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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!
"America the Beautiful," Katharine Lee Bates, 1893 [1
]
I strongly believe the neglected American people need ... leadership and our country needs to return to America the Beautiful in every way possible.
Linda Archer, Washington Post, April 18, 2007 [2
]
AND CROWN THY GOOD WITH BROTHERHOOD
This summer, as political tempers flared from Iowa to Idaho, from California to the Carolinas, one rather nasty theme emerged. "Iowa Gay Marriage Ruling Stirs 2008 Race" ran the headlines, and a contest started for the laurels of bigotry [3
]. And sure enough, between mug-shots at weenie-roasts and platitudes at county fairs, a handful of hopefuls warned the faithful that marriage between people of the same sex ranks among the major threats to our republic.
Irony rampant: The same cameras that showed us politicians of every stripe and party disporting themselves at the Iowa State Fair also featured squeaky-clean farm kids welcoming visitors to the fair with the rousing verses of "America the Beautiful." So, on behalf of a good number of fellow members of FASEB and a good number of fellow scientists everywhere—or for that matter on behalf of fellow citizens and their legislators—I’d like to remind the candidates of Katharine Lee Bates, who wrote the poem "America the Beautiful." It’s the story of a happy Boston marriage in the era of the White City.
O BEAUTIFUL FOR PILGRIM FEET
Katharine Lee Bates is the most famous native of Falmouth, Massachusetts; her statue decorates the library lawn, the road to the library bears her name, the bicycle path along Vineyard Sound to Woods Hole is named "The Shining Sea," and the upscale granola store is called "Amber Waves." Her poem, "America the Beautiful," is usually sung to music set by Samuel A. Ward, a son of the American Revolution. It pays homage to their New England forbearers:
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self control
Thy liberty in law! [1
It’s a sentiment less bellicose than that expressed in our official national anthem "...the bombs bursting in air," and considerably sweeter than the boast of "Deutschland Über Alles," the pomp of "God Save the Queen" or the gore of "Le Marseillaise." It is also a fitting post-bellum sequel to Julia Ward Howe’s "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Indeed, Julia and Samuel A. Ward were Yankee kin. [4
]
Bates was inspired to write "America the Beautiful" on her first trip out West. A professor of English at Wellesley, she had been asked to teach English religious drama at a summer school in Colorado Springs and spent a happy "three weeks or so under the purple range of the Rockies." [5
] To celebrate the end of the session, she and others on the faculty made an excursion to Pike’s Peak, pulled to the summit by mules in prairie wagons, which bore the slogan, "Pike’s Peak or Bust!" "It was at the summit, as I was looking out over that sea-like expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies that the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind," she recalled. [1
]
She left Colorado Springs with notes for the entire four stanzas and other memorabilia of her extended trip to the Rockies, but the poem did not appear until July 4, 1895, in The Congregationalist. After a musical setting by the once well-known Silas G. Pratt attracted national attention, the popular stanzas became open game for other musical versions, and by 1923, more than 60 "original" settings had been perpetrated. The verses can be sung to many old tunes including "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls." But the setting we know best nowadays was adopted by Samuel A. Ward from the hymn "Materna," and the words we use are those of Bates’ revised version of 1913. [5
]
CONFIRM THY SOUL IN SELF CONTROL
"Thy liberty in law!" could serve as a motto for Bates and her impassioned generation of pilgrim daughters. Bates graduated from Wellesley in 1880, 10 years after that stern seminary-style college had been chartered as a place for "noble, white unselfish Christian womanhood." But by 1882, winds of change from the West brought a new generation in the person of Alice Freeman (1855–1902). Freeman was only 27 years old when she was called from the coeducational University of Michigan to become Wellesley’s second president, and she proceeded to transform it into a college ready for the 20th century. She also helped to found Radcliffe and the Marine Biological Laboratory. As president of Boston’s Woman’s Education Association (WEA) Alice Freeman collaborated with Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, widow of the biologist, to work out the legal arrangements whereby the "Harvard Annex for Women" became Radcliffe College. The WEA also raised $10,000 to promote the teaching and research of women in science, a gift which made it possible in 1888 to purchase land near the all-male U.S. Fisheries building at Wood’s Holl (as it was then) to establish the Marine Biological Laboratory. The WEA also ensured that women might work at the laboratory by requiring the presence of two of its members on the board of trustees: The first two were graduates of Vassar and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [6
]
