What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song

Magnigicent… A civic edication in one volume. —George F. Will

What So Proudly We Hail

The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song

Amy A. Kass

Leon R. Kass

Diana Schaub

Editors

Contents

Introduction

1. NATIONAL IDENTITY: WHY SHOULD IT MATTER?

Edward Everett Hale, The Man without a Country

Mary Antin, from The Promised Land

Ralph Ellison, In a Strange Country

2. THE AMERICAN CREED

Declaration of Independence

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

Publius, Federalist No. 10

Mayflower Compact

George Washington, To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island

3. THE AMERICAN CHARACTER: INDIVIDUALS FREE AND EQUAL

Jack London, To Build a Fire

Saul Bellow, A Father-to-Be

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Harrison Bergeron

Bernard Malamud, Idiots First

Mark Twain, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The May-Pole of Merry Mount

Philip Roth, Defender of the Faith

4. TOWARD A MORE ROBUST CITIZENRY: THE VIRTUES OF CIVIC LIFE

Self-Command and Self-Respect

Benjamin Franklin, Project for Moral Perfection, from The Autobiography

Henry James, Pandora

Bayard Rustin, Twenty-Two Days on a Chain Gang

Frederick Douglass, The Last Flogging, from My Bondage and My Freedom

Law-Abidingness and Justice: Toward Public Order

Abraham Lincoln, The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions (Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois)

Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

Susan Glaspell, A Jury of Her Peers

Courage and Self-Sacrifice: Toward Country and Its Ideals

John McCain (with Mark Salter), On Roy Benavidez, from Why Courage Matters

Sullivan Ballou, Letter to Sarah

Michael Shaara, Chamberlain, from The Killer Angels

George S. Patton Jr., Speech to the Third Army

Stephen Crane, The Veteran

Stephen Vincent Benét, The Devil and Daniel Webster

Civility, Tolerance, Compassion: Toward Neighbors

Ring Lardner, Contract

Stephen Crane, The Blue Hotel

Wallace Stegner, The Traveler

Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street

Public-Spiritedness, Charity, Reverence: Toward the Public Goods

Stephen Crane, The Open Boat

John F. Kelly, Veterans Day Speech to the Semper Fi Society of St. Louis

Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address

John Updike, The Deacon

Flannery O’Connor, The Artificial Nigger

Homer Hickam, Dosie, of Killakeet Island

5. THE GOALS OF CIVIC LIFE

Lifting the Floor

Ursula Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

Thomas Jefferson, Writings on Education

Frederick Douglass, Why Should a Colored Man Enlist?

Booker T. Washington, Democracy and Education

W. E. B. DuBois, The Talented Tenth

Wallace Stegner, He Who Spits at the Sky

Willa Cather, The Best Years

Elevating the Ceiling

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Artist of the Beautiful

Ralph Ellison, The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience

John Updike, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

Herman Melville, Lee in the Capitol

Tom Wolfe, Yeager, from The Right Stuff

John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort

Preservation and Perpetuation

Ring Lardner, Old Folks’ Christmas

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

George Washington, Farewell Address

Theodore Roosevelt, Manhood and Statehood, from The Strenuous Life

Calvin Coolidge, Speech on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., In Our Youth Our Hearts Were Touched with Fire

George Washington, Thanksgiving Proclamation

O. Henry, Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen

6. MAKING ONE OUT OF MANY

Immigration and Assimilation

Theodore Roosevelt, True Americanism

Leonard Q. Ross, O K*A*P*L*A*N! My K*A*P*L*A*N! from The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N

Richard Rodriguez, Aria, from Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

Andrew Ferguson, from Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe’s America

Songs for Free Men and Women

Daniel Mark Epstein, The Star-Spangled Banner

The Star-Spangled Banner

My Country, ’Tis of Thee

America the Beautiful

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

God Bless America

This Land Is Your Land

Symbols

The Great Seal of the United States

The American Eagle: Two Poems

Song of the American Eagle

Herman Melville, The Eagle of the Blue

The Flag: Willa Cather, The Namesake

Acknowledgments

Sources and Credits

To Our Students

For additional materials and opportunities for comment, readers are invited to visit our website: www.whatsoproudlywehail.org

Introduction

This is a book about America for every American. More precisely, this is a book about American identity, American character, and American citizenship. Addressing hearts as well as minds, exploiting the soul-shaping powers of story, speech, and song, it is designed to make Americans more appreciatively aware of who they are as citizens of the United States. Its ultimate goal, stated without apology, is to produce better patriots and better citizens: men and women knowingly and thoughtfully attached to our country, devoted to its ideals, and eager to live an active civic life.

Although we are committed to the goal of producing thoughtful patriots and engaged citizens, the editors have no partisan political agenda or ideological intentions. The patriotism we seek to encourage is deep, not superficial; reflective, not reflexive; and, above all, thoughtful. This anthology addresses liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans and independents, employers and employees, rich and poor, young and old, and Americans of every race, religion, and ethnicity, for all Americans have a stake in the well-being of our nation.

Thoughtful Americans have a stake as well in the questions explored in this book: Who are we? How do we identify ourselves, as individuals and as a people? What do we look up to and revere? To what larger community and ideals are we attached and devoted? For what are we willing to fight and to sacrifice? How can America produce citizens who are knowledgeably attached to their country and their communities, and who possess the character—the attitudes, sensibilities, and virtues—necessary for robust civic engagement? How do we—parents, teachers, and community leaders—form good citizens?

