These are the days that challenge our patriotism. Our nation is overrun by insurrectionists, calling themselves patriots but not sharing the values we associate with America at its best. Friends talk about citizenship in Canada. And we wonder what will remain of our nation when the pandemic, political strife, and economic struggle have played themselves out. But I call myself a patriot, and I’d like to tell you why.
In 1943, a year after I was born, Abe Meeropol wrote The House I Live In, an anthem of sorts to the diversity of our society. It was first sung by Paul Robeson, my childhood hero, and later by Frank Sinatra, who made it much more popular. Take a look at the lyrics and you’ll understand why I have loved it all my life:
What is America to me? A name, a map, the flag I see?
a certain word “Democracy?” What is America to me?
The house I live in, the friends that I have found,
The folks beyond the railroad and the people all around,
The worker and the farmer, the sailor on the sea,
The men who built this country, that’s America to me.
The house I live in, my neighbors white and black,
The people who just came here, or from generations back,
The Town Hall and the soap box, the torch of Liberty,
A place to speak my mind out, that’s America to me.
The words of old Abe Lincoln, of Jefferson and Paine,
Of Washington and Douglas, and the task that still remains,
The little bridge at Concord, where Freedom’s fight began,
Our Gettysburg and Midway, and the story of Bataan.
The house I live in, the goodness everywhere,
A land of wealth and beauty with enough for all to share,
A house that we call Freedom, the home of Liberty,
and the promise for tomorrow, that’s America to me.
The town I live in, the street, the house, the room,
The pavement of the city, or a garden all in bloom,
The church, the school, the clubhouse, a million lights I see,
But especially the people, that’s America to me.
But especially the people, that’s the true America.
Meeropol was a Communist, as was Paul Robeson. Even Frank Sinatra, at the time he first sang it, was what today we’d call a Progressive. The song, which I grew up listening to on our Victrola and singing to myself, was broadly considered subversive, though if you just listen to the words, it’s hard to understand how that could be.
During the late 1930’s and into the 1940’s, my parents were also Communists and, like Meeropole and Robeson, they were great patriots. My mother helped to create a food co-op to better feed the people in our Bronx neighborhood during the War. My father was in the army during WW2. When he returned, he took to speaking on street corners about how special American might be if it better included the working class and the “Negroes.’ I remember him standing very tall in 1948, lauding the virtues of Henry Wallace, the third-party candidate who challenged the Democrat, Harry Truman, the Republican, Thomas Dewey, and the Dixiecrat, Strom Thurman. I also remember, when I was 6 years old, answering a knock on our door. It was the FBI, wanting to know where my father was.
When I was 14, I tried to organize a busload of kids to travel to Washington for a Civil Rights march aimed at broadening the American franchise. I was told by children and teachers that I was un-American, and no one signed on. We were living in the McCarthy-scarred era of the Red Scare. Twenty years later, when I joined others to protest the Vietnam War, which killed millions of innocents, I was told: “America, love it or leave it.” There are many Americans today who would agree.
My parents were passionate patriots, and they raised us as patriots. They believed in the promise of America, that all men and women are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, such as liberty and justice for all. They took this proclamation literally, not as some loose metaphor, and they worked throughout the years of my youth to make its promise come true. From a very early age, this became my creed.
My parents were both children of immigrants. And proud of it, because they believed that the striving and the mixing of immigrants were the secret sauce of America’s greatness. They had grown up in poverty, and in those early years in the Bronx when I was very young, they still struggled, especially during my father’s army service, when he sent back paltry sums to my mother. But they didn’t think of themselves as disadvantaged. Their struggle was mostly matter-of-fact — just how life was, a challenge, and the furthest thing from a matter of shame.
In fact, the struggle was what made us strong, what defined us, and fighting, arm-in-arm, with other races, ethnic and religious groups, is what built the communities that then defined the America they knew. I still tear up when I listen Paul Robeson’s Ballad for Americans. At one point in the song, he is asked by a congregation of working people: “Are you an American?” He responds:
“Am I an American?
I’m just an Irish, Jewish, Italian,
French and English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Polish,
Scotch, Hungarian, Swedish, Finnish, Greek and Turk and Czech
And that ain’t all.
