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FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA: KATHARINE LEE BATES AND THE STORY OF AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

On a rare day when smoke from distant wildfires obscures the summit of Pikes Peak, scores of arriving tourists are reminded that in 1893, the view from here inspired America’s most popular song.

Tourists reading poem: America the Beautiful. Oh beautiful for spacious skies for amber waves of grain…

KATE UDALL AS BATES: When those words first came to me way up there on Pikes Peak, I never imagined that my little poem would eventually be known and loved by all Americans.

ELVIS: Oh beautiful for spacious skies…

JUDY COLLINS: for amber waves of grain…

WHITNEY HOUSTON: For purple mountain majesties…

JOHN DENVER: Above the fruited plain.

RAY CHARLES: America. America…

BARBRA STREISAND God shed his grace on thee…

JENNIFER LOPEZ: and crown thy good with brotherhood….

BLANE HOWARD : from sea to shining sea.

STEPHEN KINZER, HISTORIAN AND JOURNALIST: I love that song because it stirs my kind of patriotism. It should be our national anthem.

But, truth be told, most of my words aren’t sung anymore and their message is all but forgotten.

So let me tell you the story behind my song.

ELLEN LEOPOLD, AUTHOR “A SOUL AMONG LIONS”: When I hear America the Beautiful today, I remind myself that it has all these verses that I don't know about.

Whitman heard America singing. But I saw America suffering. Saw the factories where children were deprived of body and soul. Saw the immigrants, scorned and cheated by the sons of immigrants. Saw the women who could not even vote.

FALMOUTH CONGREGATION: Oh beautiful for spacious skies…

I wanted to see a different America, immersed in beauty, with liberty and justice for all, as it was meant to be.

CONGREGATION: from Sea to Shining Sea

I was born here on Cape Cod, by the shining sea. My father was a minister. But I never knew him. He died when I was four weeks old. Mother did every kind of work to feed us. My brothers chipped in with the fish they caught. So many neighbors helped too. When I was five. President Lincoln was shot. I’ll never forget my mother’s grief.

MELINDA PONDER, BATES BIOGRAPHER: And she wrote that she imagined the church bells ringing, too, so that even her father, who was buried in the graveyard, could hear them ringing to toll for Abraham Lincoln.

How I admired the men of my village who gave their lives for his cause—that slavery be abolished forever.

BLANE HOWARD: Oh beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife…

PONDER: These were men who had died in the Revolutionary War and then men who had died in the Civil War fighting for the Union.

From far beyond Nantucket, the whole world came to us.

PONDER: And I think this is what eventually made her what I would call a global citizen.

Most men in our town were sailors. Many never returned home alive. Hattie Gifford was my best friend. We played everywhere, even in the Old Burying Ground.

LEONARD MIELE, AUTHOR, VOICE OF THE TIDE: One day, Hattie and her mother were going to meet her father, a mariner who was out to sea…What they didn't know was that he had died coming home, and they placed the wooden coffin at their feet and said, this is your father.

With so much death around us, I wrote my own will.

GIRL’S VOICE: I, Katie Bates, do hereby bequeath all my worldly possessions to Hattie L Gifford, with the wish that she will give them to poor Indians.

Reading was my window to the outside world. I was shy and near-sighted, with my head mostly in a book. I wrote down every one I read. One day, a peddler came by and put some spectacles on my nose—and suddenly, I saw that the trees outside had leaves! Mother gave me this little book to write in. I had nothing important to say, but I said it anyway.

Girl’s voice: Boys are necessary, but when they kiss the girls, write love notes, can’t talk sense and hug girls, they are the greatest bores in existence.--Katie Bates

In 1871, Mother moved us to Wellesley, Massachusetts, only 20 miles from the big city of Boston. I wrote for my high school newspaper and the local daily. My school was right near the site where a new women’s college was being built.

DR. PAULA JOHNSON, PRESIDENT OF WELLESLEY COLLEGE: They really founded this school as a powerful, educational institution that would educate women from different socioeconomic strata. ..And that founding principle has held true for 150 years.

I entered Wellesley College in 1876. Class of 1880. “Katie of 80” the other girls called me. We lived in College Hall, which was too fancy for my mother’s tastes. Palm trees in the Atrium–in Massachusetts? Voted class president, I was popular but not happy.

PONDER: They had to come and eat in the dining room at a certain table. And then all day long they had, well, they had daily chapel she had to go to. So for her it was very rigid.

