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Our National Anthems

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from: Alfred Gingold
to: Timothy Noah, Josh Daniel, Erik Tarloff

Posted Thursday, Oct. 4, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

Josh: As it happens, the last uncut version of Hamlet I saw was in May. I assume it was uncut, since it was endless, also stuffed with theatrical Hamburger Helper—portentous dumb shows, fussy lighting effects, etc. The last cut Hamlet I saw was Peter Brook's in April, and I not only complained about it, I damn near got apoplectic over it. Not that there's anything sacrosanct about a text. I love Olivier's headlong movie version, which dispenses with Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Fortinbras (among others), reorders scenes, dumps others, and still feels like Hamlet. I mean, so what if Brook butchered the play to make room for the indulgent shtick of his dreadful actors and his pretentious directorial bullwah? It didn't ruin the play for all time. It just ruined it for the audience, who might have understood Laertes' rage at Hamlet if they'd met him before he inexplicably turned up at Ophelia's funeral, or gotten the gist of the Hecuba speech a tad more clearly if the Player hadn't declaimed it in an invented language. Shakespeare, I feel certain, would have plotzed. And then called his agent.

But I digress. The point is, just because nobody sings the "pilgrim's feet" verses anymore doesn't mean they're not part of the song—viz., Tim's argument above. And it still seems to me that if "GBA" breaches the church/state divide with its ecumenical invocation of the deity, then "ATB" obliterates it.

As to "TLIYL" 's viability as an anthem, I think you touch on its problem when you say that a national anthem should be something people—by which I assume you mean everyone—want to sing. Of all the songs we're discussing, only "TLIYL" has an association with a distinct political segment of the population—the left. Whatever problems people have, musically or intellectually, with the "SSB," "ATB," or "GBA," they transcend divisions within the culture. I'm not so sure "TLIYL" does, at least not now. But then, "GBA" didn't fare so well in the '60s either.

Tim, I certainly didn't intend to demean Katharine Lee Bates, much less question her proclivities, but you've got to admit, those "pilgrims feet" lines clunk something awful. In any event, your exegesis of "more than self their country loved/ And mercy more than life" is really good, especially the part about Reconstruction, but I think it proves my point, which is that most of "ATB" couldn't be harder to understand if it were written in Chaucerian English. One lyric that would pop right out if it were sung today is the finish, "God shed his grace on thee/ Till nobler men keep once again/ Thy whiter jubilee." Now we both know that's a reference to the "alabaster cities," but do you think that's how those words would play now?

As to poor old Irving B. subverting the whole idea behind two sacred holidays, there's a difference between secularizing and subverting. The religious aspects of Christmas and Easter aren't undermined in his songs; they're just not mentioned, in the interest of allowing us all into the holiday spirit. Besides, when it comes to secularizing sacred holidays, the British and the Germans got there long before we did (viz., A Christmas Carol and Christmas trees, respectively).

To me, the interesting and splendid thing about these songs is how much they mean to so many. On the Saturday after the attacks, there was a candle-lit walk down to our local firehouse, which lost 12 of its 28 firefighters in the Towers. It seemed as if the whole neighborhood turned out; our main drag was packed solid. It was very quiet, eerily so for so large a crowd. As we walked down the avenue, small groups sang, but very softly, all the songs we've discussed here and some we haven't, such as We Shall Overcome and Give Peace a Chance (What do you want, it's Park Slope). At the firehouse, we all stood in silence for a few moments, then someone raised a candle in salute and everyone followed. What a sight! Eventually the whole great mob of us sang "GBA" and "ATB" to the firemen. A brave few assayed the "SSB." The crowd broke up quite slowly, and you could hear more quiet singing as we walked home. It was the keenest sense of community I'd felt all week, and the music more than helped. This discussion has heightened my appreciation of all these songs. They have their moments in and out of fashion and their various musical and lyrical issues, but they really do what we want them to do.

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from: Alfred Gingold
to: Timothy Noah, Josh Daniel, Erik Tarloff

Posted Thursday, Oct. 4, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET
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Alfred Gingold has written eight books, Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column, Erik Tarloff is a novelist and Slate Book Clubber, and Josh Daniel is Slate's managing editor. This week they weigh the merits of our patriotic greatest hits.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


[Notes from the Fray Editor: Joseph Britt also commented on Erik Tarloff's remarks on the Fray; in fact Mr Tarloff is a very experienced Fray-watcher--see also BML's post here. BML also introduced the tangential but deeply fascinating topic of songs about states, here, while Urquhart revealed that Tennessee has six official state songs.]


Has it occurred to anyone else that Americans tend to regard singing the way our colonial ancestors regarded combat--as something anyone can do without any training or discipline, based on their natural ability? I think of this every time I hear someone moaning about how hard "The Star-Spangled Banner" (or, for that matter, "O Holy Night") is to sing. It's certainly a challenge, but challenges can be mastered by most people with a little practice and the right technique.

It goes back to the lamentable low standard of musical education in the public schools, a product of the soft bigotry of low musical expectations. It may be that currently popular music that is designed only to be danced to, not sung along with, bears some responsibility also. Thankfully no one has suggested we ought to have a national anthem we can dance to, not even in The Fray.

--Joseph Britt

(To reply, click here.)


I have to cast my vote with Josh on this one. Despite its terminal hootenanny connotations, "This Land" as a national anthem would be a defining break with the pseudo-arch prosody of nationalistic anthems, and would be in fact the first democratic people's anthem in history. Is that worth something?

Forget Pete Seeger and the debacles of the American Communist Party's Stalinization for a minute and think about the real progeny of Guthrie's road-minstrel folk revival: the entire boom baby generation. We came of age in a landscape where geiger counters were replacing rosaries, and the language of Dick and Jane had replaced the Bible and McGuffy's reader as our entree to literacy. We made out to the lyrics of doo-wop and had our moral awakenings in the turgid prose of surgeon-general's warnings.

We don't need, nor can we parse, the locutions of the founding fathers. While I was growing up, I didn't know anyone who could have paraphrased "The Star Spangled Banner," or glossed it beyond "something about rockets and our flag, kind of tattered, some battle. Baltimore?"

"God Bless America" is the song of Lion's Clubs and Rotary lunches, tent revivals and mall openings. It is for my generation an evocation of black and white rotoscope images of Milton Berle and Pearl Bailey. There is something contrived and reminiscent of gastro-intestinal finales at fund raisers and school auditoriums. It is the song of an ersatz America, a formulaic tin-pan populism that never really reaches beyond the footlights into the junk drawers, closets, photo albums and reveries of a real America.

I know that "TLIYL" will never become our national anthem. But it is a song closer to the dead center of the bell curve of true American sentiment than any of the others mentioned here.

--Zeitguy

(To reply, click here.)

 (10/2)

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