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The current series is The First Woman but that’s not relevant right now because this is a special bonus to celebrate the 250ᵗʰ birthday of my country.

In 1776 the United States Continental Congress signed our birth certificate with stirring words:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

As an aspiration, these words were beautiful. As a description of reality, they overstated the case.

They still overstated the case when Katharine Lee Bates was born approximately four score years later. The United States that welcomed her in 1859 was far from perfect. In fact, war was about to break out over exactly what we mean when we say “all men” and “liberty” and “pursuit of happiness” and “consent of the governed.”

All of those terms were up for dispute. And hardly anyone was even talking about whether “all men” included women.

The Declaration of Independence never promised anyone prosperity, but that was certainly another ideal that a great many people associated with the United States when they immigrated here. Unfortunately, prosperity also proved complicated to achieve, and that was certainly true for the Bates family of Massachusett.

Katharine Lee Bates, Author

Katharine’s mother was college educated, but college education didn’t translate into middle-class income, especially not if your husband died. Katharine’s father lived only a few weeks after her birth. For years, her mother struggled to keep the family fed and housed by sewing for the neighbors, selling vegetables from the garden plot, and accepting help from their church and relatives (Schwartz, 61).

Fortunately, Katharine had a family that valued education, and she lived in a time when college education was opening to more and more women. Wellesley College was astonishingly cheap, in part because they required their students to do housework for an hour every day (Schwarz, 61). Katharine joined their second ever class.

Her talents were literary and she published stories, poems, and essays, partly for the joy of doing it, and partly because she needed the money. After she graduated, she wrote a novel that won a prize, which sent her to study at Oxford. On her return, Wellesley hired her as an English professor in 1891 (Leopold, 62).

A professorship sounds very impressive, but the salary attached was not luxurious. It couldn’t be, given the low tuition rates at Wellesley. Katharine earned $400 per year, plus board and washing (Schwarz, 62). For context, that salary was a better than the average salary paid to cotton mill workers in Massachusetts at this same time period (Mass. Dept. of Labor, 9). But not a lot better. It was more than Madam CJ Walker from ep. 16.12 made as a laundress. But it was a tiny fraction of what Madam Walker made as a hair care tycoon. Even when she was in her early years of business she made more than Katharine

One way that Wellesley professors like Katharine made it work was by pooling incomes with a friend. Wellesley was famous for what were called Boston marriages, which meant two women living together in an arrangement that was perfectly open and respectable at the time because it was assumed to be deep, but platonic, friendship, with a side benefit of being a smart financial move. Modern people with LGBT issues on their minds tend to assume these relationships were not platonic, and they can trot out various quotes from Katharine and others about love and yearning to advocate their viewpoint.

My own viewpoint is that either type of relationship was possible, and both should be worthy of respect. Also, that the quotes are inconclusive because Victorians expressed both romance and friendship in ways that sound sexual to modern ears. There is more that could be said on this subject, and many of my sources spend a great deal of time on it, but it has nothing to do with “America the Beautiful,” so not for me today.

A Trip Out West

An additional way to boost the finances was to take a guest lecturing position over the summer holidays. In 1893, Katharine accepted one of these at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Like many easterners, Katharine had crossed the Atlantic to the Old Country, but she had seen relatively little of the new country, even though she lived there.

By 1893, going west was not the ordeal it once had been. All Katharine had to do was hop a train. It stopped in Chicago, which that summer was hosting the enormously successful Columbian Exposition.

Chicago had gone all out on this Expo. Architect Daniel H. Burnham had designed and built a number of Neoclassical buildings. The buildings were white, as befits a classical building. That made them very beautiful in American eyes, but the public (and presumably Katharine) looked on in thrilled astonishment at night when they were lit by electricity light bulb. It glittered. They called it the White City.

Inside the buildings, electricity was also on full display. Visitors could marvel at all kinds of electric devices, including many that were designed to help with the traditionally feminine tasks. There were electric sewing machines and electric laundry machines. Inventor Josephine Cochran had a showcase of an electric machine that could wash the dishes for you. It was unbelievable!

