Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has stripped the name of a U.S. Navy veteran and gay rights activist from a ship and moved to return the last names of Confederate generals to U.S. Army bases.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
What’s in a name? Ask Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He stripped the name of a veteran and gay activist from a Navy ship and returned the last names of Confederate generals to Army bases. Here’s Jay Price of member station WUNC.
JAY PRICE, BYLINE: He had already restored the names of Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Benning in Georgia. Now Hegseth has done the same for all the other bases originally named for Confederates. He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that bringing back the old names was about tradition.
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PETE HEGSETH: This is something we’ve been proud to do, something that’s important for the morale of the Army.
PRICE: A 2021 law barred the use of Confederate names for bases. He got around that by finding soldiers with the same last names as the Confederates and saying the bases are now named for them. This bureaucratic sleight of hand required the names of three soldiers to restore the name A.P. Hill to a Virginia base. Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights activist and attorney, says there’s no explaining away the fact that these bases are really once again named for Confederate officers.
BRYAN STEVENSON: I think it’s a very serious threat to the American identity to embrace names of people who were traitors, who fought against this country, who were committed to preserving slavery, who believed in racial hierarchy and white supremacy.
PRICE: Soldiers enlisting in, say, 1980, he said, could shrug off a Confederate base name as a decision made in a different era. But it’s something else entirely to have those names brought back and celebrated by current leaders.
STEVENSON: If Germany opened a base and called it Adolf Hitler base but said, oh, it’s not – it’s named after somebody else named Adolf Hitler, there is no defense, no justification that we would accept that would make that appropriate.
PRICE: All the renaming, he said, is part of Hegseth’s war on diversity, equity and inclusion. And he says it’s especially misguided given that the military is one of the nation’s most diverse institutions, and more than 20% of the Army’s soldiers are Black. Connor Williams, who teaches at Middlebury College, was lead historian for the federal Naming Commission that developed recommendations for the non-Confederate names Hegseth has now removed. He says, unlike Hegseth’s unilateral decision, the process was bipartisan and thorough.
CONNOR WILLIAMS: For 20 months, we traveled throughout the South. We met, listened to American soldiers, officers, political figures, community leaders, advocacy groups. And that’s how we ended up with these 10 names, which presented clarion, unsurpassable examples of service and sacrifice that make our military great.
PRICE: Hegseth and President Trump have both criticized the removal of the original Confederate names as an attempt to erase history. Now, though, Hegseth has himself removed the name of Harvey Milk, the gay rights icon and Navy veteran, from a ship and replaced it with that of another sailor who was awarded the Medal of Honor in World War II. The change, Hegseth says, takes the politics out of ship names. Naval historian and author Brian Lavery says it’s unusual for a navy to rename a ship.
BRIAN LAVERY: If it was me, whatever my political ideology, I would keep hands off because whatever happens is going to divide the Navy. And the last thing you want is a divided Navy.
PRICE: And, he says, there’s another reason not to make changes this way. It could actually make ship and base naming perpetually political, changing with every swing of an election.
For NPR News, I’m Jay Price in Durham, North Carolina.
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