On being a proud American

Ted Grimsrud—September 9, 2025

An essential part of the expected disposition that characterizes citizens of the United States, it seems to me, is pride in being an American. This sense of pride characterizes Americans going back to the origins of the country. Perhaps such a sensibility reached its highest peak in the years of my youth in the afterglow of the victory in World War II and prior to the major stressors of the 1960s Civil Rights conflicts, war in Vietnam, and other challenges to the nation’s self-satisfaction. Though the prideful sensibility faced disruptions in the 1960s and ever since, it remains a significant element of many people’s senses of identity: “I am proud to be an American.” Certainly, that feeling of pride shaped my sense of identity during the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. However, I came to see such pride as problematic when I learned more about the actual character of the American Empire.

Pride in America as a factor in warism: The impact of World War II

This sense of pride, I suggest, has fostered a kind of false consciousness among many Americans. We assume (our embedded theology tells us) that we should be proud to be Americans, an assumption that can lead us to believe that we have something to be proud of. That is, we seek to justify the feelings of pride rather than considering that perhaps we should not be so proud. A big part of the hostility that greeted the social change movements of the 1960s surely stemmed from perceiving those movements as threats to the sense of pride.

Along with the push toward false consciousness, the pridefulness also makes people susceptible to being manipulated to support war. One of the main justifications for pride in America, especially for those raised in the afterglow of World War II as I was, is the perceived American record of fighting in just wars and winning them. As a child, I found it important to believe that the US had never lost a war—and never been involved in an unjust war. In a kind of vicious cycle, many Americans uncritically believe that we show our country’s worth by going to war. We tend to recognize the wars by definition as just simply because our country fights in them.

The push toward the US joining World War II needed to emphasize American virtue and commitment to freedom and democracy. If we were going to war, it could not be for simply political and self-serving motives. Our willingness to take such a step had to be seen as emerging from our peaceable and just values and traditions. The dynamic of the propaganda effort US leaders used had to avoid obviously advocating overtly going to war. So, during the 1940 presidential campaign—with war raging in Europe and the Far East—President Franklin Roosevelt continually reiterated that the US would not go to war.

With the election safely won in November 1940, Roosevelt began to set the stage to enter the war. His two most important statements came in a major speech in January 1941, labeled his “Four Freedoms” speech, and a formal agreement that Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued in August 1941 that became known as the Atlantic Charter. These two statements make it clear how central a role the popular sensibility of pride in American moral virtue played in Roosevelt’s argument to go to war.

When Roosevelt presented the “Four Freedoms” he announced that he would send a bill to Congress that would heighten American support for Britain’s war effort. The key values that motivated such accelerated involvement could be summarized as support for what he called “the four essential human freedoms” that he sought to further with his policies: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

During 1941, the US edged closer to entering the wars but with the continued resistance of popular opinion and of Congress. So, Roosevelt held back from taking the step of presenting a war resolution to Congress. In August, he attended a secret meeting with Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland. To prepare for the US entering the war, the two leaders produced a document they called the Atlantic Charter. The Atlantic Charter outlined these Allies’ war aims—though Roosevelt insisted at this point, given that the US had not yet formally entered the war, in calling the Charter “common principles” for “a better future world,” not “war aims.”

The Charter made some key points: It forswore changes not in accord with the “freely expressed wishes for the peoples concerned” and affirmed “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” It also looked forward, “after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” to a peace “which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.” Finally, it called on the nations of the world to disarm, “pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.”

Obviously, the key points of the Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter did not actually govern the way the US fought the war or the policies the US followed after the war. Most notably, the commitment to further freedom and self-determination for people everywhere in the world and the commitment to pursue world disarmament never shaped American policies. However, these statements meant that people would imagine that these were commitments the US did take seriously. They shaped the stated motivations for the war effort. Such commitments indeed provided something of which to be proud.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, followed almost immediately by Germany declaring war on the US, created almost unanimous support for Congress to declare war and fully enter the conflict. From early December 1941 until the war ended in August 1945, the American pro-war consensus remained strong. The aggression of the Axis powers also helped sustain the US self-understanding of being a peaceable, pro-democracy nation that only goes to war when it regrettably becomes necessary. As a consequence, the aggression of the Axis powers buttressed the sense of World War II as a good war, a necessary war, and a war to be proud of that shows the US to be benevolent in its disposition toward the rest of the world.

