GROUP TEN: PATRIOTISM

"OUR COUNTRY RIGHT OR WRONG"

That the uncritical loyalty and unreasoning allegiance which is expressed in the famous proclamation of Stephen Decatur is not completely the traditional attitude of America is indicated in the following excerpts.

The territorial extent of the United States is a geographical accident. Its institutions are devices designed to give actual being to great principles, aspirations and ideals.

It is to these principles, aspirations and ideals; rather than to the geographical area, the institutions, the symbols or even the formulas used to express the principles, aspirations and ideals; that many early Americans believed the continuing allegiance of free men to be due.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

To B. Vaughan, Passy, March 14, 1785.

Justice is as strictly due between neighbor nations as between neighbor citizens. A highwayman is as much a robber when he plunders in a gang as when single; and a nation that makes an unjust war is only a great gang.

Where liberty dwells there is my country.

REPRESENTATIVE E. B. HOLMES [1846] "My Country, Right or Wrong."

I hope the moral sense of gentlemen will stand the shock, when I tell them I am for my country, anyway and always, right or wrong. In all time, under all circumstances, in prosperity or in adversity, in peace or in war, in every aspect which

ingenuity can invent or imagination can conceive, I am for my country, right or wrong. Sir, I am for my children, right or wrong. My duty impels me to chide and rebuke them when wrong; but to be for them, and feel for them, and to act for their prosperity, happiness, and protection, whether right or wrong, is a feeling interwoven with the very ligaments of my nature. Sir, in this same sense I am for my country, right or wrong; freely reproving her public functionaries when wrong, and holding up their constitutional aggressions and their legislative oppressions to the just judgment of the people. . . .

Sir, the Constitution guarantees the liberty of speech and of the press. But on the 11th of May, where was the boasted prerogative of your Constitution in relation to the liberty of speech? Where this inestimable prerogative of freemen? Its death-knell was heard in this Hall. The lips of the 6,000 farmers, the 4,000 mechanics, and the hundred of manufacturers and professional men speaking through me upon this floor, were sealed in silence. The vivid and conscious convictions of an outraged people were stifled, and denied the right of speech. The grave and momentous question of peace or war, involving the life, the liberty, of our people, and the happiness of our common country, was pressed upon us without debate. The imprudent acts of the President, as well as the perilous condition of our army, their cries and their blood by reason of this imprudence, was made known to us, and not one word could be said upon the subject. The shield of secrecy was thrust between us and the country. The full and speedy relief which we were willing to grant to the army and the country was coupled with a shield for the President and his advisers, and a declaration of war. I ask whether such precipitancy in declaring a national war, in breaking the peace of the world, is becoming in the Representatives of this people? Is it wise, and does it become the dignity and forbearance which should characterize enlightened and benevolent freemen? Is it magnanimous or just thus to stifle debate. . . .

When and where this state of things is to end, God only knows. If our rulers are determined, as they now seem, upon annihilation and conquest, and the people shall sanction it, this is but the twilight of the political darkness that must succeed it. To my mind, the day when the people of this republic shall fully sanction the subjugation and conquest of a foreign nation, dissimilar from us in language, habits, and

laws, will be the darkest, by far the darkest day, ever witnessed by this republic.

CHARLES SUMNER [1848]

The pride, vanity, ambition, brutality even, which all rebuke in the individual, are accounted virtues, if displayed in the name of country. Among us the sentiment is active, while it derives new force from the point with which it has been expressed. An officer of our navy, one of the heroes nurtured by War, whose name has been praised in churches, going beyond all Greek, all Roman example, exclaimed, "Our country, right or wrong,"-a sentiment dethroning God and enthroning the Devil, whose flagitious character must be rebuked by every honest heart. How different was virtuous Andrew Fletcher, whose heroical uprightness, amidst the trials of his time, has become immortal in the saying, that he "would readily lose his life to serve his country, but would not do a base thing to save it." Better words, or more truly patriotic, were never uttered.

WILLIAM JAY [1849]

The sentiment, "our country right or wrong," is as profligate and impious as would be the sentiment, "our church, or our party, right or wrong." If it be rebellion against God to violate his laws for the benefit of one individual, however dear to us, not less sinful must it be to commit a similar act for the benefit of any number of individuals. If we may not, in kindness to the highwayman, assist him in robbing and murdering the traveller, what divine law permits us to aid any number of our own country men in robbing and murdering other people? He who engages in a defensive war, with a full conviction of its necessity and justice, may be impelled by patriotism, by a benevolent desire to save the lives, and property, and rights of his countrymen. But, if he believes the war to be one of invasion and conquest, and utterly unjust, by taking part in it, he assumes its guilt, and becomes responsible for its crimes.

"Our country right or wrong," is rebellion against the moral

Government of Jehovah, and treason to the cause of civil and religious liberty, of justice and humanity. . .

History and daily observation compel the conviction, that patriotism is more frequently professed than practised, and that much which assumes the name and passes current with the world, is utterly spurious.

EDWARD EVERETT [1794-1865]

And how is the spirit of a free people to be formed and animated and cheered, but out of the storehouse of its historic recollections? . . . I thank God . . . that strains of the noblest sentiment that ever swelled in the breast of man are breathing to us out of every page of our country's history, in the native eloquence of our native tongue; that the colonial and provincial councils of America exhibit to us models of the spirit and character which gave Greece and Rome their name and their praise among nations. Here we may go for our instruction, the lesson is plain. It is clear. It is applicable.

BENJAMIN HARRISON [1891]

Have you not learned that not stocks or bonds or stately houses, or products of mill or field are our country? It is a spiritual thought that is in our minds.

WOODROW WILSON

War Message, April 2, 1917.

Our object is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice as against selfish and autocratic power, and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.

We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one

of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.

We shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a say in their own government, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.

Detroit, July 10, 1916.

This is not the home of any particular race of men. It is not the home of any particular set of political traditions. This is a home the doors of which have been opened from the first to mankind, to everybody who loved liberty, to everybody whose ideal of equality was of opportunity, to everybody whose heart was moved by the fundamental instincts and aspirations of humanity. That is America.

D. A. R., Washington, October 11, 1915.

I believe that the glory of America is that she is a great spiritual conception.

Syracuse, September 12, 1912.

Let us see to it that America has the kind of government that matches her ancient ideals, that every time we look at the flag that symbolizes our history and our nationality we shall have a fresh thrill with the thought that we have not deceived mankind, that we have set up liberty and justice, that we have shown the way to the emancipation of mankind from that which is evil and wrong and of bad repute.