Norman Rockwell wonderfully captured this American notion with his 1943 illustration “Freedom of Speech.” In it a working man stands all alone at a town meeting where it is clear his words are being taken with respect. This is America at its finest: a guy with a case to make dares to stand up and take the floor.
John McCain
Today, many see U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona as the personification of the rebel American willing to take on the system. He’s a fighter who earned his standing as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Although he was repeatedly beaten, abused, and tortured, McCain refused the enemy’s offer to be released early.
As he would later write, “I knew that every prisoner the Vietnamese tried to break, those who had arrived before me and those who would come after me, would be taunted with the story of how an admiral’s son had gone home early, a lucky beneficiary of America’s class-conscious society. I knew that my release would add to the suffering of men who were already straining to keep faith with their country.”
McCain knew the power of such propaganda. He has described how his own faith in his country kept him alive during those horrible five and a half years in the notorious Hanoi Hilton: “It was hard to take our interrogators’ ridicule of our conviction that our loyalty to America was returned, measure for measure, by our distant compatriots. But we clung to our belief, each one encouraging the other, not with overexuberant hopes that our day of liberation was close at hand, but with a steady resolve that our honor was the extension of a great nation’s honor, and that both prisoner and country would do what honor asked of us.”
A student of Machiavelli would recognize why their patriotism and devotion grew steadily. I say this because the greatest bit of wisdom in The Prince is that loyalty to a ruler grows in direct proportion to the sacrifices made on his behalf. It’s certainly plausible that McCain’s five-plus years in a North Vietnamese prison made him more patriotic than before he was shot down.
“In prison, I fell in love with my country,” he wrote. “I had loved her before then, but . . . it wasn’t until I had lost America for a time that I realized how much I loved her.”
There, in a lonely cell somewhere in the middle of a foreign jungle halfway around the world, McCain clung to the part of America that his captors could never take from him. “I still shared the ideals of America. And since those ideals were all that I possessed of my country, they became all the more important to me.”
McCain once said that each POW would spend his time using his mind on different projects. Math guys would work on models and proofs. A third-generation Navy man, McCain focused on the countries of the world and where they went wrong. And when he came home, he set out to fix the country for which he had suffered and which he had served so well.
One of the things he has spent his lawmaking career trying to fix is the way we finance political campaigns. The problem begins when politicians start mortgaging themselves to contributors. It is hard to argue with McCain’s conviction that much of what is wrong in national policy-making results from the distortion of the piper calling the tune.
McCain’s election to the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate, his gutsy campaign for the presidency in 2000, and his successful fight for campaign reform in 2002 are right out of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He is the outsider standing up to the inside, the reformer fighting the system.
But most important, he is the idealist confronting the cynics.
In 2002, John McCain launched a new rebellion against what he branded “crony capitalism.” He called for far tougher measures than those proposed by either President George W. Bush or many Democrats. “Trust was sacrificed in too many corporate boardrooms on the altar of quick and illusory profits.”
John McCain knows that the American people, by nature rebellious, recoil most at being made to feel powerless. That, of course, was the spirit of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Joe Kennedy worried that it would make people in war-torn Europe think less of American democracy. He could not have been more wrong.
Those last words of Jefferson Smith on the Senate floor still hold power:
Just get up off the ground. That’s all I ask. Get up there with that lady, that’s up on top of this Capitol Dome. That lady that stands for Liberty. Take a look at this country through her eyes if you really want to see somethin’. And you won’t just see scenery. You’ll see the whole parade of what man’s carved out for himself after centuries of fighting. And fighting for something better than just jungle law. Fighting so he can stand on his own two feet free and decent, like he was created no matter what his race, color, or creed. That’s what you’d see. There’s no place out there for graft or greed or lies! Or compromise with human liberties! Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light. They’re right here. You just have to see them again. . . .
In November of 1942, the occupying Nazis issued a ban preventing theaters throughout France from showing any American or British films. French theaters chose Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith as the last English-language film to be shown before the ban went into effect. According to the Army News Service, one theater played Mr. Smith Goes to Washington every day for a month.
This is from the November 4 edition of the Hollywood Reporter:
Storms of spontaneous applause broke out at the sequence when, under the Abraham Lincoln monument in the capital, the word “Liberty” appeared on the screen and the Stars and Stripes began fluttering over the head of the great Emancipator in the cause of liberty. Similarly cheers and acclamation punctuated the famous speech of the young senator on man’s rights and dignity.
“It was . . . as though the joys, suffering, love and hatred, the hopes and wishes of an entire people who value freedom above everything, found expression for the last time.”
