A few patriotic words on our nation’s birthday. America’s number one asset is surely its ingenious system of government, which has permitted us as a people to amass great wealth in power in a short 230 years. But America is more than that. It is just as much its people and places. The ideas, the people, and the land are a unified whole. As I spent part of this July 4th weekend visiting beautiful Homosassa State Park in Florida, I was awed again by America’s natural beauty and diverse landscapes.
Leftists often make their hatred of America explicit. Little can be done for such people. But neconservatives love America in a strange way, always emphasizing its creed, and denigrating any other expression of love as chauvinism, the worship of what Peggy Noonan calls “mud.” If neoconservatives love America, they are the patriotic equivalent of autistics.
One weird thing about their dismissal of normal patriotism as ââ¬Ålove of mudââ¬Â is that most of our patriotic songs appeal to exactly that, particularly to the way our countryââ¬â¢s vastness, unspoiled beauty, and diversity match its enduring appeal to pioneering spirits, productive work, possibilities for the future, and our historical freedoms. For people that talk often of a ââ¬Åcivic religionââ¬Â of American patriotism, the neoconservatives arbitrarily dismiss our historical patriotic symbols and rituals.
Consider the opening stanzas of America the Beautiful:
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Or America:
My country, ââ¬Ëtis of Thee,
Sweet Land of Liberty
Of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrimsââ¬â¢ pride,
From every mountain side
Let Freedom ring.My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free,
Thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills,
My heart with rapture thrills
Like that above.
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet Freedomââ¬â¢s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break,
The sound prolong.
Or consider the chorus of This Land is Your Land:
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California, to the New York Island
From the Redwood Forest, to the gulf stream waters
This land is made for you and me.
As I was walking, a ribbon of highway
I saw above me, an endless skyway
I saw below me, a golden valley
This land was made for you and me.
For Noonan and her gang, paens to “purple mountain majesties,” “golden vallies,” “Land where my fathers died,” and “fruited plains” are indistinguishable from the crudest forms of ethnic chauvinism. It’s too bad neconservatives are so tin-eared. They can’t really love America fully if they are blind to everything other than its creed.
Our country is beautiful. Let’s celebrate that too on its birthday. Our poets long have. One wonders if the kill-joy neconservatives can even bring themselves to enjoy fireworks on the Fourth of July; after all, these rockets (as in “rockets’ red glare”) merely commemorate the prosaic achievement of our country’s deliverance from the attempted domination of another creedal nation neconservatives are so fond of, the 19th Century British Empire. No crusades for democracy in the War of 1812. Just Americans struggling to live as a distinct people with a distinct way of life in a conflict with a bullying and self-important empire.
America may be mud, but it’s our mud, and I pity any of my countrymen that sees only mud when he stops to look around. It’s more than mud and more than a disembodied creed. . . . It’s a country. Happy Birthday America!
4 Jul 2006 at 2:12 pm
Contra Peggy Noonan:
“Our land is everything to us . . . I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it – with their lives.”
-John Wooden Legs, Cheyenne
“The ground we stand on is sacred ground. It is the blood of our ancestors.”
-Plenty Coups, Crow
Sounds like an indigenously American point of view to me. Happy 4th of July, y’all.
4 Jul 2006 at 11:22 pm
I disagree with the interpretation of the War of 1812. While British refusal to recognize neutral shipping rights was certainly a significant cause of Anglo-American tension during the Napoleonic Wars, I think most historians would agree that the War of 1812 was caused primarily by the American War Hawks’ interest in annexing Canada. They thought they could get away with this while the British Army was busy in Spain and Portugal. Several John Randolph speeches from that era (in addition to the obvious voices of High New England Federalism) discuss this issue quite eloquently. In any case, I don’t think the war can best be summed up as a purely defensive struggle to defend the homeland against “a bullying and self-important empire.”
5 Jul 2006 at 12:07 am
I know comparatively little about the War of 1812, but I do know that it was regarded by many contemporaries as the Second War for Independence, that the British retained certain elements that never accepted our independence, and that it was, if nothing else, not the kind of ideological crusade that neoconservatives are fond of.
I would like you, however, to tell me what were its chief causes, whether the American cause was just, and what role, if anything, British expansionism and hegemonic designs played in its culmination.
