Grand Old Flag

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Take those inspiring lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” They were penned by poet Emma Lazarus, a supporter of Henry George’s “socialistic” single-tax program. Or check out the origins of “America the Beautiful.” The lyrics were written in 1893 by poet Katharine Lee Bates, an anti-imperialist university professor active in Boston progressive reform movements. Even that perennial political football the Pledge of Allegiance has progressive roots. It was authored in 1892 by Francis Bellamy, a prominent Christian socialist at the time who, according to Dreier and Flacks, hoped that the pledge would “promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age.” (Remember, “under God” was added by Congress in 1954 during the Red Scare.)

More recently, Aaron Copland created his symphonic classics Fanfare for the Common Man and Lincoln Portrait, two Independence Day favorites, in the 1930s, when he was part of a composers collective dedicated to writing music that honored the working class. And America’s unofficial national anthem, “This Land Is Your Land,” was written in 1940, when folk singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie was well connected with the Communist Party.

“The progressive authors of much of America’s patriotic iconography rejected blind nationalism, militaristic drumbeating, and sheeplike conformism,” write Dreier and Flacks. “So it would be a dire mistake to allow, by default, jingoism to become synonymous with patriotism and the American spirit.”

Twenty-first-century America, of course, is a different world from the country that spawned these progressives of the Gilded Age and the Great Depression. Theirs was largely an immigrant culture whose memory of injustices on foreign shores served as a daily reminder of America’s promise. And there was, I think, a sense of wonder that still surrounded the American experiment, a feeling perhaps that our democratic structures and civic commons were still capable of being shaped by regular people. It was, in other words, a flag worth waving.

Immigrants still stream to our borders with hopes of a better life, but today it’s hard to think of the USA as a work in progress. Its political culture is rigid and systemized. Its economy rules the world; its military might is virtually unchallenged. Its astounding affluence argues more eloquently against dissent than any patriotic rhetoric. It is, in many ways, the country many of our forebears dreamed it would be.

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