Dimensions: 0.50'' x 8.10'' x 5.20'' 144 pages University of Chicago Press Publication Date: May 2001 Paperback ISBN: 0226044386 Hardcover ISBN: 0226044378

Making Patriots
By Walter Berns

In this book, Walter Berns discusses the history and philosophy of patriotism. He focuses on how to foster love of country in a commercial republic, a form of government that emphasizes individuality and autonomy rather than the public-mindedness traditionally required of patriots. Berns is a resident scholar at AEI and a professor of government emeritus at Georgetown University. His books include Taking the Constitution Seriously
(1987) and In Defense of Liberal Democracy (1984).

In the ancient-Greek city of Sparta, every factor, geographic and demographic, and every detail of education, contributed to public spiritedness. Thus, it is not by chance that the words Spartan and patriot are almost synonymous.

The Spartans were a homogeneous people, descended from the same ancestors, few in number, and inhabiting an area smaller than the District of Columbia. Their boys, almost from the time of their birth, were trained to be soldiers, and their girls were required to exercise naked (in public), with a view to producing sons capable of being soldiers (and daughters capable of breeding them). They were not supposed to know the meaning of privacy. Taking their meals at common public tables and all the while being instructed in public affairs, they worshipped the city’s gods. In sum, as a modern commentator on the Spartan regime rightly says, "The subordination of the individual to the state has had no parallel in the history of the world." A city that discouraged self-interest and self-gratification, Sparta cannot possibly provide a model for America. Spartans were endowed at their birth with duties, but Americans were "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," private rights, including the right to pursue happiness as they themselves define it. It follows that government is obliged "to secure these rights."

Patriotism in America

This difference has consequences for patriotism. In the traditional or Spartan sense, patriotism is a kind of filial piety; the patriot loves his country simply because it is his country. But America is—or in 1776 was—a new country, founded on new principles, and therefore its patriotism is of a new kind. Abraham Lincoln gave expression to this in his eulogy on Henry Clay. Clay, he said, "loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country," a country dedicated to "the advancement of human liberty, human right, and human nature."

America differs from the likes of Sparta not only in its public principles but in its private beliefs, and the public principles require its government to respect private beliefs, especially religious beliefs. This can give rise to a problem because America was settled by Christians, and Christians are enjoined, indeed, commanded, to love God before country.

This problem had, even in 1776, a long history: Europe had struggled with it, our British forebears had fought a civil war over it, political philosophers (among them, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau) had wrestled with it, and our founders were resolved to avoid it by separating church and state, thereby taking religion out of politics. The church would have no state and the state would have no church, and no one would be faced with having to choose between them. There would be no religious martyrs in America.

The American government was not to be in the business of caring for men’s souls; instead (in the words of Federalist 10), its first object was the "protection of [the] different and unequal faculties of acquiring property." In a word, America was to be a commercial republic, or a "bourgeois society," as Marx was later to call it, and like Rousseau before him, he believed that the bourgeois do not make good citizens.

Jefferson agreed; he argued that farmers—"the cultivators of the earth"—make better citizens because they are "tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds." This is a venerable opinion, this association of land with patriotic sentiments. Unlike a stock portfolio, land is fixed in place, and this, as Adam Smith pointed out, has political significance. "The proprietor of land is necessarily a citizen of the particular country in which his estate lies," he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, whereas "the proprietor of stock is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country." The capitalist, or so it is said, makes his home in the market, and the market, as we have ever greater reasons to know, has no national boundaries.

Like Jefferson, the Antifederalists not only favored a society governed by "the substantial yeomanry of the country," but they disagreed with the framers’ Constitution because it left virtue unendowed. They argued that republican government especially depended on a virtuous people, which, for some of them, meant a religious people. The religious made better citizens, they said, and to this end they called upon the states to provide religious instruction in their schools. This the states did and (although in an attenuated form) continued to do through most of the nineteenth century. The purpose was to make good citizens, and religion—a nonsectarian religion—was thought to be a useful means of doing so, but beginning in the 1940s, the Supreme Court held that this could not be done without violating the principle of separation of church and state.

The central chapter of Making Patriots deals with Lincoln and the Civil War. It was the deadliest of our wars, but it was also the most necessary—at stake was the mean ing of the Declaration of Independence. Like Lincoln, the Confederates appealed to it, but they insisted that its principles respecting the right of self-government and the natural equality of all men did not apply to Negroes. To allow the South to secede, and to recognize its right to secede, would render the Declaration’s principles meaningless. And this has now, as it had then, much to do with American patriotism.

Patriotism after the Civil War

Lincoln also figures prominently in the following chapter. In his speech at Gettysburg, he spoke of those who had given their lives "that [the] nation might live," and went on to say that their work was unfinished. What remained to be done—"the great task remaining before us"—could only be done by "the living," and the living had to include the southern people. Without their freely given consent, the nation could not have "a new birth of freedom." Not only did they have to learn to live without slavery but—and this applied to the people of the North as well—they had to recognize the former slaves as their fellow citizens. Frederick Douglass devoted his life to this cause.

The subject of the concluding chapter is the flag of the United States, which, as we say in the pledge of allegiance, stands for the republic. Traditionally, the flag, and its ceremonies, was understood to be one of the means of promoting patriotism. But in the flag-burning cases, the Supreme Court gave a new and narrow meaning to the flag and the republic "for which it stands." It remains to be seen whether, as one of the dissenting justices feared, "the symbolic value of the American flag is not the same today as it was yesterday."