Challenges for American Identity and Citizenship, New and Old

These enduring questions are again timely, indeed urgent, as current circumstances present new reasons to be concerned about America’s future. Numerous studies have documented the cultural and historical illiteracy of today’s youth, even among graduates of our best colleges. Knowledge of American history and government has declined, in part because these subjects are no longer centerpieces of public education. Very few colleges require students to take even a single course in matters American. Studies show that, despite volunteering more for community service, today’s young people, compared with those of generations past, are less interested in public affairs, less likely to vote regularly, and less likely to stay informed about politics and current events. The reigning ideology that welcomes immigrants to our shores no longer calls for their assimilation into our melting pot but instead celebrates their diversity, multiplicity, and cultural distinctiveness; the political "unum of America is lost amid the focus on the multicultural pluribus. Ironically, although recent immigrants (and their children) usually know from fresh experience how their lives have improved by coming to the United States, the well-off children of the native-born, knowing little of history or of current political alternatives around the globe, take for granted the privileges of American citizenship and prosperity. Increasingly, leading intellectuals, opinion leaders, and politicians talk of globalization and the need to regard ourselves as citizens of the world. Between such cosmopolitan universalism and ethnic and racial tribalism," national pride and attachment are often disparaged, and in some quarters regarded as obsolete.

But national identity and citizenship in America face deeper and more permanent challenges, some linked to the special character of our liberal democratic republic. Citizenship in the United States is legally defined, by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, in this minimalist way: A citizen is any person born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. The Constitution speaks of our rights as citizens; it never mentions any of our duties or what it takes to defend those rights. To be sure, becoming a citizen by naturalization requires passing certain tests, again rather minimal. For most Americans, however, citizenship is in no way earned; it is bestowed by the mere accident of birth within our borders.

Yet the American Republic was founded as—and remains—a nation not of birth, lineage, or inherited ways but of ideas. It was the first nation to define itself in terms of certain teachings and aspirations, what may be thought of as the American creed—the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; freedom of religion and religious toleration; majority rule; minority rights; and the rule of law. To exaggerate but slightly, anyone who embraces these universal ideas can become in spirit an American.

But for this reason, attachment to the United States cannot easily rely on patriotic emotions arising from familial, tribal, and religious ties or from traditional bonds to place, language, music, and inherited cultural norms. America, according to a patriotic song, may be the land where our fathers died, but we never refer to it as the fatherland (patria) or motherland, as do Germans or Russians regarding their native land. What takes the place of such deep sentimental attachments? Is acceptance of certain basic political or philosophical principles enough to make citizens willing to serve and sacrifice for their country in time of need?

Complicating the difficulty is the fact that America embraces people from all over the world, who come with different ways, speak different languages, and practice different religions. We have never had an established national church or even an articulated national morality. Our tolerance, and even encouragement, of ethnic and religious pluralism is a great national strength, but it also poses a challenge for creating a deep national bond and spirit. As a result, our emotional ties to our separate ways and beliefs often exceed ties to our common national whole. Our identification as Americans seems at best to be hyphenated, not unqualified.

National attachments may be harder to sustain also because America celebrates the individual, not the collective. The state, according to our creed, exists to protect the rights of individuals; the individual does not exist to promote the power or glory of the state. Our individual rights encourage our private pursuit of happiness and prosperity—within the limits set by law, but not necessarily with a view to what would promote the common or public good. We jealously guard our freedoms and our privacy; save in times of national emergency, we are deeply suspicious of encroachments upon them, especially by the state. Making public-spirited citizens out of a nation of individualists has long been a challenge.

America’s embrace of science, technology, and other forms of progress paradoxically poses another challenge. The United States Constitution, silent on the all-important matter of educating citizens, speaks up in favor of progress in science and the useful arts: the first and only right mentioned in the original Constitution of 1787 is the right of authors and inventors to their writings and discoveries. But a people that looks largely to the future and that loves and rewards novelty is less likely to have reverence for the past or to care about preserving our institutions and mores. Our spectacular energy and enterprise and our penchant for innovation and improvement—traits made possible by the freedoms guaranteed under our Constitution—render tenuous our sentimental attachments to the gifts and traditions that we have inherited. This long-standing difficulty becomes more severe in the age of cyberspace and instant communication.

America is, by design, a commercial republic; according to the Federalist Papers, the multiplication of competing interests and the encouragement of trade were indispensable to protecting against majority faction, previously the bane of democracies and a threat to liberty. Yet while commerce and prosperity contribute to our freedom, this freedom can be put solely in the service of the accumulation of wealth—the means becoming the end. The love of gain, encouraged by our polity, can produce a materialism that deadens the souls of its citizens and keeps them from thinking about life in other than economic and self-interested terms. Further, our high geographic mobility, created and demanded by the modern transnational economy, weakens ties to place and opportunities for long-term local civic engagement. What kind of continuing community life is possible where children leave home never to return, where the most successful people move off to greener pastures, and where municipal institutions and local concerns lack cosmopolitan glamour?

Our economic successes thus challenge our sense of national unity and civic devotion. Thanks to technological progress and democratic capitalism, the average American worker today enjoys a higher standard of living and a longer, healthier life than did dukes and duchesses but a century ago. Yet expectations have risen as well, meaning that gratitude to the Republic for these blessings has not increased proportionately. Indeed, as inequality between rich and poor has increased, we see greater resentment, alienation, and complaints of social injustice among the have-lesses and their advocates. Addressing these inequalities, governmental entitlement programs, first enacted by the welfare state to provide safety nets for the poor, have been expanded to benefit the middle class, encouraging many citizens to think more about what their country can do for them, less about what they can do for their country.

The Importance of Citizenship

Why, you might ask, does any of this matter? What difference does it make whether the next generations of Americans identify with their country, admire its institutions and ways, and devote themselves to robust civic participation? Can we not continue to enjoy our civil rights to life and liberty and our blessings of prosperity and private happiness, however great or small our civic attachments and involvements?

