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How American patriotism was designed
Cecilia O'Leary's book "To Die For" covers the fifty-year period between the Civil War and the First World War, and shows how our modern concept of patriotism was created and given its meaning during that time. If you had assumed that the Pledge of Allegiance, Memorial Day, and the cult of Old Glory have always been with us, you should read this book and have your eyes opened. Patriotism, as we experience it today, is the result of a lot of planning and effort.

To summarize her argument, American patriotism was constructed after the Civil War as a way of reuniting the North with the defeated South on the basis of White supremacy. Organizations of veterans on both sides, and organizations of women as well, purged themselves of Black members in the course of achieving what they considered a national reconciliation. Public institutions did likewise. Patriotic symbols, celebrations, and rituals were created during this period to encourage good citizenship and loyalty. The efforts that went into this project have been forgotten, perhaps on purpose.

I had never given much though to the origins of these symbols, like the Pledge. I just assumed, as I think I was supposed to, that they were always there, transcending history, never bothing to think that everything has a history, and that there might be some interest in seeing what it is like. Growing up in the South, I had always had to face the kind of mindless gung-ho patriotism that infests that region more than any other, and I often wondered how that could square with the ritual display of the Stars and Bars and the glorification of the "War Between the States". Her book brings it all out.

In her pages, you will meet organizations you may never have heard of, like the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of Northern Civil War veterans, and its Southern counterpart, the United Confederate Veterans. You may be surprised by the number and strength of Women's organizations in this period, and by their complex struggles involving suffrage, race, and concepts of social duty.

I was personally struck by the often-repeated phenomenon of liberals, reformers, and even socialists getting co-opted into the system's ideological mechanisms. I would never have guessed that the author of the Pledge of Allegiance was the cousin of the socialist author of "Looking Backward". I was also struck, and hard, by the tradition and extent of vigilantism in America. I don't know if Europe has anything quite like it. The book is full of examples of it, from Confederate veterans terrorizing Blacks to mobs lynching preachers and Wobblies.

In spite of the many grim elements of the story, I was struck by how possible it is to change the concept of what it means to be an American. I have always felt excluded by the current definition. I come away from "To Die For" understanding that what we call "patriotism" is not burned into stone, and that people like myself can affect how this concept is redefined in the future.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Historians are only now beginning to study the subject of American patriotism. They will be using Dr. O'Leary's book for a long time to come.

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Childhood Friend Makes Good!
I have the honor to be a childhood friend of the author. We met in the second grade. Our father's had beeen classmates at Stanford University. CeCe has to be one of the most interesting, creative searchers for truth that I have ever met. I'm glad to see that the childhood sense of adventure, the tendancy to question "true beliefs", and the spirit of a real survivor are still alive and well. Although I am of White Southern Slave Owning heritage, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in American history and the American Psyche. If you ever have a chance to meet Dr. O'Leary, I'm sure you'll join me in considering her a charming and fascinating human being. Susan Merchant.

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Very good as far as it goes
O'Leary's book examines an aspect of American life and thought which too many scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are prone to take for granted: the ways in which patriotism was expressed, mostly by quasi-public rather than formal state institutions. Starting from the reasonable point that patriotism could not possibly have meant the same thing to everyone, O'Leary develops a sophisticated and difficult to label examination of it. At length, she demonstrates that another, more constructive form of patriotism was possible. In particular, opposition to the color line could be found among Grand Army of the Republic veterans for far longer than it was evident among the general population; but by the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg in 1913, their numbers and energy vitiated by the passing decades, even the GAR had basically capitulated. The result of this capitulation was that traditional masculine values such as combat heroism essentially displaced the constitutionalism and defiant commitment to inclusionist politics of abolitionists, suffragists and other reformers as the prime ingredient in patriotism. But the book should not be interpreted as a principally feminist interpretation of patriotism; it is, rather, a sectional one. This is a function of O'Leary's conclusion that the white South was increasingly able to demand the North acquiesce in and even copy its views on race as the price of national unity. After careful consideration, and comparison against personal experience, I am forced to concede that the clear implication that the minds of white Northerners were and remain more malleable than those of their Southern counterparts is a correct one. A useful follow-up to this implication (which O'Leary fails to adequately develop) would be research to examine why white Southerners, having experienced crushing defeat in battle, proved less willing than mid-twentieth century Germans or Japanese to reject their own historical social and political order and gradually come to imitate that of the war's victors. Modernity, in the sense of a lesser degree of urbanization, is probably a factor. This book is reminiscent of, but not truly comparable to, Waldstreicher's dissection of American nationalism in its first fifty years because Waldstreicher devotes far less space to the issue of African-Americans, largely because so few were free during the period his book covers (although their placement at the end of his book underlines their future significance to the definition of patriotism). O'Leary introduces other oppositional forms of patriotism, particularly in the story of Francis Bellamy, the social gospel advocate who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance but felt constrained to offer either liberty or justice so that the Pledge would be acceptable to patriots of the rights and the left. Ultimately, however, they function as asides, a major weakness which may or may not reflect pressure from the publishers to limit the size of the book. It therefore becomes impossible to avoid the conclusion that African-Americans are the very heart of O'Leary's argument that patriotism over a period of fifty years after the Civil War became less legitimate, with a further radical downturn in its social utility when the Federal government moved during World War I to enforce it. Conservatives, or simply readers accustomed to a drier presentation, would like to be able to say that the black victims of hundreds of lynchings and riots died as a result of something other than patriotism, but racism was inseparable from the patriotism of both average and elite (represented by the Supreme Court) white people as early as the 1880's, almost making the book's principal focus after that time superfluous.