One of the things we should do on July 4, other than to read the Declaration of Independence in a way that is more than a thoughtless flow of words, is to ponder a song written many years later for the occasion, and reflect on whether the current administration gives a damn about any of it.
Let’s go back to a Wellesley College English professor who took a train trip to Colorado Springs. The year was 1893 and the things she experienced during her trip were more than sights she had seen. They became impressions. The white buildings of the World’s Fair in Chicago, the World’s Columbian Exposition that celebrated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in this hemisphere, the horizon-reaching wheat fields under the wide sky as the train crossed Kansas, and at the end the breathtaking view from the top of Pike’s Peak.
Professor Katherine Lee Bates started to think of a poem as she stood on top of that mountain and when she went back to her hotel she started to write. Two years later The Congregationalist published her poem, “Pikes Peak,” to commemorate July 4. Through the years, the poem has been revised, with the version that we know best done in 1911. The last line is especially meaningful in our times when thousands of people are not granted due process.
| 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! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, O beautiful for patriot dream That sees beyond the years Several composers found the poem would make a good song. There were at least 75 different melodies attached to it by 1900. One of them was the treatment of the poem as a hymn by the organist and choir director at Grace Church in Newark, NJ. Samuel A. Ward, who was inspired during a ferryboat ride back home to New York from Coney Island to adapt the words to a hymn he had composed in 1882, “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem.” Her words and music were first published together in 1910, seven years after his death. By the time Bates died in 1929, the hymn was in the hymn books of many denominations. From time to time, someone suggests it should replace “The Star Spangled Banner” as our national anthem or be considered the national hymn. What started as a poem called “Pikes Peak” is now “America the Beautiful.” This July 4th in a good time to ask ourselves if America is still “America the beautiful.” It seems to become harder by the day to see it. POLITICO last year published fifty instances in which President Trump used the word “beautiful” to describe, among other things, beautiful Christians, his beautiful phones, a beautiful note from President Xi, a beautiful (and perfect) phone call with Vladymir Zelenskyy, the Supreme court that he once described as “a beautiful thing to watch,” and—of course—himself: “If I took this shirt off, you’d see a beautiful, beautiful person.” There was a time when he out “beautifuled” himself and actually lavished the word on somebody else—Taylor Swift. “I think she’s beautiful — very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful!” | Trump’s ‘Beautiful’ World – POLITICO But Trump’s America is no longer beautiful. The ugliness of the ICE deportation teams, the ugliness of unfeeling meat-axe budget cuts, the ugliness of constant name calling when intelligent conversation is beyond capability, the ugliness of…… The list is endless. But let’s focus on two things today. Actually, four. On his birthday, Trump celebrated the creation of the U.S. Army with a $45 million parade for himself after his DOGE cut thousands of people from the Veterans Affairs Department a move that, among other things, ended a program that is helping about 80,000 veterans make their house payments. Other cutbacks threaten services at Veterans’ Hospitals. O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife, Trump undoubtedly never pondered that thought from that great hymn. Then there’s the holiday business. A few months ago, Trump proudly told Americans that he wans Christopher Columbus to have a “major comeback,” and have Columbus Day be a major holiday. He issued one of his executive orders “reinstating Columbus Day under the same rules, dates, and locations as it has hand for all the many decades before!” as he put it on his internet page. Many government workers get the day off each year now and he sees no problem with that. What we suspect really gets his goat about that day is that it’s also Indigenous People’s Day, celebrated by those whose culture is not Trump’s. We suspect that because of his reaction to Juneteenth. On his social media page he complained, “ Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all these businesses closed. The workers don’t want it either…It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” The Associated Press has found several instances in which Trump praised the African-American contribution to “enrich every facet of American Life.” But he sees a holiday marking the freeing of American slaves as less important than honoring an explorer who never reached the American mainland who offered to provide Ferdinand and Isabella with “slaves as many they shall order to be shipped” if the royal couple gave him resources for a second trip to the New World. God shed His grace on thee Recognizing “brotherhood from sea to shining sea” is what will make America great again, not budget cuts that damage our veterans or saying Juneteenth is one holiday too many, or ICE raids that trash But don’t expect Donald Trump to ever think deeply enough, or even think at all, of Making America Beautiful Again. Don’t ever expect him to understand that ugliness and greatness will never go hand-in-hand. America! America! God mend thine every flaw,
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