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The Case for Patriotism (excerpted)
John H. Schaar
I intend to write something of a plea for patriotism. That
intention is so uncongenial to almost everybody who is likely to
read the essay that I want to spell it out with some care. In In
doing this, I wish not to disarm the critics, but to help them
find the right target.
Consider first the state of opinion and sentiment on the subject.
Patriotism is unwelcome in many quarters of the land today,
and unknown in many others. There is virtually no thoughtful
discussion of the subject, for the word has settled, in most
people's minds, deep into a brackish pond of sentiment where
thought cannot reach. Politicians and members of patriotic
associations praise it, of course, but official and professional
patriotism too often sounds like nationalism, patriotism's bloody
brother. On the other hand, patriotism has a bad name among many
thoughtful people, who see it as a horror at worst, a vestigial
passion largely confined to the thoughtless at best: as
enlightenment advances, patriotism recedes. The intellectuals are
virtually required to repudiate it as a condition of class
membership. The radical and dropout young loathe it. Most
troublesome of all, for one who would make the argument I intend
to make, is the face that both the groups that hate and those
that glorify patriotism largely agree that it and nationalism are
the same thing. I hope to show that they are different
things--related, but separable.
Opponents of patriotism might agree that if the two could be
separated then patriotism would look fairly attractive. But the
opinion is widespread, almost atmospheric, that the separation
is impossible, that with the triumph of the nation-state nation.
alism has indelibly stained patriotism: the two are warp and
woof. The argument against patriotism goes on to say that, psy-
chologically considered, patriot and nationalist are the same:
both are characterized by exaggerated love for one's own collec-
tivity combined with more or less contempt and hostility toward
outsiders. In addition, advanced political opinion holds tha
positive, new ideas and forces--e.g., internationalism,
universalism; humanism, economic interdependence, socialist
solidarity--are healthier bonds of unity, and more to be
encouraged than the ties of patriotism. These are genuine
objections, and they are held by many thoughtful people. I shall
try to respond to them toward the end of the essay.
The obstacles to speaking for patriotism do not end with
ishness of opinion. For if some people favor patriotism, largely
for the wrong reasons, and if some oppose it, largely fot
wrong reasons, others hardly think about it at all. Millions
of Americans are simply without patriotism, and this large group
includes all classes and kinds of persons. They do not think
unpatriotic thoughts, but they do not think patriotic thoughts
either. The republic for them is a vague and distant thing
absent from their hearts, lost to their eyes. Reflecting this
difference, our great patriotic holidays, now administratively
arranged to provide long weekends, are less occasions for
shared remembrance and renewal of the political covenant than
boosts to the consumer economy. That modern compendium of
man's knowledge of man, the Internatinal Encyclopedia of the
Social Sciences, apparently agrees that patriotism is a nonthing,
since it is silent on the subject.
There is another obstacle to discussion. The word patriotism
is a member of a family of words and largely takes its meanings
from its membership. Some other members of the family are legacy
covenant, reverence, loyalty, nurture, roots, citizen, debt,
gift, republic. These words, which once clarified the matter,
today encounter the same barrier of mystification-distrust-in-
difference as does patriotism itself. All these words must ap-
ppear in the discussion: there are no satisfactory alternatives.
Furthermore, these words cannot be cut out of our political
lives as easily as they have been dropped from our encyclopedia.
Patriotism has certainly declined in the United States. Nor
is this decline the result of recent or transient causes. Most
of the widely known patriotic associations were formed in the
last decade of the nineteenth century, which suggests that as
the natural springs of patriotic sentiment dried up, the land
had to be irrigated. By now the land is so parched that even
if American participation in the war in Southeast Asia does
come to an end, along with all the reports of American corrup-
tion and exploitation at home and abroad, I doubt whether we
would love this country any the more, although we would despise
it less.
