Says one writing of the “Stars and Stripes”:
“The American flag is an emblem not only of freedom but of
civilization; and as such, it ought to be beloved and worshiped by
all who live under it or who in any wise receive the benefit which it
confers on mankind.”
That is a pretty fair sample of what one can be brought to feel by
inability to think without confusion. Human nature presents no more
striking characteristic than the tendency to neglect the substance
and consider the shadow; to forget the end, in contemplation and
approval of the means; to substitute principle for action and ceremony
for principle; to attribute to the symbol the virtues of the thing
symbolized. It evidently did not occur to the patriotic gentleman who
wrote the quoted sentence, and much else in the same spirit, that the
flag being only an “emblem” of freedom and civilization (our kind
of freedom and civilization, by the way) is not at all entitled to
the love and worship that he solicits for it; these should go, not
to the flag, but to the things of which it is an emblem—to freedom
and civilization. His idolatrous tendency and his truly heathenish
confusion of mind are still further shown in his reference of “the
benefit which it” (the flag, observe) “confers on mankind.” His is a
typical utterance: the vestigial idolatry of the cave-dweller and the
sylvan nomad is still strong in the race, and flag-worship is one of
its most reasonless manifestations. Everywhere and always in these days
of war we hear and read words about the flag which a thinking human
being would be ashamed to utter of an actual beneficent deity. There is
no room whatever for doubt that what the average patriot acclaims and
honors is the actual colored silk or bunting, not what it represents.
To the conception of abstractions he comes unfitly equipped, but he can
see a tinted rag. I do not know that any harm comes of his fetishism;
it is noted merely as an interesting and significant phenomenon—one
of a thousand proving the brevity of our advance along the line of
progress toward enlightenment. It is of a piece of the average human
being’s more or less sincere respect for truth, justice, chastity and
so forth, not as practicable means to the end of human happiness, but
as things creditable and desirable in themselves, even when subversive
of their actual purpose by promoting misery.
Let the flag flap, and let “our ill-starred fellow citizens” who are
unable to get a firm mental grasp on what it stands for knuckle down
upon their knees before it and lift the voice. But, God bless them!
how they would be shocked to observe the indifference with which
it is regarded by soldiers in battle! One of the sharpest and most
righteous rebukes I ever got from high authority was for permitting my
color-sergeant to flaunt his gaudy symbol in the face of a battery.
To civilian orators and poets the flag is sacred; to the intelligent
soldier it is merely useful: it marks the battle line, preserves the
unity of the regiment and “inspires” the soldier that is unintelligent.
A singularly disagreeable instance of fetishism is related of the
Hon. William Jennings Bryan. While in Tokio, the story goes—among
his admirers—he purchased a stool upon which Admiral Togo had sat at
a Shinto ceremony. The story has it that the sale was reluctantly
made, for the stool had been long a sacred object before it was newly
consecrated by contact with the person of the renowned sailor; but the
custodians did not feel at liberty to disappoint so illustrious an
American as Mr. Bryan. On learning this, the great man magnanimously
returned it and contented himself, as well as he could, with a common
chair upon which Togo had sat in a restaurant.
It is disagreeable to think of Mr. Bryan in the character of a
sycophantic souvenir hunter. It is disagreeable to think that even
the humblest and obscurest American citizen can have so little
self-respect. Anthropolatry is but a shade less base and barbarous
than that other primitive religion, fetishism; and the two, as in
this instance, are often in coexistence. No superstition seems ever
wholly to die. Both these are rife and rampant in the civilization
of to-day, and one can name, offhand, a dozen of their customary
manifestations by persons who would be shocked by the revelation of
their close relationship to the shagpate cave-dweller, the remoter
_pithecanthropos erectus_, and, at the back of them both, the
quadrumanal arborean with a vestigial swim-bladder.