A Syllabus of Critical Patriotism

For most Americans, the term “patriotism” can be succinctly defined by the kinds of things that happen each 4^th of July (and will even more symbolically still this year, on the 250^th such occasion): the singing of the anthem with hand on heart; fireworks displays and red, white, and blue bunting; tributes to the nation’s founding, ideals, and military. In my book Of Thee I Sing: The Contested History of American Patriotism (2021), where I define and trace across American history four competing types of patriotism, I call this type “celebratory patriotism,” and I would agree that it is the default for many of our conversations and commemorations alike.

              I believe there can be definite benefits to such expressions of collective pride and love in a shared community. But even when such celebratory patriotism doesn’t blur into the more overtly exclusionary, chauvinistic, and frequently white supremacist form that I call “mythic patriotism”—as it often has throughout our history and does constantly in the Age of Trump—it generally requires from us passive participation in the rituals and traditions, and thus acceptance of the stories they tell. There’s not much room in that framing for the questioning of those stories, much less criticisms of what they get wrong, leave out, or fail to live up to.

              Fortunately, there’s another option: the type I call “critical patriotism.” This perspective highlights and critiques the moments and ways in which we’ve fallen short of our ideals, in an effort to make us better, to push the nation closer to a more perfect union. We can find inspiring examples of American critical patriotism throughout our two and a half centuries and indeed can create our own story of the United States through tracing and commemorating such histories. Here I’ll highlight six critical patriotic texts that should be prominently featured in that story.

A Revolutionary Petition in 1777: Most 21^st century Americans are aware of the irony that Thomas Jefferson who drafted the Declaration of Independence and its opening assertion that “all men are created equal” was, like so many of his peers, a slaveowner. But far fewer know that enslaved Americans themselves both highlighted that hypocrisy and used it to argue for their own freedom under these newly-declared ideals. In January 1777, just six months after the Declaration, a group of Massachusetts enslaved people and their abolitionist allies presented a petition for their freedom to the Massachusetts Legislature. The petitioners called themselves “a great number of Blacks detained in a state of slavery in the bowels of a free and Christian country.” And they noted that “your petitioners cannot but express their astonishment that it has never been considered that every principle from which America has acted in the course of their unhappy difficulties with Great Britain pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your petitioners.” In appealing directly to the identity and ideals of the new United States, these enslaved petitioners linked their own desire for freedom to that of the Revolutionary nation, and in so doing embodied—and indeed help inaugurate—a foundational American critical patriotism.

A Revisionist Speech in 1836: Boston in the 1830s was at the center of the Early Republic’s developing iconography of the “Founding Fathers” and overarching Revolutionary Memory—but it was also part of a nation that was actively betraying its ideals by “removing” countless indigenous Americans. In January 1836, at the Odeon Theatre in the heart of Boston, a Native American itinerant minister, author, and activist named William Apess rose to challenge those unfolding histories by appealing to shared patriotism. Apess grew up an indentured servant in Connecticut, ran away to join the militia during the War of 1812, and returned to become one of the era’s leading voices for change, whether in publications like his 1833 essay “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” or by leading efforts like the Mashpee Revolt of the same year. His 1836 speech “Eulogy on King Philip” would be his final public work of any kind, as he tragically passed away from a cerebral hemorrhage just three years later at the age of 41. But what a curtain call it was—Apess pays moving tribute to the 17^th century Wampanoag chief, offering a thoughtful exploration of his biography and historical context, and in so doing challenges both the historical narrative of Philip (Metacom) as an enemy of the emerging U.S. and the exclusionary logic of policies like Indian Removal that had resulted from such ideas. As Apess argues instead, “as the immortal Washington lives endeared and engraven on the hearts of every white in America, never to be forgotten in time—even such is the immortal Philip honored,” and “so will every patriot, especially in this enlightened age, respect the rude yet all accomplished son of the forest, that died a martyr to his cause, though unsuccessful, yet as glorious as the American Revolution.”

A Suffragist Declaration in 1876: The Centennial Exposition, a World’s Fair held in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park (constructed for the occasion) from May to November, 1876, was a glorious celebration of the Declaration’s 100^th birthday—but was particularly striking for its emphasis on triumphalist narratives of progress, and thus for how much of the nation’s past and present conflicts it elided. That duality was embodied by the Women’s Pavilion—the first such building at any World’s Fair, created by an all-female Women’s Centennial Executive Committee, and an impressive achievement to be sure; but one that made no reference to the most prominent issue of the day, the debate over Women’s Suffrage. And so on July 4^th, as the Centennial Exposition’s celebrations reached a fever pitch, a group of enterprising suffrage activists—Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Sara Andrews Spencer, Lillie Devereaux Blake, and Phoebe W. Couzins—took matters into their own hands. They first presented the ceremonial platform participants with a text written for the occasion, “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States,” and then occupied a nearby empty platform where Anthony read that Declaration aloud. She prefaced that reading by noting that:

“we do rejoice in the success, thus far, of our experiment of self-government. Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths but as the cornerstones of a republic. Yet we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that … all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement…We ask of our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality. We ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.”

