As editor of the socialist periodicals The Masses (1912-1917) and The Liberator (1912-1917), Max Eastman was at the center of key movements in early-20th-century radical thought in the United States. A supporter of the Russian Revolution, Eastman visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s to observe the effects of the revolution firsthand. He returned convinced that the noble intentions of the October Revolution had been subverted by corrupt leaders.

Originally presented as a speech in November 1915, "What Is Patriotism?" was published the following year in Eastman's book Understanding Germany: The Only Way to End War. In the preface to that collection, Eastman wrote, "I do not myself feel patriotic to any country. My sense of solidarity seems to attach to the human race as a whole, or to those classes in every country who are struggling towards liberty."

Compare Eastman's extended definition with Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of patriotism in Democracy in America (1835) and with the thoughts of Oliver Goldsmith in his essay "On National Prejudices" (1763).

What Is Patriotism and What Shall We Do With It?

by Max Eastman

Patriotism has always figured in literature as a virtue, except in Tolstoy's writings, where it figures as a vice, which is much the same thing. All you can do with patriotism as a virtue or a vice is preach at it. And preaching at human nature, preaching that never takes the scientific trouble to decide what is the origin and composition and actual potentiality of the traits preached at, may be said to have proven a complete failure.

For twenty centuries almost all of the professional idealists of Europe have been trying to change the instinctive nature of man by blowing salvation oratory down his throat, and Europe is now demonstrating the futility of that endeavor.

"Resist not evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." There, for instance, is an ideal which is so far disgeared from the actual running mechanism of a man's nerves that, unless he intends to hypnotize himself abnormally with that single God's dogma for life, he never can live up to it, and he never will. To preach that principle to the choleric and belligerent races of Western Europe, as a solution of the problems of their uproarious civilization, is a vicious thing because it is a crying waste of the energy of idealism.

If those same professional idealists--I mean the priests and ministers and moralists and poets of morality--instead of trying to alter with exhortation the instinctive nature of man, had once sat down to determine what the unalterable facts of that nature are, and then tried to construct a world in which such a nature could function without disaster, European civilization might be in existence now.

With proper recognition of the possible variation of individuals, we can say that patriotism is one of these unalterable facts of man's nature. A talent for fighting solidarity with a group is a part of the instinctive equipment of the human animal. It is composed of two tendencies that are laid down in his nervous system when he is born; and these two tendencies are reinforced in a peculiar way by two others still more compelling.

The first two are called pugnacity and gregariousness, or group-loyalty. All men and most animals are pugnacious. They love to fight. Everybody loves to fight. Some people get all the fighting they want at the breakfast table, and other people have to carry it out in the law courts or the battlefield, where it makes more noise. [Theodore] Roosevelt loves to charge up San Juan hill, and then he loves to prosecute for libel anybody that says he didn't charge up San Juan hill. War people fight for war and peace people fight for peace. When Roosevelt calls the peace people mollycoddles and college sissies, I only want to walk up and smash him.

Not only does everybody like to fight, but everybody has an irresistible tendency to identify himself with a group. Boys fight in gangs, and so do girls, and wolves, and cows, and elephants, and yellow jackets, and grown-up people. You don't have to prod every single individual in order to bring a bee-hive around your head. You only have to prod the hive. Every individual identifies himself with the hive.

It is exactly so with a swarm of people trained by custom and habit to think themselves one--one family, one fraternity, one church, one clan, one tribe, one nation. Love me, love my dog. Love my dog, love the whole pack. That is the way we work. We identify ourselves with the larger group; and we do this especially when the group is subjected to any kind of prod from an outsider. Patriotism was born of war. It was born of the necessity of uniting for common defense, and although a great many different feelings, some heroic and some feeble-minded, have got mixed up with the word patriotism, the basic sentiment is still one of fighting solidarity--rivalry and loyalty combined.

These two tendencies, I said, are reinforced by two others still more compelling. And those are self-love and child-love. By child-love I mean the disposition of men and women to return in times of trouble to the affections and passions which swayed them when they were very young. There is a little child inside of every one of us, and when anything gets the matter he always wants to run home to mother. Or he wants to run home to father, or sister, or brother, or nurse, or the nursery, or the old homestead, or the home town, or "my native land," as the case may be. He wants to get back to the things he was sure of, the things he loved and leaned on in the days when there was no doubt and no trouble. For these, as for no others, he will pour out his song and his sacrifice.

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