U-S-A! U-S-A! (1 Viewer)

Optimus Prime

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I was wondering about the origins of the chant

interesting
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Spectators at a Phillies-Mets baseball game broke into chants of “U-S-A, U-S-A” as news of Osama Bin Laden’s death made its way through the crowd on Sunday night.

When did Americans start yelling the name of their country over and over again to express joy or patriotic pride?

Probably in the mid-1970s. There’s a legend going around that the now ubiquitous U-S-A chant got started at the 1980 “Miracle on Ice” hockey game, when the United States Olympic men’s team, made up of amateurs, defeated the mighty Soviets.

While certainly charming and tailor-made for a Hollywood screenplay, the story isn’t true. The actual origins of the chant remain shrouded in mystery, but news stories as early as 1975 describe sports crowds repeating “U-S-A.”

For example, at that year’s National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics swimming championships, the crowd started the chant to protest the inclusion of a Canadian team that went on to win the predominantly American event.

In the 1976 Olympic ice hockey tournament, four years before the Miracle on Ice, the crowd broke out the abbreviation when the Americans defeated the Finnish team.

None of the reports from the 1970s indicate that the chant was revolutionary, or even novel, but it’s possible the journalists working at the time didn’t realize they were witnessing the birth of a phenomenon.

Whether it was truly new or not, there is evidence that it was not yet our defining national cheer. News reports from the same era often describe slightly different patriotic cheers.

U.S. Coast Guard personnel waiting to sail their vessel at a multinational ship exhibition in 1976 chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A., we don’t mess around, hey!” In 1970, blue-collar supporters of President Nixon—including those working to build the new World Trade Center towers—held a rally in Lower Manhattan.

When a peace activist appeared to spit on an American flag, the construction workers broke out into cries of “U-S-A, all the way.” It’s hard to imagine any chant other than “U-S-A, U-S-A” spreading after such an incident today.

[Update, May 3: As a commenter points out, close variants of the “U-S-A” chant appeared earlier than the ‘70s. German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics contains audio of American fans shouting, “U-S-A, U-S-A, oi, oi, oi,” which closely resembles the modern Australian cheer, “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi.”]……..


 
I was under the impression it originated in the '60s as a "shout down" against hippie rallies protesting the Viet Nam war.
I could very well be wrong, obviously.
Hippies, college students, mothers. The ones with the most to lose by continuing a senseless war. An undeclared senseless war that could not be funded by taxes or war bonds. Hence Congress robs Peter (us) to pay Paul (the military industrial complex)

We’re still paying
 
Hippies, college students, mothers. The ones with the most to lose by continuing a senseless war. An undeclared senseless war that could not be funded by taxes or war bonds. Hence Congress robs Peter (us) to pay Paul (the military industrial complex)

We’re still paying
Vietnam was a civil war that had been simmering since the French occupation and control of Indochina, and continued on after French forces were defeated at Diem Bien Phu in 1954, and one in which we percieved, erroneously as a strategic part of the larger Cold War against the Soviets and one in which LBJ used shaky, unreliable intelligence information that was never really fully verified by the CIA Director but knowingly manipulated by Robert McNamara about two, murky incidents which occured in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. When it came to a serious, overly-critical logistical analysis of what actually happened or how to correctly perceive the intelligence recovered from those incidents, very few high-ranking aspects of our intelligence community rose to the fulcrum.

Many of the sailors on those two cruisers inside the Gulf of Tonkin were on full alert all night long, had had little to no sleep, had varying, wildly different accounts of whether those two North Vietnamese torpedo boats fired at them, and pilots sent to monitor and watch the same area later on told their debriefing officers they saw nothing.
 

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