I received this timely article this morning from a friend in Canada. I found it to be most interesting and a good summary of patriotism in American history. From The Globe & Mail (Ottawa/Quebec Edition), July 3, 2021. David Shribman is an American who teaches at McGill University in Montreal. I hope you find it interesting as well on this Independence Day.
DAVID SHRIBMAN EXPLORES COLLIDING VIEWS OF PATRIOTISM IN THE UNITED STATES
This Independence Day, Americans are trying to reconcile two colliding views of what it means to love their country, David Shribman writes
David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics. He teaches at McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy in Montreal.
Two centuries ago, in 1821, the future president John Quincy Adams delivered a 4th of July speech for the ages, calling the United States “a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the Earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light, till time shall be lost in eternity, and this globe itself dissolve, nor leave a wreck behind.” Some two dozen years later, in 1845, Charles Sumner, the great Massachusetts lawmaker, spoke on July 4 of a nation seeking “the highest degree of justice.”
Nobody is giving a speech remotely like that on this American Independence Day.
Nor is any American orator speaking, as Daniel Webster did in a famous address in 1850, of the U.S. Senate as “a body to which the country looks, with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic and healing counsels.” Nor will any American leader match Ronald Reagan’s remarks in 1989, when he spoke of “an informed patriotism” grounded in “a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions.”
For nearly two and a half centuries Americans have fought about vital issues: slavery, the extension of voting rights, how deeply to be engaged in world affairs. Today, they fight about everything: political questions such as how accessible voting booths should be in the country’s elections, medical issues such as the utility of masks for vaccinated Americans, even peripheral disputes about whether the designated hitter should be permitted in National League ballparks. But perhaps the most important question in the United States is the one that its forebears found easiest to resolve: What is patriotism in the contemporary age?
Is it the celebration of “the great inheritance of constitutional freedom transmitted from our revolutionary fathers” that the great pastor and politician Edward Everett – president of Harvard, governor of Massachusetts, member of the House and then Senate, secretary of state – spoke of on July 4, 1861, less than three weeks before the first major battle of the Civil War?
Is it the “unambiguous appreciation of America” that Mr. Reagan argued was essential to a “wellgrounded patriotism?”
Or is it the cries of defiance and rebellion of the flag-bearing insurrectionists at the Capitol whom former president Donald Trump described as “these amazing patriots” on Jan. 6 – the rioters whom GOP Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona recently told a House oversight committee were merely “peaceful patriots”?
This question itself stands as evidence of a deep disquiet in the United States, of a crisis less of confidence than of character, of a sense that major questions that have been answered for decades – to the satisfaction of Americans and to the astonishment of the world – now are open for dispute.
“The politicization of the very term ‘patriotism’ is almost shameful in a country that embraces openness, transparency and democratic values,” said Tom Ridge, a Vietnam veteran who has servedasaRepublicanmemberof the House, governor of Pennsylvania and, after the terrorist attacks of 2001, was the first secretary of homeland security. “Reducing political differences to whether someone’s point of view is unpatriotic is a disgrace. That trend is as close to being unAmerican as anything I have ever seen. It is beyond disgraceful.”
Now listen to another Vietnam-era veteran, former senator and congressman Tom Harkin, who represented Iowa for 40 years on Capitol Hill: “Tom Ridge is no less a patriot for being a Republican than I am as a Democrat. When I saw all those people at the Capitol on January 6 waving flags it made me wonder whether their parents and churches taught them about what it means to love their country. Those people were not patriots, but people who wanted to impose their narrow view of America and to call it patriotism: ‘You agree with me and you are a patriot, and if you disagree you are unpatriotic.’ ”
Mr. Ridge is 75 and Mr. Harkin is 81. Their political careers are in the past. Here is the perspective of Democratic Representative Seth Moulton, 42, a Marine veteran of four tours of duty in Iraq who didn’t even tell his parents that he was awarded a Bronze Star for heroism in a battle zone:
“I’m proud of being a patriot, but the idea that storming the Capitol or attacking our democracy is somehow patriotic just allows Mr. Trump to continue to damage our country. What he is pushing isn’t patriotism but fascism, exploiting our national story and building a movement based on an ultranationalism that plays into antisemitic xenophobia and sedition.”
