On Patriotism and Other Things That Won't Die

Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. Garry Wills. 1992.

You have to hand it to Wills, man. He can really make a believer out of you.

I don’t think I’ve ever read another writer who loves America in quite the way Wills loves it, other than maybe Mark Twain or Toni Morrison, or John Brown - that is, loves it in the only way it should be loved: with great reluctance. I still have to write something up about Morrison’s Beloved, a novel at least as essential to understanding America as Huck Finn, but one thing both of those novels share with Wills’ best work is a sense of loving America in spite of yourself, not for what it is but for glimpses of what it could be. Langston Hughes articulated this best, of course. John Brown did too when he remarked, on his way to the gallows for taking up arms against an American military base, how beautiful the surrounding countryside was. But Wills is correct to credit Lincoln himself with first fully defining what it means to love America this way.

It’s in the struggle, the thing that makes America always interesting if rarely good. It’s in the fact that there is a goal we’re striving for, even if we always fall short of it. Wills isn’t sentimental about America, but neither were Twain or Morrison and neither was Lincoln. There’s no room for jingoism, for anything approaching fascism; this isn’t a nationalist patriotism, or a blood-and-soil patriotism. It’s a patriotism that can only be articulated with the full understanding that that articulation is happening on top of a graveyard. People died for this. Not all of those deaths were just. Most of them weren’t. To paraphrase Morrison, many Americans have “more yesterdays than anybody.” So what now? What does tomorrow look like?

I don’t know. Lincoln never got to see it, and I don’t know he would have cared for it. But who knows. Maybe he would believe that we’ve gotten closer to what America never has been yet, but yet must be. It’s nice to think so. Would that make it worth it? All of the death, the enslavement, the conquest, the war, the terror? My kid goes to school with Black kids and nobody thinks that’s especially strange (not in a way they’ll admit, anyway), and though it’s such a small thing there was a time when that wasn’t so. He’ll have a very different idea of what “American” means than I did growing up. I had a different idea than my mother did. So it goes. Maybe that’s all we can hope for.

But. But.

Maybe that’s still too easy. This is the genius, of course, of Lincoln’s speech and what Wills is perceptive enough to notice. The idea that: maybe we can’t. Maybe we shouldn’t. Maybe we don’t get to. Maybe we cannot hallow this ground: if it is to be hallowed, it’s been done already by people more qualified. What we have to do is be worthy of them. We are probably not worthy of them. But maybe some of us are, or were. Maybe a nation that produces a Sam Clemons, a Toni Morrison, a Lincoln, a John Brown, and a Garry Wills shouldn’t be counted out - maybe I could love Americans, join a struggle for Americans, even if that struggle is fought against America. All of those people are dead now, apart from Wills himself, who is very old and might never write another book. But maybe what we have from them all is enough. Maybe their bodies like so many others in this abattoir of a country lie moldering in their graves, but their souls, despite everything, go marching on.