When Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) was invited to teach Chaucer and early English drama during Summer School at Colorado College in Colorado Springs in 1893, she could not have imagined that her brief but profound experience on top of Pikes Peak, our local landmark mountain, would inspire her to compose a poem which, in time, turned into one of America’s best-known songs. What started out as lines simply entitled, America, eventually became America the Beautiful.

Melinda Ponder’s 2017 Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea, gives a comprehensive account of the life of a multifaceted woman who, though short in stature, became a giant in American letters and in the American psyche. Katharine Lee Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts in 1859 and attended Wellesley College as one of the students of the class of 1880, beginning her studies in 1876, only one year after the college opened. She eventually returned there as professor of English literature, a position she held for more than thirty years.

Katharine was a force of nature, a born teacher and a poet at heart. She also penned many other genres and was an indefatigable promoter of fellow poets and writers as well as a social activist, who wrote and worked on behalf of the rights of women, immigrants, people of color, and otherwise underprivileged groups. As someone who clearly loved her country, she did not shy away from criticizing the United States for its many shortcomings, including its imperialism—in particular for its aggression towards Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War (1898). This stance she shared with fellow writer Mark Twain, who was aghast when the United States attacked the Philippines. In a scathing 1901 article, To the Person Sitting in Darkness, he wrote:

There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.

True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn’t it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty; we have invited clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit’s work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world . . .

The Spanish-American War convinced Katharine that it was the right time to publish a collection of poems she had written to protest the recent Boer War in South Africa. It also compelled her to revise her poem America, which had first been published in 1895 in the Congregationalist newspaper.

Melinda Ponder summarizes the genesis of the famous poem:

At the top of Pike’s Peak in 1893, Katharine had been inspired to celebrate the beauty and patriotic history of America in spite of the terrible economic depression and the sectional and class conflicts tearing the country apart. She hoped that the shared American landscape and idealism could someday create a future nation of “nobler men” where “selfish gain” wound no longer “stain” the “banner of the free.”

Ponder goes on to explain:

As Americans began to sing her poem to various melodies, they changed her words as they saw fit [the words have since been wedded to organist Samuel Ward’s 1882 melody “Materna” and are unlikely to ever be divorced from it]. And so finally, in 1904, Katharine “re-wrote it, trying to make the phraseology more simple and direct.”

But she did far more than simplify her language; she gave her poem a new theme.

She asks God

—to augment His goodness with an even greater treasure, brotherhood, if America was to be a model for people beyond its shores

—to correct, heal, and make whole the flaws of the nation, and make firm or strengthen its ‘self-control’ and its freedom within the framework of its original rule of law

—to ‘refine,’ or improve, America’s gold, its material wealth, until its success be counted in its spiritual wealth, rather than in human riches or territory

—to emphasize how her country could become worthy of divine grace

Katharine’s revised America ran in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 19, 1904, with a full-throated endorsement:

. . . a thoroughly American production well-nigh perfect as poetry, and in the most exalted strain as politics. America has only to live up to the aspirations here breathed to realize its Golden Age—the Golden Age of those idealists of late held in scant respect, the Fathers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

For easier comparison, I have placed the two versions next to one another.

Version I (published 1894) O beautiful for halcyon skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties Above the enameled plain! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, Till souls wax fair as earth and air And music-hearted sea!   O beautiful for pilgrim feet Whose stern, impassioned stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness! America! America! God shed His grace on thee Till paths be wrought through wilds of thought By pilgrim foot and knee!   O beautiful for glory-tale Of liberating strife, When once or twice, for man’s avail, Men lavished precious life! America! America! God shed His grace on thee Till selfish gain no longer stain, The banner of the free!   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 Till nobler men keep once again Thy whiter jubilee!

Version II (published 1904) 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, impassioned stress A thoroughfare for freedom beat Across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law!   O beautiful for heroes proved In liberating strife, Who more than self their country loved And mercy more than life! America! America! May God thy gold refine, Till all success be nobleness, And every 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!

For inclusion in her 1911 publication America the Beautiful and Other Poems, Katharine renamed the poem and did one final edit, changing the first four lines of the third verse to the words we know today:

O beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country loved,

And mercy more than life.

America the Beautiful is often considered a preferred alternative to The Star Bangled Banner. The search for a national anthem began in 1861 at the onset of the Civil War, but it took until 1931, when an act of Congress finally settled on The Star Spangled Banner, despite much opposition. Many wished—and still wish— for less belligerent, and more uplifting and uniting sentiments, and a tune that is easier to sing along to. Katharine herself did not advance her own creation as a possible national anthem but its popularity during her lifetime confirmed her conviction that “Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood” (this term for her encompassed sisterhood as well).

Ponder’s informative book discusses all these points and more. It instilled in me a deep respect for the extraordinary life and accomplishments of Katharine Lee Bates. Learning about her thoughts, struggles, and activism confirmed the poignancy of something I recently heard on On Point, a podcast hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti and broadcast on weekdays on our local NPR station. Many of her thoughtful, detailed interviews have lately revolved around this anniversary year. In a conversation with Dominic Erdozain, author of the newly released book To Love a Country: The Problem of Patriotism in America, she discussed the definition of a patriot as a “loyal critic,” someone who loves his or her country but who wants to hold that country accountable and asks that it live up to its ideals. So did Mark Twain. So did Katharine Lee Bates. And so do countless courageous others day after day and year after year.

In a time when individuals who criticize their country’s past and present misconceptions and misdeeds are called “traitors” or “enemies of the state” or worse, nothing could be more relevant.

The longer my head is stuck in history books, the louder rings the truth of this essay’s title: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—The more things change, the more they stay the same. And even if history does not exactly repeat itself, it “rhymes,” as someone (possibly Mark Twain) once quipped.

The burning question that keeps me awake at night: When will we finally learn and start to do better?