LEXINGTON — Patriots’ Day weekend is truly one of the great New England rites of spring.
A small army of Islanders marched off to Lexington and Concord to observe the re-enactments and the parades on the 250th anniversary of the “shot heard ’round the world,” when, on April 19, 1775, a ragtag group of armed militia stood their ground against the British redcoats.
Another contingent boarded ferries to Woods Hole and trooped to Fenway Park on Monday for the annual tradition of a morning game to mark Patriots’ Day, a tradition that started 50 years ago. While the Fenway faithful were mustering, the world’s most elite runners were racing through Kenmore Square as part of the 129th running of the Boston Marathon. And this trifecta of events happens to very handily land during the April school vacation, which is part of what makes it such a popular tradition.
The re-enactments in Lexington and Concord mark the battle that sparked the Revolutionary War. The British soldiers’ mission was to crush a burgeoning rebel movement that had begun stockpiling arms in Concord to resist the rising demands of the colonial presence of Great Britain and its occupying army. The rebels sought to stop the British at Lexington Green.
The ragtag group of rebel soldiers, most of them farmers looking decidedly less well-tailored and posh than those dressed in the fancy red coats of Great Britain’s military regiments, dug in, rifles at the ready. Suddenly a shot cracked the air, and the smoke from a muzzle mingled with the morning fog, the first time that rebel forces opened fire on British troops. That muzzle blast became known as “the shot heard ’round the world,” a line from the poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson that memorialized the battle, which is celebrated annually with both sides clad in their respective period costumes, along with replicas of 18th century muskets and the traditional instruments used by military fife bands.
The confrontation has come to define the American spirit, and inspire other revolutionary movements around the world. The men who fought were the first American patriots.
This day in this fraught year of challenges to all that America stands for has left me wondering: Who are today’s American patriots? Are we as a nation still an inspiration to the world, or have the men and women of moral courage gone quiet, and is that light unto the world that America has tried to hold now flickering out?
The debate around proclamations of patriotism is as old as the country itself. On April 7, 1775, less than two weeks before the historic battle on Lexington Green, Samuel Johnson, the British intellectual who wrote on the political tumult unfolding in the British colonies, said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
In my own life as a journalist, one of the most principled men and greatest patriots I met was Daniel Ellsberg. But when America first learned about Ellsberg as a whistleblower in the Pentagon in 1971, he was tarnished as a traitor to his country by President Richard Nixon when he released a top-secret history of lies and deception about the war in Vietnam. A U.S. Marine and military intelligence analyst, Ellsberg had access to a trove of 7,000 pages of classified documents known as the Pentagon Papers, which he released to the New York Times and then the Washington Post, risking life in prison, but altering the course of the war and the course of history.
In 2020–021, to mark the 50th anniversary of the release of the Pentagon Papers, I had the great honor of carrying out a public history project with Ellsberg that explored the meaning of his legacy. With support from my alma mater, UMass Amherst, the nonprofit news organization I founded, GroundTruth, produced a special report and a podcast that was based on unique access to Ellsberg’s papers. A trove of more than 500 boxes of memos, letters, research, photographs, film clips, and personal letters revealed a portrait of a man who devoted his life to the nonviolent struggle for peace, truth, and democracy, allowing us to see how dissent can be the highest form of patriotism.
But these days, in a time as deeply divided as the one we live in, when it feels like a revolution is in the air, a kind of counter-revolution intended to drag America back to the past, the word “patriotism” is appropriated by all sides to mean different things.
Protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 called themselves patriots.
“You guys are f______ patriots,” one of the many rioters could be heard proclaiming in a video from the incident published by the New Yorker.
The wave of protest marches under the banner Hands Off against the policies of the Trump administration is bringing together a spirited, new movement that feels a patriotic duty to take to the streets to protect the assault on the Constitution that seems to be underway in Washington these days.
The comedian and news analyst Jon Stewart recently provided a perfect rebuke to the MAGA crowd who wrap themselves in the flag and claim the title of patriotism while dismantling the guardrails of democracy and defying so many of the ideas the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution proclaimed and fought for.
“Next time you want to dress up at the rallies wear the right f______ colored coats, because that is what you are,” he says to the camera as it cuts to an illustration of British redcoats wielding bayonets in an attack on the farmers who stood their ground in Lexington and fought for freedom.
So how can we understand these wildly opposed interpretations of the word “patriot,” and in this deeply divided moment in our history, what does the word mean? Jill Lepore, in her book “These Truths: A History of the United States,” offers outstanding scholarship and style to help us contextualize and understand the legacy of the American Revolution and the meaning of the Constitution it yielded. Lepore wrote, “The United States is founded on a set of ideas, but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.”
Here on the Island, if you want to understand our connection to the American Revolution, you need to take in the capture of the British schooner Volante by Captain Nathan Smith of Tisbury in April 1776. You can read about this and the unique position in which the fishing and whaling industry found itself during the Revolution, and the unheralded role of Islanders in Thomas Dresser’s 2021 book, “Martha’s Vineyard in the American Revolution.”
But patriots are not only the stuff of history lessons. One true, living patriot who comes to mind on our Island is Rose Styron, the poet, activist ,and widow of the renowned author William Styron. My wife Julie and I had dinner with Rose this weekend at her home on the Vineyard Haven Harbor, and even at age 96, she was holding forth and inspiring all of us to keep fighting for the ideals of our country. She has worked for years with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in many corners of the world, but now, she says, the fight for human rights and for the ideals enshrined in our Constitution is as urgent as ever, and the battle is right in front of us. Rose was featured on the front page of this paper last week at the Hands Off rally at Five Corners, illustrating what it is to be an active and engaged citizen.
She reminded us all of the true meaning of American patriotism. She took a risk to speak up for freedom from Chile under dictatorship, or for Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and in doing so, we could all hear a distant echo of what that first shot on the Lexington Green still means to the world.
Charles M. Sennott is the publisher of The MVTimes. A version of this essay was originally published through the GroundTruth free weekly newsletter on Substack. To subscribe, go to charlessennott.substack.com.
We want to hear from you
Who do you think embodies the spirit of patriotism. Who do you know on the Island or anywhere across the country whom you regard as a true American patriot? We want to record these sentiments, and share the best of them on July Fourth weekend. We look forward to hearing from you! You can write to editor@mvtimes.com; please put the word “patriot” in the subject heading.
