[Up here in New England, the third Monday in April is a holiday, Patriots’ Day. But as I argue in my most recent book, patriotism is a very complex concept, and so this week I’ll highlight a handful of examples of the worst of what it has meant for how we remember our histories. Leading up to a weekend post on the state of mythic patriotism in 2024!]
On two
layers of mythic patriotism found in the later
verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
There are multiple
reasons why I decided to put Francis Scott Key conceiving of “The Star-Spangled
Banner” and Colin Kaepernick kneeling during a performance of it on the
cover of Of Thee I Sing, and none
of them make Key look particularly good. I wrote about some of those layers in this
2019 post on the anthem (and especially on its much less frequently
performed later verses), and so once again would ask you to check out that
prior post and then come on back for a couple further thoughts on this complex
national text.
Welcome
back! In the opening paragraph of that prior post, I highlighted a particular
couplet in the anthem’s generally overlooked third verse: “No refuge could save
the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” As
I mentioned there, Key
himself was both a slaveowner and a lawyer who opposed abolition and fought
for the rights of other slaveowners, making his use of that particular word
especially fraught if not overtly hypocritical. But I would argue that the
entire phrase also plays into a specific mythic
patriotic narrative of both the War of 1812 and the American Revolution:
that enslaved people were adversaries of the American cause in both cases,
allied with the English and thus suffering defeat (flight, the grave, etc.) at
the hands of the U.S. The realities of those histories are multilayered, as I traced
in this column; but as I argued in yesterday’s post, many of the Revolution’s
most inspiring patriots were enslaved people, a trend that continue into the
Early Republic and that Key’s phrase and verse entirely and frustratingly elide.
The anthem’s
third verse is thus particularly fraught with mythic patriotic ideas, but I
would add that the fourth verse likewise includes its own form of mythic
patriotism. Key writes there, “O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand/Between
their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!” and adds, “Then conquer we must,
when our cause it is just,/And this be our motto—‘In God is our trust.’” He’s
alluding there to a narrative of the War of 1812 as a defensive conflict, one
in which the United States was invaded by England and fought back to protect
and preserve its homes and homeland. That’s certainly one way to understand the
war’s origin points; but as
I wrote in this column, that narrative entirely minimizes the concurrent
ways in which the war was both caused and defined by U.S. aggression, particularly
towards both Canada and indigenous communities. Indeed, the United States did
seek to “conquer” as part of the war, to conquer and annex a great deal of
territory from those other sovereign nations—and whether we see that “cause” as
“just” or not, it’s unquestionably a distinct one from self-defense. One more
way in which Key’s anthem views our history through an overtly mythic patriotic
lens.
Next
patriotism post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment