My Country

My generation was fiercely patriotic growing up — at least by today's standards. What standards? Names of patriots fell from our lips with the same regularity and reverence old immigrant women held for saints we never knew. Their heroes were people named Anthony and Jude and Rocco and "the Little Flower." At school we learned of legends built around people a bit closer to the immediate world: Nathan Hale and Patrick Henry and Molly Pitcher and Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Admiral Dewey and Black-Jack Pershing.

People were still alive who remembered the Maine and the Lusitania. Uncles who fought in the Great War lent additional color to the patriotic fervor that in earlier times Teddy Roosevelt epitomized.

In the year that I entered school, the day began with the salute to the flag. "I pledge allegiance.."it began. Our hands were placed over our hearts. It continued, "...to the flag of the United States of America." Our hand that was pressed to the chest was stretched out straight in the direction of the flag, palm up, "...and to the Republic for which it stands." This was serious stuff. You could get beat up or go to jail (or both) if you were disrespectful. Hats were doffed. Stand up as the flag goes by. Molly Pitcher was a model for us all.

One day we were told that we couldn't do that full stretched arm salute anymore. Leave the palm pressed against the left breast. Nazis had stolen our style and it wasn't up for arbitration with them. The Nazis weren't going to abandon their dramatics whenever Hitler appeared. Never mind his lousy haircut.

My father was almost thirty-two when war was declared. There were conversations about his chances of being drafted and leaving us, his children, orphans. We were aware of the methods used by the Japanese to pacify China. Now they were in the Philippines killing Americans. The world was a mess. We went to war against Germany and Italy as well. Enemies to the East. Enemies to the West.

The flag was in every classroom, in every home, and flags were displayed to affirm patriotism which, with the war's arrival, had become endemic. Flags were flown from prominent perches at business places as well as public buildings. Flag day (on 14 June) was observed as a holiday in Pennsylvania and pageants honored Betsy Ross who sewed the first one for George Washington so he could popularize the new nation and wrap himself with it. We saw the paintings.

Everyone had stars and stripes and they all were schooled in the etiquette that dictated when and when not the flag could be flown, where it would be placed when displayed with inferior standards, how to fold it properly, the admonition to kiss it if (God forbid) it touched the ground, and how to burn it when it became too tattered to display anymore. Our clean country was best identified with a clean flag.

The war effort touched everyone. Grandmothers could do their duty with the Red Cross. Old men could work in factories. Families that could find a patch of dirt would plant veggies in their Victory Gardens. Dimes and quarters usually spent on frivolous things would buy war stamps. A booklet full of stamps would be traded for a war bond. Little was thrown away. Even rags and cardboard and old newspapers and cooking fat went to the war effort. Old or undersized clothes and shoes were given to campaigns that collected them for Russian War Relief and Bundles for Britain. Pennies were begged from children to feed the children of China. Civilian men unqualified for military duty (like my dad) were impressed into a civilian defense corps of air-raid wardens and fire wardens (like my dad) and other duties that would save the community when the bombs that we expected would fall on our houses.

We watched a crew nail up a siren on a pole not far from our house. There was another one on the roof of the school. Others were placed close enough to each other so the hard of hearing would feel their shrill vibrations. Drills were held in daytime and streets would be abandoned. People would go to air-raid shelters that they were told were safe from block-busters and incendiaries. Maybe. At evening and at night the sirens would wail and air raid wardens would rush to the streets and make their rounds to enforce "lights out." German pilots would mistake our row-house environs for farmland. We would be spared if we worked together.

The windows of houses had black shades. When the warning sirens sounded the shades were pulled. We huddled under our dining-room table safe from big bombs that might drop through our roof.

Mrs. Cassidy lived three houses from ours. Whenever the siren screamed at night Mrs. Cassidy turned on all her lamps. The wardens could be heard shouting and banging on her door. My father thought the Germans could hear the ruckus. Mrs. Cassidy was an Irish nationalist who supposed she was in a neighborhood as unworthy as Cardiff or Liverpool and her fancy was to let the allies of Brits get what they deserved for the injustices England visited on the Irish since the crusades. Rumors among the kids in the block said that a German submarine moored in her basement between raids on shipping off the New Jersey coast. We whispered in serious speculation about that probability, never dismissing the idea. Far fetched stories are the obvious truth to kids.

There was little distinction between fire-drills and the air-raid practices at school except that the former would be signalled by the clanging fire-bell and the other by the ear-piercing siren up on the roof. We would march off in file to the hall then out to the yard where we would, in the case of the air-raid, all be strafed into mince by the Luftwaffe.

Somewhere in strategic places, that we were never able to locate, searchlight batteries were poised to pierce the night sky when the alert sounded. Ribbons of light cut through the darkness trying to find Fokkers and Junkers and Damliers and Messershmidts with bellies full of bombs. In newsreels from England we saw bags of sand stacked around ack-ack guns. The cannons would burp fire at their targets in the sky. We didn't see the piles of sand-bags here. Obviously they were in secret places.

We never heard the drone of planes at night nor saw the silhouettes that we could recognize in daytime because we studied them in plane-spotting courses published in newspapers. But in summertime when we resorted to Ocean City or Wildwood along the New Jersey shore we saw ourselves closer to Germany and closer to the reality of the real war. Look out across the ocean to the horizon. We used to strain to hope to see the Portugese coast. Now and then we would see billowing black smoke from a sinking ship blown up by U-Boats.