I have little hope that my plea for patriotism will succeed,
and much anxiety that it will be heard by many as fatuous or
wrong-headed. Citizens would not need the argument, and non-
citizens probably cannot hear it. Still, I shall make the ar-
gument. I do so partly out of blockheadedness, partly out of a
wish to repay a welcome debt to patriotic predecessors and con-
temporaries, and partly for two reasons that might carry more
weight. The first reason stems from my affection and respect
for fellow-citizens, and from my wish to see them even more
respectable than they are. We have lost patriotism. Although
many count the loss small, and many others do not know it has
occurred, I believe that the loss is great. The second reason
stems from my~wish to see a revitalized radical politics in
this country, and from my conviction that Susan Sontag is cor-
rect when she says that "probably no serious radical movement
has any future in America unless it can revalidate the tarnished
idea of patriotism." (1.) The radicals of the 1960s did not
persuade their fellow-Americans, high or low, that they genuine-
ly cared for and shared a country with them. And no one who
has contempt for others can hope to teach those others. A re-
vived radicalism must be a patriotic radicalism. It must share
care for the common things, even while it has a "lovers quarrel"
with fellow-citizens.
NATURAL PATRIOTISM
Since patriotism is a complex and dangerous word, we must
give some care to definition. But not too much care, for like all
the important political words, it cannot be protected against the
vicissitudes of history and passion; and not the wrong kind of
care either, for the word comes not from the laboratory but from
life. The word will not hold still while we attach a single,
universal meaning to it, but we can describe a nucleus of
meanings.
At its core, patriotism means love of one's homeplace, and
of tthe familiar things and scenes associated with the homeplace.
In this sense, patriotism is one of the basic human sentiments.
If not a natural tendency in the species, it is at least a
proclivity produced by realities basic to human life, for
territoriality, along with family, has always been a primary
associative bond. We become devoted to the people, places and
ways that nurture us, and what is familiar and nuturing seems
also natural and right. This is the root of patriotism.
Furthermore, we are a all subject to the immense power of habit,
and patriotism has habit in its service. Even if we leave the
homeplace for a larger world, finding delight in its variety and
novelty, we delight as much in returning to familiar things. The
theme-of homecoming is the central motif of patriotic discourse,
as old and as deep as the return of Odysseus from Troy, and the
feeling is always the same:
When we saw the top of the mountain from Albuquerque we
wondered if it was our mountain, and we felt like talking to
the ground, we loved it so and some of the old men and
women cried with joy when they reached their homes. (2.)
The other side of the case is the melancholy figure of the lone
wanderer, or of the Stoic whose "my home is everywhere" meant he
had a home nowhere.
To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more ac-
curately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and
recognizes that the legacy makebs him a debtor. There is a whole
way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence,
which defines life by its debts;: one is what one owes, what one
acknowledges as a rightful debt: or obligation. The patriot moves
within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods
memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot,
deflnes what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the
two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life,
the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears
come from membership in a territorially rooted group. The con-
scious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts,
grateful to the people and places through which they come, and
determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it un-
spoiled to those who will come after.
But such primary experiences are nearly inaccessible to us.
We are not taught to define our lives by our debts and legacies,
but by our rights and opportunities. Robert Frost's stark line,
"This land was ours, before we were the land's." condenses the
whole story of American patriotism. We do not and cannot love th
land the way the Greek and Navaho loved theirs. The graves of
some of our ancestors are here, to be sure, but most of us would
be hard pressed to find them: name and locate the graves of your
great-grandparents. The land was not granted to us in trust by
a Great Spirit, nor are there in this land a thousand places
sacred to lesser deities. Having purged ourselves of pantheism,
we do not dwell in a realm alive with sacred groves and
fountains.
We are all doctrinal monotheists and our only patriotic god is
the god of battles. We took the land from others whom we regarded
as of no account. The land itself we saw as a resource for
comfort and power available to all who had the strength to take
it. Among us, only persons (artificial as well as natural) have
rights. The homestead has none. We may buy, sell, and use it as
we wish. It has no claims we need heed or even hear. Still today,
and even in the ecology movement, the same attitude prevails:
Save Our Coast. Still possession, not union and stewardship.
Perhaps this lack of natural satriotism is some part of the
explanation of American restlessness and rootessness. (4.) When
Europeans first came to this land they saw nothing but savages in
a howling wilderness, both of which had to be conquered. Seeking
neither welcome nor permission from those already here, they
imposed their alien god and ways on the "new land." That original
act of conquest and sacrilege was repeated innumerable times as
the wave rolled west, until now the very land accuses the
intruders. There can be no experience of homecoming without
welcome, and we shall not feel welcome here until we learn how to
ask it of those who alone have it to give. That we may be slowly
coming to understand this is one of the few hopeful signs for
American patriotism.
