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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 15 (2004)

America at War Again:
Issues of Ethnicity and Unity

Stephen H. SUMIDA*

When it came to any war, Robert Frost was single-minded. Writing in1943 about the war against Germany, Frost asserted that “. . . most people believe in this war whereas I believe in any and all wars. I mean I
sympathize with all the brave people who go out to die for causes” (letter to John Bartlett, RF III.102, emphasis added).1
Ever since World War II, however, Americans have seen how wars
and warfare have changed; and accordingly ideas and practices of “patriotism,” American nationalism, bravery, and the act of dying for a cause
have changed or at least have been reexamined. The reexaminations involve moral issues stirred by decisions, indecisions, and actions of theUnited States in the atomic bombings of Japan, the Korean Conﬂict, theCold War, the war in Vietnam (which called into question earlier historical conﬂicts, such as the United States war in the Philippines in 1898
and afterward), and certainly the American loss of the conﬂict inVietnam, a debacle in Mogadishu, and the complexities of Kosovo. Butother recent instances of warmaking by the United States have been met
by not only further antiwar protests but also a return to a patriotism thatlooks like Robert Frost’s and that has been boosted by the incursions into
Panama, Granada, the Gulf War of 1991, the war in Afghanistan, andthe second war on Iraq, all perceived as victories to patriots who want
Copyright © 2004 Stephen H. Sumida. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, University of Washington

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to “put Vietnam behind us.”2 Of course the terrorist attack on the UnitedStates on 11 September 2001 hugely affected Americans’ attitudes toward patriotism and military power, however diverse these attitudes may
be. While possibly I am entirely alone in invoking Frost on the topic of
war in the present case, I thought of him last November and December
when I was devising a topic for today. I thought of Frost as offering apoint of reference for discussing attitudes among Americans toward war
in our time. And while it may occur to you that Frost in many otherinstances, in his poetry, is complex, ironical, and artfully ambiguous, I
want to comment on how even Frost’s ambiguity is used in reductive
ways to epitomize so-called American values that support our going towar.
My prime example for a poem in which Frost writes about war, during wartime, and implying his belief “in any and all wars,” ought to bememorable to any American over the age of ﬁfty or ﬁfty-ﬁve. The poem
is best remembered by its contexts; it is called “The Gift Outright”3:
THE GIFT OUTRIGHTThe land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
[1936]
1942

I was mistaken in saying that Frost wrote this poem during wartime.
His biographer Lawrance Thompson reports rather sharply that Frost
gave copies of “The Gift Outright” to the Jones Library of the town ofAmherst, Massachusetts and to Thompson himself in 1936 (RF III. 390).
Thompson reports, too, that on 5 December 1941 Frost read the poem

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7publicly, for perhaps the ﬁrst time, at an appearance at the College ofWilliam and Mary in Virginia (RF III.83–84)—doing so because henames Virginia in the poem. Two days later the United States entered or
was drawn into World War II because of the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor and, Frost complained, by the inability of the British to wage
their war against Germany without the help of Americans. Frost went on
to publish “The Gift Outright” in his next collection, A Witness Tree, in
1942.
One of the poem’s unusual features—unusual for Frost, that is—is that
it is a historical poem (only one earlier poem, “La Noche Triste,” Frost’s
very ﬁrst poem occurs in this category, according to Thompson [RFIII.84]).4 Its most obvious feature, however, was evidently not obvious
at all to most Americans or to Frost in 1942. In “The Gift Outright,” whoare “we”? “We” are Anglo Americans, those whose history goes backto when their forebears were British colonials in what became the Republic of the United States of America. “We” are so exclusively deﬁned agroup, in Frost’s poem, that even the land itself, the land that “was ours
before we were the land’s,” has no American identity until that group
goes on to create a history on and of “The land vaguely realizing westward, / But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced.” In his idea of history,
Frost is both quite right and quite wrong. He is right in that the Britishcolonials did not consider or call themselves “American” until the mideighteenth century (see “American” in the Oxford English Dictionary).
They had not given themselves to the land, as they did not until then givethemselves the name of the land, “Americans.” But earlier, “American”
did acknowledge the presence, life, and stories of the indigenous peoples, for the term earlier referred to the plants, animals, and natives by
the name, “American.” “We” further excludes whatever diversity ofnationality and origin there was among those who fought against the
British in the Revolution: people of French, Spanish, and Dutch origin,for instance; and people of American Indian nations; African Americans;and how could Frost even have conceived of Filipinos ﬁghting, as theywere, on the side of the Revolution down around Louisiana?
I have two illustrations of how exclusionary the “we” is in Frost’spoem. First, in the early days of the Republic American Indian leaders,
far from being ignored as part of America, were sometimes portrayed ina central place among the founders of the nation. John Trumbull, a prominent artist of the new American Republic in the late-18th century, painted
composite portraits of American leaders with Native Americans placed

