January 2011

Our article in the February issue about a wounded Union soldier in the Civil War (“Asa Smith Leaves the War”) stirred the memory of Mrs. Joseph E. Danaher of North Syracuse, New York. Both her maternal great-grandfather, George Gleasman, and his brother, Godfrey, served with the 97th Regiment, New York Volunteers, although they were well over the maximum enlistment age of forty-five. Godfrey, the younger of the two, enlisted first, on November 30, 1861, giving his age as forty-four. Two weeks later George joined up; he couldn’t say he was forty-four without being a twin, and he couldn’t say he was older than Godfrey without possibly being turned down, so he said he was forty-three.

It has been said that true patriotism never flags; Dr. Samuel Johnson went further, declaring that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Certainly, in the panorama of American history, many a rogue can be detected peering from behind the American flag, and today a red, white, and blue decal is no guarantee of anything.

One might have corresponding doubts about the Pledge of Allegiance, which, after all, is a type of loyalty oath—and everyone knows that any traitor worth the name will unblushingly swear to anything, while he has riot and sedition in his heart. Actions do speak louder than words.

There I am in corduroy knickerbockers and black cotton stockings, standing beside my desk at attention in Miss Sykes’sThird Grade room of the Martha A. Baker School in Mattapan. The time is the last month or so of the War that is going to End All Wars and Make the World Safe for Democracy. Our boys Over There—spearheaded by the Yankee Division—are punching holes in the Hindenburg Line. The Huns are running in terror; the Beast of Berlin and the Clown Prince are trembling in their shiny spurred boots. We are pledging allegiance. Most of us wear lozengeshaped Junior Red Cross buttons, though I, in a subsequently regretted surge of affection, gave mine to Marion Henries. Miss Sykes, for all her patriotic fervor, insists on the decencies. Edwin McDonald is not allowed to wear his Celluloid pin that reads “To H-LL with Kaiser Bill.”

The Panama Canal was the biggest, most costly thing Americans had ever attempted beyond their borders, as was plain to everyone in the summer of 1905, and particularly to the man most responsible for the project, Theodore Roosevelt. But as Roosevelt also knew full well by then, and as the American people were beginning to suspect, the Canal was so far a colossal flop. Earlier, when a group of Yale professors had challenged the legality of the American presence in Panama, Roosevelt had answered grandly, “Tell them I am going to make the dirtfly on the Isthmus.” That was supposed to have squashed all such talk and fixed public attention on ends instead of means. Henceforth the President would speak of building the Canal as though it were a mighty battle in which the national honor was at stake. It was just the way the ill-fated Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had talked twenty years earlier.

It would have taken considerable effort to locate an Allied fighting man on the battle line in Western Europe on September 10, 1944, who doubted that the end of the war was just around the corner. To American GI’S and British Tommies up front, heartened by six weeks of unrelieved victory, the chances of being home by Christmas were beginning to look very good indeed.

Those six weeks had been spectacular. Since late July, when the Anglo-American armies had burst out of their Normandy beachhead, the vaunted German army had fled for its life. Narrowly escaping encirclement at Falaise, nearly trapped against the Seine, harried out of Paris, driven pell-mell toward the Siegfried Line, which guarded the borders of the Third Reich itself, the German forces in France had lost a half million men and 2,200 tanks and self-propelled guns. It was a rout, a blitzkrieg in reverse.