Among Freeman’s first appointments at Wellesley were Eliza Mosher as professor of practical physiology and Katharine Coman (also from Michigan) as professor of political economy and history. In 1885, she appointed Katharine Lee Bates an instructor of English. In 1897, they were joined by Mary Calkins, a student of William James, who established the first laboratory of experimental psychology to be headed by a woman. Like Mosher, Coman, and Calkins, Katharine Lee Bates was destined to spend her entire life at Wellesley; she became full professor in 1891 and long-term chair of the English Department until her retirement in 1925. But her life had changed forever in 1887 when she met Katharine Coman. The two Katharines lived together for more than a quarter of a century in the loving bonds of what was then called a "Boston marriage" and is now appreciated as "a devoted lesbian couple." [7
] They called their Wellesley home the "Scarab," their faithful collie "Sigurd," and their automobile "Abraham" (because they were so often deep in its bosom). When parted by professional travel, they wrote passionate, almost daily, letters to each other:
Your love is a proof of God. How does love come, unless Love is?...That is a glorious sentence wherewith to close your letter. I love it and I love you and I love what shadowy hint of God comes to me. [7
THINE ALABASTER CITIES GLEAM
In 1893, on that journey to Pike’s Peak, the two Katharines stopped to visit the great Columbian exposition in Chicago, with Bates becoming "naturally impressed by the symbolic beauty of the White City." By that time Alice Freeman had become Alice Freeman Palmer after marrying a Harvard philosopher, and the Palmers together supervised construction and installation of the Woman’s Building, a monument fashioned in the mock alabaster of the exposition’s Beaux Arts style. Featuring statues of prominent feminists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, its interior was chock-a-block with objects picked to show:
...the contributions made by women to the huge workshop of which this world so largely consists, their contributions not only to the industries of the world but to its sciences and arts. Thus it is hoped in a measure to dispel the prejudices and misconceptions, to remove the vexatious restrictions and limitations which for centuries have held enthralled the sex. [8
The Woman’s Building was an anomaly among the grander structures of the Columbian Exposition, the iconography of which played to the "prejudices and misconceptions" of centuries. In statuary great and small, burly men steered the ship of state, while women were placed on pedestals, perched as guiding spirits or cast as docile handmaidens. MacMonnies’ "Central Fountain of the Exposition" underscored each of these roles. [9
]
A visit to the Palmers’ Woman’s Building was not the only reason why the two Katharines had stopped in Chicago; there were professional reasons as well. Bates had taught in Colorado Springs on equal terms with such male professors as Rolfe of Harvard and Todd of Amherst, while Coman lectured on the economic history of Western expansion. In Chicago, Coman heard Frederick Jackson Turner deliver his famous address on "The Role of the Frontier in American History." He argued that the Western frontier had for three centuries been a metaphor for the American dream, for "manifest destiny." Now that the open frontier had closed, and the United States had become one nation from sea to shining sea, other frontiers awaited. Coman’s two-volume Economic Beginnings of the Far West was devoted to parallel themes, and her economic history of the railroads again echoed Turner’s message that the age of an external frontier and the West as wilderness was over. Coman and Bates were convinced in 1893 that the spirit that had won the West would in time remove those "vexatious restrictions and limitations." [10
]
GOD MEND THINE EV’RY FLAW
The America of continental expansion was no collection of White Cities. 1893 was a year of significant social unrest, and the strife was by no means liberating. Grover Cleveland entered the White House for the second time with the country in the midst of a deep economic depression. On February 23, 1893, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad had gone bankrupt and before the end of the year, the Erie, the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe went belly-up as well. Two and a half million people were unemployed—one-fifth of the work force—and Henry Adams lamented that "much that had made life pleasant between 1870 and 1890 perished in the ruin." [11
] Even the President admitted that "values supposed to be fixed are fast becoming conjectural, and loss and failure have invaded every branch of business." In legislation, which was to provide windfall profits for J.P. Morgan and for Augustus Belmont, Cleveland brought the country back to the gold standard in the very week that Bates stood atop Pike’s Peak. [12
]
Meanwhile, federal and state militias were sent against workers in the Carnegie/Frick (or Homestead) steel strike and against switchmen in Buffalo and coal miners in Tennessee and finally, into the Pullman strike in Chicago. Each of these episodes of class warfare was later treated in Katharine Coman’s Industrial History of the United States (1905).