Up to a point, perhaps so. The genius of our liberal democratic form of government allows most of us happily to tend our own gardens and mind our own business, inattentive to the problems that our nation faces. We are spared the often turbulent and bloody consequences of living in countries where politics is all-important and omnipresent, especially those whose illiberal regimes compel service to the state and punish deviance from official orthodoxies.

But our freedom not to care comes at a price, precisely because we live in a polity in which the people are sovereign. It is we the people who must elect the representatives to govern on our behalf, defend our nation in times of crisis, and shoulder our responsibilities in times of peace—at the very least, by upholding the law, voting in elections, paying our taxes, and serving on juries. How well will we judge, how wisely will we choose, how firmly will we stand if we don’t know who we are as Americans and why the blessings we share are worth defending and perpetuating, or if we lack the affections for our country that can move us to act in public-spirited ways?

Citizenship in the United States is only partly a national matter, for we live in a federal republic, with various levels of government—national, state, county, and local—responsible for different aspects of our common life. We depend on local schools, hospitals, transportation, libraries, colleges, museums, parks, police and fire departments, and departments of sanitation and public health—many of which require civic support and citizens’ attention. Our life together comprises also the myriad voluntary, nongovernmental associations—from religious institutions to Little League, from soup kitchens to nature-preservation societies, from the Red Cross and the United Way to friends of the symphony and the PTA—where, through our own active participation, we give meaning to our lives and strengthen our communities, which in turn enrich our existence. How vibrant will our communal life be, how rich will our human associations be, if we think only of ourselves and our immediate families and our own pursuit of happiness? Can we have communities worth joining if we lack public spirit, civic attachment, and the character needed for active and effective civic participation?

The Importance of Character

What, then, is the character needed for American citizenship? Character, it should be stressed, goes deeper than temperament or personality, deeper also than one’s moral beliefs and principles. It is a disposition of soul, not merely a state of mind. It is more than the sum of the rules and commandments—the thou shalts and the thou shalt nots—to which we give assent or the moral maxims to which we intellectually subscribe. People may hold decent opinions or support right values without incorporating them into the grain of their being: Thought alone cannot guide action. The source of our conduct is always a matter of the heart as well, embodied in the state of our desires, the shape of our wishes, and the direction of our intentions. Character, then, is the established disposition of our power of choosing, a most peculiar fusion of heart and mind that reveals itself in the choices we make and the deeds we do.

The excellences of character we call virtues—their opposites, vices—and we name them according to the specific domains in which they show themselves: courage in relation to fearful things; generosity in relation to wealth; self-command in relation to temptations and passions; civility and justice in dealings with others; compassion and charity with regard to suffering; respect and reverence in relation to things deemed worthy and holy. In freeing a person from passions and desires that might otherwise enslave him, the virtues both perfect the individual and facilitate his pursuits and aspirations, also making him a responsible member of the community. In shaping a person’s attitudes and dispositions toward other people, the virtues elevate relations among fellow citizens and give rise to public-spirited acts and activities.

The virtues of character are largely the product of rearing and habituation, acquired through practice and training, and reinforced by praise and blame, reward and punishment, from parents, teachers, clergy, and other members of the community. Even if human nature is everywhere more or less the same, different ways of life will encourage different virtues—and contribute to different vices. A polity like ours, which celebrates individual liberty, commerce, and progress, is likely to produce a character different from that produced by a polity that celebrates service to the state, piety, and strict adherence to tradition. And the character and virtue (or vice) a polity tends to produce may not be the same as the character it needs in order to flourish.

What, in the American Republic, will keep liberty from producing scoff-laws and libertines? What will keep the pursuit of gain from destroying generosity and charity? What will keep free speech civil, religious freedom tolerant, and the love of progress grateful for blessings received? What will enable a rights-loving nation to produce citizens who will choose gladly to do their duty—to their offspring, their neighbor, their community, their nation?

The Importance of Identity

Citizenship is a legal and political status, relating each citizen to the body politic, conferring privileges and immunities, and assigning or implying responsibilities and duties. Character is an ethical condition, shaped partly by the polity, but with virtues and vices that are not finally regime-specific (self-command, generosity, and courage in battle are universally available, and we recognize them even among our enemies). But deeper than citizenship, and separable from character, is our national identity: that which makes us Americans, both in fact and in our self-understanding. Our character helps to distinguish us—as human being, rather than animal; as civilized, rather than barbarian; as virtuous or decent, rather than vicious or indecent. But our national identity helps to unite us. Only through identifying with our nation—its ideals, its ways, its story, its aspirations, its institutions—will we care enough to take an active role in promoting its well-being.

National identity names both an objective fact and a subjective state of soul. The objective aspect of national identity is familiar to anyone who has traveled abroad: even those fellow countrymen who feel little affection for the United States are immediately recognized as Americans, not only from the distinctive way we speak but also from myriad subtle manifestations of having been reared in our midst. But for present purposes, it is each person’s internal sense of belonging to the nation that matters most. For how will anyone be willing to pull his civic oar if he cares little for city or country? What kind of robust civic life is possible for a citizen who lacks patriotic attachment?

