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Like “America,” “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” inserts religious filial piety in lines about “Land where my fathers died, / Land of the pilgrims’ pride” and “Our fathers’ God.” The land and its beauty are not the focus as they are in “America,” although freedom rings from mountainsides and “thy rocks and rills, / Thy woods and templed hills” call to mind New England’s white-steepled villages nestled amidst a rolling forested landscape. God is “author of liberty” and unlike “America” the poem acknowledges no limits on freedom. All four stanzas glorify freedom and liberty. “My Country, ’Tis of Thee,” another religious patriotic song, addresses God in the first line and again in the last stanza. “America the Beautiful” is Puritan and Congregational from beginning to end. Congregationalists like Bates still deeply held to those values.
Puritan ministers preached self-control and Puritan laws limited liberty for the common good and for God’s glory. Puritans sought godly, orderly communities and built those classic New England towns with their white church spires rising over town greens amidst green and plentiful landscapes. Congregationalists were descendants of the Puritans of New England. Daughter of a Massachusetts Congregational minister, she published it in The Congregationalist magazine, appropriate for such a deeply religious (and, incidentally, very Congregational) poem. Katharine Lee Bates wrote “America the Beautiful” in 1893 after an inspirational climb to the top of Pike’s Peak in Colorado.
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The last stanza describes a “patriot dream” of the future: a beautiful America full of gleaming alabaster-white cities “undimmed by human tears.”
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The second stanza lauds New England’s religious founders, the Pilgrims, for beating “a thoroughfare for freedom” “across the wilderness.” However, freedom does not imply license if God will “confirm thy soul in self-control, / Thy liberty in law.” Stanza three praises the self-sacrificing soldiers of the “liberating strife” of the Civil War and asks God to make the nation’s wealth into a “gain divine” and by implication not simply for the sake of greed. Uniquely among the three songs, “America the Beautiful” invokes a social and moral vision for America. Each of the four stanzas starts with “O beautiful.” The first stanza praises the beauty and abundance of the land - “spacious skies,” “amber waves of grain,” “purple mountain majesties,” “fruited plain,” and “shining seas.” All four stanzas appeal to God, asking for grace, brotherhood, perfection, and nobleness. “America the Beautiful” details a remarkable vision of America. But read them closely and be surprised how the lyrics describe the meaning of America in three very different ways. The words are so familiar that, really, no one pays attention to their meaning.
“America the Beautiful” will be popular, and so will “Our County, ’Tis of Thee,” and of course the national anthem, “Star-Spangled Banner” (despite its notoriously unsingable tune). On the Fourth of July, Americans will celebrate Independence Day at picnics, concerts, fireworks displays, and gatherings of many kinds, and they almost always sing.
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