Fort Liberty is Fort Bragg again, but no more Braxxie!
Let the mail mixups resume!
Fort Liberty in North Carolina is now Fort Bragg again, but without the infamous slaver Braxton Bragg. The new Fort Bragg name is sure to throw left and right off their games.. As a bonus, we all remember how some people get the two Fort Braggs mixed up, sometimes by mail, but also by social media groups. That’s back!
The Trump administration came up with a real twist – the fort is now named for a World War II hero named Bragg, not Braxton Bragg. The base is now named for the late Roland Bragg, a mechanic and paratrooper who fought in World War II including the Battle of the Bulge. Bragg died in 1999. Until Trump renamed the base for him, he was a beloved hero in his family but not known well elsewhere. Now he has a Wikipedia page and is on the front page of the New York Times.
Fort Bragg back east is NOT a city, but an Army base. It’s one of the biggest and most important Army bases. The city nearby is Fayetteville, NC. Both Fort Bragg CA and Fort Bragg base in North Carolina were named for former Gen. Braxton Bragg. Former underlings did it, hoping to curry favor with their old boss. Bragg seems to have been well regarded while a frontier officer but was one of the stupidest generals in history after he became a traitor and joined the Confederacy and became a general. He was so incompetent and lost so many battles, the other Confederate generals mutinied and were going to court martial him. Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy went out and saved dumbo Bragg from his peers and made him the president’s personal secretary.
His legacy as a slaveholder, and confederate and being part of the genocide of Native Americans (although not anywhere near his name-sake city in California, which he never visited ) has energized numerous efforts to erase his name from Mendocino County’s second biggest city. Name change efforts happened in the 19th century, the 90s, and then the city council spent a year looking at the issue beginning during the Black Lives Matters movement in 2020. The city appointed a committee including several Natives as well as people from a wide variety of perspectives. They and the council came to the conclusion that better history celebration and teaching of Native peoples was a good idea, but not a name change.
The issue seemed resolved in a Democratic fashion.
Shortly after that, the Change Our Name group formed, energized primarily by retired professor and author Philip Zwerling and Mikael Blaisdell. Their efforts have attracted large crowds and much community debate. The group’s efforts to change the name of the schools got people fired up and created Fort Bragg Forever and also energized many old timers into political activism, mostly on the right. The school board never took up name change, being occupied with the issue of education. Nobody is considering a name change. Yet it rages away as an issue.
The new Bragg, private Roland was a private from Maine who did some awful jobs like handling toxic substances on the base and becoming a paratrooper. But reporters have been scrambling all day to find out about him. In fact, the idea of naming the base after him was on the list when the military decided to get rid of Braxton Bragg back in 2023. That listing produced some facts and a trail that the media followed to his family, who were stunned by proud of a man who lived a good life after the war and died in 1999. He saved the life of another paratrooper during the Battle of the Bulge, stealing a German ambulance and getting his mate to safety. This won him the Silver Star. Naming the base for. a man who defended our country rather than offending it was about time.
For this story, I have chosen images from the Name Change debate that happened two years ago between Phil Zwerling and Bruce Anderson, publisher and editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser. Although these are two very smart men, the event was utterly baffling to me. When dragged into the light of a debate, the issue seemed to be so inconsequential as to be invisible. As Gertrude Stein said in her famous review of Oakland, there was “no there there.”
I had planned to write a neutral story for the Mendocino Voice about it and if the debate had been intelligible I would have. But I didn’t want to do what we in the media do every day- make it seem dignified and sensible for the people who weren’t there. As the night went on I kept scratching my head. Then I got the idea that I would take photos of the faces of everyone watching. The faces tell the story. Some of these people pictured are no longer with us but they all tell a story I found compelling enough to share with you.. I believe you can see from their visages more than the words the debaters spoke that this issue really makes no sense in the world we live in. Take a look. You may come to a different conclusion than I did but I think you will also get a unique story from studying that audience. Tell me what you think. I do believe photos can speak much more than words.
Trump’s renaming of Fort Bragg was clever in dumping the idiot Braxton. This switcaharoo happened here also. Then Vice Mayor Bernie Norvell suggested in 2020 using a different hero named Bragg from the Civil War, this one a Yankee. There are actually several who would qualify., However, the Fort part of the name remains an issue here, because the Fort was a symbol of the ruthless treatment of Natives here.
While finding a legitimate military hero to replace a fool was a good political move, Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico was a huge waste of money and his renaming of Denali back to Mt. McKinley is most shocking.
Since the 1970s when the Alaska State Legislature to change the name back to Denali, the majority of Alaskans have been for the ancient name of Denali, meaning “the high one”. The state of Ohio blocked the renaming many times, as Ohio is the only place mediocre president William McKinley is remembered, being an Ohio giant who got Peter-principled into president.
The GOP senator in Alaska asked Trump not to do it but the new president was on a mission, apparently to satisfy Fox News. The name McKinley just sounds clumsy when used in Alaska and Denali is a beautiful and easy-to-use name. Having worked in Alaska as a firefighter, I felt that Alaska, outside its handful of cities is still Indigenous land and this should be left to the people who live out there, not some guy 5000 miles away, renaming it for another president sitting in that same chair. Public input, part of every such process since the time of Abe Lincoln has evaporated in one month. A great American tradition is destroyed! How can the state of Alaska not be allowed input on the name of the mountain?? Only in a fascist system is the answer. This is NOT America. To be America, we need public processes for something like a total freeze on all alternative energy through proper federal agencies, not an order by a dictator. Public input is always the way, even if it is gone for the moment.