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in the center. In one such portrait, “ ‘The Young Sachem’ (A Chief of
the Six Nations)” is centered, surrounded by images of a sculptor andthree Senators. In another, “ ‘Good Peter’ (Chief of the Oneida Indians)”
is ringed by four Anglo dignitaries, one of them the artist himself. It isinteresting that the Native American subjects are at once centered andsurrounded. Second, in a 1994 cartoon the artist Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie
portrays the American pop culture ﬁgures the masked Lone Ranger andhis American Indian sidekick Tonto. They are surrounded by Indians
about to attack. The Lone Ranger says, “TRAPPED! Wild Indians everywhere. What are we going to do?” Smiling at his own thoughts, Tonto
thinks, “ ‘WE?!’ ”5
I nonetheless agree with William Pritchard that this poem is “ﬁne” inits sounds, meters, style, and relations between style and sense.6 I do notknow why, but Pritchard calls “The Gift Outright” a “ﬁne sonnet”(Pritchard 239). The poem is sixteen lines long and not fourteen, theusual (though not exclusively so) length of a sonnet. Something about“The Gift Outright” impresses the reader with a sense of artistic (andpolitical) unity, which the poem is about. It is a poem ﬁt for wartime,
1942.
When I said earlier that Frost’s “The Gift Outright” is perhaps best
remembered by its contexts, I think of what I saw on television in 1961.
It must have been a week after the inauguration of President John F.
Kennedy, a week after 20 January 1961—because in those days it took
a week for news already broadcast in North America to reach Hawai‘iin whatever format television “news,” by now old, was sent to the middle of the Paciﬁc. I saw a bright winter light bathing the people on thegreat inaugural platform: John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Earl
Warren, Lyndon Johnson, and others stood tall and squinting. I remember that at some point Robert Frost stepped forward and read a poem. I
was impressed because I felt or was told that it was unusual—and unusually classy—for a president to invite a poet to speak at the inauguration.
I thought for years afterward that this meant that Frost was our American
Poet Laureate (only now I learn that he was proclaimed the Poet Laureate
not of the United States but of the small state of Vermont, nothing more,because he had a residence there). This was a sort of glory that seemedpromised by the new President, the First Lady, and their charisma.
I do not remember what others then saw and heard and what Frost
experienced, almost in panic. Accounts that I now study tell how the winter light glaring off the snow blinded Frost. He had had to have his poem,

