THE SHAPE OF AMERICAN PATRIOTISM
AS WE CONCLUDE THIS INVITATION TO THE AMERICAN PAST, your faithful scribe has a few closing thoughts about the proper uses of our study of the subject and a related confession to make. Let the confession come first. The book you have just read attempts to tell the story of the American past, some of it anyway, in as objective a manner as I could, while being fair and generous to all legitimate positions. Mindful of Herbert Butterfield’s insistence that the historian should strive to be a recording angel and not a hanging judge, I have tried my best to be guided by that dictum. But while trying to be objective, I have not claimed to be neutral in all respects. There is a crucial difference between the two. And although it is important to do one’s best to be objective, even when it involves confronting unpleasant and shameful things in our past, I cannot pretend to be neutral when the larger cause of America and American history is involved. This is part of what it means to say, as we did at the outset, that history always begins in the middle of things. Those who write about history are also in the middle of it.
This book is offered as a contribution to the making of American citizens. As such, it is a patriotic endeavor as well as a scholarly one, and it never loses sight of what there is to celebrate and cherish in the American achievement. That doesn’t mean it is an uncritical celebration. The two things, celebration and criticism, are not necessarily enemies. Love is the foundation of the wisest criticism, and criticism is the essential partner of an honest and enduring love. We live in a country, let us hope, in which our flaws can always be openly discussed, and where criticism and dissent can be regarded not as betrayals or thought-crimes but as essential ingredients in the flourishing of our polity and our common life. We should not take these aspects of our country for granted. They have not been the condition of most human associations through most of human history. They do not automatically perpetuate themselves. Hence they are among the very things we must be zealous to guard and protect, rather than leaving them to chance.
There is a strong tendency in modern American society to treat patriotism as a dangerous sentiment, a passion to be guarded against. But this is a serious misconception. To begin with, we should acknowledge that there is something natural about patriotism, as an expression of love for what is one’s own, gratitude for what one has been given, and reverence for the sources of one’s being. These responses are instinctive; they’re grounded in our natures and the basic facts of our birth. Yet their power is no less for that, and they are denied only at great cost. When the philosopher Aristotle declared that we are by nature “political animals,” he meant that we are in some sense made to live in community with one another. It is in our nature to be belonging creatures. One of the deepest needs of the human soul is a sense of membership, of joy in what we have and hold in common with others.
Much of the time, though, the way we Americans talk about ourselves takes us in the opposite direction. We like to think of the individual person as something that exists prior to all social relations, capable of standing free and alone, able to choose the terms on which it makes common cause with others. We have an endless fascination with romantic culture heroes from Emerson and Whitman to the current crop of movie stars and pop musicians, all of whom sing the praises of nonconformity and the song of the open road, again and again, in strikingly similar ways. Even our own battered but still-magnificent Constitution, with its systemic distrust of all concentration of power, assumes that we are fundamentally self-interested creatures. This does capture some part of the truth about us.
But only a part. For among our deepest longings is the desire to belong, and it is an illusion to believe that we can sustain a stable identity in isolation, living apart from the eyes and ears and words of others. Patriotism, to repeat, is an utterly natural sentiment whose primal claims upon our souls we deny at our peril. But we should not take it in the initial form in which it is given to us. An instinctive and unthinking patriotism is not good enough. Like every virtue, patriotism is something we must work upon, refine, and elevate, if we are to make it what it should be.
For Americans, this becomes an especially complicated task, because American patriotism is not a simple thing. America can be hard to see because America itself is more than one thing. We have illustrated that fact repeatedly in the preceding pages. There are at least two distinct ways of understanding American patriotism, and each one has its valid place.
To illustrate the point, consider, as one small example from the relatively recent past, the passing controversy over the naming of the U.S. government’s Department of Homeland Security after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The use of the term homeland generated complaints almost from the start, and the reasons had to do with a clash in fundamental perceptions about American national identity. Homeland seemed all wrong to some. It was insular and provincial. Some heard in it an echo of the German concept of Heimat, a fatherland of blood and soil.
That was not America, they argued. Americans’ attachment is not to something geographical or ethnic, but to a community built around widespread assent to a universal civic idea of “freedom.” In other words, they urged, America is best understood not as a country in the usual sense but as an idea, or rather as the embodiment of a set of ideas – a nation dedicated to, and held together by, a set of propositions. A creed rather than a culture.
