THE CIVIL WAR: THE TRUE STORY BOOK 2

Foxes in the Henhouse

Foxes in the Henhouse

By John Marquardt on Apr 14, 2021

During the past half century, there has been an ever-increasing tide of derogatory comments about the South in general and the Confederacy in particular.  In more recent years, what began merely as verbal sneers and written slurs have now evolved into far more sinister acts of actual violence being perpetrated on our memorials and monuments.  Even worse, there is now a growing body of both Federal and State legislation that calls for the total erasure of an entire culture and history.  While the majority of this mendacity initially emanated from the Northeast and West Coast, all too much of it has now either originated or is being disseminated by an active "fifth column" of elected officials, academics and the media within the South itself.

An excellent exemplification of this would be a column written a couple of years ago by Jeff South, an associate professor of journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University.  In his piece, the Texas-bred author cited another article he had written forty years earlier for a Virginia newspaper about the thirty thousand-strong 1981 Boy Scout Jamboree held at Fort A. P. Hill near Bowling Green.  While the original story merely related the facts about the theme of the event, "Scouting's Reunion with History," South now regrets that he did not tell the Scouts that their reunion was being held at a facility which honored "a man who fought to maintain slavery."  Perhaps the fact that South has also attended and taught at three universities in communist China might have had some bearing on his current thoughts regarding the rewriting of history, specifically renaming all the various United States military facilities which honor Confederate heroes.

According to Professor South's current narrative, the Army installations that were established in the South during both World Wars were named after Confederate leaders merely as a means to recruit more Southern white men into service.  He also stated in his recent article that the two wartime eras were still a time when the Southern States were promoting the "Lost Cause ideology" and that the Army officials, acting in a spirit of reconciliation, were willing to view the Confederate generals as tragic heroes rather than what South now terms  "treasonable racists."  The actual naming of United States military facilities is quite a different story however.  The initial policy for this appeared in a War Department general order of 1832 which merely stated that all new posts will be named by the War Department.  In 1878, a new War Department order allowed the regional commanders to choose the names which resulted in military bases being given a wide variety of names, including those of cities, geographical sites, non-military individuals and even Indian tribes.

The naming of Army facilities after military leaders did not come about until Quartermaster General Richard Batchelder proposed the idea in 1893.  The plan that was adopted was to have the Secretary of War name the facilities after consulting with the base commanders, the chief of the War College's Historical Section and civilian officials in the areas involved.  Two decades later, this resulted in a number of installations in the South being named after Confederate generals.  Even after the practice became official U. S. government policy in 1939, more bases were named for such military leaders.

While various alterations in the naming process were made over the years, including the creation of a Memorialization Board in 1946 by then General of the Army Eisenhower which set forth certain criteria for naming, no radical changes were introduced until last year when the Defense Department and Congress tried to create a commission under the National Defense Authorization Act to rename bases that honored what they termed "traitors who fought to preserve slavery."  President Trump vetoed the measure and called it a "politically motivated attempt to wash away history," but his veto was overridden by both houses of Congress and an axe-wielding group with the elephantine epithet of "The Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America" became an Orwellian reality charged with erasing all "names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia" related to such DOD "items."