Patriotism -- Final End

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Date Posted: 00:14:39 05/28/02 Tue
Author: Drummond
Subject: Patriotism

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The Nation
=====================================
June 3, 2002

Patriotism's Secret History
by Peter Dreier & Dick Flacks

Many Americans believe that the left is "antipatriotic" (and even anti-American), while the political right truly expresses the American spirit and reveres its symbols. Particularly since the late 1960s--when the movement against US intervention in Vietnam gained momentum--the terms "progressive" and "patriotism" have rarely been used in the same sentence, at least in the mainstream media. It has become conventional wisdom that conservatives wave the American flag while leftists burn it. Patriotic Americans display the flag on their homes; progressives turn it upside down to show contempt.

Recent months have seen a dramatic increase in the number of Americans
proudly displaying the Stars and Stripes on their cars, homes,
businesses, T-shirts, caps, lapel pins and even tattoos. This outpouring
of flag-waving signifies a variety of sentiments--from identification
with the victims of the September 11 attacks to support for the
military's invasion of Afghanistan. But in our popular culture, displays
of the American flag are--along with the very idea of
"patriotism"--typically viewed as expressions of "conservative"
politics. The patriotic fervor since September 11 has revitalized that
belief and, as in other times, has given conservative politicos and
pundits a handy means to undermine dissent and progressive initiatives.

A case in point: In Santa Barbara, California, progressive County
Supervisor Gail Marshall is facing the possibility of a recall election
fueled by right-wing forces opposed to her support for environmental
regulation, affordable housing and labor unions. Because Marshall
occupies the key swing seat on the five-member county board, Santa
Barbara's conservative activists--funded by oil interests, agribusiness
and land developers--have been trying to unseat her for years. They
launched a recall campaign after Marshall refused to rubber-stamp a
proposal to require the Pledge of Allegiance at meetings of one of her
community advisory boards. Marshall said she wanted the board to discuss
the idea, but her opponents--who made sure that TV camera crews were
present at the meeting where the issue first surfaced--have turned her
civil libertarian instincts into proof that she's hostile to public
expressions of patriotism.

In TV ads and newsletters, Marshall's opponents--who are gathering
signatures for a recall petition that, if successful, will go before the
voters this fall--claim that her alleged reluctance to have the pledge
recited was clear confirmation of their suspicion that she is a
"socialist."

Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by a leading
Christian socialist, Francis Bellamy, who was fired from his Boston
ministry for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist. Bellamy penned
the Pledge of Allegiance for Youth's Companion, a magazine for
young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000.

A few years earlier, the magazine had sponsored a largely successful
campaign to sell American flags to public schools. In 1891 the magazine
hired Bellamy--whose first cousin Edward Bellamy was the famous
socialist author of the utopian novel Looking Backward--to
organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary
of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America by promoting use of the
flag in public schools. Bellamy gained the support of the National
Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and
Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote
the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program's flag salute ceremony.

Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf
of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of
America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge
would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in
capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age, with its
robber barons and exploitation of workers. Bellamy intended the line
"One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all" to express a
more collective and egalitarian vision of America.

Bellamy's view that unbridled capitalism, materialism and individualism betrayed America's promise was widely shared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many American radicals and progressive reformers proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America stood for basic democratic values--economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and racial minorities, a welcome mat for the world's oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right-wing xenophobia and social injustice only fueled progressives' allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

Most Americans are unaware that much of our patriotic culture--including
many of the leading icons and symbols of American identity--was created
by artists and writers of decidedly left-wing and even socialist
sympathies. A look at the songs sung at post-9/11 patriotic tribute
events and that appear on the various patriotic compilation albums, or
the clips incorporated into film shorts celebrating the "American
spirit," reveals that the preponderance of these originated in the
forgotten tradition of left-wing patriotism.

Begin with the lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your
tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Emma
Lazarus was a poet of considerable reputation in her day, a well-known
figure in literary circles. She was a strong supporter of Henry George
and his "socialistic" single-tax program, and a friend of William
Morris, a leading British socialist. Her welcome to the "wretched
refuse" of the earth, written in 1883, was an effort to project an
inclusive and egalitarian definition of the American dream.

The words to "America the Beautiful" were written in 1893 by Katharine
Lee Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College. Bates was an
accomplished and published poet, whose book America the Beautiful and
Other Poems includes a sequence of poems expressing outrage at US
imperialism in the Philippines. Indeed, Bates identified with the
anti-imperialist movement of her day and was part of progressive reform
circles in the Boston area concerned about labor rights, urban slums and
women's suffrage. She was also an ardent feminist, and for decades lived
with and loved her Wellesley colleague Katharine Coman, an economist and
social activist. "America the Beautiful" not only speaks to the beauty
of the American continent but also reflects her view that US imperialism
undermines the nation's core values of freedom and liberty. The poem's
final words--"and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining
sea"--are an appeal for social justice rather than the pursuit of
wealth.

Many Americans consider Woody Guthrie's song "This Land Is Your Land,"
penned in 1940, to be our unofficial national anthem. Guthrie was a
radical with strong ties to the Communist Party. He was inspired to
write the song as an answer to Irving Berlin's popular "God Bless
America," which he thought failed to recognize that it was the "people"
to whom America belonged. The words to "This Land Is Your Land" reflect
Guthrie's fusion of patriotism, support for the underdog and class
struggle. In this song Guthrie celebrates America's natural beauty and
bounty but criticizes the country for its failure to share its riches,
reflected in the song's last and least-known verse:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry I stood there wondering
If this land was made for you and me.

