The “renaming” binge goes on. President Trump signed an order this past week that makes the former Lake Ontario, the easternmost of the Great Lakes between the Canadian province of Ontario and the US’s New York state into “Lake America”. It flows into the St. Lawrence River, which may well become the “Grand River of America” by the time you read this. This move hasn’t been quite as spectacularly splashy as his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, which, as we all know, didn’t exactly send mapmakers scurrying back to the drawing board. But, with a stroke of the pen, and a bit of vengeful rhetoric, the president has managed to divert attention from a host of more pressing national problems, along with centuries of tradition.
Name changes don’t, of course, come easily. There are notable examples of name changes that did or didn’t stick. From history, Russian Tsar Peter the Great created his beautiful city in the west that was St. Petersburg. It became Leningrad in 1924, when Tsars weren’t really a “thing” anymore. With the fall of the old Soviet Union in 1991, it went back to its roots and once again donned the name St. Petersburg. Even the last tsar’s family – mostly bits of bone – were returned to the ancient capital to be interred. The point being, nothing really lasts forever.
But it comes back to President Trump’s obsession with property. It’s been a hallmark of his administration. Mr. Trump spoke of acquiring Greenland, Panama, and most recently the Strait of Hormuz. He referred, with the same reaction as a bomb dropping, to Canada as the “51st state”, thinking that Canadians would jump on the idea. They didn’t. So, he responded as he typically does – by slapping on a few tariffs. It’s been downhill ever since. Mr. Trump also brought up the idea of rebuilding Gaza into a beautiful resort area on the Mediterranean, and we all could see in our minds how it would look. Like the former White House Rose Garden, with cobblestone terraces and patios, tables with yellow striped umbrellas. Acres and acres of high-end suites and gold leaf. That idea too dropped with a resounding thud, even among Israelis. Of course, the Palestinian residents there would be in the way unless they wanted to staff the new Trump resorts, so a need for mass deportations would be called for, but that’s rather another of his areas of expertise. Problem solved.
Most of us don’t remember but some have read about “Fordlandia”, more that 14,000 acres of Amazon rainforest that auto maker Henry Ford purchased in Brazil in the last century. His intent, as the story goes, was to build an autonomous, utopian empire that would produce rubber for his growing automobile business. His efforts to recreate the “company town”, as he had in Michigan, in the tropical jungles of the Amazon basin proved to be a major disaster. There was, as one would expect, a vast gulf of resistance among the indigenous peoples, to say nothing of the climate and overall dissatisfaction of the Americans that Ford sent to South America to supervise the work. So, once again, the imposition of “Americanism” on a foreign land isn’t always something that lasts.
Another example might be the Philippines, which the United States annexed more than a century ago from the Spanish. What is interesting about this island cluster is that it’s never felt a need to rename, held over from the 1540’s. “Philippines” is a remnant from its Spanish colonial days, and the islands were named for King Philip II. Former President William Howard Taft oversaw the transition from a colony to an independent nation by working with the native population to achieve independence. Probably one of his finest achievements. Yes, there were some successful land acquisitions, the Louisiana Purchase from France and Alaska from Russia, but at the time, they were willing to part with them. Hawaii was what we might term a “hostile takeover” accomplished in Trumpian style by US agricultural interests, and the native Hawaiians, spread across a cluster of islands, were really too few in number and defenseless, to oppose it. Even the last native Hawaiian monarch was dethroned and imprisoned for a time. There were rumors, although this remains unverified, that Mr. Trump was considering another “hostile takeover” of Puerto Rico, until someone in the White House reminded him that it is already a part of the US. If memory serves, that subject came up after Hurricane Maria hit the island, and Mr. Trump referred to the disaster relief, inadequate as it was, as “foreign aid”. Earlier this year, Mr. Trump also spoke of “taking over” Cuba as its economy continued to falter. I believe his exact words were, “I can do anything I want.” What an interesting comment from an American president, particularly as foreign relations vision. In the process, perhaps it could be rebranded as “Melania’s Vineyard”, much as we have an island off the coast of Massachusetts. But actually, Mr. President, the US Constitution begs to differ with your “do anything I like” doctrine. Unlike those obnoxious House Hunters that need to “put their stamp” on everything they see, your powers are limited, and like many of your executive orders, reversed by the courts. You aren’t allowed to grab foreign lands or rename the geography at will. That’s not in the Constitution under Presidential powers. Historically, many of those “grabbing” efforts haven’t lasted very long. Napoleon Bonaparte, for all of his efforts to conquer as far as the eye could see, found winter in Moscow to be mostly inhospitable. Adolf Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich” too fell just a few years short of that mark, and the few remaining notable names of his era are places like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau – places of tradgedy, rememberance, and deep sadness, not as monuments to success. Remember too “The sun never sets on the British Empire” of Queen Victoria’s day has pretty much seen that sun not only set but go into total eclipse. King Charles is no longer “Emperor of India”, and the royal image is disappearing on currencies across the globe.
The president, perhaps with the best of patriotic intentions, like a sparkling Reflecting Pool, would do well to remember some of geography’s shifting references, names, and boundaries. The USSR, Yugoslavia, the Belgian Congo, Rhodesia, Dutch Guiana, the Confederate States of America, didn’t have much staying power, and have all disappeared from the map, along with the historic Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, the Papal States, the Holy Roman Empire. Yes, they’ve gone the way of the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, and the Romanovs. There was a time, centuries ago, when England ruled large portions of what is now France. Those holdings got smaller and smaller until Queen Mary Tudor’s reign, when the last outpost – the city of Calais – finally succumbed to French control. I doubt very much that an order of the British Prime Minister could reimpose their historic names or control. What were called the Low Countries – the Netherlands and Belgium, were ruled by Spain, while many chunks of Northern Italy were part of the Austrian empire. Yes, it’s all shrunk, been broken up by regional identities, by religious dissentions, and changed their names to something more relevant. But that relevance goes two ways. Random changes, particularly those done out of spite, don’t typically last. Names that do last do so because they hold a special place for those that inhabit them. For example, Mount McKinley, renamed in 1917 for the assassinated president, was traditionally called “Mount Denali”, from the language of the Native Alaskans. The name has gone back and forth since 1975, with Alaskan state officials favoring the traditional name, and Republicans from Ohio, President McKinley’s home state, objecting and blocking the name change. President Obama approved the change by the Interior Department, and thus at the federal level, to “Denali” for his visit to the mountain in 2015, but Mr. Trump has vowed to . . . . well, you guessed it. I’m of the view that it’s rather a silly waste of our legislators’ time.
So, as we see our government once again drawn to a range of issues from the nonsensical to the truly ridiculous, we saw Canada’s response and a consequent image of a large sign, posted on the Canadian side of Lake Ontario with the Premier of Ontario next to it, that states boldly, “Lake Ontario – Now and Always”. We can hope that this renaming craziness will stop. Not likely, though. Now that Palm Beach has renamed its airport the “Donald J. Trump International”, it’s quite possible that Florida may become “Trumplandia”, the Keys renamed the Kushner Islands, and the state capital moved from Tallahassee to Mar-A-Lago.
I'm Thinking...No! 