Nelson Plan to Save the Planet!
http://www.NelsonPlanSaveThePlanet.com 8-6-5pm
1. Use the Pickens Plan For Energy
www.PickensPlan.com T. Boone explains the Pickens Plan briefly  6 minutes.
www.PickensPlan.com/news Boone Speaks Click Video Topeka Town Hall 7-30-08 1 hour 5 min
www.EndAddictiontoOil.com    www.TheWindTurbines.com   
  www.TheNaturalGasCars.com            www.UseSolarPowerEnergy.com   .
2 . Conserve the Planet 
www.DropOfOil.com Reduce waste saving "One Drop Of Oil" at a time.
www.DropOfOil.com/SaveThe/Planet1.html  Reduce consumption saving "One Drop Of Oil" at a time.
3 Change our Culture and Patriotism
 www.AmericanPatriotismNeeded.com  Get Americans to be patriotic (This Is going to be hard.)

While we rally 'round the flag, boys,
Rally once again,
Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom!
—George F. Root

Although it has been amended, formally as well as by judicial interpretation, the Constitution written in 1787 has ordered the affairs of this nation for more than two hundred years. We have become so accustomed to it that we might take its longevity for granted, but it is, in fact, remarkable, especially when compared with the experience of other peoples. There are more now, but when I last had reason to look into this matter—in 1983, as a member of the American delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva—there were 164 countries in the world, and all but six of them (Britain, New Zealand, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Libya) had written constitutions. But of those 158 written constitutions, more than half had been written after 1974, and, if the past is any guide, many of them will be rewritten or replaced in the future. France, for a conspicuous example, has had five republican constitutions in the period when we have had one, and, to update the old joke involving the cynical Paris taxi driver, "there'll be a sixth."

Many factors account for our success, not the least of them being the Constitution itself and the remarkably learned and talented men who drafted it. (Jefferson, in Paris at the time, called the Constitutional Convention an "assembly of demi-gods.") Then, unlike France, America did not have to deal with a sullen nobility, dispossessed by the revolution of its property and privileges but not of its hopes to regain them. (Tocqueville had this in mind when he said that the "great advantage of the Americans is that they arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution, and that they [were] born equal instead of becoming so.") Unlike Poland, this country was not surrounded by powerful neighbors with hostile intentions; and (according to Federalist 2) it began with a people "speaking the same language" (unlike Belgium), "professing the same religion" (unlike what was Yugoslavia), "attached to the same principles of government" (unlike Spain), "very similar in their manners and customs" (unlike Canada), and a people who had established their general liberty and independence "by fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war." Abraham Lincoln referred to them as "the patriots of seventy-six" and wondered whether the men of his time (and ours) would be prepared to do as they did. He had reason to wonder about this, especially because what they did in 1776 was to fight for a principle, or an idea, that later generations might take for granted or misunderstand.

I said in the first chapter of this book that patriotism means love of country and implies a readiness to sacrifice for it, to fight for it, perhaps even to give one's life for it. But, aside from the legendary Spartans, why should anyone be willing to do this? Why, especially, should Americans be willing to do this? In theory, this nation began with self-interested men, by nature private men, men naturally endowed not with duties or obligations but with certain unalienable rights, the private rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of a happiness that each defines for himself, and, again in theory, government is instituted only "to secure these rights." So, to repeat the question, why should self-interested men believe it in their interest to give their lives for the idea or promise of their country?

As one might expect, Lincoln provided the best answer to this question. I refer here, at least initially, not to the Gettysburg Address, or any other of his formal and famous speeches, but to an informal (in fact, extemporaneous) "address" delivered from the White House balcony to the men of the 166th Ohio regiment on the evening of August 22, 1864. He began by thanking them for their service to the country and continued by saying this:

I almost always feel inclined, when I happen to say anything to soldiers, to impress upon them in a few brief remarks the importance of success in this contest. It is not merely for to-day, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children's children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives. I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours. I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father's child has. It is in order that each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence: that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright. . . . The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.

Everything Lincoln says is true: their interests were bound up with the country's interests; in a way, their interests, if not identical with the country's interests, were dependent on them. But one has to wonder whether this argument would carry any weight with "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot," who, as Thomas Paine wrote even in 1776, "will shrink from the service of their country." Such persons might see that the country deserves to be defended, but also that it is in their interest that someone else do the defending; their motto is, "Let George do it." Jean-Jacques Rousseau had these calculating men in mind when he said, in effect, that reasoning on the basis of self-interest alone would not lead anyone to put his life at risk for another or for his country.

The Founders were aware of this problem. They knew, and accepted as a fact, that the nation was formed by self-interested men, men, as John Locke puts it, naturally in a "state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit . . . without asking leave or depending on the will of any other man." But they also knew, as Locke knew, that these men ceased to be autonomous, or simply self-interested men, when they entered civil society and agreed to be governed. That agreement made them citizens, and a citizen is obliged to think of his fellows and of the whole of which he is a part. This requires that he possess certain qualities of character, or virtues, and, as Madison says in Federalist 55, "republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form [of government]." Because these qualities cannot be taken for granted, they must somehow be cultivated.

