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America's Almost National Anthem
"America the Beautiful" by Katharine Lee Bates
About "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
"Battle Hymn of the Republic" by Julia Ward Howe
America's Almost National Anthem
by Colleen Kelly
When Katharine Lee Bates traveled across the United States,
she wrote more than postcards home. Before the trip was over, the Massachusetts educator had composed most of a poem that
would become a secular hymn and beloved patriotic song: "America the Beautiful."
Bates, a professor at Wellesley College, journeyed to Colorado
in 1893 to teach. She had been jotting down impressions about the landscape since she left Boston. But her poem really came
together after ascending Pike's Peak in a wagon emblazoned "Pike's Peak or Bust."
The experience at the top of the 14,110-foot mountain literally
knocked her friends off their feet. Bates later said she had one "brief ecstatic glimpse" of the panorama before two other
teachers fainted from the change in altitude and guides rushed the whole party down the mountain.
That evening, she wrote the opening lines of the song we
know today. She composed more verses that incorporated her impressions from earlier in the trip. But her poem isn't just about
scenery. Bates told friends that other "great" nations had failed chiefly because they weren't "good." Unless America crowned
its greatness with goodness--with brotherhood--its magnificence as a land would be for naught.
Upon her return home, Bates looked over the verses she
wrote on her trip and pronounced them "disheartening." Yet when she pulled them out again after two years, she made some revisions
and sent the poem to a magazine called The Congregationalist, where it was published in the July 4 issue of 1895. "The
hymn attracted an unexpected amount of attention," Bates would write years later. She revised the poem several times, and
it grew more popular as time passed.
The meter of the verse let it be sung to several well-known
melodies of the day. Most often, people used a tune called "Materna," written by Samuel Augustus Ward in 1882 for a hymn called
"O Mother Dear, Jerusalem." In 1926, the National Federation of Music Clubs held a contest to put "America the Beautiful"
to original music, but none of the hundreds of entries was deemed as good as Ward's tune.
That same year, the song's supporters made a push to have
"America the Beautiful" declared the country's national anthem. In 1931, Congress chose "The Star-Spangled Banner" instead.
Still, the song's popularity remains strong. It's been recorded hundreds of times, by everyone from Alvin and the Chipmunks
to Boxcar Willie. Elvis even used to belt it out as the finale of his Las Vegas show in the early 1970s.
Bates herself, an early advocate for the education of women,
led a remarkably emancipated life for a woman of her time. She headed the English department as Wellesley, traveled through
Europe and the Middle East, and studied at Oxford in England. But her most popular and enduring work is this poem that envisions
a nation with ideals as great as its landscape.
Colleen Kelly
KnowledgeNews is brought to you by Every Learner, Inc.,
an independent small business dedicated to supporting lifelong learners. Copyright © 2007, Every Learner, Inc. All rights
reserved.
"America the Beautiful"
by Katharine
Lee Bates
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, impassion'd
stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry 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 ev'ry gain divine!
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine
alabaster cities gleam,
Undimm'd by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good
with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
--Katharine Lee Bates
About "The Battle Hymn of the Republic"
by Colleen Kelly
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln became president of the
United States. Seven southern states had already seceded from the Union. In his inaugural address, Lincoln tried to conciliate:
"I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists. I believe I have
no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Slavery could continue, said Lincoln, but so must the Union.
Lincoln struck a much different chord in his second inaugural,
four years and hundreds of thousands of lost lives later: "Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge
of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred
and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another
drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true
and righteous altogether.'"
Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), a published poet and Boston
abolitionist, came more quickly than Lincoln did to the fervent and public conviction that slavery was an offense against
God that demanded action.
Visiting the Union army in Virginia in 1861, Howe heard
Union soldiers singing "John Brown's Body." The song reminded her of the abolitionist John Brown, who attacked an arsenal
at Harper's Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in 1859. Brown wanted to distribute weapons to slaves and encourage an uprising
against slave owners. The attack ended badly for everyone, especially Brown, who was captured, convicted of treason, and hanged.
Howe, who may have been connected to the group of abolitionists
who secretly financed John Brown's plot, found the soldiers' singing inspiring. Immediately, she determined to set the stirring
tune to new verses that would remind the Union troops that they were risking their lives for a just and divinely ordained
cause ("As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free").
Howe described how the poem came to her almost in a dream
the next morning: "[I] awoke the next morning in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for
lines were arranging themselves in my brain. I lay quite still until the last verse had completed itself in my thoughts, then
hastily arose, saying to myself, I shall lose this if I don't write it down immediately."
The poem first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly
in 1862. Set to the same folk tune that the soldiers had used for "John Brown's Body," it quickly became the unofficial anthem
of the Union troops. The song has retained its popularity over the years, particularly among troops in World War II. After
the war, Howe took up other causes, playing a crucial role in the women's suffrage movement and in the establishment of a
national Mother's Day. Her "Battle Hymn" became just that: the anthem Americans use to fight for a just cause.
Colleen Kelly
KnowledgeNews is brought to you by Every Learner, Inc.,
an independent small business dedicated to supporting lifelong learners. Copyright © 2007, Every Learner, Inc. All rights
reserved.
Battle
Hymn of the Republic
by Julia Ward Howe
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the coming of the Lord:
He
is trampling out the vintage
where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning
of His terrible
swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Chorus
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory,
glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires
of a hundred circling
camps,
They have builded Him an altar
in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence
by the
dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
Chorus
I have read a fiery gospel
writ in burnished rows of
steel:
"As ye deal with my condemners,
so with you my grace shall deal;"
Let the Hero, born of woman,
crush the
serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on.
Chorus
He has sounded forth the trumpet
that shall never call
retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men
before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him!
Be
jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Chorus
In the beauty of the lilies
Christ was born across the
sea,
With a glory in His bosom
that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy,
let us die to make men
free,
While God is marching on.
Chorus
He is coming like the glory
of the morning on the wave,
He
is Wisdom to the mighty,
He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool,
and the soul of Time His
slave,
Our God is marching on.
Chorus
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