America the Beautiful

The story

In 1893 Katharine Lee Bates, a 33-year-old English professor at Wellesley College, took the train to Colorado Springs to teach at Colorado College. Sights on the journey found their way into her poem: the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the "White City" whose gleaming buildings promised a future; the wheat fields of Kansas, through which her train passed on 16 July; and the view of the Great Plains from the top of Pikes Peak. The words began to come to her on the summit, and she wrote them down back in her room at the Antlers Hotel. The poem, first called "Pikes Peak", was published as "America" in the Fourth of July 1895 issue of the church paper The Congregationalist. It quickly caught the public's fancy, and an amended version appeared in 1904.

The music came separately. Samuel A. Ward, organist and choirmaster of Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey, had written a hymn tune in 1882; it came to him on a ferry from Coney Island back to his home after a summer day, and he wrote it down at once. He set it to the old hymn "O Mother Dear, Jerusalem" and named it "Materna", and the hymn was published in 1892. Many tunes were tried for Bates's poem, the first sent in by Silas Pratt and at least 75 by 1900, but Ward's was thought the best, and the words and his tune were first published together, as "America the Beautiful", in 1910. The two never met. Ward died in 1903, not knowing what his music would become; by Bates's death in 1929 the song's popularity was well established, and it appears in the songbooks of many American congregations.

At various times, above all during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, there have been efforts to make it a national hymn or anthem beside or in place of "The Star-Spangled Banner", and before 1931 it was considered a candidate for the national anthem. Supporters say it is easier to sing and more melodic, and some object to the war imagery of the anthem and to its third verse's implied support of slavery and racism; others prefer the anthem for its war themes. None of these efforts has succeeded.

Ray Charles's soulful version reached the R&B chart in the Bicentennial year of 1976 and is traditionally played on New Year's Eve after the Times Square Ball drop; he sang it at the 1984 Republican National Convention and at Super Bowl XXXV in 2001, and Whitney Houston covered his arrangement in 1991. Its popularity grew in the years after the September 11 attacks, when it was sung at sporting events beside the national anthem, and it has opened many Super Bowls and editions of WrestleMania. A multilingual version in a Coca-Cola advertisement for Super Bowl XLVIII drew criticism from some conservatives. At the 2023 US Open, Cécile McLorin Salvant sang, in place of the familiar lines of the first verse, the second verse's prayer that God mend the nation's every flaw, a choice the jazz critic Nate Chinen found full of meaning. Jennifer Lopez sang it at the inauguration of Joe Biden in 2021 and Carrie Underwood at the second inauguration of Donald Trump in 2025. Its phrases "from sea to shining sea" and "purple mountain majesties", the shade of Pikes Peak, have become American idioms.

What it says

A hymn of praise to the land of the United States, from its skies and grain fields to its mountains and plains, joined to a prayer that God bless the country, correct its faults and make its people worthy of it. The mood is reverent and hopeful rather than martial.

The words