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written especially for the inauguration, typed in an extra large font. But
even thus prepared, he could not see the words clearly, and he could notrecite the poem from memory because it was newly composed, a rather
effulgent and stately poem, uncharacteristic of Frost, in which he proclaimed the arrival of a new “Augustan” age for America (Pritchard
253–55; RF III. 277–83). Frost said aloud that the sunlight was blinding
him. Lyndon Johnson got up, took off his top hat, and used it to shade
Frost’s page to make it easier for Frost to see. When Johnson’s effort
failed, Frost tried to grab the hat and help Johnson. Remembering thatevent, a colleague told me that Frost “very nearly lost it.” And then Frostbegan to recite “The Gift Outright” from memory. And when he cameto the last line of the poem, he paused to announce that he would revise
a word, for this occasion, so that it would read, not about what the nation“would become,” but what “she will become” (RF III.282).
Being ﬁfteen years old and unable to think that anything could gowrong in such a presidential setting, I thought that Frost’s recital of “The
Gift Outright” was his intention all along. I would not remember that hehad faltered. Later, I would think that after all, one of the themes of thepoem, the giving of “our” blood in order to give ourselves to the land,
our nation, was paralleled by President Kennedy’s stunning and rousing
exhortation in his inaugural speech that day, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” I would still
later think of how “The Gift Outright” was repeated in a wartime context of 1961: it was now the Cold War, against an “-ism,” an ideology
and a system that threatened to “bury” us.
Despite his near collapse, Frost triumphed at the inauguration of John
F. Kennedy by virtue of his unplanned but commanding recital of “The
Gift Outright.” In September 1962 Frost went on to pay a visit to Premier
Nikita Khruschev at the Soviet leader’s summer house (Pritchard
255–56). Adhering to his philosophy about war—“I sympathize with all
the brave people who go out to die for causes,” and war to Frost was likea ﬁght between two boys, except bigger—he reportedly told Khruschev
that the United States and the Soviet Union should see their conﬂict asa “rivalry” that strengthens both sides. When he returned to the UnitedStates Frost was prepared to tell President Kennedy about how he hadadvised Khruschev. To his disappointment, Frost was not invited to meetwith the President again.
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nation, the United States of America.7 In most of his poetry, Frost is notstraightforward about anything. It is strange, however, that he evidently
is taken as a poet who speaks directly. With one of Frost’s most famous
poems, I want to demonstrate how a deeply ambiguous poem is popularly interpreted as a simple and therefore admired one when taken as a
metaphor or a simple allegory for a decision to go to war. The poem is“The Road Not Taken”:
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the ﬁrst for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
[1915]
1916“The Road Not Taken” may be the most quoted poem of America. But
it is not an actual line from the poem that is quoted; rather it is aparaphrase of the penultimate line. The expression, “The Road Less
Traveled,” is ubiquitous. It can be found in advertisements for banks,
schools, cigarettes, cars and trucks, soft drinks, vacation travel packages,
suntan lotion, whatever. The expression signiﬁes the making of an individualized, self-conﬁdent choice that shows one’s boldness about goingagainst a crowd of conformists. It epitomizes American individualism.
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the graduation ceremonies of more than half of the high schools in the
United States every June. Yet the very words, “The Road Less Traveled,”
do not exactly occur in the poem. Moreover, the title of the poem is not“The Road Less Traveled” but the other road: not the road “I” took but“The Road Not Taken.”
How is this so?
Before I address this question, I want to connect this poem toAmerica’s warmaking today. On 22 December 2002, Tim Russert, thehost of NBC TV’s Sunday morning program, Meet the Press, showed aclip from the Meet the Press broadcast of 25 December 1955. The hostin 1955 asked Robert Frost whether there was anything in Frost’s lifethat he would change. In response, Frost recited “The Road Not Taken.”
He had explained that “a man” would lack “complete understanding” if“he lacked poetry in his life.” Then Frost recited his famous poem about
making decisions, “The Road Not Taken.” As soon as Frost’s 1955
recital of his poem ended, the 2002 program cut to the present. Tim
Russert immediately went on to speak of “The Road Less Traveled”—
please note again that this is neither the title of Frost’s poem nor a phrase
in the poem—and Russert proceeded to comment on how since 9/11 theUnited States has traveled that “less traveled road” of freedom, values,and valor. I felt when I watched this that Russert was blundering into an
incomplete understanding that arises, Frost cautioned, when a man“lacked poetry in his life.”
For what does Frost’s poem say? Most of the poem is an account of
how two roads lay there equally unused, equally untrodden. The speaker faces a choice between two equal alternatives. Line after line, thespeaker of the poem states his or her quandary. In one of his novels, John
Barth echoes Frost: how do you choose between equally reasonable alternatives? He proposes a method for choosing: choose from left to right,
like reading or writing English, so that the alternative on the left wins;
or choose from top to bottom, so that the uppermost wins; or, if not spatially, then temporally, choose by chronological order, so that the earlier
occurring alternative wins. Just choose. When it is ﬁnally, paradoxically,
an arbitrary choice, then take the leap of faith and pick one. In popular
Japanese culture, or in Japanese American culture because this ﬁlm is so
powerfully signiﬁcant to some of us Nikkei, at the beginning of Akira
Kurosawa’s ﬁlm Yojimbo the protagonist played by Toshiro Mifune andwho calls himself Kuwabatake Sanjuro in this episode comes to a fork
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high into the air then follows the road that the stick points toward when
it falls on the ground. This is the existential, jitsuzon-teki, act of choosing that I came to feel and admire that Frost’s poem also was about. I
wonder if Kurosawa was deliberately alluding to Frost. Pritchard comments that the last stanza of the poem is not about the speaker’s psyche
at the time of making the decision but a projection into the future, withthe speaker imagining how it will seem one day “ages and ages hence”
that he had chosen “the one less traveled by” (Pritchard 127). My teacher
of modern poetry in graduate school, Professor Roger Sale, a colleagueof Pritchard and of Robert Frost, went on to question, what “difference”
has the choice made? Why should we assume that it was a good difference? The line could be an expression of regret, told “with a sigh.”
In the reductive, unambiguous reading that Tim Russert of NBC’s
Meet the Press was presenting and that, I assert, participants in more thanhalf the high school graduation ceremonies in the United States perform
every year, the “difference” that the choice has made is a great and noble
one. This reading misses the ambivalence, the poignancy, perhaps theremorse, of the reﬂections one increasingly has on life when one is fortunate to live long enough. And there is a further complication to thispoem. Frost’s biographer Thompson devotes pages to recounting how
Frost wrote the poem as a parody of a Welsh friend of his named Edward
Thomas (RF II.88–89). Thomas was habitually indecisive. Frost hated
this characteristic. So the poem Frost wrote was not even meant in theﬁrst place to be an expression of Frost’s own character. It was a parodyof a self-doubting Thomas.
So very much has been written about Frost and this poem that here I
have presented only what I am thinking at this time and cannot myself
claim to be comprehensive. Indeed I may be in a tiny minority of readers of Frost’s wonderful poem. In my three decades of teaching, I havemet only one student who could tell me that her teacher read Frost’s poem
in a way similar to what I have presented here and what my sources andteachers (for example Pritchard and Sale) have shown me. By comparison, I have known many more students who have argued against me bysaying that the poem is about American individualism and that the usual,unambiguous way or reading Frost’s poem is perfectly valid, because in
the ﬁrst place any interpretation of a poem is individual and as true as
any other interpretation. I really have to ask them, and I do: do you wantme to read and interpret your paper that way, in any individualistic way
I want?

