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 Outdated?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.

Abraham Lincoln showed the humility of a genuine patriot when he did not claim that God was on his side but prayed that he might be on God's. Over the long run, the U.S. approach to its national interest has nearly always been suffused with a highly moral tone. At times, that tone has been debased, as it was by those who saw in the Spanish-American War a crusade to "Christianize" the heathen, provide God's chosen with more markets and advance their "resistless march toward the commercial supremacy of the world." This led Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, ex-President Cleveland and other dissenters to denounce what they called President McKinley's "effort to extinguish the spirit of 1776." They held with Lincoln, they said, that "no man is good enough to govern another man without that man's consent." To many Americans, that was the very essence of Americanism--and, ultimately, they carried the day. The U.S. gave Cuba and the Philippines back to the people.

Rise & Decline

"The office of America is to liberate," said Emerson, "to abolish kingcraft, priestcraft, caste, monopoly, to pull down the gallows, to burn up the bloody statute-book, to take in the immigrant, to open the doors of the sea and the fields of the earth." No nation has ever undertaken a similar task, and it is hardly surprising that the American path has often been strewn with monumental confusions as well as good intentions. Wilsonian idealism did not make the world safe for democracy in World War I; it wound up driving disillusioned Americans into an isolationism that probably helped pave the way for World War II.

That war brought, perhaps, the greatest wave of patriotism in U.S. history. Fix the hour at 6 p.m., Dec. 7, 1941. It was an hour of intense feeling for country, outrage at the shedding of American blood, a sense of common danger, resolve to defeat the enemy. A people that had been divided hours before was mobilized by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; millions shifted from self-interest to self-sacrifice. In the wake of World War II cams a subtle and complex act of patriotism, the Marshall Plan, embodying not only the best of American ideals but also the wisest of American self-interest. In its wake also came a minority phenomenon that has recurred in the U.S. and other nations throughout history: superpatriotism. The post-World War II variety, with its aspects of stupidity and neuroticism, was personified by Joe McCarthy.

The relatively few, noisy disciples of McCarthyism created a highly inaccurate picture of the place of patriotism in the U.S. and gave it a bad name. The truth is that most Americans are casual patriots most of the time. Whatever national loyalty a man feels is indirect, the product of satisfaction with his job, family, friends, union, church, country. If asked what other country he might prefer, he draws a blank. Rarely have Americans hated America enough to commit treason, renounce citizenship or denigrate their country while abroad. Saul Alinsky, the professional agitator, says with some surprised self-analysis: "Get me outside the country and suddenly I can't bring myself to say one nasty thing about the U.S." Such pride goes far beyond material advantages. In a 1963 survey, two U.S. political scientists asked 5,000 citizens of five countries what made them proudest. Of the Americans, 85% cited their country's political institutions, compared with 46% of Britons, 30% of Mexicans, 7% of Germans and 3% of Italians.

At a time when nationalism is growing in many parts of the world, the visible, audible evidence suggests that U.S. patriotism has taken a different turn and declined. One pointed comparison: in 1942, despite segregation, Joe Louis happily served because "what's wrong with my country ain't nothing Hitler can fix;" in 1967, despite great progress toward desegregation, Cassius Clay refuses to serve because "I don't have no quarrel with those Viet Congs."

Roman Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen sees patriotism as "essentially linked with love of parents, neighbor and of God." Since these relationships, he feels, have deteriorated, so has patriotism. Episcopal Bishop James Pike, who defines patriotism as "loyalty to law and order and support of the positive purposes of the Government that makes possible one's freedom," finds no evidence of decline. He sees only change, toward increased exercise of individual conscience and greater "moral sensitivity."

Others, in different terms and with their own degree of subjectivity, assay contemporary patriotism in even sharper contrast. Historian Henry Steele Commager thinks the dissenters of 1967 are the real patriots. "Those who have the most affection for the country," he says, "are those who are most alienated from its present policies. Those who are not affectionate are those who are selling out the cities and failing to educate the poor. I don't think it shows any love for country to be spending all our money on bombs and ignoring the rest of our problems." At the other pole is the view of Oren Lee Staley, of Corning, Iowa, a dissenter in his own right as head of the National Farmers Organization, which does not hesitate to protest U.S. farm policies. Speaking for country people, Staley says: "Although they do not understand all that is involved in Viet Nam, they do understand one thing. We as a nation have a commitment. They support the country because of their heritage. They want to see protected what they are part of and the heritage they are proud of."

In the Process of Change

These differences reflect a truism: patriotism has become more individualistic as U.S. society has grown more complex. The U.S. people, in their modern, more urban way of life, are better educated, more aware of the world and more sophisticated than their forebears. For the past decade, the young have grown up in an era of selfcriticism, and have learned to question American assumptions. They have also learned an idealism that often lacks realism--no tably an awareness that power and politics are inescapable facts of international life. Their definition of patriotism must be worked out in the context of a war that has none of the clear-cut aspects of Pearl Harbor, at a time when the country's internal problems are being examined with unprecedented intensity and emotion, and under a President who, despite all his efforts, has not been able to stir fervor in the hearts of his countrymen.

Out of all this comes the current pattern of dissent which disturbs _the President and many other Americans. For 185 years, perhaps no other country has given more legal protection to dissenters than the U.S. Every effort to repress dissent has, in the long run, brought an enlargement of the rights of free speech and press. Even in the most strained times, few intelligent Americans have attacked dissent as disloyalty. Given the U.S. proposition, no shade of opinion is unpatriotic--unless it advocates violence or overthrow of the Government. Unhappily, a few extreme dissenters tend toward that direction: that some assault the impregnable Pentagon is evidence of a sadly impotent search for meaning, of disbelief in the U.S. political process, of something gone wrong in the U.S. pursuit of happiness--or, perhaps, of the Administration's inability to give large segments of American youth a meaningful vision.

The hope is that there will be another change in feeling, that sterile extremism will go the way of McCarthyism, that Americans, young as well as old, will return to a Lincolnian patriotism that permits each man pride in his own country and strives for a world in which all men can pursue their own ideal of freedom.

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