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President-elect Trump pledged this week to undo former President Obama’s 2015 decision to rename North America’s highest peak after its Koyukon Athabascan name “Denali,” meaning “High” or “Great “.
Speaking to conservatives at a conference in Phoenix, Trump made the pledge and noted that President William McKinley was also a Republican who believed in tariffs. He first promised to undo Obama’s action in August 2015 and called it an “insult to Ohio,” where McKinley was born and raised.
During his remarks in Phoenix, he also pledged to undo the Democrats’ renaming of southern military bases named after Confederates, such as Fort Liberty in Fayetteville, North Carolina, which was once named after General Braxton Bragg.
The 20,320-foot mountain was first named Mount McKinley in 1896 by gold prospector William Dickey, after learning that the Ohioan had won the GOP presidential nomination, and as a blow to prospectors of silver knew that he preferred Democrat William Jennings Bryan and his plan for a silver. standard for the dollar.
William McKinley of Ohio (1843-1901) was the 25th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1897, until his assassination in September 1901. (Universal History Archive/Universal Image Group via Getty Images)
Six months into his second term, McKinley was visiting Buffalo, New York, when anarchist worker Leon Czolgosz assassinated him in a cheer line. Czolgosz believed that the root of economic inequality lay with the government and was reportedly inspired by the 1900 assassination of Italian King Umberto I.
However, many Alaskans have it seemed to prefer the historical name Denali:
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski he told KTUU that Trump’s plan to bring back “Mt. McKinley” is a “terrible idea.”
“We already went through this with President Trump way back and at the beginning of his first term,” he said Monday.
Murkowski said both she and Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, who is originally from McKinley, Ohio, support the name Denali.
“(Denali) is a name that goes back thousands of years … the highest mountain in North America, shouldn’t it have a name like ‘The Great One’?” Murkowski added.
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Denali, near Talkeetna, Alaska (AP Photo/Becky Bohrer, file)
In 2015, Sullivan told the Anchorage Daily News that “Denali belongs to Alaska and its citizens” and that naming rights are held by Alaska Natives.
In a statement to KTUU This week, Sullivan said many Alaskans prefer the “name that the very tough, very strong, very patriotic Athabaskans gave” to the peak.
Meanwhile, then-Rep. Rep. Ralph Regula, R-Ohio, spent decades in Congress preventing any name change from McKinley to Denali, as the eponymous chairman of his Canton district said.
Regula, who died in 2017, criticized Obama for the name change, saying he “thinks he’s a dictator.”
Appearing to cite his own work introducing procedural hurdles and language added to Interior-related bills, Regula said Obama could not change that law “with the stroke of a pen.”
“Do you want to change the Ohio River?” he joked.
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Senator Lisa Murkowski speaks during a news conference. (Drew Anger/Getty Images)
However, some Ohio officials have also been deferential to the will of Alaskans.
Current Lt. Gov. Jon Husted told him Dayton Daily News in 2015 that if Denali is what Alaskans want, he in turn understood that, as he wouldn’t want Alaskans dictating Ohio’s name changes.
“So I guess we shouldn’t say people from alaska they should do in their own state. But I’m a big fan of Canton and McKinley and I’m glad it’s being talked about more,” he said at the time.