So it was that Lincoln, as I explained at some length in chapter 5, used his words and the occasion of the Civil War to promote a love of country, reminding us that as citizens we are bound to each other and across the generations by a cause we hold in common, that there is a price to be paid for what he called (in his address to the Ohio regiment) "our birthright," and that we are indebted to those who have already paid it. So, too, a grateful nation erects monuments and memorials to him and the Founders, to the end that generations of Americans might stand in awe of them and of their words carved in the walls of the memorials; and it names its states, counties, cities, parks, boulevards, and schools after them. Their stories are the nation's story, and telling it should be the nation's business; in fact, it should be an important part of the civics curriculum in our schools. It is a way of inculcating in children a reverence for the past and its heroes, with the view of causing them to love their country. More generally, it is a way of preparing them to be citizens. We used to do all this, but it is rarely done today. Our schools teach "social studies," but neglect American history and biographies; and while our universities continue to offer courses in political theory, the theory taught is no longer what it was when Jefferson proposed the teaching of Locke's treatises and Sidney's discourses on government. Locke and Sidney, Montesquieu and even Rousseau, have given way to Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, none of them a champion of constitutional government.

It is important to understand that America is the result of the coming together of theory and practice, and nowhere is this more evident than in the men who founded it. They were both political theorists and political practitioners, or, to put it differently, there was not then, as there is now, a division between intellectuals and politicians. The Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, men who had distinguished political careers, but who also wrote books and scientific papers, and founded universities (Jefferson, the University of Virginia; and Franklin, the Philadelphia Academy, which became the University of Pennsylvania). Not only that, but Franklin was one of the founders of our first so-called learned society (the American Philosophical Society), and Jefferson served as one of its first presidents. As for James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, they combined to write The Federalist (or Federalist Papers), which has been described in our own time as "the most important work in political science that has ever been written, or is likely ever to be written, in the United States."

But where there was once a unity there is now a division. Our politicians typically know nothing about what is going on in the world of political theory, and our theorists typically do not believe it part of their job to promote the cause of republican government. Some do—those who are not Marxists or "postmodernists"—but even they are likely to teach a version of republicanism different from that espoused by the Founders. There are no citizens in this new version, not in any meaningful sense, and no common good, only "autonomous" individuals, each with his own idiosyncratic view of the good. It follows—or is said to follow—that government may not put the weight of its authority behind any particular view of the good. On all such matters, it must be neutral or, as the current cant would have it, nonjudgmental.

This new republican theory made its first public appearance in the dissenting opinion written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a free speech case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1925. Holmes said, and among libertarians became famous for saying, "If, in the long run, the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces of the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way." This view was repeated, again in a dissenting opinion, by Justice Hugo Black in a Communist Party case in 1961. As he put it, "education and contrary argument" may provide an adequate defense against communist (or fascist) speech, but if that "remedy is not sufficient," he added, echoing Holmes, "the only meaning of free speech must be that the revolutionary ideas will be allowed to prevail." First expressed by dissenters, this is now the accepted or prevailing view. The only meaning of free speech turns out to mean that it is worse to punish the advocacy of Stalinism or Hitlerism than to be ruled by a local Stalin or Hitler. This, quite obviously, could not have been the view held by James Madison and the other members of the Congress who drafted the First Amendment in 1789. They were sensible republicans.

Among other things, they knew what the Founders generally knew, and what they emphatically say in Federalist 2, namely, when instituting a government, the people are expected to surrender "some of their natural rights, in order to vest [the government] with requisite powers." But Holmes and Black are unmindful of this. Unlike Madison and the other authors of the First Amendment, they treat the constitutional right of freedom of speech as if it were a natural right, the right men possessed in the state of nature; there, as autonomous individuals, men might speak (and do) as they please without regard to political consequences because, there being no political community, nothing said (or done) could have political consequences. But, as the Founders made clear, that ceased to be the case when men entered civil society and formed a political community.

Under what is now the prevailing view of the First Amendment, however, men retain the right to speak as they please, regardless of the consequences of their speech, because the government is forbidden to weigh those consequences or take them into account. Just as Congress may not make any law favoring religion, especially one religion over another, so it may not favor, or put the weight of its authority behind, one or another view of republican government. Accordingly, while Americans, out of habit, might continue to "pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands," the Republic itself stands for nothing in particular, which means that the flag stands for nothing in particular. This, of course, was not the view of those who designed it. For them the flag, and its ceremonies, was one of the means of promoting patriotism.

The flag carried by the Continental army in January 1776 had thirteen stripes and the British ensign in the upper left-hand corner; but, after we declared our independence in July of that year, the Continental Congress resolved that "the flag of the thirteen United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white: that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation," which is to say, a new and different kind of country. Congress later declared the "Star-Spangled Banner" to be the national anthem, and June 14 to be Flag Day, and, later still, John Philip Sousa's " Stars and Stripes Forever" was designated the national march. As Madison indicated, republican government especially requires public-spiritedness, and Congress obviously intended the celebration of the flag—on Flag Day, for example—to be one of the means of promoting it.

