“Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”—Francis Scott Key, from “The Star-Spangled Banner” (1814)
Could you ever doubt that I’d get around to writing about “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the event that inspired it, the bombardment of Fort McHenry, which happened on this date in 1814? Not when the composer of our national anthem was the ancestor of the author of what, in my opinion, is The Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby: F(rancis) Scott (Key) Fitzgerald. Not when it was written toward the end of a conflict that, I daresay, rivals the War on Terror in controversy. Not when its history and meaning are as fraught as the country it celebrates.
I suspect you were pretty surprised to find the lines I just quoted. So was I, when I came across them in an anthology edited by education historian Diane Ravitch, The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation.
But that was nothing compared with my surprise when I looked for information on Key in Henry Adams’ History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison—a work of scholarship so all-encompassing that sometimes I’ve felt that if an event wasn’t mentioned there, it didn’t happen.
Oh, I found information on Key there, all right—but it was Philip Barton Key, not the Maryland attorney who was arranging a prisoner exchange of a friend, on board a British vessel, when the American party was forced to watch the bombardment of Fort McHenry.
(The 15 stars and 15 stripes in the flag Key saw is in the image accompanying this post, a battered but beautiful relic preserved in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.)
And “the twilight’s last gleaming” and “the bombs bursting in air”? Well, in Adams’ telling, it all sounds like a fizzling firecracker.
The more I thought about it, the more it sounded to me like Sherlock Holmes’ mystery of the dog that didn’t bark in the night. So I turned back to Ravitch, who disclosed something of this mystery.
Though the poem (originally titled “Defense of Fort McHenry”) was first performed as a song a month after Key created it in a hotel room immediately after the event, it took some time before it became huge. Federal troops began singing it during the Civil War, but it still wasn’t formally part of armed forces ceremonies when Adams completed his history in 1891. (It wasn’t until four years later that it had to be played when the flag was lowered, and Congress didn’t make it the national anthem until 1931.)
Two of the main criticisms of the anthem are that it’s borrowed (the tune derived from an English bar song, “To Anacreon in Heaven”) and bombastic. Mike Stivic, the All in the Family son-in-law memorably described by Archie Bunker as a “leftie-commie-pinko-meathead” (I love the redundancy, don’t you?), sparked one of his great set-tos with Archie over the anthem, with Mike—predictably, during the Vietnam War—seeing it as glorifying military conflict. It all ended hilariously with the following exchange between Mike and his mother-in-law:
Edith: "What are you fighting about?"
Could you ever doubt that I’d get around to writing about “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the event that inspired it, the bombardment of Fort McHenry, which happened on this date in 1814? Not when the composer of our national anthem was the ancestor of the author of what, in my opinion, is The Great American Novel, The Great Gatsby: F(rancis) Scott (Key) Fitzgerald. Not when it was written toward the end of a conflict that, I daresay, rivals the War on Terror in controversy. Not when its history and meaning are as fraught as the country it celebrates.
I suspect you were pretty surprised to find the lines I just quoted. So was I, when I came across them in an anthology edited by education historian Diane Ravitch, The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation.
But that was nothing compared with my surprise when I looked for information on Key in Henry Adams’ History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison—a work of scholarship so all-encompassing that sometimes I’ve felt that if an event wasn’t mentioned there, it didn’t happen.
Oh, I found information on Key there, all right—but it was Philip Barton Key, not the Maryland attorney who was arranging a prisoner exchange of a friend, on board a British vessel, when the American party was forced to watch the bombardment of Fort McHenry.
(The 15 stars and 15 stripes in the flag Key saw is in the image accompanying this post, a battered but beautiful relic preserved in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.)
And “the twilight’s last gleaming” and “the bombs bursting in air”? Well, in Adams’ telling, it all sounds like a fizzling firecracker.
The more I thought about it, the more it sounded to me like Sherlock Holmes’ mystery of the dog that didn’t bark in the night. So I turned back to Ravitch, who disclosed something of this mystery.
Though the poem (originally titled “Defense of Fort McHenry”) was first performed as a song a month after Key created it in a hotel room immediately after the event, it took some time before it became huge. Federal troops began singing it during the Civil War, but it still wasn’t formally part of armed forces ceremonies when Adams completed his history in 1891. (It wasn’t until four years later that it had to be played when the flag was lowered, and Congress didn’t make it the national anthem until 1931.)
Two of the main criticisms of the anthem are that it’s borrowed (the tune derived from an English bar song, “To Anacreon in Heaven”) and bombastic. Mike Stivic, the All in the Family son-in-law memorably described by Archie Bunker as a “leftie-commie-pinko-meathead” (I love the redundancy, don’t you?), sparked one of his great set-tos with Archie over the anthem, with Mike—predictably, during the Vietnam War—seeing it as glorifying military conflict. It all ended hilariously with the following exchange between Mike and his mother-in-law:
Edith: "What are you fighting about?"
Mike: "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Edith: "Did the singer forget the words again?"
The criticism that “The Star-Bangled Banner” is unsingable—how true is it? Sure, Key wasn’t a tunesmith like Irving Berlin (“God Bless America”) or Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”), but the song is not that bad—and I’m not referring to the fact that Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston, Jennifer Hudson, Linda Ronstadt and Robert Merrill, to name just a few singers off the top of my head, have done well by it.
