It's surprising, and heartening, that a rich kid like Vidal developed the same understanding.īut 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

In the Depression, theįorcing bed of my generation's youth, all us kids hanging on the corner understood these facts about Republicans and about patriotic rhetoric.

has often gained and maintained power by the patriotic appeal, by putting out more flags than anybody else. If, as Vidal has Democratic Governor Tilden say in '1876,' 'those gentlemen have only one real interest,Īnd that is the making of special laws to protect their fortunes,' it is equally true that the G.O.P. Republican Party during our generation's nonage-all conspired to put us off the patriot game. 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 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. And Edward Everett Hale's cautionary tale, 'The Man Without a Country,' uniforms who orated at the school assembly for Flag Day and Armistice Day. Were apt to snicker over the tremolo of the World War I vets in bedizened V.F.W. 3, 1925) was particularly distrustful of patriotic rhetoric. Ore Vidal's and my generation (he was born at West Point, Oct. Ma1876: A Centennial Novel for the Bicentennial By JULIAN MOYNAHAN 1876: A Centennial Novel for the Bicentennial

1876 by Gore Vidal