Mark Steyn: America The Beautiful

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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Happy Independence Day

 

At Front Page, Don Feder offers 17 ways to celebrate America’s birthday.  Here’s his closing:

Never give up! – America wasn’t started or safeguarded over the course of 245 years by quitters. Think of Valley Forge, the string of defeats the Union Army suffered in 1861-62, Belleau Wood and Bastogne. To pledge allegiance to the flag means that you will fight to keep it waving, regardless of the odds.

We are in a war for America’s survival, every bit as desperate as the Revolution, the Civil War or the Cold War.  It includes the metaphorical equivalent of house-to-house fighting.

We are fighting for the preservation of free speech, religious liberty, private property, limited government and public safety. If the Founding Fathers could pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, the least we can do is to risk our reputations and jobs to stand up to the cancel culture and other types of leftist tyranny.

Happy Fourth of July.

Read all 17 ways to celebrate here.

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Fake News misreports Salute to America

The headline: FAKE NEWS Caught AGAIN As They Attempt To Spin Yesterday’s D.C. Celebration As “Small”. DCWhispers reports -- and has photographic proof of Fake News (read: outright lies):

Despite a bit of damp and humid weather, tens of thousands cheered the President Trump-led Fourth of July celebration in Washington D.C. yesterday. It was a patriotic event enjoyed by young and old alike but clearly out of favor with the Trump-hating/America-hating, far-left media which is now once again spreading their own altered version of reality:

Many networks refused to cover the live event. Clearly, that makes lying about it to the American people even easier.

More here. Related: As Trump Salutes Air Force Flyover, CNN Cuts to Commercial.

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Happy Independence Day

Fourth of July Cleveland fireworks

photo credits: Pat J Dooley Photography

Independence Day from a British perspective

art credit: en.wikipedia.org

Breitbart UK’s James Delingpole is one of my favorite reporters/commentators, and his Independence Day column is a good example of why:

For me, Independence Day means the birth of the Anglosphere. As an Englishman, I don’t feel at all resentful that you triumphed over George III’s Redcoats, nor do I count it as a defeat. It was a victory for all of us: the settlers in the thirteen colonies got to forge their own destiny; the mother country could focus her attentions elsewhere, notably India; we could all enter a new mature relationship as free traders (bringing both parties massively increased prosperity); and, best of all, it resulted in the U.S. Constitution.

Yes, of course, none of these happened without bitterness, betrayal, and much bloodshed. As happens in civil wars, it pitched friend against friend, father against son, even husbands against wives. In Britain, it became pretty much a replay of the English Civil War with “Roundheads” – Whigs and Low Church Dissenters supporting the Colonists, and Royalists – Catholics and Tories on the Loyalist side. Among the pro-American faction was MP Edmund Burke, representing the key trading port of Bristol. He famously wrote, “The temper and character, which prevail in our colonies, are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. … An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.”

Burke was right. He was talking about the impulse for liberty that courses through all our veins, English and American alike. We are far, far more similar than we are different. Certainly, we British have far more in common temperamentally and intellectually with our fellow English-speakers than we do with our neighbours on the continent – which is the true reason, of course, that we British just voted for Brexit in the EU referendum. At heart, you Americans and we British are instinctive patriots: heirs to the traditions established by Magna Carta. We believe in our nations’ exceptionalism, and rightly so. Andrew Roberts once argued that we should see the British Empire and the post-war U.S. as discrete entities, but merely as a benign Anglosphere hegemony which has been making the world a better, freer, safer place for four centuries.

It’s because we understand this that we are prepared to die so readily for our countries. We are part of a tradition that goes back to the birth of democracy at the Battle of Salamis when the Greek city states won their unlikely victory over the Persians. Better to die a free man than live a slave.

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