After vacation, I just wanted to keep reading books in my hammock forever! Books I chose! But I admired Mr. Durant, Wellesley’s founder. He made sure nearly all our professors were women. And he brought beauty to every corner of the campus. At Lake Waban, I found a cure for my college blues.

BATES POEM, READ BY ANOTHER VOICE: Oh, the delight of nature! Where she leads…refresh your heavy lids while you behold how sunshine revels in the lowliest weeds…

I majored in English and Greek but my real love was verse…Chaucer…Shakespeare.

PONDER: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was her favorite poet, and he was a big influence in many ways in her life. And he had wanted Americans to see their own history in his poetry.

He invited our class to his home in Cambridge. When he told me he liked my poem, Sleep, I nearly wept for joy! I told a friend that if I could write a poem people remembered after I died, I’d consider my life worth living. My poems were mostly serious. But I loved humor too, writing of our class:

OTHER VOICE: This, O this is the Classical Class/ Who even at play on the green young grass/ Gossiped in Greek, or punned, alas!/ In Latin that might…or might not…pass…

I taught high school until I joined the Wellesley faculty in 1885. By then, my stories were being published. Though I needed money, I wrote mostly for the joy of it. Life brings blessings in disguise. In 1888, I was exposed to smallpox. Forced to quarantine, I wrote a novel for teens about a rich girl and a poor boy. Rose learns that Thorn, a crippled beggar, is her brother, abandoned in childhood. Her heart goes out to those like him. As mine did.

PONDER: she wanted to write a novel to foreground the problems in this country with the sweatshops and the women living in tenements who had such terrible working conditions.

READER’S VOICE, from Rose and Thorn: For them, there is no day…For them, there is no Sabbath…For them, there is no Easter. In that dreary tenement house, they are as the dead and buried.

Mark Twain called the era “The Gilded Age.” The rich lived in luxury, while the poor, arriving by the millions, grew destitute. Fortunes rose from their work but they did not benefit. Railroads opened the west and the Indian treaties were broken, leaving them only slivers of land. Soldiers slaughtered the Indians’ buffalos for sport.

LEAH WITHEROW, HISTORIAN: In later work, she describes in more detail… the shame of Indians, meaning the United States’ abhorrent treatment of indigenous peoples on the continent.

OTHER VOICE: Our wigwams shall vanish from these, our lands/ Our paths be lost in the blowing sands…/ Our hearts are bitter and clamorous/ Red Sun, Red God, O comfort us!

My novel wasn’t much. But I won a literary prize of $700 for it, enough to travel to England the next summer. I’d study at Oxford and receive a Masters’ degree for my efforts. My friend Annie Scoville and I left Brooklyn in May 1890. She brought two big cases filled with bottles of Ginger Ale! It took both of my brothers to get them on the ship! The seas were so rough, I arrived exhausted. After touring in Scotland and England, I spent months at Oxford, polishing my credentials in English literature. While I was there, the trustees of Wellesley College decided to require that every professor pledge her Christian faith. That requirement had nothing to do with education. I refused to sign and thought I wouldn’t return to Wellesley. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. I was always nervous about my teaching. When I was sick, I’d put a note on my classroom door: (VISUAL) But the trustees backed down. So I came back—to take over the English Department as a full professor. In England, men sought me out.

PONDER that was when her first suitor, Oscar Triggs, started courting her…

I even considered marriage. But in those days, if a Wellesley teacher wed, she lost her job.

MIELE: They had to sacrifice marriage to become scholars. That was one of the weaknesses of education at that time.

But Wellesley offered me a vibrant community of brilliant women.

WITHEROW: Can you imagine teaching at Wellesley in the 1890s? This educational endeavor must have been so exciting for women.

I’d always been quite conservative, but my colleagues had a great influence on me.

MIELE: The women there were representing all causes in the United States, whether it was the urban poor, helping immigrants, getting the vote for women.

WITHEROW: All of these issues were hotly contested, and I would argue that they still are being hotly contested today.

Vida Scudder, a Christian socialist, stood out among us. But we all shared her passion for women’s emancipation. I grew closest to Katharine Coman, an economist and historian.

WITHEROW: Catherine Coman was brilliant. I think she was one of those people that burned fiercely. She was the social conscience of the pair.

