Alex Horton reports for WaPo that “Erasing Confederate items from U.S. military will cost $62 million, panel says.”
Removing the last vestiges of Confederate history from the U.S. military, including renaming nine Army posts, will cost more than $62 million, a congressional commission said Tuesday.
The cost was summarized by the group tasked with a sweeping audit of the Defense Department to identify, rename, modify or remove assets that commemorate the battlefield exploits of those who fought during the Civil War to preserve slavery. There are 1,100 such items across the military, the commission found.
The project underscores how deeply rooted Confederate symbology is within the armed forces, a tradition-bound institution where some units still trace their lineage to key Confederate victories and commanders.
The nine installations to be renamed, all in former rebel states, have been a discussion point for years. But those talks reached a crescendo after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, which prompted a vast reexamination of race and racism in the United States. The commission was created in the next year’s defense policy bill.
The commissioners said in a call with reporters that, at Arlington National Cemetery, they recommended removing a statue atop a Confederate monument that depicts enslaved people, strip its bronze and leave the granite base and foundation. The commission previously decided that Fort Belvoir in Virginia, named after an 18th-century plantation on the same grounds, was out of its purview, deferring to the Pentagon to decide whether it should be renamed.
The deep-rootedness of the issue doesn’t surprise me in the least. The Lost Cause myth creation was incredibly effective, the South has long been disproportionately represented in the officer corps, and the likes of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson have long since been incorporated into the US Army’s lore even though they fought against it.
Nor does the figure of sixty-nine miiiillllllion dollars seem like a huge price. It’s a one-time expense and we have an annual defense budget of $770 billion. We can absorb it.
How far we need to go to root these out is certainly debatable. The irony of things like renaming bases is that the vast majority of folks who train at them have no idea who the people they’re named after are. So, for example, I spent ten months at the Field Artillery school in Fort Sill, Oklahoma and had to just now Google who it was named after. (Brig. Gen. Joshua Woodrow Sill, a Union officer who fell at the Battle of Stones River.) I went to Airborne school at Fort Benning, one of the bases that’s being renamed, but had no idea who its namesake, General Henry L. Benning, was. (A prominent lawyer and judge who would later be Georgia’s Chief Justice.) A work colleague, a Black Army colonel who has spent quite a bit of time at the base (he’s an Infantryman) confessed he didn’t know, either, before the controversy over Confederate base names.
Now, I would argue that this actually makes it more reasonable to rename these bases. Even if the vast majority of Black soldiers serving on them aren’t offended by the name, why honor people who have long since faded from the history books? Certainly, Hal and Julia Moore are more worthy of being recognized at the home of the Infantry than Benning.
Still, it’s not obvious where one draws the line.
Defense One‘s Jacqueline Feldscher reports, “Arlington’s Confederate Memorial Should Go, Commission Says.”
The Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery should be dismantled, a panel of officials recommended on Thursday in their third and final report on renaming U.S. military bases, buildings, streets, and monuments that honor the Confederacy.
The Naming Commission, which was established by the 2021 Defense Authorization Act to address systemic racism in the military, is recommending that the statue on top of the memorial and all bronze elements of the monument be removed, but that the granite base should remain in place to avoid disturbing the graves nearby.
In an act meant to heal lingering animosities from the Civil War, Congress authorized the remains of Confederate soldiers to be reinterred there in 1900, eventually burying more than 400 Confederate troops in the graveyard. The monument was erected in 1914. “The history of the Confederate Memorial embodies the complex and contested legacy of the Civil War at Arlington National Cemetery, and in American culture generally,” says a description on the cemetary’s website.
The memorial includes a statue of a woman representing the “American South” surrounded by 14 shields representing the states that joined the Confederacy as well as Maryland, which remained neutral. The monument also includes a Latin quote that portrays the South’s position during the war as a “noble” cause, according to Arlington National Cemetery, using a common phrase of the revisionist “Lost Cause” movement of the early 20th century.
“It is problematic from top to bottom,” Ty Seidule, the vice chair of the naming commission, told reporters.
So Congress of the reunited United States, acting 35 years after the war, voted to inter 400 Confederate war dead at Arlington (which had been Robert E. Lee’s family estate). Fourteen years later, a monument was placed upon it reflecting the sentiment of the day that the history was “complicated.”
It seems strange, indeed, to reverse that decision six score and two years later. Hell, just add another plaque explaining the current understanding.