Perhaps it is impossible to know whether the nature of the
conquest helped produce American restlessness and rootlessness,
but it is certain that the restlessness and rootlessness in their
turn make a natural patriotism nearly impossible. The seeds of
patriotism can germinate even on the stoniest ground, but they
nust have time to put down roots. We are a nation on the go,
always moving, and always with somewhere left to move to. Many
of us now even have mobile homes, with no roots in the earth at
all. The purpose of life is to get ahead, and getting ahead means
eaving others behind--an outlook, I think, which makes us dis-
tinctive among the nomadic peoples. There is little piety toward
the past and the future is something to be conquered. Ages and
yenerations of care are required for the nurturing of that pri-
mary patriotism of place which has been a treasured and defining
experience of most of humankind. In recent American letters, per-
haps only William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and Edmund Wilson wrote
in the language of natural patriotism--and Wilson became queru-
lous toward the end. We are a people to whom the experience ofq
displacement is so natural that we do not know we are displaced
and it is hard for us to appreciate how desolating the experien
can be for others. The following words were written by a Laotian
poet pleading for a way of life now destroyed by American bombs:
Pity--our houses, ricefields, inheritance--we must abandon.
The ricefields will grow jungles. They will become a wild
place filled with tigers. Have pity; the lands, the ponds
with fish, everything; pity the bathing hole where no one
will come to swim and muddy the cool waters. Pity the
crabs, fish, game, bamboo shoots; our kind of food. Sorrow
for the fruit trees we planted in the garden and around the
village, the clumps of large and small bamboo; have
pity!....The day does not exist.when we will forget. (6.)
Can we for whom "relocation" means moving elsewhere in the
pursuit of income and opportunity understand this? Have we found
satisfactory substitutes for it in battinq averaqes, or color
televisio or flights to the moon?
In sum, then, that kind of patriotism which Tocqueville
called instinctive is not available to us. (7.) There is no way
to measure the weight of this loss, but if instinctive patriotism
is the basic urge I think it is, then the loss is heavy. Surely,
human beings can feel the lack of something they need even though
they might never have had it. To feel the loss of something it
is not necessary first to have had that thing. (Consider "love",
for example, which many psychologists say we all need, even thouc
many of us have never had it.) The trouble is, that when a de-
privation is of this sort the victim may not interpret his condi-
tion correctly: people attempted all sorts of cures for goiter
before they learned about iodine. Not knowing what it is one nee
one mistakes symptoms for the cause, and tries to fill the need
through harmful substitutes for the real thing. Perhaps this is
the case with us.
Just one step removed from land patriotism is patriotism of
the city. Both center on the idea and sentiment of home and
nurture. Both acknowledge that they foundation of life is debt.
Both shape individual life by reference to the common and
familiar things. Their only important difference is in the object
of attachment. The city is the creation of human beings and is in
that obvious sense artificial, the image of an ideal, while the
land, even when altered by labor and love remains fundamentally
the work of nature. The supreme expression of city patriotism
is to be found in Pericles' eulogy for the Athenian dead, and a
study of that discourse will teach one all that can be learned
about the subject.
Certainly city patriotism can be as intense as patriotism of
the land. Machiavelli cared more for his city than for his own
soul. And Fustel de Coulanges' book on The Ancient City de-
scribes how much of human life could be founded on the city's
gods, exhibited in the city's temples and public spaces, and
protected by the city's walls. Each family had its private home i
and hearth, but the city was a second home, made by all and com-
mon to all. City patriotism was profoundly "social" in its
orientations: Socrates did not like to leave Athens for even a
day in the country because he could not talk with trees.
