Military Review English Edition November December 2016 | Page 12

The Crisis of
National Identity
Samuel P. Huntington

Editor’s note: The following article is a chapter extract from Who
Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2005)
by Samuel P. Huntington. © 2004 by Samuel P. Huntington. It is
used by permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Salience: Are the Flags Still There?
Charles Street, the principal thoroughfare on Boston’s
Beacon Hill, is a comfortable street bordered by four-story brick buildings with apartments above antique stores
and other shops on the ground level. At one time on one
block American flags regularly hung over the entrances
to the United States Post Office and the liquor store.
Then the Post Office stopped displaying the flag, and
on September 11, 2001, the liquor store flag flew alone.
Two weeks later seventeen flags flew on this block, in
addition to a huge Stars
Samuel P. Huntington
and Stripes suspended
(1927–2008) was the
across the street a short
Albert J. Weatherhead III
distance away. With
University Professor
their country under
at Harvard University,
attack, Charles Street
where he was also the
denizens rediscovered
director of the John M.
their nation and identiOlin Institute for Stategic
fied themselves with it.
Studies and the chairman
In their surge of
of the Harvard Academy
patriotism, Charles
for International and
Streeters were at one
Area Studies. He was
with people throughout
the director of security
America. Since the Civil
planning for the National
War, Americans have
Security Council in the
been a flag-oriented
Carter administration,
people. The Stars and
the founder and coedStripes has the status of
itor of Foreign Policy,
a religious icon and is
and the president of
a more central symbol
the American Political
of national identity for
Science Association.
Americans than their
10

flags are for peoples of other nations. Probably never in
the past, however, was the flag as omnipresent as it was
after September 11. It was everywhere: homes, businesses, automobiles, clothes, furniture, windows, storefronts, lampposts, telephone poles. In early October,
80 percent of Americans said they were displaying the
flag, 63 percent at home, 29 percent on clothes, 28 percent on cars.1 Wal-Mart reportedly sold 116,000 flags
on September 11 and 250,000 the next day, “compared
with 6,400 and 10,000 on the same days a year earlier.”
The demand for flags was ten times what it had been
during the Gulf War; flag manufacturers went overtime and doubled, tripled, or quintupled production.2
The flags were physical evidence of the sudden and
dramatic rise in the salience of national identity for
Americans compared to their other identities, a transformation exemplified by the comment on October 1
of one young woman:
When I was 19, I moved to New York City.
. . . If you asked me to describe myself then,
I would have told you I was a musician, a
poet, an artist and, on a somewhat political
level, a woman, a lesbian and a Jew. Being an
American wouldn’t have made my list.
[In my college class Gender and Economics
my] girlfriend and I were so frustrated by
inequality in America that we discussed moving to another country. On Sept. 11, all that
changed. I realized that I had been taking the
freedoms I have here for granted. Now I have
an American flag on my backpack, I cheer at
the fighter jets as they pass overhead and I am
calling myself a patriot.3
Rachel Newman’s words reflect the low salience of national identity for some Americans before September 11. Among some educated and elite
Americans, national identity seemed at times to have
November-December 2016  MILITARY REVIEW