More Thoughts on the Flag

Last week I discussed the importance of symbols in political life, and of the flag in particular. In this essay, I want to explore both how the American flag gets repurposed toward ends other than its intended ones and what that all portends.

Let’s begin with a couple of important speeches from the early part of the 20th century that come from the pen of Albert J. Beveridge, a Republican Senator from Indiana, one of the leaders of the Progressive movement, and also a Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer of John Marshall.

In his terrific history of US foreign policy, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776, the historian Walter McDougall divides American history into two periods that he analogizes to the Old and the New Testaments in Christian scripture. The Old Testament period, more inward-looking, resembled Israel of old with its promise of a “Holy Land” occupied by a “chosen people” who had little to do with the nations around them. America, defined by primarily by what it “was, at home,” an example to other nations, “preached the doctrines of Liberty at home, Unilateralism abroad, an American system of states, and [later] expansion.” These Old Testament traditions were “coherent, mutually supportive, and reflective of our original image of America as a Promised Land.”

The New Testament era consisted of “Progressive Imperialism, Wilsonianism, Containment, and Global Meliorism,” marked by the idea that “America had a responsibility to nurture democracy and economic growth around the world.” The traditions of the New dispensation (the one we live in still) “were far less coherent, clashed with each other and with the received Old Testament wisdom, and reflected an image of America not only as a Promised Land, but as a Crusader State called to save the world.” Does our temptation to “impose our will abroad, however virtuous our intent, violate the Old Testament principles that made American great in the first place”? Can we “be a Crusader State and still remain a Promised Land? That question hangs over our third century.”

What was the turning point that moved us from being a Promised Land to being a Crusader State? It was, according to McDougall, an event that Americans may know about but don’t pay sufficient attention to: the Spanish-American War (although he nods toward industrialization as the definitive material factor). Just as Abraham Lincoln was the great interpreter of the meaning of the Civil War, so too Albert Beveridge (who had also written a biography of Lincoln) was the great interpreter of the Spanish-American War. Beveridge employed the symbolism of the flag to justify America’s “resistless march toward the commercial supremacy of the world” and the establishment of “our principles over the hearts of all mankind.” Beveridge never doubted that he was on the right side of history or that the flag was the appropriate symbol of such rightness, of “the gospel of liberty.” In an address to a Republican assembly in 1898, Beveridge asked those preparing to vote:

Will you say by your vote that American ability to govern has decayed; that a century’s experience in self-rule has failed as a result? Will you affirm by your vote that you are an infidel to American power and practical sense? Or will you say that ours is the blood of government; ours the heart of dominion; ours the brain and genius of administration? Will you remember that we do but what our fathers did we but pitch the tents of liberty farther westward, farther southward we only continue the march of the flag? The march of the flag!

Further:

as our commerce spreads, the flag of liberty will circle the globe, and the highways of the ocean — carrying trade of all mankind, be guarded by the guns of the republic. And, as their thunders salute the flag, benighted peoples will know that the voice of Liberty is speaking, at last, for them; that civilization is dawning, at last, for them — Liberty and Civilization, those children of Christ's gospel, who follow and never precede, the preparing march of commerce! It is the tide of God’s great purposes made manifest in the instincts of our race, whose present phase is our personal profit, but whose far-off end is the redemption of the world and the Christianization of mankind.

Beveridge believed “we are God’s chosen people” and “Abraham Lincoln was his [God’s] minister,” who alone understood that God’s “great purposes are revealed in the progress of the flag, which surpasses the intentions of Congresses and Cabinets, and leads us like a holier pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night into situations unforeseen by finite wisdom, and duties unexpected by the unprophetic heart of selfishness.” In other words, minding our own business is a kind of selfishness, a keeping of our lights under a bushel.

Beveridge believed America had the divine task of civilizing the world. In an even more important speech he gave on the floor of the Senate in January of 1900, Beveridge defended the idea of empire, arguing that America had a divine mandate to rule over the Philipines, for the “Star of Empire,” beginning in Bethlehem, had moved westward before finally and definitively shining its light on America.

