愛国心について考える

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Nov. 10, 1967

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Essay: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PATRIOTISM? 

AMID the cacophony of protest against current U.S. foreign policy, it may be hard to believe that Nathan Hale ever cried: "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." For many Americans, who through the years thought that a rather wonderful thing to say, it is even harder to believe that today so many young men chant a new anthem: "Hell, no, we won't go!" Indeed, the phenomenon of bitter antiwar protest reflects profound changes in U.S. attitudes toward patriotism—an emotion once proudly shouted from the rooftops but now seldom even discussed. Is patriotism dead? Outdated? Should it still enter the discussion of grave national issues? 

Patriotism is just as important as ever. The problem is in defining it—and few definitions are so elusive. It consists of three distinct but interrelated emotions—love of country, pride in it, and desire to serve its best interests. The love is easily traced to man's natural affection for his particular home, language and customs. The word patriotism comes from pater, Greek for father, and means love for a fatherland. From the love flows pride: the firm belief that one's country is good and perhaps superior to all others—a pride not only in the country's objective worth but because that worth enhances one's own. 

Adlai Stevenson's definition was expectedly eloquent. "When an American says that he loves his country," he declared, "he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect." Eric Hoffer, the philosopher-longshoreman has a more prosaic but very pragmatic description: "The day-to-day competence of the workingman." He adds: "If I said I was loading ships for Mother America, even during a war, I would be laughed off the docks. In Russia, they can't build an outhouse without having a parade and long speeches. This is the strength of America." 

Few people seem to be willing to proclaim their patriotism these days, and Fourth of July oratory has gone out of fashion. But John F. Kennedy's inaugural address was squarely in the old spine-tingling tradition. "Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country." And more: "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." There was an affirmation in the best spirit of patriotic oratory, and it forced the blood up into the temples of people who never really expected to feel that way. 


Right & Wrong 

For centuries, countless thinkers have denounced patriotic pride for one of its unhappiest effects: the irrational hatred that one people aims at a "lesser" people. Arnold Toynbee attributes the death of Greco-Roman civilization to patriotic wars between city states—and failure to establish international law. Early Christians rejected patriotism on the ground that man's obligations are to God, and after that to all of humanity. A Jesuit general once called patriotism "the most certain death of Christian love." There is no question that chauvinism—hyperpatriotism—can be induced in any country, including a democracy, where truth may be a poor competitor in the marketplace of ideas. A tragic example is Germany, where Nazi excesses in the name of the fatherland left such scars that today patriotism is for Germans an embarrassing idea. 

At its root, patriotism bore no such scar. In 1578, during the Dutch-Flemish revolt against Spanish rule, the word patriot was. first used to mean one who represents people and country against the king. By the 18th century, patriotism denoted love of a free country, devotion to human rights as well as nationalism. To Stephen Decatur's famous toast "Our country may she always be right; but our country right or wrong" Carl Schurz later replied: "When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right." Who decides what is right and what is wrong? The Schurz position suggests that the only valid answer to that question is the free individual conscience—indeed, that true love of country involves criticism as well as praise, for mere acquiescence may be mindless indifference. 

The Essence of Americanism 

Chaotic—or even anarchic—as that answer may seem, it is the base of U.S. patriotism. At the end of the 18th century, nothing was more quixotic than trying to nationalize 13 hostile colonies, assorted religious sects, and 2,500,000 individualists. The colonists were so unimpressed by the Revolution that one-third of them sided with Britain. At Valley Forge, George Washington wrote that patriotic idealism could not inspire his ragged, ill-trained army, that it must be toughened by "a prospect of interest or some reward." He meant cash. Only well after victory did the shaky American nation burst forth with an optimistic self-image based on the idea that the humane spirit of 18th century enlightenment could be fully realized for the first time anywhere. General Washington called himself "a citizen of the great republic of humanity at large," and countless divines proclaimed Americans to be God's chosen people. "We are acting for all mankind," said Thomas Jefferson. Beneficent fate "imposed on us the duty of proving what is the degree of self-government in which a society may venture to leave its individual members." 

The very fact that the U.S. was a nation only in name produced a fervent drive to create national symbols that sometimes obscured Jefferson's aspirations. The drive was fueled by waves of immigrants rushing to a virgin continent that offered fabulous opportunities for self-advancement. The gold-rush spirit animated Americanism, the country's unestablished religion. The whole public-school system was aimed at Americanization. Noah Webster's spelling book taught American English to Germans, Poles, Swedes, Italians—and declared that "Europe is grown old in folly, corruption and tyranny." Geography was American, and America was bigger than the universe, the finest, happiest and soon to be the strongest nation on earth. Parson Weems's biography beatified Washington; Fourth of July speeches were gravely heeded. Even arithmetic books instilled patriotism. Symbols burgeoned—Old Glory, the Liberty Bell, the bald eagle, Uncle Sam. Everyone memorized militant songs, such as Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean ("Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue"). And McGuffey readers—hardly a child alive could not recite Longfellow's verse: 

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! 

Sail on, O Union, strong and great! 

Humanity with all its fears, 

With all the hopes of future years, 

Is hanging breathless on thy fate! 

The symbolism, the national heroes, the sacred founding documents, the optimistic faith in progress—all these unified and inspired millions of uprooted immigrants in an often frighteningly free society. The mood filled a basic human need: never do men so long to belong as when they give up one fatherland for another. Conversely, the U.S. proposition was freedom from orthodoxy. There was not—and is not—any one perfect Americanism. Not in a country that cherishes diversity as a national virtue. 

But if diversity is a condition of freedom, it is also a recipe for self-interest—and a patriotism that sometimes reaches no deeper than symbols. Over the years, peacetime patriotism in the U.S. was expressed as a wealth of other emotions; how Americans feel about America is clearly linked to how they feel about themselves functioning in America. Thus in the 19th century every imaginable interest group claimed superior nativity. Businessmen denounced unionists as alien anarchists; each generation of naturalized immigrants scorned each later wave of "foreigners," notably Roman Catholics, victims of outrageous persecution by the nativist Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Just before the Civil War, slavery apologists attributed to themselves the one true Americanism; some Southerners wanted to claim the Stars and Stripes as their own flag.