The Star Spangled Banner and Pledge Of Allegiance Both Under Fire

The story of the lyrics is more straightforward. We know that Key wrote out his lines after the battle, and that they were quickly published, and found immediate popularity in a country desperate for good news after the British had torched Washington. But the third stanza is troubling. One line taunts the British for their failure, and specifically calls out “the hireling and slave” who joined the British forces. That line calls attention to a fact that considerably weakens the song’s claim to celebrate “the land of the free”—the presence of significant numbers of African-Americans, fighting with the British in hopes of finding a personal freedom they had no chance of securing in the United States. Among the invading army were at least 200 “colonial marines”—escaped slaves from Virginia and Maryland, eager to fight against their former masters.

A deeper study of Key only compounds the problem. We can overlook the fact that he was tone-deaf. But his position on slavery is impossible to avoid. Key was not only a slave-owner, but he zealously defended the peculiar institution in his legal work, persecuting local journalists who questioned slavery, and even those who possessed anti-slavery writings in their homes. (A 2012 book, Jefferson Morley’s Snow-Storm in August, fills out the details.) His brother-in-law was Roger Taney, who became chief justice of the Supreme Court and authored the infamous Dred Scott decision, which argued that African-Americans could never be citizens of the United States. Indeed, much of what we know about how Key wrote out “The Star-Spangled Banner” comes from an account Taney published in 1857, the year of Dred Scott.

The fact that “The Star-Spangled Banner” contains these serious flaws did not in any way slow down its popularity. It may even have helped, as the new song spread like wildfire through newspapers and songbooks. Americans were desperate for good news in 1814, and didn’t care to look too closely at the details. New England was on the verge of seceding over America’s feckless foreign policy and a war that had achieved none of its objectives. The president of the United States, James Madison, was in flight, and the White House a charred ruin. At other difficult times in our history—notably, during the Civil War—the anguish that lies not too deep below the surface of the song gave it a new burst of popularity. That note of fragility gives the song more depth than the drum-bashing triumphalism with which it is usually performed.

Two hundred years after that long night in Baltimore, is it time to rethink the Star-Spangled Banner? It has its merits—to drown out bad news with bluster, brass and percussion worked in 1814, and the song continues to radiate personality, even as most of us try and fail to sing along with its awkward leaps over one-and-half octaves. It feels right that the city that gave us Hairspray also surrendered this essential bit of national theater. The music has entered so deeply into our consciousness that even its parodies can seem beautiful—much as the Jimi Hendrix version, inflammatory at the time, has acquired a great dignity of its own.

But the story of Key’s nearness to slavery cannot easily be forgotten, especially in an era that demands more accountability, and offers to tools to find it. Critics over the years—I am hardly the first—have been brutal about the Star-Spangled Banner’s many shortcomings. The New York Herald Tribune dismissed it as “words that nobody can remember [set] to a tune that nobody can sing.” In 1918, a woman named Kitty Cheatham denounced the words as “German propaganda” (because they undermined the Anglo-American alliance), and saw the music as a product of “darkness,” “degeneracy,” and “the carnal mind.” Christian Science leader Augusta Stetson called it a “barroom ballad composed by a foreigner.” A 1965 writer thought it “as singable as Die Walkure, as American as ‘God Save the Queen’”; the columnist Michael Kinsley has ripped its “empty bravado” and “mindless nonsense about rockets and bombs.”

Perhaps—like Old Glory herself—the unsingable song is here to stay. But if not, we have a worthy contender waiting in the wings: “America the Beautiful,” a stirring piece of music, easily sung and irrefutably composed by U.S. citizens. The lyricist, Katharine Lee Bates, was a lifelong Republican who supported a Democratic president, Woodrow Wilson, in his quest to teach democracy to the world. She felt the words come to her on top of Pike’s Peak, in Colorado, after a cross-country train trip. The music was provided by a church organist from Newark, Samuel Ward, whose ancestor of that name was a delegate to the first Continental Congress. He began to hear it in his head after a trip to Coney Island. What could be more American? It would take a gigantic effort to remove the “Star-Spangled Banner” from its throne—a throne that becomes a little more entrenched this weekend. But to ask hard questions about entrenched power is an American tradition even older than our attempts to sing this enduringly difficult national song.