Spirited, messy debates over who deserves to be remembered or honored in the public square are necessary parts of a functioning democracy. But when something such as Mount Rushmore becomes a site of controversy, many ordinary people are likely to throw up their hands and ask: If we cannot agree on the majesty of that national monument, just what can we agree on?
“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” In fact, much of the greatest American art of the 20th century emerged from just such an attitude. The history and emblems of America, what used to be referred to as Americana, have proved to be worthy subjects for countless artists, composers, writers, and filmmakers, few of whom had backgrounds or politics that would suggest that they would have been readers of, say, The Conscience of a Conservative or A Choice, Not an Echo. American art, it turns out, once had the capacity to be patriotic without being political.
Take, for example, the case of arguably the greatest homegrown composer of the last century, Aaron Copland. A first-generation American, the son of Jewish parents who emigrated from Russia to New York, Copland found ample inspiration in the heritage and mythology of his country of birth. “I spent three years in Paris as a student, and you get very aware of French music as a separate entity in the world of music,” Copland said in a 1985 interview with WNYC radio. “The French are very proud of their French composers, and in the ’20s and early ’30s, I was preoccupied with the idea of writing concert music which was recognizably American in style.”
Well, Copland settled the score: In his music for the ballets Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), the composer conjured the brash gusto of the men and women who settled the West (or, in the case of Billy, who maintained a legendary criminal career in the West). Copland’s sense of the terrain and its inhabitants is utterly sure; listening to the “Hoedown” segment from Rodeo, one can almost picture a barn dance with pink and blue skirts swirling in the air. In A Lincoln Portrait (1942), Copland dared to imagine a musical equivalent to the soaring language of the 16th president (whose words are read in the piece), while, in assembling his score to the 1944 ballet Appalachian Spring, he chanced upon, and then resuscitated, the little-known Shaker tune “Simple Gifts” — identifying the heartrendingly straightforward melody that would anchor the ballet and reverberate through a million graduation ceremonies. Copland was no conservative — his liberal politics led to his being targeted during the McCarthy era — but he summoned a world in which the Wild West, the Great Emancipator, and a Shaker village were alive with artistic possibility.
We have become so accustomed to art that either denigrates or ignores American history that it is a shock to be reminded of earlier generations of artists who venerated not just the country’s ideals but also its outward symbols. Seized by a kind of patriotic earnestness during World War I, Boston-born impressionist painter Childe Hassam churned out a remarkable series of “flag paintings” in which Old Glory was the focal point. Some, such as Flags on the Waldorf (1916), depict realistically proportioned red, white, and blue flags drooping over city streets, but others feature almost cartoonishly outsized flags that nearly overtake the image. For example, Avenue in the Rain (1917), which has had a home in the White House since 1963, presents a street blanketed in flags draping from buildings, several of which are reflected on wet pavement below. Decades later, the work of a pair of patriots — one living, one dead; one Russian-born, the other a native of Washington, D.C. — was synthesized in a ballet singular in its adoption of American iconography, 1958’s Stars and Stripes. Putting to fresh use tunes by John Philip Sousa, choreographer George Balanchine dreamed up a ballet in which dancers were asked to match the pep and posture of a military regiment.
Like Copland and Hassam before him, Balanchine assumed a certain baseline pro-American sentiment in the audience that he was free to riff on and play with. These artists borrowed from the vast repository of American iconography to create works that reflected a deep-seated but unpretentious love of country. When, at the end of Michael Cimino’s Vietnam War masterpiece The Deer Hunter (1978), the kith and kin of a fallen veteran gather for a meal and begin to sing “God Bless America,” the point is not to boast but to grieve. After 9/11, when members of Congress assembled to sing that very same song, director Cimino recognized the echo. “They’ve been running Deer Hunter like crazy on Bravo,” Cimino told the New York Observer in 2002. “And here is the whole goddamn Congress singing ‘God Bless America’ on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. I said, ‘Holy s—, this is the ending of the movie.’” In both the movie and real life, patriotism was used as the glue to bind together a community in mourning.
At its most noble, patriotic art is a kind of invisible epoxy, promoting a sense that, if we can partake in a mutual love for the land we share, we can vanquish our differences. Little in contemporary pop culture seeks to promote such concord, although there are exceptions. In his documentaries on the Civil War, the Roosevelt family, or country music, Ken Burns has a way of making viewers feel that they have a claim on the stories he is telling, that the stories are ours. And Steven Spielberg’s great series of American history films, Amistad (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Lincoln (2012), sought to enlighten a populace that had become removed from the trials of generations past. In one extraordinary shot in Saving Private Ryan, a young woman typing letters of condolence to the parents of fallen World War II soldiers looks away from her typewriter and glances directly at the camera, making eye contact, for just a millisecond, with the Generation Xers in the audience who know little of such sacrifice.
If our nation is good enough to inspire artists of this type, it must be pretty good indeed. So let us listen, then, to Aaron Copland — not just the notes he wrote, but why he wrote them and the country he wrote them for.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
