The late, great biographer William Manchester wrote in “Goodbye, Darkness,” his memoir of World War II, that to fight in the Pacific “you needed nationalism, the absolute conviction that the United States was the envy of all other nations, a country which had never done anything infamous, in which nothing was insuperable, whose ingenuity could solve anything by inventing something.”
I doubt very much whether most soldiers viewed the world through so simple a prism. The 1930s were hardly devoid of political dissent and savage critiques of the American record. You don’t have to be a my-country-right-or-wrong jingoist to defend your nation. You don’t need to put on blinders to be patriotic, or to feel a surge of satisfaction upon hearing “Stars and Stripes Forever” on Independence Day.
All you need is the ability to hold two ideas in your head at the same time: to recognize that while the people who colonized and founded this nation by and large accepted brutal racial oppression and other practices we reject today, they also embraced a commitment to liberty and justice that would transform their society and, to an amazing extent, the world. “We hold these truths to be self-evident . . . .”
Granted, some patriotic Americans can keep only one of those ideas — the self-congratulatory one — in their heads. But then, some critics of flag-waving patriotism seem capable of acknowledging only one idea, too: the litany of oppression. The latter group emerged after 9/11 with special vehemence to warn us, for example, that “patriotism threatens free speech with death” (novelist Barbara Kingsolver) and “The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war” (writer Katha Pollitt), as well as to recommend such dour books as Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” with its goal of awakening “a greater consciousness of class conflict, racial injustice, sexual inequality and national arrogance.”
If that were the sum total of the American experiment, I’d object to flag waving, too.
Most people don’t read much history these days, as survey after survey shows, and may be especially susceptible to one-dimensional opinions of their country. It would help if they knew that “all nations are born in war, conquest and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past,” as British historian Paul Johnson writes in “A History of the American People” (1997). Because the United States was founded “in the full blaze of recorded history,” its stains “are there for all to see and censure: the dispossession of a indigenous people, and the securing of self-sufficiency through the sweat and pain of an enslaved race.”
Johnson wonders whether a nation can “rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them?” Readers of his quirky but riveting account must decide for themselves, although the author provides plenty of grist — both the good and bad — for answers.
Surely this nation’s role in the defeat of the 20th century’s two bloodiest tyrannies, first in World War II and then in the Cold War, should weigh heavily on the scales. As should America’s commitment to legal and political equality and religious freedom, its material abundance — available even to the common man — and the still unparalleled opportunity it offers to those prepared to seize it.
Johnson dedicates his book to “the people of America — strong, outspoken, intense in their convictions, sometimes wrong-headed but always generous and brave, with a passion for justice no nation has ever matched.”
OK, perhaps he overdoes it. But tomorrow is our nation’s birthday, so we’re entitled to bask in the compliments of an admiring friend.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
