Healing America Means Rethinking Patriotism

Reformers of the Progressive era shared many of these anxieties, yet their instinct was to revise rather than reject the patriotic impulse. Jane Addams felt that Americans could take pride in the antimilitarism of the founders and their vision of America as an alternative to the highly militarized, garrison states of Europe. More importantly, she believed Americans should embrace the kaleidoscope of cultures within their shores and weave that energy into their national identity. Who wants to live in a melting pot, after all? she protested. Rather than lecturing immigrants, or melting them into a drab conformity, we should learn from them. In the “cosmopolitan humanitarianism” of a community like Hull House, her settlement in the west side of Chicago, Addams found a model for presidents and a template for world peace. “When this newer patriotism becomes large enough,” she wrote, “it will overcome arbitrary boundaries and soak up the notion of nationalism. We may then give up war, because we shall find it as difficult to make war upon a nation at the other side of the globe as upon our next-door neighbor.”