Why Is the Army Still Honoring Confederate Generals?

By James Risen, The Intercept

07 October 19

 

n the South in the years before the Civil War, it would have been difficult to find a more zealous advocate for slavery than Henry Lewis Benning. He was a firebrand from Georgia and an early advocate of Southern secession. As his public stature rose, Benning became an increasingly ardent voice for the creation of a pro-slavery Southern republic. He helped draft Georgia’s ordinance of secession, which took the state out of the Union just before the Civil War.

Benning was such a powerful force for secession that Georgia sent him as the state’s representative to persuade Virginia to secede as well. In a speech in Virginia in early 1861, Benning revealed in unflinching terms his belief that secession was the only way to save slavery in the South. Georgia had seceded, he said, because of “a deep conviction on the part of Georgia that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. … If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain slavery is to be abolished. By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case. … War will break out everywhere like hidden fire from the earth.”    

Virginia seceded, and Benning went on to become a general in the Confederate Army.

Today, Benning would be a long-forgotten footnote to the history of Southern white supremacy — if not for the U.S. Army. That’s because the Army honors Benning above almost any other military officer in American history. Fort Benning, in Georgia, one of the most important military installations in the United States, is named for him.

Benning’s qualifications for having one of America’s most iconic Army bases named after him? He was a Confederate and he was from Georgia.

Fort Benning is just one of 10 Army bases named for Confederates, a legacy of the Jim Crow era in the South, when many of today’s largest bases were built in rural Southern areas where the Army could accumulate large tracts of cheap land with the kind of terrain and climate needed for training.

Eager to expand rapidly during the periods around World War I and World War II, the Army placated white Southern community leaders by naming newly constructed bases after Confederates, usually generals with some local connection. The Army didn’t seem to care who the bases were named after as long as they won local cooperation to build them fast.

“In times of crisis, the Army was going to work with the local people who had power and influence, and they would go along with them on what to name the bases,” observed David Cecelski, a North Carolina historian who has written extensively about slavery and civil rights.

But today, 100 years after some of those bases were built, they retain their Confederate names. And in an era of protests against Confederate statues and monuments in cities and towns across the South, the U.S. Army has faced almost no resistance to its steadfast determination to keep those names in place.

There have been no significant protests targeting bases named for Confederates. Either protesters don’t realize who the bases are named for, or they are unwilling to confront such big, powerful targets.

Yet the base names were products of the same reassertion of Southern white supremacy that prompted the erection of many Confederate statues and monuments. Fort Benning, for example, was built in 1918, at the height of Jim Crow, when lynching and other white violence against black people throughout the South was widespread. “All of those Confederate statues were really symbols of white supremacy, and they were put up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not right after the Civil War,” noted Catherine Lutz, an anthropologist at Brown University and author of a book about the relationship between Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, where the base is located. “They were symbols of resurgent white supremacy, and they were also warnings.”

Questions about the base names have occasionally been raised with the Army. But officials have always sought to dismiss such concerns by arguing that the bases are named to honor American soldiers, and that changing the names would upend tradition.

The issue briefly flared in the aftermath of the 2015 shooting of worshippers at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist. Protests followed in Charlottesville, Virginia, over whether that town’s statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee should be removed, prompting a backlash from white supremacists and neo-Nazis, who organized the “Unite the Right” rally there in August 2017. The rally turned deadly when a white supremacist deliberately plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. That tragedy brought national focus to the question of what should be done about public monuments, statues, and other representations honoring the pro-slavery Confederacy at a time of increasing diversity in the United States.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville, the Army faced specific questions about the fact that two streets at Fort Hamilton, an old base in Brooklyn, were named for Confederates. Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat who represents large swaths of central and south Brooklyn, asked the Army to change the names of Stonewall Jackson Drive and General Lee Avenue at Fort Hamilton.

“These monuments are deeply offensive to the hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn residents and members of the armed forces stationed at Fort Hamilton whose ancestors Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought to hold in slavery,” Clarke said in a statement at the time.

The Army refused, and an Army official wrote that renaming the streets would be “controversial and divisive.”

Since the skirmish over the street names at Fort Hamilton died down, the Confederate names of Army bases have received little public attention despite a surge in white supremacist violence this year, including the mass shooting in El Paso in August.

