Katherine Lee Bates’ greatest hope in life was to write a poem that people would remember after she died. Soon, 133 years later, millions of people across the United States will sing “America the Beautiful,” commemorating the nation’s 250th anniversary. However, some of the same problems America faced at the time Bates wrote her poem are still relevant today.
Filmmakers Laurence Cotton and John de Graaf join us to discuss their documentary “From Sea to Shining Sea,” which follows the life of Katherine Lee Bates, and the striking relevance of “America the Beautiful” today.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. One of Katharine Lee Bates’ greatest hopes in life was to write a poem that people would remember after she died. She succeeded to an extraordinary extent.
[“America the Beautiful” Playing]
Miller: Those were the iconic voices of Elvis Presley, Judy Collins, Whitney Houston, John Denver, Ray Charles, Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Lopez, and Blaine Howard singing, obviously, “America the Beautiful.” It’s based on a poem that Bates initially wrote in the 1890s as both a celebration of our country and a plea for us to become the best versions of ourselves. As we approach the 250th birthday of the United States, we thought it was a great time to learn more about the woman who wrote the song that many people have argued should be our national anthem. I’m joined now by the Pacific Northwest filmmakers, Laurence Cotton and John de Graaf. Their documentary “From Sea to Shining Sea” is about the life of Katharine Lee Bates and the continuing relevance of her most famous work. Larry and John, it’s great to have you both on Think Out Loud.
Laurence Cotton: Great to be here. Thanks, Dave.
John de Graaf: Yeah, thank you.
Miller: Larry, first, why make a movie about Katharine Lee Bates?
Cotton: Well, there’s, boy, there’s many slices on that. I am a native New Englander, number one, although I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for almost 32 years. John and I have both independently and together produced films that tell the American conservation story, the history of the conservation movement. We’re devoted appreciators of the outdoors, but also the theme of beauty in our lives, and John might have something to say about that too.
We were completing a film, a prior film about Stuart Udall. “Stuart Udall: The Politics of Beauty” is the full title, and we came upon the story of Katharine Lee Bates. We both dimly knew the basics, but not more than that, and we decided that our next film after Udall would be this film about Katharine Lee Bates. We also were well aware that America250 was approaching.
Miller: John, and so that, the impending 250th anniversary birthday, that played into this for you?
de Graaf: Well, yes, in a way, I mean I don’t think it was something we were thinking right at the top of our heads when we started the film, but when we were into our film, it became more and more clear to us that yes, the timing is perfect for this, this is coming up right away, and this song could hardly be more relevant than it is today, and so yeah, it just really worked out right.
Miller: John, why do you think “America the Beautiful” has become such an enduring song?
de Graaf: Well, sadly, part of that is, I mean, it has a beautiful melody, and it’s easy to sing. But I would say that sadly, part of that is because people don’t really understand the song. I wish they understood it more. I came to understand a lot more in doing this program, but the singer Brandi Carlile, who sang “America the Beautiful” at the Super Bowl, I think really got it right. She said in a press conference before that “America the Beautiful” is not a boast, it’s a prayer. It’s not an affirmation that America is all these wonderful things, it’s an aspiration that America become these things, essentially with God’s help.
And when you look at the song, you find out that the first verse really is extolling the beauty of America, the mountains, all of those things. But the second, third and fourth verses are looking at the flaws in the country. The second verse is really about the Gilded Age, which Katharine Lee Bates lived in, about the gap between rich and poor, how difficult life was for the poor, for the immigrants, and so forth. The third verse is about the Spanish-American War, which Bates abhorred because she felt it was an example of imperialism, that we were trying to colonize. We, a former colony, were trying to colonize other countries, and she reacted very negatively to that.
And so she writes, “America, America, God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control,” and this was a point she made. And then the fourth verse about alabaster cities was based on her trip to the 1893 Chicago World Exposition, where she saw this beautiful white city, but it was surrounded by slums and by people who were suffering and starving, and she wanted to see an alabaster city in America, “undimmed,” as she puts it, “by human tears.” She wanted us to really be inclusive and make the best of our country. She wasn’t saying we were there yet.
Miller: There’s a lot to dig into that you just got there, but I want to go back to Katharine Lee Bates’ early years. Larry, like you, she was a New Englander. She was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, a coastal town full of ships and sailors, some of whom you all know the movie came from far away. How did that affect her understanding of the world?