Our beach at Ocean City was near the one where the hulk of the Sindia lay, wrecked before we were born and almost smothered in the sand. We played along its exposed gunwhales and at the mast. On the sand where the water lapped, the tides brought in gobs of oil and tar from more recent sinkings made by dreaded U-boats. We spent a lot of time scraping the sticky sludge from our soles and heels before going back to the house. This inconvenience added to our hatred of Germany.

Danger was real. At night, a wartime brownout dulled illumination on the Boardwalk. Lamps were painted black on the ocean side. Shore patrols of sailors and Coast Guardsmen kept civilians off the beaches. They scanned the sea for rafts that might bring spies ashore from U-Boats. Some had already landed elsewhere and were tracked down by the FBI, caught and executed. Don't mess with us.

Collective national ardor makes a parade worthwhile. Those things have pretty much disappeared in later times. The half-hearted attempts to muster-up an enthusiastic march up Main Street is as much victim to falling out of habit as the lack of zeal that is the result of finding other priorities on holidays. Everybody wants to get out of town or glue their eyes to sports channels.

Parades are still held on Decoration Day. Now it's called Memorial Day and translated to the convenience of Monday so the hoards can flee to resorts. The Fourth of July is another Monday holiday, a day for parades...and picnics. In lesser measure, parades are held on Flag Day and Veteran's Day, known to us previously as Armistice Day.

When I was a kid, Decoration Day was held in great regard. Troops and citizens marched in Main Street parades throughout the land after solemn flag-raising ceremonies. I was a little boy when old men — witnesses, participants, victims — could still be tapped for stories of clashes between the blue and gray. A veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic would appear here or there as the honorary guest. If he could remember his name, he might have tales to tell exaggerated by the demand of his audience for romance. Even if he just sat under a tree oblivious to the day he was revered as one of the heroes of the Civil War.

Spanish American War veterans were more common at the ceremonies but much fewer than the great lines of men who fought in the Great War — the last of romantic apparitions to identify carnages. Widows and "gold-star mothers" attended the parades. Patriotic speeches were followed by "the roll"of those gone. A snare drum accompanied each name. Finally, volleys of rifle fire cracked and little children screamed and dogs barked. Taps followed. The day moved to picnics and family gatherings and when the sun went down fireworks would be the day's benediction. We decorated our bicycles (or tricycles) with red, white and blue crepe and our houses with flags and bunting. We bought firecrackers at the candy store and popped them off in the street to the delight of some, to the annoyance or horror of others.

It was a great day. Logic changed its name from Decoration Day to Memorial Day because the army of mourners carrying flowers to cemeteries to decorate graves had evolved to memorial parades. And mourning gave way to happier reunions. My grandmother would preside over family gatherings until the Civil War was a hundred years done. Her ten children and their children as well always appeared. Her brothers were infirmed so they couldn't stand with comrades from the Spanish-American War and didn't much care. Ed Stotesbury lived up the street. He was older than my uncles, Cliff and Harry, and he was a drummer boy in the Civil War. He came down to the parade and tapped his drum with feeble hands and gave a little talk at the school. He loved to talk of his little role in saving the union and was sure to tell it to listeners at the Stock Exchange or the Union League or at his other houses in Bar Harbor or Palm Beach. My grandparents raised ten children in their eight room house and Ed Stotesbury and his wife, Eva, shared a hundred and forty rooms between them in the palace up the street that Trumbauer got credit for but Abele designed.

When the Second World War ended the ranks of marchers in parades were swelled by millions of men and women of a new generation of warriors. The older ones were older and fewer in number. Some of them felt displaced, ignored and they voiced unhappiness with their reduced condition. They didn't have as much clout at the Legion and VFW halls. People were indifferent to their complaints, yet cheered them on in the parades as they marched by curbs lined with their benefactors.

In Germantown, veterans trooped down the main street to Market Square. The monument in granite and marble depicted a Union soldier atop a pedestal. A fence made of bayonets, welded to iron rods, enclosed the shrine. After proper memorials, patriotic speeches, wreath laying and the calling of the roll, volleys of gunfire saluted the dead. Kids screamed. Dogs barked. As in Wyndmoor and countless other towns, the rest of the day was given over to families.

Throughout my childhood some things changed little, if at all. Before the war when we went to school we would salute the flag (arm salute) and give the pledge and then the teacher would read to us about Moses or Daniel, or Saul and David, or Noah and the ark, or Jonathan and his brothers, or Jesus and his parables. The roll (of the living) was called and those present worked on more immediate things. After the war, it was much the same. The salute was modified, of course. We were older and read aloud the stories of the Jews who were our civilization's first heroes. When I came to my last year in high school our successor state of the judeo-christian tradition held the last great parade for a conquering hero of the Joshua mold and seven million people crowded the path of march.

Grant and Dewey and Pershing were closer to the hearts of little boys who had grown old before I knew of them. They were in the mold of David, or Judah Maccabee, or the Duke of Wellington and Nelson, whose acts of bravery stirred hearts in succeeding generations and made identity noble. Our own icons were Patton and Halsey and MacArthur. MacArthur died in 1964, the last of the old warriors. He was entombed with the panoply that befitted Pharaohs and Caesars and Shoguns. This kind, arrogant and brave, flawed and brilliant, despised and loved, are impossible to find now. Too many checks prevent them from remaining on any stage.

That ardor of old was briefly revived in 1991 and Americans fought a hundred hour war in the cradle of civilization where it's said they dropped more bombs than anywhere else in previous wars. Soldiers came home to a flurry of parades and hoopla. But within a year there was little stomach for flags and ribbons and meaningful parades and picnics by families scattered by space and apathetic dispassion.

We've escaped the dull. What's on television?