Like some Santa Barbarans attending UC Santa Barbara, I joined the on-campus ROTC in 1966, and after volunteering for ROTC boot camp in the summer of 1967, Fort Benning became the outdoor venue where I persevered through six arduous weeks in the blazing Georgia heat.
With hundreds of other soft college boys, we crawled and ran and fired M-14s at the U.S. Army’s famed “Home of the Infantry.” The base, a premier military training camp to this day, is named for Henry L. Benning, a general in the Confederate States of America during the horrendous Civil War.
This war, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, remains by far the most destructive war in American history.
Fort Benning is just one of several military posts named after Confederate leaders, and now are all in the news since President Donald Trump on Dec. 23 vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act that included provisions to rename these bases.
During my demanding boot camp experience, an African-American trainee named Gene Washington was in my particular squad. Another Californian, he was a football player from Stanford and future star NFL wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions. He just zoomed through the six hell-weeks.
Before the advent of film (1920s) and television (1950s) and then the internet, visible monuments and memorial statues played a huge role in American public culture. My family, from deep southern Illinois, often dragged me over to nearby Vincennes, Indiana, to admire the colossal monument to George Rogers Clark, a once-famous hero of the Revolutionary War.
At one time, hauling your kids to museums with statues and paintings of heroes was quite common and important for civics education. Many of us have strong visual memories of the Lincoln Monument, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, both in Washington, D.C., or other locally famous effigies and stone memorials.
As a 19 year old in 1967, I never heard Washington, or anyone, ever wonder why we were training at an Army fort named for a rebellious general determined to keep enslaved African-Americans as his personal “property.” A native Georgian and slaveholder, Benning led Benning’s Brigade for Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Confederate armies.
Author Susan Neiman in her prescient 2019 book, Learning From the Germans, wisely observed about these current Confederate monuments debates: “The debates are not really about affect at all, despite all the emotion they raise. They are about the values we deliberately choose to hold.”
Neiman compares post-World War II German statues to Confederate statuary emphasizing the differences. She highlights the very important role heroic statues and public monuments play in expressing unifying cultural values — whether it’s Benedict Arnold or Abraham Lincoln, Lee or Ulysses S. Grant, or images of Father Junípero Serra images in Southern California.
In today’s fractured America we even fight over how to open our public schools or wear masks in public during the coronavirus crisis. Our unifying cultural values have weakened, and many public school teachers are afraid to teach a strong civics curriculum.
Cultural debates over values, civics and equality resonate in many ways. Issues over race, class, gender and active tolerance arise everywhere in today’s Trumpian America, as some forget that black lives, and that all lives, matter.
It’s late 2020 and we’re enfolded by the onrushing Anthropocene’s incessant wildfires, hammered by COVID-19 and distressing political chaos; it’s not 1967 when the Vietnam War raged and I trained for combat.
The savage IN-equalities infecting our society come to the fore now, intensified by pestilence, race-baiting and savage economic disparities. Where is the Senate pandemic rescue bill?
No one can doubt America’s desperate need for a more fair social democracy; the cries scream out as so many cannot breathe free. Furthermore, without cultural unity and deeply shared values, how can we effectively challenge the Anthropocene’s catastrophic impact on the climate planet?
Neiman carefully notes that in post-World War II Germany there are NO statues to “Hans Wehrmacht” (the typical German WWII infantryman), yet in the American South there are hundreds of statues large and small, immortalizing heroic “Johnny Reb” and Lee and Jefferson Davis.
As a child in 1950s southern Illinois, I imbibed heroizing stories about Stonewall Jackson, Merrill’s Marauders and the “tragic” saga of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg.
But it is past time in this Anthropocene to stop celebrating the faux mythology of Southern heritage and how Serra’s network of California missions helped indigenous peoples here.
These standing Confederate statues do inculcate an illusory and heroizing southern myth of “the Lost Cause.”
Gene Washington never complained to me that Benning was a Confederate general, and therefore a traitor, and a racist defender of slavery. These statues, like a recently removed Andrew Jackson statue in New Orleans, become anchors of implicit as well as explicit cultural and racial bias.
Do we want to celebrate critical civic values like love of country, service to others, economic equality and the transcendent values embodied in the Lincoln and King statues? Or should we turn to unity-busting negative cultural values celebrating the South’s defense of African-American slavery?
Why should we not teach about Lee’s treason, which he shared with Nathan Bedford Forrest, and then remove any of their statues still standing?
“Monuments are values made visible,” Neiman wrote. As a longtime schoolteacher, I want our children to look up to heroes like Lincoln and Harriet Tubman, like King and Gandhi, and Sojourner Truth and Angela Merkel.
Why have teachers in America continued to lead their children to see statues honoring Lee, and even Forrest, the racist founder of the original Ku Klux Klan?
It’s past time to bid farewell to statues and buildings honoring Jackson, Serra, Woodrow Wilson, and yes, goodbye to Henry L. Benning’s name on an American military base. Let’s consider renaming the famous fort for Crispus Attucks, an African-American and Native American stevedore who died in the 1770 Boston Massacre.
Although the Civil War ended 155 years ago, we still need to join the 21st century and walk a unified values “trail.” Germans reject their own World War II heroic images, but we still honor Civil War traitors like Benning.
When my twin German grandsons, ages 8, visit America 20 years from now, will schoolchildren still admire statues of Lee, Forrest and “St. Genocide” Serra?
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