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The continual misappropriation and, I must say, misunderstanding of
Frost’s and one of the most famous poems in twentieth-century American
literature reminds me of how in 1972 Richard Nixon’s presidential
campaign slogan was, “Now More Than Ever.” Could not any adviser
warn Nixon that this phrase appears in John Keats’s poem, “Ode to a
Nightingale,” where the line reads in full, “Now more than ever seems
it rich to die” (emphasis added)?
How ironical it is, then, that in making war this year the United States
had to try to fashion an image of a united nation and war effort, whenmany peoples of the United States have had histories and experiencesthat fracture the old and attempted constructs of unity. Take Frost’s “The
Gift Outright,” for example. In November and December of 2002 I
offered a course at the Blaine Memorial United Methodist Church of
Seattle (a church founded by and for Issei, Blaine will be a century old
in 2004). Our class met every Sunday for eight weeks, in a course called“Two Nisei Writers of Seattle: Monica Sone and John Okada.” Sometimes as many as forty-ﬁve attended a session. Busy Sansei participants
came and went, chasing after their children, but about twenty-ﬁve Nisei
attended class regularly for eight weeks. They were contemporaries andfriends, even relatives, of the two authors we studied.
As important as Sone and Okada are in Nikkei literature, such a course
had never been run before. It was as if members of the class were characters in the two books studied, in Seattle where the narratives are set.
Near the end of our course, I presented Frost’s “The Gift Outright” fordiscussion. Bob Sato, a participant in the course, is a veteran of WorldWar II and the all-Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe. Mr.
Sato is a former Commander of the Nisei Veterans’ Committee and anational activist for Nikkei concerns. I used to expect him to be narrowly
patriotic and against any critique or protest of America at war. But when
we discussed “The Gift Outright,” he openly stated that he thought that“that guy” Frost epitomized in the poem the very thing that Bob Sato, aJapanese American, fought against in World War II—against a deﬁnition of America as exclusively “Anglo.” There is meanwhile no doubtthat Bob Sato is patriotic and that he gave himself to America in his
service in the war. He has been battling since then to have his gift
accepted. For ﬁve decades he has stood up to fellow Americans, veterans in the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, who still do
not accept Nisei veterans as fellow comrades in arms. Sato is a critic of
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people mistaken for belonging in that group. Mr. Sato is campaigning to
educate others to understand how the internment of Japanese Americans
and, profoundly related to it, the persecution of so-called “Arabs” inAmerica are setbacks in America’s own unﬁnished path of democracy:
they are injustices against democracy and the Constitution, he says.
To Bob Sato and myself, and to many Nisei in our Sunday class, theUnited States government’s pronouncements and postures regarding
freedom, democracy, and national unity in support of the war seem asironically shattered with contradictions and hypocrisies as their internment in World War II was. And this is why, I feel, the war against Iraq
turns our stomachs. It is not a “just war,” and perhaps knowing that, as
Huck Finn puts it, “You can’t pray a lie,” President George W. Bushdoes not invoke the Biblical concept of a “just war,” as his father did in
1991, to label and justify the Iraq War of that he began in 2003. The selfrighteous claims of our country about bringing freedom and democracy
to the people of Iraq—that is, of “liberating” them—are very close to theterms that leaders such as President William McKinley used in 1898 totake over the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, professedly to free a savage people
from a savage monarchy and put an end to alleged tyrannical abuses. In
regard to such self-righteousness, nothing much has changed compared
to 1961 when Frost recited “The Gift Outright” in a panic, to 1942 when
Frost ﬁrst published the poem, and earlier to1936 when he read and wroteit, to 1898 when the United States imperialized Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico,
Guam, Cuba, and the Philippines, to the nineteenth century when Manifest Destiny was America’s destiny, and back to the European conquest
and colonization of the American continents. Nothing much has changed
when it comes to self-righteousness.8 Although nowadays in American
Studies we distance ourselves from assuming an “American exceptionalism,” I wonder if the self-righteousness of making war may still be an
American specialty because of American claims about dispensing giftsof liberation and democracy.
In its war against Iraq, the United States has employed many means
to appear to transcend conﬂicts and tensions between American diversity and American unity in the broader interests of marshalling an America
united in warmaking. The television news coverage alone, of American
soldiers at war, by making visible the skin color of soldiers and by theidentiﬁcation of surnames, displayed the racial diversity of the military
and the American nation. Men and women of different races were seen
to be literally in uniform. Like the Native American men who were once

