American dreams

The meaning of patriotism

You know those annoying little pushed notifications that spring up every time you do an Internet search? They may have something to do with what you were searching for, but often they don’t really hit the spot. They are sponsored advertisements, which advertisers have paid to ensure the appearance of when you search for what you just searched for. They are a source of annoyance that goes beyond the insistent beggar, the door-to-door brush salesman and flag-day collectors. Class of their own. But are they as annoying as patriotic sentiments in popular songs?

Lee Greenwood is a musician and song writer, who penned the by now world-famous song God Bless The USA, which is an invocation by Mr Greenwood to none other than God to do precisely that. USA means United States of America, and, as a song, not an inaugural speech or a constitutional provision, it inculcates sentiments of patriotism. It’s inculcated them in me, and I’m not even American, so it’s a powerful musical tour de force. It has bedfellows: it was preceded by Irving Berlin’s 1918 song God Bless America, and Katharine Lee Bates’s 1895 song America The Beautiful. It was followed by Bruce Springsteen’s 2000 song Land of Hope and Dreams, which is about a train for which no ticket is needed: just hop on as you will.

Song lyrics, as a form of poetry, cannot be taken all too literally (even if rap songs can get their authors convicted on charges of murder); yet, the enduring sentiment on reading a poem reflects less the actual words used by the poet and more the ultimate place to which they wanted to convey you with the work.

America’s patriotism is a commingled blend created out of the same melting pot as the Americans themselves. America is the brave new world, like that which Prospero alludes to in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Of that there is little doubt: the popular narrative is that those who come, and who ever came, to America never do so by accident. They come for its opportunities, for its way of life, for a better life, better than what they’ve left behind, or maybe they come to escape the law. Such is the familiar story of the American immigrant. From Germany, from Russia, from Lithuania, from Ireland, China and Italy, and, nowadays, from Central America and Mexico. It’s not that the streets of America aren’t actually paved with gold; it’s about how you define gold.

Such a grand land of individualism, self-expression and space, pure space, there is within the American social experiment a huge amount of conformity. They say—and they’re not wrong—that, if you inhabit an apartment block in Switzerland where everyone’s curtains are blue, you’d better ensure yours aren’t orange. So much individuality is still permissible in America, and yet the famous American Dream knows a great number of restrictions and qualifications. The possibilities are not endless in America, even if there might be an endless number of them: but you’re directed to those you can have, depending on whether you’re white, Ivy League, Hispanic, Asian, Black, or from one of the myriad other classes as which immigrants get seen after swearing their allegiance to the flag as an American

Image: Eddie (left) and Alex Van Halen (right), in their young and shirtless days.

The case of rock musician Eddie Van Halen is indicative. Eddie’s parents were of mixed Dutch and Indonesian race, and were subjected to racial discrimination in Amsterdam and Nijmegen after Eddie was born in 1955. In 1962, the family emigrated to America, to Pasadena in California, to be close to relatives who had also settled there. Eddie and his brother, Alex, spoke no English on arrival and, being therefore placed in a segregated elementary school, were subjected to taunting and bullying by other school pupils. Eddie would go on to become one of the top five rock guitarists of all time, and passed away a very rich man in 2020. Five years previously, the Smithsonian Institution interviewed Eddie Van Halen on his views about the American Dream. He said, “We came here with approximately fifty dollars and a piano, and we didn’t speak the language. Now look where we are. If that’s not the American dream, what is?”

What is, indeed? No one would contest that Eddie and Alex Van Halen’s story is one of success. They were good at their craft, they got the breaks from fellow professionals and made the deals that secured their path to the top, and the hits that sustained them. But that wasn’t the American Dream. Surely Eddie couldn’t have seriously meant that the American Dream comes from being a good guitar player? What the American Dream in fact is, is in large part another dream: that Eddie and Alex could have still been respected, have had a decent income and good prospects, even if they’d not been able to strum or drum their way out of a wet paper bag. There are no end of takes on what is the American Dream, but fundamentally, it is tied to what is set out in the Declaration of Independence: that all men are created equal, and should be treated equally. The American Dream, whether it is seen as an evocation of the spirit of the Declaration, or as the hope of achieving some other kind of material level of lifestyle, remains today what it ever was: a dream. The emphasis has shifted, but its unattainability (except by the likes of Eddie Van Halen), has always been a fact of life.