5 Jul 2006 at 1:10 pm
Come on Roach. I would have thought you to be one to conclude that, obviously, the War of 1812 was caused by the Jews. Somehow or another, like everything else you seem to believe, the Jews MUST have been behind this, right? And if not, the Jews must have been in a position to stop the war, but chose to ignore it. Jews jews jews. Always blame the jews.
5 Jul 2006 at 1:25 pm
I am sorry, but I think you have deficiencies in reading comprehension or you have taken my measured discussion of the Hungarian Revolution, where I noted that the exclusive focus in our culture on the Holocaust has eclipsed other important episodes of political violence, as proof that I somehow blame Jews for everything. I do no such thing and find such reductionism to be facile and moronic; I note, however, that you engage in such reductionism yourself and cannot see the distinction between someone who makes a point that some Jews might disagree with and an attack on the Jews as a people. I find any such attacks on an entire people to be un-Christian and immoral. So learn to read, or at least learn to behave, or I’ll have you banned.
5 Jul 2006 at 2:46 pm
Great post, Chris. On the War of 1812, I believe your reader is correct that the significant driving force behind the United States declaring war on Great Britain (which we did, unbelievably, first) was the desire to take Canada and acquire more territory. The harrassment of our vessels and sailors and the violation of neutral rights were important aggravating factors that helped make the war seem more justifiable, but expansionism was what pushed us over the edge. The drive for annexation was the important element solidifying the Republicans from West and South behind the war, while the damage done to mercantile interests by the war (in spite of the war’s apparently rather uninspiring motto of Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights) pushed the Federalist Northeast into ever greater opposition leading up to the failed Hartford Convention. A good summary history of the War of 1812 can be found in the book From Sea to Shining Sea, which also provides short histories of the Tripolitanian and Mexican wars, though I’m sure there are probably better books on the war and the period.
You are correct that some characterised the war as the second war for independence, and there is a certain ring of truth to this characterisation (though our real independence from British finance never really happened during the 19th century). It is worth noting, however, that this phrase about the second war of independence comes from Calhoun, who was at that time a very excited War Hawk. He was liable to make the war into something perhaps a little more grand and high-minded than it was. It did become, very quickly, a purely defensive struggle because of the remarkable failure (as usual) of our Canadian campaigns, and certainly victory at New Orleans secured the West for us and made sure that we would not be hemmed in by the British on two sides.
5 Jul 2006 at 2:51 pm
One more point on the war. Your main point is well-taken that, whatever else we may say about the War of 1812, it was not a utopian or crusading kind of war to make the world a better place or to bring democracy to the far corners of the world. It was an opportunistic war prosecuted with a kind of national interest in mind, aimed at strengthening the U.S. at the expense of the old enemy. There may be good, republican reasons to criticise the drive for expansionism, but in the 19th century we are still looking at American foreign policy pursuing tangible American interests. That, I think, was what you intended to convey with your statement about the war.
5 Jul 2006 at 9:28 pm
Someone, I can’t remember who, recently made the point that the neocons see America as a handful of pleasant abstractions {”Freedom!” “democracy!”), that can be transplanted and flourish anywhere (even in the barren soil of Mess O’ Potamia) rather than a one-of-a-kind place, owing to the land, the history, the people, the cultures and collective memories that can’t be reproduced just anywhere.
7 Jul 2006 at 12:41 pm
I appreciated the post but have a few questions.
First, let me state that I agree with the proposition that America is more than just a creed (which, I take it, we agree is stated in the Declaration of Independence). What, however, happened prior to July 4 (America’s “birthday”) that created the “American” people (inhabiting 13 separate English colonies) which distinguished that people from the English-speakers still in England and elsewhere? Were the inhabitants of Canada at the time of the Revolution simply “Americans” who chose not to go along with the whole independence thing, in which case the only real differences between them and the “Americans” were the government to which they gave their allegiance and their refusal to accept the American “creed”?
It seems to me this discussion goes straight to the heart of what was at stake in the Civil War. Chris’s post appears to presume that the United States is a “country,” which seems to me another way of saying it’s an indisoluble union. (Remember that Robert E. Lee referred to Virginia as his “country.”) I agree with Chris’s proposition but struggle to define what created the American “country” other than the Declaration of Independence (which I beleive Jefferson and Madison referred to as the “act of Union”).
Anxious for thoughts on all this.
