The New Old Glory
Lynne Cheney sees the world in black and white. Or, rather, in red,
white and blue. Or at least she would have young Americans see it that
way. She begins this forty-page children's book with a textbook example
of ethnocentrism:
I wrote this book because I want my grandchildren to understand how
blessed we are. I want them to know they are part of a nation whose
citizens enjoy liberty and opportunity such as have never been known
before.
Of course, Lynne Cheney has not seriously contemplated the levels of
"liberty and opportunity" in, say, the Netherlands or Canada today, or
Choctaw society in 1600. She doesn't mean her declaration as a serious
statement of comparative history--it's just nationalist cheerleading.
Americans fortunate enough to have lived in another country for an
extended period or to attend a college that prompts students to rethink
such pat evaluations will not be convinced by these sunny
pronouncements. Nor will Cheney's twenty-six alphabetical entries--"A is
for America," "B is for the birthday of this nation," etc.--win them
over.
But then, this book isn't aimed at adult readers. It's not intended to
be thought about. It may not even be intended to be read but merely to
be waved, for it includes no fewer than 120 different images of the
Stars and Stripes, from front cover to back.
But let's think about it anyway.
Perhaps the empty nationalism in A Patriotic Primer does more
good than harm. After all, Abraham Lincoln, among others, was favorably
influenced by Parson Weems's equally silly A History of the Life and
Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington: With Curious
Anecdotes Equally Honourable to Himself and Exemplary to His Young
Countrymen. Lincoln believed that the Founding Fathers were great
men. At the outset of the Lincoln-Douglas campaign, speaking on July 10,
1858, in Chicago, he said:
"I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence,
which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making
exceptions to it--where will it stop? If one man says it does not mean a
Negro, why may not another say it does not mean some other man? If that
Declaration is not...the truth, let us tear it out! [Cries of 'no, no!']
Let us stick to it then, let us stand firmly by it then."
Eventually, taking America's founding ideals seriously, Lincoln brought
the rights of man back to life in a nation that was not letting them
influence public policy.
Maybe somewhere out in Nebraska, or rural Alabama, or even in Somalia,
waiting to immigrate to the United States, some boy or girl will
similarly be made more idealistic about our nation's possibilities and
will become a better future leader because of this primer.
Certainly America-bashing is not the antidote to the unthinking--even
antithinking--nationalism that Cheney provides.
Moreover, Cheney has done her best to look like a multiculturalist. "H
is for Heroes," for example, and she lists a dozen: Abigail and John
Adams, Jane Addams, Clara Barton, Frederick Douglass, Nathan Hale, Chief
Joseph, Sam Houston, Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson and
Harriet Tubman.
This is the same Lynne Cheney who in 1994 lambasted the National
Standards for United States History for including Harriet Tubman while
"Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and
the Wright brothers make no appearance at all." But the primer's list of
heroes is only one-third white male! Shades of the dreaded standards!
Admittedly, Thomas Edison and the Wrights do get pictured under "Q is
for America's Quest for the new, the far, and the very best." But they
are paired with other pesky women and minorities: Louis Armstrong, Emily
Dickinson, Althea Gibson, Martha Graham and I.M. Pei, along with Ben
Franklin and Babe Ruth. Again, white males are in the minority.
Elsewhere, Harriet Tubman's alter ego, Sojourner Truth (actually, the
two were very different, but they always appear in textbooks as the twin
African-American women of the nineteenth century), makes an appearance
under "S is for Suffrage," along with eight other women. And "V is for
the Valor shown by those who've kept us free" includes not only Medal of
Honor winners Alvin York and Audie Murphy but also Molly Pitcher, the
54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team
of Japanese-Americans who fought in World War II.
We can poke fun at the astounding sight of a suddenly inclusive Lynne
Cheney, but surely, we must admit, it is a spectacle of progress. Would
we have her remain blinkered to view only white males as heroes?
To be sure, her novice status about women and minorities sometimes
shows: Thus one of her "S is for Suffrage" heroes is Esther Hobart
Morris. Morris hails from Cheney's "home state" of Wyoming, but Cheney
has not done her homework. In 1869, Wyoming Territory passed the first
law in the United States giving women the right to vote. Fifty years
later, with suffrage on the brink of national triumph, Wyoming Democrats
claimed they had started it all, which they had. So a pair of Wyoming
Republicans chose Morris, also a Republican but then long deceased, to
honor as the force behind that law and as its co-author (with Democrat
William Bright). Morris had once served for eight months as justice of
the peace of South Pass City. Eventually their crusade bore fruit: Not
only did Morris get a rock cairn and an inscribed sandstone slab in
South Pass City but eventually Wyoming installed her statue as its
initial entry in the National Statuary Hall in our nation's Capitol.
In recent decades, however, it became clear that Esther Morris had
nothing to do with the law. Wyoming's Division of State Parks and
Historic Sites installed a rare corrective on the American landscape: a
bronze plaque near the South Pass monuments that states, in part,
After her death in 1902, some historians claimed that Mrs. Morris had
helped Bright write the suffrage bill.... However, recent studies
indicate that Bright was the only author.
The National Statuary Hall's guidebook for a walking tour has also
gotten the word: It merely credits Morris as being a good justice of the
peace, if only for eight months. Trying desperately to supply some
reason for her inclusion in the hall, it notes also that "she was
present at a dinner in Cheyenne given for Susan B. Anthony" in 1895!
Perhaps that is why Cheney included her in America: A Patriotic
Primer.
