I have a picture of myself dressed in an actual American flag costume that was hand-sewn by my mother.
Ours was a musical family, and when I was growing up, the Fourth of July often involved concerts in the park. My parents, my brothers, and I would perform patriotic songs, and, naturally, we had to dress the part. “God Bless America” was one of my favorites to perform, and if you haven’t sung it recently, you owe yourself the pleasure of doing so.
The trick is to take a deep enough breath before each line, leaving plenty of oomph for the second and fourth syllables: Gooood BLESS AmERicaaaaa! At the time, I had no idea that this exceedingly singable tune was written by an immigrant.
Israel Baline was only five years old when his family fled poverty and antisemitic violence in Tsarist Russia, coming to the U.S. in search of freedom and new opportunity. They found it, and young Israel, who by then had changed his name to Irving Berlin, became a naturalized citizen in 1918, just in time to fight in World War I.
He survived the war. I probably don’t need to tell you that he went on to write “God Bless America,” “White Christmas” and more than a thousand other songs that America has been singing along to ever since.
As it happens, my own beautiful American family now includes two immigrant children, both of whom are naturalized American citizens. They were only two years old when my wife and I adopted them. Although we take whatever opportunities we can to encourage an appreciation of their culture of origin, Arkansas is their “home sweet home.”
They can recite the Pledge of Allegiance, sing along to the entire Hamilton soundtrack, and they love Chick-fil-A. Neither of them (despite our efforts) speaks more than a few words of their native language, and were they to be deported “home,” they would be utterly bewildered and helpless.
Such a thought is unimaginable. And yet, the party in power has imagined it with undisguised relish.
Whose Land?
This week, the Supreme Court has just announced a long-awaited decision on a constitutionally dubious executive order to end birthright citizenship. While the Court ruled (not unanimously) in accordance with the Constitution, it did so only after handing down another ruling that will mean the deportation of thousands of Syrian and Haitian refugees who followed every legal requirement this country asked of them. Former Fox Commentator Megyn Kelly was among those greeting the news with triumphant glee: “We don’t want you. We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out. Go home. Go back to f–king Haiti!”
In recent weeks, the Justice Department announced it would begin making good on plans it teased last year for stripping American citizenship from naturalized citizens accused of certain offenses. Some of those offenses are precise, others worryingly vague. But the point of that plan is clear enough: “This land is our land, it isn’t your land, and the lines between ‘us’ and ‘you,’ between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ will be drawn however we, the privileged and powerful, please.”
Meanwhile, ICE continues using its vast new budget to expand surveillance and harassment of citizens and non-citizens alike.
What a time to be celebrating America’s greatness and freedom!
Alternate Interpretations
The front porches on my block are currently bright with flags. Plans are underway for a neighborhood parade, fireworks stands all over the city are doing big business, and Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest is scheduled to air on ESPN.
I can’t help but wonder what all this looks like to many of our neighbors, as they do their best to live and work and shop for weekend picnic supplies, all while worrying that, at any moment, masked men might throw them or their loved ones into an unmarked van to be sent God knows where for God knows how long.
A decade before the Civil War, another great American asked a mostly white audience, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” This was, of course, Frederick Douglass, whose birth on American soil gave him no claim to the rights of citizenship until he managed to escape enslavement in Maryland in 1838.
Douglass answered his own question with an oration of more than 10,000 words, excoriating American Christians for their complicity in slavery and their hypocrisy in standing silently by. The speech deserves to be read in its entirety, but any portion, like a single firecracker taken from a string, is a blast that leaves one shaken:
I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour. . . .
What, to the immigrant, is our Fourth of July? What must they think of our speeches and concerts purporting to celebrate our national virtues of bravery and freedom?
Later in his speech, Douglass makes the point that praise of the founders was often loudest on the lips of those who had most betrayed the principles they’d fought to establish. “The cause of liberty,” he warns, “may be stabbed by the men who glory in the deeds of your fathers,” and all their patriotic carrying on might not amount to much more than cheap theater.” He continues:
To say now that America was right, and England wrong, is exceedingly easy. Everybody can say it . . . It is fashionable to do so; but there was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day, plotters of mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men. To side with the right, against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor! Here lies the merit, and the one which, of all others, seems unfashionable in our day.
The Lens of History
Set aside for a moment the appalling fact that Douglass has recently appeared on the long list of authors banned from school libraries and curriculum. It is nearly as easy for us today, 174 years after he gave his speech, to join him in decrying slavery as it was for Americans then to shake their fists at the memory of British oppression. To condemn historical wrongs and join in the celebration of their defeat does not “try men’s souls.”
It does not require a great deal of moral courage in 2026 to denounce Nazi extermination camps that were turned into museums decades ago. It is a somewhat riskier business to raise one’s voice in condemning the 45 billion dollars Congress authorized to add an untold number of ICE detention facilities, whose shockingly inhumane conditions have provoked hunger strikes and public outrage, with little action from smirking DHS officials.
What, to the immigrant, I ask, is our Fourth of July?
What I didn’t quite grasp while belting out “God Bless America” with such childish bombast was that the song is a prayer. Irving Berlin meant it as such, despite being agnostic himself, and as the threat of fascism grew in Europe in the late 1930s, he added this opening verse to his original lyrics:
While the storm clouds gather
Far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance
To a land that’s free;
Let us all be grateful
For a land so fair,
As we raise our voices
In a solemn prayer.
(As an aside, “God Bless America” became an enormous hit during World War II. However, Woodie Guthrie would detect a note of bellicose Christian nationalism in it and wrote “This Land is Your Land” in response. I knew nothing about any of this as a boy, of course. I knew only that both tunes were great fun to sing, and that America really was the “land that I love.”)
In the mouths of many of our leaders, “God bless America” has become a snarl of triumph rather than a humble plea. A sincere prayer for God to “Stand beside her and guide her through the night with a light from above” would require confessing that we are stumbling through the night of our own ignorance, scoffing at the wisdom even of our own founding documents. A sincere prayer would risk acknowledging the possibility that we require strength or expertise beyond the borders of our own self-satisfaction.
Labored Hope
Having captivated and excoriated his listeners for almost an hour, Frederick Douglass concluded on a hopeful note, “drawing encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.” Despite suffering so much at the hands of those who had betrayed America’s high ideals, Douglass maintained that the ideals themselves were still worthy of admiration: “notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country.”
As the parent of immigrant children, I cannot afford the luxury of despair and neither can anyone else who wants to live in a land that is truly free and just. I can only hope my children and the other immigrant children of this “land that I love” can someday look as graciously as Douglass managed to upon the nation that has turned so often and so savagely on its most vulnerable.
May God bless all Americans with courage and decency, and may our actions in this hour make us worthy at length of those who have honored us with their hopes and dreams for a better life.
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Benjamin Utter is Associate Professor of English, Language & Literature at Ouachita Baptist University.