When an English professor and writer from Boston stood at the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado on July 22, 1893-looking out at the “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountain majesties” that stretched before her and delighted her New England eyes-she was about to make history.
Although women had been ignored in 1862 as serious poets in a nationwide search for a national hymn to replace what the all-male search committee termed the militaristic and unsingable “Star-Spangled Banner,” in 1893 Katharine Lee Bates wrote “America the Beautiful” as a poem.
In the hearts of those who heard them at the time, Bates’ words fulfilled the search committee’s requirement that a national hymn be “the national heart-beat set to music,” and “pervade and penetrate and cheer the land like sunlight.”
This month Colorado Springs, Colo., and Falmouth, Mass.-Bates’ home town-plan centennial celebrations of her poem, which was eventually set to music. Colorado Springs’ celebration July 23-25 will include a children’s parade, the swearing in of new citizens and an international bazaar. Initiation of an annual arts award is planned for the future. Falmouth’s festivities-between July 22 and Aug. 12, Bates’ birthday-include having historic houses open to the public, fireworks, a band concert and harbor cruises. A parade in which participants will wear period costumes, a reading from Bates’ work and introduction of Bates family members are planned for her birthday.
Chicago can claim a share in those celebrations. Bates’ poem was inspired by scenes in Chicago as well as Colorado. Standing atop Pikes Peak that July day, Bates had reached the end of a journey made possible by her connections with remarkable women from Cape Cod to Chicago. These women, as role models and community builders, helped her articulate a sorely needed new vision of America.
In 1893, America was suffering from problems similar to those of our own times. The Panic of 1893 was accompanied by economic recession, unemployment, urban problems, labor unrest, hostility among ethnic, racial and gender groups and the spiritually devastating materialism of the “Gilded Age” described by such writers as Henry Adams. The nation needed to be reminded of its ideals.
Also in 1893, Americans were flooding to Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition to celebrate, a year late, the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to America. A “White City” of sparkling buildings rising from the lagoons constructed in the mud flats of Jackson Park on the city’s South Side, Chicago’s exposition gave Bates images of a visionary American community and empowered her as a woman poet to voice those dreams.
Like the fair’s 27 million other visitors, Bates was dazzled by its hopeful images of human creativity and cooperation. Its ambitious exhibits had been planned as a unified whole, which outdid all previous fairs in size and technology. It called forth other creations that defined 1893 America: the “Pledge of Allegiance,” the rousing marches of John Philip Sousa, Antonin Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, the early film technology of the kinetoscope; the picture postcard, the mechanized dishwasher, and a new snack, Cracker Jack.
And this exposition, unlike the 1876 Centennial fair in Philadelphia-which only belatedly had begrudged women an unfinanced token exhibit-the 1893 fair’s planners included an energetic and influential board of lady managers headed by Bertha Palmer, wife of wealthy merchant and hotel builder Potter Palmer. The Chicago event’s celebration of women’s lives could not be overlooked.
Bates had been involved in the fair long before she visited it. As chair of Wellesley College’s English department, she had helped prepare its medal-winning World’s Fair exhibit, an important chance for the then 14-year-old college to show that it was indeed becoming a school of the highest caliber.
But the fair itself had the greatest impact. Chicago, rebuilt after the fire of 1871, was truly a modern and American city, a place where the landscape supported its cross-section of immigrants and a vast transportation and commercial network. As Bates wandered through the fair’s Midway of exotic villages and rode the newly invented Ferris Wheel, which enabled its riders to see the city below, she contemplated its symbolism-an apocalyptic dream of an “alabaster city” capable of lifting America beyond its materialism and internal conflicts, an image perfect for her concluding stanza of “America the Beautiful.”
Bates could also see how women working together had made women’s talents visible throughout the fair, especially in the Woman’s Building. Designed by a young woman architect, Sophia Hayden, it showcased women’s achievements in the arts, handicrafts and workplace. For it, Bertha Palmer had constructed her own network of women throughout the world. Committees of women from all the states and 41 other countries had coordinated and arranged displays that she hoped would show that women should be given “the full use of their faculties.”
Inspired by this new America, Bates traveled across Kansas’ “fertile prairie,” as she called it, a seemingly endless pastoral landscape, feeling herself “a better American for such a Fourth (of July).” She arrived just in time for her summer employment at the Colorado Summer School in young, rambunctious Colorado Springs at the foot of Pikes Peak “under the purple range of the Rockies.”
When she rode in a mule-drawn wagon on July 22, 1893, to the top of Pikes Peak with her summer school colleagues, she stood gazing “at the far expanse of mountain ranges and sealike sweep of plain.”
Bates was not unlike the frontier women described by scholar and author Annette Kolodny, professor and former dean of humanities at the University of Arizona.
The waves of grain evoked Bates’ memories of her oceanside childhood home in the Cape Cod village of Falmouth, Mass. A friendly community of white-steepled churches and clapboard houses set around a village green, Falmouth, as she later recalled, “practiced a neighborly socialism without having heard the term.” It was her model for the ideal America-a place where individuals, particularly women, came together to understand, enjoy and help each other.
Born in 1859, the fourth child of a Congregationalist minister, Bates was raised by her soon-widowed mother and aunt, both early graduates of Mount Holyoke Seminary (now College) who encouraged her talents.
Bates graduated in Wellesley College’s second class of women students in 1881. Her love was writing, and, encouraged by other women, she managed to publish poetry, short fiction and literary essays in widely read New England periodicals while supporting herself as a teacher. Soon after she joined Wellesley’s faculty in 1885, Bates widened her own notion of community and women’s vocations. She gained insight from such colleagues as Katharine Coman and Vida Scudder, social reformers who were searching for solutions to America’s economic problems, particularly those that affected urban women and children.
Bates published her poem as “America” on July 4, 1895, in the Congregationalist, a magazine of the Congregational church, and soon it was being sung to many different melodies. Eventually, Samuel Ward’s “Materna” became the most popular. Revising her poem into a more singable version in 1904, Bates emphasized her theme of national community even more, repeating her prayer for America that “God shed his grace on thee/And crown thy good with brotherhood/From sea to shining sea!”