Cotton: She had a sense of the tragic element of life, unquestionably. She did not exactly grow up wealthy. Her father was a minister. She grew up in the church. She was surrounded by families with seafaring fathers. And sometimes those fathers did not return, and families had to deal with the consequences. She was well aware of her Revolutionary War history, also the Civil War history, when she was…
Miller: It wasn’t history for her.
Cotton: Well, correct, it wasn’t indeed, it wasn’t history for her. It was Civil War knowledge, and Abraham Lincoln was a childhood hero. He clearly had a huge impact on her whole life, and she certainly held up to his ideals. So all of those elements came together. She wrote one, as John will gladly cite to you, she wrote rather compelling poems and stories as a young person that is detailed in our film.
And she was already referencing the Native Americans at that point, her sympathy for Native Americans, the Wampanoag, peoples of the southeastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod, and she had some contact with them. Certainly, there was more of a population presence then than there is now, but they are still there, I can guarantee you. All of those elements came together. She was born to be a poet. It’s quite clear. Subsequently, later on, I know you’re asking about her youth, but subsequently, she, of course, became a Chaucer scholar and a renowned professor of English literature at Wellesley College.
Miller: And then John, as a professor, she took a fateful famous trip to Colorado. Can you tell us about the trip that prompted the beginning of the writing of this poem?
de Graaf: Yes, Bates and her lifelong partner, Katharine Coman, another professor at Wellesley College, were invited to teach summer school in 1893 at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. And she went out there on the train, met her colleague in Chicago, but on the way, she stopped at Niagara Falls, which really showed for her the beauty of America. She followed along the Great Lakes, met her partner in Chicago where they toured the World Columbian Exposition and saw the Great White City and the slums around it, and then traveled west through the wheat fields of Kansas, seeing the beautiful wheat fields and so forth, to Colorado Springs at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. And after being there and teaching her classes there, she took a trip up to the top of Pike’s Peak, on a mule, basically, in a little what was called a prairie wagon, part of it. And on the top, she was so struck by the beauty of the country, the mountains to the west, the plains to the east, that the words kind of came to her that later became the song “America the Beautiful.”
Miller: So I want to turn to some of the original lines that were in one of the drafts of the poem. She wrote, “America, America, God shed thy grace on thee / Till selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free.” Larry, what prompted her to write that?
Cotton: Well, the Gilded Age, she was certainly struck by the Gilded Age, these extreme economic inequities of the Gilded Age, it was very evident to her. She was already, as a Wellesley College professor, involved with the settlement house movement. She and colleagues of hers helped establish the Denison House, which was, I believe, the first settlement house in Boston to support immigrant women and children, to improve the quality of their lives. She knew about the good work that was going on. Jane Addams, the Hull-House in Chicago, at that time, this was the beginning of the social reform era, as John already called attention to. She was certainly struck by the visible slums not that far away from the alabaster cities of the World Columbian Exposition. So she wanted to address material inequities and her concerns that material greed was dominating American society at the time.
Miller: How much did the poem evolve before it became the iconic poem that is now the text of the song sung at baseball games and all over the place?
Cotton: Well, I think I’ll let John handle that. It did go through several iterations. She herself wrote quite a few new lines, dropped others, changed some of the phraseology. John might be able to give a more precise answer. John?
de Graaf: Well, I think she wanted to make the song more metaphorical and less straight out, like “till selfish games,” a little straightforward. She also wanted to make it more singable because when she wrote it, it was a poem, she didn’t know people were gonna start singing it. But as soon as it came out, the first version, people started singing it, and there were 75 different versions of how people sang the song. And so I think she wanted to make it as singable as possible, and it really fit that, the melody by Samuel Augustus Ward that it was later part of.
But certainly, the big change, there were minor changes, as Larry points out, after 1895 when it was first published, but the big changes came after the Spanish-American War. She truly abhorred the Spanish-American War, particularly the follow-up war in the Philippines in which she saw that American soldiers were slaughtering poor peasants who wanted nothing more than their freedom and their independence.
And she wrote powerful poems about that. And that really made the third verse what it was. And those words, “confirm thy soul and self-control,” were not merely about imperialism, they were also a reference to the materialism of the Gilded Age, that we wanted too much, that we were too obsessed with materialism. She changed the lines, “till selfish gain no longer stained the banner of the free,” to “America, America, may God thy gold refine,” saying we need to have a different idea of wealth. That wealth was about community, about care, about beauty, about welcoming the people who were coming. It was not just about money.