City patriotism, then, is not profoundly different from land
pariotism, though it is a step beyond it in the direction of the
rtificial and the ideal. Like land patriotism, it too is declin-
ing. In the times when cities were few, they were precious to the
itizens by reason of their very artificiality. A small man-made
thing protected by its walls from the vast wilderness without,
he city nourished a life which was distinctively human. As time
went on, the works of the humankind appeared everywhere, becoming
less valuable as they became more common. That is true the world
over. In the United States, in addition, cities have been from
the beginning products largely of the impulse of profit and
hustle, owing little to the sacred and the traditional. Hence,
there is as little of city patriotism among us as there is of the
ancient patriotism of place. Furthermore, the people and shapes,
as well as the monuments and traditions, of our cities change so
rapidly that citizens have no time to form solid and enduring
attachments. Even the sports teams, closest modern equivalent to
the gods of the ancient city, can be moved by a few million
dollars.
II
COVENANTED PATRIOTISM
But if instinctive patriotism and the patriotism of the city
cannot be ours, what can be? Is there a type of patriotism
peculiarly American: if so, is it anything more than patriotism's
violent relative nationalism?
Abraham Lincoln, the supreme authority on this subject,
thought there was a patriotism unique to America. Americans, a
motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded
together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory,
not by the calls and traditions of a city, but by a political
idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a
set of principles, and by an exchange of promises to uphold and
advance certain commitments among ourselves and throughout the
world. Those principles and commitments are the core of American
identity, the soul of the body politic. They make the American
nation unique, and niquely valuable among and to the other
nations. But the other side of this conception contains a warning
very like the warnings spoken by the prophets to Israel: if we
fail in our promises to each other, and lose the principles of
the covenant, then we lose everything, for they are we. This
makes it quite clear that we are dealing here with a conception
very different from Rousseau's advocacy of a civil religion as
the bond of political community. For Lincoln, the principles of
the covenant set the standard by hich the nation must judge
itself: the nation is righteous and o be honored only insofar as
it honors the covenant. For Rousseau, civil religion is designed
to induce the individual to venerate the nation itself. I shall
hope to show that the best way to define the failure of American
patriotism is to see it as a decline from the noble example and
promise of Lincoln's conception, to the banel performance of
Rousseau's.
Lincoln developed and expounded his conception of the
national covenant over a number of years and on a number of
significant occasions. One of his fullest statements of the idea
came when he was about to enter the highest office in the land.
On his way to Washington to take up the Presidency, Lincoln was
invited to speak in Independence Hall, Philadelphia. Deeply moved
by the place, he expressed his understanding of America's meaning
and mission in a handful of his own memorable words--and half con
sciously revealed his own and the nation's future. The whole
speech should be read. Here are some critical passages:
I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing
here in the place where were collected together the wisdom,
the patriotism, the devotion to principle, from which sprang
the institutions under which we live...I can say...that all
the political sentiments I entertain have been drawn...from
the sentiments which originated,and were given to the world
from this hall in which we stand. I have never had a feeling
politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied
in the Declaration of Independence...I have often inquired
of myself, what great principle or idea it was that
kept this confederacy so long together. It was...something
in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people
of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.
It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights
should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all
should have an equal choice...
Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis?
If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in
the world if I can help to save it. If it can't be saved
upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this
country cannot be saved without giving up that principle--I
was about to I say I would rather be assassinated on this
spot than to surrender it. (8;)
In this discourse Lincoln asserted that the articles of the
political covenant are both perfectly clear and grounded in the
firmest authority. Three years later, on land consecrated by
blood, he repeated the same themes. The nation born in 1776
was "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal." Continuing in unbroken line, gen-
eration was tied to generation by that common birth and promise.
In a fragment written early in 1861, but not published, Lincoln
stated his understanding of the relation between covenant and
people--between the Declaration of Independence on the one side
and the Constitution and Union on the other. He expressed the
connection by a luminous metaphor drawn from the Book of Pro-
verbs. The principle announced in the Declaration he called an
"apple of gold,"while "the Union and the Constitution are the
pictures of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture
was made, not to conceal or destroy the apple; but to adorn and
preserve it. The picture was made for the apple--not the apple
for the picutre." (IV,240)
One more statement, this time from the young Lincoln. Again
the occasion is significant. Lincoln had just been elected to the
Illinois legislature, and he accepted an invitation to address
the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield: an occasion of beginning,
then, llke the speech in Independence Hall. Lincoln chose as his
theme, "the perpetuation of our political institutions." (I,108
153)
He opened the discourse by reminding his listeners that the
men of the Revolution had fought to found a polity dedicated to
liberty and self-government. Those principles were safe while
the founders lived for they knew the price that had been paid
for them. The scenes and memories of the struggle were visible
to their eyes and lively to their memories. Many individuals and
families treasured and retold the stories of sacrifice and
danger. But now these scenes are distant. We who came after the
struggle and had no part in it cannot see it in the scars on our
bodies, cannot even relive it through the eyes and voices of the
actors. Being distant, we easily forget why those others fought
and died, and we cannot justly value the gift they gave to us.
