San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick
Thursday
The National Football League’s season begins tonight, but it seems that there been less talk about action on the field and more about San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick refusing to stand during the National Anthem because of America’s treatment of people of color. This reminded my friend Carl Rosin of E. E. Cummings’s poem “i sing of Olaf glad and big,” and he sent in the following essay.
By Carl Rosin, English Teacher, Radnor High School
“We almost beat one guy to death to make him kiss the flag,” a patriot in Litchfield, Illinois, told a Chicago reporter in 1940.
So begins Garrett Epps’s Atlantic Monthly article “America’s New Lesson in Tolerance,” which addresses NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s unpopular protest against the American flag and national anthem by linking it with unpopular protests of the 20th century. The erudite Professor Epps, who teaches law and writing at the University of Baltimore, delves into the 1940 Supreme Court case Minersville School District v. Gobitis.
Noting how SCOTUS got Billy and Lillian Gobitas’s name wrong, Epps describes the case of two Jehovah’s Witnesses who “refused to engage in a required flag salute and pledge of allegiance at their Pennsylvania elementary school”:
Lower federal courts supported their right to refuse the pledge. The case, however, reached the Supreme Court in 1940, as German armies were grinding toward Paris. The justices rejected the children’s religious-freedom claim to an exemption from the flag-salute requirement…. In the majority opinion, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote that “We are dealing with an interest inferior to none in the hierarchy of legal values. National unity is the basis of national security.” The legislature must have the freedom to promote that unity by requiring children to pledge allegiance, he wrote, and religious objections were no defense.
The fascist threat of the era – a legitimate existential threat that dwarfs current-day threats to our nation – seems to have rationalized the decision. The imprimatur of the high court, furthermore, seemed to sanction some shiver-inducing injustices against Witnesses: beatings, looting, burning, torture, castration. One can barely recognize the America in which such things were done.
And yet, of course, we do, and literature is an especially eloquent reporter. To Kill a Mockingbird, “Strange Fruit,” and Sterling A. Brown’s poignant and under-acknowledged poetic ballad “He Was a Man” (to name just a few literary works) all call out the extrajudicial monstrosity of lynching. Atrocities such as those perpetrated against citizens who are perceived as unpatriotic, meanwhile, are captured by E. E. Cummings’s “i sing of Olaf glad and big.”
The poem, which preceded Gobitis by nine years, may be most infamous for its profanity, which retains its sting even today. It tells the story of a “conscientious object-or,” Olaf, whose refusal to fight for the nation results in his being imprisoned, then tortured, then allowed to die. Complicit in his death are the military brass (“a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride”), brutally conformist soldiers, and ultimately the president. Olaf is the prisoner they
stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl
As he is unbowed, they escalate to cursing and beating him. The savagery increases further, as the officers
egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat
Finally, at the president’s behest, they throw Olaf into a “dungeon,” where he dies.
As shocking as the imagery is, I suspect that Olaf’s reaction shocked the public even more. I cringe to think that his “impoliteness” may have led some to feel that he deserved no better. The first stanza of abuse ends with a demand for compliance, to which Olaf
responds,without getting annoyed
“I will not kiss your fucking flag”
Cummings challenges us: does profanity directed at the beloved national symbol poison our interpretation of the profane one, innocent though he may be? After the “teasing” (Cummings makes powerful use of understatement) with roasted bayonet, Olaf doubles down on his commitment:
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some shit I will not eat”
This intensity, emphasized by the diction that alarms censors, escalates the abuse, resulting in Olaf’s death. In the final stanza, the speaker has elevated Olaf to a kind of sainthood. He is the most American of the characters in this condensed tragedy.
Epps describes how the Court corrected its shortsightedness on Gobitis:
By 1943, the court itself repented. The public outcry, the addition of a new justice, and three switched votes produced a new rule. Whatever “free exercise” of religion required, the new majority decided, the salute requirement violated the First Amendment’s twin guarantee, free speech. In a famous passage, Justice Robert Jackson wrote that “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Perhaps because of the reversal, anti-Witness violence subsided. The Court is to be commended, all the more so because World War II was still in progress with the outcome far from certain.
Epps concedes that Kaepernick is not a perfect analogue for the Gobitases. Even if he were, he has no right to expect to be free from criticism or even backlash (within legal limits, that is). That being said, there is cause for concern. The unfettered trolls of the Internet have been making threats that are compatible with what the Witnesses suffered. The fear that disunity engenders is a dangerous force.
For example, consider the passions that were fanned by the Cold War, leading to powerful warnings, from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) to the Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” (1960). Outsiders fare very badly in both.
These texts call for us, like Miller’s John Proctor, to stand up for principles, as per Martin Niemöller’s classic quotation that begins, “First they came for the Socialists….” The Atlantic’s always-insightful “By Heart” series, in which modern authors discuss literature that inspired them when they were young, features Alexander Maksik lauding the way his boldly non-conformist teacher taught Cummings’s boldly non-conforming poem. Maksik recalls how that teacher and poem “began to turn my apathy into contempt for apathy.”
Those offended by Cummings’s characterization of the U.S. military would probably see the poem not as a hypothetical indictment against the threat posed by dogmatism but as a treasonous accusation against the United States. Indeed, the poem was published the same year that the poet visited the Soviet Union. That may have cost Cummings some sympathy, but poets aren’t in the business for sympathy.
Similarly Kaepernick’s socks, depicting pigs wearing police caps, give a whiff of an ad hominem attack that has soured observers on the seriousness of the protest.
Even if the messengers are compromised, however, the message of Epps’s neatly-stated concluding line reverberates: it is un-American to tell us what to kiss…or what to eat.
Here’s the poem in its entirety:
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or
his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but–though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments–
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
“I will not kiss your fucking flag”
straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)
but–though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation’s blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat–
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
“there is some shit I will not eat”
our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died
Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too
preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
Further thought: I googled and did a brief database search into a history of protests against and censorship of Cummings’s poem, but, to my surprise, came up empty. Perhaps in the interbellum period, when America was isolationist to an extent that is hard to imagine today, few conflated his anti-militarism and anti-fundamentalism with anti-Americanism. I will ask a librarian friend to check further and will report back what she finds.