The divisions are so great that some Americans who say they love their country are questioning whether they want to be called patriots.
“I’m not sure I want to be called ‘patriotic’ right now even though I love the country – only because of what the term has come to mean and the people with whom it has been identified: white guys with long guns,” said the Reverend Leah D. Daughtry, the CEO of the 2008 and 2016 Democratic National Conventions and a co-author of the 2018 book For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics.
“The term needs some redefinition, because now the people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 could label themselves patriots and argue that the Capitol police officers who defended the Capitol were not patriots. It makes you wonder whether the term is so meaningless – or so full of all the wrong meaning – that we should abandon it.”
As recently as the turn of the century, American politics spun on the axis of basic questions of taxation and tolerance, global involvement or global retreat, the rights of the fetus or the rights of women. These issues have not retreated from the American agenda. Instead they have become grafted onto a broader question of the nature of America itself – and thus which point of view, for or against any of these issues, is the patriotic course.
“There seldom has been a time when the definition of patriotism has been so much in dispute,” said James Wright, an American historian who, as the former president of Dartmouth College, is the only Marine ever to serve as leader of an Ivy League institution. “To me it means engaging in a common effort to address our problems. For a long time we moved in that direction and served as an inspiration around the world. That is less true now that people’s views on specific issues have become a measure of their patriotism.”
To be sure, there have been moments like this, chapters in the American story where there have been clashes about the meaning of patriotism. As the War of 1812 approached, many Americans saw an early burst of patriotism in opposing the British impressment of American mariners and even in American forays into Upper Canada, while many New Englanders felt that patriotism required them to oppose the conflict, though much of that dissent was grounded in commercial concerns. Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax as an expression of opposition to the Mexican War, and when Ralph Waldo Emerson asked him “what are you doing in there?” Thoreau is reported to have said, “What are you doing out there?”
For decades before and during the Civil War, some American political figures considered the patriotism embedded in the struggle to save the Union paramount to the struggle over the morality of slavery; Daniel Webster’s adherence to this ethic eroded his popularity in Massachusetts and his legacy in history. In late 1939 through almost all of 1941, when Canada was engaged in the Second World War but the United States was not, voices such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh and the diplomat Joseph P. Kennedy considered isolationism an element of patriotism.
“Patriotism is, in many ways, a mysterious word,” Harvard president Derek Bok said at a 2003 John F. Kennedy Library forum on patriotism. “We have one tradition in our country that thinks of patriots as heroes, as bulwarks of their nation, as defenders of the American way of life. But there’s another strand of thought that has been with us for a very long time that casts a much more skeptical eye on patriotism.”
In the Vietnam era, there was a vigorous, emotional debate that pitted “hawks,” who wanted to continue the combat in Southeast Asia (and who described themselves as American Patriots) against “doves,” who were war critics (and who argued that their opposition to the conflict was itself an expression of patriotism).
The clash can be seen in the collision of the views of the two men who battled for the presidency in 1972.
“I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny these days,” president Richard Nixon said in his famous “silent majority” speech of 1969 that pleaded with Americans for their support in Vietnam. “But I feel it is appropriate to do so on this occasion.”
The view of senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who as the Democratic presidential
nominee would lose 49 states to Mr. Nixon, was starkly different. “The highest patriotism,” said Mr. McGovern, a Second World War hero, “is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher standard.”
The colliding views of patriotism today are of a different nature, a different amplitude, a different volume – and a different significance.
They do not involve a specific policy but a broader way of looking at the world. They do not involve a military conflict but a cultural conflict. They do not involve a question of what Americans should do but a question of who Americans are.
Contemporary politics now has been distilled down to a collision of different definitions of patriotism. But its handmaiden is a collision of different definitions of a swiftly changing country.