Congressional Democrats, who now control the House of Representatives, may take action on the issue this year, but it is not clear how forcefully they will push, especially at a time when impeachment is overshadowing everything else in the House. A spokesperson for Clarke said that she plans to introduce legislation soon that would mandate the renaming of military bases named for Confederates, similar to a measure she proposed in 2017.

Meanwhile, Rep. Adam Smith, a Washington state Democrat who is now chair of the House Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Pentagon, appears to be quietly pushing for changes in the process by which bases are named. In 2017, after the “Unite the Right” rally, Smith joined Clarke and several other members of Congress in signing a letter to then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis calling for the renaming of bases named after Confederates. Now Smith and House Democrats are pushing for a provision in the legislation covering the Pentagon’s budget that would require new “military naming conventions,” congressional officials say, but it is unclear whether they would require the renaming of existing bases or would only apply to future installations. It’s also not clear whether the Pentagon will continue to resist any change.

The Army’s current position that it is merely celebrating American soldiers and upholding tradition ignores the ugly truth: Many bases are named for Confederates who were ardent white supremacists in the South before, during, and after the Civil War.

Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, is a good example. Built in 1918, the base is named for Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general. Not only was Bragg considered to have been one of the most incompetent generals in the Civil War, he was also a major slaveowner.

Bragg was born in Warrenton, North Carolina, where his father used slaves in his contracting and construction business. Long before the Civil War, Bragg’s mother shot and killed a free black man who said something to her that she didn’t like. She was arrested but acquitted by a jury.

In 1856, just five years before the start of the Civil War, Bragg bought a sugar plantation in Louisiana where he owned 105 slaves. After acquiring the plantation, Bragg wrote to his wife that the slaves were “a fair lot, the children very fine and of a pretty age and just getting to the field.”

After the outbreak of the Civil War, an Irish journalist wrote that Bragg told him that “slaves were necessary for the actual cultivation of the soil in the South; Europeans and Yankees who settled there speedily became convinced of that; and if a Northern population were settled in Louisiana tomorrow, they would discover that they must till the land by the labor of the black race, and that the only mode of making the black race work was to hold them in a condition of involuntary servitude.”

Then there’s Fort Gordon, in Georgia, built in 1941 and named for John Brown Gordon, a Confederate general who is widely believed to have been the head of the secretive Ku Klux Klan in Georgia following the Civil War. After he was elected to the U.S. Senate, Gordon helped forge an infamous political deal in which white Southern politicians agreed to break a prolonged deadlock over the outcome of the 1876 presidential election by not blocking the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, from assuming office. In return, the Republicans agreed that they would remove federal troops from Southern states, effectively ending Reconstruction.

Fort Rucker, in Alabama, is named for Edmund Rucker, who served the Confederacy as an officer under Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest’s cavalry was responsible for the massacre of 300 Union soldiers, most of them black, at Fort Pillow in Tennessee in 1864, which today is considered one of the worst atrocities of the Civil War. After the war, Forrest became the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and also went into business with Rucker in a railroad-building project, according to a recent biography of Rucker.

While the Army may not have cared much about the names of its bases when they were built, white Southern leaders certainly understood their political significance. Federal bases named for Confederates helped maintain the romantic illusion of “the Lost Cause” and the notion, popularized by the film “Birth of a Nation” and the novel “Gone with the Wind,” that the South had fought to preserve a pastoral way of life rather than to maintain the brutality of slavery.

That reading of Southern history was clearly a factor in the naming of Fort Benning. When it was built in Columbus in 1918, the local Rotary Club asked the Army to name it after Benning, who was buried there. To celebrate the base’s opening, a parade was held, featuring Benning’s 65-year-old daughter. As she rode through town, in a car flying the American flag, an older woman in the crowd – a woman whose own granddaughter called her an “unreconstructed rebel” – shouted, “I’m ashamed of you, riding down Broad Street behind that old rag!”

Steven Mnuchin Was Hopelessly Crooked Even Before the Newest Scandals Came Along

By Jeremy Stahl, Slate

07 October 19

An ongoing roundup of Trump administration malfeasance, Part 2.

his Is Still Happening is a new feature in which Slate will attempt to offer an update on Cabinet-level corruption, what could be done to bring the officials to account, and what Democrats are doing in response (generally, nothing). The second installment is about a figure who has been at the center of many Trump-era scandals, Steven Mnuchin. 