A Symbolic Poem in 1936: Although such suffrage activists did eventually succeed in earning the right to vote for American women with the 1920 ratification of the 19^th Amendment, America in the early 20^th century was as far from its founding ideals of equality as it had ever been: racial segregation, discrimination, and violence practiced not just in the Jim Crow South but across the nation; federal immigration laws seeking to diminish the nation’s founding and enduring diversity; big corporations and the wealthiest Americans targeting the labor movement and Progressive reforms alike, leading to an ever-more stratified and inequal nation. From his first publications in the early 1920s through his death in 1967, the African American poet, author, and critic Langston Hughes was a leading voice in both chronicling and challenging such unjust and un-American trends. And he never did so more clearly and potently than in “Let America Be America Again,” a poem originally published in Esquire magazine’s July 1936 issue. The poem begins with a multi-stanza dialogue between idealized national imagery and grievous national realities, the latter expressed in parenthetical responses to the former: “O, let my land be a land where Liberty/Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,/But opportunity is real, and life is free,/Equality is in the air we breathe./(There’s never been equality for me,/Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’” And after a series of stanzas that examine in depth both the nation’s difficult history and its ongoing unfulfilled promises, Hughes returns to but revises this opening dialogue, in a pair of stanzas that expresses his full critical patriotic perspective:

“O, let America be America again—/The land that never has been yet—/And yet must be—the land where every man is free./The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—/Who made America,/Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,/Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,/Must bring back our mighty dream again.//O, yes,/I say it plain,/America never was America to me,/And yet I swear this oath—/America will be!”

Protest and Prayer in 1971: Just a few years after Hughes published that poem, the U.S. entered World War II, a conflict in which—despite all the inevitable horrors of war—America seemed clearly to be part of a global fight to uphold its ideals. Unfortunately, that was very much the exception to the rule, as across the 20^th century the U.S. consistently pursued military adventures—whether kept secret or made very public, whether at our back door in Cuba or as far away as Southeast Asia—that betrayed our ideals and oppressed peoples around the world. At the same time, any American criticism of those conflicts was deemed unpatriotic, attacked with mythic patriotic slogans like “Love it or leave it.” All of which made the brave resistance of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization founded after the “Spring Mobilization to End the War” in 1967 New York City, that much more inspiring and important . VVAW did consistent grassroots work on a number of fronts, and continues to be active to this day, but it’s most symbolic critical patriotic actions took place in 1971: the Operation POW Protest, a Memorial Day march from the Revolutionary historic site in Concord to a campout at Boston’s Bunker Hill Monument; and Operation Dewey Canyon III, an April march from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery. There the Reverend Jackson Day, an infantry veteran and chaplain, led a bracing and beautiful prayer for peace. Day noted:

“I believe there is something in all of us that would wave a flag for the dream of an America that brings medicine and candy, but we are gathered here today, waving no flags, in the ruins of that dream…We’d like to lay the burden on someone else… But it is the people who have power, we and all the other people, and the burden is laid on us. Give us the strength to carry it, we ask. Give us the strength which comes from hope, for only hope isn’t heavy.”

Courageous Testimony in 2019: Hope might not be heavy, but it can be very difficult to find and share—a problem that comes with the grappling with our hardest histories that critical patriotism requires; and a challenge that has been, let’s say, only amplified over the last decade. Yet in these hugely fraught times, I find hope in past expressions of critical patriotism, such as Teddy Roosevelt’s in 1918: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country…In either event it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth—whether about the President or anyone else.” And no contemporary American has lived up to that call more potently than Army Lt. Colonel and National Security Council (NSC) official Alexander Vindman, during his November 2019 Congressional testimony before the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry into President Trump. He opened his remarks, “I have dedicated my entire professional life to the United States of America. As a young man I decided that I wanted to spend my life serving the nation that gave my family refuge from authoritarian oppression… it has been an honor to represent and protect this great country.” And he concluded by directly addressing his father, whose “courageous decision” to leave the U.S.S.R. had begun that journey: “Dad, my sitting here today…is proof that you made the right decision forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry, I will be fine for telling the truth.”

I can’t say for certain if any of us will be fine—but I most definitely agree with Vindman, and all these critical patriots from across our history, that telling the truth about America is a crucial starting point. When we do, when we grapple with the worst of our history, we find as well inspiring examples of our best, models for the critical patriotism we will need if we are to move together toward a more perfect union. May that we find the courage to tell and share and live up to that story of America, here on our 250^th July 4^th and every day.