Miller: Even if she softened and maybe made slightly more metaphorical, some of these lines, she was, as you’re arguing, she had a lot of political position: pro-immigrant, anti-imperialist, pro-suffragist, anti-war, that were absolutely at odds with the dominant power structures of the day. Did that get in the way of the spread of “America the Beautiful”?
Cotton: I don’t think so. And by the way, certainly it wasn’t at odds with her fellow faculty at Wellesley College. That was a common theme that they all shared, and I dare say at wide and even in New England literary circles and intellectual circles at that time, so it wasn’t that much at odds among the community that she was a part of.
Miller: Even if it was at odds, say, with Teddy Roosevelt or others.
Cotton: Yes, on the Spanish-American War, she certainly took issue with Teddy Roosevelt prior to becoming president. But this was the social reform era. There were many individuals across the United States, influencers of the day who were deeply involved with supporting the same causes that she supported.
Miller: One of the things that strikes me, John, and you touched on this earlier, talking about this as a prayer, in Brandi Carlile’s words, but just how religious this song is. It explicitly has pleas for God to help us in every stanza. The music was written by a church organist and choirmaster. How do you think about this religiosity in the context of a kind of unofficial national anthem?
de Graaf: Well, I think Bates was a religious person, not so traditionally religious. In fact, at one point in her life, she wasn’t going to go back to teach at Wellesley College because the trustees were going to require that every professor pledge their Christian faith, take an oath pledging their Christian faith, and she said, “That’s against the whole idea of the separation of church and state, and I’m not going to do it. I don’t believe in that.” And the trustees backed down and she came back to teach.
We should understand that at that time there were many religious people who firmly believed, not like Christian nationalists today, but who firmly believed in the separation of church and state. The Pledge of Allegiance is the best example, I think, of this period. It was written in 1892, also in Boston, by a minister, a socialist minister named Francis Bellamy, who was alarmed by the way immigrant children were being treated in the Boston schools, being bullied by American-born kids.
And he wrote the pledge as something that these kids could all say together, so they would feel that they were all one group, that they were together, with lines like “One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Now he specifically did not put anything about religion in that pledge, and he insisted that it not be there because this was a pledge for everybody regardless of their faith. The words “under God” were not put into the pledge until the McCarthy era in 1954.
Miller: One of the striking moments in the documentary, Larry, is that Bates made a decision, despite the immense popularity early on from the song and all of these folks who said, “Hey, we want to license it, we want to put it to music.” She made not a penny from it. Why not?
Cotton: Again, it was part of her broadly, her Christian orientation, her deep commitment to the sense of community in Wellesley, in New England, and to her nation. And given her, she didn’t describe herself as a Christian socialist, but I will tell you she was surrounded by a few of them, one or two in particular – I would name one, Vida Scudder – who very much self-identified that way at Wellesley, and the idea of making a profit off this marvelous poem that became a beloved hymn just, I think was beyond acceptability for her.
Miller: John, how successful?
de Graaf: $5.
Miller: $5. OK, there you are.
Cotton: $5 for the poem when it was first published.
Miller: John, how serious have efforts to turn this into the national anthem, how serious have they been over the years?
de Graaf: Well, it has been fairly serious at times. It was certainly seriously considered in 1930 when a national poll was taken, that between this song and “Star Spangled Banner,” as to which Americans thought should be our national anthem, and “America the Beautiful” outpolled the “Star Spangled Banner” two to one. But the next year, 1931, Congress, feeling that “America the Beautiful” was just not enough of a martial song, not militaristic enough, in fact, decided to go with the “Star Spangled Banner.” Many people have tried to change that, especially Ray Charles, the singer who loved the song and does certainly one of the most well-known renditions of it. He lobbied Congress for six years to try to get them to turn it into our national anthem. So far, of course, all those efforts have been unsuccessful. I hope that they come back again.
Miller: John and Larry, thanks very much.
Cotton: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to join you today, Dave.
de Graaf: Thank you, my pleasure.
Miller: John de Graaf wrote and directed the documentary “From Sea to Shining Sea.” Larry Cotton was one of the producers.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