As it happens, American identity is important not only for civic life. Paradoxically, it is also important for personal self-fulfillment. In this age of global economics and the World Wide Web, it is tempting to dismiss as outdated or dangerous the significance of national identification for personal identity and personal happiness. One can choose to identify oneself as belonging to the party of humanity or even imagine oneself as a citizen of the world. But that is a dream contrary to fact, because citizenship is a political category, tied to membership in a specific political and legal system. National identity is unavoidable; it is also desirable. For the plain truth of the matter is that, for the vast majority of human beings, human life as actually lived is lived parochially and locally, embedded in a web of human relations, institutions, culture, and mores that define us and give shape and meaning to our lives. One’s feeling for global humanity, however sincere, is based on an abstraction, hard to translate into the concrete and meaningful expressions of interest and concern that lead neighbor to care for neighbor, Chicagoan for Chicagoan, Texan for Texan, and American for American. We are not talking about shallow jingoism or the psychic boost we give ourselves by yelling USA, USA at the Olympics. We are talking, rather, about the genuine elevation of our lives made possible by belonging freely and feelingly to something larger and more worthy than our individual selves.

Other nations, of course, can and do lay claim to similar attachments and loyalties—appropriately so. But for us Americans, there are special reasons to promote and celebrate our national identity. For we are the heirs of a way of life that has offered the blessings of freedom and dignity to millions of people of all races and religions, and that extols the possibility of individual achievement as far as individual talent and effort can take it. The universal ideas set forth at the founding of the American Republic were embodied not in some universal nation of humankind united, like the biblical city of Babel, but in a particular nation—well-founded, stable, orderly, decent, and given always to self-critical efforts to bring its reality ever more closely in line with its ideals. To belong to such a nation is not only a special blessing but also a special calling: to ensure that, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal will long endure, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Making Citizens: Educating Hearts and Minds

Recognizing the importance of American citizenship, character, and identity is relatively easy. Knowing how to produce them is difficult, especially given the obstacles, old and new, that we face today. Active and attached citizens of good character are not born, they are made. Their making depends partly on explicit instruction, partly on habituation in character-shaping activities—in homes, schools, houses of worship, community organizations, youth groups, voluntary associations, branches of military service, and the like. How all these influences work and coalesce is, in truth, something of a mystery, especially if we remember that making citizens involves more than correcting people’s ignorance or refining their opinions. It requires, above all, the shaping of the central attitudes, sensibilities, and concerns of their being. It is precisely to address these deeper, and often neglected, aspects of making citizens that we have assembled this volume.

Many people in the United States, concerned about the state of civic literacy and national identity, have been developing new programs of instruction that emphasize American history, political thought, and civic institutions.

These worthy efforts are largely cognitive: they seek to correct our abysmal ignorance by providing knowledge. But such knowledge will not by itself produce love of country or desires to do something in its service. Knowing the good, while necessary, is not sufficient for doing the good.

Another recent approach to improving civic participation emphasizes learning by doing. Called service learning, this approach sends students out into the community to perform mandated services for others, in the hope that the students thereby develop the habit of serving. But these worthy humanitarian activities are usually framed in social services’ language of client and provider, or the cosmopolitan language of compassion and care, rather than in the political and polity-specific language of American citizenship. And they are rarely accompanied by the sorts of study and discussions that could inform the sentiments employed or make the students more thoughtful about the character and purposes of the polity in which they live and serve.

Developing robust and committed American citizens is a matter of both the heart and the head. Like all building of character, it requires educating our moral imaginations, sentiments, and habits of heart—matters displayed in but also nurtured by great works of imaginative literature. As has been known at least since Homer and Plato, it is the poets, not the philosophers and historians, who shape the loves and hates of souls and cities. Today as well, works of fiction speak most immediately, engagingly, and movingly to the hearts and minds of readers of all ages. For these reasons, we have adopted a literary approach to making citizens, an approach centering on stories.

The Power of Stories

By furnishing our imaginations with well-drawn characters confronting concrete difficulties in well-defined circumstances, a well-crafted story can shed light on our national character and civic practices. By enabling us to identify and sympathize with the characters and the situations in which they find themselves, the story invites us to reflect also on ourselves and our own personal and civic experiences. For a practically minded people like us, not generally given to deep philosophical inquiry or long epic sagas, the short story is a perfect vehicle for generating fruitful self-examination and self-knowledge. In fact, it may well be the supremely American literary form, whose nervous, formal, concentrated, brief, and penetrating literary character, as Wallace Stegner has said, best expresses us as a people. Many of us love to tell stories, and most of us love to hear them. But to hear—or read—and discuss the best stories told by the best storytellers is more than a way of passing time. It is a way of deepening time, by taking us to the profoundly humanizing truths contained in the ordinary surfaces of our experience. With the help of a great storyteller, we can see in the commonplace the things that really matter. Yes, stories are entertaining, but at their best they inform and reform us by dramatizing belief and rendering feeling thoughtful.

Short stories—most of them fictional, some autobiographical, and all written by American authors, living and dead—form the majority of the selections in this anthology. Supplementing the stories are important public speeches, by noted American statesmen and civic leaders, that shed light on our commitment to freedom and equality or give voice to our enduring aspirations for national and civic improvement. The speeches not only illuminate some past circumstance; thanks to their rhetorical power, they enable us today to feel more fully our lives as American citizens and to recognize which dispositions and practices enhance (and which undermine) republican self-government and ordered liberty. Carefully considered, the feelings and reactions aroused by both the speeches and the stories can be thoughtfully attached to principled opinions. And the cumulative experience of such reflective reading and discussion can foster a deeper sense of American identity and contribute to forming the character needed for robust American citizenship and public life.

The American Republic, despite its grandeur, is not simply a success story. And the American character is not simply a picture of unalloyed human excellence. The honest treatment of our subject, therefore, does not allow for chest-thumping, self-congratulatory tales. Thoughtful and engaged citizenship cannot be had by simple indoctrination into the American creed. But it can be fostered by looking into the multiangled mirrors our finest authors provide, and by discovering in our reflections the richness and worth of American identity, character, and citizenship.

