The U.S. Naval Academy has renamed a building that once honored Matthew Fontaine Maury, the founder of modern oceanography. It is now named for President Jimmy Carter, a failed president whose most significant achievement was ordering the failed rescue mission of American hostages in Iran.
The reason Maury had to go: He served in the Confederate Navy, all things Confederate now being the subject of a communist campaign of lies and hate.
The attack on Maury is part of a larger campaign that began in earnest after a mass shooting at a black church in South Carolina, and intensified further after George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose while being restrained by Minneapolis police.
Immigrant Navy Secretary
The building that will get Carter’s name is Maury Hall.
“When [U.S. Defense] Secretary [Lloyd] Austin directed us to implement the recommendations of the Naming Commission, he instructed us to give proud new names,” said Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro:
Names that echo with honor, patriotism, and history. Names that will inspire generations of service members to defend our democracy and our Constitution. Today, on the Friday before Presidents Day weekend, that is exactly what we are doing. I can think of no one more worthy of this renaming than President Jimmy Carter.
If Del Toro, a Cuban immigrant, can’t think of anyone more worthy for whom to name a building than the man who let 52 Americans languish in Islamic captivity for 15 months, one wonders how he graduated from the academy with a degree in electrical engineering.
And apparently among the names that “echo with honor, patriotism, and history” is boy rapist Harvey Milk, the homosexual San Francisco councilman who was shot to death in 1978. Under President Barack Obama, the Navy named a ship after Milk in 2016.
Anyway, academy Superintendent Sean Buck was similarly effusive about Carter.
“By naming this building in his honor we not only recognize his great contributions but ensure that his legacy will forever inspire our nation’s future leaders,” Buck said. “For generations to come, when midshipmen walk the corridors of Carter Hall, I have no doubt that they will be reminded of President Carter’s example and his legacy of lifelong service, and reinvigorated with the call to serve we all answered when we took our first oath.”
The news release on the renaming did not offer details of Carter’s “lifelong service,” although he was active duty in the Navy for seven years and in the reserves for another eight.
Maury vs. Carter
The man for whom the building was named was one of the most significant contributors to modern marine and atmospheric science. He was also a trailblazing educator.
In a speech for United Daughters of the Confederacy, the late Captain Miles P. DuVal, Jr., a 1918 academy grad, called Maury a “benefactor of mankind.”
DuVal opened his story about Maury with a summary of his achievements:
- Author, First Book on Nautical Science by an American Naval Officer, 1836;
- First Superintendent, U.S. Naval Observatory, 1844-61;
- First Hydrographer, U.S. Navy, 1844-61;
- Precursor, U.S. Weather Bureau, 1843-57;
- Founder of the science of oceanography;
- Father of world meteorology;
- Pathfinder of the seas;
- Locator of the first transatlantic cable;
- Advocate of naval reform and reorganization;
- Champion for establishment of the U.S. Naval Academy;
- Prophet of the Panama Canal;
- Planner for Amazonian, Mississippian, and Antarctic explorations;
- Leader for international cooperation in Antarctic research;
- Inventor of the first electrically controlled submarine mine successfully used in warfare;
- Introducer of chinchona cultivation into Mexico;
- Author of public school geographies; and,
- Father of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech).
Carter’s achievements as president are somewhat less notable:
- 14.6 percent inflation;
- Eight percent unemployment;
- Deep recession;
- Gas rationing;
- The failed Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the hostages held at the American embassy in Iran;
- The seizure of that embassy by Iranian militants; and,
- “A crisis of confidence … that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will … [and] is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.”
Culture War Against the Gray
The Navy will also rename USNS Maury, a survey ship, and the USS Chancellorsville, a guided-missile cruiser, but has not announced the new names.
Given the Biden administration’s preoccupation with promoting sexual perversion in general and sex perverts to high office, whether the Navy will find another homosexual rapist or sex pervert for whom to name a ship is unknown.
The attack on all things Confederate began decades ago, but intensified after Dylann Roof murdered nine blacks at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Afterward, neoconservative Governor Nikki Haley signed a bill to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state Capitol.
After the death of Floyd, every Confederate monument in Richmond, Virginia, was vandalized and removed, including Maury’s.
West Point will remove all Confederate symbols, and the military will rename bases that honor Confederates.
As for Carter and the Confederacy, though he recently said the Confederate battle flag is a “cancer in people’s minds” that “we should do away with,” years ago he was pictured with that flag at least twice.