It’s also possible that Katharine Lee Bates visited the art displays, where she might have seen paintings by Mary Cassatt (ep. 10.10) and Uemura Shōen (ep. 10. 9).

Outdoors, Katharine might have ridden an electric boat around the lake. Or alternatively. Venetian gondolas, a Viking ship, or a Japanese dragon boat (PBS).

If she was feeling adventurous, Katharine might even have dared to enter a contraption built by American inventor George Washington Gale Ferris. He had wanted to build something as the American response to M. Eiffel’s tower, built for the 1889 fair. His American response turned out to be the first ever Ferris wheel carried riders higher than most of them had ever been in their lives.

All of these activities were possible at the Columbian Exposition. Unfortunately, my sources don’t tell me which ones Katharine actually did. But I think her own words later make it clear that she saw the White City.

From Chicago, Katharine took a train south and west, looking at acre after acre of corn and other crops out her window. On the nation’s birthday, she wrote in her diary: “Fertile prairies. Hot run across western Kansas. A better American for such a Fourth” (Burgess, 101).

The Writing of America the Beautiful

The city of Colorado Springs sits on the extreme western end of the Great Plains at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. If you face east, you see the grasslands stretching out before you as far as the eye can see. If you face west, you see a long line of purple mountains, north and south.

The tallest of those mountains is Pike’s Peak. Colorado Springs already sits at 6,035 ft above sea level, and Pike’s Peak towers over it at 14,115 feet.

Then as now, the peak was a popular tourist destination. One day, Katharine took a mule-drawn prairie wagon up as far as it would go, and then burros the rest of the way to the top.

She would later write, “Our sojourn on the peak remains in memory hardly more than one ecstatic gaze. It was then and there, as I was looking out over the sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind” (Burgess, 102).

By the end of the day, she had written her hymn, but she doesn’t seem to have recognized it as her best and most popular work. She tucked it away in a notebook with other scribblings she did in Colorado and called the summer’s output “disheartening” (Burgess, 102).

It was not until two years later that she dusted it off and sent it in for publication. On July 4, 1895, a magazine called the Congregationalist printed it with the title “America.”

If you are familiar with the words the song, you may be a little surprised by some of these words. Katharine later revised it, but even so, you will find references in both versions to the things she had seen on her trip: the sky, the plains, the mountains, and the gleaming white city of Chicago. Here are the words from the 1895 version:

O beautiful for halcyon skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the enameled plain!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till souls wax fair as earth and air
And music-hearted sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till paths be wrought through wilds of thought
By pilgrim foot and knee!

O beautiful for glory-tale
Of liberating strife,
When once and twice, for man’s avail,
Men lavished precious life!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
Till nobler men keep once again
Thy whiter jubilee!

Lots of songs are written in common meter double, and that means that the words and the melodies can be swapped in and out at will. This was a thing people did back when recorded music was not a possibility, and even printed sheet music was unavailable to some. People learned to sing, and if they could sing new words to a tune they already knew, that was easier.

For example, here’s part of the first verse of “America the Beautiful,” with the revised words, and sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” one of the most popular choices (Library of Congress):

Or here’s the first part of the second verse to the tune of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear”:

Or perhaps the first chorus to the tune of “Amazing Grace:”

It all fits perfectly.

No tune had yet achieved dominance when the United States entered World War I. But regardless of the melody, the words were extremely meaningful to thousands of young people who were far from home and suffering in a land that was too war-damaged to have waves of grain or fruited plains or gleaming alabaster cities. Katharine’s text was now assured of a permanent place in the American consciousness. It was further cemented firmly in place by the advent of radio in the 1920s.

A National Anthem

It came as a little surprise to me that throughout all this time, ever since 1776 in fact, the United States had no national anthem. We had patriotic songs, but nothing had been officially designated. At times where we would now sing or play the national anthem, it was fairly common to use “My Country Tis of Thee.”

Or there was “The Star-Spangled Banner,” with a text written in 1814 and set to a pre-existing tune. The military used The Star-Spangled Banner one heavily, and it’s no wonder because the main message is that of military might. Or at least military survival in the face of great odds.

