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Our National Anthems

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

Why Not Love America for its Beauty?

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2001, at 3:20 AM ET

There's only one patriotic song that consistently brings tears to my eyes, and it's "America the Beautiful." I will explain why in a moment. But first, allow me to rebut Alfred Gingold and Erik Tarloff's defenses of "God Bless America" and "The Star-Spangled Banner." (I'll address Josh Daniel's defense of "This Land Is Your Land," which I find much harder to knock down, in my next entry.)

In re "God Bless America": Irving Berlin is one of the great hard cases, creator of some of the most beautiful as well as some of the most kitschy entries in the American songbook. Among Berlin's triumphs I'd list "Isn't This A Lovely Day," "Puttin' On the Ritz," and "Top Hat." Among the dogs are…well, "White Christmas," "Easter Parade," and "God Bless America." As Alfred notes, "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade" are wildly popular and emphatically secular. These leave Berlin highly vulnerable to the accusation of having dumbed Christianity down, which must be held against him in any serious aesthetic reckoning. (In his novel Operation Shylock, Philip Roth has some fun with the idea that Berlin's secularizing of Christmas and Easter ought to make him a Jewish hero.) "God Bless America," on the other hand, is a song about a secular subject (love of country) that insists on putting God at stage center. It's probably unavoidable that the word "God" is going to appear in any mainstream patriotic song about America, but does "God" really have to be the first word? Even if you set church-state concerns aside and buy Alfred's notion that this is a nondenominational "civic god," it's always seemed to me that there was something annoying, even vaguely sacrilegious, about the way Berlin's song bosses Him around. ("Stand beside her, and guide her," etc.) Taken together, Berlin's "White Christmas," "Easter Parade," and "God Bless America" foster an unhealthy confusion about what to render unto Caesar and what to render unto God.

"The Star-Spangled Banner," Erik writes, is "an attractive and stirring tune" that is "close to impossible" for amateurs to sing. He calls the latter a "small problem." But, like Josh, I think that a stirring national anthem that nobody can sing is a national anthem that isn't much use. If you're concerned, as I am, by the passivity and apathy that plague civic life in America, you don't want the expression of that patriotism—"The Star-Spangled Banner"—to be something that ordinary people experience as listeners rather than singers. How does that make love of country any different from any other banal consumer activity? True patriotism must communicate that America is who and what we are, and not just some place we happen to live.

"America the Beautiful," on the other hand, is a lovely melody set to lyrics celebrating this country's exceptional beauty. Alfred suggests that this theme renders it trite. I think it lends the song a wonderful everydayness: America's glories are revealed not only when it's under siege, but also, and perhaps especially, when we're all just going about our business amid the amber waves of grain. It's true, as Alfred points out, that the later verses invoke God more than seems absolutely necessary ("God mend thine every flaw," "May God thy gold refine"), but it's done in a much humbler spirit than in "God Bless America"; God is being asked to confer grace, not being hectored by Kate Smith to show His citizenship papers. (Even when Ray Charles gave "America the Beautiful" a lovely gospel cast, its religiosity never seemed heavy-handed.) And anyway, nobody ever sings the later verses—not even the arrestingly lyrical one that includes "Thine alabaster cities gleam/ Undimm'd by human tears." (I was totally unfamiliar with it until Ross Perot started quoting it during the 1992 presidential campaign.) The song's gentleness may have something to do with the fact that, unlike "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "God Bless America," it was written by a woman. Katharine Lee Bates, an English professor at Wellesley, was inspired to write it while gazing from the summit of Pikes Peak, a setting that lends at least the illusion that you're taking in the country in its entirety. In her new book, America the Beautiful, ABC News correspondent Lynn Sherr describes the moment:

[F]or Katharine Lee Bates her "one ecstatic gaze" at the panoramic view across the vast continent was a revelation. To the east, the sweep of plains across America's heartland; to the west, the regal mountains that defined the pioneers' dreams. That night when she returned to the Antlers Hotel, she wrote in her diary, "Most glorious scenery I ever beheld."

Other patriotic songs assert that we will go to war and perhaps even die to protect the U.S.A. "America the Beautiful," and, arguably, "This Land Is Your Land," explain why we love it in the first place.

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123456789
from: Timothy Noah
to: Alfred Gingold, Josh Daniel, Erik Tarloff

Why Not Love America for its Beauty?

Posted Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2001, at 3:20 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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[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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