CHAPTER 3
The Reluctant Warrior
It occurred to me that the Rattle-Snake is found in no other quarter of the world besides America.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, 1775
If you’re an American, your favorite movie is probably Casablanca. At least, that’s what the surveys show. When you think of it, it’s hard to beat Humphrey Bogart as a world-weary nightclub owner in an exotic locale carrying a torch for the translucently beautiful Ingrid Bergman.
But there’s something else that locks this movie in our dreams. It’s about us. It’s about an American guy torn by his passion for a lost love and the need to fight a triumphant Nazism that threatens everything he holds dear. The Wehrmacht has overrun Europe. World War II is raging, the United States is still neutral, and here’s this Yank running a bar in a North African city that’s become a haven for refugees. He, too, is a refugee from the war and from the memory of a girl he loved and lost in Paris.
The movie script gives his name as Rick Blaine. But it’s the rogue persona of Humphrey Bogart that jumps off the screen. That’s what plays in our memory. In a very tough situation, he’s standing in for us at our best. He will fight when he has to and not a moment sooner. Until then, he sits out the war in Vichy-controlled Morocco.
“I stick my neck out for nobody,” he says when the collaborationist local police chief arrests one of the regulars at Rick’s Café, mainly in order to impress a newly arrived SS officer. Rick refuses to show concern even when this odious Major Strasser boasts of soon catching the great resistance leader Victor Lazslo.
“Excuse me, gentleman, your business is politics,” he says, getting up to leave. “Mine is running a saloon.”
It’s only when there’s talk of attacking America that our hero begins to suggest the stuff he’s made of.
MAJOR STRASSER: Can you imagine us in London?
RICK: When you get there, ask me.
MAJOR STRASSER: How about New York?
RICK: Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.
Now our guy is showing his teeth. His ideals, his love, and his country all on the line, Rick will commit himself to the
war against an evil he now sees in its face.
“I’m no good at being noble,” he bids farewell to his beloved Ilsa, who he’s learned is the wife of Victor Lazslo, “but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
There’s a fine reason why Casablanca is the most cherished American movie of all time. It gets to us Americans, stays with us, for the basic reason that it strikes at something deep in us. We’re proud to live in a country where every neighborhood, especially those “certain sections of New York,” would go toe-to-toe with the SS. We’re proud of an American guy who knows what’s worth fighting for and what isn’t.
This grand American notion of the reluctant warrior is a theme that we’ve treasured from our beginnings. We are not a country that’s ever been impressed by generals in epaulets and high-peaked hats. Our officers don’t strut. Our troops don’t goosestep. We deride a Fidel Castro who parades about in his rebel fatigues decades after the revolution has lost its zing. But while we reject the dandified haberdashery of war, we will strike back ferociously when attacked, when someone or something we value dearly is threatened.
“Don’t Tread on Me”
On September 11, 2001, New York firefighters offered their lives by racing up the steps of the World Trade Center towers as thousands raced down to safety. “This is my job,” said one brave fireman as he saw the question in the passing woman’s eyes. Meanwhile, in the skies over Pennsylvania a brave passenger yelled “Let’s roll!” as he and others rushed the cockpit. Why should we fear even a dangerous world when we have men like these?
There was also the reaction of our new, untested president. “This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger,” he said to a hushed audience in the National Cathedral that first Friday.
Hours later he stood amid the rubble of the World Trade Center, his arm slung over the shoulder of an older firefighter. “We can’t hear you!” someone yelled from the crowd. “I can hear you!” he yelled back through a bullhorn. “The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” At that moment Bush became president to all Americans. What the Supreme Court could not accomplish in December of 2000, this flash of fighting spirit did.
Our fierce reaction to the events of September 11 has been compared to the U.S. response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Both times the country was caught off guard. Both times we understood what our history expected of us.
Even back before the stars and stripes, we had a battle flag that rallied us and warned our enemies. On it was a coiled rattlesnake atop a bright yellow background, with the words “Don’t Tread on Me” emblazoned underneath. Nicknamed the “Gadsden Flag” for the South Carolina patriot Christopher Gadsden, it was quickly adopted as the standard of the then-fledgling Continental Navy. It was first flown in December 1775, not yet one full year into the Revolution.
Although the Gadsden Flag remains the most famous “Don’t Tread on Me” image, it wasn’t the rattlesnake’s only appearance during the Revolution. Marines in the Continental army were inspired to paint the same serpent on the sides of their drums as they marched into battle.
