The country is fractured. Can we really celebrate its birthday?
Ceremonies honoring next Fourth of July’s Semiquincentennial are already gearing up. Earlier this month, a traveling Stars and Stripes banner — the U.S. “Flag Sojourn 250” — was raised over Mississippi, having already covered 40,000 miles of its ongoing international tour of cemeteries, landmarks, governor’s mansions and courthouses. “For nearly 250 years,” Mississippi’s First Lady Elee Reeves announced, “the American flag has been a source of comfort in times of grief, unity in times of uncertainty, and pride during moments of great national joy.”
Wronger things have been uttered with less self-awareness. In fact, the American flag was not taken all that seriously as a national symbol until 1814. Congress didn’t even bother settling on its modern template until four years later. Until then, all kinds of designs were patched together from silk, linen, wool or “anything at hand.” During and after the Civil War, of course, the ensign was as much a symbol of tyranny to many Southerners as it was a source of unity. Sympathizers from Mississippi to Kentucky burned the flag, tore it down, ripped it and spit on it.
America’s national identity has always been filtered, negotiated, useful and relatively honest. What makes the upcoming pageantry and platitudes remarkable is the country’s mood.
Conceits aren’t facts: “Heritage is not history,” to borrow the scholar David Lowenthal’s distinction, but instead “what people make of their history to make themselves feel good.” America’s national identity has always been filtered, negotiated, useful and relatively honest. What makes the upcoming pageantry and platitudes remarkable is the country’s mood.
Republican and Democratic patriotism are worlds apart. The sense of pride that once bound the right and left is so threadbare that pundits have openly despaired of America’s “identity crisis” and called for a fresh national story to “rally people to a new trajectory.”
Jamie Holmes’ “The Free and the Dead: The Untold Story of the Black Seminole Chief, the Indigenous Rebel, and America’s Forgotten War” will be published on Feb.
