The Origin of US Patriotism...

[Hexen]

I've been wonder about this for a long time....

What was the origin of the extreme US patroitism/exceptionalism we got today? For example where did terms like "America is a free country", "Home of the Free, Home of the Brave" originally came from and such?

I do know that the pledge of alleigance has been changed overtime (like the current one "One Nation Under God" came from the 1950s...).

I've been wondering...did the whole "America is a Free Country" claims also came from the 1950s as a knee jerk to the Soviet Union at the time?

Does anyone know the mysterious origins of these things? (It's a nice thing to know your history you know...)

[Broletariat]

The American "Revolution" probably had something to do with it.

[gorillafuck]

The American "Revolution" probably had something to do with it.
Why do you put revolution in quotes?

[Hexen]

Maybe it's something that the bourgeoisie were priding themselves at the time while their parrots (the working classes) picked it up and repeating it thinking it's about them...

Also what was the origin of the "American Dream" term?

[Broletariat]

Why do you put revolution in quotes?
Because it was mostly a transfer of upper-class power. I'd call the real American Revolution to be the Civil War, or as they call it where I live, the War of Northern Aggression.

[Robocommie]

Because it was mostly a transfer of upper-class power. I'd call the real American Revolution to be the Civil War, or as they call it where I live, the War of Northern Aggression.

Wait, a revolution by the south?

[Hexen]

Because it was mostly a transfer of upper-class power. I'd call the real American Revolution to be the Civil War, or as they call it where I live, the War of Northern Aggression.

I don't think the Civil War was a revolution but rather it was a war for dominance. If it were a real revolution, then the slaves would have rebelled against their masters...

I don't think there ever was actual working class revolution took place in the US which the American Revolution was basically a bourgeoisie revolution to be independent from the British crown so they can steal more resources/land/etc in their never ending quest for wealth.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Because it was mostly a transfer of upper-class power. I'd call the real American Revolution to be the Civil War, or as they call it where I live, the War of Northern Aggression.

You do realize that for the time, bourgeois democracy was indeed a revolutionary concept. now its reactionary. it has served its purpose in time.


its like a revolution/national liberation struggle.

[Lenina Rosenweg]

The American Revolution could be regarded as a revolution although it didn't go nearly as far as the French Revolution or later revolutions. As well as a war for independence it was equally a civil war between "patriots" and pro-British Tories. It did abort the development of what would have been an entrenched British landed aristocracy in the north and midwest of America, something which did play a role in the development of Canada.The southern aristocracy stayed neutral or sometimes came out against the Brits (Washington, Jefferson, etc.) Although the AR did not go all that far, it was a tremendous inspiration for later revolutions.

The US Civil War/Reconstruction period was also a revolution. It went much further than the AR, although it was aborted. Marx felt the two most important events of the 19th century were the Paris Commune and the ACW.

American patriotism comes from several sources, I think. There was originally a 19th century pride in what was seen as American democracy and egalitarianism against European "despotism" and oppression. This was combined w/the view stemming from the Puritans of America as a "shining city on a hill", a "new Jerusalem".In the late 19th century an ideology of free enterprise "Americanism" was developed by industrialists in opposition to socialism and the labor movement.This was reinforced in WWI and WWII. This was further developed in the 50s w/the bizarre ideology of America as "the world's beacon of freedom".

Journalists repeat over the idiotic slogan that "America is the greatest country in the world" w/out anything ever to back this up. The conventional wisdom is that "everybody wants to come here" when very few people from developed countries want to immigrate "here". The US media and educational system generally have a very superficial coverage of the outside world and reinforce the view that anywhere outside the US is a dangerous place full of chaos, drug violence and jihadists.

[Broletariat]

Wait, a revolution by the south?
Huh? No I was just noting the level of Southern pride around where I live. They call the Civil War the War of Northern Agression.


I don't think the Civil War was a revolution but rather it was a war for dominance. If it were a real revolution, then the slaves would have rebelled against their masters...

I don't think there ever was actual working class revolution took place in the US which the American Revolution was basically a bourgeoisie revolution to be independent from the British crown so they can steal more resources/land/etc in their never ending quest for wealth

Slaves were rebelling against their masters, even long before the Civil War started. You get a good sense of the fact that war was going on even before it was officially declared from the book Jailbreak Out of History: The re-biography of Harriet Tubman.


