One mild October evening in 2001, my ABC News pals Kayce and Peter Jennings hosted a party in their elegant New York apartment to celebrate the book I’d just published, a history of the song, “America the Beautiful,” whose stirring message captures this country’s spirit far beyond the natural splendor of its opening lines.
The timing was surreal.
As I revealed the back story of “amber waves of grain” (think Kansas wheat fields) and shared the startling relevance of less familiar lyrics, another group of patriots, some 100 blocks south, combed through the still-smoldering ashes from the month-old 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Like the first responders who’d rushed into the Twin Towers as everyone else ran out—like the soldiers of the American Revolution and Civil War who gave their lives for our liberty—they were our “heroes…”
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
Everyone (including the not-yet-naturalized Canadian TV anchor) burst into song when I finished speaking:
O beautiful for…
It wasn’t the first time those words helped face down evil.
At 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, when World War I officially ended, battle-weary American GIs emerged from their trenches and gaped at the silence of the armistice. Weeping, they sang about what they’d been fighting for: Purple mountain majesties. Liberty. Grace.
On December 7, 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with congressional leaders at the White House into the wee hours. Outside, a terrified crowd gathered in the bitter cold and, looking up, started to sing about a more hopeful vision of “spacious skies…”
And in November 1963, in the wake of a youthful president’s assassination, newly elevated President Lyndon Johnson urged the nation to unite in the “these familiar and cherished words: ‘America, America’”
Our annual July 4 celebration provides another such moment, especially this year, exactly 130 years since the poem on which the song was based was first published. And since its resonance remains so strong.
You might be thinking: Seriously? With the assaults on our freedom and the demolition of our institutions, morality, and democracy, there’s nothing to sing about. These are (to reclaim a lately abused word) nasty times. Still, America the Beautiful buoyantly affirms our grand experiment and reminds us of what it can be.
The song’s words were written by Katharine Lee Bates, a New England poet and professor of English whose 1893 trip West exposed breathtaking vistas and a nation hurtling towards a vibrant future. America’s rapid industrialization had also brought economic turmoil, greed, expansionism, and anti-immigration fervor. She was writing a poem, with no intention of turning it into a song, let alone our de facto national anthem.
The music was written by Samuel Augustus Ward, a New Jersey church organist inspired by a summer sunset over New York Harbor. He envisioned a new setting for a hymn. The two artists never met or communicated. But when people found her poem in the newspaper and his melody in the hymnal, they combined them into a soaring and singable new anthem. Two separate works of art forging one American icon: a rallying cry for today.
Take the third stanza, a plea to temper runaway profits with something more principled.
The poet Bates had never heard of cryptocurrency or gifted presidential jets. In seeking a society based on honor, not accumulation, her targets were the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Long before actual gilt corroded The White House. And her original words (she revised the poem twice) were even harsher:
And then there’s the rarely sung second verse, that would probably get Bates arrested today:
She is saying that America is not perfect. We get things wrong, but we learn from our misdeeds and forge ahead under the rule of law.
And oh yeah, “self-control.”
When the Civil War first inspired loyalists to seek a national anthem—and decades before “A the B,” as Bates called it, was written—essayist Richard Grant White explained the need. “Men will sing what they would be shamefaced to say,” he wrote in 1861. “It is not food for the soul, but wine.”
America the Beautiful has intoxicated the best of us.
Ray Charles, one of many who’ve proposed it replace the martial and somewhat unsingable Star Spangled Banner, created his own bluesy, soulful version. Elvis Presley crooned a rendition with simplified chords to bursts of teenage squeals. Schoolkids and grown-ups alike usually do the first verse from memory.
With some missteps. My favorite came from a woman who said it was “O beautiful for spaceship guys.”
Or maybe that’s just a sign of the song’s versatility. Because more than a century after the excesses of the era that helped inspired it, America the Beautiful remains a song for our times.
And for our entire planet. Towards the end of her life, as isolationism and nativism started to pollute the American ideal of inclusion, Katharine Lee Bates asked an audience to think of its last words “as applying from the Pacific to the Atlantic, around the other way, and all the states in between, and that will include all the nations and all the people from sea to shining sea.”
At this time of national despair, we may not have a leader or a plan, but we do have a marching song for an anniversary.
Before she revised it—back when she called it “America”—Katharine Lee Bates published her poem for the first time on July 4, 1895.
This Independence Day, it’s time to sing it again.
The post America the Beautiful? Yes appeared first on Washington Monthly.
Continue reading...