[250 years ago this past Saturday, Patrick Henry delivered his “Give me liberty or give me death!” speech to the Virginia Assembly. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that and four other patriotic speeches!]
Since I
began this week’s series with an excerpt from Of
Thee I Sing, I wanted to end it with another, the opening paragraphs of
the book’s Introduction:
“On November
19th, 2019, Army Lt. Colonel and National Security Council (NSC) official
Alexander Vindman testified before the House of Representatives’ impeachment
inquiry into President Donald Trump. Vindman, who had first-hand knowledge of
the telephone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president, offered testimony
that was highly damaging to the president, and so Trump’s defenders and allies
went on the attack against Vindman. They did so in large part by using his
story as a Ukrainian American immigrant to directly impugn his patriotism and
implicitly accuse him of treason: after Fox News host Laura Ingraham
highlighted Vindman’s background in relationship to his work as a Ukraine
expert for the NSC, law professor and former Bush administration official John
Yoo replied, “I find that astounding, and some people might call that
espionage”; and the next morning CNN contributor and former Republican
Congressman Sean Duffy went further, claiming, “I don’t know that he’s
concerned about American policy, but his main mission was to make sure that the
Ukraine got those weapons . . . He’s entitled to his opinion. He has an
affinity for the Ukraine, he speaks Ukrainian, and he came from the country.”
Unstated but clearly present in these responses is the idea that Vindman’s
criticism of the president had marked him as unpatriotic and even un-American,
opening up these broader questions about his affinities and allegiances.
Just over a
century earlier, however, former president Teddy Roosevelt began his 1918
Metropolitan magazine article “Lincoln and Free Speech” with these lines:
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the
President or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he
himself stands by the country . . . In either event it is unpatriotic not to
tell the truth—whether about the President or anyone else.” And in the prepared
statement with which he began his testimony, Alexander Vindman expresses his
own vision of patriotism clearly. “I have dedicated my entire professional life
to the United States of America,” he begins. “As a young man I decided that I
wanted to spend my life serving the nation that gave my family refuge from
authoritarian oppression, and for the last twenty years it has been an honor to
represent and protect this great country.” He contextualizes his ability to
offer such honest public testimony as part of “the privilege of being an
American citizen and public servant.” And he ends with his father, whose
“courageous decision” to leave the U.S.S.R. and move his family to the United
States had, Vindman argues, “inspired a deep sense of gratitude in my brothers
and myself and instilled in us a sense of duty and service.” Addressing his
father directly with his closing words, Vindman makes a moving and compelling
case for Roosevelt’s point about the essential patriotism of telling the truth:
“Dad, my sitting here today . . . is proof that you made the right decision
forty years ago to leave the Soviet Union and come here to the United States of
America in search of a better life for our family. Do not worry, I will be fine
for telling the truth.””
As I go on
to trace there, and as has only become more evident in the years since, Vindman
was not entirely fine, as he paid both a professional
and a personal price for his truth-telling critical patriotism. Here in
March 2025, a couple months into the second and even more radical and unhinged administration
of the President whose allies and supporters levied those attacks on Vindman,
it’s fair to say that critical patriotism has become one of the most fraught perspectives
one can take on the U.S. government. But, as I hope every figure and speech in
this week’s series has illustrated, critical patriotism has always been fraught
and fragile, always put those who express and fight for it in danger, and
always been an absolutely essential element of our nation’s ideals and
identity. May we learn from and live up to the legacies of these figures, and of
all our critical patriots, past and present.
March
Recap this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Speeches you’d highlight?
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