When contemplating how the strands of the American mythos come together to form a living, breathing nation, I have written elsewhere that country (the physical space) is as important as the creed and covenant that are often used to define America’s culture and polis. But why? What separates the American mythos from your garden-variety blood-and-soil nationalism that has tarnished Europe and Asia, and now rears its ugly head in Africa? That tension has animated many of the essays that have been published as America celebrates its 250th birthday, so it’s a question worth asking lest the idea of an American nation be stripped of all nobility and traded for vapid platitudes paid to philosophical abstractions as would befit “men without chests.”
Appropriately enough, to satisfy the most skeptical, the seminal philosophical treatise braiding the three-strand cord of creed, covenant, and country is, in keeping with Tocqueville’s astute observation, not a philosophical treatise at all. It’s a poem.
Katherine Lee Bates’s “America the Beautiful” (along with its soaring melody composed by Samuel Ward) weaves the unbreakable three-strand cord of creed-covenant-country that lyrically describes the American manifestation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Fittingly, it was a cross-country trip from her home in Massachusetts, through the White City at the Chicago World’s Fair and the grain fields of Kansas to the heights of Pikes Peak that provided Bates with the backdrop and inspiration to contemplate the grandeur and nobility of the American creed and covenant. For Bates the country made the creed and covenant comprehensible and concrete:
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!
The poem starts with the physical grandeur and groundedness of America. It’s not just America’s natural beauty, however, but her cultivated beauty as well. The “amber waves of grain” and the “fruited plain” lie alongside the “purple mountains” under “spacious skies” and between the shining seas. The physical beauty of America is not just its wild spaces, but its civilizational spaces as well. There’s a harmony between wilderness, city, and farm that Bates captures exquisitely. Separate any one from the other, and you have a diminished America. America is a beautiful place, and this place grounds its creed.
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
This is one of the most philosophically complex verses in American poetry in my unlearned opinion. Bates is not just reflecting on America’s history but is developing the meaning of that history. Don’t be misled by the term “pilgrim” here. Yes, it does refer to the Pilgrims, but remember that Bates is standing on top of Pike’s Peak at the closing of the American westward movement. The westward movement is not just a safety valve for immigration as Charles Beard would soon ambivalently term it. Rather, Bates recognizes that that westward movement, from Plymouth Rock to Pikes Peak and beyond was motivated by an idea: a desire for freedom that was grounded in moral virtue connoted by “stern, impassioned stress.” Lest one think Bates is romanticizing the American West, which is very easy to do, the last part of the verse indicates that Bates is not blind to America’s “every flaw” which often played out against the majestic backdrop of the western landscape. Here, the prayer shifts from asking God’s blessing to seeking God’s forgiveness, Spirit-led repentance, and a future more fully just. The creed of America is recognized, our failure to live up to it mourned, but the faith that God can “mend thine every flaw” is expressed. The power of the American creed is not in its abstract principles but in its theological grounding and its practical outworking through our “pilgrim feet.”
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine!
The country, the creed, and now the covenant makes its appearance in the poem. Remaining grounded in the national history of America, Bates brings forward the unique ethos of the American warrior: mercy and self-sacrifice. In modern history, only in America do you see a willingness to defend the right and the good for its own sake. Bates suggests that willingness to expend blood and treasure in the defense of what is right and good is original to our experience of war. In the original wording of the poem, Bates wrote, “When once and twice, for man’s avail, // Men lavished precious life!”
She’s referring to America’s two great wars up that point (1889): The American War of Independence and the American Civil War. Core to both conflicts was the concern for defending human dignity and freedom, first as a political right and then as a human right. This is what makes concerns for just war so central to America’s public discussions on conflict. Culturally and historically, this has shaped a particularly American approach to the military. We don’t disregard the political and economic ramifications of a war, but our first concern, at least in our public rhetoric, is the rightness of the cause. Undergirding that sense of rightness is a desire to defend and extend the blessings of liberty not necessarily in an imperial way but as an act of mercy to a fellow human being. Significantly, such an approach to war should check any impulse to imperial wars of liberation for the sake of some abstract concept of democracy. The heart of the American warrior, at least ideally, responds to a legitimate cry for liberty with a justice and mercy that grows out of his own love of liberty. For Bates, and for all of us, that is indeed gold only God can refine. So the concluding prayer is one of sanctification. We’ve moved from asking God’s blessing to confession and repentance to petitioning that God would be faithful to complete the good work he has begun in us nationally.
What does this say about covenant? Biblically, a covenant is an agreement between parties to undertake specific duties or suffer penalties. More often than not, covenants were sealed in blood sacrifices. In the American experience Bates illuminates, the American covenant of freedom is sealed in the blood of the nation’s heroes who have given “the last full measure of devotion” as Lincoln so eloquently put it.
At this point, one might be wondering if a country could ever live up to such a vision as the one Bates casts. Maybe not in our lifetime, but as Bates closes the poem, she leaves no doubt that she is fully aware that her vision is incomplete, that we have further to go on this journey of realizing freedom in this beautiful land. That “thoroughfare for freedom” is still being built. We have flaws to mend and “alabaster cities” to build, and liberty and justice to pursue. However, that future is indeed out there for patriots who hold that vision before them and, critically, go under the grace and mercy of the God of the Bible:
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
Image Credit: National Geographic