The Structure of This Book

One of the virtues of an anthology is that readers are free to pick and choose what they wish to read, skipping around in no particular order. Yet there is method in our ordering, and we think there is additional advantage in following the text straight through. Chapter One, National Identity: Why Should It Matter? explores the nature and significance of national identity in general and of American identity in particular.

Chapter Two, The American Creed, lays out the major ideas and ideals of the American Republic: freedom, individual rights, and government by consent; equality; enterprise and commerce; freedom of and for religious worship; and religious toleration. Taken together, the five selections also invite reflection on how, as Tocqueville observed, America manages marvelously to combine the spirit of freedom and the spirit of religion, which elsewhere often war against each other. Mindful of our nation’s founding principles and ideals, readers will be ready next to reflect on the character of citizens likely produced under such a polity.

Chapter Three, The American Character: Individuals Free and Equal, comprises seven short stories, each of which examines different traits of the American character. The stories explore the strengths and weaknesses of American individualism and independence, the implications and limits of our love of equality, the condition of virtue in a democratic society devoted to gain and reputation, and the assets and liabilities of religious devotion and religious toleration. These portraits of the American character do more than celebrate life lived under our principles. They also point out the deficiencies and excesses to which we Americans may well be prone precisely because we are privileged to live our lives as free and equal individuals, pursuing happiness as each sees fit.

Alerted by seeing how our honored virtues are linked to our potential vices, the reader is ready to consider what is needed to protect us from vices, and which virtues are requisite for robust American citizenship. The selections of Chapter Four, Toward a More Robust Citizenry: The Virtues of Civic Life, are divided into five sections, each devoted to a different set of virtues, each targeting a different domain of civic attention and responsibility: the virtues of individual self-command and self-respect, without which neither personal flourishing nor fruitful civic engagement is possible; the elementary civic virtues of lawabidingness and justice; courage and self-sacrifice, virtues for critical times, not only in battle but in other difficult situations as well; civility, tolerance, and compassion, virtues required toward our neighbors; and, finally, public-spiritedness, charity, and reverence, virtues and responsibilities regarding larger public goods.

While Chapter Four deals with the virtues Americans need for an active and flourishing civic life, Chapter Five, The Goals of Civic Life, explores the basic question: What should civic life be for? What are the goals to which we as engaged and responsible citizens should devote ourselves? Beyond the fundamental goals of lawabidingness, public order, and national security—implicit in the virtues discussed in Chapter Four—is a wide array of possible purposes. Some civic activities are directed toward lifting the floor for those who suffer near the bottom of society, whether owing to poverty and injustice, racial discrimination, lack of education, or inadequate family life. Other civic activities are directed toward elevating the ceiling of human possibility and achievement, whether in the fine arts, athletics, statesmanship, or bold adventure, enterprise, and exploration. Still other civic activities are focused not on change but on perpetuating and preserving our traditions, institutions, and ways of life. About these differing goals there is often public contention, less about their goodness than about their relative importance and urgency. Rarely do we take the time to reflect carefully on any of them, seen in the company of the others. Accordingly, the three sections of Chapter Five are devoted to these three kinds of goals, seeking to give each its due.

After the explorations of civic virtues and civic goals, we are still left with the question of national identity with which we began: how to make one out of many? What can counter our centrifugal and privatizing tendencies, resulting from our devotion to (our own) life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? What can attach the hearts and minds of our citizens—each of us an individual and family member with his or her own interests and concerns, each of us a member of this or that ethnic, racial, or religious subgroup, each of us a citizen also of this or that neighborhood, town, or metropolis—to the American Republic as a whole? Chapter Six, Making One Out of Many, considers three aspects of national unity and identification: assimilation and integration of immigrants, especially in relation to a common public language; American patriotic songs for free men and women; and the great symbols of the American Republic—the Great Seal of the United States, the American eagle, and the American flag.

The centrality of the songs in the last chapter deserves a further word. In encouraging national identification, songs target not our character as much as our sentiments and attachments, our feelings of love, reverence, and devotion. Song—the singular combination of moving speech set to stirring music—is everywhere employed in shaping hearts and souls, and the capacity of song to inspire is part of its power. Yet if focusing only on principles and ideas risks a thin and heartless attachment of the intellect, focusing only on music risks a thoughtless surrender to roused emotion and jingoistic fervor. The approach to the songs in this anthology seeks to avoid both dangers, by inviting attention to the meanings of the words and self-conscious reflection on the feelings aroused by singing them.

The Spirit of Reading and Thinking

The three editors of this volume have been engaged in teaching high school and college students for a cumulative total of more than a century. In our teaching, we have relied mainly on the great writings by the best authors, whether living or dead, for we have found them to be the best companions for thought and the richest materials for enlarging the horizons, stimulating the imaginations, and challenging the intellectual complacencies of our students. Thus, we rely most heavily on stories by America’s finest writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Wallace Stegner, Saul Bellow, and John Updike, and on speeches by America’s great statesmen and civic leaders, including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, Theodore Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. Authors such as these help us not only to understand the phenomena about which they write but also to experience them. By giving powerful voice to profound experiences, their writings allow us access to those mysterious aspects of human affairs that are graspable not by outward description alone but by educated feeling.

We offer these works not because they are authoritative, and we chose these authors not because they are old or great or canonical. Rather, we offer them in the spirit of wisdom seeking rather than wisdom delivering—as writings that make us think, challenge our unexamined opinions, expand our sympathies, elevate our gaze, and introduce us to possibilities open to citizens in our everyday American life that may be undreamt of in our philosophizing.

