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Our National Anthems

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

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2001, at 9:00 PM ET

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.

Too Beautiful for You?

To Erik:

One man's "profoundly dull" is another man's "stately and inspirational." You know a lot more about music than I do, but your complaint about "America the Beautiful" seems mainly about the lyrics. You object in particular to "fruited plain," which I find wonderfully expressive. Would you prefer "barren plain"? Katharine Lee Bates inserted the phrase "fruited plain" specifically to make it easier to set the words to music, and I think it was an inspired choice. (The original phrase, "enameled plain," was not only difficult to sing but also too bleak and wintry. The "alabaster cities" that "gleam/ Undimm'd by human tears," apparently inspired by the White City at Chicago's Columbian Exposition in 1892, lend the song all the whiteness it needs. Incidentally, as a Washingtonian, I like to think of "alabaster cities" as an idealized picture of the marbled capital city, a welcome departure from the usual abuse Washington is subjected to nowadays. I realize, though, that this aspect of the song may have little appeal to Erik, Alfred, or Josh, who live, respectively, in Berkeley, New York, and Seattle.)

Anyway, a "fruited plain" is a plain whose dreary flatness stands in contrast to the bright color and fecundity of its blossoms. This describes the tension between America's puritanical virtue and its lusty pursuit of happiness. You'd never see a fruited plain in anything written to honor the Taliban.

(I should note here that I'm continuing to rely heavily, for factual information, on Lynn Sherr's new book, America the Beautiful: The Stirring Story Behind Our Nation's Favorite Song.)

"Of Thee I Sing" is an appealingly perverse choice, coming as it does from a satirical musical, but of course it's totally inappropriate. Really, you might as well select "Sail Away" (which is better and certainly more enduring satire, addressing as it does the topic of slavery). And that Feinstein version of "Of Thee I Sing" really stinks.

To Alfred:

You're not playing fair! You make Katharine Lee Bates sound like a foot-fetishist ("O beautiful for pilgrim feet"), a jibe no less juvenile than schoolchildren cackling at "We like sheep" in Handel's Messiah. The rest of the verse makes clear that Bates is referring to the pilgrims' trek "for freedom … Across the wilderness." And "Till souls wax fair as earth and air" isn't in the song at all; it's a line from an earlier, obviously inferior version of the hymn. The "wax fair" line was recast by Bates in 1904 as "And crown thy good with brotherhood." (I don't know how "wax fair" ended up here.) As for "more than self their country loved/ And mercy more than life," the first part doesn't strike me as being obscure at all. Those who fought the Civil War loved their country more than their selves, hence they were willing to sacrifice their lives. That they loved "mercy more than life" is, I'll admit, a bit of a whitewash in light of Sherman's march to the sea. Or perhaps this is a reference to Reconstruction, an era when the oversupply of mercy toward the defeated Confederacy created, among other things, Jim Crow.

You say that "America the Beautiful" is too religious. But the song's very existence is in fact a secularization. For many years, the hymn was sung to various melodies, including "Auld Lang Syne," but eventually the melody it stuck to was Samuel Augustus Ward's "Materna," which is a religious hymn to Jerusalem. ("O mother dear, Jerusalem! When shall I come to thee?/ When shall my sorrows have an end? Thy joys when shall I see?") I'll concede that this leaves "America the Beautiful" vulnerable to criticism similar to the one I leveled against "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade." Irving Berlin, though, was subverting the whole idea behind two sacred holidays. Here, Bates is merely subverting an individual religious hymn—a misdemeanor at best. Really, Bates is just borrowing a pretty melody. And it wasn't even Bates who chose the melody. The public did. To argue that "America the Beautiful" rapes "Materna," you'd have to agree that "The Star-Spangled Banner" rapes "To Anacreon in Heaven," the drinking song that supplied its melody. And that, of course, would be ridiculous.

To Josh:

I'm still thinking about "This Land Is Your Land," which has many of the virtues I admire in "America the Beautiful." So far, the only real argument I can summon against it is that "This Land Is Your Land" doesn't lend itself well to orchestral arrangement. When I try to imagine it, I hear something in my head resembling the absolute worst of Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops.

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

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2001, at 9:00 PM 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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