Donald Trump and the Politicization of Geography

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/texas-news/trumps-geographic-renaming-plans-leave-mapmakers-pondering-what-next/3749133/

Since the commencement of his second term as president, Donald Trump has sought to politicize the system by which the United States government identifies significant geographic areas that lie under its jurisdiction. On January 20, he signed an executive order requesting that the Interior Department assign Mount Denali and the Gulf of Mexico new designations to complement his ideology. From that day until the present moment, North America’s tallest mountain and largest body of water have borne immensely jingoistic titles: Mount McKinley and the Gulf of America. Government maps and documents may reflect this change, but the rest of the world — and most of the U.S. population — stand in stark disagreement with Trump’s unprecedented alteration of America’s cartographical conventions. 

The U.S. has traditionally determined the names of its territories based upon the will of its citizenry. The states acquired since 1783 mostly owe their present appellations to the imaginations of the American colonists who originally settled them or to the commonly accepted designations they held before undergoing American conquest. For example, the names of America’s two most populous states — Texas and California — are both of Spanish derivation, as are several of the major cities contained therein. When the U.S. annexed both in the 1840s, Mexican municipalities like Los Angeles and Anglo settlements like Houston — named for Texan pioneer Samuel Houston — kept their names intact by the desires of their populations. 

This very principle shaped how the term “Gulf of Mexico” came to characterize the large expanse of water between the Southern United States, eastern Mexico, and the eastern rim of the Caribbean. The American fishermen, sailors, and fur traders who first settled the American territories along the Gulf described the enormous body of water from which they drew their material livelihood and access to the world economy with the term invented by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century. 

After the Louisiana Purchase bequeathed the young United States full sovereignty over what would later develop into the states between Florida and Texas, the Gulf of Mexico became an established part of America’s national geography. For the next two centuries, the U.S. government did not refer to it by anything but the name lent to it by those who live along its coast and that which the English language inherited from the Spanish long before the United States came into being.

Today, the inhabitants of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida continue to know the waters to their south as the Gulf of Mexico. As indicated by a poll conducted in the latter of those states, Trump’s rechristening of the Gulf remains heavily unpopular among those who live along its shores. Critics argue that he made that decision in abrogation of the principles of popular sovereignty that have guided the American nation’s historical naming conventions, transforming the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America to celebrate his perception of national greatness and to insult the nation of Mexico for its perceived role in the crisis that currently bedevils the Southern border. 

The case of Mount Denali is somewhat different but bears the same essential contours. Though European and American explorers knew of its existence in the late 18th century, the site possessed no universally recognized distinction. An American prospector first named the peak after William McKinley during the 1890s. The title became popular with the explorers and miners who came to that part of North America in the first decade of the 20th century, prompting the territorial government of Alaska to use Mount McKinley on its official maps; the federal government then followed suit. Nearly three quarters of a century later, residents, induced by Native American activism, embraced the landmark’s indigenous title of Denali. Since 1975, the state of Alaska has reflected this popular will on its maps, which continue to refer to the Western hemisphere’s second-highest peak by its native title. It took exactly forty years for Washington to recognize this change in local opinion, which it did thanks to the personal initiative of Barack Obama, who had his Interior Department alter its name to Denali on U.S. Geographical Survey maps in 2015. Trump’s reversal of this decision was not a response to a shift in the popular attitudes of the Alaskan people vis-à-vis Denali’s taxonomic identity. Instead, he has re-baptized the peak McKinley to honor a former president whose association with expansionism and protectionism complements critical aspects of Trump’s political program. Shoving his ideology into the American nation’s hitherto apolitical system of place-naming, Trump’s move may represent a fundamental challenge to the pluralistic traditions of American toponymy. 

A brief examination of world history will serve to indicate what that might mean for this country, for many nations that occupy this planet have — unlike the United States— often changed or established the names of their territories for political reasons. 

Consider the case of St. Petersburg. It was Peter the Great who founded that city as his capital in the eighteenth century, lending it his own name and that of the apostle for which he was christened. He also assigned it the German morpheme -burg, thus associating it with the German-based commerce that dominated the Baltic Sea and the Teutonic peoples who existed throughout it. This name would prove fitting, for St. Petersburg quickly became one of the Russian Empire’s most Westernized cities. Tsar Nicholas II changed it to Petrograd in late 1914 to sever its etymological connection with Germany, with which Russia had just entered into armed conflict. Once the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War in the early 1920s and became masters of what soon became the U.S.S.R., they once again rebaptized their nation’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, rendering it Leningrad in celebration of the leader who had so consummately led them to victory against the armies of White Russia. The sole communist state in a capitalist world, Russia found itself heavily isolated from the West; it was therefore fitting that the name of its chief entrêpot no longer referenced Christianity or the oceanic commerce associated with German communities along Russia’s Baltic coast. Only the end of the Cold War and the concomitant demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 would change these facts, restoring St. Petersburg’s original appellation and bringing Russia back to its pre-revolutionary economic mode, thereby facilitating the rapid globalization of the country that then followed.   

Other examples of places that changed names due to the decisions of their leaders — and not the sentiments of their inhabitants — include the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whom the tyrant Mobotu Sese dubbed Zaire during his three decades of dictatorship; Ho Chi Minh City, which stopped being Saigon after the communist forces of North Vietnam conquered it and renamed it after their eponymous leader; and Danshube, the Tajik capital that Joseph Stalin gave the name Stalinabad in 1929 and which it retained until 1961. 

The naming of no American territory has ever been as inextricably linked to politics and the whims of individual leaders as those of St. Petersburg, Zaire, Ho Chi Minh City, or Dashube. The United States is a fundamentally different nation from those responsible for such etymological shifts. For nearly 250 years, popular sovereignty has determined the appellations of the locations that dot the American landscape. Trump’s actions since January represent a drastic overturning of this precedent. One could certainly observe that, by using his ideology to fashion new names for Mount Denali and the Gulf of Mexico, Trump has challenged an integral principle of American democracy. Critics of his administration have noted, moreover, that several aspects of his larger political program may harbinger a greater turn away from pluralism and toward a more absolutist mode of governance.