We Need a New National Anthem

Fletch: there’s a war going on, man! Why are you talking about a national anthem? The pandemic is still on; autocrats are threatening; inflation is rampant; America is polarized as it hasn’t been since the 19thC. Who cares about a new National Anthem?

That Polarization is the Reason we need a new National Anthem.

 Of what use is a national anthem? Hell, most people can’t even sing ours.

    ~ Was it the perilous fight or the perilous night through which Francis Scott Key o’er the ramparts watched?

    ~ Was it amid the rocket’s red glare or And the rocket’s red glare that gave proof through the night -- or was it through the fight? -- that our flag was still there?

    ~ And was that rocket’s, singular, or rockets’, plural?

Why should you care? Because a national anthem is a useful device for creating a moment of comity. It symbolizes something citizen’s share, in our case, both liberal and conservative, young and old, Democrat and Republican, big city dweller and small town folk, we all share our citizenship in these United States of America. To sing together the national anthem is a moment to proclaim together a patriotic statement of our common identity as Americans.

 

I think the Star-Spangled Banner makes a terrible national anthem. Not just because few can sing it right. We only sing the 1^st verse, after all, but in fact it has four. And they are next to impossible to sing. Here’s the 3^rd: (mentally sing it to the tune.)

 
        And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
        That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
        A home and a Country should leave us no more?
        Their blood has wash'd out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
 
        No refuge could save
        the hireling and slave
        From the terror of flight
        or the gloom of the grave.
        And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
        O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

What in the world did Key mean – “their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution?” and “No refuge could save the hireling and slave . . .”? Key was claiming that the blood of British wounded and killed washed away their footprints which “polluted” our homeland. Well, in fact, there was damned little blood: the British took few casualties in their march across the Chesapeake region. Their capture and burning of the White House and Capital was virtually unopposed. Their withdrawal from the attack on Ft. McHenry was more a matter of logistics than casualties.

And what of the ”hireling” and “slave?” By “hireling”, Key was claiming the British were using mercenaries as they had during the Revolutionary War 30 years earlier. Not so; they did not use mercenaries during the War of 1812. And “slave”? As the British swept through Eastern Maryland tobacco plantations they promised to set free slaves who would take up arms and fight for England.

Now we are getting close to the crux of Francis Scott Key. Who was this amateur poet whose work was set to the tune of a popular British drinking song.

Wait! What? Our National Anthem was a British drinking song?!

Francis Scott Key was a lawyer, not a poet. The scion of a wealthy Maryland tobacco plantation family, Key, in fact, owned slaves. Moreover, he was a leader of the American Colonization Society which called for shipping freed slaves back to Africa. And as district Attorney of Washington DC, he indicted and prosecuted Abolitionists. He was, simply put, a Southern racist from my home State of Maryland. 

I now have some sympathy for Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee during the Star-Spangled Banner.

The Star-Spangled Banner became the National Anthem by Act of Congress in 1931 despite its racist authorship, despite its glorification of war and violence, despite its fanciful version of history. By the way, we did not win the War of 1812.

In the fall of 1938, as fascism and war threatened Europe, the Roosevelt administration asked Irving Berlin to write a peace song. He retrieved an unpublished score he had set aside and shaped it into "God Bless America.” Kate Smith did the rest:

God bless America, land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above

This past April, by the way, when it was revealed that Kate Smith performed racist songs in the late ‘30s, the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers both dropped her arrangement of the song from their organ playlists.

My objection to God Bless America as a candidate for our National Anthem lies not in Smith’s racism – that’s beside the point. Irving Berlin was a Russian-born Jew brought here as a dreamer at age of four; what could be more American than that?

No, my concerns are first, with its overt appeal to an intercessionist God; I don’t believe God takes sides and intervenes, and second, my 1^st Amendment concern about separation of faith and state. We don’t need an official God as a Searchlight to guide us.

My candidate for a new National Anthem is, as you might have guessed, America, the Beautiful, a poem written by Katherine Lee Bates, a feminist professor at Wellesley, who was inspired by her climb in 1893 of Colorado’s Pike’s Peak. Her “America” was set to a hymn by Samuel Ward and published in 1910, becoming an immediate and lasting hit. Even more so after Ray Charles recorded it over and over.

I favor it because it’s

•        aspirational and uplifting,
  
•        it looks forward not backward, 
  
•     calls for brotherhood, not glorifies war.     

       She is calling us to become, not praising us for what we supposedly are.
    · She calls for us to accept “God’s grace”;
    · to “amend our every flaw” (of which we have many);
    · to adopt “self-control”;
    · to enact “our liberty in law” (the voting rights act?); and most pertinent, 

• to "crown thy good with brotherhood.”

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!

Well Fletch: there you go, tilting windmills again. This Congress isn’t about to change the National Anthem.

True. But wouldn’t it be grand if they would? Wouldn’t it be grand to have an anthem we can all sing? One that is uplifting and positive? One that expresses aspiration to improve our country? One that calls for brotherhood in these dis-United States of America?

It would be one small step toward the healing we so badly need. Tilting windmills? Maybe. I am but one, but I’m going to add my voice in any way I can. Will you join me?