Patriotism from the Ground Up

In 1946, Merle Curti's The Roots of American Loyalty offered a narrative history of American patriotism, tracing a "pattern of emotions and ideas" from the eighteenth century up to World War II (p. ix). Curti sought to promote a "more intelligent and understanding patriotism" in contrast to the "blind unthinking love of country" that he saw embodied in veterans groups and hereditary societies' identification of loyalty to America with militarism, nativism, and free-market capitalism (p. vii). But in the half century since Curti's book appeared, a new round of red scares and foreign wars associated the language of patriotism even more firmly with the political right, so much so that subsequent generations of scholars, especially those who came of age in the 1960s, by and large steered clear of the topic. Historians abandoned the study of American patriotism in the 1960s not only because they found the professional patriots repugnant but because the prevailing paradigm used to study it went out of favor. Curti's pioneering work grew out of an intellectual climate in the late 1930s concerned with defining an American culture, in particular understanding the myths and symbols that held Americans together. This concern continued in the postwar years, paralleling the Cold War and the rise of the American Studies movement and consensus history, and culminated in sociologist Robert Bellah's characterization of an American "civil religion" in 1967.1 Since then, although the civil religion paradigm continued to inform important studies such as Sacvan Bercovich's The American Jeremiad (1978), its influence paled beside historians' efforts to characterize the distinctive beliefs of smaller groups, especially the working class, immigrants, African Americans, and women. His