[On July
22, 1893, Wellesley Professor Katharine
Lee Bates first composed the words to what would become “America the
Beautiful.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy “America” and other national songs,
leading up to a special weekend post on 21C nominees for new anthems!]
On three forms
of patriotism found in one iconic song.
From its title
to its final “sea to shining sea,” much of Katharine Bates’s “America
the Beautiful” embodies a straightforward, celebratory version of patriotism.
Those celebrations focus, as they often do, on mythic images of the nation’s
natural wonders—that is, while natural elements such as “spacious skies” and “waves
of grain” are of course genuinely part of the American landscape, phrases such
as “purple mountain majesties” reveal that Bates is viewing those natural
elements through tinted lenses. Elsewhere
in this space I’ve called this straightforwardly celebratory version of patriotism
the “easy” kind, but it’s fair to say that it also often relies on these kinds
of hyperbolic images, a sense of the nation’s genuine wonders that uses mythic descriptions
of those elements rather than simply highlighting their actual details. There’s
nothing necessarily wrong with exaggerated descriptions, of course; but it’s
telling that a song focused on the nation’s natural beauties can’t simply
describe those beauties accurately or without also relying on such mythic
images.
While such
mythic images might make it harder to see and engage with the nation’s darker
realities, I think it’s a second version of patriotism, one also found in Bates’s
lyrics, that more fully limits our ability to be critical
patriots. Bates’s second verse is less frequently sung but particularly telling,
as it opens, “O beautiful for
Pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress/A
thoroughfare for freedom beat, across the wilderness.” It’s not
surprising that an 1890s poem would identify the Pilgrims as an American origin
point, but Bates goes further here, both in connecting that community to “freedom”
(despite their already well-known
efforts to limit it among themselves) and especially in describing the America
they encountered as a “wilderness.” Bates
famously first wrote these words during a trip to Colorado’s Pike’s Peak,
an area that had (like much of the West) within the prior couple decades been
stolen from native
peoples. While this is only a couple lines in the song overall, it links
Bates’s imagined beautiful nation to a white supremacist version of patriotism,
one from which Native Americans have been removed as thoroughly and wrongly as
they were from lands like Colorado’s.
There’s no way
to read “America the Beautiful” without recognizing the presence of those
celebratory and white supremacist forms of patriotism, but reading it only
through those lenses would nonetheless be an over-simplification. Besides the
Pilgrims, the song’s other specific historical community are Civil War
soldiers, those “heroes” who “proved, in liberating strife/Who more than self
their country loved, and mercy more than life.” And in its final couple verses,
“America” links that recent sacrifice to a broader, critically patriotic
perspective, a “patriot dream that sees beyond the years/Thine alabaster cities
gleam, undimmed by human tears.” While the lyrics don’t specify the contemporary
causes of those tears (understandable in a brief, anthemic text), lines like
this nonetheless communicate the gap between Bates’s current nation and the
idealized one for which her text strives. Which comprises a distinct, important
critically patriotic complement to the song’s mythic and celebratory sides, and
makes this a genuinely multi-layered national anthem.
Next anthemic
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other national songs you’d highlight?
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