“One of the things fuelling so much of a political conflict right now is that we are living in an age when whiteness and patriotism are decoupling,” said Eric Liu, the founder of Citizen University, a non-profit working to foster a culture of American engagement. “We now have a more complex picture of who is ‘us.’ And so patriotism is not holding onto a bygone day when whiteness equalled Americanism, but recognizing that in a mass, diverse republic, we can actually deliver liberty and justice for all. We haven’t yet put that to the test. Trying to do that is patriotism to me.”
And younger Americans have an entirely different view of patriotism: an activist engagement in civic life.
“There is a new generation that is very engaged and very committed to participation and voting,” said Mark Gearan, who has been director of the Peace Corps, president of New York’s Hobart and William Smith Colleges and is now director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
“They have seen how politics and policy affects their lives on environmental justice, educational access, abortion and gay rights. And they see that as a form of patriotism, as a form of serving their country.”
It is seldom recognized, but Johnson made his famous remark, aimed at William Pitt – sometimes known as the “Patriot Minister” – just 12 days before the 1775 Battles at Lexington and Concord that would change the course of North America and, in a way, of the world, even as the American rebels would forge a new patriotism across the Atlantic.
The definition of patriotism has, of course, changed since then. Early Americans felt it in defence of a fragile republic. Today’s Americans debate it in a mature country whose pre-eminent role in the world may be eroding. And yet from the beginning, American patriotism was infused with a utopian if not religious devotion. One of its greatest exponents was Andrew Jackson (president from 1829 until 1837), now reviled as a slaveholder and as a practitioner of genocide against Indigenous people but as recently as a dozen years ago regarded as, in the title of Jon Meacham’s Pulitzer-winning biography, an “American Lion.”
“Like many Americans, Jackson thought of the existence of the United States as providential,” said Daniel Feller, a University of Tennessee historian and emeritus editor of the papers of the seventh president. “He thought that a continent brimming with fantastic national resources apparently there for the taking, plus a form of government that was still distinctive in the world, was not accidental.”
Indeed, that is how former prime minister Brian Mulroney still views American patriotism. “Canadians love their country but they express that love and their patriotism in a subtle way,” he said in an interview. “Americans are not subtle about it. They are the most patriotic people in the world.”
Some of that patriotism comes from being the recipient of, rather than the source of, immigration.
“When you deal with love of country and when you face up to the country’s role in the world you understand that no country is perfect,” said Circuit Court Judge Jose A. Cabranes, born in Puerto Rico.
“When I do immigration formalities I tell the new citizens never to forget that they preferred to be here rather than there.”
That recognition remains a vital part of American patriotism today. But so do the violent impulses that took their form in the assault on the Capitol, producing what former senator Paul G. Kirk Jr. of Massachusetts described in a recent conversation as the “weaponizing of patriotism” and a skewing of the definition of the word.
“Those people at the Capitol certainly weren’t patriots,” said former senator Bob Dole of Kansas, 97, the 1996 GOP presidential nominee who was injured in the last days of the Second World War and later served in Congress for 36 years.
“They were troublemakers who did a good job at making trouble. Patriotism means serving your country in peace or war, being a good citizen and helping others.”
“These violent scenes we have witnessed do not represent acts of patriotism, but an attack on our country and its founding principles. Our Founding Fathers established a nation of laws, not a nation of anarchy. We call for all those involved to listen to law enforcement officials and help restore order in our nation’s capital.”
– Statement of Republican National Committee, issued at 7:54 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021
In a 1787 letter to William Stephens Smith, the son-in-law of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Two centuries later, the radical historian Howard Zinn said that “dissent is the great form of patriotism.”
In that regard, might the tweet a QAnon follower calling himself Thad Williams posted Jan. 3 be considered consistent with some definitions of patriotism? “Patriots, if you need financial help getting to DC to support President Trump on January 6th, please go to my website.”
This 4th of July, Americans are trying to reconcile two colliding views of what it means to be a patriot. Because in our time, as in the time of Jefferson – who wrote the Declaration of Independence that was promulgated 245 July 4ths ago – the nature of patriotism is perhaps the most fundamental American debate. This July 4 will be one of parades, picnics – and contemplation about the definition of patriotism. The parades and picnics will come with the relief afforded by the COVID downturn and will offer comfort. The examination of contemporary patriotism will bring little but immense discomfort.