For more than a century, Fort Benning’s name honored a Confederate general who supported slavery. The military changed the name of the Army base in Georgia two years ago, but now the Trump administration is set on restoring the familiar one — this time for a different Benning.
The new namesake is Fred Benning, a Nebraska native awarded the military's second-highest honor for his battlefield courage as an 18-year-old corporal in 1918, near the end of World War I. The military noted that he later served as mayor of the small Nebraska town of Neligh, but it did not mention that he ran a bakery, opted to have his Distinguished Service Cross mailed to him rather than presented at a military ceremony and didn't discuss his wartime experiences once home. He died in 1974.