How about just simply that the original tune was meant to be sung in bars? How hard can that be? (Well, maybe after a couple of beers…)
One aspect of the overlooked second and third stanzas is that it allows us to see that Key was not really advocating imperialistic designs for his country (in fact, because of his religious beliefs, he opposed the War of 1812). Rather, he was hailing the endurance of freedom, despite terror and self-doubt—an attitude we can use today.
If there was any reason to celebrate that “our flag was still there,” it came at this point in the War of 1812. That conflict might have begun, in effect, as America’s “Second War of Independence”—an attempt to force Britain to respect our rights as neutrals in the Napoleonic Wars—but it quickly devolved into a war of conquest, a failed attempt to take Canada, featuring one mad act—the burning of York (later Toronto)—that led the British to retaliate in kind in Washington.
Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t the first Cabinet member to mismanage a war; believe it or not, he wasn’t even the worst. That honor would definitely have gone to Simon Cameron had Abraham Lincoln not eased him out of the way with the post of Ambassador to Russia. (Talk about being exiled to Siberia!) Aside from him, the dishonor of being worst falls to John Armstrong for his gross mishandling of the War of 1812, as I noted in a post about the burning of Washington a few weeks ago.
And so, instead of the “bombs bursting in air,” we remember, eight years after 9/11, “war’s desolation.” It might sound a bit odd to some to thank “the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation,” but I think most of the rest of us will take it given the blessing that God bestows: not just victory, in Key's lyrics, but "peace."
And finally, from the dissenter against his country’s path to war, comes the key line of these verses: “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just.” Unlike another figure associated indelibly with the War of 1812, naval hero Stephen Decatur, Key is not standing for “my country, right or wrong.”
Essayist Gordon Brumm notes perceptively how crucial one word makes: Conquest comes not because our cause is just, but “when”—i.e., if—it is.
As it would prove in the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and Vietnam—not to mention all kinds of conflicts within its own borders—America is hardly a perfect country.
Its distinctiveness, rather, lies in the fact, I think, that it is the land of the second chance—where immigrants can start over, their lives no longer shadowed by the religious, class, or other conflicts of their ancestors, and where, because of freedoms that have been expressly written down and fiercely debated over the years, political errors can be corrected more quickly than in absolutist regimes.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense. In a time of uncertainty, that belief remains as perennial as Key’s “land of the free and home of the brave.”
The criticism that “The Star-Bangled Banner” is unsingable—how true is it? Sure, Key wasn’t a tunesmith like Irving Berlin (“God Bless America”) or Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”), but the song is not that bad—and I’m not referring to the fact that Marvin Gaye, Whitney Houston, Jennifer Hudson, Linda Ronstadt and Robert Merrill, to name just a few singers off the top of my head, have done well by it.
How about just simply that the original tune was meant to be sung in bars? How hard can that be? (Well, maybe after a couple of beers…)
One aspect of the overlooked second and third stanzas is that it allows us to see that Key was not really advocating imperialistic designs for his country (in fact, because of his religious beliefs, he opposed the War of 1812). Rather, he was hailing the endurance of freedom, despite terror and self-doubt—an attitude we can use today.
If there was any reason to celebrate that “our flag was still there,” it came at this point in the War of 1812. That conflict might have begun, in effect, as America’s “Second War of Independence”—an attempt to force Britain to respect our rights as neutrals in the Napoleonic Wars—but it quickly devolved into a war of conquest, a failed attempt to take Canada, featuring one mad act—the burning of York (later Toronto)—that led the British to retaliate in kind in Washington.
Donald Rumsfeld wasn’t the first Cabinet member to mismanage a war; believe it or not, he wasn’t even the worst. That honor would definitely have gone to Simon Cameron had Abraham Lincoln not eased him out of the way with the post of Ambassador to Russia. (Talk about being exiled to Siberia!) Aside from him, the dishonor of being worst falls to John Armstrong for his gross mishandling of the War of 1812, as I noted in a post about the burning of Washington a few weeks ago.
And so, instead of the “bombs bursting in air,” we remember, eight years after 9/11, “war’s desolation.” It might sound a bit odd to some to thank “the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation,” but I think most of the rest of us will take it given the blessing that God bestows: not just victory, in Key's lyrics, but "peace."
And finally, from the dissenter against his country’s path to war, comes the key line of these verses: “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just.” Unlike another figure associated indelibly with the War of 1812, naval hero Stephen Decatur, Key is not standing for “my country, right or wrong.”
Essayist Gordon Brumm notes perceptively how crucial one word makes: Conquest comes not because our cause is just, but “when”—i.e., if—it is.
As it would prove in the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and Vietnam—not to mention all kinds of conflicts within its own borders—America is hardly a perfect country.
Its distinctiveness, rather, lies in the fact, I think, that it is the land of the second chance—where immigrants can start over, their lives no longer shadowed by the religious, class, or other conflicts of their ancestors, and where, because of freedoms that have been expressly written down and fiercely debated over the years, political errors can be corrected more quickly than in absolutist regimes.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense. In a time of uncertainty, that belief remains as perennial as Key’s “land of the free and home of the brave.”
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