I was baptized Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist, Lutheran,
Atheist, Roman Catholic, Jewish, Presbyterian, Seventh Day Adventist,
Mormon, Quaker, Christian Scientist and lots more.”
They answer: “You sure are something.”
Like my parents, I left Communism far behind, once I learned about the repressive quality of its regimes and the way they smothered individual initiative. But we retained the left-wing ideals that our family always associated with being an American. We understood that the ideals were aspirational and unlikely to be fully achieved, but we relished the battle, and, in large measure and in distinctive ways, the struggle to fulfill the patriotic promise defined each of our characters.
I have never let go of the striving that is at the core of patriotism to me — the need to protect it by keeping it vital, by continually updating and validating what it is. I weep when I see it standing off to the side – wooden and irrelevant — and exult when it is taken seriously enough to expect more of ourselves in its service. Think here of MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or Barak Obama’s Inaugural Address and most recently, Amanda Gorman’s vision of her American future.
There are many other Americans who also claim the mantle of patriotism. The flag-waving far Right insists that they are the true inheritors, as the direct descendants of the Founding Fathers: White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants..with maybe a few Catholics mixed in. But as with the Nazis’ version of patriotism, the idea of defining legitimate national membership by blood deeply offends me.
Then there are the centrists, who claim, often convincingly, that their position in the middle, earned through years and years of negotiations, represents the true democratic heritage. Throughout his career, Joe Biden has been a liberal who edged towards the center. The same might be said of John McCain. When I’m in my most realistic state of mind, I credit them for believing in and maintaining the integrity of democracy. But I also think that the timidity of centrism–in the name of realism–gives up too quickly and too completely on the ideals that are the backbone of our democracy.
All three groups – left, right, and center — are filled with a great yearning and nostalgia for the days when they imagined they were ascendant. But it seems to me that the most distinct periods in American history, the ones that have defined us, are characterized most by the ways that we met the challenges of our most perilous times.
We begin with the founding, which was a revolutionary time, a time when the Colonists were willing to risk their lives to overthrow a monarch and establish a democratic state. Nothing centrist there. Next came the Jacksonian era, a time we’ve learned to suspect because of its racist edge, but a time, as well, when the “common man” came storming to Washington, D.C., to displace the landed gentry who ruled during the revolutionary era. Next came the abolition movement and, very briefly, Reconstruction, which built on the founders and the Jacksonians efforts to expand the franchise. Then the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson (again, with more warts than I acknowledged when I was young), which broke up the monopolies and empowered the unions. Another time of tumult and progress.
The New Deal came next, with its Work Progress Administration, its Tennessee Valley Project, and introduction of Social Security—all responding to the Great Depression and to the vast disparities of power and wealth that had been exposed even to those who didn’t want to see. These disparities had derailed the Roaring Twenties, which were not so different from the affluence, excess, and concentration of wealth and increase in poverty that define our own age. Johnson’s Great Society, responding to the Civil Rights Movement and the need for jobs and health, may be seen as a continuation and expansion of the New Deal. There was strife and struggle and uncertainty at each of these periods, but we strove mightily to fulfill the aspiration towards a just society.
The radicalism of the Reagan Era appalled me in its slavish loyalty to free-market capitalism and its efforts to dismantle the social welfare state. Yet its promoters, who sought to undo much of the progress I heralded and were more successful than I imagined they could be, drew many ordinary Americans to their cause. They were energized by the struggle. They also saw themselves and their president as crusading patriots. They still do, as we see among the “never Trumpers” and Lincoln Project architects.
I needn’t say that we are again in the midst of a challenging time. Those who would turn the American clock backwards voted 70,000,000 strong for Donald Trump. They do not stand for America, as I understand it; and we must defeat their neo-fascist and falsely patriotic goals. But we must also lean forward, as the Founders, the Jacksonians, the Abolitionists, the New Dealers, and the Great Society did. This is not a time for centrist compromise. Today’s Republicans won’t compromise. The Democratic party has moved left. That is, it has moved yet again towards the realization of the American ideals, of liberty and justice for all. Once more, we must be brave and steadfast in this patriotic quest.
Barry Dym 