Editor’s note: This column by The Atlanta Constitution’s editor appeared July 4, 1967.
Abraham Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg of our forefathers who, a mere four score and seven years before, had brought forth upon the continent a new nation … conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. …
In a time when much of the world’s attention is painfully focused on “new” and developing nations; when the gulf between the have and have-not peoples widens inexorably and ominously, it is well, perhaps, to give over the Independence Day period to consideration of the deeper meaning and origins of what is called nationalism or patriotism.
It is true, as historians have reminded us, that American patriotism of necessity had to be, and was, more ostentatious, flowery and fervent than that of most of the peoples of the old world. Henry Steele Commager said of this patriotism that, after all, “the process of drawing the juices for a German boy newly arrived in America was very different from that for a French or an English lad at home, where everything could be taken for granted.
“Tradition in America,” Commager wrote, “had to be labored, for it was not born into the young; it did not fill the horizon as the glory of Joan of Arc or the fame of nelson filled the horizons of French and English boys and girls… .
There was no American past — there was only the present and it was critical. To be sure, the horizon had early begun to fill up. The affair at Concord and the Rude Bridge occurred in April, 1775.
The newcomers from many old lands took to patriotism. It was the cement that put a pluralistic nation together. Historians remind us that in America this loyalty derived from the image of the past was a product of the intellectuals — the writers and the poets. It was largely that of a New England-New York group. Their names are familiar to us: Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Whittier. Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the more famous architects. The Minuteman statue commemorates the centennial of that catalyst April 17, 1775.
The people who moved westward took the image of the past with them. Paul Revere rode with them. So did Lincoln’s sense of the union —- the mystical union of peoples from many lands and many “pasts” who believed in a flag and the new nation for which it stood.
Today’s American poets, writers and “intellectuals” are a badly divided, almost preposterously contradictory group. Whereas there are intellectuals who strongly support the nation’s policies, others engage in selective morality. They are for armed commitment and strong intervention almost anywhere in the world save in Vietnam. Irving Kristol, writing of them in the July 1967 “Foreign Affairs,” commented:
“… the (U.S.) intellectual community, en masse, disaffected from established power even as it tries to establish a power base of its own, feels no such sense of responsibility. It denounces, it mocks, it vilifies — and even if one were to conclude that its fierce indignation was justified … the fact remains that its activity is singularly unhelpful … . The Policy Maker in the United States today (and, no doubt, in other powers, too) feels this responsibility a terrible burden. The intellectuals, in contrast, are bemused by dreams of power without responsibility, even as they complain of moral responsibility without power. It is not a healthy situation … .”
It is not a healthy situation. It will create, almost certainly, a climate of anti-intellectualism until there is recognition that today’s world situation is a product of history and events. Intellectual mockery of the Johnson-(Soviet Premier Alexei) Kosygin talks, for example, may be the ideal cocktail party conversation, but it is neither intellectually honest nor in good taste.
At any rate, Independence Day week is one in which we may think on the new nation, its inescapable responsibilities of power, and the fundamentals historically found in the word patriotism.
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