You do realize that for the time, bourgeois democracy was indeed a revolutionary concept. now its reactionary. it has served its purpose in time.


its like a revolution/national liberation struggle.

I was under the impression that bourgeois democracy had already existed in the form of Parliament and the like? Perhaps I'm just misinformed, that is what this place is for after all. Plus it's hard to consider the American "Revolution" to be a revolution when you had things like the Paris Commune going on not too long after.

[Rusty Shackleford]

I was under the impression that bourgeois democracy had already existed in the form of Parliament and the like? Perhaps I'm just misinformed, that is what this place is for after all. Plus it's hard to consider the American "Revolution" to be a revolution when you had things like the Paris Commune going on not too long after.

well, i dont think bourgeois democracy can exist to its fullest extent in the UK at the time due to the still strong monarchy. now the monarchy is a joke.

and the AR/AWI is partially a political and economic revolution where the bourgeoisie did indeed end up having full state power.

scientific socialism didnt come around for another 60 or so years.

[A.R.Amistad]

American Revolution was a revolution. So was the American Civil War. Really, the Civil War just picked up where 1776 had left off. It was a half a century revolution basically, with points of higher and lower contention. I don't agree with American exceptionalism or nationalism, but I don't understand the contempt here for the American Revolution.

A good few Marxist sources I found on the subject:

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/samadams.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/braverman/1956/09/amer-rev.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/braverman/1946/03/amer-rev.htm

[A.R.Amistad]

Slaves were rebelling against their masters, even long before the Civil War started. You get a good sense of the fact that war was going on even before it was officially declared from the book Jailbreak Out of History: The re-biography of Harriet Tubman.

Like I said. The bourgeois-democratic revolution didn't end in the 1700's. It was more like an on-off continuous revolutionary period between 1776 and 1870. It was full of events like John Brown's raid, Nat Turner's rebellion, the Underground Railroad, Nullification Crisis, etc.

[graymouser]

I don't think the Civil War was a revolution but rather it was a war for dominance. If it were a real revolution, then the slaves would have rebelled against their masters...
Yeah...that's wrong. If you read any honest history of the Civil War, the slaves started liberating themselves as soon as the Union Army was in the South. Emancipation had to be decreed because it was already becoming reality, and the North couldn't afford to pass up the huge influx of Black volunteers that were basically trying to join them for a year and a half.


I don't think there ever was actual working class revolution took place in the US which the American Revolution was basically a bourgeoisie revolution to be independent from the British crown so they can steal more resources/land/etc in their never ending quest for wealth.
There was a bourgeois-democratic revolution in the US from 1775 to 1781, yes. It was a fight for colonial independence, and after the English revolution only the second bourgeois revolution (and the first to result in a republic). The French revolution was also bourgeois-democratic in character. So was the Civil War, which was a continuation of the unfinished democratic tasks of the original revolution. The pre-1848 bourgeoisie was revolutionary, in the sense that it had to clear out the remnants of feudalism and achieve the democratic tasks, however poor a job they made of it, in order to consolidate the system of free labor. The turning point was the revolutions of 1848 when the bourgeoisie proved incapable of performing these tasks and became a reactionary force. The exception was in the US, where the unfinished task of freeing the slaves became a fight the bourgeoisie couldn't back out of. Still, after 1876 (for Europe 1848) the bourgeoisie in the developed countries became exclusively reactionary.

[DaComm]

I've been wonder about this for a long time....

What was the origin of the extreme US patroitism/exceptionalism we got today? For example where did terms like "America is a free country", "Home of the Free, Home of the Brave" originally came from and such?

I do know that the pledge of alleigance has been changed overtime (like the current one "One Nation Under God" came from the 1950s...).

I've been wondering...did the whole "America is a Free Country" claims also came from the 1950s as a knee jerk to the Soviet Union at the time?

Does anyone know the mysterious origins of these things? (It's a nice thing to know your history you know...)

