Warren Goldstein: Suddenly I'm feeling patriotic!
[Warren Goldstein is chairman of the history department at the University of Hartford and author of William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience (Yale University Press, 2004).]
It was Wednesday, the day after, and I wanted the election news, so absorbing for so long, now wondrous, to keep coming and coming. Trying to squeeze every drop of meaning from the morning paper, making my Web-site rounds, I was listening to my local NPR station when the host asked, "Is there a new progressive patriotism in America?" Calls flooded in proclaiming a resounding Yes, and I began figuring out how to put an American flag on my front door.
Saturday evening, my wife, Donna Schaper (a United Church of Christ minister who serves a storied activist church in Greenwich Village), and I were tuned into A Prairie Home Companion when Garrison Keillor launched into a patriotic medley. I turned to Donna and said, "You've got to do something patriotic in church tomorrow: 'America the Beautiful' or 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'" She proposed "God Bless America" — and I objected: "too over the top."
Let me back up. Born in 1951, pure midboomer, I grew up moving every year or two because my father was a career naval officer. I used to love his crisp white uniforms and dreamed, briefly, of becoming the first Jewish admiral — until I found out Uriah Phillips Levy had already claimed that honor. I learned to play "Stars and Stripes Forever" on my clarinet. And I supported the Vietnam War vigorously until the fall of my senior year in high school, when my friends and teachers began to convince me otherwise, and my father fought a losing battle against my "too liberal" environment.
The war took over everything. (Say "the war" to anyone in my generation, and the only one that registers is Vietnam.) Deeply influenced by the now-late William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), I became a historian mostly to understand how U.S. history had given rise to the Vietnam War. And I wanted nothing more to do with patriotism. I was ashamed of the pillage that followed the flag in Vietnam. I saw the emblem brandished at pro-war rallies, dividing our country into deep factions. It pained me to hope for an American defeat in Vietnam, but every alternative struck me as worse — for everyone.
For the next four decades, I felt profoundly marginalized by mainstream American political culture. Including the flag. I studied the "100 percent American Campaign" born in World War I-era domestic repression, and saw how the American Legion wrapped itself in the flag as its thugs beat up and killed labor radicals. Sure, civil-rights marchers had carried American flags, but by the time of the big Washington antiwar marches, those symbols had all but disappeared. Then we got Richard M. Nixon's partisan patriotism, with its flag lapel-pin totem....
So when Donna interrupted her own order of service last Sunday to ask her pianist to play "God Bless America," I said (to myself) "Oh, no!" — but began, haltingly, to sing. And as I sang, emotion that I didn't expect, and didn't even know might be there, welled up inside me, and the tears flowed; I'd forgotten a handkerchief and didn't care and just kept singing. And did I have company! I spoke to a dozen other people about my own age at coffee hour afterward, including several academics; all had resisted at first ("I've hated that song," one historian told me) and then given in, joyfully and tearfully. A longtime leader of the Village Independent Democrats had brought a batch of flag-lapel pins — I grabbed one, and the rest were gone by the end of coffee hour. What's going on here?...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Ed
It was Wednesday, the day after, and I wanted the election news, so absorbing for so long, now wondrous, to keep coming and coming. Trying to squeeze every drop of meaning from the morning paper, making my Web-site rounds, I was listening to my local NPR station when the host asked, "Is there a new progressive patriotism in America?" Calls flooded in proclaiming a resounding Yes, and I began figuring out how to put an American flag on my front door.
Saturday evening, my wife, Donna Schaper (a United Church of Christ minister who serves a storied activist church in Greenwich Village), and I were tuned into A Prairie Home Companion when Garrison Keillor launched into a patriotic medley. I turned to Donna and said, "You've got to do something patriotic in church tomorrow: 'America the Beautiful' or 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic.'" She proposed "God Bless America" — and I objected: "too over the top."
Let me back up. Born in 1951, pure midboomer, I grew up moving every year or two because my father was a career naval officer. I used to love his crisp white uniforms and dreamed, briefly, of becoming the first Jewish admiral — until I found out Uriah Phillips Levy had already claimed that honor. I learned to play "Stars and Stripes Forever" on my clarinet. And I supported the Vietnam War vigorously until the fall of my senior year in high school, when my friends and teachers began to convince me otherwise, and my father fought a losing battle against my "too liberal" environment.
The war took over everything. (Say "the war" to anyone in my generation, and the only one that registers is Vietnam.) Deeply influenced by the now-late William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), I became a historian mostly to understand how U.S. history had given rise to the Vietnam War. And I wanted nothing more to do with patriotism. I was ashamed of the pillage that followed the flag in Vietnam. I saw the emblem brandished at pro-war rallies, dividing our country into deep factions. It pained me to hope for an American defeat in Vietnam, but every alternative struck me as worse — for everyone.
For the next four decades, I felt profoundly marginalized by mainstream American political culture. Including the flag. I studied the "100 percent American Campaign" born in World War I-era domestic repression, and saw how the American Legion wrapped itself in the flag as its thugs beat up and killed labor radicals. Sure, civil-rights marchers had carried American flags, but by the time of the big Washington antiwar marches, those symbols had all but disappeared. Then we got Richard M. Nixon's partisan patriotism, with its flag lapel-pin totem....
So when Donna interrupted her own order of service last Sunday to ask her pianist to play "God Bless America," I said (to myself) "Oh, no!" — but began, haltingly, to sing. And as I sang, emotion that I didn't expect, and didn't even know might be there, welled up inside me, and the tears flowed; I'd forgotten a handkerchief and didn't care and just kept singing. And did I have company! I spoke to a dozen other people about my own age at coffee hour afterward, including several academics; all had resisted at first ("I've hated that song," one historian told me) and then given in, joyfully and tearfully. A longtime leader of the Village Independent Democrats had brought a batch of flag-lapel pins — I grabbed one, and the rest were gone by the end of coffee hour. What's going on here?...