Although debates over the meaning of patriotism in a democracy date to Demosthenes warning ancient Greeks about their civic complacence, in America the phase “my country, right or wrong” dates to a specific, alcohol-fueled dinner in 1816 in the Virginia naval town of Norfolk.
The dignitaries present were celebrating a military victory by the U.S. Navy off the Barbary Coast. The first toast that night paid homage to a poem penned two years earlier in Baltimore celebrating another naval battle: “The Star-Spangled Banner — Long may it wave/ O’er the land of the free/ And the home of the brave.” As the wine flowed freely, the hero of the hour — “the Conqueror of the Barbary Pirates,” the newspapers called him — arose to give his toast: “Our country,” said Commodore Stephen Decatur. “In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, and always successful, right or wrong.”
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