9 September 2024

Mild Monday - "America the Beautiful" by Katherine Lee Bates

“America the Beautiful” isn’t an unfamiliar piece to anyone, probably. But the upcoming anniversary of 9/11 brought it to mind.

This song actually started as a poem written by Katherine Lee Bates, a Wellesley professor, during a summer-term ‘visiting professor’ trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1893. Having spent a fair chunk of my childhood in that part of the country, I was gratified to learn that the image I’ve always had in my mind when I sing “For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain” is exactly the same image Bates was looking at when she wrote it.

Source: Pixabay

I find it a little ironic, though, that the author of such a beloved American song was an honest-to-goodness ‘Progressive’ of her time—active in social reform movements and a proponent of Wilson’s League of Nations, despite having previously been a Republican. But that was an era when there were ‘Progressives’ in both parties (as I’ve written before, Teddy Roosevelt was one), and patriotism was still considered normal and right.

Bates, born in 1859, grew up in a female-headed household in Massachusetts due to her father’s death when she was an infant. Her mother and aunt had been college-educated themselves, so it was not strange that she went to the all-female Wellesley College, which had only recently opened. After graduating, she taught at a Wellesley-prep high school for several years.

In 1889, she won an award for her first novel—a morally instructive story for young adults—from the Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Society (her father had been a Congregational minister). She used the prize money to study for a year at Oxford University, then returned to teach English Literature at Wellesley for the rest of her life. She never married (although she had courted with at least two men), at least in part because she would have lost her professorship (even Wellesley frowned upon married women working); although—like many other Wellesley professors—she lived in a close relationship of uncertain nature with a fellow female professor. She died in 1929.

The tune we ordinarily sing this song to, called “Materna,” had been written for a different hymn by Samuel A. Ward. Born in New Jersey in 1848, Ward was a shoemaker’s son who grew up to be a skilled organist and composer. He died in 1904, and his tune was not paired officially with Bates’ poem until 1910.

The poem, originally titled simply “America,” was first published in The Congregationalist in 1895. It quickly became popular, and at least 75 tunes were written to accompany it, although Ward’s tune had become the favored musical setting by 1910. Bates made revisions to the words in 1904 and again in 1911, mostly to the chorus part of each verse. For example, “Till all success be nobleness / And every gain divine” was originally “Till selfish gain no longer stain / The banner of the free!”

Although the song is not considered as ‘problematic’ as many of our patriotic hymns—and in fact has been suggested as a replacement national anthem—the shining image of America still bothers some. An NPR writer sees the poem as “asking if the nation, and perhaps the world, can ever live up to its high ideals.”

But this skepticism, as tempting as it might be, misses an essential point: the poem is not about the real and imperfect America, but rather about a Platonic idea of America. In Plato’s philosophy, all things in the real world are poor copies of perfect things in the unseen world. Bates, who was educated in a time when the Greek and Roman writers were still taught as the foundation of Western thought, would have been familiar with this concept. As a social reformer, she certainly wanted the world to be better. But this poem is about the idea of America. American cities will never truly be built of alabaster, but the idea prompts us to reach higher. Far higher than the current distaste for American idealism can ever lift us.

In the wake of 9/11, a memorial service was held in the chapel on our campus. One of the hymns was “America the Beautiful.” The terrible irony on that occasion between the real and the ideal, as we sang “Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears”—when we were, in fact, weeping for the damage to one of those cities—has lodged deeply in my heart. To this day, I cannot sing that line without tears coming to my eyes.

America the Beautiful

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!

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
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!

Thoughts?