A cultural revolution has been sweeping through the U.S. Army—and the remarkable thing is it’s barely been noticed, as a deeper revolution had already taken hold very quietly.
Starting this past March and continuing into the fall, all nine Army bases that are named after Confederate generals have been, or will be given, new names more in keeping with American values and the look of the U.S. military today.
The move was ordered by Congress in 2020, and the new names were chosen by a bipartisan eight-member commission—half of them retired officers, half civilians—after an exhaustive year-and-a-half-long process.
Two of the top Republican presidential candidates—former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis—recently inveighed against the move as an example of “wokeness” or “political correctness in the hallways of Pentagon,” and vowed, if elected, to restore the name of Fort Bragg, which the commission changed to Fort Liberty.
We can draw one of two inferences from these remarks: Either these GOP hopefuls are engaging in even more base-dipping cynicism than usual—or they know nothing about the history of these bases and should keep their mouths shut.
Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the world, was named after Braxton Bragg—not only a Confederate general during the Civil War (and therefore a traitor to the United States), but one of the very worst Confederate generals, a commander who didn’t win a single battle and who wantonly shot his own soldiers for the slightest dissension.
Similarly, Fort Benning, a leading infantry training base, was named after Henry Benning, among the most ardent secessionists in the entire Confederate army who once said he’d rather die in pain and misery than see slavery abolished and who was the last, foot-dragging general to attend the surrender ceremony.
Fort Gordon was named after Lt. Gen. John Brown Gordon, who, after the Civil War, became a Grand Dragon in the Ku Klux Klan.
Fort Hood was named after Gen. John Bell Hood, the fastest-rising officer in the Confederate army, who led his troops to some of the war’s most catastrophic defeats.
Fort Lee was, of course, named after Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate army and a cruel plantation owner even by the standards of the day, regularly whipping his 200 slaves and splitting up many of their families.
“Most of the people we talked to—at the bases and in nearby communities—had never heard who these officers were, what they’d done,” the commission’s co-chair, Ty Seidule, told me in a phone conversation. “Then we’d tell them about guys like Hood or Bragg, what terrible people they were. Some people would say, ‘Well, it will always be Fort Bragg to me,’ but many others said—and well, you can’t hear these stories and say, ‘No, I don’t want that name around here!’ ”
Congress passed the name-changing law in the wake of national protests following the George Floyd killing—which led even the fairly hidebound Army establishment to rethink its past and present. Black Americans account for 20 percent of the Army’s ranks, Hispanics for another 17 percent, and women (of all races) for 17 percent. Yet until now, no military bases were named for Black people or women—and just one, a small facility in Puerto Rico, for a Latino.
It was therefore natural for the commissioners to seek “diversity” in the new names. However, Seidule—a retired Army brigadier general, former chair of the military history department at West Point, and visiting professor of history at Hamilton College—stressed that they weren’t seeking diversity for its own sake. They wanted the new names to fit not only today’s Army but also the function of the base.
For instance, Fort Lee is the Army’s logistics center. And so its new name—Fort Gregg-Adams—is in honor of two of the Army’s most decorated pioneers in logistics.
Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg volunteered for the Army in 1946, organized its supply networks amid the devastation of postwar Germany and Japan, and spent the next 35 years doing the same at bases worldwide, rising from private to three-star general and ultimately serving as the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s logistics director, all while privately mentoring countless enlisted men and leading the fight to desegregate the Fort Lee officers’ club.
Lt. Col. Charity Adams, the highest-ranking Black female officer in World War II, set up and commanded the Army’s postal directory—“the lifeline for soldiers’ morale,” as the commission’s report puts it—processing, sorting, and delivering nearly 200,000 letters a day, close to 6 million pieces of mail each month, to and from 7 million soldiers. In her 1995 memoir, One Woman’s Army, Adams recalled a general threatening to “send a white 1st lieutenant here to show you how to run this unit.” Just a major at the time, Adams snapped back, “Over my dead body, sir”—inspiring great loyalty from her battalion, most of them also Black women.
Gregg, age 95, is still alive and spoke at the naming ceremony in Fort Gregg-Adams in Virginia this past April. Adams died in 2002, but her children attended and spoke as well.
