When I took up a career in journalism a half-century ago, I accepted the task of using words responsibly. You can’t be sloppy with language if your goal is to be accurate; that is, you can’t exaggerate, say, nor can you fail to articulate a harsh reality. Words matter.
So one word that I think needs some attention today is this: insurrection.
Obviously, our nation’s most potent experience with insurrection was the Civil War – a four-year insurrection by 11 states that claimed 620,000 lives – equivalent to the death of 6 million Americans today.
Notwithstanding that, the U.S. military during the Jim Crow era named nine military installations after Confederate generals – for example, General Robert E. Lee, the commander of all Confederate forces, and General George Pickett, he of the failed “Pickett’s charge” at Gettysburg, and General Leonidas Polk, who was an Episcopal bishop. Two years ago, under congressional statute, the Pentagon removed those names from the bases, and new names were given that didn’t carry that stain of insurrection.
This word, “insurrection,” matters today, especially, because of President Donald Trump’s apparent eagerness to use the Insurrection Act of 1807, a law rarely invoked over these past two centuries. It authorizes the president to deploy military troops to essentially act as police when they’re needed to put down an insurrection. Trump has suggested over and over again that he needs to use the Insurrection Act because police and the National Guard alone can’t control the protests that are spreading across the country against his handling of immigrants.
Sending troops into the streets under false premises is what tyrants do, which is why the Insurrection Act places tight restrictions on presidents. By that law, a president can legally deploy military troops to perform searches and make arrests, but only in an extreme emergency. Such as, for example, the movement of the troops under Generals Lee and Pickett and Polk against loyal U.S. soldiers during the Civil War.
Let’s be clear: law enforcement and combat are not the same thing. Police are trained in conflict de-escalation and crowd control and crime prevention; soldiers are trained to capture and kill.
If you want to know what a brave soldier can do, let’s talk about Henry Johnson of Albany, New York. You may already know his story.
Henry Johnson was a small Black man – 5 foot 4 – a redcap railroad porter at the Albany Union Station when World War One broke out. He volunteered for duty, and one night in May of 1918, in the Argonne Forest of France, Henry Johnson was on sentry duty when his unit was attacked by a large German raiding party. Johnson fought them off – using grenades, the butt of his rifle, a bolo knife and his fists. He killed four attackers and wounded others while suffering wounds himself – 21 in all, during his service. He saved his fellow soldiers.
For this, Henry Johnson was the first American soldier to receive the French Croix de Guerre with Golden Palm. But his own government didn’t similarly honor Henry Johnson – until 2015, 86 years after his death, when he was finally awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. And then, two years ago, a military fort in western Louisiana was named Fort Henry Johnson. It was the fort that had been named after General Leonidas Polk – the bishop-turned-general, who, it might be noted, claimed ownership of at least 400 enslaved people, though maybe as many as 1,000.
But that naming is now being reversed by order of President Trump, as part of his sweep against anything having to do with diversity and equity. Now Fort Henry Johnson will be called Fort Polk again. But that name will supposedly honor a World War Two commander also named Polk – a white guy, of course, like Leonidas Polk, but unlike Henry Johnson. And the other eight military posts named for insurrectionists of the Confederacy will get their old names back, too – but they’ll likewise be officially designated as honoring other veterans with surnames matching the Confederates’. Clever, right?
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
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