The great Mark Steyn has a regular feature on his website, Steyn's Song of the Week, and his column over this weekend offers the wonderful backstory to the song America The Beautiful by Katharine Lee Bates and Samuel A Ward. Here is most of the column:
. . . And to round out this
Glorious Fourth in not so glorious times, at a time when we dwell mostly on
what is ugly in our society, here is a hymn to beauty. This much requested essay
is adapted from Mark's book A Song For The Season:
In 1893, a Massachusetts professor
called Katharine Lee Bates was giving a series of summer lectures on English
literature at Colorado College, in Colorado Springs. "One day," she
recalled, "some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to
14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave
the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw
the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed
there."
Professor Bates had not previously
traveled in the Rockies or seen much of her country at all beyond New England,
and the unbounded beauty of the land awed her - and inspired her. It was
"the most glorious scenery I ever beheld, and I had seen the Alps and the
Pyrenees," she said.
"My memory of that supreme day
of our Colorado sojourn is fairly distinct even across the stretch of 35
crowded years," Miss Bates wrote a year before her death in 1929. "We
stood at last on that Gate-of-Heaven summit, hallowed by the worship of
perished races, and gazed in wordless rapture over the far expanse."
Though she insisted "the
sublimity of the Rockies smote my pencil with despair", she was not
"wordless" for long. "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 floated into my
mind":
Oh beautiful for
spacious skies
For amber waves of
grain
For purple mountain
majesties
Above the fruited plain!
She put them down on paper that
evening in her room at the Antlers Hotel. Today you'd be hard put to find a
quatrain known to more Americans. Whether it's Gary Larson's "Far
Side" cartoon of Columbus approaching land and saying, "Look! Purple
mountains! Spacious skies! ...Is someone writing this down?" or Rush
Limbaugh at noon eastern welcoming listeners "across the fruited
plain" to his daily radio show, every anchorman, cartoonist, comedian or
advertising copywriter who evokes those words is assured that they're as
instantly familiar to his audience as any lines ever written in American
English.
Though they were born that day on
Pikes Peak, they were not given to the world until the Fourth of July 1895,
when they appeared in a weekly church publication in Boston called The Congregationalist. Whether or not
Katharine Lee Bates could see actual amber waves or purple mountains in that
thin air, she captured precisely the scale of America as no-one had done
before: As the anonymous author of a long-ago booklet on patriotic music
published by the John Hancock Insurance Company wrote: "Among our American
songs, none surpasses in nationalistic idealism 'America, the Beautiful.' In it
Katharine Lee Bates has caught the beauty, majesty, and immensity of this
country of ours." The words have a humility before that beauty and majesty
and immensity, yet they rise to the task and do them justice. In The Congregationalist, the editor's
introductory note read:
Miss Bates's poem has the true patriotic ring pertinent to Fourth of
July.
And over 125 Fourths later, those words are not just the accompaniment
to the celebration but part of the fabric and foundation of it.
Mark’s full column is here.
Happy Independence Day to everyone across the fruited plain.
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