The real problem with A Patriotic Primer is not with who does and
does not make its several lists of honorees. In a famous 1971 speech,
"White History, Negro History, Black History," Vincent Harding showed
the real problem with Cheney's entire inclusionist approach: It leaves
out conflict. Not only Martin Luther King Jr. but also Malcolm X can be
portrayed as wonderful American success stories--Malcolm rose from the
ghetto to speak at Harvard, did he not? But both of them were shot,
after all, and to the delight of important elements in our federal
government.
Cheney does designate "K is for King." She writes, "Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. fought for justice with prayers, peaceful marches, and some of
the most powerful words our nation has ever heard." But she takes care
not to mention or describe civil disobedience, preferring the softer
"peaceful protest." And she takes care not to mention King's phrases
about the "evil system in America" or any other statement with which
anyone might ever disagree.
From King's "I Have a Dream" speech she does not quote "I have a dream
that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of
its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are
created equal.'" Instead, she chooses "I have a dream that my four
children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by
the color of their skin but by the content of their character." For some
years, neoconservatives have used that sentence to claim that Dr. King
opposed affirmative action, despite his specific endorsement of
affirmative action on many occasions.
Conflict also disappears from her "V is for Valor" page: One
illustration commends "brave American soldiers [who] fought in the
jungles of Vietnam." Never mind that they did not fight to "keep us
free," that they did not win, that their defeat did not result in the
loss of our freedom and finally, that those who fought to end the war in
Vietnam, in and out of the military, were equally brave.
Avoidance of potential conflict must also account for her bizarre
choices under "I is for Ideals." Here Cheney submits the following list,
in chronological order: Mount Rushmore, Sitting Bull's Grave, the Alamo,
the Portrait Monument, the Tomb of the Unknowns, the Civil Rights
Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Hardly a list of ideals!
Mount Rushmore, of course, pictures four Presidents. Regarding its
ideals, Lame Deer, a Lakota leader, summed up its message as well as
anyone:
These big white faces are telling us, "First we gave you Indians a
treaty that you could keep these Black Hills forever, as long as the sun
would shine, in exchange for all the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. Then
we found the gold and took this last piece of land, because we were
stronger, and there were more of us than there were of you, and because
we had cannons and Gatling guns.... And after we did all this we carved
up this mountain, the dwelling place of your spirits, and put our four
gleaming white faces here. We are the conquerors.
Sitting Bull's Grave is even more problematic, because it turns out he
was buried twice! At Fort Yates, North Dakota, where in 1890 Native
American policemen killed him, a handpainted sign nailed
to a tilted wooden post says simply, "Burial Site of Sitting Bull."
Cheney's illustrator, Robin Glasser, shows us the more elaborate
tombstone across the border in Mobridge, South Dakota. This monument
dates only from 1953, when a group of enterprising grave-robbers from
Mobridge drove to Fort Yates with a backhoe, dug up the grave, stole the
bones and scurried back across the state line.
For years the Roadside America website has displayed images of both
gravesites, along with such other attractions as the World's Largest
Replica Cheese (Wisconsin, naturally) and America's Only Two-Story Brick
Outhouse (New York State). Exactly what American ideals does the
Mobridge grave exemplify? A certain twisted entrepreneurship, perhaps,
damn the moral consequences. For that matter, the events leading to
Sitting Bull's arrest and death--our illegally taking the Black Hills
because gold had been discovered there--also amount to twisted
entrepreneurship, damn the moral consequences. So maybe the monument is
appropriate.
The Alamo presents its own moral quagmire. The key ideal for which the
Anglos contested Texas, the one freedom Mexico would not grant them, was
the freedom to own slaves. That's not the full story, but it is a key
part, and an element the "Daughters of the Republic of Texas," who own
the site, never mention.
Two of Cheney's ideal sites do represent ideals, at least
biographically: the Portrait Monument of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (colloquially known as "Three Ladies in a
Bathtub") in the rotunda of the Capitol, and the Civil Rights Memorial
in Montgomery. Two others, the Tomb of the Unknowns and the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial, show respect and perhaps grief for our war dead but
make no claims for their idealism.
Ideals can be controversial. Mine might not be yours. If we phrase them
so we can all agree on them, they might become so vague as to be
content-free. Obviously we do not want to think about them, certainly
not argue about them, at least not while reading A Patriotic
Primer. We just wanna feel good.
So how do we deal with books like this primer? Surely not by teaching
children the opposite of ethnocentrism: "America is the most evil
nation," as an unreconstructed Stalinist said to me in the aftermath of
9/11. Such a judgment is even less warranted than Cheney's frenzied
flag-waving.
America's children need the skills to do their jobs as Americans. What
are their--our--jobs as Americans? Individually we may be bus drivers,
investment bankers, sociologists--but surely our job as Americans
is to bring the America of the future into being.
Looking at the past, thinking about American history, can surely help
our children do their job as Americans. For example, understanding what
caused antiracist idealism to increase during and after the Civil War,
then what caused it to wither in the period 1890-1925, only to
resurface after 1954, can help us perceive what actions now might
increase the chances for racial justice in America. The same is true for
gays in the military, what to do about Saddam Hussein, whatever.
What George W. Bush needs from our children and from the rest of us,
whether he knows it or not, is for us to think. Not flag-wave, not
America-bash, but think.
Unfortunately, thinking is the last thing Lynne Cheney means her book to
provoke. In this sense, while unabashedly nationalist, America: A
Patriotic Primer is profoundly unpatriotic.
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