7 Jul 2006 at 7:06 pm
Jason you bring up a subject that has long interested me but I’ve never taken much time to actually get into the details of studying: what was the position of the loyalists during the American War of Independence and how does their parallel “Americanism” color what we should think of American culture circa 1776.
I think to speak in generalities we had commonalities and differences then as now. And then more than now those differences were defined by regional cultures, the predominance of slave-holding, regional cultures imported from England, geography, and probaly other factors too.
I think a nation can exist without a state requiring an “indsoluble” union. The German nation, for instance, once stretched from Germany to Austria to East Prussia and a smattering of villages across Eastern Europe. And the Indian and Chinese diasporas today have created a kind of multi-state nation of Chinese, just as the diaspora Jews were once a nation in many respects without a country or a state in which they were coexstensive.
So, I think we were a people, but also peoples. But the exact contours of that relationship is hard for me to gauge. I studied the ideology of the American Revolution pretty extesnsively in college and after, but the opposition, not so much.
9 Jul 2006 at 11:48 am
Compared to any American patriotic song, “La Marseillaise” is downright bloody!
Americans of both the Red & Blue persuasions might well be shocked to learn the French were so bloodthirsty a bunch, since we’ve come to associate them with stuff like fine wine, cheese, and making love with their faces….
Let’s go children of the fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us tyranny’s
Bloody flag is raised! (repeat)
In the countryside, do you hear
The roaring of these fierce soldiers?
They come right to our arms
To slit the throats of our sons, our friends!
Refrain
Grab your weapons, citizens!
Form your batallions!
Let us march! Let us march!
May impure blood
Water our fields!
This horde of slaves, traitors, plotting kings,
What do they want?
For whom these vile shackles,
These long-prepared irons? (repeat)
Frenchmen, for us, oh! what an insult!
What emotions that must excite!
It is us that they dare to consider
Returning to ancient slavery!
What! These foreign troops
Would make laws in our home!
What! These mercenary phalanxes
Would bring down our proud warriors! (repeat)
Good Lord! By chained hands
Our brows would bend beneath the yoke!
Vile despots would become
The masters of our fate!
Tremble, tyrants! and you, traitors,
The disgrace of all groups,
Tremble! Your parricidal plans
Will finally pay the price! (repeat)
Everyone is a soldier to fight you,
If they fall, our young heros,
France will make more,
Ready to battle you!
Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors,
Bear or hold back your blows!
Spare these sad victims,
Regretfully arming against us. (repeat)
But not these bloodthirsty despots,
But not these accomplices of Bouillé,
All of these animals who, without pity,
Tear their mother’s breast to pieces!
Sacred love of France,
Lead, support our avenging arms!
Liberty, beloved Liberty,
Fight with your defenders! (repeat)
Under our flags, let victory
Hasten to your manly tones!
May your dying enemies
See your triumph and our glory!
Refrain
We will enter the pit
When our elders are no longer there;
There, we will find their dust
And the traces of their virtues. (repeat)
Much less eager to outlive them
Than to share their casket,
We will have the sublime pride
Of avenging them or following them!
Refrain
9 Jul 2006 at 5:07 pm
I’m not too surprised. France was remade or attempted to be remade according to a liberal creed in its revolution. The old France, the land of a thousand cheeses and widely varying regional customs, became the new france of the metric system and the one-size-fits-all rationalism of the encyclopaedists.
It’s notable that our national songs do not resemble this crusading, blood-thirsty nonsense until our civil war when songs like the Battle Hymn of the Republic emerged. Then a more strictly ideological concept of America which demanded uniformity and defined our countrymen as traitors emerged. What a sad time. But the “creedal nation” reductionism is scandalized by our patriotic songs. Let’s remind these neoconservatives, who would strip away our country’s other more traditional aspects of identy, of how mistaken they are by remembering our history and traditions, many of which are still in living memory like our patriotic songs.
9 Jul 2006 at 9:00 pm
So the question of whether the union was “indisoluble” is a completely legal one, dependent on the nature of the Constitution? There’s no argument that, once the people of the colonies threw their lot into together as one “country,” that put an end to the argument about whether they’d sink or swim together?
9 Jul 2006 at 9:48 pm
The Supreme Court ruled, in Texas v. Jones I believe it was, after the Civil War, that any authority claimed by the CSA was a nullity and in violation of the Constitution precisely because the country was deemed indivisible as a matter of law. A rather interesting stance coming from a country that began its history by secession, after all.