Our forgetting opens the path to talented persons of great
ambition who, if they cannot gain fame by preserving the
principles of the founding, will gain fame by wrecking them. Only
if the founding principles are kept alive and pure in the minds
and hearts of the citizenry shall we be safe from perverted
ambition--or,indeed, safe from ourselves. We must, then, see as
the chief task of political life the task of political education:
inculcate respect or valid laws as a "political religion"; retell
on every possible occasion the story of the struggle; teach
tirelessly the principles of the founding. The only guardian of
the compact is an informed citizenry, and the first task of
leadership is the formtion of such a citizenry. (9.)
This is a conception of patriotic develotion that fits a nation
large and heterogeneous as our own. It sets a mission and pro-
des a standard of judgment. It tells us when we are acting just-
and it does not confuse martial fervor with dedication to coun-
try. Lincoln also reminded us that the covenant is not a static
legacy, a gift outright, but a burden and a promise. The nation
consists only in repeated acts of remembrance and renewal of the
covenant through changing circumstances. Patriotism here is more
than a frame of mind. It is also activity guided by and directed
toward the mission established in the founding covenant. This
conception of political membership also decisively transcends
the parochial and primitive fraternities of blood and race, for
it calls kin all who accept the authority of the covenant. And
finally, this covenanted patriotism assigns America a teaching
mission among the nations, rather than a superiority over a
hostility toward them. (10.) This patriotism is compatible with
the most generous humanism. (11.)
Now, only the willfully blind could fail to see that
American patriotism in practice has failed to live up to
Lincoln's teaching of the ideal. Most of the reasons are obvious;
others are more subtle.
First of all, certain peoples were excluded from the
covenant, some from the beginning, some later on: Indians,
Negroes, Mexican Americans, Orientals. Then too, from early on,
liberty was largely interpreted as private liberty, and equality
soon came to mean equal opportunity to compete for the prizes of
wealth and power.
There was little teaching of liberty as public liberty--the power
of acting with others to shape the conditions of the common life.
(Henry Adams thought the political age had ended in 1816,
supplanted by the economic age.) The activity of politics was
seen as but another of the instrumentalities by which
self-interested individuals advanced toward private goals. The
very notion of a public good dissolved into an aggregate of
particular goods, and Lincoln's conception of the patriotic
citizen as one who treasures and upholds the basic principles of
the political covenant dissolved along with it. (12.)
Today our skepticism toward all notions of disinterested,
public regarding behavior is so thoroughgoing that the patriot
can hardly appear. We are inclined to regard all professions of
disinterested and altruistic motive as the blandishments of a
charlatan or the intrigues of a schemer--and we are largely
right, for over time~a people gets the politics it expects and
asks for. When these political conceptions were added to the
ethic of competition and mastery in the economic sphere, the
ground was prepared for the full flowering of that individualism
which Tocqueville diagnosed as the deadliest enemy of civic
virtue. In sum, liberalism and capitalism corrupted the covenant,
while racism denied it to large groups of the population.
Other forces completed the work which liberalism,
capitalism, and racism had begun. The idea and experience of a
covenanted community has deeper roots in the American past than
those exposed by Lincoln. The Puritan Commonwealth of New England
was exactly such a community. Individuals became members of the
community only upon acceptance of certain articles of religious
faith and morals. That acceptance had to be proved in practice,
and to the satisfaction of the guardians of the covenant. Social
institutions were designed to encourage performance of the
covenant.
