Making Patriots.(Review)

Walter Berns Making Patriots. The University of Chicago Press, 150 pages, $20

This (too) short book grew out of an essay written by the distinguished political philosopher Walter Berns for The Public Interest. What it does is to probe into American history in search of the meaning and implications of the Declaration of Independence and its immediate progeny. Professor Berns asks: What was meant--is meant?--by our pledge of allegiance to the flag and to the Republic for which it stands? The author knows what was meant by those who coined the words and by those who fought to give the words standing in an independent country. He knows to declare our republic unique. Walter Berns can be pretty assertive in expressing his own views but to say that much about America calls for a little rhetorical caution, so he lets Thomas Pangle say it:

 
   The declaration by which Americans made themselves independent marked the 
   birth of the first nation in history grounded explicitly not on tradition, 
   or loyalty to tradition, but on an appeal to abstract and universal and 
   philosophical principles of political right. 

Therein hangs the story. There are problems in forwarding this view of the flag for three reasons. One, we don't know how to foster a belief in American principles among our children. This is so because the schools do not, under pain of violating academic freedom, feel free to inculcate a respect for American values. Two, we have been taught that our values are enduring only insofar as they are revalidated year after year by democratic procedures; which is to say, if they fall into disfavor, then the postulates of the American revolution are no longer enviable. And three, the American flag is something anyone who wishes is at liberty to burn. The Supreme Court said so, to be sure by the narrowest margin, but it is now accepted that burning the flag is a form of speech, therefore, to be safeguarded by the courts pursuant to our pledge, by whatever is the surviving altar, to defend the Bill of Rights.

Prof. Berns tells us that the Founders had no doubts about the principles they asserted. However bizarre, it is true that the revolution they engaged in continues a sacred right. Not so infidelity to government laws. On Prof. Berns's reading, the State of South Carolina had no right to defy the union, having become a constituent part of it. It would have had the right, by the constitutional canon, to rebel against the strictures of the United States government, but this right the Civil Warriors did not claim, claiming instead a right to dissociate from the union. In resisting this, President Lincoln was, correctly, defending a contract.

But the preservation of an America guided by the principles of the Declaration required ongoing generations of virtuous citizens. How was this to be brought about? Everyone who spoke out on the subject after the war acknowledged that the job of inculcating good citizenship--of making patriots--was an educational enterprise. But the word "education" does not exist in the Constitution, and occurs only once in the Federalist Papers. I am reminded of Alfred North Whitehead's observation that that which is not mentioned in the idiom of a period is that which is truly singular. The Founders did not speak of the responsibility of the state to inculcate virtue because they took it for granted that the state (read the states) would do so, and indeed the McGuffey Readers alone, we learn from Prof. Berns, were responsible for attitudes about America and about obligations to America in as many as one-half of our schoolchildren.

The obligation to educate in virtue was primarily that of parents: derivatively, of the schools they founded and governed. And the responsibility, also, of religion, almost ...