I suppose citizens of the United States enjoy fireworks partly because our National Anthem celebrates bombs bursting in air. (I won’t go to Wikipedia to check.) Last night, the better half and I discovered, much to our surprise, that the window in our guest bedroom provides a terrific vantage from which to watch the City of Hillsdale’s fireworks. We are only a couple blocks from the Fairgrounds, the site from which municipal workers launch those bombs. Earlier in the day (all about us), we enjoyed the City’s Fourth of July parade from the driveway of a good friend and neighbor, though we are still wondering why the parade and fireworks took place on July 3rd.
One additional wonder of this holiday season is why we know so little about Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star Spangled Banner, and another of Baltimore’s accomplished artists. Google Books shows a number of children’s books about Key, his song, and the anthem’s adoption as the nation’s song — it did not happen until 1931 (I wonder what they sang at baseball games when Babe Ruth was a rookie). But for any aspiring (or established) historian out there, the life of Key, who was an prolific poet and hymn writer, his poem about a significant battle during the War of 1812, how this war played in the imagination of the new nation, and the process by which later generations of Americans appropriated Key’s anthem, offers a historical canvass waiting to be filled. It could even work as well as the recent book of our neighbor and good friend.
Not to mention that Key’s anthem contains a political theology that few citizens of the United States ever consider. To remind my fellow Americans, here is the complete text of the Star Spangled Banner:
Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved 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!
Old Life 