The Puritans discouraged the formation of isolated, prlvate
farmsteads and tried to keep all persons in the towns, in sight
of each other, and with life centered in the meetinghouse. In
sum, membership was not a right of birth. It had to be earned,
and was the reward of choice and effort. Institutions were
designed to encourage the choice and supervise the effort.
That idea of earned membership still forms the center of
American nationality, but time and circumstances have worked
strange changes on it. (13.) As time went on, America opened her
doors to the stranger on easy terms. Only one restriction
remained: the stranger must not become a republican. He had to
accept the fundamental terms of the founding covenant. The
Constitution even specifies that each state shall have a
republican form of government. We imposed no religious tests for
membership, no tests of cultural or linguistic background, no
tests--with well-known exceptions--of blood or race. But we dld
require a profession of republican faith. In that decisive way,
the New England idea of earned membership in a covenanted
community persisted. It is a fascinating idea, at once universal
and generous in that it is willing to embrace as members a great
variety of human and cultural types, rejecting neither Turk nor
Greek, a Turk or Greek, blind to divisions that had for centuries
thought the Old World to repression and war; narrow in that it
reduced the person to official beliefs, denying the significance
of all those other tllings that go to make up character and
style, al1 those things that human conversation is about.
As time went on, the narrowlless prevailed against the
generosity. First of all, the social institutions that provided
the nursery and school for learning and following the covenant de
ined. The close New England Town gave way to the isolated
homestead, or to the city of recent immigrants. No longer was
life lived and tested under the eyes of familiars. Then, the
forgetting that Lincoln so feared took its toll so that the gift
of public liberty seemed a small one. Our teachers began to
teach, and we to value, private life and liberty above all. The
growth of capitalist enterprise and the spread of the competitive
ethic hastened the work of isolation and privatization. And then,
during the last third of the nineteenth century, capitalism
became equated with America herself. At the very time when the
free enterprise system was being swallowed by the corporate
system, the ideology of free enterprise became identified with
the spirit of Americanism. Finally, with the huge immigrations of
1890-1920, and with the emergence of the United States as a world
power, efforts to assilmilate the foreign-born and assure their
loyalty were greatly accelerated. More and more we turned to
propaganda and to one or another form of loyalty test. An
American became one who would not profess certain beliefs or who
would not do certain things: from belief in anarchism, to the
practice of polygamy, or joining the Communist Party, and on to
disavowing the use of revolutionary force and violence. A nation
of strangers, ignorant of the most important things about the man
next door, we attempted to assure predictable behavior by
requiring ritual disavowals of feared beliefs and practices. The
quest for consensus in national politics we followed almost
naturally--as though patriots were persons who did not disagree,
as though patriotism were a matter of professing certain
doctrines and supporting the party policies of the day, rather
than a steadfast devotion to the founding principles and a
disinterested search for the good of the whole.
The "Apple of Gold" tarnished, while we polished the "picture of
silver." Rousseau's conception of a civic religion drove out Lin-
ln's conception of a covenanted citizenry whose patriotism was
exercised in active dedication to the promises and goals of the
public.
Even so, Lincoln's idea remains alive as possibly the only saving
conception of patriotism possible for us. It is surely the
understanding of patriotic duty that inspired the civil rights
activity of the 1960s, and that for one glorious moment called
more Harvard Seniors, among others, to the Peace Corps than to
the Business School. It is the only idea of civic obligation
that can provide a full defense for civilly disobeying laws or
orders circumscribing liberty or violating the principle of
equal justice for all. The idea was expressed by many of the
young men who publicly refused conscription during the late 1960s
the grounds that the Vietnam War violated America's obligations
to herself and to the nations--expressed not by those who
lied or hid, or who used the labyrinth of the law to avoid the
burdens of moral choice and political action, but by those who
publically resisted and publicly paid the penalties of resis-
tance
Lincoln's conception of covenanted patriotism also offers
the noblest rationale for active citizenship (government of, by,
and for the people resident in our tradition. Virtually every
other argment for participation familiar to Americans starts from
the premise of self-interest and sees political participation in
exclusively instrumental and economistic terms. Seen in this
light SDS's "Port Huron Statement" of 1962, with its conviction
that individual should "share in t:hose social decisions
determining the quality and direction of his life," is the finest
expression of Lincolnian idea in recent times. The Port Huron
Statement offes a vision of an active and cooperative citizenry
who see the political system as their system, and who understand
that if the System is to survive according to its own principles,
it will survive only by their efforts, and not by the
ministrations of an elected monarch and an elite of managers, no
matter how benign and competent. Such an elite might be able to
keep order and distribute comfort, and might even be able to
defend the populace against external enemies and help it adjust
to the strains of incessant change at home, but it cannot
preserve the system on its own principles. It cannot do that
because one of the principles is that the system belongs to the
citizens. It is theirs; and at the moment sn elite "saves" it for
them, at that moment it dies.
