Patriotism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The word patriotism derives from the Latin patria, meaning “country.” Patriots are citizens joined by a love of country and a readiness to sacrifice, perhaps even die, for their country. Such patriotism was emphatically characteristic of the Spartans of classical antiquity. They were citizens in the strict sense of the term: They shared an identity with others to whom they were related by nationality, as well as by blood, and a sense of belonging to a community for which they bore responsibility. In a word, they were public-spirited.

The Spartans’ sense of public-spiritedness did not develop by accident. Spartan boys were trained, almost from birth, to be soldiers, and Spartan girls were required to exercise naked (in public), with a view to producing sons capable of being soldiers, as well as daughters capable of giving birth to them. Their readiness to fight (and perhaps give their lives) for their country is best exemplified by the legendary King Leonidas and the three hundred Spartan soldiers who fought the Persians and died at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. For good reason, then, the word Spartan has come to be associated with patriot.

In one respect at least, it was easy for Spartans to be patriots, easier than it would prove to be for later generations of Greeks, or Europeans generally. Spartans could be for their city without reservation or equivocation, because there was nothing else in Sparta to be for: no gods other than the city’s gods, and no life other than the life in and provided by the city. As George Grote suggests, the subordination of the individual to the state has had no parallel in the history of the world.

The likes of Sparta were surely not to be found anywhere in the West after the advent of Christianity. By effecting a separation of the “things that are Caesar’s” and the “things that are God’s,” Christianity made it more likely that a person’s loyalties would be divided, and sometimes come into conflict.

Such conflict became even more likely after Martin Luther (1483–1546) launched the Reformation. Before Luther, there had been one church, but now there were several: Lutherans and Calvinist, as well as Roman Catholic. This development had political consequences. Could a devout Roman Catholic such as Thomas More (1478–1535) obey his sovereign, Henry VIII (1491–1547), after the sovereign broke with the papacy in Rome? Could the Calvinist (or Presbyterian) Scots obey their king, Charles I (1600–1649), who commanded them to worship according to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer? Not likely and, in the event, impossible; the pious More preferred the scaffold and the stubborn Scots a civil war.

The seventeenth century was not a propitious time for the making of patriots. Almost everywhere in Europe, the rulers were princes and the people subjects, not citizens. This may explain why the first recorded use in English of the word patriotism did not occur until 1726, when it was defined as “public-spiritedness.” Generally speaking, only citizens (not subjects) could be expected to be public-spirited.

Thus, patriotism became linked with the rise of popular sovereignty. This development, in turn, depended on the discovery or pronouncement of new universal and revolutionary principles respecting the rights of man—see, for example, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (c. 1690). From these new principles came new governments—first in America, then in France—and with them a new understanding of patriotism, or an understanding other than the sort of filial piety associated with Sparta.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) was the first to recognize this new form of patriotism, or at least to speak of it. In his Democracy in America (1835–1840), Tocqueville argued that this patriotism was more rational than the simple love of one’s native land; this patriotism, he said, was “born of enlightenment” and grows with “the exercise of rights.” Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), in his 1852 eulogy on the American statesman Henry Clay (1777–1852), declared that Clay “loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country; and he [worked zealously] for its advancement, prosperity and glory, because he saw in such the advancement, prosperity and glory of human liberty, human rights, and human nature” (Lincoln [1852] 1989, p. 264). There is nothing parochial about this patriotism; Lincoln made that very plain. Clay is praised not so much for loving his country, but rather for loving the idea of his country, or its principles. Those principles are scientific and, therefore, universal principles. Any country might adopt them.

This was of particular concern to Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the Anglo-Irish statesman and political theorist. He understood that the French Revolution (1789–1799) was something new and (to him) something alarming, especially because its principles appeared to be readily exportable; those abstract, scientific, and universal principles, if exported—and unleavened by the unique experiences or traditions of a country—would reduce not only the French but the people of all Europe to “one homogenous mass.”

Something like this did in fact begin to happen, but the French Revolution, and what Pierre Manent has called the enormous Napoleonic enterprise, “unleashed a contrary movement of particularization and national separation” (Manent 1998, p. 187). In a word, the attempt to export these universal principles gave rise to the glorification of the nation, which is to say, nationalism and a politics of ethnicity, where what matters is blood, not the political principles associated with patriotism. “I speak for Germans simply, of Germans simply,” said the philosopher Johann Fichte (1762–1814) in 1807, a sentiment repeated by many another Europeans (Fichte 1807, p. 3).

Since then, in intellectual circles, the very idea of the nation—as well as that of patriotism—has been discredited. This process began in 1848 when Karl Marx (1818–1883) declared in The Communist Manifesto that “working men have no country” (Marx and Engels [1848] 1932), and they would refuse to fight for country. This proved not to be true when World War I broke out in 1914. Then, after World War II (1939–1945), Europeans set about the task of divesting themselves of their sovereignty in favor of the European Union. It remains to be seen if the citizens of the European Union will love it, let alone fight for it.

It seems that patriotism has become unfashionable among some intellectuals. One prominent American university professor, Martha Nussbaum, suggests that the times require that people get rid of patriotism and, to that end, become citizens of the world and lovers of humanity. But humanity does not have a government, and there is no reason to believe that, if it had a government, it would be lovable.

SEE ALSO Citizenship; Nationalism and Nationality

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Berns, Walter. 2001. Making Patriots. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. [1807] 1922. Address to the German Nation. Trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull. London: Open Court.

Grote, George. 1851–1867. History of Greece. Vol. 2. New York: The Bradley Company, Publishers.

Lincoln, Abraham. 1989. Eulogy on Henry Clay, July 6th, 1852. In Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1832–1858, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. New York, NY: The Library of America.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. [1848] 1932. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Modern Library.

