Another July 4th come and gone. Another national holiday when our ears have been insulted with the sorry excuse we have for a national anthem. While you may think I’m writing as a professional musician who can give you at least a dozen reasons why the piece sucks, I’m not. That’s for another time and blog.
No, I really want to examine what the national anthem says about our view of our nation – what we celebrate about it; what it says about our national principles; what we value. Because it’s pretty appalling.
Let’s start with the history of the anthem. I’ll bet most people don’t know we didn’t even have a national anthem until 1931. That’s right. We managed to survive for 155 years without one. There were lots of other patriotic songs around – “Hail, Columbia,” “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” “America the Beautiful” just to name a few of the most prominent – but none of them was officially the national anthem. The current beauty we have was written in 1814 as a poem, not a song, and bumped around the national consciousness for quite a while. In 1888, the U.S. Navy adopted it as its official song and then in 1916, Woodrow Wilson, arguably one of our most racist presidents, supported using it. But it wasn’t until 1931 that Herbert Hoover, another of our, shall we say, lower tier presidents, signed it into law as our national anthem.
You probably know that it has multiple stanzas, most of which, blessedly, are never sung. Of particular interest is the third stanza where Francis Scott Key, the poem’s loathsome author (more on him later), explicates some particularly despicable and racist ideas. These lines
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
refer specifically to gloating at the deaths of American slaves who had fled to the British who had promised them freedom in exchange for serving in the British Navy. By all accounts, they were honorable and capable sailors. But Key took great delight in their dying in battle for the unpardonable sin of trying to escape from slavery and achieve freedom by fighting for the wrong side. Hmm, flash forward 50 years – sound familiar?
Let me tell you more about Francis Scott Key. Or rather, let me quote Shaun King who wrote a stunning column in 2016 about why he would never stand for the national anthem again and included this information about the lovely Mr. Key.
“While I fundamentally reject the notion that anyone who owned other human beings was either good, moral, or decent, Francis Scott Key left absolutely no doubt that he was a stone cold bigot. He came from generations of plantation owning bigots. They got wealthy off of it. Key, as District Attorney of Washington, fought for slavery and against abolitionists every chance he got. Even when Africans in D.C. were injured or murdered, he stood strong against justice for them. He openly spoke racist words against Africans in America. Key said that they were ‘a distinct and inferior race of people, which all experience proves to be the greatest evil that afflicts a community.’”
https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/king-stand-star-spangled-banner-article-1.2770075
This is the man whose words we so glibly mouth every time we sing the anthem. All of the foregoing should have been enough to disqualify it as a national anthem long ago. Apparently not.
Now that you know the history, let’s look a bit more closely at the lyrics, especially of the first verse which is really the only one that most Americans know. The entire verse is a hymn to a piece of fabric, couched in warlike, aggressive terms, with only the smallest nod to anything having to do with the American spirit which Key slips in, at the very last second, almost as an afterthought, “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” Not to put too fine a point on it but we all know even that wasn’t true. There were already more than 1 million enslaved people in the U.S., representing more than 20% of the entire population.
It’s a song about a flag flying through the night. It’s not about freedom or equality or “self-evident truths.” It’s not about “life, liberty [or] the pursuit of happiness.” It’s not about dreams of a better future. It doesn’t even mention the land or the people or the cities. It’s a war song to a piece of cloth. No wonder we have such a fetish about the flag in this country. Our primary national song is fixated on it. And the remaining verses? Equally blood-thirsty and militaristic. Is that really what we want the world to know about us?
So what are the options? A quick look at “Hail, Columbia” and “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” reveal similar militaristic motifs. Plus I’m not sure many Americans don’t even know what they sound like. “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee” is filled with magnificent imagery. In fact, it’s so beautiful, here it is in its entirety.
My country, ‘ tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountainside let freedom ring!
My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free, thy name I love;
I love thy rocks and rills,
Thy woods and templed hills;
My heart with rapture thrills, like that above.
Let music swell the breeze,
And ring from all the trees sweet freedom’s song;
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break, the sound prolong.
Our fathers’ God, to thee,
Author of liberty, to thee we sing;
Long may our land be bright
With freedom’s holy light;
Protect us by thy might, Great God, our King.
Exquisite. Compact. Evocative. Sadly, its connections with “God Save the King/Queen” probably excludes it from consideration. But the sentiments are stirring, even if some of us would prefer not to have the religious references.
That leads me to the obvious choice, “America the Beautiful.” Written in 1893 following a trip up Pikes Peak by the poet, Katherine Lee Bates, a Wellesley professor, it was first published in 1895. She revised the lyrics in 1904 and again in 1913. It was sung to any number of popular tunes including “Auld Lang Syne” (who knew?) before it finally settled into its current form, set to Samuel Augustus Ward’s melody “Materna.”
Right off, I’ll agree that there are a few wrong notes. “Brotherhood” may be problematic for some although it doesn’t bother me. Those “pilgrim feet” didn’t necessarily beat a “thoroughfare of freedom” as far as the indigenous peoples’ were concerned. But on the whole, the words are a stunning representation of the American dream without being a hymn to a flag or a paean to war. Even the requisite nod to fighting (“oh beautiful, for heroes proved in liberating strife”) is tempered by their love of “mercy more than life.”
More importantly, there is the recurring theme of striving to be better, to be purer, to be all the things we dream we can be. “May God thy gold refine/Till all success be nobleness/And every gain divine.” Or my favorite line “God mend thine ev’ry flaw/Confirm thy soul in self-control/Thy liberty in law.” Wouldn’t a dose of humility about how far we still have to go be a nice addition to what we show to the world?
While I would never choose a national anthem solely based on its relevance to the issues of the day, “America the Beautiful” touches so many of the challenges we face today. The perfect beauty of the country from its “spacious skies” to its “amber waves of grain,” “purple mountains majesty,” and “fruited plain,” reminds us of our responsibility to be good stewards of the environment which we have been given. We need to turn “all success [to] nobleness” by fighting the horrendous corruption in our present political system. And confirming liberty in law. Isn’t that at the heart of the BLM movement? Guaranteeing the safety and sanctity of each individual life under the law? As an added dividend, wouldn’t it be nice to have a national anthem written by a woman?
Last, don’t we want that patriot dream to “see… beyond the years?” Don’t we want to hold those founding principles in our heart and share them with the world? Don’t we want our cities to gleam beside our beautiful landscape, “undimmed by human tears?” Isn’t a brother/sisterhood from sea to shining sea (including Puerto Rico and the Pacific territories, of course) what we’re still trying to achieve? Wouldn’t that be a better face to show to the world and to sing from our hearts? I think so.
Blog Extra: For those of you who still want to have a song for the flag, I would suggest Stephen Sondheim’s “The Flag Song,” written for “Assassins” but cut from the Broadway production. It’s a great tribute to the flag as symbol and a study in the contradictory feelings it engenders. You can hear the incomparable Brian Stokes Mitchell sing it here: https://youtu.be/TV5cwSx6qrM
Low Boredom Threshold 