Here is what a German immigrant to the US is quoted as saying in 1851:

“The German emigrant comes into a country free from the despotism, privileged orders and monopolies, intolerable taxes, and constraints in matters of belief and conscience. Everyone can travel and settle wherever he pleases. No passport is demanded, no police mingles in his affairs or hinders his movements ... Fidelity and merit are the only sources of honor here. The rich stand on the same footing as the poor; the scholar is not a mug above the most humble mechanics; no German ought to be ashamed to pursue any occupation ... [In America] wealth and possession of real estate confer not the least political right on its owner above what the poorest citizen has. Nor are there nobility, privileged orders, or standing armies to weaken the physical and moral power of the people, nor are there swarms of public functionaries to devour in idleness credit for. Above all, there are no princes and corrupt courts representing the so-called divine 'right of birth'. In such a country the talents, energy and perseverance of a person ... have far greater opportunity to display than in monarchies.”

F. W. Bogen: The German in America (Boston, 1851)

Considerable time has passed since 1851 and both America and Europe have changed, beyond recognition, even. How much of that text do you read, agree with, and then conclude no longer applies?

• the income gap is widening, and that in itself is indicative of a degree of despotism; the privileged orders do indeed exist in the US, and are recognisable from their homes, cars and country clubs;

• monopolies are now no stranger to the US;

• there is, it’s true, no internal passport in the US (the only internal check on movement is carried out on land traffic by the California Department of Agriculture). There is the ubiquitous driver’s license, and it is used routinely to track citizens. They are also tracked through their credit card purchases, their mobile phones and everything else the Central Intelligence Agency can get a-hold of. Nobody needs internal passports in 2024, least of all the CIA. Meanwhile the EU’s Schengen Agreement put paid to many internal border checks in Europe, but for how long can’t be stated with certainty—Germany is reintroducing some border formalities as I write;

• as for honour, I’m not sure what a source of honour is. In some places it’s dying selflessly for one’s fellow man, in others it’s dodging getting a rap sheet. In yet others, it depends on what’s on the rap sheet;

• in America in 2024, the rich do not stand on the same footing as the poor. I even doubt whether that was so in 1851;

• scholars are probably a mug (presumably the stature of a mosquito) below the mechanics by now (they’re no longer mechanics—they’re computer analysts);

• prostitution is probably still an occupation for which a mug of shame might be shown, but the modern US has far worse professions—the oldest and second-oldest are indeed swapping places;

• wealth and possession of real estate confer not the least political right: were that only so;

• the people’s physical and moral powers are indeed weakened by a nobility, in all but name, and by a standing army, which used to be just the National Guard but now includes the police;

• in name, there are no princes, but there is one court above all others that claims a divine birthright beyond the scrutiny of ordinary members of the electorate (the indirect one, that is);

• the final sentence may be true, and it may have been true then. But, if so, would Eddie Van Halen have been a nobody if he’d not gone to Pasadena? That, more than anything else, comes down to luck. Which he had. There.

The American Dream shouldn’t be to be lucky. That’s winning the lottery. It should be all about these princes, privileges, and armies. It should be to have as fair a chance as the next man, on a like-for-like basis, regardless of your skin colour, income level, education, class, location. And, on those counts, America still has some distance to go with its dreaming.

Do immigrants need to persuade themselves to be patriotic for their new country? Immigrants like the German worker interviewed in 1851 and the Van Halens in 1962 headed for where there were others like them. In a country as long and broad as the United States, it is understandable that folk still want to be within comfortable reach of those who share their values, ideals, traditions and even language. Unmissable is the stamp of Germanness in Milwaukee, as are the Spanish traditions of New Mexico (not from any recent influx across the Mexican border, but from Spanish imperial families who settled there even before the Pilgrim Fathers set sail). It is as though the place names chosen by settlers as they moved westward were intended less to hearken back to fond memories of the homeland than to offer a signal to those yet to come, that there, they might find their kith, if not their kin, from towns such as Berlin, Geneva and Paris.

“[T]he crucial first decision of immigrants [is] where to reside in this vast, unfamiliar country. Immigrant communities were not established by accident or fiat, but by the desire of their residents … The newcomer’s decision where to live was often related to choice of occupation and attitude toward economic advancement … Not all immigrants shared with native-born Americans, or even other immigrants, a common definition of upward mobility and the good life. Consequently, immigrant behavior in the marketplace was often misunderstood.”

