Nine months after President Bush created the federal Office of Homeland Security, the agency’s name still has an odd ring to American ears.
As many times as we’ve heard it in the news, it just does not sound like us.
Few Americans talk about the U.S. as their “homeland.” That has the sound of someplace else, somewhere across an ocean, perhaps.
And unless you were a policy type, “homeland security,” the concept and the term, simply flew below the radar before Sept. 11.
What the Office of Homeland Security and the newly proposed, cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security do sound like is a matter of disagreement, even among people who study the nuances of words for a living.
For some, it conjures up dark images of Mother Russia under Stalin, or the Nazi Fatherland. For others, the name has a soothing association — protecting the heartland in a frightening time.
Whatever feelings the appellation stirs in Americans, it is destined for an even higher profile now that Bush has proposed the cabinet-level department, to be established through the largest reorganization of the federal government since 1947.
In fact, the term `homeland security’ isn’t new to people studying terrorism. For example, members of a 2000 panel led by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman issued a report urging better `homeland security.’
But you can be sure White House officials thought long and hard and considered many alternatives before settling on that phrase as an agency name.
Lest you think dictionary editors, with all their training in the connotations of different words, react to such things as a pack, consider what two such editors had to say about the name.
In Boston, dictionary editor Joseph Pickett gives it a thumbs down.
“I remember the first day it came out, someone mentioned to me it sounds like some Stalinist department in a huge totalitarian government,” said Pickett, executive editor of Houghton Mifflin’s American Heritage Dictionary.
“It’s probably not the best choice of words,” Pickett said. “Historically, `homeland’ has been associated with extreme nationalism, which is not what Americans are given to. They’re patriotic, but extreme fear of and hatred of other peoples has not been the experience.”
In Bedford, Va., Anne Soukhanov heard something different in the name.
“I find it a fascinating term,” said Soukhanov, editor of the Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary. “The connotations are of FDR’s fireside chats and Jimmy Carter’s sweater chats. `Homeland’ just screams `heartland’ to me. Middle America, Midwest values. [The sense that] `everything’s going to be all right if we just keep plugging.'”
Alternative names for such a government agency have their own possible pitfalls.
A “Department of Internal Security,” for example, has its own Gestapo-like associations, Soukhanov noted, and a “National Security Agency” already exists. “Domestic Security” or “Domestic Defense” might have a “household-y” sound, Soukhanov added.
Historian Michael Hogan recalled that after World War II, the federal War Department, instead of being dismantled as expected, was folded into a new, permanent Department of Defense.
The new choice of words was no accident.
“One conveys the image of war and battle and the other captures the American notion that the country is never an aggressor country and only defends itself,” said Hogan, dean of the College of Humanities at Ohio State University.
“It’s easier to sell a new agency as a defense agency, just as today it’s much easier to sell `homeland security.’ “
The name “Department of Homeland Security” does not sit well with Hogan, author of “A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954.”
“You can put a little parenthesis around it and call it the Department of (In)Security if you want,” Hogan said.
“In one way, it’s designed to protect our security in terms of these terrorist threats. In the other, it will be a threat itself to our civil liberties and civil rights.
“They might have named this agency the `Department of Homeland Rights and Securities’ and conveyed the notion that the security we’re talking about is not just security against an air attack or anthrax but creating a free environment for the exercise of our rights as Americans.”
Pickett, the American Heritage Dictionary editor, said the phrase “homeland security” could become a staple of government and of Sunday talk shows without ever becoming the term most Americans reach for when discussing the threat of terrorism on U.S. soil.
“It remains this very sort of artificial government term. . . . I think in that [official] sense, it will be with us forever, as long as the American government exists, probably,” Pickett said.
“But whether people are going to start talking about their concerns about `homeland security,’ that remains to be seen.”
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Contact Marja Mills at Tempo, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611 or e-mail mmills@tribune.com.
