Why I’ll stick with ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’
Today, March 3, marks the 95th anniversary of the day Congress made “The Star-Spangled Banner” our official national anthem (signed into law by President Herbert Hoover in 1931).
Most of us know at least part of the story of Francis Scott Key and how our national anthem came to be. I’ve always liked the anthem, and I can still remember a lot of the national chatter when I was younger about replacing it with something like “America the Beautiful.” I love the Ray Charles version of that song but it’s still not quite as great as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I remember a teacher in elementary school being rabid about changing it to “America the Beautiful,” which I found annoying even as a kid. The clamoring for change continues to this day on social media but I’d like to stick with the “Star-Spangled Banner” and I’ll tell you why.
I first came to love “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a youngster, especially from the Olympics in the Cold War era, when the U.S. still competed against the Soviet Union. And with my dad in the Air Force, the anthem was part of daily life: at 5:00 p.m. on base, everything paused when it played, and you always heard it before the movies started as well. Everybody in the theater would stand when it was played.
I primarily associated the tune with patriotism and pride but didn’t think too deeply on the words. Later I realized Key put together something quite exceptional in 1814, particularly if you read all four stanzas. It’s strong and militant, which I love, but it also carries a quieter warning: a free country can come apart.
Most people may not realize the even fuller context in which Key wrote it and how desperate the hour actually was: the White House had been burned by the British just three weeks earlier, and Key was detained aboard a ship as he watched Fort McHenry endure the bombardment in Baltimore Harbor.
Simply put, that’s the real point worth remembering: a republic is fragile, and it only endures when citizens are willing to defend it, steward it, and refuse to take its freedoms for granted. The anthem reminds us our freedoms were nearly extinguished less than 40 years into our American existence, which is always worth remembering, and preserving. Finally, the last stanza of Key’s poem is quite great:
O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto – “In God is our trust,”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
—Ray Nothstine
— The Federalism Beat