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soldiers in World War II, in Leslie Silko’s novel, Ceremony, the uniform
made them seem like all other American soldiers, not just Indians. In
much the same way, but less explicitly and obviously, Jay Gatsby inFitzgerald’s novel obscured his ethnic identity by wearing the uniformof an American soldier in World War I and by changing his name fromJames Gatz to Jay Gatsby, when his ethnicity, German American, was
not a very good one to wear back home in the United States. The uniform of an American soldier enabled him to assimilate, to become “uniform.” In the war in Iraq, thus, American soldiers, men and women,
appeared on television as both diverse and uniform, in uniform, at thesame time. At the height of combat, a male African American ofﬁcerdelivered the daily press brieﬁngs at the headquarters in Qatar; a Navajo
woman soldier was killed and to some degree made a hero in a battle
when her unit strayed off course and encountered Iraqi paramilitary ﬁghters; in the same battle, a white woman was captured after ﬁghting valiantly and was rescued in a commando raid nine days later; a male Chinese
American soldier was ordered to climb up the new statue of Saddam
Hussein in the center of Baghdad to cover the face of it with an Americanﬂag, an ill-conceived but entirely deliberate act of Americans momentarily possessing and not liberating Iraq; and white male ofﬁcers wereeverywhere. The display of American diversity was unprecedented, in
this war.
Many of us live in concern that the unity in diversity that our country
is displaying, through the American media, in the war on Iraq, hides
something.
The special quality of unity and diversity in the American military
obscures certain imbalances. For instance, sixteen percent of theAmerican war dead have been Latinos, almost all of them immigrants.
Behind this statistic are questions: why such a high percentage and why
should immigrants be playing such a costly role? Some of these casualties are not citizens of the United States. Joining the all-volunteer armiesof the United States offers some upward mobility to people who are near
the bottom of legal status, rights, and opportunities. Latinos have thus
enrolled disproportionately in the military. Why are they especiallyprone to becoming casualties? As happened to Nisei soldiers in Europe
in WWII, the casualty rate of Latinos may be high because they are thefootsoldiers and the ones ordered to enter some of the worst battles. The
military has appeared diverse; but it seems now that some groups have
had a better or worse chance of being targeted.

