October 1, 2001
Flag Fever: the Paradox of Patriotism
By BLAINE HARDEN
UNTIL it was uncorked by acts of war on Sept. 11, generations of Americans had never found a compelling reason to take a stiff drink of patriotism or take comfort in its unifying high.
With an ennobling wallop, patriotism has since inspired a deeply felt and classless sense of community. Charitable gifts have skyrocketed, as have sales of flags and stocks of donated blood. Firemen and police officers, who define themselves by sacrifice and service rather than by status and stock options, have become objects of mass adulation. According to some reports, irony has died.
New York City, the erstwhile epicenter of selfishness and sin, has been judged in its time of trial and found good by more than 8 out of 10 Americans. Perhaps boundaries were melting between the Red Zone, the conservative heartland that voted for the Republican president, and the Blue Zone, where coastal liberals had clung to doubts about President Bush's work ethic, his judgment and his intelligence.
Yet, from the moment suicide terrorists steered airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the invidious paradox of American patriotism came back into play. Constitutional rights, which supposedly form the core of patriotism's appeal, suddenly lost ground to fear. As it has during every major military conflict since World War I, a nationalist undertow that is culturally conformist, ethnically exclusive and belligerently militaristic began to silence dissent, spread fear among immigrants and lock up people without explanation.
The White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, warned reporters that in times like these "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do." In lock step with times like these, loose lips have been slapped shut. As an Oregon columnist, a University of New Mexico professor and a late-night talk show host all discovered last week, the country is suddenly thick with self-appointed censors. They are firing, disciplining and pulling advertising from those whose commentary or jokes sound insufficiently loyal.
Patriotism's extraordinary power to expand and constrain the American spirit is hardly new. But it seems novel now because so many people — including many among that huge bulge of the population that came of age during and after the Vietnam War — have never lived it themselves.
A heartfelt and reinvigorating love of country has not been universally experienced in the United States since the Kennedy assassination, said Gary Gerstle, a professor of history at the University of Maryland and author of "American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century" (Princeton University Press, 2001). "After the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, there was a sustained cultural crisis," he said. "Many Americans did not waver, but a lot did. They asked, `Who are we?' `Are we good?' What is emerging now is something completely different. It's a broadly based consensus on the value of America."
Patriotism seems particularly potent and purely felt among the tens of millions of Americans who came of age after the 1960's and early 70's. Unlike many of their parents, they can wave the flag without the mixed feelings of a generation that did its darndest to dodge military service in an unpopular war and, in more than a few cases, burned flags rather than waved them. Unburdened by such memories — the wars of the 90's were all too short and decisive to stir such passions — Americans under 40 suddenly have a chance to reimagine themselves, to participate selflessly in a world-rousing conflict that might define them as something other than Generation X, Y or Z.
For all its ennobling kick, historians agree that patriotism has almost always been at odds with itself. It reinforces a sense of community by erecting strong walls to comfort those on the inside. But outside those exclusive walls, it has a history of denying equal protection under the law and making life seem scary.
The flag, as much as any symbol, embodies the paradox. As surprisingly reassuring as it has been to many baby boomers who had never before viewed themselves as flag- wavers, it has been unnerving for Arab- Americans and other immigrant groups, like Sikhs. "I see flags everywhere, yet my first instinct is apprehension," said Nabeel Abraham, an American-born anthropologist of Palestinian descent who is a co-author of "Arab Detroit" (Wayne State University Press, 2000), an examination of the country's oldest and largest Arab-American community. He said most Arab-Americans and many Asians who could be mistaken for Arabs are staying home as much as possible and keeping quiet. "We don't know what to expect," he said. "We expect the worst."
For other Americans, not just those whose ethnicity make them feel coerced by patriotism, the proliferation of flags and "God Bless America" signage can seem a bit too simplistic, a feel-good distraction from trying to understand a monstrously precise act of simultaneous suicide.
A contentious and still unresolved struggle over what the flag should symbolize has been going on since at least 1863, when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Since then, according to Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, a history professor at California State University in Monterey Bay, there have been Americans who define the flag as primarily a symbol of equal rights and social justice under the law. It was not until World War I, she said, when federal and state governments joined forces with right-wing organizations and vigilantes, that the flag's egalitarian resonance was drowned out by jingoism.
In 1918, a Montana court sentenced E. V. Starr to 20 years in prison for refusing to kiss a flag. As Professor O'Leary noted in "To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism" (Princeton University Press, 1999), an appeals judge reluctantly decided he could not reverse the sentence. But he did condemn the way that patriotism, with the approval of government authorities, had devolved into a kind of "fanaticism."
Since then, the strength of exclusionary patriotism has waxed and waned, usually as a corollary of fear, with abuses most widespread when the federal government plays a supporting role. In the frenzy that followed World War I, the Palmer raids, led by an attorney general whose house had been bombed, included the detention, beatings and deportations of thousands of people, most of them immigrants. Each successive war featured its own shameful excess. World War II had the internment of 110,000 Japanese, the Korean War coincided with McCarthyism, and during the Vietnam conflict the F.B.I. infiltrated antiwar groups.
Less than three weeks into America's latest flush of flag-waving fervor, it's too early to know if patriotism's undertow will cause systemic abuses of civil liberties. The signals, so far, are mixed.
The Bush administration's request for authority to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely has run into opposition from senior Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Even harsh critics of the administration, like Michael Maggio, an immigration expert, say the White House seems to be able to sense when it has gone too far.
"I have been impressed by the administration's willingness to back away from some of its most outlandish proposals," he said, referring to an earlier plan, now discarded, to deport foreign-born legal residents suspected of terrorist involvement.
Perhaps most reassuring, for Americans who thirst for a brand of patriotism that elevates their spirits and protects minorities, are President Bush's repeated calls for ethnic and religious tolerance, along with his highly publicized meetings with Arab, Muslim and Sikh leaders.
"As long as this continues, it bodes well for inclusion and tolerance," said Professor Gerstle, at the University of Maryland. "But this is a very fluid moment. What happens if another airliner hits a building? Many people are going to be out for revenge if American boys get killed."
The worst abuses against immigrant Americans occurred not at the beginning of World War I, but at the end, when the federal government lost touch with Constitutional protections and briefly joined forces with the mob.
President Bush and his senior advisers have warned Americans to expect a war that is long, murky and unsatisfying. As months stretch into years, it is also likely to be a conflict that periodically screams for the clarifying blood of a scapegoat. If the president is going to continue to insist on an inclusive kind of patriotism, home-front defense of tolerance could prove as formidable as the war itself.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