Furthermore, this argument goes, those ideas have a universal and all-encompassing quality, so that the defense of the United States is not merely the protection of a particular society with a particular regime and a particular culture and history, inhabiting a particular piece of real estate, whose chief virtue is the fact that it is “ours.” It is something far greater and more inclusive than that. American society is built not on our shared descent but on our shared consent, meaning that every individual is created equal and is equally provided with the opportunity to give his or her assent to the values for which the nation stands. It doesn’t matter where you came from, as long as you can say yes to those propositions, those ideas, that creed.
This is a very powerful view. Its power is reflected in the fact that the United States has, for so much of its history, been so welcoming to immigrants. For one is, in this view, made an American not so much by birth as by a process of agreeing to and consciously appropriating the ideas that make America what it is. Converts are always welcome. In fact, in this view of America, we are a nation of converts, every one of us. The use of the term homeland seemed to the critics to be a betrayal of precisely this core meaning, the openness and vitality at the heart of the American experiment.
As we saw in chapter 5, there is evidence for this view at the very beginnings of the history of the United States, provided by Alexander Hamilton’s contention in Federalist 1 that the American nation was marked by historical destiny to be a test case for all humankind, deciding whether it is possible for good governments to be constituted by “reflection and choice” rather than relying on “accident and force.” Such a mission, Hamilton added, being universalistic in character, should join “the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism” in the hearts of those hoping for the success of the American experiment. In other words, Hamilton was saying that the success of the American experiment then being launched would contribute to the well-being of the whole world. The particular mission of America is part of the universal quest of humanity.
There can be no doubt that, on some level, this view is correct in stressing that a strong sense of American universalism is a key element in the makeup of American national self-consciousness, and therefore American patriotism. But it is far from being the only element. There is in the United States, as there is in all nations, an entirely different set of considerations also in play. Those considerations are particular, not universal. They are not best understood as matters of blood and soil, or race, or biology, or any such determinant. Instead, as the French historian Ernest Renan insisted in his 1882 lecture “What Is a Nation?,” a nation should be understood as “a soul, a spiritual principle,” constituted not only by present-day consent but also by the dynamic residuum of the past, “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories” which form in the citizen “the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.”
In this view, shared memories, and the passing along of them, are what form the core of a national consciousness. They are what make us an “us.”
“The nation,” Renan explained, “like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion. To have common glories in the past and to have a common will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more – these are the essential conditions for being a people.… A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.”
As I’ve said, Renan strongly opposed the idea that nations should be understood as entities united by racial or linguistic or geographical or religious or material factors. None of those factors could account for the emergence of this “spiritual principle.” What binds them instead is a shared story, a shared history. The ballast of the American past is an essential part of American national identity, and it is something quite distinct from the “idea” of America. But it is every bit as powerful, if not more so. And it is a very particular force. Our nation’s particular triumphs, sacrifices, and sufferings – and our memories of those things – draw and hold us together, precisely because they are the sacrifices and sufferings, not of all humanity, but of us alone. In this view, there is no more profoundly American place than Arlington National Cemetery or the Civil War battlegrounds of Antietam and Gettysburg and Shiloh.
This quality of particularity is, in its own way, a different kind of universal. It is simply the way we are. It is part of the human condition and is something that we share with the peoples of nearly all other nations. It is universal precisely because it is not universalistic, just as the love of one’s own parents or one’s family or one’s spouse is universal precisely in its particularity. All parents love their children, but my parental love and obligations are directed at my own. And that is as it should be. All enduring civic affections must be built from the inside out.