In due course, the governments of the United States and forty-eight of the fifty states enacted statutes forbidding the burning (and, generally, the desecration) of the flag. They saw it as the symbol of this new country, this novus ordo seclorum, a country dedicated to the principles set down in the Declaration of Independence: liberty, equality of opportunity, and religious toleration. Its friends pledge allegiance to it and salute it, and its enemies burn it. (What better way to express contempt for the country than by burning its flag, or otherwise showing disrespect for it, for example, by spitting on it or by wearing it attached to the seat of one's trousers?) And when a person was tried and convicted under one of those statutes, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction, saying, "The state [of Nebraska] may exert its power to strengthen the bonds of Union, and therefore, to that end, may encourage patriotism and love of country among its people."

But this was said in 1907, before the new political theory took hold. In 1984, with his friends chanting, "America, the red, white, and blue, we spit on you," one Gregory Lee Johnson burned the American flag and was convicted under a Texas statute forbidding the desecration of a venerated object; and in 1989 the U.S. Supreme Court, by the narrowest of margins, declared the statute a violation of the First Amendment. Writing for the five-justice majority, Justice William Brennan said that Johnson's act was a form of expression, that the First Amendment protects the freedom of expression, that the Texas statute was not neutral insofar as it was aimed at this particular kind of expression, and, therefore, was unconstitutional.

This was sufficient to dispose of the case, but Brennan went on for another five pages to argue that Johnson was convicted for exercising the "freedom that this cherished emblem represents." Like the American Civil Liberties Union, Brennan believes that the flag stands, above all, for freedom of expression, which implies that, by prohibiting Johnson from expressing himself, the state of Texas, not Johnson, had committed an offense against the flag. His argument, although not stated as such, takes the form of a syllogism: the flag stands for the Republic, the Republic stands for freedom of expression, therefore the flag stands for freedom of expression.

But the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, not expression, and, whereas all speech may be expression of a sort, not all expression is speech, and there is good reason why the framers of the First Amendment protected the one and not the other. A person can express himself in isolation, or (and it amounts to the same thing) by burning the flag or a draft card, by denouncing Catholics, or by marching through a Jewish neighborhood brandishing swastikas. But speech implies a listener—one speaks to someone—and, as well, the willingness to be a listener in return. In a word, speech implies conversation and, in the political realm especially, deliberation. It is a means of arriving at a decision, of bringing people together, which requires civility and mutual respect; and in a polity consisting of blacks and whites, Jews, Muslims, and Christians, liberals and conservatives, and peoples from every part of the globe, civility and mutual respect are a necessity. So understood, speech is good, which is why the Constitution protects it.

Even so, the flag and country obviously stand for more than freedom of speech (to say nothing of freedom of expression). Even Johnson knew this. He was part of a group gathered "to protest the policies of the Reagan administration and of certain Dallas-based corporations," which, of course, he was entitled to do; indeed, he would not have been arrested—not under the statute involved—had he burned an effigy of Ronald Reagan. (Reagan may be venerated in some quarters, but he is not a "venerated object.") Instead, he burned the flag, evidently because he wanted to show his contempt for it and, therefore, what it stands for. If, however, the right to speak freely, or even to express oneself, is all it stands for, he could not have shown his contempt for it by exercising the freedom for which it stands. In that circumstance, he would be paying tribute to it; and that, surely, is not what he intended to do.

I do not mean to belittle the importance of freedom of speech; as I suggested above, it is an essential feature of republican government. I mean only to say that the flag stands for everything the country stands for, and, therefore, that Brennan's understanding of it is partial or incomplete. As such, it cannot explain why it is, as Brennan said it was, a "cherished emblem." It cannot explain why, for example, the marines on Iwo Jima, where some six thousand of them died fighting for their country, raised the flag on Mount Suribachi, in fact (as we know from the famous photograph, and especially from the Marine Corps Memorial in the Arlington National Cemetery), struggled to raise it on the only staff available to them, a piece of battlefield pipe. Nor can it explain why it was thought appropriate to drape the flag over the body of the marine sergeant killed in the 1998 bombing of our embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, or why the embassy staff—I'm quoting the Marine Corps report—"stood erect and silent as the body was removed from the rubble and placed in a waiting vehicle." The fact is, the flag is used to express what is in the hearts and minds of most Americans on such occasions. The chief justice said as much when, in his dissenting opinion in the Johnson case, he spoke of "the deep awe and respect for our flag felt by virtually all of us." We are, as the chief justice suggests, emotionally attached to it.

