American Patriotism And The Citizenship of Small Things

At the old Patterson School on Weaver Road in China Grove, North Carolina — out where the ears of corn stand against the horizon like company men clocking in for first shift — 89-year-old Bobby Mault marks the price of freedom.

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With the help of his high school classmate and co-founder, the late Frank Albright, Mault – who saw three brothers serve in World War II when he was just a boy – transformed the schoolhouse into a shrine to hometown heroes. The place is packed wall-to-wall with the forever-young faces of the local set, all looking uneasy in dress uniforms. Visitors are as likely as not to know the people in the photographs by their first names. They came up together, went to school together, worked the same farmland, and ate at the same dinner table.

This all started at the old Texaco on North Carolina Highway 152, Mault Brothers, it’s called. For years, Bobby ran it with his brother Ed. A friend — a good ol’ boy — dropped off a uniform for display, something for the farmers to talk about when they stopped in and lingered on hot days with cold bottles of Cheerwine in hand.

After a few years, the Mault Brothers Texaco was full of these conversation pieces. It took nearly 2 decades, but Mault finally worked out a deal with the Rowan-Salisbury School System to house his collection in the once-shuttered school building. Now, he has something like 3,000 uniforms from every conflict since World War I. 

What grabs you about the place is how intimate it can feel — especially measured against the hard chrome and white lines of the national military museums. The gravitas that Bobby (with loads of volunteers like Bobby Harrison who helps run the place now) has built is a gravitas of the known. The Price of Freedom Museum is a temple to the familiar. 

In this American moment — when the actors on the national stage are more often moved by greed and anger than by generosity and love — it can be tough to get a grasp on exactly what it means to be patriotic. Hell is empty, and the devils are all cable news contributors. 

America’s once-sacred institutions have become the target of rightful ridicule, serving the personal and political ambitions of the anointed few rather than the genuine interests of the many.  Meanwhile, red-team/blue-team politics, paired with isolating and deflating COVID-19 mitigation measures, has led to a deepening of political and socio-economic fault lines. 

It’s not surprising that, according to a 2023 Gallup poll, a near-record low of 67% of adults say they are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. When Gallup first asked the question in 2001, that measure was at 87%.

Love of country is on the outs, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

There’s a passage in Michael Herr’s Dispatches, the book he wrote while serving as a correspondent for Esquire during the Vietnam War, that lodges itself against the spine. “Jugs stuck the ace of spades in their helmet bands, they picked relics off of an enemy they'd killed, a little transfer of power. 

They carried around five-pound Bibles from home, crosses, St. Christopher's, mezuzahs, locks of hair, girlfriends' underwear, snaps of their families, their wives, their dogs, their cows, their cars, pictures of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, the Pope, Che Guevara, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, wiggier than cargo cultists. One man was carrying an oatmeal cookie throughout his tour, wrapped up in foil, plastic, and three pairs of socks. He took a lot of sh-t about it (‘When you go to sleep we're gonna eat your f—-ing cookie’), but his wife had baked it and mailed it to him, he wasn't kidding.”

Maybe I’m misreading the passage, casting it in the shadow of my own presuppositions, but I think it has to do with two versions of America — America the machine whose metal teeth grab and rip through soft flesh, and America the healer whose gentle hands nurse and dress the broken skin. 

In the July 1896 issue of The Atlantic, there’s a passage that goes like this,  “Modern life has largely divorced, often cleft into many parts, two impulses which in the best days of ancient civilization were almost inseparable, or even fused into a single passion, the love of country and the love of home.” 

Edmund Burke wrote in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that “to be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country, and to mankind.”

Patriotism starts at home, and – like charity – emotion without action won’t do the trick. 

I asked a friend, a Green Beret who spent half his life serving overseas, whether he thinks friendship and patriotism are the same. “I think they both have to do with love,” he told me.

A kid in his 20s eating a burger at the bar in a cafe in Virginia had this to say about it: “I think patriotism means getting to know people in your community, caring for them … even when they disagree with you, even when they hate you. I think it means just being a good person.”

Maybe the best of America is every one of us at our best. Maybe it’s the effect achieved by millions of men and women striving not against each other, but for each other. Maybe it’s an insistence on making an America we can still be proud of. And maybe it starts with just trying to do the right thing. 

Since Bobby Mault opened his museum out at the old Patterson School on Weaver Road in China Grove, North Carolina, more than 15,000 school children have walked through its doors and walked back out again with a special understanding of the place where they grew up and the people who’ve called it home. 

They, like Bobby, are part of something now – they’ve joined the citizenship of small things.