To Die for: The Paradox of American Patriotism

Cecilia O'Leary's book "To Die For" covers the fifty-year period between the Civil War and the First World War, and shows how our modern concept of patriotism was created and given its meaning during that time. If you had assumed that the Pledge of Allegiance, Memorial Day, and the cult of Old Glory have always been with us, you should read this book and have your eyes opened. Patriotism, as we experience it today, is the result of a lot of planning and effort.To summarize her argument, American patriotism was constructed after the Civil War as a way of reuniting the North with the defeated South on the basis of White supremacy. Organizations of veterans on both sides, and organizations of women as well, purged themselves of Black members in the course of achieving what they considered a national reconciliation. Public institutions did likewise. Patriotic symbols, celebrations, and rituals were created during this period to encourage good citizenship and loyalty. The efforts that went into this project have been forgotten, perhaps on purpose.I had never given much though to the origins of these symbols, like the Pledge. I just assumed, as I think I was supposed to, that they were always there, transcending history, never bothing to think that everything has a history, and that there might be some interest in seeing what it is like. Growing up in the South, I had always had to face the kind of mindless gung-ho patriotism that infests that region more than any other, and I often wondered how that could square with the ritual display of the Stars and Bars and the glorification of the "War Between the States". Her book brings it all out.In her pages, you will meet organizations you may never have heard of, like the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of Northern Civil War veterans, and its Southern counterpart, the United Confederate Veterans. You may be surprised by the number and strength of Women's organizations in this period, and by their complex struggles involving suffrage, race, and concepts of social duty.I was personally struck by the often-repeated phenomenon of liberals, reformers, and even socialists getting co-opted into the system's ideological mechanisms. I would never have guessed that the author of the Pledge of Allegiance was the cousin of the socialist author of "Looking Backward". I was also struck, and hard, by the tradition and extent of vigilantism in America. I don't know if Europe has anything quite like it. The book is full of examples of it, from Confederate veterans terrorizing Blacks to mobs lynching preachers and Wobblies.In spite of the many grim elements of the story, I was struck by how possible it is to change the concept of what it means to be an American. I have always felt excluded by the current definition. I come away from "To Die For" understanding that what we call "patriotism" is not burned into stone, and that people like myself can affect how this concept is redefined in t

I have the honor to be a childhood friend of the author. We met in the second grade. Our father's had beeen classmates at Stanford University. CeCe has to be one of the most interesting, creative searchers for truth that I have ever met. I'm glad to see that the childhood sense of adventure, the tendancy to question "true beliefs", and the spirit of a real survivor are still alive and well. Although I am of White Southern Slave Owning heritage, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in American history and the American Psyche. If you ever have a chance to meet Dr. O'Leary, I'm sure you'll join me in considering her a charming and fascinating human being. Susan Merchant.

O'Leary's book examines an aspect of American life and thought which too many scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are prone to take for granted: the ways in which patriotism was expressed, mostly by quasi-public rather than formal state institutions. Starting from the reasonable point that patriotism could not possibly have meant the same thing to everyone, O'Leary develops a sophisticated and difficult to label examination of it. At length, she demonstrates that another, more constructive form of patriotism was possible. In particular, opposition to the color line could be found among Grand Army of the Republic veterans for far longer than it was evident among the general population; but by the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg in 1913, their numbers and energy vitiated by the passing decades, even the GAR had basically capitulated. The result of this capitulation was that traditional masculine values such as combat heroism essentially displaced the constitutionalism and defiant commitment to inclusionist politics of abolitionists, suffragists and other reformers as the prime ingredient in patriotism. But the book should not be interpreted as a principally feminist interpretation of patriotism; it is, rather, a sectional one. This is a function of O'Leary's conclusion that the white South was increasingly able to demand the North acquiesce in and even copy its views on race as the price of national unity. After careful consideration, and comparison against personal experience, I am forced to concede that the clear implication that the minds of white Northerners were and remain more malleable than those of their Southern counterparts is a correct one. A useful follow-up to this implication (which O'Leary fails to adequately develop) would be research to examine why white Southerners, having experienced crushing defeat in battle, proved less willing than mid-twentieth century Germans or Japanese to reject their own historical social and political order and gradually come to imitate that of the war's victors. Modernity, in the sense of a lesser degree of urbanization, is probably a factor. This book is reminiscent of, but not truly comparable to, Waldstreicher's dissection of American nationalism in its first fifty years because Waldstreicher devotes far less space to the issue of African-Americans, largely because so few were free during the period his book covers (although their placement at the end of his book underlines their future significance to the definition of patriotism). O'Leary introduces other oppositional forms of patriotism, particularly in the story of Francis Bellamy, the social gospel advocate who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance but felt constrained to offer either liberty or justice so that the Pledge would be acceptable to patriots of the rights and the left. Ultimately, however, they function as asides, a major weakness which may or may not reflect pre

Before the Civil War, Americans spoke of the United States as a plural noun; after the war and Reconstruction, Americans spoke of the United States in the singular: a nation. How and on what basis, after the wartime deaths of over half a million Americans, did a broken country reassemble itself into an unprecedentedly singular unit? As another historian of patriotism, I can tell you that Cecilia O'Leary's *To Die For* is a powerful, evocatively written set of answers to this question. Focusing on patriotic activism in the US in the half-century after the Civil War and especially organized patriotism's peak between the 1890s and World War I, O'Leary shows how race, or whiteness more precisely, came to dominate the criteria for national reunion and national belonging. Coinciding with the rise of Jim Crow in the South, an invented history of the Civil War--how Confederates and white Northerners waged a trivial "strife of brothers"--substituted itself, and effectively (in the eyes of white Americans) erased, the history of how African Americans had fought for their own freedom. Even Union veterans' organizations and the Woman's Relief Corps, an independent association of black and white women who had demonstrated their loyalty to the Union cause, marginalized their black membership or became racially segregated under pressure from white members interested in fellowship with the white South. When commemorating the Battle of Gettysburg on its fiftieth anniversary in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern Democrat in the White House since the Civil War, was flanked by white veterans in Confederate uniform as well as in Union uniform, and made no mention of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. This story of how patriotism became "racialized" is the most meaningful contribution of O'Leary's book.Her book also contains the best history yet of how the American flag became conceived as an object capable of being desecrated. Flag politics originated in the 1890s among white reformers concerned about immigration and even, in the case of Francis Bellamy (author of the Pledge of Allegiance, 1892), among Christian socialists. The movement spread to patriotic groups both conservative and reformist. Finally, O'Leary captures the shift in patriotism with the First World War, when the U.S. government came to involve itself directly in fostering patriotism--what had been the work of voluntary associations--and when patriotism, more than ever, became synonymous with conformity.*To Die For* leaves room for plenty of additional work to be done on this and related topics. The scholarly literature on the history of American patriotism is, with a few exceptions, in its infancy, dating from the end of the Cold War. As historians, we still need to know more about who and where and how. O'Leary's very broadly conceived cultural history is in some ways hampered by the youth of the field at large, in places slippin