Seidule, who has attended several naming ceremonies, including this one, said, “These have been the most moving, most emotional that I’ve ever been to. These are amazing people. You tell the people at the bases about their stories, and for the most part, they have embraced the stories.”
Here are some of those stories:
Fort Benning is now Fort Moore, named after Lt. Gen. Hal Moore and his wife, Julia Moore, mainly for their contributions to Army family life. Julia came up with the idea of having uniformed messengers personally notify families of soldiers killed or wounded in battle—then fiercely lobbied for the Pentagon to create those “notification teams.” (Until she did this in 1965, taxi drivers delivered telegrams bearing the news.)
Fort Hood in Texas is now Fort Cavazos, named after Gen. Richard Cavazos, a Korean and Vietnam War hero—winner of two Legions of Merit, a Silver Star, five Bronze Stars, and the Purple Heart as well as careerlong roots in Texas—who was the first Hispanic American to pin four starts on his epaulet.
Fort Polk, in Louisiana, is now Fort Johnson, named after Pvt. William Henry Johnson, a member of the Harlem Hellfighters, who joined the French army during World War I after the U.S. Army refused to enlist any Black Americans. The French awarded him the Croix de Guerre for his bravery, the first American soldier to be so honored. Upon returning home, he was paraded through Harlem and down Fifth Avenue to chants of “Here comes Black Death,” the nickname he famously earned on the battlefield. The U.S. government paid him no benefits, and he died destitute in 1929.
Fort Rucker, home of a large Army aviation unit, is now Fort Novosel, named after Chief Warrant Officer Michael Novosel, a medevac helicopter pilot who flew 2,543 extraction missions, rescuing more than 5,500 seriously wounded soldiers, in Vietnam.
Fort Gordon is now Fort Eisenhower. And it’s just incredible that, until now, no U.S. Army base has been named after Dwight D. Eisenhower, the five-star general who commanded allied forces in Europe during World War II, then later became president of the United States.
The name-changing marks a formal end to the U.S. Army’s long, largely unquestioned obeisance to the “Lost Cause” myth, which honored Confederate soldiers for upholding Southern traditions and states’ rights rather than seeing them as perpetrators of slavery.
It also exposes the tacitly assumed myth that these bases were named during or soon after the Civil War. In fact, about half were named during World War I, about half during World War II—in other words, many decades after the Civil War. The purpose of the original names, like that of the gigantic statues commemorating Confederate officers in cities throughout the South, was to remind Black soldiers and citizens just who was still in charge.
Seidule’s presence on the commission is significant. The author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning With the Myth of the Lost Cause, he had been pushing for renaming the bases—and reassessing this aspect of Army culture—for more than 15 years. “I got nowhere with this until three events,” he told me. “Those were the Charlotte massacre of 2015, the Charlottesville killings of 2017, and George Floyd in 2020. Then even some of my Army comrades started thinking.”
One of those comrades was retired Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, then CIA director, who wrote in the Atlantic that he was stationed for many years at the bases named after Confederate officers, but
I never thought much about these men—about the nature of their service during the Civil War. Nor did I think about the message those names sent to the many African Americans serving on these installations—messages that should have been noted by all of us.
Petraeus told me that it was only after he retired in the Army, in 2011, that he “started thinking about how strange it was that the leaders of the fight against the Union were more widely honored” than were those who fought for the country. The Floyd killing and the subsequent protests, he said, were “the catalyst” to writing his Atlantic essay—which, in turn, lent extra legitimacy to Seidule’s campaign and, finally, the bill creating the commission.
There is a lot more work ahead. The commission identified 1,011 things on Defense Department property—streets, bridges, courtyards, water towers, and so forth—that were named after Confederate officers. It passed these lists to the secretary of defense, who passed them to the service secretaries, who pushed them down to base commanders. All of them will be changed, though this will take longer.
Meanwhile, the underlying realities have started to change. According to Seidule, no elected politician—other than Pence and DeSantis—has criticized the name changes since they were announced. You don’t need to be “woke” or “politically correct” to consider Arthur Gregg, Charity Adams, Hal and Julia Moore, William Henry Johnson, and all these other new names to be far more worthy of military honors than any slave-holding secessionist.