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1876: A Centennial Novel for the Bicentennial
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 27, 2009 04:57pm |
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| Category | Review |
| Author | Julian Moynahan |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Sunday, March 7, 1976 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Gore Vidal's and my generation (he was born at West Point, Oct. 3, 1925) was particularly distrustful of patriotic rhetoric. Growing up we were apt to snicker over the tremolo of the World War I vets in bedizened V.F.W. uniforms who orated at the school assembly for Flag Day and Armistice Day. And Edward Everett Hale's cautionary tale, "The Man Without a Country," with its cruel, unusual and vindictive punishment of the unpatriotic hero, failed to put a lump in our throats no matter how often we were made to swallow its dreadful nonsense.
The reasons are not far to seek: the Depression ("They put a rifle in his hand. ... They shouted Hip Hooray. ... But look at him today"); the goose-stepping nationalist frenzy of the Nazis and Fascists in Europe; the virtual eclipse of the Republican Party during our generation's nonage--all conspired to put us off the patriot game. If, as Vidal has Democratic Governor Tilden say in 1876, "those gentlemen [the Republicans] have only one real interest, and that is the making of special laws to protect their fortunes," it is equally true that the G.O.P. has often gained and maintained power by the patriotic appeal, by putting out more flags than anybody else. In the Depression, the forcing bed of my generation's youth, all us kids hanging on the corner understood these facts about Republicans and about patriotic rhetoric. It's surprising, and heartening, that a rich kid like Vidal developed the same understanding. But it's less surprising when you consider that he was a neighbor in the Hudson River valley of Franklin Roosevelt, the father of us all, who multiplied loaves and fishes and jobs for the poor and taught the rich, some of them, a more enlightened notion of self-interest than can be expressed by the image of hogs in star-spangled waistcoats gorging themselves at a trough painted red, white and blue. |
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