The Official: Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin 

What Is Still Happening: Mnuchin has been implicated in many, many, many scandals—big, medium, and small—since President Donald Trump first nominated the former Goldman Sachs chief information officer, hedge fund manager, foreclosure specialist, and film executive to be secretary of the treasury. He has been most recently in the news not for any of that early-term malfeasance, but for his current and ongoing efforts to cover up Trump’s tax returns. 

In April, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal issued a formal request to the Internal Revenue Service for Trump’s tax returns under a 1924 update to the tax code, which commanded that “upon written request” from the chairmen of the relevant committees, the Treasury “Secretary shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request.” Mnuchin, fulfilling an earlier promise to defy any such request, responded in May that he would not be furnishing the tax returns as the statute obligated. This came after Mnuchin acknowledged that his department had communicated with the White House about how it should handle the issue. As the Washington Post noted, the tax request “process is designed to be walled off from White House interference, in part because of corruption that took place during the Teapot Dome scandal in the 1920s.” Oh, well! 

In his response to Neal, Mnuchin argued that he could ignore both the spirit and the letter of the law, making an unsupported claim that the request for tax information “lacks a legitimate legislative purpose.” Even though the law says that “the Secretary shall furnish” the requested tax information, no questions asked, Neal had offered a legitimate legislative purpose for the request, namely to ensure that IRS policies subjecting presidential tax returns to “mandatory examinations” were being carried out properly. That legislative purpose only grew more urgent this past July when, according to a letter Neal sent Mnuchin in August, a federal whistleblower presented the committee with “credible allegations of ‘evidence of possible misconduct’—specifically, potential ‘inappropriate efforts to influence’ the mandatory [presidential and vice presidential] audit program.” On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that the whistleblower was an IRS official who reported that he was told that at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to interfere in the mandatory audit of the president’s or vice president’s returns.

Mnuchin’s refusal to turn over requested tax returns in direct violation of the law should clearly be a really big deal! Besides Neal’s stated legislative purpose, there are open questions about whether foreign-backed lenders provided financing to Trump at a time when the self-declared bankruptcy king struggled to entice other lenders, and the returns could clarify to what extent foreign actors might have financial leverage over the president. Further, because he failed to divest from his businesses, a tax return could illuminate how much money Trump continues to receive from foreign governments potentially seeking to curry his favor in direct violation of the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause. The returns could also help Congress find out if the president cheated on his taxes. Finally, all of this could be part of a case for impeachment. 

But it would be unfair to Mnuchin to focus strictly on his misconduct as an appendage of the president’s misconduct. The treasury secretary has done plenty of sketchy to unlawful things on his own, in apparent service of his own interests. Whether helping himself or his boss, he’s accumulated a remarkable list of grifting accomplishments: 

• Before Mnuchin’s confirmation he acknowledged that he had failed to disclose to the Senate Finance Committee nearly $100 million in assets, as well as his role as a director of an investment fund incorporated in the Cayman Islands, a notorious tax shelter. 

• As part of that confirmation process, Mnuchin lied to Congress: He denied that under his management, OneWest Bank—an institution that specialized in foreclosures in the aftermath of the financial crisis—had participated in the practice of “robo-signing” foreclosure documents without doing the necessary diligence. Contrary to Mnuchin’s Senate testimony, a former vice president of OneWest testified in court that she signed 750 foreclosure documents a week without reviewing many of them; that she took 30 seconds per document; and that she had “changed my signature considerably” to accommodate her OneWest signing practices, adding that “it’s just an E now.” It’s worth noting that shortly after Mnuchin entered office, the bank offered $89 million to settle claims that it had abused the foreclosure process. Just one example of that abuse involved the firm’s attempts to foreclose on the home of a 90-year-old woman who had made a 27-cent payment error. Mnuchin and his fellow investors, for their parts, made $1.6 billion in the 2009 deal to take over the failed bank that would become OneWest, and Mnuchin personally took a $10.9 million payout after OneWest merged with a different bank in 2015. 

• Mnuchin was chastised in early 2017 by career ethics officials for violating laws against self-dealing when he promoted The Lego Batman Movie, which was financed by his production company. 

