“America, America!
God mend thine ev’ry flaw.” ~ KL
Bates
Life wasn’t easy in the late
1800s, but Katherine was luckier than most.
After her father, a Protestant minister died when she was less than a
month old, her brothers worked to support the family. Katherine got an education – a B.A. from
Wellesley College in 1880.
Teaching became her life’s passion; she believed that human
values could be exposed and developed through literature. After spending a year at Oxford, she returned
to Wellesley, a full professorship and an annual salary of $400 which included
“board and washing.”
When asked to teach a summer course in Colorado Springs,
Katherine boarded the train from Massachusetts in July 1893 for the long journey
westward. She slept curled across two
coach seats, and woke early when the sunlight fell through the window.
Her fellow passengers were fascinating. Some had tangled hair and burnt skin; some
had charming southern accents. The guy
from Illinois marveled when Katherine explained she was a writer and poet. She met a peddler from Cleveland, a cobbler
from Chicago, a cowboy from Nebraska.
Their simplicity was endearing.
They represented the best of America – independent, hardworking, and
church going.
The view across the plains was breathtaking. She collected the images in her diary: the
fertile farmland stretching across the continent; golden wheat fields waving in
the hot summer wind. Her notes conveyed
an attitude of appreciation and gratitude for this country’s extraordinary
physical beauty and abundance.
But the best was yet to come. As the train arrived in Colorado, she choked
up absorbing the splendor of the Rocky Mountains for the first time. Purple with white caps, like ice cream atop a
purple Popsicle. They stood as symbols
of stability and certainly; dignity and power over everything. The trip had given her fodder for the
greatest poem she’d ever write.
A craving overwhelmed her.
She would later close her lecture series by joining colleagues on a
daring expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak, making the ascent by the only
method then available for people not skilled enough to climb by foot – a prairie
wagon.
It was there, as she gazed over the expansive fertile
countryside spreading for miles under those “spacious” skies, that all the
impressions she’d been collecting on her trip coalesced in the endless horizons
before her. America’s possibilities were
limitless!
She took out her journal and wrote, “O beautiful for
spacious skies …” a poem published two years later. Katherine Lee Bates received $5 for her
effort. It was later put to the music of
Samuel Ward’s “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem.”
“America the Beautiful”
has been called a hymn, a prayer, even the national heartbeat set to
music. It’s perhaps all of those and
more, celebrating the physical beauty of the land not only as it was, but as it
could be – a rural nation awakening to industrial leadership.
Happy Birthday America!
“America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy
good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.” Amen