On a subject this complicated and massive, there can be no pretense of representing all important points of view. There are other civic virtues and other national goals that we have not considered. There are important authors that we have overlooked; there are stories that might be better than those we have included—and in fact we welcome readers’ suggestions. In the end, we have gone with readings that we know and have taught or that were recommended to us, that we think valuable for addressing the questions about American identity and citizenship, and, of course, that we ourselves admire and enjoy.

As any teacher knows, most good books do not teach themselves. We are all frequently lazy readers, who skip over what is puzzling or unfamiliar, and, even worse, who fail to see the depth in what is familiar and congenial. Moreover, in delicate political subjects, our prejudices get in the way, and our inexperience blinds us to crucial subtleties and nuances. Accordingly, we have tried to introduce each reading with some observations and questions designed to make for more active and discerning reading.

The readings in this anthology impose no particular moral, political, or religious teaching. Indeed, they impose nothing; they only propose. They propose different ways of thinking about different aspects of our shared lives as American citizens. Some of these proposals will almost certainly impose themselves upon the reader’s mind and heart as being more worthy than others. But they will do so not because they offer simple abstractable principles or suggest procedures for solving this or that problem of public life. They will do so because they strike the thoughtful reader as wiser, deeper, and truer. We ourselves have had this experience with our readings, and we hope you will also. For the American life you examine in these pages is—or could become—your own.

1

National Identity: Why Should It Matter?

The Man without a Country

EDWARD EVERETT HALE

Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909), Unitarian minister, antislavery activist, and for a time chaplain in the United States Senate, was also a prolific author of essays and stories, of which this one—written in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation—is the best known. The plot of the story is straightforward: Seduced by Aaron Burr, young, ambitious Philip Nolan, an artillery officer in the Legion of the West, becomes a Burr accomplice and is later convicted of treason. Asked after his conviction whether he wishes to declare his loyalty to the United States, he cries out, Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again! His judges, half of them Revolutionary War veterans, give him precisely what he asks for. From that moment, September 23, 1807, until his dying day, May 11, 1863, Nolan never but once again hears the name of the United States, spending the rest of his life literally and figuratively at sea.I

Why is Philip Nolan so quickly seduced and enlisted, body and soul, into the service of Aaron Burr? What causes him to change his attitude and feelings toward his country? Is Nolan’s eventual appreciation of his country simply the love of his own—his family, his country, his flag, his mother—or is it tied instead to something peculiarly American, such as our principles of freedom and equality? What does Nolan—what do we—learn from the emancipated slaves’ desire to return to their native lands?

Hale hoped that his story would contribute towards the formation of a just and true national sentiment, or sentiment of love to the nation. Does it do so for you?

I suppose that very few casual readers of the New York Herald of August 13th, 1863, observed, in an obscure corner, among the Deaths, the announcement,

NOLAN. Died, on board U. S. Corvette Levant, Lat. 2° 11′′S., Long. 131° W., on the 11th of May, PHILIP NOLAN.

I happened to observe it, because I was stranded at the old Mission-House in Mackinac, waiting for a Lake-Superior steamer which did not choose to come, and I was devouring, to the very stubble, all the current literature I could get hold of, even down to the deaths and marriages in the Herald. My memory for names and people is good, and the reader will see, as he goes on, that I had reason enough to remember Philip Nolan. There are hundreds of readers who would have paused at that announcement, if the officer of the Levant who reported it had chosen to make it thus:—Died, May 11th, THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY. For it was as The Man without a Country that poor Philip Nolan had generally been known by the officers who had him in charge during some fifty years, as, indeed, by all the men who sailed under them. I dare say there is many a man who has taken wine with him once a fortnight, in a three years’ cruise, who never knew that his name was Nolan, or whether the poor wretch had any name at all.

There can now be no possible harm in telling this poor creature’s story. Reason enough there has been till now, ever since Madison’s Administration went out in 1817, for very strict secrecy, the secrecy of honor itself, among the gentlemen of the navy who have had Nolan in successive charge. And certainly it speaks well for the esprit de corps of the profession and the personal honor of its members, that to the press this man’s story has been wholly unknown,—and, I think, to the country at large also. I have reason to think, from some investigations I made in the Naval Archives when I was attached to the Bureau of Construction, that every official report relating to him was burned when Ross burned the public buildings at Washington. One of the Tuckers, or possibly one of the Watsons, had Nolan in charge at the end of the war; and when, on returning from his cruise, he reported at Washington to one of the Crowninshields,—who was in the Navy Department when he came home,—he found that the Department ignored the whole business. Whether they really knew nothing about it, or whether it was a Non mi ricordo, determined on as a piece of policy, I do not know. But this I do know, that since 1817, and possibly before, no naval officer has mentioned Nolan in his report of a cruise.

But, as I say, there is no need for secrecy any longer. And now the poor creature is dead, it seems to me worth while to tell a little of his story, by way of showing young Americans of to-day what it is to be A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

