America the Beautiful
338

Text: Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929)
Music: Samuel A. Ward (1847–1903)
Tune name: MATERNA

Behind the inspiration for this patriotic hymn are the scenic wonders of America— the skies, the fields, the mountains, and the cities. But equally important, it is a tribute to the people of America’s past who “more than self their country loved.”

“America the Beautiful” is a remarkable combination of national feeling and religious feeling. In each verse, the first two lines allude to some of the numberless blessings Americans enjoy— the heritage of heroes, patriots, and pilgrims, as well as the “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountain majesties.” The author’s gratitude bursts forth in a panoramic series of allusions to American landscape and American history. Following these exclamations, lines three and four of each verse are a prayer, almost in the form of a warning: Americans must not take these blessings for granted but must continually pray for the grace and guidance of God.

Katharine Lee Bates was a professor of English at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. During the summer of 1893, she had been invited to lecture at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. She wrote that on one summer day in Colorado she stood at the summit of Pike’s Peak and “gazed in wordless rapture over the far expanse of mountain ranges and sealike sweep of plain.” Earlier, as she had journeyed west, she had attended the Columbian Exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair, “whose White City,” she stated, “made such strong appeal to patriotic feeling that it was in no small degree responsible for at least the last stanza of ‘America the Beautiful.’ It was with this quickened and deepened sense of America that we went on, my New England eyes delighting in the wind- waved gold of the vast wheat- fields” (quoted in John Barnes Pratt, Present Day Hymns and How They Were Written [New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1940], 6).

By the 1920s her text had become permanently associated with MATERNA, a tune which Samuel A. Ward had written in 1882. The tune name derives from the fact that the anonymous text for which it was originally written began with the words “O mother dear, Jerusalem.”