America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Katie asks us to work for justice, embrace peace, to do and be good, and for us to love liberty. And for that, she says, we will someday be rewarded in a place undimmed by human tears. (By the way, “Thine alabaster cities gleam” is a direct reference to the White City of the World’s Columbian Exhibition.)
Over the years, Katie received many letters from people sharing what “America the Beautiful” meant to them, but her favorite was this: on the day the Germans surrendered in the Great War, soldiers serving in France heard about it at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The fighting had been brutal, but all at once the sound of nothingness rang out across the countryside. “A bewildering silence fell. The soldiers stood speechless, staring at one another, or dropped to the ground. Then they saw on a hillside a battalion in formation and heard them singing ‘America the Beautiful,’ and they all came to life again, and sang it with tears on their faces.”[12]
The National Hymn Society pressed Congress to make “America the Beautiful” the national anthem. “It expresses the highest and deepest emotions of patriotism, not in any spirit of militant aggression and world-conquering imperialism, but with a profound gratitude and affection for the country, the government, and the traditions that have made us what we are.”[13]
World-famous American opera singer Jessye Norman felt the same. “It doesn’t talk about war,” she said in 2012. “It doesn’t talk about anything but this land, and the joy that we should have in being in this land.”[14]
Katharine Coman died in January 1915, as the blistering winter winds of Massachusetts buffeted the house that she and Katie shared. Katie leaned close to her bed, knowing the moment was drawing near. “Underneath are the everlasting arms,”[15] Katharine whispered. Katharine, whose faith was always stronger than her own. Katharine, who always felt certain about who she was and where she was going.
Before she passed, Katharine penned a note to Katie. “I have no fear, Dear Heart, for Life and Death are one, and God is all in all. My only real concern to remain in this body is to spare you grief and pain and loneliness. But I should not leave you comfortless. I would come to you as my mother comes to me in my best moments when my heart is open to her. The breezes come in off the meadow where the song sparrows are piping. Sure God is love.”[16]
Even when you know someone is dying, even when you can see they are suffering and you wish for them not another moment of painful breath, nothing can really prepare you for the moment. Not the moment they depart this life, but the moment you realize you must continue to exist, even though they are gone. Why do the birds go on singing, as though nothing has changed? Why do the children continue playing as though everything has not just been ripped asunder? “I don’t know why this heart of mine should go on beating when Katharine’s heart is ashes,” Katie wrote in her diary. “But it does.”[17]
She wrote to Katharine’s relatives, who by this time felt like her family too, and said, “I seem to find Katharine again, not in vision, but within myself, the courage in my grief, the comfort in my weariness, and the guidance in my perplexity. We must not cease loving and working, we who sorrow, for our Beloveds are pressing on in bright new paths of service, and it will never do for us to be left too far behind.”[18]
In 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed a bill into law making “The Star-Spangled Banner” the national anthem. But that didn’t diminish the role Katie’s song played in the minds and hearts of Americans. After Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, members of Congress met with FDR until after midnight to discuss what the American response should be. As the congressmen departed, a small crowd gathered outside the White House and began to sing, their voices raw and tearful under the dark sky. It wasn’t “The Star-Spangled Banner” that moved them in the December chill as the country stood at the threshold of another world war. It was “America the Beautiful.”
Katie never sought the spotlight. She rode her bicycle all over Wellesley, drinking in the fragrance of spring and the crunch of leaves beneath her tires in autumn. She became fluent in Spanish and began to translate Spanish literature into English, her mind motivated by the desire to know and know and know.
She stayed out of the battles over the national anthem, never advocating for her lines or offering an opinion when a group held a contest to choose an original melody for the verses. (They received twelve hundred entries, and in the end, chose none. None could live up to Samuel Ward’s now familiar tune.) Katie became an unwitting celebrity, finding herself thrust onto national stages she never anticipated, never accepting the credit for her work’s success.