Philip Nolan was as fine a young officer as there was in the Legion of the West, as the Western division of our army was then called. When Aaron Burr made his first dashing expedition down to New Orleans in 1805, at Fort Massac, or somewhere above on the river, he met, as the Devil would have it, this gay, dashing, bright young fellow, at some dinner-party, I think. Burr marked him, talked to him, walked with him, took him a day or two’s voyage in his flat-boat, and, in short, fascinated him. For the next year, barrack-life was very tame to poor Nolan. He occasionally availed himself of the permission the great man had given him to write to him. Long, high-worded, stilted letters the poor boy wrote and rewrote and copied. But never a line did he have in reply from the gay deceiver. The other boys in the garrison sneered at him, because he sacrificed in this unrequited affection for a politician the time which they devoted to Monongahela, sledge, and high-low-jack. Bourbon, euchre, and poker were still unknown. But one day Nolan had his revenge. This time Burr came down the river, not as an attorney seeking a place for his office, but as a disguised conqueror. He had defeated I know not how many district-attorneys; he had dined at I know not how many public dinners; he had been heralded in I know not how many Weekly Arguses; and it was rumored that he had an army behind him and an empire before him. It was a great day—his arrival—to poor Nolan. Burr had not been at the fort an hour before he sent for him. That evening he asked Nolan to take him out in his skiff, to show him a canebrake or a cottonwood tree, as he said,—really to seduce him; and by the time the sail was over, Nolan was enlisted body and soul. From that time, though he did not yet know it, he lived as A MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

What Burr meant to do I know no more than you, dear reader. It is none of our business just now. Only, when the grand catastrophe came, and Jefferson and the House of Virginia of that day undertook to break on the wheel all the possible Clarences of the then House of York, by the great treason-trial at Richmond, some of the lesser fry in that distant Mississippi Valley, which was farther from us than Puget’s Sound is to-day, introduced the like novelty on their provincial stage, and, to while away the monotony of the summer at Fort Adams, got up, for spectacles, a string of court-martials on the officers there. One and another of the colonels and majors were tried, and, to fill out the list, little Nolan, against whom, Heaven knows, there was evidence enough,—that he was sick of the service, had been willing to be false to it, and would have obeyed any order to march any-whither with any one who would follow him, had the order been signed, By command of His Exc. A. Burr. The courts dragged on. The big flies escaped,—rightly for all I know. Nolan was proved guilty enough, as I say; yet you and I would never have heard of him, reader, but that, when the president of the court asked him at the close, whether he wished to say anything to show that he had always been faithful to the United States, he cried out, in a fit of frenzy,—

D—n the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!

I suppose he did not know how the words shocked old Colonel Morgan, who was holding the court. Half the officers who sat in it had served through the Revolution, and their lives, not to say their necks, had been risked for the very idea which he so cavalierly cursed in his madness. He, on his part, had grown up in the West of those days, in the midst of Spanish plot, Orleans plot, and all the rest. He had been educated on a plantation, where the finest company was a Spanish officer or a French merchant from Orleans. His education, such as it was, had been perfected in commercial expeditions to Vera Cruz, and I think he told me his father once hired an Englishman to be a private tutor for a winter on the plantation. He had spent half his youth with an older brother, hunting horses in Texas; and, in a word, to him United States was scarcely a reality. Yet he had been fed by United States for all the years since he had been in the army. He had sworn on his faith as a Christian to be true to United States. It was United States which gave him the uniform he wore, and the sword by his side. Nay, my poor Nolan, it was only because United States had picked you out first as one of her own confidential men of honor, that A. Burr cared for you a straw more than for the flat-boat men who sailed his ark for him. I do not excuse Nolan; I only explain to the reader why he damned his country, and wished he might never hear her name again.

He never did hear her name but once again. From that moment, September 23, 1807, till the day he died, May 11, 1863, he never heard her name again. For that half century and more he was a man without a country.

Old Morgan, as I said, was terribly shocked. If Nolan had compared George Washington to Benedict Arnold, or had cried, God save King George, Morgan would not have felt worse. He called the court into his private room, and returned in fifteen minutes, with a face like a sheet, to say,—

Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court. The Court decides, subject to the approval of the President, that you never hear the name of the United States again.

Nolan laughed. But nobody else laughed. Old Morgan was too solemn, and the whole room was hushed dead as night for a minute. Even Nolan lost his swagger in a moment. Then Morgan added,—

Mr. Marshal, take the prisoner to Orleans in an armed boat, and deliver him to the naval commander there.

The marshal gave his orders and the prisoner was taken out of court.

Mr. Marshal, continued old Morgan, see that no one mentions the United States to the prisoner. Mr. Marshal, make my respects to Lieutenant Mitchell at Orleans, and request him to order that no one shall mention the United States to the prisoner while he is on board ship. You will receive your written orders from the officer on duty here this evening. The court is adjourned without delay.

I have always supposed that Colonel Morgan himself took the proceedings of the court to Washington City, and explained them to Mr. Jefferson. Certain it is that the President approved them,—certain, that is, if I may believe the men who say they have seen his signature. Before the Nautilus got round from New Orleans to the Northern Atlantic coast with the prisoner on board, the sentence had been approved, and he was a man without a country.

The plan then adopted was substantially the same which was necessarily followed ever after. Perhaps it was suggested by the necessity of sending him by water from Fort Adams and Orleans. The Secretary of the Navy—it must have been the first Crowninshield, though he is a man I do not remember—was requested to put Nolan on board a Government vessel bound on a long cruise, and to direct that he should be only so far confined there as to make it certain that he never saw or heard of the country. We had few long cruises then, and the navy was very much out of favor; and as almost all of this story is traditional, as I have explained, I do not know certainly what his first cruise was.

But the commander to whom he was intrusted—perhaps it was Tingey or Shaw, though I think it was one of the younger men,—we are all old enough now—regulated the etiquette and the precautions of the affair, and according to his scheme they were carried out, I suppose, till Nolan died.

When I was second officer of the Intrepid, some thirty years after, I saw the original paper of instructions. I have been sorry ever since that I did not copy the whole of it. It ran, however, much in this way:—

Washington (with a date, which must have been late in 1807.)

"SIR,—You will receive from Lt. Neale the person of Philip Nolan, late a Lieutenant in the United States Army.