For it is our emotions, more than our rational faculties, that are triggered by the sight of the flag, not when it is used (or abused) for commercial purposes, but when it is waved and flown on Flag Day and the Fourth of July, and displayed at the various war memorials on the Mall in Washington or, for that matter, in towns and cities around the country, and on the battlefields at Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg, and at the cemeteries where those who fought and died are buried, not only at Arlington and Gettysburg, but in the faraway places we sometimes visit, among them, Manila in the Philippines, Cambridge in England, Château-Thierry in the north of France, and, perhaps most famously, above Omaha Beach in Normandy. The sight of it, especially in these places, evokes memories of past battles and of those who fought them, and to whom we are indebted. They served our country and were the better for it; by honoring them, as we do, we pay a service of our own and are the better for it. I can make this point with an analogy: not every American can be a Lincoln, but all Americans are made better by reading his words and coming to love him and the cause for which he gave his life.

To the end that we remember him, and by remembering, come to love him, the government authorized the building of the Lincoln Memorial; and no one, I think, not even the most zealous civil libertarian, would argue that the Johnsons among us are free to express themselves by spraying it with graffiti. There is something about the memorial that forbids its desecration, and, because it, too, causes us to remember, the same ought to be true of the flag.

As it happens, no one is burning the flag these days, not because everyone has come to respect it, but because, since flag-desecration is no longer illegal, there is now no point in burning it. Whatever its intentions, the Supreme Court has succeeded in putting the Johnsons among us out of business, or, at least, out of the flag-burning business. Nevertheless, efforts have been made to amend the Constitution, giving Congress the authority to "prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States," and, according to the public opinion polls, something like two-thirds of the American people favor its adoption. But I doubt that any good can come of it. It can be adopted only over the disdainful opposition of intellectuals in the national press, the law schools, and, of course, the American Civil Liberties Union, and, whatever its outcome, the debate will be nasty and serve no good purpose. Better, then, to leave well enough alone.

The four dissenters in the second of the flag-burning cases (United States v. Eichman) said they feared, partly as a result of the Court's decision in the Johnson case, that "the symbolic value of the American flag is not the same today as it was yesterday," and that Americans living today would have "difficulty understanding the message [it] conveyed to their parents and grandparents." But there is reason to believe their fears are exaggerated. As is made clear in the epilogue that follows this chapter, the flag continues to be treated by some Americans with the respect it deserves, and most Americans, I should like to think, will be moved by the story recounted in it, just as they were moved by the film Saving Private Ryan with its scenes of the flags in the cemetery in Normandy.

Debating American Identity, 1890-1920
by Jonathan M. Hansen

Read an interview with the author.

On September 9, 1918, the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs appeared in Cleveland Federal Court to answer charges that he had violated the Espionage Act in a speech at Canton, Ohio, the previous June. According to the district attorney, Debs had impugned the U.S. government, derided the federal courts, praised the Russian Bolsheviks, and mocked the idea of a war fought to make the world safe for democracy. Worse, from the district attorney's perspective, was Debs's "sneering attitude towards patriotism and his attempt to make patriotism as we commonly understand it, ridiculous and absurd by his biting sarcasm." Noting that Debs had discharged these remarks "in the open air" and in the presence of "women and young men," and taking into account his "forceful and earnest delivery," the district attorney concluded that Debs was a threat to "the morale of the people."

After three days of testimony the government rested its case, whereupon Debs's counsel, Seymour Stedman, prepared to call his first witness. At Debs's insistence, Stedman informed the court that the defendant would plead his own cause. There was no point refuting the prosecution's report, Debs declared; it was entirely accurate. At issue, rather, was whether his Socialist critique was really un-American, as the prosecutor charged, or the very embodiment of patriotism, as he himself had been arguing for twenty-five years. Resolved that it was not Eugene Debs but American institutions on trial in Cleveland federal court, Debs believed that no one was more qualified to rise to their defense than he.

Debs began his plea to the jury by accepting full responsibility for his acts and utterances, assuring his peers that he harbored no guilt in his conscience. He then responded to the government's charges one by one: he had impugned the U.S. government for thwarting the advance of industrial democracy; he had derided the federal courts for persecuting the defenders of beleaguered workers; he had praised the Russian Bolsheviks for overthrowing the tyranny of the czar; and he had mocked the idea of a war fought to make the world safe for democracy because the people themselves had never yet declared a war. Renouncing the district attorney's patriotism, Debs invoked another model. Patriotism, he argued, meant more than shedding blood and upholding law. As manifested in American history, patriotism meant defending sacred principles and resisting tyranny and oppression, often in defiance of the law. The court of King George III had branded America's Founding Fathers criminals and traitors, Debs reminded the jury. "Isn't it strange," he remarked, "that we Socialists stand almost alone today in upholding and defending the Constitution of the United States."

This book poses the problem of U.S. civic identity at the turn of the twentieth century: how does a country founded on liberal principles and composed of diverse cultures secure the solidarity required to safeguard individuality and promote social justice? The problem of American civic identity has received considerable attention of late from scholars and cultural critics concerned about the current state of liberalism and democratic participation. Rampant individualism, economic disparity, and the impression of a government for sale on the open market induce political cynicism and a consequent retreat from public life that transforms citizens into spectators. Local political passivity coincides with the rise of religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism around the world, lending this problem urgency. As the United States confronts vexing social and political challenges at home and abroad, more and more Americans may be heard to wonder, in the words of historian David A. Hollinger, "How Wide the Circle of the 'We'?"