Such extreme patriotism probably arose from the American Bourgeoisie Democratic Revolution (commonly referred to as the American Revolution), which eliminated the monarchist rule of England and replaced the system with a Bourgeois Dictatorship. Being an American myself I can firmly state that our people are extremely stupid. We concur that because we can vote, that we have democracy, although it is the Capitalists that our are candidates because money determines who we elect, and it is the Capitalists that have the money. We hold to the fact that everyone is equal, yet set we support the super-exploitation of the under-developed world. We think we are better than China because China is communist, yep, China with it's sweat shops and market economy, is communist. If you haven’t noticed, the Americans are not the most logical/critical thinkers, and often times egotism as seen in the US spawns from a lack of knowledge (in this case, we only intake the knowledge that the Capitalist media controls, and chose not to look beyond these idiotic lies).

[Rusty Shackleford]

can we also look at this as a development of nationalism amongst bourgeois and feudal states in the 1800s.

there is also the instance of the Kentucky(or was it Kansas?) riflemen kicking british ass in New Orleans a few weeks after the War of 1812 ended. that was a pretty big boost for american patriotism.

[A.R.Amistad]

Kentucky

I sure hope so we Kentuckians do tend to kick ass ;) (to bad I'm really a hoosier lol)

[mikelepore]

For example where did terms like "America is a free country", "Home of the Free, Home of the Brave" originally came from and such?

The phrase

O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

is from the poem "The Star Spangled Banner" by Francis Scott Key. The phrase refers to how impressed the author was by the fact that the flag was still intact after the British fired a large amount of artillery at the fort in Baltimore, Maryland during the war of 1812.

[mikelepore]

What was the origin of the extreme US patroitism/exceptionalism we got today? For example where did terms like "America is a free country", "Home of the Free, Home of the Brave" originally came from and such?

It really was an enlightened action to add phrases of this kind to the highest law of the land in 1791: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

The problem is that patriotic people only see their mental image of that ideal principle even when there are many exceptions and people are being persecuted. It didn't take long for the hypocrisy to appear either -- The Sedition Act of 1798, enacted during the administration of the second president, John Adams, sent people to prison for criticizing the government in any way judged to be an example of "false, scandalous, and malicious writing."

[Across The Street]

Hexen: "also, what was the origin of the American Dream term?"


Somebody correct me if I am wrong here, but I believe that term came about after baby boomers came back from WWII and the whole concept of suburbia started to develop. I believe it started more on the east coast but quickly spread to the rest of the continent.

[28350]

Because it was mostly a transfer of upper-class power.

The American Revolution was by-and large a progressive thing, much like other revolutions (viz. French) at the time. It's hardly progressive by today's standards, but back then the progressive phase of capitalism had yet to be exhausted.

[ed miliband]

Can someone clarify for me how the Democratic Party moved from smearing the Republican Party as the party of "free love and n*gger loving" (I'm not making that up), to the party that they are today...? I'm not saying today's Democratic Party doesn't have racist elements, but the Republicans are now widely considered to be the most - hmmm - obviously racist party.

[manic expression]

Patriotism in the US is a big topic. I'll do my best to give my views. I think patriotism has to do with the era it lived in. The first form of Ameriacn patriotism, which essentially meant regarding yourself as "American" and not as a Virginian or Carolinian or Bostonian first, is what most nations go through in their formative stages. This patriotism also meant self-governance, it meant basic civil liberties, it meant making a world without kings; in a word, it was the patriotism of the enlightenment.

In the 19th Century, with the increase of religious vigor, patriotism became more closely identified with evangelical Christianity.

There were also two very different interpretations of what patriotism was supposed to mean politically as the US came into the 20th Century. Isolationism and expansionism came to dominate the discourse. The isolationists, to their credit, tried to stop American imperialism in the Philippines and elsewhere. Isolationism and expansionism did a tug-of-war for awhile, with WWII and the Cold War killing bourgeois isolationism once and for all. Of course, the isolationists never really said anything about expanding into (read: stealing) American Indian land.

But those are all bourgeois versions of American patriotism. We have yet to hear from the working class on the matter.

One problem is how US patriotism denies the existence of other nations. The Black nation, the various Latino nations, the various American Indian nations...they're all told to get behind the American party and not have separate identities. That's one thing we need to struggle against the most. It's difficult for Americans to think of the US as a multinational country, and changing that will be a big step forward.