"This person on his trial by court-martial expressed with an oath the wish that he might ‘never hear of the United States again.’

The Court sentenced him to have his wish fulfilled. For the present, the execution of the order is intrusted by the President to this Department.

"You will take the prisoner on board your ship, and keep him there with such precautions as shall prevent his escape.

"You will provide him with such quarters, rations, and clothing as would be proper for an officer of his late rank, if he were a passenger on your vessel on the business of his Government.

"The gentlemen on board will make any arrangements agreeable to themselves regarding his society. He is to be exposed to no indignity of any kind, nor is he ever unnecessarily to be reminded that he is a prisoner.

"But under no circumstances is he ever to hear of his country or to see any information regarding it; and you will especially caution all the officers under your command to take care, that, in the various indulgences which may be granted, this rule, in which his punishment is involved, shall not be broken.

"It is the intention of the Government that he shall never again see the country which he has disowned. Before the end of your cruise you will receive orders which will give effect to this intention.

"Resp’y yours,

W. Southard, for the Sec’y of the Navy.

If I had only preserved the whole of this paper, there would be no break in the beginning of my sketch of this story. For Captain Shaw, if it was he, handed it to his successor in the charge, and he to his, and I suppose the commander of the Levant has it to-day as his authority for keeping this man in this mild custody.

The rule adopted on board the ships on which I have met the man without a country was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No mess liked to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all talk of home or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or of war,—cut off more than half the talk the men liked to have at sea. But it was always thought too hard that he should never meet the rest of us, except to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system. He was not permitted to talk with the men, unless an officer was by. With officers he had unrestrained intercourse, as far as they and he chose. But he grew shy, though he had favorites: I was one.

Then the captain always asked him to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession took up the invitation in its turn. According to the size of the ship, you had him at your mess more or less often at dinner. His breakfast he ate in his own state-room,—he always had a state-room,—which was where a sentinel, or somebody on the watch, could see the door. And whatever else he ate or drank he ate or drank alone. Sometimes, when the marines or sailors had any special jollification, they were permitted to invite Plain-Buttons, as they called him. Then Nolan was sent with some officer, and the men were forbidden to speak of home while he was there. I believe the theory was, that the sight of his punishment did them good. They called him Plain-Buttons, because, while he always chose to wear a regulation army-uniform, he was not permitted to wear the army-button, for the reason that it bore either the initials or the insignia of the country he had disowned.

I remember, soon after I joined the navy, I was on shore with some of the older officers from our ship and from the Brandywine, which we had met at Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to Cairo and the Pyramids. As we jogged along, (you went on donkeys then,) some of the gentlemen (we boys called them Dons, but the phrase was long since changed) fell to talking about Nolan, and some one told the system which was adopted from the first about his books and other reading. As he was almost never permitted to go on shore, even though the vessel lay in port for months, his time, at the best, hung heavy; and everybody was permitted to lend him books, if they were not published in America and made no allusion to it. These were common enough in the old days, when people in the other hemisphere talked of the United States as little as we do of Paraguay. He had almost all the foreign papers that came into the ship, sooner or later; only somebody must go over them first, and cut out any advertisement or stray paragraph that alluded to America. This was a little cruel sometimes, when the back of what was cut out might be as innocent as Hesiod. Right in the midst of one of Napoleon’s battles, or one of Canning’s speeches, poor Nolan would find a great hole, because on the back of the page of that paper there had been an advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap from the President’s message. I say this was the first time I ever heard of this plan, which afterwards I had enough, and more than enough, to do with. I remember it, because poor Phillips, who was of the party, as soon as the allusion to reading was made, told a story of something which happened at the Cape of Good Hope on Nolan’s first voyage; and it is the only thing I ever knew of that voyage. They had touched at the Cape, and had done the civil thing with the English Admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving for a long cruise up the Indian Ocean, Phillips had borrowed a lot of English books from an officer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was quite a windfall. Among them, as the Devil would order, was the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which they had all of them heard of, but which most of them had never seen. I think it could not have been published long. Well, nobody thought there could be any risk of anything national in that, though Phillips swore old Shaw had cut out the Tempest from Shakespeare before he let Nolan have it, because he said the Bermudas ought to be ours, and, by Jove, should be one day. So Nolan was permitted to join the circle one afternoon when a lot of them sat on deck smoking and reading aloud. People do not do such things so often now; but when I was young we got rid of a great deal of time so. Well, so it happened that in his turn Nolan took the book and read to the others; and he read very well, as I know. Nobody in the circle knew a line of the poem, only it was all magic and Border chivalry, and was ten thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily through the fifth canto, stopped a minute and drank something, and then began, without a thought of what was coming,—

"Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,"—

It seems impossible to us that anybody ever heard this for the first time; but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on, still unconsciously or mechanically,—

This is my own, my native land!

Then they all saw something was to pay; but he expected to get through, I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on,—

"Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,

As home his footsteps he hath turned

From wandering on a foreign strand?—

If such there breathe, go, mark him well."

By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any way to make him turn over two pages; but he had not quite presence of mind for that; he gagged a little, colored crimson, and staggered on,—

"For him no minstrel raptures swell;

High though his titles, proud his name,

Boundless his wealth as wish can claim,

Despite these titles, power, and pelf,

The wretch, concentred all in self,"—

and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung the book into the sea, vanished into his state-room, and by Jove, said Phillips, we did not see him for two months again. And I had to make up some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not return his Walter Scott to him.

That story shows about the time when Nolan’s braggadocio must have broken down. At first, they said, he took a very high tone, considered his imprisonment a mere farce, affected to enjoy the voyage, and all that; but Phillips said that