It stands to reason that Woodrow Wilson would be the president to bring us Army bases named for traitors who waged war on this country with the goal of preserving slavery. He took office in 1913 with a team of white supremacists who announced themselves by requiring separate white and colored bathrooms in federal buildings. The Wilsonians inflicted a neo-Confederate regime on the capital that was felt in far corners of the nation.
North Carolina newspaperman Josephus Daniels had the bloodiest résumé in the Wilson Cabinet. A decade and a half before going to Washington, he was a principal instigator of a murderous coup in Wilmington with the goal of removing Black people from positions of authority in city government.
His Raleigh newspaper, The News & Observer, stoked white rage by equating Black political power with the rape of white women and trafficking in cartoons like one that depicted a giant black bat with “Negro rule” inscribed on its wings, a foot on a ballot box and white women trapped in its claws. On Nov. 10, 1898, throngs of white men burned and murdered at will, driving Black officials and their allies from Wilmington. The state Legislature then disenfranchised African Americans.
The coup was rooted in an influential civic religion known as the Lost Cause. The Lost Causers venerated racial terrorism as a means of suppressing Black political influence. They romanticized slavery, portraying African Americans who lived in chains as happy and well cared for. They recast the pro-slavery war as a just struggle for “states’ rights” while elevating the dead Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, to the stature of a patron saint.
The Wilsonians were plying these waters when they gave Lee’s name to Fort Lee in Virginia. The myth of the noble Confederate that was used to justify the naming honor was bankrupt from the start. Some rebel honorees were known at the time to be profoundly incompetent as soldiers and leaders. At least one honoree was a state Ku Klux Klan leader. Yet another, the execrable George Pickett, was a war criminal.