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In America today, the USA PATRIOT Act gives us plenty to worry
about.9 According to the Act, section (412), anyone suspected of terrorist plotting or activity may be detained indeﬁnitely, without a duly
processed arrest, without charges, without trial, without conviction, inshort without due process of law. This is so close to what happened in
the detainment and incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War
II that although the PATRIOT Act is worded as if it targets individuals,
it reminds us of the targeting of entire groups by race, ethnicity, national
origin, religion, and “creed.” The PATRIOT Act is now in force. Underit, how can we even know who and how many are at present being“detained”? When 20,000 people protested the threatened war in themass march in Seattle on 15 February 2003, those who rallied at the
Immigration and Naturalization Service at the end of the march reported that they had caught glimpses of people behind the bars of the windows of the basement of the building. The people were waving to draw
attention. They seemed to be detained there, locked up. Who are they?
They may not be isolated cases. Through the year we have heard in
Seattle and from other places about people taken from their homes into
prisons under sheer suspicion, not for acts committed. In Seattle, theHamoui family suffered horrendous treatment. The mother in the family was violently arrested, imprisoned for months, and denied adequate
medical care. The family has reason to believe that Arab Americans as
a group are targeted. While we see a display of American diversity on
the battleﬁeld, a concentrated discrimination may be occurring, at home,in America, in an obscene way—that is, off-scene and hidden fromview—a discrimination that highlights difference and crushes it.
I prepare to go to press with this paper nine months after I delivered
it in a speech for the Japanese Association for American Studies. Today,
in February 2004, America’s war in Iraq still goes on in spite of Bush’s
declaration on 1 May 2003 that major combat had ended and despite
Bush’s premature implication in saying this that the war was over. This
paper began as a rather tidy one in my mind, when I proposed it inDecember 2002, because I felt I already knew what I wanted to say about
Frost and war and his two poems. Subsequently the war began and has
continued. My subject, America at war, is continually changing. My
thoughts about war also grew in unexpected directions; I was aware ofthis when visiting the Heiwa no Ishi Ji, the Peace Memorial of Okinawa,in early June 2003. The already abundant information became entirely
without bounds and unruly, like the moral, emotional, and psychic uncer-

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tainties that some and perhaps many of us have been experiencing in the
United States. It is no surprise that voters are now watching and analyzing the election campaigns of 2004 for clarity and deliberate choices.
NOTES
This paper was given at the Annual Meeting of the Japan Association for American
Studies, Kobe University, 31 May to 1 June 2003.
1
Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years 1938–1963(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976). Cited hereafter in my paper as RF III,
this is the third of three volumes in Thompson’s literary biography of Frost. My parenthetical citations of RF II refer to the second volume, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph
1915–1938 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). I do not cite the ﬁrst volume, The Early Years. The ﬁrst and second volumes are by Thompson alone.
2
See Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (New York: PublicAffairs,2002). A foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Hedges has covered wars in
Bosnia, El Salvador, Israel, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. In a peculiar sense, he
has experienced more war than have soldiers, leaders, and peoples of any single nation
at war. His interest in War Is a Force is in studying how war intoxicates warmakers.
3
The texts of poems by Frost that I quote in this paper are from the Complete Poemsof Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).
4
In Meet the Press on NBC TV, 25 December 1955, Frost recited “The Gift Outright”
and remarked that this was his poem of most direct comment on America. Footage ofthis recital and commentary by Frost was shown on Meet the Press on 28 December
2003.
5
For Trumbull’s portraiture of The Young Sachem and Good Peter, see Theodore
Sizer, The Works of Colonel John Trumbull: Artist of the American Revolution, revised
edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), ﬁgures 110 and 113. I have only photocopies of Tsinhnahjinnie’s cartoon and have been unable to reach her for further identiﬁcation of the source beyond the note alongside the cartoon that it is from “Living theSpirit.” Thanks to Teresa Brownwolf Powers for her help in trying to contact the artist.
6
William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, second edition, with a
new Preface (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). Pritchard, a ﬁne andsensitive reader of poetry, “reconsiders” Frost’s poetry and life; he also is “reconsidering” the “literary life” of Frost that Thompson wrote.
7
It can be said that “The Gift Outright” is about “violence and belonging,” the themeof the annual meeting of the American Studies Association for 2003, in Hartford,
Connecticut.
8
On 23 April 2003 a “Day of Reﬂection” was held at the University of Washington
in Seattle, an afternoon devoted to numerous sessions and activities in dialogue and commentary on the war on Iraq. I attended a session on “The Bible and War: The Defenseof Territory in American Christianity,” by a scholar of Comparative Religion, James
Wellman, who spoke about Evangelical Christianity in the United States and how the
many groups in this category constitute a political force, based on their beliefs, and generally lend support to ways that George W. Bush sees the world and acts within it. In
Wellman’s analysis, righteousness is an element in Evangelical and Bush’s character.
While the Day of Reﬂection was meant to invite participants of different political positions, those against the war were the heavy majority of the people who proposed sessions.

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STEPHEN H. SUMIDA

USA PATRIOT, the name of the Act, is an acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”
The Act guides the work of the new Department of Homeland Security. I thank my student in our Senior Thesis course, Dion Wigfall, for his research on Homeland Security
and the PATRIOT Act.