I have no idea whether Katharine was even aware that between 1918 and 1929, J Charles Linthicum, Representative of Maryland, repeatedly introduced bills to get The Star-Spangled Banner recognized as the national anthem. He had to do it repeatedly because the bill kept failing.

Not everyone thought “The Star-Spangled Banner” was a good choice. In the words of a Time magazine article of the time, that song was “of too elaborate composition, too great a range, to be suitable for the national hymn. Besides, the tune is stolen from an old drinking song, ‘To Anacreon in Heaven.’ Furthermore it is only an occasional piece, written for an unimportant incident in a minor U. S. war (1812).” (Time, May 2, 1927).

In 1926, the National Federation of Music Clubs wanted to nominate a different national anthem, and the text they chose was “America the Beautiful.” But obviously it can’t be a national anthem without a designated tune. So 901 tunes were submitted for consideration, including many tunes that had been used with that text for years. Katharine refrained from expressing any opinion, but I think she was pleased that so many people liked her work (Burgess, 104).

As for the results of the contest, every source I have says merely that the four judges did not declare a winner and then moved on without comment. How can this be? How can you announce a contest, accept submissions, and then fail to deliver a verdict? Maybe there was a tie? Maybe they got bored evaluating 901 tunes? Every possibility I can think of has a readily available solution, so I just don’t know what went wrong.

Anyway, it was the court of public opinion that eventually decided that the appropriate hymn tune should be Materna. It was called that because composer Samuel A. Ward wrote it to go with a text called “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem.” He did not live long enough to realize that his music was immortalized with a very different text.

Katharine Lee Bates died in 1929. So she was not alive to see that in 1930, the Veterans of Foreign Wars collected 5,000,000 signatures on a petition urging Congress to pass yet another bill on adopting “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem (New York Times, January 19, 1930). This time the bill passed. President Herbert Hoover signed it into law on March 4, 1931.

Katharine’s Legacy

“The Star-Spangled Banner” has served us just fine as a national anthem. But there are still people who prefer “America the Beautiful,” and for many of the same reasons that Time Magazine laid out in 1927.

Katharine herself said that she thought that the popularity of “America the Beautiful” was “clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood” (Burgess, 106).

That fundamental faith in human brotherhood is written right into our founding document, the Declaration of Independence. The idealism comes in because we somehow believed that principle even while we were very spectacularly not living it.

Katharine was well aware that her beautiful America was far from perfect. She baked that right into her text, “America! America!” she wrote in the revised version of the poem, “God mend thine every flaw.”

The poem doesn’t say what Katharine thought the flaws were, but it’s not hard to parse out: She had personally experienced poverty, while others had great wealth. She had seen and worked with immigrants in the slums of Boston. In comparison to them, she herself had great wealth. She was denied the right to vote for most of her lifetime. She knew about national tragedy: she remembered watching her mother cry after receiving the news of Lincoln’s assassination. At various points, she spoke out against America’s wars and America’s discrimination and America’s isolationism, some of which affected her personally and some of which did not. She also struggled a bit with religion, though you’d never know it from the text of “America the Beautiful.” Perhaps it was only religion as defined by the dominant American culture that troubled her. And certainly she suffered her share of being panned by America’s literati critics, including those at the New York Times, who patronizingly reviewed her as a “good minor poet” (NYT).

Loving America did not blind her to these things. She actually argued the contrary.  In a poem called “To My Country,” she wrote:

O dear my Country, beautiful and dear,
Love does not darken sight.
Not blindfold are her eyes; their vision clear
Discerns more flaws than keenest hate has known;
Nor is Love’s judgment gentle, but austere.
The heart of Love must break ere it condone
One stain upon the white.

To this day, the United States has plenty of flaws, and those who love it best are fully aware of that. But my podcast isn’t about modern issues, so I’m going to leave it there and wish you a happy 4^th of July, on the 250^th anniversary of America’s birth. If you’d like to hear a full rendition of “America the Beautiful,” with Samuel Ward’s tune, here it is:

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