The two Katharines were also in the vanguard of social activists. Bates and Coman were among the founders in 1887 of the College Settlements Association, a group that made it possible for young female college graduates to spend a year at community settlement houses among the poor and the immigrants—the "teeming refuse" of Europe’s shores. In the course of this work, Bates and Coman became closely associated with the pioneer of Chicago’s Hull House and future Nobel Peace Prize winner, Jane Addams. In 1889, Addams’ lifelong companion, Ellen Gates Starr, described how the settlement-house movement might benefit not only the needy but also the philanthropist:
It is not the Christian spirit to go among these people as if you were bringing them a great boon: one gets as much as one gives [but] people are coming to the conclusion that if anything is to be done towards tearing down these walls ... between classes that are making anarchists and strikers the order of the day, it must be done by actual contact and done voluntarily from the top. [13
A generation of social workers, public-health activists, and egalitarians spent their lives convinced of the need for that actual contact.
In 1892, Katharine Coman became chair of the committee which opened Denison House in Boston and made it a center of labor organizing activity to which Bates was inevitably drawn. Denison House, Hull House, and the other settlement houses were deeply committed to reform of working hours, protection of immigrants, compulsory school attendance, school health, and—above all—abolition of child labor. It was toward this end that the poet Sarah Cleghorn wrote in The Masses:
The golf links lie so near the mill,
That almost every day,
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play. [14
When violence broke out during the Chicago Pullman strike of 1894, and strikers burned down the remnants of the White City, Coman and Addams sided with workers against the militia; Coman went to Chicago again in 1910 to help striking seamstresses win union rights. [15
]
UNDIMM’D BY HUMAN TEARS
Meanwhile, tragedy had struck the couple; Coman’s last work was completed as she lay dying of breast cancer. Unemployment Insurance: A Summary of European Systems (1915) was a meticulous survey of how other industrialized countries cared for the aged, the disabled, and the unemployed. [15
] She concluded that social services in Bismarck’s Germany and Third Republic France were far in advance of those in her own country. Posthumously published to little acclaim, it later became a blueprint for social justice in the United States. The book’s call for seniors’ and disability benefits in the New World—social security—became a platform plank of the Progressive and then the Democratic parties. After the New Deal, Coman’s dream became the law of the land. Bates describes how she helped her friend finish this major economic study:
Through those four years beset with wasting pain,
The surgeon’s knife again and yet again,
... So we twain
Finished your book beneath Death’s very frown.
For all the hospital punctilio,
Through the drear night within your mind would grow
Those sentences my morning pen would spring to meet... [16
The lines come from a volume of passionate love poems, Yellow Clover, written by Bates and published in 1922, seven years after Coman died. Each of these poems is devoted to Katharine Coman, and in some, Bates reached levels of emotional expression—perhaps even art—that eluded her in seven other volumes of verse.
Your life was of my life the warp and woof
Whereon most precious friendships, disciplines,
Passions embroider rich designs ...
No more than memory, love’s afterglow?
Our quarter century of joy, can it
Be all? The lilting hours like birds would flit
By us, who loitered in the portico
Of love’s high palace ... [17
Bates spoke in no loud voice the love that dared not speak its name: yellow clover stood for physical love in the flower language of the two Wellesley scholars, who
Stooped for the blossoms closest to our feet
And gave them as a token
Each to each
In lieu of speech,
In lieu of words too grievous to be spoken... [18
"Undimm’d by human tears" is the hopeful lyric of Bates’ most successful public poem, our national anthem of social justice, a hymn to the better angels of American nature. The lyrics of "America the Beautiful" should remind the bigots of this world of a generation of women whose emotional ties and social reforms have outlasted the alabaster cities’ gleam of the Columbian Exposition.
And crown thy good with brotherhood From sea to shining sea!
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FOOTNOTES
The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and other articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to journals{at}faseb.org.
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