Guthrie was not alone in combining patriotism and radicalism during the
Depression and World War II. In this period, many American composers,
novelists, artists and playwrights engaged in similar projects. In the
early 1930s, for example, a group of young composers and
musicians--including Marc Blitzstein (author of the musical "The Cradle
Will Rock"), Charles Seeger (a well-known composer and musicologist, and
father of folk singer Pete Seeger) and Aaron Copland--formed the
"composers' collective" to write music that would serve the cause of the
working class. They turned to American roots and folk music for
inspiration. Many of their compositions--including Copland's "Fanfare
for the Common Man" and "Lincoln Portrait"--are now patriotic musical
standards, regularly performed at major civic events.

Earl Robinson was a member of the composers' collective who pioneered
the effort to combine patriotism and progressivism. In 1939 he teamed
with lyricist John La Touche to write "Ballad for Americans," which was
performed on the CBS radio network by Paul Robeson, accompanied by
chorus and orchestra. This eleven-minute cantata provided a musical
review of American history, depicted as a struggle between the "nobodies
who are everybody" and an elite that fails to understand the real,
democratic essence of America.

Robeson, at the time one of the best-known performers on the world stage, became, through this work, a voice of America. Broadcasts and recordings of "Ballad for Americans" (by Bing Crosby as well as Robeson) were immensely popular. In the summer of 1940, it was performed at the national conventions of both the Republican and Communist parties. The work soon became a staple in school choral performances, but it was literally ripped out of many public school songbooks after Robinson and Robeson were identified with the radical left and blacklisted during the McCarthy period. Since then, however, "Ballad for Americans" has been periodically revived, notably during the bicentennial celebration in 1976, when a number of pop and country singers performed it in concerts and on TV.

During World War II, with lyricist Lewis Allen, Robinson co-wrote
another patriotic hit, "The House I Live In." Its lyrics asked, and then
answered, the question posed in the first line of the song, "What is
America to me?" The song evokes America as a place where all races can
live freely, where one can speak one's mind, where the cities as well as
the natural landscapes are beautiful. The song was made a hit by Frank
Sinatra in 1945. Sinatra also starred in an Oscar-winning movie
short--written by Albert Maltz, later one of the Hollywood Ten--in which
he sang "The House I Live In" to challenge bigotry, represented in the
movie by a gang of kids who rough up a Jewish boy.

"The House I Live In," like "Ballad for Americans," was exceedingly
popular for several years but became controversial during the McCarthy
period and has largely disappeared from public consciousness. Its
co-author, Lewis Allen, was actually Abel Meeropol, a high school
teacher who also penned "Strange Fruit," the anti-lynching song made
famous by Billie Holiday. In the 1950s Meeropol and his wife adopted the
sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their parents were executed as
atom spies. Despite this, Sinatra kept the song in his repertoire.
Perhaps the most astonishing performance of "The House I Live In" was at
the nationally televised commemoration of the centenary of the Statue of
Liberty in 1986, when Sinatra sang it as the finale to the program, with
President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy Reagan, sitting directly in
front of him.

Only a handful of Americans could have grasped the political irony of
that moment: Sinatra performing a patriotic anthem written by
blacklisted writers to a President who, as head of the Screen Actors
Guild in the 1950s, helped create Hollywood's purge of radicals.
Sinatra's own left-wing (and nearly blacklisted) past, and the history
of the song itself, have been obliterated from public memory.

Even during the 1960s, American progressives continued to seek ways to
fuse their love of country with their opposition to the national
government's policies. The March on Washington in 1963 gathered at the
Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. famously quoted the words
to "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Phil Ochs, then part of a new generation
of politically conscious singer-songwriters who emerged during the
1960s, wrote an anthem in the Guthrie vein, "Power and Glory," which
coupled love of country with a strong plea for justice and equality.
Interestingly, this song later became part of the repertoire of the US
Army band. And in 1968, in a famous antiwar speech on the steps of the
Capitol, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the Socialist Party,
proclaimed, "I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it."

In recent decades, Bruce Springsteen has most closely followed in the
Guthrie tradition. From "Born in the USA," to his songs about Tom Joad
(the militant protagonist in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath),
to his recent anthem for the victims of the September 11 tragedy ("My
City of Ruins"), whom he urges to "come on rise up!" Springsteen has
championed the downtrodden while challenging America to live up to its
ideals. Indeed, by performing both "Born in the USA" and "Land of Hope
and Dreams" at benefits for the families of World Trade Center
casualties, Springsteen has coupled his anger at injustice with his
belief in the nation's promise.

In each major period of twentieth-century history--the Progressive era,
the Depression, World War II and the postwar era--American radicals and
progressives expressed a patriotism rooted in democratic values and
consciously aimed at challenging jingoism and "my country, right or
wrong" thinking. Every day, millions of Americans pledge allegiance to
the flag, sing "America the Beautiful" and "This Land Is Your Land," and
memorize the words on the Statue of Liberty without knowing the names of
their authors, their political inspiration or the historical context in
which they were written.

The progressive authors of much of America's patriotic iconography
rejected blind nationalism, militaristic drumbeating and sheeplike
conformism. So it would be a dire mistake to allow, by default, jingoism
to become synonymous with patriotism and the American spirit. Throughout
our nation's history, radicals and reformers have viewed their movements
as profoundly patriotic. They have believed that America's core
claims--fairness, equality, freedom, justice--were their own. In the
midst of current patriotic exuberance both authentic and manipulated,
then, it is useful to recall the forgotten cultural legacy of the left.
We need to ask, once again, "What is America to us?"

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Replies:

Re: Patriotism -- sue da babe, 10:08:24 05/28/02 Tue
They are all flying the flag in England, -- PAUL., 18:17:08 05/29/02 Wed
- Brazil is looking for revenge against France -- Drummond, 23:50:46 05/29/02 Wed
  - Im not a royalist myself. -- PAUL., 05:25:24 05/30/02 Thu