For The 4th, Independence[?] Day

Posted on Fri, Jul. 01, 2005

• Patriotism, pain and pride
• 93 years and 6 wars later, author's words still ring with truth

• PETER S. CANELLOS Boston Globe
  

• When the American literary lion William Dean Howells turned 75 in 1912, New York's superintendent of libraries asked him for some words of wisdom that could be read to children. Howells chose a subject that bristles with tension even now, 93 years later, as a vastly different United States prepares to celebrate its own birthday.
  

• "While I would wish you to love America most because it's your home, I would have you love the whole world and think of all the people in it as your countrymen," Howells wrote. "You will hear people more foolish than wicked say `Our country, right or wrong,' but that is a false patriotism and bad Americanism. When our country is wrong she is worse than other countries when they are wrong, for she has more light than other countries, and we somehow ought to make her feel that we are sorry and ashamed for her."
  

• There has been talk of sorrow and shame in Washington over the past month as members of Congress weigh in on the future of the Guantanamo Bay prison, where hundreds of enemy combatants picked up in Afghanistan are being held without normal legal protections. Some have claimed mistreatment, though the most disturbing allegations have not been proved.
  A growing chorus of Democrats, and some Republicans, are calling for closing the prison, arguing that it is, as Howells might put it, an island of sorrow or shame. But others, such as House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, stressed that Guantanamo inmates are treated quite well compared with prisoners in other countries, pointing out the horrors of prison camps maintained by Japan and the former Soviet Union in decades past. He suggested the enemy combatants even enjoy better conditions than they would in their native countries.
  "They've never been treated better and they've never been more comfortable in their lives," Hunter told a group of journalists two weeks ago, offering as a prop a plate of oven-fried chicken, one of the entrees served to inmates at Guantanamo.
  Meanwhile, the commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, took issue last week with critics of the Iraq war, arguing that some of the doubts being expressed by Washington politicians were undermining the troops. While acknowledging the necessity of debating the war, Abizaid suggested the stakes are different with troops in the field, that every expression of outrage in Washington harms the morale of soldiers in Iraq and thereby helps the enemy.
  The questions of whether the United States should hold itself to higher standards than the rest of the world, and whether those who seek to do so are helping the country or hurting it, have popped up in more or less the same form since the early days of the republic, when sentiment for war routinely swelled and receded like waves on a beach.
  The Howells precept is intriguing because he was noted both for his patriotism and his opposition to the Spanish-American War. His stance stemmed from his belief that the government and the press had misled the American people about the extent of Spanish aggression.
  The Spanish-American War had been over for 13 years when Howells offered his words of wisdom to New York's children, but critic Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker magazine believes the war was in Howells' mind when he stressed the patriotic necessity of dissent.
  Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, authors of "A Writer's Life," a new Howells biography, suggest in their book there is no clear evidence of what, if anything, prompted his ruminations on patriotism.
  Most likely, he was not striking out for any particular cause but merely offering a disinterested observation, as 19th-century men of letters were expected to do on important occasions.
  Reading Howells' words now, six wars later, what is striking is not the extent to which Americans disagree about their country, but how much patriotism they share.
  Almost no one, left or right, would disagree with Howells' claim that the United States has "more light than other countries." People disagree only on whether the greater light is immutable or must be fed, like a fire, through conflict and dissent.
  After 229 years, America's strength is in neither her faith nor her dissent. It is that both sides in her greatest disputes believe they are upholding her ideals. There can be no better proof of the force of American patriotism, or greater assurance of its endurance for decades to come.
  
• Peter S. Canellos is the Boston Globe's Washington bureau chief.