On National Holidays and Independence

I have a troubled relationship with the 4th of July.  Perhaps this is because I was born on  August 6, 1945, the day when my country used the first atomic bomb to annihilate the population of Hiroshima, to be followed only three days later by a similar slaughter of innocent civilians in Nagasaki. As the first-born of the Atomic Age “Bombs bursting in air” ever calls to mind that racist attack on Asians — not that the fire-bombing of Dresden was any more humane or less indelibly etched on the minds of the knowledgeable. 

 I remember with some embarrassment my first overseas stay as a college junior  in Marburg, Germany (1965-1966) when I tried to explain to German fellow students (in German, of course) that the holiday “4. Juli " (4th of July) was soon upon us. It had not occurred to me that non-US folk would not find the 4th of July more remarkable than the 3rd or the 5th — and perhaps less so than that 14th (“Bastille Day”). 

I had never before referred to the holiday as “Independence Day” and did not yet know the German word “Unabhängigkeitstag” for the fictive birthday of our nation-state. 

As a person of Irish, Scots-Irish  and German origins (among a larger mix)  I think the day had a different meaning to me than to the many “New” Englanders I have since met who identified with the English colonists in their war of separation and independence. 

(The Irish have still not totally shaken off the dominance of the English, despite significant steps toward Europe, and the Scots-Irish don’t necessarily want to do so. Scotland itself has considered the question. Germans, before forming their own unified nation-state in the mid-19th century, had resisted various forms of internal and external oppression —sometimes more, sometimes less tolerable — by Church, Holy Roman Empire, the French, other Germans, Danes and Prussians — whom I always describe as “Slavs who learned German” — Bavarians and Austrians and the various royal houses of medieval and modern Europe. They share this history with most Europeans.)

An “Independence Day” is hard to come by amid the various “National Holidays” marked to celebrate various turns of fate in various other countries, including Kings’ and Queens’ Birthdays and Coronations — despite the occasional  establishment of a new kingdom separate from a previous monarchy or the union of formerly separate states. 

The U.S. may be unique in celebrating a Declaration of Independence which has no force of law and which spoke at the time a largely aspirational message which preceded the actual agreement on constitution, structure and boundaries of a new nation-state, the United States of America, whose boundaries and nature have been in flux time and again, and which did not end the wars for independence or expansion

Connected with the concept of “the 4th of July” — if not necessarily with Independence Day — is obeisance to a flag via a pledge of allegiance and a hymn celebrating it which is associated with freedom for some, but with militarism, colonialism, imperialism and slavery for others.  While we see this to be the case with the Confederate Flag still waved by sore loosers in the South, we don’t so quickly recognize these same layers of meaning in the current U.S. national flag. Beyond the celebration of war in the first stanza, the “Star Spangled Banner” also celebrates exclusion. Although each verse ends with the rousing “the home of the free and the land of the brave,” stanza three offers “gloom and the grave” to “hireling and slave” alike, in contrast to stanza four’s paean to “freemen” standing “between their loved home and the war’s desolation” and thanks God for preserving the freemen’s nation and sets  the tone for future exploits and “American exceptionalism”: 

“Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’”  

Should we understand that freemen were propertied owners of the "loved home" they defended and the rest excluded from this blessing?

The alert among us will recognize the monetization of this idea of trust in God in the slogan on our currency, “In God we trust” and the rather recent insertion into the “Pledge of Allegiance” after the words “one nation” the phrase “under God,” which serves to cover a multitude of sins against those for whom the benefits of the  nation remain a future hope or a current source of disappointment and frustration because of their lack of “white privilege.”

What irony that the original pledge of allegiance, according to USHistory.org, was written by a Christian socialist Baptist minister without reference in the pledge to either the United States or God.  The UShsitory.org article suggests its author, Francis Bellamy, thought it could be used in any nation, as originally written. Yet it was apparently written to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the "new world" amidst a commercial drive by a flag-maker and patriotic magazine publisher to instill patriotism in the youth and install American flags in all schoolhouses across the country as part of the celebration of the 1892 World’s Columbian Exhibition. 

It was U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower who inserted the word’s “under God” as part of the opposition to the threat of “godless Communism” in the midst of the Cold War in 1954 (and who also warned us against the "military-industrial complex" more recently renamed "military-industrial-congressional" complex).

Happy Holiday anyway!

Jim

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You may also be interested in Peter Dreier's take  on the Fourth of July 2018 a.k.a. “Independence Day” and other articles he has recently written on current issues.

Shortly after I published the above Peter Dreier published a further set of reflections on Progressives and Patriotism — a July 4th Sampler explaining his views on Patriotism, perhaps more directly relevant to but different from my own take.