Mine is the story of a group of American intellectuals who believed that the solution to the problem of American civic identity lay in rethinking the meaning of liberalism. Between 1890 and 1920, William James, John Dewey, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Randolph Bourne, Louis Brandeis, and Horace Kallen, among others, repudiated liberalism's association with acquisitive individualism and laissez-faire economics, delineating a model of liberal citizenship whose virtues and commitments amount to what I have labeled "cosmopolitan patriotism." While celebrating individual autonomy and cultural diversity, the cosmopolitan patriots exhorted Americans to embrace a social-democratic ethic that reflected the interconnected and mutually dependent nature of life in the modern world. From their perspectives, Americans could best secure the blessings of liberty and property by ensuring their universal distribution.

The cosmopolitan patriots constituted no discrete political or intellectual community. In independent but overlapping criticism, they attempted to reconcile American nationalism with the liberal principles undergirding the American republic. Far from impinging on individuality, the cosmopolitans asserted, a nation genuinely committed to liberty could marshal the political, economic, and cultural resources required to safeguard individual autonomy from the illiberal outcomes of a corporate-industrial, mass-market society. Cosmopolitan patriotism maintained a critical tension between local, national, and international affiliations. Locally, the cosmopolitan patriots sought to revive the reciprocal face-to-face community relations once assumed to nurture and sustain individual autonomy. Nationally, they challenged Anglo-American cultural assumptions about the meaning of American identity. Just as individuals achieved self-realization in the context of community, so cultural, ethnic, and voluntary communities could realize their potential by contending in the public sphere. Internationally, the cosmopolitan patriots repudiated diplomacy that advanced Western interests at the expense of other nations. Democracy imperiled anywhere jeopardized democracy everywhere; what was good for America was likewise worthy of the world.

The subjects of this study did not refer to themselves as cosmopolitan patriots. By calling them patriots, I mean to accentuate their claim that critical engagement with one's country constitutes the highest form of love. The cosmopolitan patriots rejected the notion ascendant in their day that patriotism entails uncritical loyalty to the government and to the military in wartime. The cosmopolitan patriots were not blind to the magnanimity of soldiers sacrificing their lives on the battlefield; some of them endorsed America's entry into World War I. But all insisted that love of country, like sacrifice itself, could take many forms. At the end of the nineteenth century, the cosmopolitan patriots launched a vigorous critique of American corporate capitalism, sexism, and racism in the name of equal opportunity and equality before the law. Critical vigilance became the keystone of their patriotism. Loving their country, they vowed to extend its privileges and immunities to all Americans regardless of gender, class, ethnicity, or race. Exalting public duty in the interest of private right, they summoned fellow citizens to assist individuals whose political, economic, or social circumstances compromised their pursuit of happiness.

The cosmopolitan patriots were devoted to America's founding principles, but they saw no reason why those principles could not extend over the entire earth. They regarded democracy as a universal impulse, hence they did not construe the U.S. Constitution as the final word on democratic institutions. The cosmopolitans regarded as compatriots individuals of any nation whatsoever who shared their commitment to equal opportunity and equality before the law, just as they denounced individuals, institutions, and governments—at home or abroad—that compromised those fundamental tenets. The cosmopolitan patriots expected American foreign policy to uphold the democratic ideals regulating life inside the republic. In a nation founded on putative universal values, promoting those values universally constituted the ultimate form of self-defense.

By adopting the adjective cosmopolitan to describe a group of patriots, I want to highlight their perspective on social and political affiliations. Liberals of their day are thought to have divided into two camps regarding the role of ethnoracial affiliation in people's lives. Universalists viewed ethnoracial allegiances as parochial and divisive, the source of untold misery the world over; cultural pluralists celebrated ethnoracial allegiances as wholesome and inviolable, the sine qua non of individual and collective agency. The cosmopolitan patriots recognized partial truth in both accounts. They shared universalists' commitment to individual self-realization but insisted that individuals realize themselves in local, national, and global communities. They acknowledged that communities and nations have historically inhibited individuality at home and abroad but argued that this need not be so. A nation genuinely committed to liberal individuality, they maintained, would view affiliation as a product of choice rather than a consequence of stultifying ascription.

In appropriating cosmopolitanism as a middle ground between universalism and cultural pluralism, I cut against the grain of a historical tradition that has long associated cosmopolitism with what Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. derided as "a rootless self-seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost." To Holmes, as to so many critics, cosmopolitans did not recognize the culturally contingent character of their privileged moral and economic position. Cosmopolitans were social parasites, preying upon the work of others. More recently, scholars have dismissed cosmopolitan patriotism as theoretically contradictory. Patriotism's passions are said to be corrosive of individuality and moral universalism, just as individuality and moral universalism are thought to weaken affective bonds.