• Earlier this year, that same federal ethics watchdog agency refused to certify Mnuchin’s 2018 financial disclosure after it learned that he had “sold” his stake in a film production business to his then-fiancée and current wife, Louise Linton. This “sale” came after Mnuchin signed an ethics agreement promising to divest from the company. 

• Linton was a key player in a separate scandal involving the secretary. In 2017, she posted Instagram photos of herself disembarking from a military plane in Kentucky just prior to a solar eclipse, including the hashtags for high-end fashion brands that she was wearing at the time. When a mother of three from Portland, Oregon, posted a comment on Linton’s Instagram page expressing dismay over the fact that taxpayers had funded what seemed like a personal glamour trip, Linton responded: 

Aw!!! Did you think this was a personal trip?! Adorable! Do you think the US govt paid for our honeymoon or personal travel?! Lololol. Have you given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self sacrifice to your country? I’m pretty sure we paid more taxes toward our day “trip” than you did.

What great #patriotism! 

Linton’s question about government-funded honeymoon travel was more than rhetorical: It was later reported that Mnuchin had requested use of a government jet for himself and Linton to travel on their 2017 European honeymoon, but the request had been denied. It was also later reported that between the spring and fall of 2017, Mnuchin had taken eight trips on military aircraft, costing taxpayers $1 million, when he could have flown commercial airlines as had been the practice of his predecessors, and with his wife as his regular flight companion. (Linton recently joked about having been described as the “Marie Antoinette, Darth Vader, and Cruella de Vil” of the Trump administration entourage.) 

• Mnuchin managed to entangle himself in perhaps the most convoluted scandal of the Trump presidency: the Russia affair. As lawmakers left town for the winter holidays last year, Mnuchin announced a decision to undo sanctions against Oleg Deripaska, a Vladimir Putin–aligned Russian oligarch at the center of the Mueller investigation. Special counsel Robert Mueller would find that Deripaska had been promised “private briefings” and had likely been provided Trump internal polling data by former Trump campaign chairman and current federal prison inmate Paul Manafort. But Mnuchin determined that congressionally approved sanctions against Deripaska should be significantly lessened. Mnuchin also reportedly misled Congress about the terms of the deal the Treasury Department struck with Deripaska to cut those sanctions. Mnuchin also failed to address his own conflict of interest revolving around a direct business connection to a top shareholder at Deripaska’s firm. No collusion, though! 

• Mnuchin was accused of using his Jewish identity to help shield the president after Trump said there were “very fine people” among the attendees of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that included participants who wielded flaming torches and chanted neo-Nazi slogans. 

• Mnuchin postponed the Treasury Department’s previously announced move to put abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, reportedly because he understood the change would upset the president, who is a big fan of the current face of the $20 bill, virulent racist Andrew Jackson. 

How Long It Has Been Going On: Mnuchin’s abuse of corporate positions of power stretches back at least a decade, as evidenced by the validated charges of foreclosure misconduct against OneWest. He extended his corruption to the public sector the moment he set out to enter government service in late 2016, through his lies and withholding of information during his confirmation process, and began abusing his office in the first months after he’d obtained it. His latest efforts to cover up Trump’s tax returns can be dated at least back to March, when he promised that he would “protect the president” before the request for Trump’s returns had even been made. 

What Would Normally Happen: Normally, the president would just hand over his tax returns, as every previous modern candidate had done prior to Trump. Because there’s no precedent for what Trump has done, it’s hard to think of a parallel case and a “normal” response. After the Teapot Dome scandal, Congress tried to solve the problem of the executive branch preventing congressional financial investigations and blocking access to tax returns—in that case, it had been Mnuchin predecessor at the Treasury Department Andrew Mellon who had come under scrutiny—by passing the law saying that the secretary “shall furnish” requested returns. But Mnuchin is simply ignoring that law. 

As for Mnuchin’s various conflicts of interest, self-dealing, and ethics lapses, that’s also a highly unusual situation. There’s no real enforcement mechanism on those issues aside from impeachment. As the Times noted of the failure to get his 2018 disclosure certified following the revelations that he had attempted to “divest” one of his investments by “selling” it to Linton: 

It is extremely rare for cabinet officials to not have their financial records certified, said Virginia Canter, a former senior ethics counsel at the Treasury Department. In 2001, Paul H. O’Neill, President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, divested his holdings in Alcoa, an aluminum producer, because of conflicts of interest.