Alan M. Kraut: “The Huddled Masses—The Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921” (The American History Series, pub. Harlan Davidson, 1982).

Nothing in that has changed, right down to the present day.

“Haitians, often by word of mouth, shared with other Haitians that there was good work and a good life to be found in Springfield. This is how most immigrant communities in the United States form; there’s nothing conspiratorial about it. Springfield was a safe place where Haitians could go and raise their children, and even though it meant leaving the only place they had ever known, there was also the promise of some community—the simple pleasure of sometimes being in conversation with other people who share the same cultural vernacular. These Haitians wanted to find home, even if it meant having to wander far afield.”

Roxane Gay: The Haitian Question (The New Yorker, 17 September 2024)

Kraut and Gay are separated by nearly half a century, and yet the emphasis has not changed in that time: work (or occupation) and, an interesting expression, a good life. The German commentator cited by Bogen would not have formulated—even had the expression existed then—the desire to come to America as some sort of Dream of financial comfort or availability of work, but expresses his aspirations of a good life in terms of a lack of despotism, privilege and monopoly, taxation and constraint, and so on. The immigrant of 1851 seems far more driven by the desire to escape a state of oppression in his old country than any particular desire for untold wealth in his new one. In 1851, it was not poverty itself that drove migrants to migrate, it was the desire to escape oppression. In the modern world, what drives migration is the palpable certainty of death if they stay, against the mere possibility of death if they leave. In either case, what drives a migrant to set forth upon the oceans is the prospect of a good life.

A commune is by far not a nation, but communes on the whole reflect this philosophy: that their members share in poverty what little they have, as the price to be paid for acquiring collective resilience and escaping oppression (or what they perceive as oppression). The influx of new members and the departures of existing members of communes are a factor of these two elements: the readiness to share even that which counts as little, against the weight of oppression that burdens the prospective member, as measured against the weight of oppression that a member feels once they affiliate. The notion of commune living attracts poorer, rather than richer, members of society, not because of the freeloading aspect of getting something for nothing, but because communal living allows those who have no material contribution to make to nevertheless make a valued contribution in another way: through what they are as a person, and through what they can do in terms of physical or intellectual work that might be of little economic value outside the commune’s four walls.

Incidentally, perhaps one misconception about communal living is that it offers no attraction to the wealthy, who, it might be assumed, carry with them a sense of self-sufficiency that obviates any need to beg a share from what others might have to offer or, by extension, to offer any kind of share of what they themselves possess. They would indeed probably feel a sharp decline in living standards were they to join a commune, and the sharing of their possessions would undoubtedly bring joy to their fellow residents. But what many wealthy fail to appreciate is the inter-relational sharing from which they would benefit: a form of sharing based far less on commercial exchange and far more on pure, simple love. It is a clever person who can devise a questionnaire that, when put to the wealthy, will elicit an honest answer to: are you lonely?

There have been people who declared themselves to be an independent republic, an independent kingdom, an island nation and even an empire (Emperor Norton), but whether they ever felt patriotic towards themselves I cannot say. I would rather say that such an act smacks more of megalomania, and a megalomaniac will, I guess, be someone who feels they are owed patriotism rather than cherishing it towards their putative realm.

America and patriotism are two expressions that are never far apart. There are elements of British society that positively cringe upon hearing the strains of Rule Britannia (in the clip, even Sarah Connolly at the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms feels the need to adopt the smirking pose of Lord Nelson, lest her sentiments be taken … too seriously?) or Land of Hope and Glory, here linked in a version that, again, shows the British need to be patriotic in a vein that hints at the ridiculous—whether as a plea in mitigation or as a disguise, who can tell?

So, do I cringe yet again as I watch the linked video with the massed promenaders from 1990 united in song extolling the Mother of the Free to the highest? Yes, I do, and yet I do so with tingles in my spine—it is a great piece of music, which I’ve played myself in orchestra (the brass teacher at school had a habit of referring to it indecorously as Pomp and Circumscision), so, why is that? Can you cringe at something and feel proud of it at one and the same time? Perhaps you can: full in the knowledge of your country’s failings, in that one moment, patriotism allows you to gloss over them and to think of the good things about your nation. The danger comes when, once the last notes have died, that sense of greatness itself does not abate, but remains ringing in the ears, creating a barrier. Patriotism, once it unites, can very easily pull up the ladder behind it and form a club that is as exclusive as any elite.