The cosmopolitan patriots of this study were neither parasitical nor theoretically naive. They recognized that affiliations change with context. The unvarnished claims of either universalism or cultural pluralism are plausible only in a political or moral vacuum. In real life, individuals maintain overlapping, often competing, allegiances—as Eugene Debs discovered when canvassing locally for international socialism, as Jane Addams learned when taking the measure of her "cosmopolitan" neighbors. Most people do not or cannot strive for theoretical coherence in their workaday lives. Rather, individuals maintain dynamic equilibrium between their private and public, local and national, national and international affiliations—precisely the pragmatic response I associate with cosmopolitan patriotism. Which is not to say that sustaining such equilibrium is easy or pretty or perhaps even possible. But such is nevertheless what most individuals attempt to do.

The cosmopolitan patriots recognized the complexity of people's lives. Rather than regarding cosmopolitan patriotism as a means to reconcile universalism with cultural pluralism or liberalism with nationalism, we do better to view cosmopolitan patriotism as a site on which these and other ideologies conflict. Hence, readers seeking harmony will be disappointed by this book. Cosmopolitan patriotism promises not harmony but historical insight into the moral and political dilemmas that confront individuals who love their country and yet refuse to separate the privileges and immunities Americans enjoy from the plight of individuals and communities around the world. As the cosmopolitan patriots observed, acknowledging the equal moral standing of all human beings need not entail renouncing the various private, local, and national institutions in which morally equal individuals find meaning. Recognizing the range of affiliations individuals maintain, the cosmopolitan patriots worked through local, national, and international organizations to promote the political, economic, and cultural integrity essential to individuality.

Besides refining our understanding of cosmopolitanism, this book expands our knowledge of American patriotism, a project initiated by historian Merle Curti half a century ago, but one that has remained largely dormant since the Vietnam War due to the recoil of the American Left from a sentiment seemingly indistinguishable from chauvinism. Lost in the silence has been our awareness that patriotism once sustained a democratic critique of political, economic, and social injustice, a point especially worth preserving as it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish democracy from mass consumption and mass consumption from liberalism. This book also contributes to recent scholarship challenging Progressivism's tarnished image as an elite-driven, corporate-administrative push for social control. Though some Progressives were undeniably elitist, others—among them James, Addams, Debs, and Brandeis—shared John Dewey's conviction that radical, participatory democracy represented the only hope for self-realization in a radically polarized economy.

Emanating from within the discipline of history, this project joins the current discussion among philosophers and political and literary theorists about "globalization." The cosmopolitan patriots occupy a middle ground between contemporary liberal and poststructuralist positions on imperialism, for instance, by applying the discourse of political economy to the problem of cultural integrity. Where liberal scholars view political and economic independence as prerequisites of individual autonomy, poststructuralists deny a necessary causal link between politics, capital, and agency. Privileging culture over capital, poststructuralists have ostensibly restored agency to oppressed individuals and communities, highlighting their critical adjustment to and refashioning of conditions and customs once thought to be the source of their undoing. In an era of globalization, poststructuralists argue, individuals and communities construct evanescent identities from limitless cultural options—in conscious defiance of conventional claims like kin and country, and with no apparent concern for political or economic power.

The poststructuralist account of identity formation is valuable insofar as it highlights the dynamism and contingency inherent in cultural interaction. But scholars who uncouple cultural analysis from political economy risk constraining the freedom of those they seek to empower: first, by underestimating the importance of economic and political independence to individual and collective autonomy; second, by eroding cultural diversity itself. Surely cultures unable to perpetuate themselves scarcely warrant the name. The cosmopolitans illuminate this important, if familiar, debate. Experience among dislocated laborers, immigrants, and African Americans convinced them that culture was no substitute for economic and political justice. With cultural vitality and self-realization as their goals, they summoned Americans to address the economic and political disparity that eroded individual and collective autonomy, and hence the social reciprocity on which culture, like democracy, depends.

The cosmopolitans' recoupling of culture, economics, and politics spawned an attitude of humility toward the non-Western world that contrasts markedly with current enthusiasm for globalization. They welcomed the cultural contact that characterized their era, but they did not lose sight of its cost. They opposed unlimited Western expansion and defended unfamiliar cultures and governments. They ventured abroad—whether physically or figuratively—out of curiosity rather than insecurity or avarice. The more Western the world, the less it interested James and Addams, especially. The cosmopolitans viewed contact as an opportunity for self-reflection rather than self-assertion. Not presuming to save the world, they evinced a certain wonder, awe, and humility in and about the world—which, had it caught on, might have prevented some of the injustice that conventional liberalism spawned and then sought, guilt ridden, to correct.

Cosmic Patriotism

Eugene Debs's letters and papers suggest that the meaning of patriotism, like the nature of war, was changing in America at the turn of the twentieth century. In the aftermath of the Pullman strike, as Debs converted to Socialism, he referred to patriotism matter-of-factly as a liberating, revolutionary, and noble sentiment. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, Debs's references to patriotism became comparative, always invoking a good patriotism in opposition to a bad. Patriots had apparently become despots. As the world entered a twenty-year period of seemingly constant battle, Debs's revolutionary patriotism came under siege. He continued to associate patriotism with the defense of liberty and democracy, but other Americans had begun to imbue patriotism with a different set of values.