Something similar holds true for countries and for patriotism, even American patriotism. Yet this aspect of American patriotism is not always well articulated, particularly in academic settings. One will have better luck finding it in popular culture, in songs and fictions where one can find the more primal aspects of American patriotism expressed with great directness and vividness. Consider the words of the classic American patriotic songs, where the senses of “home” and shared suffering are ever-present. “The Star-Spangled Banner” speaks not of the universal rights of man but of the flag, and like all revered symbols it recounts a very particular story, recalling a moment of national perseverance in time of war and hardship during the War of 1812. “America the Beautiful” mingles wondrous invocations of the American land with reverent memories of military and religious heroes of the past and calls to virtue and brotherhood. Lee Greenwood’s anthem “God Bless the USA” is not a disquisition in political science but a tribute to the land and to “the men who died” to preserve freedom. And there is little else but images of land and echoes of Heimat in Irving Berlin’s song “God Bless America” – “Land that I love!” and “My home sweet home!” – which has enjoyed a surge of popularity in the years since 9/11.
Nearly all Americans love this song, but most of them have no idea that its composer, one of the formative geniuses of American popular song, was born in Tsarist Russia with the name Israel Beilin. This is, of course, both amazing and entirely appropriate. Even immigrants who shared neither descent nor language nor culture nor religion could find a way to participate in the sense of America as, not an idea, but a home, a place where they could be “born again.” Not only could they participate in that sense but they could become among the most articulate exponents of it. This astonishing feature of American life illustrates a quality about the United States that sets it apart from every other nation in the world. It also serves to illustrate the immense distance between the actual form taken by American patriotism and the “blood and soil” nationalisms to which it is so often inaccurately compared. America can be hard to see.
So there is a vital tension in the makeup of American patriotism, a tension between its universalizing ideals and its particularizing sentiments, with their emphasis upon memory, history, tradition, culture, and the land. The genius of American patriotism permits both to coexist, and even to be harmonized to a considerable extent, therefore making them both available to be drawn upon in the rich, but mixed, phenomenon of American patriotism. It would be a mistake to insist on one while excluding the other. They both are always in conversation with one another, and they need to be. And that conversation, to be a real and honest one, must include the good, the bad, and the ugly, the ways we have failed and fallen short, not merely what is pleasing to our national self-esteem. But by the same token, the great story, the thread that we share, should not be lost in a blizzard of details or a hailstorm of rebukes. This is, and remains, a land of hope, a land to which much of the rest of the world longs to come.
Abraham Lincoln showed an instinctive understanding of this complexity in American patriotic sentiment, emphasizing first one, then the other in his oratory, as circumstances dictated. In his First Inaugural Address, pleading against the rising tide of secession, he appealed not to principle but to memory, expressing his hope that “the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
These are familiar words, so familiar that we may not notice in them the careful and dignified blending of the local with the national, the public with the private. Those “mystic chords of memory” are understood to emanate not only from the earth’s fallen heroes but also from the hearts of living individuals and the hearthstones of living families. The choice of the word hearthstone was especially inspired, because it invokes in a single word the whole universe of local and particular loyalties and intimacies that are the stuff of ordinary human life – the warm and welcoming center of a beloved family home. Lincoln hoped that by sounding the notes of the local and particular, one could also reinvigorate the larger chorus of the national.
At other times, though, Lincoln’s oratory took on a different and more expansive tone, attributing universal meaning to the survival of the American experiment. In his second annual message to Congress in 1862, he envisioned the United States as “the last best hope of earth,” as did Jefferson before him and Ronald Reagan after him. In the Gettysburg Address of 1863, Lincoln speculated that the war’s outcome would test for the world whether a stable and enduring nation built upon the twin commitments to freedom and equality was even possible – words that recall Hamilton’s words in Federalist 1. Yet he was not being inconsistent. All of the meanings he tapped into were part of the complex web of sentiments and meanings making up American national identity. All made sense.
The mixed patriotism that the United States has brought into being is one of the bright lights of human history, and we should not allow it to be extinguished, either through inattention to our ideals or through ignorance of our story. So we have a responsibility before us. We must know both, not only our creed but also our culture. We need to take aboard fully all that was entailed in our forebears’ bold assertion that all human beings are created equal in the eyes of the Creator and that they bear an inherent dignity that cannot be taken away from them. But we also need to remember, and teach others to remember, the meaning of Lexington and Concord, and Independence Hall, and Gettysburg, and Promontory Summit, and Pointe du Hoc, and Birmingham, and West Berlin, and countless other places and moments of spirit and sacrifice in the American past – places and moments with which the American future will need to be conversant and will need to keep faith. I hope this book can be helpful in carrying out these important tasks.