The Surprising Origins of America’s Best-Loved, Most Misunderstood Song

As a producer of documentaries for public television, I’ve long been interested in inspirational stories about individuals who’ve devoted their lives to making our country a better place. My subjects have included Terry Pettus, a Seattle radical and labor organizer who helped save the Lake Union Houseboat community; Ruth Youngdahl Nelson, a national “Mother of the Year” and religious leader, who risked life and limb in a small boat trying to block the first Trident submarine from entering Puget Sound; and Gordon Hirabayashi, a University of Washington student who refused to go to a concentration camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II.

I also like films that surprise the audience. My most recent is the little-known story behind one of America’s most iconic songs and the powerful relevance it has for our current times. I found the story remarkably inspiring and hope others will as well. From Sea to Shining Sea: Katharine Lee Bates and the Story of America the Beautiful reveals hidden meanings embedded in that song. I’ve been surprised by reactions to it across the political spectrum.

This July 22 marks the 132nd anniversary of the day in 1893 when the first stanzas of the popular anthem “America the Beautiful” were written in Colorado by Katharine Lee Bates, a Massachusetts-born poet, scholar and social justice advocate. She wrote it first as a poem after visiting Pikes Peak during a summer teaching job at Colorado College. Her words were so popular that that they were soon set to music in 75 different versions that were floating on American lips until a melody by Samuel Augustus Ward was named the official one in 1910.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, many Americans will no doubt sing the song with pride, as have countless popular singers such as Barbra Streisand, John Denver, Elvis Presley, Whitney Houston and Ray Charles. Charles lobbied to make it our national anthem. Yet, few Americans understand the meaning of its lyrics or the events that inspired its metaphors. “America the Beautiful” is as much critique as celebration, and remarkably relevant to our own times.

I never fully realized how misunderstood the song was until I began work on the film and read a well-researched biography of Bates by Boston author, Melinda Ponder, and another by veteran journalist Lynn Scherr. I began exploring the Falmouth, Massachusetts, Historical Museum and the Wellesley College Archives for more information about Bates’ life. She loved her country but was troubled by the inequality of the “Gilded Age,” and the song reflected her values. For while the first verse celebrates America’s beauty, the other three stanzas ask us to mend the nation’s flaws and fully honor the values we claim to hold.

Born in 1859 in Massachusetts, Bates’ earliest memory as a child was the 1865 assassination of Abraham Lincoln. She wrote then about how she admired his efforts to end slavery and about her dismay at the poverty of the Wampanoag Indians in her home town. She went on to study at Wellesley College, graduating in 1880, and taught literature there for four decades, continuing her studies periodically at Oxford. While an undergraduate, she told a friend that “if I could write a poem people remembered after I died, I’d consider my life worth living.”

Wellesley, one of the first women’s colleges in the U.S., encouraged students and faculty alike to be “reformers.” Bates and her female colleagues advocated for full equality and justice for workers and minorities, a welcoming attitude toward immigrants, and world peace. They opened a settlement house in Boston and helped immigrant Italian women organize a union to earn more for the clothes they sewed. She shared her political concerns, metaphorically, in her poem.

Traveling the country, Bates wrote of the mad rush for wealth she witnessed in the mining town of Cripple Creek after coming down from Pikes Peak: “America, America, may God thy gold refine.” Saddened by what she saw, her first draft included the words “till selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free,” words she later moderated. America, she observed, was growing rich but lacked compassion and was doomed to go the way of all the previous empires of history.

Bates revised her poem over the years, based on her experiences. Her words “America, America, God mend thine every flaw/Confirm thy soul in self-control,” (added in 1904), were an expression of her dismay over what she considered to be American imperialism in the Spanish-American War. A visit to Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition, also in 1893, led her to discover that its gleaming “White City” sat right beside a slum filled with hungry and miserable people, generating the last stanza of the song—“Oh beautiful for patriot’s dream that shines beyond the years/Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears.” [my italics]

Bates died in 1929, much acclaimed and no doubt considering her life as having been worth living. In her last speech in 1928 at Boston’s Mechanics Hall, she told an enormous crowd they should think of not just the United States but the whole world as one community, united in brotherhood, “from sea to shining sea.”

But there is little doubt that Bates would be dismayed by America today. Though her song was performed at President Trump’s inaugural, his praise of President McKinley, and his designs on Greenland, Panama and even Canada, would have appalled her, just as McKinley’s own Spanish-American War conquests did. She would mourn the scorning of immigrants, the slashing of support for the poor and hungry, and the worship of conspicuous wealth.

I have shown the film about Bates’ life in several communities around the United States, with many more screenings planned. I expected criticism from the political right, since the film portrays Bates as the progressive patriot and critic she was, while many on the right, including Trump, think of her song as an unqualified acclamation of American glory like the Star-Spangled Banner. But surprisingly, most audiences–even in more conservative places like Colorado Springs and Phoenix, moderate but working class and ethnically diverse Vallejo, California, and rural La Conner, Washington–have responded very positively.

But in the left-wing bastion of Santa Cruz, one activist disparaged Bates for being reformist and not a revolutionary (true, Bates was no flaming radical) and accused me of covering up her lesbianism.

I stuck to the facts as I learned them: Bates lived in a “Boston marriage” with her beloved partner, Katharine Coman, for 25 years. They made no secret of their love for each other, as the film clearly points out. But historians differ as to whether that love had a sexual dimension, since Bates, in a closeted time, never spoke to that. Most Wellesley women faculty lived with other women, as they were not allowed to keep their jobs if they married.

No doubt also, some on the left are not taken by the patriotic sentiment and appeals to God that populate the song. But I think it’s a mistake to leave our flag and legacy to those whose idea of patriotism is a chauvinistic display of Old Glory on their pickup trucks.

Sadly, views of our history have become polarized between the Trump/De Santis idea that America has never done anything wrong and the idea I’ve heard from many college students that America has never done anything right and our history is only an endless cycle of oppression.

Besides being wrong, both views leave us passive: Trump would never have us change America, except to return to the Gilded Age values of McKinley, while the oppressed/oppressor view tends toward hopelessness, not action. But our history is complex, and countless Americans, in the spirit of Bates, have committed their lives and shed their blood to make America all it claimed to be. We need their inspiration now.

Which is why I was very excited when the Boston Pops Orchestra, as part of their July 4 concert this year on the Charles River Esplanade, played an adaptation of my film for a crowd of a half-million, using my narration, many of our team’s visuals, and a whole new musical score by Stephen Flaherty, who won a Tony for the musical Ragtime. A United States military chorus performed sections of the song.

Keith Lockhart, the beloved conductor of the Pops, revealed the thinking behind its decision to highlight the story. “America the Beautiful,” he wrote, “may be the most beloved and well-known of our patriotic songs, but most of us know little about the poet who created it, Katharine Lee Bates, an extraordinary American thinker and patriot, whose vision of true American Exceptionalism resonates as strongly today as it did a century ago.”

Bates would undoubtedly be tempered in her pride by the knowledge that most of the words in her four verses are now all but forgotten, and the flaws she addressed in her deeply patriotic hymn have yet to be corrected. To honor our 250th birthday next year, let us commit ourselves to the unfinished work “America the Beautiful” so eloquently asks of us.