Of course, all of this is nothing compared with the president’s own failure to divest from his businesses, which is perhaps why Mnuchin’s conflicts might not matter so much to the public. 

In regard to the apparent abuses of government resources surrounding the $1 million in noncommercial travel, there is some very recent precedent there. Trump’s first health and human services secretary, Tom Price, was forced to resign that job for spending $400,000 on private planes for official business travel. Apparently, though, the norm that abuses of government resources might result in removal from office or resignation only applied to the first couple of Trump Cabinet officials who were caught doing that. 

What Democrats Have Done: Issued stern verbal warnings, sent out subpoenas, and gone to court. None of these efforts have accomplished anything so far. Given the breadth and scope of Mnuchin’s abuses, the Democratic timidity in confronting him seems particularly pathetic. 

That timidity is not relegated just to the House of Representatives. Shortly after she entered federal office, Sen. Kamala Harris of California struggled to explain why she had failed to prosecute OneWest Bank’s foreclosure violations as California attorney general back in 2013. 

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, tried to vote to overturn the Deripaska sanctions relief with the support of many Republicans, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked that effort. Sen. Ron Wyden, for his part, has been harshly critical of Mnuchin’s various past abusive business practices and more recent violations of federal ethics statutes, but nobody has actually done anything about either of those issues. 

As for the tax returns, Neal has taken a route that even many of his colleagues in the generally sheepish Democratic caucus have found to be meek. In May, after Mnuchin refused to hand over Trump’s tax returns as required by law, Neal escalated by issuing a subpoena. A week later, when Mnuchin said he would not be complying with the subpoena, Neal decided not to seek to hold him in contempt of Congress, but instead simply went to court. “I don’t see what good it would do at this particular time,” Neal told CNN, when asked about contempt. “I think that if both sides have made up their minds, better to move it over to the next branch of government, the judiciary.” The case landed in front of Trump-appointed D.C. District Judge Trevor McFadden, and when Neal requested that the case be fast-tracked because of the urgency of the matter, McFadden said no. 

Meanwhile, Neal said earlier this month that he hadn’t determined yet whether to even release the whistleblower complaint about the alleged abuse of the audit system to the public. He also couldn’t say whether an allegation of political interference in the audit process, on top of the total nullification of the law requiring tax records be turned over to his committee, on top of Mnuchin ignoring congressional subpoenas, deserved being drawn into the Democrats’ newly launched impeachment inquiry. 

“That’s hard to speculate about,” Neal said. “I think that certainly you believe as we go down this road, that the inquiry could entail a lot of different things. You can see, I’m very guarded about what I have to say because this is an active court case.” Fellow lawmakers are apparently growing impatient with Neal’s handling of the whistleblower complaint, with one telling the Post that Neal had “been almost entirely silent about the whole matter” in private meetings with Democrats on his committee. 

Great work, Richard Neal! 

What Is Likely to Be Done: As with the Ukraine scandal, Democrats could play their one big card and initiate impeachment proceedings against Mnuchin. They could also consider exercising their long-dormant inherent contempt powers, perhaps in new ways such as issuing fines, though such fines might be impossible to enforce and also would likely be a drop in the bucket to Mnuchin. It seems unlikely that they will do either of these things. You would think that Trump’s tax returns would be a critical part of any impeachment inquiry, but so far they’re not critical enough for the Democrats to really fight for them. 

One thing Democrats might—and should—do about Mnuchin is this: make sure he at least answers for whatever his role might have been in the Ukraine scandal. Mnuchin has said repeatedly that he wasn’t on the call on which Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival Joe Biden (Mnuchin argued against releasing the summary of that call and claimed publicly “it was largely a congratulatory call” before that release showed otherwise). He has, however, said that he was involved in the process of blocking $250 million in military aid to Ukraine while Trump’s pressure campaign was happening. Mnuchin has further claimed “there was no connection” between the military aid being withheld and the pressure campaign to investigate Biden. 

If House Democrats have any sense, they’ll subpoena the treasury secretary for documents related to his work on the aid issue and seek to compel him to testify on the things he has already discussed publicly. Do they have any sense? We’ll see! 

How Impeachable This Stuff Is: Mnuchin’s involvement in Trump’s scandals and ability to participate in his own personal ones seems nearly unsurpassed in this administration. 8 out of 10.