Cecilia Elizabeth O'Leary
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By: Princeton University Press
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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 19th Century -> General
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4
Average rating: 5.0 of 5
Excellent history of American patriotism 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.
Before the Civil War, Americans spoke of the United States as a plural noun; after the war and Reconstruction, Americans spoke of the United States in the singular: a nation. How and on what basis, after the wartime deaths of over half a million Americans, did a broken country reassemble itself into an unprecedentedly singular unit? As another historian of patriotism, I can tell you that Cecilia O'Leary's *To Die For* is a powerful, evocatively written set of answers to this question. Focusing on patriotic activism in the US in the half-century after the Civil War and especially organized patriotism's peak between the 1890s and World War I, O'Leary shows how race, or whiteness more precisely, came to dominate the criteria for national reunion and national belonging. Coinciding with the rise of Jim Crow in the South, an invented history of the Civil War--how Confederates and white Northerners waged a trivial "strife of brothers"--substituted itself, and effectively (in the eyes of white Americans) erased, the history of how African Americans had fought for their own freedom. Even Union veterans' organizations and the Woman's Relief Corps, an independent association of black and white women who had demonstrated their loyalty to the Union cause, marginalized their black membership or became racially segregated under pressure from white members interested in fellowship with the white South. When commemorating the Battle of Gettysburg on its fiftieth anniversary in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern Democrat in the White House since the Civil War, was flanked by white veterans in Confederate uniform as well as in Union uniform, and made no mention of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. This story of how patriotism became "racialized" is the most meaningful contribution of O'Leary's book.Her book also contains the best history yet of how the American flag became conceived as an object capable of being desecrated. Flag politics originated in the 1890s among white reformers concerned about immigration and even, in the case of Francis Bellamy (author of the Pledge of Allegiance, 1892), among Christian socialists. The movement spread to patriotic groups both conservative and reformist. Finally, O'Leary captures the shift in patriotism with the First World War, when the U.S. government came to involve itself directly in fostering patriotism--what had been the work of voluntary associations--and when patriotism, more than ever, became synonymous with conformity.
*To Die For* leaves room for plenty of additional work to be done on this and related topics. The scholarly literature on the history of American patriotism is, with a few exceptions, in its infancy, dating from the end of the Cold War. As historians, we still need to know more about who and where and how. O'Leary's very broadly conceived cultural history is in some ways hampered by the youth of the field at large, in places slipping into generalities. However, her book is extremely strong, not least for its writing style: evocative, vivid, and accessible.
Her book is required reading for anyone interested in the history of American nationhood. Some modern conservatives of late have cast a fond look backward at the patriotic crusades of the 1890s, but O'Leary's book shows that the political right's current control of patriotism and its symbols is not foreordained. It also shows us how the bases for national unity are ever-changing.
Editorial Review:
This text claims that most trappings of America's national icons are modern inventions that were deeply and bitterly contested. While the Civil War determined the survival of the Union, what it meant to be an American remained an open question, as the struggle to make a nation moved off the battlefields and into cultural and political terrain. This study explores the conflict over what events and icons would be inscribed into national memory, what traditions would be invented to establish continuity with a "suitable past", who would be exemplified as national heroes, and whether ethnic, regional and other identities could co-exist with loyalty to the nation. The book traces the origins, development and consolidation of patriotic cultures in the USA, from the latter half of the 19th century, up to World War I. The author suggests that the paradox of American patriotism remains even today, and asks whether nationalism and democratic forms of citizenship are compatible.