In March 1895, writing in the Railway Times, Debs recalled the events of the previous July that had led to his arrest for complicity in the Pullman strike. Debs argued that the court injunction precipitating the intervention of federal troops in the strike augured the return of despotism to America. "Only a semblance of liberty remains, when courts and the military put forth their unrestrained power," Debs had warned his readers. The collusion of public officials and railway owners highlighted the need for "a new party to take the reigns of government and bring it back to pristine purity." Just as their forefathers had done before them, Debs urged "all who are animated by the spirit of patriotic devotion to liberty to unify to perpetuate the liberties of the people." Confident that patriotism denoted a devotion to freedom, Debs did not qualify the term as he would come to do, nor did he acknowledge contest over its meaning. Indeed, in a speech that same month, Debs swaddled Pullman strikers in the American flag, as yet unperturbed by the flag "fetishism" he would eventually denounce. The Stars and Stripes "tell of strikes for liberty and independence," Debs remarked in an attempt to legitimate his role at Pullman; the American Revolutionaries themselves had been "strikers and boycotters."

Independence Day 1895 found Debs ruminating about the state of American liberty in a cell in Woodstock, Illinois, prison, as fireworks shook the countryside around him. Why celebrate the nation's birthday, Debs wondered, "when Liberty itself lies cold and stiff and dead, stabbed to death" by a federal injunction? Anxious about the future, Debs gazed back wistfully to liberty's past—to "the dead, who, when living, in the spirit of heroism expanded to the full stature of patriots and dared all things, battles, wounds, imprisonment, confiscation, and death, to secure liberty for themselves and their posterity." A year later, on Labor Day, perceiving the further erosion of freedom, Debs remarked, "again, I ask celebrate what?" Once more he found solace in the "the patriots" of the American Revolution who, "fired by the immortal declaration of Patrick Henry, . . . wrested from the British crown the jewel of Political Independence." If the American worker would only wield his ballot like the patriots of old, Debs observed, Labor Day might become "a second Fourth of July—a day when Americans may repeat the language of the Declaration of Independence." Debs's indictment of corporate America had sharpened, but he retained faith in patriotism based on equal opportunity, equality before the law, and consensual government—patriotism that compelled critical vigilance. Daring all and fearing nothing, the American Revolutionaries had proved their devotion to a cause larger than themselves. A little such patriotism, Debs believed, would go a long way toward beating back the egotism rampant in fin de siècle America.

Two years later, as President McKinley committed American ground troops to the Philippines, Debs began to qualify his references to patriotism. "We [socialists] are not afflicted with the kind of patriotism which makes the slaves of our nation itch to murder the slaves of another nation in the interest of a plutocracy that wields the same lash over them all," Debs announced in the Social Democrat. "It seems not a little singular that thousands are so patriotic (!) in a country in which the only interest they have is six feet in a potter's field." Detecting corporate capitalism's influence in stoking Americans' jingoism, Debs urged American workers not to let "the booming of cannon" silence their agitation. Beneath the uproar waged "the real warfare for humanity." The following year saw Debs's bitterness mounting. Alarmed by America's annexation of the Philippines, Debs declared the American "patriot" to be "the biggest humbug on earth. Under the pretense of loving his country, he struts and swaggers, prates about the 'flag' and the 'glories of war' and makes a spectacle of himself generally." This new "patriotism"—hereafter, he would allude to it in quotation marks—masked the self-interest of a plutocratic elite; emanating from "sumptuous banquet halls," it reflected the interests not of the soldiers who would be expected to surrender their lives, but of investors keen to open distant mines and markets. Debs would side with partisans of liberty against proponents of empire. He was "for the Filipinos," hoping beyond hope that they might "yet repel the invaders and achieve their independence."

The symbolic meaning of the American flag was changing too, according to Debs. Once thought to represent the principles underlying the American republic, the flag had become the emblem of the new patriotism itself. Like the new patriotism, the flag "fetish worship" demanded blind loyalty to state policy. On Independence Day, 1899, Debs scored the hypocrisy and braggadocio of those like Roosevelt, who elevated loyalty to the flag above defense of the nation's democratic institutions. "Thousands of orators all over this broad land will glorify the institutions under which we live," Debs observed. "In pride they will point to Old Glory and declare that it is a flag that waves over a free country." He would abstain from such celebration, having no respect for a flag symbolizing "capitalist class rule and wage slavery."

Debs was not alone in protesting the conformist thrust of the new patriotism. In the spring of 1900, the philosopher William Everett called the attention of the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College to patriotism's curious transformation from "a generous and laudable emotion" to "a paramount and overwhelming duty to which everything else which men have called duties must give way." Everett called on the "philosophers" before him to defend American principles from vicissitudes of "interest" and "passion." The field of linguistics constituted a crucial arena in this contest. Linguistically, Americans surrendered the enduring meaning of concepts like patriotism to fickle convention, rendering them "worthless when we come to some great public or private crisis." To Everett's mind, the industrial and cultural upheaval confronting his generation constituted one such crisis, and the apotheosizing of patriotism as obedience and soldiering illustrated the rule. Did philosophy have anything to teach patriotism, Everett asked, or could patriotism defy philosophy "as she claims the submission of every other human interest?"