As far as what to do with American patriotism moving forward, I say, redefine it. Personally, I don't really get why leftists spurn patriotism. Sure, it's used as justification for terrible things, but so is democracy. Redefine what it means to make it progressive once more. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think it's what revolutionaries should do.


Yeah...that's wrong. If you read any honest history of the Civil War, the slaves started liberating themselves as soon as the Union Army was in the South. Emancipation had to be decreed because it was already becoming reality, and the North couldn't afford to pass up the huge influx of Black volunteers that were basically trying to join them for a year and a half.
Yes, and also through Emancipation Lincoln stopped Britain and France from potentially recognizing the Confederacy. Britain was abolitionist through and through by that time, by making the war about emancipation vs slavery, British intervention was out the window. The Emancipation Proclamation just made a lot of sense from just about every perspective; the careful wording also kept some states and forces who weren't as hot on ending slavery still within the Union fold, since it didn't free the slaves but classified slaves as resources of rebellious states and thus could be confiscated by Union forces. Lincoln's legacy lies in the wisdom of Emancipation (interesting how he wasn't really an abolitionist and yet that became his place in history).

[Lacrimi de Chiciură]

Can someone clarify for me how the Democratic Party moved from smearing the Republican Party as the party of "free love and n*gger loving" (I'm not making that up), to the party that they are today...? I'm not saying today's Democratic Party doesn't have racist elements, but the Republicans are now widely considered to be the most - hmmm - obviously racist party.

During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, the Republicans adopted the "Southern_strategy" to consolidate their representation of the white racist demographic.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy)

[death_by_semicolon]

Agreed. The tipping point was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Prior to that, the Dem Party was essentially two parties divided geographically- North and South. Up to that point, the South still had a legacy of aversion toward the Republicans left over from the Civil War and Reconstruction. The racial resentment of LBJ (a Dem) signing the Civil Rights Act became a new motivational source of votes for the Republicans, which they continue to embrace today. Both parties are garbage, though.

Regarding patriotism here, it has too many sources to count. Many of them, particularly in the last 60 years or so, are completely fabricated, arrogant, brutish, embarrassing, and only serve to promote imperialist geopolitical agendas. I'm all for loving one's own country (I love mine), but not to the point that it becomes a nationalist superiority complex...which, to be honest, is what "American exceptionalism" actually is. From a social and economic standpoint the only thing "exceptional" about America in recent decades is it's exploitation of the inter- (and intra-) national working class, indigenous people, and environment.

[FreeFocus]

The origin of American patriotism? The Doctrine of Discovery, Christianity, and their disastrous applications in the ethnic cleansing and claiming of of North America. Americans always speak of being a "shining example," being that "shining city upon a hill." The rhetoric in the 1600s is the same as the rhetoric today, except today's is applied to the entire world and there's real science behind propaganda and brainwashing now.

[the last donut of the night]

The origin of American patriotism? The Doctrine of Discovery, Christianity, and their disastrous applications in the ethnic cleansing and claiming of of North America. Americans always speak of being a "shining example," being that "shining city upon a hill." The rhetoric in the 1600s is the same as the rhetoric today, except today's is applied to the entire world and there's real science behind propaganda and brainwashing now.

This.

I think we should also see how American patriotism can be very racist as well.

[Raúl Duke]

I don't know much about the origins of U.S. Patriotism but I'm guessing that this sentiment has many expressions (just as, arguably, there could be many visions of what the "American Dream" is).

However, I do know that one expression of U.S. nationalism was towards a sense of exceptionalism and that the U.S. was an example for the world. This led them to believe that they were entitled to commit to the Monroe Doctrine towards the rest of the American continent (in particular Latin-America).

If you look at U.S. propaganda after the Spanish-American War till WWI or WWII you can see how the U.S viewed their colonies and other countries (i.e. as children/savages to be taught by Uncle Sam).

In a sense, this type of U.S. nationalism, the American exceptionalism and/or the "American example", fuels some excuses used for U.S. imperialism. Afgahnistan and Iraq are still viewed or were viewed as "savages" (children) that need to be taught/civilized by the U.S.