

That all started to change during the Great Depression, but it really took into the 1970s for it to break.  We'll omit that part of the story, as that would be secondary to what we're looking at now.

Wyoming is now the New Post Reconstruction South.

How so?

Consider this.  Plantation economics had originally made the South one of the wealthiest parts of the United States.  Cotton actually was the second crop subject to the plantation system.  Tobacco was first, and tobacco made the south wealthy.  Cotton followed and added to that.  The North wasn't poor, but in the pre industrialized country, agriculture was king and the South had market agriculture, producing tobacco, cotton, and corn based alcohol, all for sale.  Nothing like it existed in the North.  Going into the Civil War, they still believed that this was the case.

It wasn't.

Wealth had moved to industry by 1860 and the North had taken advantage of it.  It was much more economically developed, and as a result, much more of the wealth had gone down hill to its population.  It also had an economy which acknowledged and accepted government assistance, which made for good roads and canals.  It was more affluent, better educated, and much better informed.  The South fooled itself into believing the opposite and entered into a war it couldn't win as a result.  After the wear, the class that had controlled that wealth maneuvered to keep it, and did so successfully, keeping the South in a state of existence that, but for slavery, closely mirrored that which had existed before the war.

So what does this have to do with Wyoming?

Quite a lot.

The original wealth of the South came from simple farmers, true yeoman, the class that Thomas Jefferson hoped thought necessary to democracy and hoped to see flourish in the country even though he was a planter. The conversion to a planter based economy took some time.

That's true of Wyoming, to a degree, as well.

The first European cultured people to enter Wyoming weren't Americans at all, but rather Quebecois.  French culture people were pretty prominent in the state early on, and it was really the fur industry they built that caused the early private fort system to come about.  The government followed in the 1840s following the Mexican War, when the Army first marched into the purchased Ft. Laramie in order to guard the trails to the Pacific Coast that were developing.  The first really Wyoming based economic endeavor to some about after trapping was the livestock industry, which didn't enter the state until the 1870s, for the most part.

But even as early as the 1880s petroleum was seen as the state's future.  By the 1890s, it was common for newspapers to put remote oil prospects on the front page, even as the livestock industry was dominating the actual economy and providing for most of the state's employment.  Coal had an even earlier appearance, being first mined by the Union Pacific railroad to fuel its trains.

It was really World War One, however, that gave Wyoming an oil extraction, and at that time refining, economy.  And much of that was locally centered.  Refineries sprung up all over the state in this time period.  Casper saw not only three refineries develop, but major structures as well. The Oil Exchange Building was completed in 1917.  The Pan American Building sometime after that.   The Ohio Building in the 1940s.  The Sinclair Building, now only a memory, was built during this time period as well. The big club, where all sorts of business deals were made, was The Petroleum Club.

So we based our wealth, after 1917, on the extractive industries.

We did nothing wrong whatsoever by doing that.

But times have really changed, and they're in trouble.  

We can't and won't accept that.

The US of 2022 isn't the US of 1917, or 1922, or even 1962, or 1982.  But we basically are looking back to 1982, or so, economically, culturally and politically to an era when things were better for us.  

And this requires us, apparently, to now believe in The Lost Cause.

At one time if you talked to Southerners, everybody's Civil War ancestor was a colonel of epic heroism, not a deserter from the Confederate armies, even though a huge number of Southern soldiers became just that.  And they didn't fight for slavery, but for their culture.

We haven't been able to adjust to the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, twice, so we now have that as our Lost Cause Myth.  The brilliant super genius "very good genes", as Trump would have it, didn't lose, the election was stolen.

Never mind the clear evidence that Trump was planning to steal the election prior to the election occurring.  Never mind the destruction of the U.S. Post Office as part of that.  Never mind the effort to undermine COVID voting protocols.  Now, listen to people like Chuck Gray and you'll learn that 10,000 mules were employed in a nefarious plot.

I don't know how many Wyomingites really believe that, but probably about the same number, percentage wise, of Southerners at one time that believed that Uncle Euclid was a Colonel in the Confederate Cavalry, and not a barefoot infantryman in who deserted.  There were likely always doubts.  But like Homer Stokes in Oh Brother! Where Art Thou, there are underlying issues that people really have in mind.  "That ain't my culture and heritage".

The ultimate problem is that this is going to, long term, marginalize us economically and politically.  Just like it did the Post Reconstruction South.

4.  Democracy can work for the left.

As we've noted elsewhere, the real starting point in the attack on American democracy was by the left going towards a Court oriented aristocracy.  If Americans wouldn't reform and usher in the new liberal era on their own, the Courts could rule and force them.

The left was pretty comfortable with that.

Now the Courts have stripped that role away from themselves and returned issues that never should have been determined solely by nine ancient people with Ivy League law degrees to the people, effectively telling them they'll just have to figure these things out for themselves.

And low and behold, they actually can.

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.

Related Threads:

Colorado Civil War Memorial, Denver Colorado

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.