The role of philosophy was to uphold standards of Truth and Right. The new patriotism undermined Truth and Right by valorizing a bankrupt ideal of virtue. Everett regarded virtue as both the sum and standard of citizens' joint enterprise. A virtuous citizenry did not hew to the dictates of corporate capitalist and government elites, but delineated its ideals collectively. It loved Truth and Right, not some flag or physical territory. Land could fall under evil proprietorship, so too a government and even a country: "a whole people may be wrong and deserve, at best, the pity of a real patriot rather than his active love." The point was not that standards of Truth and Right remained unchanged. Rather, the patriot defended a reading of Truth and Right that consisted of the sum total of past, present, and future experience—one that transcended his or her immediate perspective. To Everett, "America" constituted "something more than the single procession which passes across its borders in one generation: it means the land with all its people in all their periods; the ancestors whose exertions made us what we are, and whose memory is precious to us; the posterity to whom we are to transmit what we prize, unstained, as we receive it." Thus the real patriot acted and spoke "not for the present generation alone, but for all that rightly live, every event in whose history is inseparable from every other." What, then, should the patriot do? Anything that would promote his or her country's "perfection," though here too perfection was less something to be attained than a goal for which to strive. "What our country chiefly calls on us for is not mighty exertions and sacrifices," Everett insisted, "but those particular ones, small or great, which shall do her real good, and not harm." Like Debs's patriot, Everett's was a vigilant, engaged citizen quick with both criticism and praise, as ready to act locally as internationally, as concerned about others' liberty as he was about his own.

If it was the philosopher's job to demystify patriotism, it was the publicist's burden to inculcate it. But how should nations promote patriotism, E. L. Godkin asked in the summer of 1906 in the pages of The Nation? Although Godkin professed to be weary of the recent spate of legally mandated school programs designed to instill patriotism in students by rote, he admitted the legitimacy of the problem of loyalty in a nation founded on political commitments and composed of diverse peoples. In place of America's "idiotic flag-fetishism," Godkin offered the counsel of Edmund Burke. From Burke's perspective, loyalty was the stuff not of forced oaths but of like privileges and equal protection. Rising before Parliament in 1755, Burke urged his peers to "let the [American] colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government." Only then will they "cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of the power to tear them from their allegiance." After Burke, Godkin believed that reciprocity was the solution to the problem of loyalty: just as the citizen had to earn his or her rights, so the nation had to deserve its citizens' loyalty. Like Dewey, Godkin believed this quid pro quo to be essential in promoting an engaged and loyal citizenry. "The truth," wrote Godkin, "is that love of country, in the high and proper sense, cannot be taught. It is commanded by the country that deserves it. . . . Give men justice, freedom, and equal treatment before the laws, and you do more than all possible schools and schoolmasters to intensify their national love for land and kin. Try to stimulate this by hot-house methods, and you make patriotism artificial and false, an idle name; you stifle the noble kinds of love of country, now exemplified in Russia—the readiness to overthrow duly constituted authorities who betray the public trust."

In the labor strife that marked the era, the "old" and "new" patriotisms locked horns. Just as Debs urged workers to adopt the patriotism of the American revolutionary heroes and "strike for liberty" against corporate capitalism, so the captains of industry bid "loyal" workers to defend the American system against the alien influence of socialist agitators. When, in 1902, Debs's Americanism was impugned by capitalist detractors, he told a Boulder, Colorado, audience that "in the capitalist system" he was indeed "a rebel and not a patriot." But Debs's confident dismissal of "capitalist patriotism" belied a deeper problem. His principal rhetorical strategy for motivating workers to convert to socialism was being appropriated by his adversaries to ensure workers' loyalty to state capitalism—and it seemed to be working. In the summer of 1903, Debs noted the paradoxical effect of the new patriotism on his ideal of manhood. Responding to an announcement that the U.S. Postmaster General planned to commission railroad conductors as employees of the U.S. Postal Service—and thereby invoke the Sherman Act to derail a strike—Debs mourned that "this will make a scab, a patriotic scab, of every railroad man engaged in train service."

Debs viewed the global nationalist conflicts of the early twentieth century as a conspiracy among capitalists throughout the world to thwart the progress of international justice. "The chief significance of national boundaries, and of the so-called patriotisms which the ruling class of each nation is seeking to revive," he wrote in the Independent, "is the power which these give to capitalism to keep the workers of the world from uniting, and to throw them against each other in the struggles of contending capitalist interests for the control of the yet unexploited markets of the world." If Debs's conspiracy theory ignores the extent to which Western consumers—as well as capitalists—benefited from imperialism, it nonetheless highlights the connection between capitalism, imperialism, and the rise of the nation-state. All were implicated in the new patriotism. Writing in Miner's Magazine in 1902, Debs attributed America's aggression in the Philip