Proud veterans

Both of my parents served as citizen soldiers during World War II. My father, Carl Grimsrud, first enlisted in the National Guard in 1940 as a way hopefully to have more control over the circumstances of his military service. Though he very quickly lost control of his fate, he never questioned the necessity of his service. He happily did his part to serve his country.

Carl spent nearly three years engaged in serious combat in the South Pacific. He thrived as a soldier and remembered his time in the Army positively. Before being shipped to the warzone, Carl spent a few months training in Oregon. That was when he met my mom, Betty. After Carl left Oregon, Betty too wanted to do military service in support of the war effort. She worked as a recruiter.

Carl made back to the states as soon as he could. These big experiences shaped their lives. They always talked about “the war” as the orienting point for what came before and what came after in their lives. Proud of their service, they believed in the appropriateness of being in the military. Near the end of her life (and after my father had died), my mother did allow that she by then had some doubts about the American Empire. That was in relation to the Reagan and Bush I interventions in Central America. Her doubts surely did not extend to the virtues of the American involvement in “the War.”

So, I grew up with a lot of pride in my country. My pride stemmed from each of my parents having had positive, life-shaping experiences of serving their country in an endeavor that ended the aggression of both the Germans and the Japanese. It simply felt good for me to be an American. My parents actually rarely talked about their war experiences, and they rarely voiced their patriotism. They embodied a quiet, soft-spoken sense of confidence in the goodness of their country and satisfaction about the roles they played in furthering American democracy in the world.

World War II became such a positive event that made the United States worthy of pride due to the unquestioned evils of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. American propagandists in this war had to do little to manipulate data and imagery to make those enemy countries look bad. Hitler to our day continues to be evoked as the paradigmatic example of evil in the world and a key reason for the American military to be strong and ready to intervene. For example, Barack Obama, early in his presidency, received the Nobel Peace Prize and used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to invoke the Hitler rationale for his administration’s warist policies.

The general effectiveness of American tactics and that we did decisively win the war both against Germany and Japan helped reinforce the positive feelings. Successful wars are much easier to put a positive spin on. That the war almost completely took place far away from American national boundaries also helped strengthen the positive feelings. Compared to all the other major powers, few Americans experienced the devastation of total war. When the war ended, the US retained its prosperity and sense of security. Americans experienced the fruits of victory in relatively unambiguously positive ways.

Americans’ postwar sense of security surely made them likely to affirm a commitment to America’s role as the world’s great superpower. As American leaders affirmed their status as the world’s only nuclear power, made war mobilization permanent, transformed the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union into a relationship of enmity, and greatly enhanced the place of the large corporations that profited from expanded warism, most of the people said yes.

America’s turn to global domination

In the mid-1930s, the American military was small, of comparable size with Romania and Portugal. World War II changed all of this. Becoming the world’s top dog for the sake of the American way of life gave Americans something else to be proud of. The US embrace of this role became clear with President Truman’s speech of March 1947 that revealed the “Truman Doctrine” and establish the American National Security State. The nation would, from that time forward, be committed to the proposition that “America must oppose any Communist threat to freedom anywhere in the world.” This fateful statement committed the US to military intervention anywhere in the world. After this, the US would go to war due to presidential orders, and never again would Congress issue a formal declaration of war in order to initiate large scale military action. The US would from then on rapidly and widely expand its military presence around the world by establishing many more military bases.

The Truman Doctrine evoked the idealistic statements such as the Four Freedoms and Atlantic Charter with their emphasizing self-determination. We will intervene, the Doctrine affirmed, in order to further freedom and self-determination for others in face of global forces of oppression and tyranny. In practice, American military interventions had little to do with self-determination for others and much more to do with American leaders’ perceptions of what would serve American domination. To evoke the call to defend “freedom,” though, helped to ensure that Americans who tended to think positively about their nation as a force for freedom in the world would uncritically affirm such interventions.

[This is the third of a long series of blog posts, “A Christian pacifist in the American Empire” (this link takes you to the series homepage). The second post in the series, “Blank check nationalism?” may be found by clicking on this link. The fourth post, “American warism,” may be found by clicking on this link.]