Finally, Lincoln's idea proposes a strictly political
definition of our nationhood, one which liberates us from the
parochialism of race and religion, and one which severs patriotic
devotion from the cult of national power. It is, in my
estimation, a calamity that this idea of patriotism has been so
corrupted and subverterted among us. The work of reviving,
purifying, and establishing it the supreme task of American
political education.
1.) Trip to Hanoi, (New York: FaLrrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968),
p. 82.
2.) The words are Manuelito's,a chief of the Navaho, describing
the return of his people to their ancestral lands. Quoted here
from Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 35.
3.) The early Christians were poor patriots. Their monotheism
killed the lesser gods, denuding the land of sacred groves and
local shrines. Machiavelli also thought that the Christians were
poor patriots.
4.) See Chapter 1, "The Spirit of the Place," in D.H. Lawrences
Studies in Classic American Literat:ure for a suggestive
development of this theme.
5.) These lines were written on Thanksgiving Day, one of the
purest of American holidays. And yet, there are complexities to
be remembered here as well. The Puritans had not only days of
thanksgiving but days of penance too, and they were reluctant to
routinize high occasions. They remembered that their plenty was a
gift. And what of the Indians? There is not enough whisky in the
land to drown their pain on this day when the conquerors feast.
6.) Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an
Air War (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). Quoted here from New
York Review of Books, Vol. 19, No. 2 (August 10, 1972), p. 20.
7.) Democracy in America (New York: Schocken, 1961), Vol. I. p.
282.
8.) Roy P. Basler, ed. Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1953), Vol. IV, p. 249.
9.) Lincoln returned time and again tio this theme of forgetting,
nowhere more powerfully than in his great speech at Peoria
(October 16, 1854) where he argued that the Nebraska bill was but
one more step along the path whereby "little by little, but
steadily as man's march to the grave, we have been giving up the
Old for the New faith." Ibid., Vol. II. p. 275.
10.) This mission used to matter to others elsewhere in the
world. A report from Russia: "On the morning of the Fourth of
July, 1876...hundreds of small, rude American flags or strips of
red, white and blue cloth fluttered from the grated windows of
the (political prisoners) around the whole quadrangle of the
great St. F>etersburg prison..." Reported in Ira Woods Howerth,
"Patriotism, Instinctive and Intelligent," (1912); quoted here as
reprinted in Mauriceb G. Fulton, ed., National Ideals
and Problems (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press,
1968), p.213.
11.) I want to call the reader's attention to Randolph Burne's
essay "TransNational America" in Bourne, War and the
Intellectuals, ed. with introcution by Carl Resk (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1964), pp.107-24. It is the only American
writing on patriotism known to me that is not shamed by Lincoln's
understanding of the matter.
12.) For a more sanguine account of the development of American
patriotism than the one which follows, see Merle Curti, The
Growth of American Thought, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row,
1966), ch. 16.
13) The seed of the following analysis comes from G.K.
Chesterton's crotchety and brilliant essay in his What I 'Saw in
America.'
John Schaar now retired, was professor of Political Science at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of
Legitimacy and the Modern State (Transaction Books, 1981);
Loyalty in America (University of California Press, 1957);
Escape From Authority, and co-author of The Berkeley Rebellion
and Beyond. Thls piece is excerpted from a longer article that
first appeared in the New American Review.
May 17, 1972, pp. 59-100 and is anthologized in its entirety in
"Legitimacy and the Modern State," published by Transaction
Books.
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