America the Beautiful

On the Fourth of July in 1895, a church weekly in Boston, The Congregationalist, published Katharine Lee Bates’s poem “America.” The paper described it as having “the true patriotic ring.” Bates was 35, the daughter and granddaughter of Massachusetts Congregational ministers, and an English professor at Wellesley College, outside Boston.

A couple of years before, on her first travels out west, she had spent a few weeks teaching at a summer school in Colorado Springs. On a day trip, she and other teachers traveled in a covered wagon—pulled first by horses, then by mules as the terrain got steep—riding far above the timberline. Their destination was the almost three-mile-high pinnacle of Pike’s Peak in the Rocky Mountains. She called the spot “that Gate-of-Heaven summit.”

Facing toward Kansas—160 miles to the east and among five states besides Colorado visible from that peak on clear days—she wrote in her diary of being struck by “one ecstatic gaze.” Later, she emphasized, “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”—the poem—“floated into my mind.”

In 1903, a music publisher set Bates’s words to homespun music to create “America the Beautiful.” Years before, a church organist and choirmaster named Samuel Augustus Ward had written that melody for a Presbyterian hymn. Bates revised her lyrics in 1904. That version made Ward’s tune one of the best-known in America, though the words have been set to 60 or more other tunes. The Boston Evening Transcript pronounced the Bates-Ward pairing “the American national hymn.”

It was often sung as an alternative to Francis Scott Key’s “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which didn’t become the official national anthem until 1931. Bates’s hymn became a staple on national holidays and, she recounted, “for special occasions [such] as Grand Army reunions, patriotic mass-meetings, concerts, masques and pageants, flag-raisings, Columbus Day, meetings for immigrants, civic welcomes for new citizens, goodbyes for enlisted men.” (Columbus Day later became a national holiday.) It was published in “countless periodicals,” including the Scholar’s predecessor, The Phi Beta Kappa Key.

Singing the hymn is a way of pledging allegiance. America’s skies and mountains, waves of grain and shining seas, make America beautiful, the lyrics say, and those features of nature are stand-ins for the national flag. The poetic, sometimes old-fashioned words seem lit by a dazzling sun. The exclamation points seem to bring out its energy in the opening stanza:

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!

Melinda M. Ponder explains in her excellent biography of Bates that the poem was written to inspire Americans, “to lift them above the alarming scenes of rioting, starvation and greed on their streets and think of their legacy of notable national ideals.” America was in an anxious, angry state: in an economic depression, with widespread business and bank failures, high unemployment, and social and racial unrest. And in the run-up to the Spanish-American War, concerns lingered over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The Gilded Age of rapid economic and industrial growth and extreme inequality was severely tarnished. The country was crankily polarized.

“America the Beautiful” is part anthem and part prayer, a mix of celebration and supplication, which is really a way to challenge Americans. The celebration is of Americans’ common purpose (“brotherhood”) and fundamental values (“freedom” and “liberty in law”) as well as patriotism (“Who more than self their country loved”). The challenge is to tame excesses of capitalism (“May God thy gold refine / Till all success be nobleness”); improve conditions in violence-prone cities (“Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears!”); and, fundamentally, fix the nation’s imperfections, including its imperialist expansion, to make a better America.

The first published version of the poem, in 1895, didn’t mention “brotherhood.” The closing lines of its opening stanza were slight: “Till souls wax fair as earth and air /And music-hearted sea!” But when Bates wrote the 1904 revision, copyrighted as part of her 1911 book America the Beautiful and Other Poems, she embraced a view of social reformers. They favored a national community of people of different races, ethnicities, and arrival dates in America. In the 1910 census, one of every three adults was born in another country or had a parent who was. Bates distilled her outlook in a line of one of her other poems: “Feast me no feasts that for the few are spread.”

In the revision, stressing what she judged America’s greatest potential distinction, she repeated these lines: “And crown thy good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea!” When the Boston Evening Transcript published the revision, it gushed, “America has only to live up to the aspirations here breathed to realize its Golden Age”—and in that way honor “those idealists of late held in scant respect, the Fathers of the Declaration and the Constitution.”

The poem’s third stanza was “the most beautiful and exalted,” the Transcript commented, because it expressed “faith in America’s perfectibility” and how the nation could increase its chances of improvement: “America! America! / God mend thine every flaw, / Confirm thy soul in self-control, / Thy liberty in law!” The stanza helped explain Bates’s antagonism to American imperialism: before the United States inflicted its power in foreign territories, it had to safeguard the rights of its own people.

In the 1895 version of Bates’s poem, the stanza ended, “Till selfish gain no longer strain / The banner of the free.” Her revision  drops those lines and shifts the spotlight from the negative (“selfish gain”) to the positive (“nobleness”)—“Till all success be nobleness / And every gain divine!”

Bates was born in Falmouth on Cape Cod in 1859, two years before the start of the Civil War, and was inspired by Abraham Lincoln as a leader and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as a poet. She went to the new, all-female Wellesley College—she called it an “Adamless Eden”—in its second entering class. After she graduated, she taught English, Latin, and algebra at one nearby high school, and moved on to teach Latin, Greek, and geometry at another. Then she began a 40-year career back at the college, as an instructor in English, a professor, and eventually department chair.

She prompted an end to Wellesley’s requirement that “every Trustee, Teacher and Officer should be a member of an Evangelical Church,” because she believed that worship was a private matter. She opposed the death penalty, wrote John de Graaf, director of a documentary film about Bates called From Sea to Shining Sea: as he put it, she argued “it would be better ‘to convert criminals into men instead of corpses.’” She switched from being a Republican in Lincoln’s spirit to an internationalist Democrat in 1924, because of Republican opposition to the League of Nations, which she advocated as “our one hope of peace on earth.”

She was a charismatic teacher; a respected literary critic; an ardent writer of poems, fiction, and nonfiction; and an intrepid crusader. She had “three romances—two with men and one with a woman,” recounts Ponder. Although “short in stature,” Ponder writes, “she carried herself with the erect posture and attentive expression of an accomplished professional woman.” In a 1928 speech to public school superintendents, Bates said her “song” had given her “great joy” to write. She died the following year, a renowned American songwriter and a global citizen.

“O beautiful,” with the “O” a burst of awe, launches the first line of each of the four stanzas in her poem. The first exults what she recalled in her diary as the most “glorious scenery I ever beheld.” The second and third valorize the nation’s pilgrims, pioneers, and heroes, especially of the Revolutionary and Civil wars. The fourth extols far-sightedness in the quest for the American dream. “Beautiful” describes what she saw in America on her westward adventure and what she urged Americans to aspire to—as Ponder writes, “both physical beauty and a transcendent experience.” In the poem, beauty is an aesthetic value and a moral one.

She believed, she wrote, that “Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.” Even in our present perilous time, when those beliefs sound naïve because so much is under attack, at home and abroad, and so many people are distressed—when “beautiful” is sometimes used heedlessly to describe what it shouldn’t be applied to—“America the Beautiful” is rich in ingredients of idealism. It’s a tribute to splendor and a spur to justice.

The first lines of the last stanza are now especially important: “O beautiful for patriot dream / That sees beyond the years.” They define devotion to America as a commitment to preserving the strengths of yesterday and today, while building on them for a better tomorrow. They treat as a hallowed duty the work of making “a more perfect Union,” which the Constitution expects of all Americans, especially public officials who swear an oath to it in the most testing of times. To use Bates’s masterful choice of a word, that means building on what has proven beautiful about the nation, to make it more so for Americans in the future.