Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture

1. Homeland and Its Discontents

In the autumn of , Americans began to hear their country referred to as the “homeland,” a compound noun linked to other nouns such as “security ” and “defense.” “Homeland” was not a new word, of course, but after the devastating attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., it seemed to connote meanings new to most of us—vulnerability, fear of strangers, retrenchment, territorial fortification. At the same time, the phrase “God bless America,” which orators had long used as a mere perfunctory coda, took on a broad range of overtones, from defiance and reassurance to anxiety and supplication. As the months passed, words such as “home,” “land,” and “blessing” began to reveal some of the other concealed meanings that four centuries of Anglo-American history had packed into them. Compounding a Problem “Home” has a narrower meaning in American English than in British English . In Britain, the “home secretary,” for example, attends to domestic (as distinct from foreign) affairs, and “home counties” means those shires bordering London. The American word “home,” however, has as its primary meaning the house in which one lives. Only in its  supplement did the Oxford English Dictionary, in its entry for “home,” acknowledge this usage: “In U.S. and Canada, [‘home’ is] freq. used to designate a private house or residence merely as a building.” Of course, the word connotes much more, but these notions of familial and communal protectiveness all seem to converge within the walls of a house or apartment. “Land,” on the other hand, 1     2   connotes a broad geographical and governmental entity and is roughly synonymous with “country.” Thus, when Americans in the past used the words “home” and “land” in a single sentence, each word preserved its separate meaning.1 In America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the phrase “the land of the free and the home of the brave” refers to two complementary , yet distinct, concepts and implies that during the British bombardment of Fort McHenry (September –, ), the bravery of the local Baltimoreans had preserved the freedom of the entire nation.2 Like the “Star-Spangled Banner” (the anthem and the banner itself), most patriotic symbols strive to unite “home” and “land” by seeming to overcome the tensions that exist between the local and the national, the citizenry and the government. Patriotic songs provide ample evidence of this collective need. In , during the second administration of Theodore Roosevelt, as American forces were beginning a three-year occupation of Cuba, George M. Cohan wrote the immensely popular song “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” In his one allusion to Francis Scott Key’s poem, Cohan wrote: “You’re the emblem of / The land I love, / The home of the free and the brave.” The two concepts that Key had linked in juxtaposition, Cohan placed in apposition , so that once subsumed beneath this unifying emblem, “home” might become equated with “land.” The song most often heard following September , , was neither the stately anthem nor the brassy show tune. It was the prayerful “God Bless America.” God bless America, Land that I love. Stand beside her and guide her Through the night with a light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, To the oceans white with foam, God bless America, My home, sweet home. Irving Berlin wrote this song in , one year after Cohan’s “Over There” had encouraged American families to believe that their sons would quickly and painlessly subdue the Hun and two years after President Wilson had finally declared “The Star-Spangled Banner” the national anthem, a choice confirmed by Congress in . Berlin’s first two and last two lines put land and home together by a doubled apposition: America as land, and America as home. These lines also place the unified nation within the context of two clichés of American domestic piety. One was the popular embroidered sampler phrase “God Bless Our Home”; the other, also a sampler phrase, was “Home, Sweet Home.” As Berlin’s audience would have understood, the latter phrase appeared on plaques and samplers because it brought to mind the best-loved sentimental parlor song of the nineteenth century, John Howard Payne’s “Home, Sweet Home.”3 A comparison with Payne’s lyric reveals how Berlin, when he wrote “God Bless America,” had not only quoted it but also nationalized its meanings. “Home, Sweet Home” had been the very embodiment of...