A Star Spangled Quandary.

• Date: 22 March 2000
• Published date: 22 March 2000

Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism. Princeton University Press, 1999.

ART CRITIC PETER SCHJELDAHL RECENTLY REVIEWED THE WHITNEY MUSEUM'S new show described as "Make Some Sense of America." His essay began, 'What's American? I am. I've always been obsessed with my nationality -- not that I understand it. Americanness is the world's most abstract political and spiritual condition." He then added that Americans are "profoundly superficial" and "Americanness is nobodiness," a void he feels as "the earnest of my belonging" (Schjeldahl, 1999: 94-95).

Compared with the Whitney show, which attempts to give credence to Henry Luce's 1941 definition of "the American Century" as a triumphal march across the globe, Cecilia O'Leary delves deeply into the forgotten origins and earlier evolution of these mystical chords of union designed to describe what pledging allegiance is all about. Her title, To Die For, represents the ultimate patriotic sacrifice of civic commitment to the national purpose, producing a pantheon of heroes, even if unknown. "My country, right or wrong," "we're number one," and "love it or leave it" represent the well-worn clich[acute{e}]s of this popular hysteria. On the other hand, it is equally significant that Americans also view patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, for whom no one wants to die, a signifier that patriotism can even be empty of meaning.

That patriotism can be paradoxical might not have been well received during the Cold War. I can easily imagine J. Edgar Hoover opening an O'Leary file to isolate her views from respectable opinions. In those days, Americanism and allegiance were fixed verities beyond challenge or criticism, almost immune to the virus of dissent. To argue that patriotism had been historically constructed by organized elites to suit their own purposes, was by its very nature subject to manipulations for ulterior motives, was always both inclusive and exclusive, its definitions regularly contested, and its forms and rituals only established to verify circumstances of the past, would not have been a legacy the national consensus was interested in hearing. The mood was: "I belong, therefore I am." This ideology seemed so spontaneous and unconscious as to be beyond self-recognition. But it was not always so.

If acquiescence and passivity have come to characterize the good (or normal) American, O'Leary has recovered the history of former generations whose disagreements and conflicts reveal how a sense of national identity came to be created and which identities would dominate the future American "family." I am tempted to add at this point, the dysfunctional ones, as in most families.

O'Leary recognizes how open the future lay, how many definitions might have become dominant in the process of contesting legacies that could have been established out of such diversity. Yet her main focus is on two opposing traditions that evolved overtime, one of which became consolidated as supreme by the end of World War I. At that moment, "the racially exclusive, culturally conformist, militaristic patriotism triumphed over the more progressive, egalitarian visions of the nation" (p. 7).

It is now time to ask whether either of these traditions had roots in the founding fathers' initial declaration that formed the Constitution of the United States and which one best represented those priorities, a question O'Leary omits. That preamble does have relevance alongside the lived experience of the participants who later tried to define its meaning.

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish the constitution for the United States of America.

The new government, therefore, assembled a package of equal priorities in which the pursuit of any one of them was presumed to be consistent with the others. To insure the common defense, for example, was not to be accomplished by means that were unjust or denied the blessings of liberty. Americanism included all six of the preamble's agenda, and patriotism should have embraced this totality rather than selected items favored by various self-interested protagonists. As O'Leary so tellingly argues, much of the nation's history can only be understood in terms of the consistent tension among those ideals.

Nor should it be forgotten that the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address added considerable interpretive weight to liberty and equality as "the underpinnings of the Constitution, the essential ingredients of the philosophy of natural rights that the framers passed on to posterity...." And the preamble's "We, the people," as Leonard Levy...