This is the “empire” of which the prophetic voice declared “Westward the Star of Empire takes its Way”—the star of the empire of liberty and law, of commerce and communication, of social order and the Gospel of our Lord—the star of the empire of the civilization of the world. Westward that star of empire takes its course. And to-day it illumines our path of duty across the Pacific into the islands and lands where Providence has called us. In that path the American government is marching forward, opposed at every step by those who deny the right of the Republic to plant the institutions of the Flag where events have planted that Flag itself.

Beveridge, believing in the principle of "self-governance," asserted that some races and nations were incapable of it, and thus in need of "instruction and guidance." To leave the Philipines under their own governance would be to "say that barbarism and undeveloped resources are better than civilization and the earth's resources developed." Annexing Cuba, which he saw as a "mere extension of our Atlantic shoreline," would be a "prouder Cuban destiny than separate nationality." The key to civilizing the world was American wealth and "administration." America might need Cuba for security reasons, but "Cuba needs the United States for Cuba's salvation." In a particularly telling analogy, with reference to the new territories acquired in war, Beveridge preached that "what war and nature--aye, what God hath joined together" mere politicians could not "put asunder."

And then this:

Here is the program of reason and righteousness, and Time and Events will make it the program of the Republic:
First: We have given Porto [sic] Rico such a civil government as her situation demands, under the Stars and Stripes.
Second: We will put down the rebellion and then give the Philippines such a civil government as the situation demands, under the Stars and Stripes.
Third: We are regenerating Cuba, and when our preparatory work is done, we should have given Cuba such a civil government as her situation may demand, under the Stars and Stripes.
The sovereignty of the Stars and Stripes can be nothing but a blessing to any people and to any land. [Emphasis in original.]

Civilization is preserved only by "the most superior nations extending it," by the method of "colonization where the superior nation can establish itself among the inferior races." National greatness requires that we become colonizers and impose "orderly administration" on our subjects.

The institutions of every nation follow its flag. German institutions follow the flag of the Fatherland. English institutions follow the banner of St. George. French institutions follow the tricolor of France. And just so, American institutions follow the emblem of the Republic. Nay! Our institutions not only follow the flag, they accompany it. They troop beneath its fold. Wherever an American citizen goes, he carries the spirit of our institutions. On whatever soil his blood is shed to establish the sovereignty of our flag, there are planted the imperishable seeds of the institutions of our Nation; and there those institutions flourish in proportion as the soil where they are planted is prepared for them.

Likewise, Woodrow Wilson used the symbol of the flag to justify America's sacred and redemptive mission in the world. Convinced as he was of America's righteousness, Wilson believed that America thus had a messianic purpose in the world. He expressed this idea clearly in a speech he gave at Independence Hall on July 4th, 1914. Again, the symbol that embodied this salvific plan was not a crucifix, but a flag:

A patriotic American is a man who is not niggardly and selfish in the things that he enjoys that make for human liberty and the rights of man. He wants to share them with the whole world, and he is never so proud of the great flag under which he lives as when it comes to mean to other people as well as to himself a symbol of hope and liberty. I would be ashamed of this flag if it ever did anything outside America that we would not permit it to do inside of America. ...

My dream is that as the years go on and the world knows more and more of America it will also drink at these fountains of youth and renewal; that it also will turn to America for those moral inspirations which lie at the basis of all freedom; that the world will never fear America unless it feels that it is engaged in some enterprise which is inconsistent with the rights of humanity; and that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity. [Emphasis added.]

One might rightly say that Wilson turned America itself into a symbol, the incarnation of abstract right(s) and the carrier of God's presence in time. These Wilsonian ideals were very much present in the speeches and policies of George W. Bush as well, and remain a vital force in American politics. I think we understand American foreign policy better if we remember some of McDougall's main points: that America and its foreign policy derive from religious sources and employ religious imagery; that "idealism" and "realism" don't adequately capture the complexity of our affairs and approaches; and that our self-understanding of our place in the world is internally disputed, fractured, and incoherent. The debate of whether the use of religious symbolism with the flag as the preeminent symbol amounts to a truthful recognition of America's place in the world or stands as an example of idolatry and hubris is one of the deep divides in our politics. But there’s no doubting the New Testament linking of the flag to imperial ambitions, and the Old Testament tradition mostly saw empire as, well, a threat to democracy.

By Jeff Polet

Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation

Related Essays