[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 the
importance, and the limits, of contextualizing an iconic anthem.
I’ll get to my
own couple of paragraphs and analyses in a moment, but I have to dedicate one
paragraph in a post on “God Bless America” to Sheryl Kaskowitz’s wonderful book God
Bless America: The Surprising History of an Iconic Song (2013). I had
the chance to hear an early version of Kaskowitz’s work as part of a New
England ASA conference back in 2011 (or maybe it was 2010—I’ve been part of
a lot of NEASA conferences!), and it was already obvious that her project was
going to offer compelling and crucial reinterpretations of this seemingly
familiar American text. The book more than paid off that early promise, and is
one of my favorite AmericanStudies scholarly texts of the last decade, readable
and engaging and provocative and highly relevant in equal measure. You can get a
preview of it here, and I promise that it’s well worth your time in full.
There are a lot
of reasons why that’s the case, but I would argue that one of the book’s most
significant effects is the best kind of scholarly revision. I have to imagine that
most Americans, even those who AmericanStudy for a living, thought of “God Bless
America” much as I had—as a pretty simple and saccharine musical complement to
a bumper-sticker sentiment. But as Kaskowitz reveals (or reminds us, but these
were largely forgotten histories before she explored them in her project), from
the song’s first 1918
version by the Russian Jewish immigrant songwriter Irving Berlin through
its 1938 revision by
Berlin and Armistice Day
debut performance by Kate Smith into its World War II evolution
and beyond, “God Bless America” exemplified a great deal of complex and crucial
early 20th century American and world history. Among other effects
of better remembering those complex histories, I would argue that they
highlight a frustrating limit to the recent “cancelling” of
Kate Smith, which largely fails to engage with the nuanced, often contradictory
histories of American popular music that her life and work reflect and that “God
Bless America” certainly sums up.
So the story
behind “God Bless America” is a lot more complicated and multi-layered than it
might seem—but as for the song and its sentiment, I’d still say they are
frustratingly limited in a specific and important way. While of course in most
ways my identity closely aligns with mythic narratives of “American” identity,
as I wrote in
this post there’s one area where I significantly diverge: as an atheist in
a nation that (particularly since the mid-20th century, as Kevin
Kruse has amply demonstrated) has gone out of its way to emphasize again
and again phrases like “under God” and “in God we trust.” As I hope this week’s
posts have consistently illustrated, every choice of an anthem or national song
certainly represents a vision of that nation’s identity and community, and
likely inevitably excludes as well as includes along the way. But of all our
prominent national songs, “God Bless America” nonetheless stands out for its
thoroughgoing embrace of images of America and Americans as fundamentally
religious, its expression of a communal belief with which those of us who do
not believe would have a profoundly difficult time connecting. That doesn’t
elide the song’s interestingly multi-layered story and history, but it does
make it one with which this AmericanStudier won’t be quick to sing along.
Last anthemic
post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other national songs you’d highlight?
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