History Book: Twelve notes of nationhood

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

You’re hearing your USA men’s hockey gold medalists singing the anthem down in Miami after returning from the Olympics a week ago.

There’s been a lot of singing of the anthem lately. Jack Eichel, the Americans’ top center iceman

JACK EICHEL: Representing your country and we all take so much pride in wearing this red, white and blue jersey, and what it means to be an American and it's awesome. I mean, it's incredible. It's really hard to put into words. You hear the anthem and you sing it together. It's, it's, it's hard to explain.

Today on the WORLD History Book, we’ll attempt to explain it.

The Star-Spangled Banner is so deeply embedded in American culture … it goes back even before it officially became the national anthem … starting with the War of 1812.

Here’s WORLD’s Emma Eicher.

EMMA EICHER: September 13th, 1814. America and Great Britain are at war. Again. British troops have just left Washington, D.C. in ashes. Their warships are positioned in the Chesapeake Bay ready to attack Baltimore. Fort McHenry stands guard between the ships and the city as the last bastion.

As the British prepare to bombard the fort, one of the ships—the HMS Tonnant— holds an American hostage: Doctor William Beanes. They accuse him of being a spy.

MARC FERRIS: They arrest this dude named Dr. Beanes, and they bring them aboard the ship …

That’s Marc Ferris. He’s the author of The Star Spangled Banner: The Unlikely Story of America’s National Anthem.

Two Americans try negotiating Beanes’ release before the battle: Francis Scott Key, a lawyer, and federal agent John Skinner.

FERRIS: They get into a tiny boat. They're, I guess, they're waving a white flag. They're approaching the biggest warship in the world, and they're like, hey, we want to talk about Dr. Beanes.

They manage to convince the British troops that Beanes isn’t a spy, and the three of them beat a hasty retreat back to their own vessel. Then at dawn, Britain blasts cannonballs and rockets at Fort McHenry.

Key watches the missiles light up the dark sky. And he scribbles down some of the most memorable words in American history:

FERRIS: The rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, the rampart, that's Fort McHenry. It gave proof through the night that the flag was still there.

With the stars and stripes flying triumphantly over the fort, the British sailed home in defeat. Key finished writing the piece the next day, titled “The Defeat of Fort M’Henry.”

Many today consider it a poem. But Key actually wrote the piece with music in mind.

MARK CLAGUE: Lyricists invented new words to well known melodies that were already part of the cultural conversation.

Mark Clague is a professor of musicology at the University of Michigan. He also wrote O Say Can You Hear?: A Cultural Biography of the Star-Spangled Banner.

MARK CLAGUE: It's a tradition that was very common in the 19th century called the Broadside Ballad tradition. So he imagines those words to the “Star Spangled Banner” already having in mind the melody to which we sing it today … and was used for actually hundreds of other songs in American history.

Newspapers picked up the story, and suddenly the whole country was singing Key’s song. The ballad seemed to inject a shot of pride into the veins of the nation.

Reverence for the nation’s flag came along with America’s newfound patriotism.

CLAGUE: After 1814, the song helps popularize the power of the flag for the American people and the unexpected victory at Baltimore.

The song joined the ranks of American classics, like “Yankee Doodle””

YANKEE DOODLE: Yankee Doodle came to town, a-riding on a pony, stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni …

And later, Katharine Lee Bates’ “America the Beautiful”:

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL: 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.

On March 3rd, 95 years ago, President Herbert Hoover considered which one should become the national anthem. There were other popular songs in the running too: like “Hail, Columbia,” “My Country, Tis of Thee,” and “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.”

Marc Ferris says there were issues with most of them.

Take “My Country, Tis of Thee” for example.

FERRIS: It's the melody of the British National Anthem, “God Save the King” …

And as for “Yankee Doodle”:

FERRIS: Nobody takes “Yankee Doodle” seriously …

Clague says “America the Beautiful” wasn’t a rallying cry for the nation.

CLAGUE: “America the Beautiful” makes us feel great about, you know, America from sea to shining sea … America the Beautiful is wonderful when everything's going pretty well.

“Hail, Columbia,” was a runner-up. But the “Star-Spangled Banner” was the clear choice.

CLAGUE: It was always obvious to people that the “Star Spangled Banner” was the symbolic song of the nation, and it was just a matter of making it official at that point.

The anthem is tricky for singers, with a sweeping range. Clague says that’s part of what makes it great.

CLAGUE: It takes a lot to sing this song well, and you have to sort of go for it. And I think there's something inspiring about the tune, the melody that demands that America sort of be heroes like, you have to become bigger than yourself in order to realize that song.

And what would the “Star-Spangled Banner” be without the flag itself? The stars-and-stripes came with its own traditions. Here’s Ferris again:

FERRIS: In the 1890s, the man who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, introduced what was known as the Bellamy salute to the flag.

The Bellamy salute was taken from an old Roman tradition of standing with one arm raised to the flag, palm down. But that’s where the Nazi salute came from.

So Congress revised it in 1942. It changed to standing with a hand over the heart, hats removed. The hats off part is a military custom.

FERRIS: It's an amazing cultural thing, and nobody around the world, there's no country on this planet that plays its national anthem more than we do.

In America, flags are everywhere. On front porches, high school gyms, and the biggest sporting events like the Olympics and the Super Bowl. And where the flag is, so is the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Clague says he believes the most important word in the anthem is: you.

CLAGUE: Oh say, can you see? And the reason for that is because it invites us all to be part of the story, to have a kind of personal relationship to the song. I think that's that, to me, is the magic of the song and what it calls us to do. I think it's a call to citizenship, as much as it is a symbol of nation.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Eicher.

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