“There were numerous economic and social incentives for the immigrant who would abandon his culture and adopt the language and customs of his new home. Well aware of what was at stake, the members of each group tried to choose carefully which aspects of American life they would embrace and which they would resist.”

Kraut, op. cit.

Kraut seizes here upon a contentious point in the process undertaken by immigrants as they assimilate into a new society. Some degree of assimilation is always necessary. Even Joshua Norton, the Emperor of the United States, was assimilated into his surroundings in San Francisco. No man or woman can exist as an island, even if it is on an island that they exist. Patriotism is therefore an all-embracing sentiment that transcends wealth, position, privilege, or even origin, to unite a people with one voice. The contentiousness lies in Kraut’s use of the word choose, and whether and to what degree one ought rather to use the phrase are coerced into. What is remarkable about patriotism is the freedom that it vaunts as its core element, and the condemnation it levels at those who, by their free choice, decide to reject it.

The notions of America’s patriotism made America a great country. If America herself is to be taken as one gigantic oeuvre, then I’m sure there are criteria against which we can say, unequivocally and without fear of contradiction, that it has been a great success. Of these things, one might justifiably be proud, patriotic. But when did American patriotism itself come into being?

I doubt whether there was very much of it about when America was first settled. The settlers themselves—the Pilgrim Fathers—were certainly glad to have survived the uncertainties of the wild Atlantic Ocean, but, with no country as such of which to be patriotic, and with a mother country across the waters back in England, whatever patriotism might have been felt would not have been felt for America, but for Britain. By 1776 and the War of Independence, two things had emerged that were not manifestly present in 1620 when Plymouth Colony was founded: patriotism for a land other than the land of the settlers’ origin; and a determination to fight in the name of this new patriotism in order to achieve a new statehood. What had been viewed upon the arrival of the pilgrims as there for the taking, it was discovered in the intervening years, needed some qualification: it was there for the taking provided he who’d taken it before put up no objection, or could be otherwise persuaded to part company with it. Moreover, there for the taking doesn’t mean that a rival third party might not have also set his sights on the matter. But it is the ideas thrust up by American patriotism that in large part define what it is that constitutes the American Dream.

It cannot be that the American Dream comprises a denial of the rest of the globe, that the American Dream, in the form of the Statue of Liberty, offers a welcome to other peoples of the world whilst putting up insurmoutable barriers to their actual entry into the realm. It cannot be that the American Dream at one and the same time unites all peoples legitimately within the borders of the US in united, unified fervour, whilst directing tentacles of imperalist influence outside those borders. And yet, it seems that that is exactly what it does. Because the American Dream is founded in the principles of the Declaration of Independence, was adapted to mean achieving 2.4 children, a house of your own, above all a car, two vacations a year and provision for retirement, and there’s good reason for why that was dubbed a dream: in 2024, achieving those things is, according to recent research, well nigh an impossibility for well over 60 per cent of Americans. The root cause of the inability to achieve the American Dream is (a) a capitalist system that is, by its very nature, doomed to pervert the American Dream, given the inherent conflict it institutes between the owners of the means of production and the workers, together with the incompatibility between that system and the equality vaunted by the Declaration of Independence, or, alternatively, (b) our inability to play guitar like Eddie Van Halen.

When I listen to my national anthem, and to patriotic songs like Rule Britannia, I feel pride and contrition at the same time. I feel a shared guilt for the sins committed in the name of the nation-states with which I am associated, even if I don’t exactly know with whom I share this guilt (for there are fellow countrymen who do not feel this guilt). The guilt of the convict condemns him to spend time in prison. Upon his release, society continues to view him as guilty, even though his debt is repaid. But collective guilt for acts once viewed as patriotic often results in not even a fine, and certainly not one that would in any way make good the debt owed, and it certainly never gives rise to any spontaneous act of contrition. The Haitians paid dearly an indemnité in a sum that can be valued at different amounts but in principle started at 150 million francs in exchange for France’s recognition of its erstwhile colony’s independence. The 1825 royal decree imposing the debt was recently repealed, but no proposal has been made to repay the amount stumped up by Haiti in the years from 1825 to 1947. Still less has there been any offer, or indeed forlorn demand, that France should pay Haiti for the exploitation of its land and people in the period of French imperial ownership—approximately 150 years from 1650 to 1791.

People disown family members who commit outrageous crimes. But we never disown our native country, regardless of how heinous its sins have been. We remain patriotic. Whatever that means.