AMERICA
“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.
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassion'd stress
A thorough-fare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.
America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self control,
Thy liberty in law.
O beautiful for heroes prov'd
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country lov'd
And mercy more than life.
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine.
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears.
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.”
Katharine Lee Bates, “America”, The Congregationalist (1895).
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/bates.php
Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) was Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College, where she taught for 40 years. Professor Bates began to write the poem “America” following a trip she had taken to Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1893 to teach a short summer session at Colorado College. On this trip she visited Chicago, traveled through the wheat fields of Kansas, and stood atop Pikes Peak and was awed by the majestic views it presented of the Great Plains. It was on the pinnacle of that mountain that the words of this great poem began to take shape. As she later recalled:
“One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.”
A few years afterward, Samuel Augustus Ward (1847-1903) set the poem to music on the basis of his earlier hymn “Materna”. Bates and Ward never met, and Ward died not knowing the popularity the song “America the Beautiful” would achieve.
At the dawn of the Twentieth Century, America was seen in a very different light than at the opening of the Twenty-first. At that time, the physical splendor (“O beautiful for spacious skies”), revolutionary beginnings of a new people infused with a love of freedom (“O beautiful for pilgrim feet”), exceptional devotion to country beyond self (“O beautiful for heroes prov'd”), and material achievements and melding of a diverse people under God’s eye (“O beautiful for patriot dream“) were celebrated by all in word and song.
At that time, Americans accepted that the country occupied a special place among the nations of the world. Its position was defined not by the superiority of its people but by its unique origins, its drawing of the poor and dispossessed from across the globe, its abundance of natural resources, and its political and religious institutions, which at once acknowledged the supremacy of God and yet allowed each man and woman to be an equal and independent before his Creator and in the body politic. This nation was seen as different. It was beautiful. It was exceptional.
The idea of American exceptionalism is best set forth by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1831 work Democracy in America:
“The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people.”
The liberties that at once gave rise to and sprang from American exceptionalism are, in Abraham Lincoln’s words of 1861, a gift from the Almighty to an “almost chosen people”. In Lincoln’s view, the defense of these liberties is a struggle he regarded as “even more [important] than National Independence” and their existence is “a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come”. As Lincoln saw it, by virtue of God’s blessings, Americans are exceptional because they are instruments responsible for perpetuating and extending the cause of liberty as the very basis for society. In this task, the newly elected President called on all to support him as he extended liberty to the slave, even those opponents who, as he put it, “do not agree with my political sentiments”.
All Americans since the time of Lincoln, and indeed from the time of the founding of the republic, have sensed the cause of freedom and liberty is integral to what it means to be an American, that it transcends political differences, and that every American is an example and instrument for extending liberty. They also understand that the ultimate power of the United States in the world is not in its military or its economy or its debased culture. While elites abroad may envy our military power and position in the world, and in their lust for power may seek to remove the influence of our love of liberty, the mass of world’s men and women yearn for our freedom, understand the unearned nature of our exceptionalism, and wish us no ill.
Here at home, however, the notion of American exceptionalism is in decline today. The presumption of exceptionalism requires confidence in your history and self-assurance in your ideals when facing your future. Those on the Left see the United States today as a self-serving country that pursues narrow interests and struts on the world stage as a hegemon, without moral claim to its preeminence nor honor in its leadership. In their eyes, the United States is no different from any other country.
In this regard, the President recently told foreigners while on their soil, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism." To bring the point home, he indicted his own country for its past sins and its failure to live up to its putative ideals. In doing so, he reduced America the Beautiful to the United States and its institutions, a mere country of physical territory and questionable governance, one among many, large and small in size and good and bad in administration, devoid of its supreme ideals of liberty and individualism and religious sensibility, equal to others in all respects with none of the qualities that make America the Beautiful unique. To the Left, the age of American primacy is over and the values of America have lost their legitimacy.
The view that the United States is no longer America the Beautiful but a plain and ordinary secular state has an uncomfortable degree of truth to it. Today, the country is exhausted and depressed and overwhelmed by debt, confused in its policies and in decline morally and economically. In its present state it cannot serve as an example to the rest of the world. Its leadership at the highest levels has rejected its history and renounced any idea of its exceptionalism. In the view of its critics, which includes its present leadership, the United States is only one country among many and does not merit and cannot be trusted with global leadership.
The country is now at a crossroads. It can continue down the road it is now on and become merely another country with a secular state in an increasingly hostile world. Or it can decide to be the exceptional nation it was, acknowledging its blessings from Above and His mandate to live in harmony and peace in a manner tolerant to all. It can recognize that this nation is more than a country, its people are more than a citizenry, its order based on more than law, its character rooted in more than station. As John F. Kennedy said, it is the “elements of the American character which have made this nation great” and “the characteristics of the American people have ever been a deep sense of religion, a deep sense of idealism, a deep sense of patriotism, and a deep sense of individualism”.
Kennedy is right. These are the central ideas that give rise to the liberty at the core of American exceptionalism, and for that reason these are the ideas the Left rejects.
Religion, idealism, patriotism and individualism define what makes America beautiful and what it means to be an American. Without them the promise of our liberties as an independent and self-reliant people cannot be fulfilled and we as a people cannot survive.
It is to our ideas and ideals, then, that we must return. When we do, we will be able to say with Emerson,
To the mizzen, the main, and the fore
Up with it once more! -
The old tri-color,
The ribbon of power,
The white, blue and red which the nations adore!
It was down at half-mast For a grief- that is past!
To the emblem of glory no sorrow can last!
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