The enduring appeal of the song, she said, “is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.”[19] Katie approved nearly every reasonable request for her lyrics to be reprinted—in hymnals, schoolbooks, newspapers, and in performances. Keeping up with her correspondence was nearly a full-time job, and she had a steady stream of visitors who came to Wellesley wanting to meet her in person.
In March 1929, Katie, who was nearly seventy, contracted pneumonia. She slowly grew feeble, and soon it became apparent that she was very sick. Her friends took turns staying with her, bringing her tea, reading to her in the quiet of the evening. She asked to hear “At Last” by John Greenleaf Whittier.
When on my day of life the night is falling,
And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown,
I hear far voices out of darkness calling
My feet to paths unknown
Over the course of her entire life, Katie made a total of five dollars for “America the Beautiful,” the fee she was paid when her poem was published in The Congregationalist magazine in 1895. The poem, she said, was made possible by her older brother, Arthur, who took over some of the roles of father when their own father died. It was Arthur who paid for her to go to Wellesley, and it was Wellesley that made her who she was.
Katie wasn’t the suffragist picketing the White House encouraging President Wilson to give votes to women, although she met him once before he became president. Katie didn’t chain herself to courthouses, get arrested, and go on hunger strikes. She didn’t win elections or defeat foes in battle. But what she did was—and is—important. Her words light the way of truth: our shared history as a nation and the direction in which we should be heading.
Katharine Lee Bates died on March 28, 1929, the sound of Whittier’s poem reverberating through the room like the soft tolling of a Paul Revere bell. Just the previous month, Virginia Randolph had watched, helplessly, as the school she loved burned. And now Katie would be eulogized at the one she devoted her career to.
At her funeral, Samuel Ward’s melody began in its gentle murmur before lifting to its crescendo. A friend rose to eulogize her, saying, “To have put the expression of the highest and deepest patriotism into the mouths of a hundred million Americans is a monument so noble and enduring that it seems as if no poet could possibly ask or expect anything more complete.”[20]
A bronze tablet at Wellesley bears her name. And beneath it:
Scholar Patriot Poet
Who gave enduring speech to the love of Americans for America
The bell in the bell tower atop her father’s Congregationalist church in Falmouth, Massachusetts, still rings out each year on the anniversary of her death, reminding us all of the power of one woman’s words to articulate the highest ideals of the American soul.
Forward Out of Darkness
Nine
Inez MilhollandNew York, 1910
“Goddess,” the fellows whispered to each other, craning their necks to follow Inez as she walked by.
“Amazonian beauty,” another remarked.[1]
With her mane of dark hair, piercing light eyes, and an eye-catching figure, Inez Milholland attracted men’s attention wherever she went. Women, though sometimes envious of her looks, loved the inspiring words that tumbled boldly from her lips.
Inez was a new kind of woman. Audacious. Sure of herself. Intelligent. Under her 1909 Vassar yearbook picture were the words: “Fascinating—but a trifle dangerous for household use.”[2]
For decades, Gilded Age women had been corseted by a cult of domesticity, by notions that true femininity must suffocate a woman’s independent thoughts and beliefs. Women didn’t need things like an education. What they needed was a man and a family. But that wasn’t enough for Inez.
Inez stood on the precipice of change. When Inez looked to the future, she saw suffrage for women, prison reform, and the end of racial and sex discrimination. By 1910, Inez was attending law school at New York University, one of only a handful of women to do so.[3] Her plan was to use her legal education to fight for justice. To throw off the shackles of gendered expectations. She would don a cape, mount a horse, and ride down Pennsylvania Avenue like the general of an invading army of new women toward the White House, if that’s what it took.
And it did.
Inez was a Milholland, raised by parents with serious progressive principles. Her father, John, helped found the NAACP, and counted Ida B. Wells as a personal friend.[4] Although John Milholland was raised desperately poor, he made a small fortune from pneumatic tube systems, which were deployed by the likes of the United States Post Office. Milholland was no Carnegie, no Rockefeller, but he did well enough to have a home in New York City, a farm in the country, and a townhouse in London.