Manent, Pierre. 1998. Modern Liberty and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Nussbaum, Martha Craven. 1996. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Boston: Beacon.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. [1835–1840] 2000. Democracy in America. Vol. 1 (Pt. 2, chap. 6). Trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Walter Berns

Patriotism, in the most elementary sense of the term (the word derives from the Latin patria or “fatherland”), suggests the loyalty that all citizens owe to their country or nation. With varying degrees of intensity, nearly all Americans claim to be patriotic citizens of the republic. But the term also has a narrower, more specific history, with sharper political implications. In the two centuries since the Revolutionary War, patriotism has tended to shift from a left‐wing to a right‐wing cause.

The term first achieved prominence in Anglo‐American politics during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. The British ministry of Sir Robert Walpole, which admitted only Whigs to office and castigated all Tories as disloyal to the Hanoverian dynasty, alienated a number of prominent Whigs, who took the name “Patriots” to distinguish themselves from the Tory opposition. But some prominent Tories, such as Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, saw an opportunity to create a combined Tory and Whig opposition strong enough to topple Walpole, and also appropriated the label “Patriot” for that goal. By 1750, even Frederick, Prince of Wales, claimed to be a patriot prince, an ambition he bequeathed to his son, who inherited the throne as George III in 1760. To everyone invoking a patriot identity, the label implied placing loyalty to one's country ahead of personal interest or factional causes.

North American spokesmen jubilantly hailed the accession of George III as a “Patriot King,” only to find that his ministers threatened their liberties through direct parliamentary taxation of the colonies. As the resistance movement gained coherence and grew more militant, its members called themselves “Sons of Liberty,” “Whigs,” and “Patriots.” Their enemies were “Tories,” who preferred the softer name of “Loyalists.” The launching of American independence identified American patriots as republicans and enemies of monarchy, a radical position in the eighteenth century that would become associated with “left” politics during the French Revolution a few years later. That association persisted into the early national period. Democratic‐Republicans called their opponents “Tories” and “monocrats” (champions of monarchy), not “Federalists.” By 1800, the Federalists seemed to oblige them by increasingly refusing to celebrate the Fourth of July (they preferred Washington's Birthday as their national festival) and above all by refusing to read the Declaration of Independence in public lest it offend Great Britain. Well into the nineteenth century, the term patriot retained these radical associations.

The veterans' movements that followed the Civil War probably marked a shift toward a more conservative definition of patriot. In the former Confederate states, secret paramilitary societies such as the Ku Klux Klan drew heavily on Confederate veterans and their younger kin to undermine Radical Reconstruction through terrorist acts. They saw themselves as patriots committed to “redeeming” the South for white supremacy from “black Republican” rule. The Union counterpart was much less militant, but over time the veterans' group known as the Grand Army of the Republic grew less eager to celebrate emancipation and more inclined to glory in the triumph of the Union, while agitating for bonuses and other veterans' benefits.

That trend has continued in the twentieth century. Veterans' organizations, such as the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, have at times almost claimed a monopoly on American patriotism and have often questioned the loyalty of citizens who disagreed with their objectives. The word patriot was becoming strongly associated with the Right in politics, partly because the Left often advocated such internationalist causes as the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and decolonization movements after World War II, both of which also had strong Communist support.

The Vietnam War sealed these identities. The Left opposed the war and tried to end it; the Right denounced such efforts as disloyal and appropriated all the symbols of American patriotism. By the 1972 presidential election, President Richard M. Nixon, who had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, but without seeing combat, successfully invoked his own patriotism while overwhelming his Democrat opponent, George McGovern, who had survived twenty‐five missions as a bomber pilot in the European theater of World War II but never used his Army Air Force record to win votes in the campaign.

The label “Patriot,” at least in its partisan sense, is recently shifting even further to the right. It has been actively appropriated by paramilitary militia movements around the country, which now seem to equate “Patriot” with white supremacy and a fierce hatred for most actions of the federal government. The ability to capture the label remains an important touchstone in American public life.
[See also Commemoration and Public Ritual; Culture, War, and the Military; Militarism and Antimilitarism; Nationalism; Public Opinion, War, and the Military; Religion and War.]

Bibliography

Pauline Maier , From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776, 1972.
George C. Rable , But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction, 1984.
William Pencak , For God & Country: The American Legion, 1919–1941, 1989.
Christine Gerrard , The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742, 1994.
Richard Abanes , American Militias: Rebellion, Racism & Religion, 1996.
Simon P. Newman , Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic, 1997.

John M. Murrin

492. Patriotism (See also Chauvinism, Loyalty.)

1. America, Captain comic-strip character known as the “protector of the American way.” [Comics: Horn, 155–156]
2. American elm traditional symbol of American patriotism. [Tree Symbolism: Flora Symbolica, 182]
3. Cincinnatus farmer-hero who defeated Rome’s enemies, returned in triumph, went back to his farm. [Rom. Hist.: EB (1963) V, 712]
4. Fourth of July “Independence Day”; day celebrating adoption of the Declaration of Independence. [Am. Hist.: Misc.]
5. Hale, Nathan (1755–1776) hero of American revolution; famous for “I regret I have but one life to give for my country.” [Am. Hist.: Hart, 341]
6. Joan of Arc, St. (1412–1431) heroically followed call to save France. [Christian Hagiog.: Attwater, 187]
7. nasturtium symbolizes love of country. [Flower Symbolism: Flora Symbolica, 176]
8. Nolan, Philip long banished, he comes at last to passionately love the United States before his death. [Am. Lit.: Hale The Man Without a Country in Magill I, 553]
9. Uncle Sam personification of U.S. government. [Am. Folklore: Misc.]

Patriotism. See Nationalism.