This (too) short book grew out of an essay written by the distinguished political philosopher Walter Berns for The Public Interest. What it does is to probe into American history in search of the meaning and implications of the Declaration of Independence and its immediate progeny. Professor Berns asks: What was meant—is meant?— by our pledge of allegiance to the flag and to the Republic for which it stands? The author knows what was meant by those who coined the words and by those who fought to give the words standing in an independent country. He knows to declare our republic unique. Walter Berns can be pretty assertive in expressing his own views but to say that much about America calls for a little rhetorical caution, so he lets Thomas Pangle say it:

The declaration by which Americans made themselves independent marked the birth of the first nation in history grounded explicitly not on tradition, or loyalty to tradition, but on an appeal to abstract and universal and philosophical principles of political right.

Therein hangs the story. There are problems in forwarding this view of the flag for three reasons. One, we don’t know how to foster a belief in American principles among our children. This is so because the schools do not, under pain of violating academic freedom, feel free to inculcate a respect for American values. Two, we have been taught that our values are enduring only insofar as they are revalidated year after year by democratic procedures; which is to say, if they fall into disfavor, then the postulates of the American revolution are no longer enviable. And three, the American flag is something anyone who wishes is at liberty to burn. The Supreme Court said so, to be sure by the narrowest margin, but it is now accepted that burning the flag is a form of speech, therefore, to be safeguarded by the courts pursuant to our pledge, by whatever is the surviving altar, to defend the Bill of Rights.

Prof. Berns tells us that the Founders had no doubts about the principles they asserted. However bizarre, it is true that the revolution they engaged in continues a sacred right. Not so infidelity to government laws. On Prof. Berns’s reading, the State of South Carolina had no right to defy the union, having become a constituent part of it. It would have had the right, by the constitutional canon, to rebel against the strictures of the United States government, but this right the Civil Warriors did not claim, claiming instead a right to dissociate from the union. In resisting this, President Lincoln was, correctly, defending a contract.

But the preservation of an America guided by the principles of the Declaration required ongoing generations of virtuous citizens. How was this to be brought about? Everyone who spoke out on the subject after the war acknowledged that the job of inculcating good citizenship—of making patriots—was an educational enterprise. But the word “education” does not exist in the Constitution, and occurs only once in the Federalist Papers. I am reminded of Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that that which is not mentioned in the idiom of a period is that which is truly singular. The Founders did not speak of the responsibility of the state to inculcate virtue because they took it for granted that the state (read the states) would do so, and indeed the McGuffey Readers alone, we learn from Prof. Berns, were responsible for attitudes about America and about obligations to America in as many as one-half of our schoolchildren.

The obligation to educate in virtue was primarily that of parents: derivatively, of the schools they founded and governed. And the responsibility, also, of religion, almost universally acknowledged as the fountainhead of those values the Constitution, pace its toleration of slavery, sought to enshrine. A key here was the formal separation of church and state, which removed any temptation to co-opt the government for catechistic duties. That separation of church and state having been assured, the states were left to encourage religion and to benefit from its teachings.

What happened was the advent of American self-doubt. This was explicitly licensed by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Prof. Berns quotes his language, “If, in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.” Hugo Black compressed that to: “The only meaning of free speech must be that revolutionary ideas will be allowed to prevail.”

“Accordingly,” Prof. Berns observes,

while Americans, out of habit, might continue to “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands,” the Republic itself stands for nothing in particular, which means that the flag stands for nothing in particular. This, of course, was not the view of those who designed it.

One can see Prof. Berns biting his lip to say it softly: “For them the flag, and its ceremonies, was one of the means of promoting patriotism.”[1]

By the year 1991, this philosophical nescience had crept into legislation.

In 1991 the state of Florida enacted a statute requiring its public schools to teach that no “culture is intrinsically superior or inferior to another,” which is a way of saying to its more recent immigrants that they might just as well have stayed in Cuba or Haiti, as if there is nothing to choose between Castro’s dictatorship and constitutional democracy, or Haitian voodooism and the biblical religions.

I don’t think that Prof. Berns really makes his case, i.e., teaches us how to make patriots. To begin with, I fear that he—and Abraham Lincoln—takes it too much for granted that the discharge of military duty, whether in peace or war, is an expression of patriotism. It is certainly that for many soldiers and sailors and even draftees. But it is also simple submission to the laws. (It is sobering to note the valor shown by the Russian and German military in defending their hideous governments.) There is an anthropomorphization of the ideals Berns cherishes, and he gives it to us in a chapter on Abraham Lincoln, whom he nicely designates as “Patriotism’s Poet.” Lincoln voiced ideals higher than those that moved the typical Union soldier. What he accomplished was to give those who survived, and those who were left to mourn the dead, a sense of the nobility of the enterprise.

To make a patriot is to cultivate, as Prof. Berns instructs us, the virtues that lead to patriotism: the love of country, of its institutions, and of the insights of the Founders, which insights Walter Berns postulates as true and as imperishable as Mr. Lincoln suggested hopefully at Gettysburg they might be.

Notes
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1. I like it better when Professor Berns discharges 200-proof scorn. In a footnote he quotes Justice Wiley B. Rutledge from Everson v. Board of Education disallowing public transportation for parochial school children. “[The purpose of the First Amendment],” said Justice Rutledge, “was to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority by comprehensively forbidding every form of public aid or support for religion.” Berns: “No one with any knowledge of our history could have written this.” Go back to the text.