Benjamin Franklin was struck by the insignia’s message:
I observed on one of the drums belonging to the marines now raising up there was painted a Rattle-Snake, with the modest motto under it, “Don’t Tread on Me.” It occurred to me that the Rattle-Snake is found in no other quarter of the world besides America. She has no eyelids. She may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance. She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. The weapons with which nature has furnished her she conceals in the roof of her mouth so that, to those who are unacquainted with her, she appears to be a most defenseless animal. And even when those weapons are shown and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible; but their wounds, however small, are decisive and fatal. Conscious of this, she never wounds ’till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her.
Was I wrong, Sir, in thinking this a strong picture of the temper and conduct of America?
“The Rattle-Snake is solitary, and associates with her kind only when it is necessary for their preservation,” Franklin adds. This menacing icon of America’s independent nature symbolizes the instinct to ally with others when faced with a common danger.
George Washington
During the American Revolution, the artist Benjamin West was asked by King George III what he thought George Washington, the leader of the American revolutionaries, would do after the war. When West answered that Washington would return to his Virginia farm, the king replied, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”
As much as the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag and its accompanying rattlesnake, as much as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, Washington personifies the reluctant warrior. His victories at Trenton and Princeton not only kept the Continental army in the field, they kept his young country in the war. That brilliant campaign of retreat along the Delaware, his courage in the winter at Valley Forge, and his final triumph at Yorktown hold an illustrious place in military history.
But it was Washington’s quiet retirement to his plantation on the Potomac that most made him a noble model for the new republic. Once he had led his troops to victory against the British, he returned with dispatch to his beloved Mount Vernon. Called back in 1789 to become his country’s first president, he again set an example of disinterested service by limiting his tenure to two terms.
The manner of his second retirement was also standard-setting. In the autumn of 1796, he submitted an article to a Philadelphia daily newspaper, then spent the following weekend correcting the proofs. In this, his farewell address to “the People of the United States; Friends and Fellow Citizens,” Washington made three points.
First, he said he would not seek reelection to a third term. Second, he thanked the country for the honors it conferred on him and the confidence it had shown in him. Third, he issued a warning that said, in effect: Don’t allow America to be sucked into becoming some other country’s easy ally or automatic enemy:
The Nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, with of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.
Washington believed that the strength of a country’s readiness to fight necessary wars is fortified by its readiness to return to peaceful endeavors once the last necessary shot has been fired. It was a philosophy he had eloquently articulated twenty years earlier, during the height of the Revolution itself. “I shall constantly bear in mind that as the sword was the last resort for the preservation of our liberties, so it ought to be the first to be laid aside when those liberties are firmly established,” he had written from New Jersey in 1777.
Even as Washington made a dramatic point of withdrawing swiftly to Mount Vernon, he advised his country to draw back in the same way from “permanent alliances” that could lead us into other countries’ wars: “ ’Tis our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” He wanted America to play the field and avoid getting hooked up with one or the other European power, either England or France.
“In a word, I want an American character that the powers of Europe may be convinced we act for ourselves and not for others,” he said simply.
“No one better taught than Washington that the sword is readiest for its proper use when most swiftly relinquished after the crisis is over,” noted biographer Garry Wills. “He never glorified the sword. His own scheme of ornamentation
at Mount Vernon was peaceful and rustic—he directed that a dove of peace, with its olive in its mouth, be used as weather vane.”
Washington despised the pomp and opulence of the British royal court, and determined from the beginning to set a new model. A heroic general who could have made himself dictator for life, he calmly abdicated the spoils and laurels of victory for the freedom and dignity of private citizenship.
“When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen,” he wrote to the New York legislature in 1775, “and we shall most sincerely rejoice with you in that happy hour when the establishment of American Liberty, upon the most firm and solid foundations, shall enable us to return to our Private Stations in the bosom of a free, peaceful and happy Country.”
Translation: Excuse me, gentlemen, your business is politics. Mine is running a plantation.
Thomas Jefferson
On taking the presidential oath in March 1801, Thomas Jefferson reaffirmed the ideal set by George Washington. Like the first president, he wanted to keep the young republic clear of the perennially raging war between Britain and France. “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none,” Jefferson promised in his first inaugural.
At the time a small country, America would inevitably be the unlucky pawn if dragged into a war between the two early nineteenth-century superpowers. Though Jefferson favored democratic France against royalist Britain, he realized that the new republic’s survival hinged on staying neutral.
The brilliant Jefferson’s warning about “entangling alliances” would hold sway for a century. This policy of staying clear of European conflicts, of sticking to our business and own wars, continued right up until World War I.
The United States had done everything it could to stay neutral. Our slow entry into the great European conflict, which President Woodrow Wilson sold as a war to make the world “safe for democracy,” was followed by an eager desire to return home swiftly at war’s end.
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 168