In time, we became almost inseparable. My literature classes quickly attracted students who believed in Wellesley’s creed: (VISUAL)

WITHEROW: There were comments from some of her former students describing how she lit a fire, a passion within them.

In 1892, my colleagues and I opened a settlement house for immigrant women in Boston.

PONDER: Katherine Coman was organizing these Italian women into a union to get better pay for their sewing. And the settlement house had classes for children.

But there were always more poor than we could care for. The next year, Katharine and I were invited to teach summer school in Colorado.

BLANE HOWARD: O Beautiful for pilgrims’ feet…

WITHEROW: This epic train journey was something that many Americans were eager to take….She kept careful notes of the journey.

I’d never been West before.

BLANE HOWARD: across the wilderness

WITHEROW: And for Katharine Lee Bates, this not only provided her with additional income but also a vacation.

On the way, I stopped at Niagara Falls—O Beautiful America! I met Katharine in Chicago. She took me to the Columbian Exposition, with its famous “White City.”

SHANNON QUARTET, 1924: …Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears. America…

So many new things were introduced for the first time there. All promising a bright tomorrow. But only blocks away, another city presented itself, filled with suffering humanity.

OTHER VOICE: Beyond the circle of her glistening domes/ A bitter wind swept by to waste and wither/ A cry went up from hunger-smitten homes/But came not hither.

That year, America was in the grip of economic depression.

MIELE: Banks were closing. Coal, steel and railroad industries were striking. The haves and the have nots were fighting in the streets. Corporations were making money and the people were not.

O my beloved country—it was hard to see her in such pain! After Chicago, we sped across golden wheat fields to Colorado Springs at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. I had arrived in the West of my imagination! To teach Chaucer. Our fellow teachers at Colorado College were noted writers.

WITHEROW: It wasn't all work and no play for these amazing assemblage of professors at the Colorado College summer session in 1893. They went on a moonlit drive in the Garden of the Gods, which must have been terribly romantic. They went dancing in the Broadmoor casino.

And on July 22nd, I rode to the top of Pikes Peak! What a bouncing, bone-shaking ride it was! But the view from the top made it all worthwhile.

WITHEROW: On the summit, she pens a telegram that she sends to her mother, and she describes this is the most glorious scenery I've ever beheld.

And suddenly, words were filling my head, stirred by the great mountains to the west, and the plains so far below in the east. That night, I scribbled the first lines of poetry into my notebook…America is beautiful, yet in so many ways, we’ve made it ugly. We saw that ugliness down in Cripple Creek mining camp, where crazed men dug madly for gold.

WITHEROW: As miners pour into the district, money is being made, millionaires are being minted…Of course, the hillsides are being denuded, the mine activity is feverish and furious.

And I wrote: America, America, God shed thy grace on thee/Till selfish gain no longer stain the banner of the free…I would later soften those lines, but not my meaning.

HOWARD: America, America May God thy Gold refine…

If our country was materially rich, but without compassion, it would surely end up like every previous empire of history. That’s what I thought. My poem, AMERICA, was first published on July 4, 1895. I got five dollars for it. People immediately began to sing my words. By the time the official melody was published, there were at least 75 others floating around. So many people wrote asking me for rights to it. I gave it away.

PONDER: she felt that her poem was a gift to the nation. That was how she viewed it. So she of course, she didn't view it as something that was going to make her money. That would be against all of her values.

Those were happy times for me. But as the 19th Century grew to a close, my faith in America would be challenged as never before. Having taught myself Spanish, I was preparing to visit the International Institute for Girl in Spain. Just then, Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt urged that America expand its territory—by seizing Spanish colonies, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

KINZER: 1898 was the year when the United States changed so radically from a country that seemed satisfied within its own borders to a country that was always looking to influence others.

It was the very sin our Founding Fathers opposed when we were England’s colony. In February 1898, an American battleship, the Maine, exploded and sank in Havana, Cuba. Immediately, and with no real evidence, our leaders blamed Spain.

KINZER: Americans went wild with the idea of saving Cuba from Spanish brutality.

The war cries grew insistent, led by Teddy Roosevelt.

KINZER: He never saw a war he didn’t like. He had complete contempt for nonwhite people and thought the idea that a country like Cuba or the Philippines could govern itself was completely absurd.

In April, we declared war. In May, our Pacific fleet sank most of the Spanish navy in Manila Bay. Remembering the horrors of the Civil War, I wrote articles urging peace. Ours should be the flag of Right, not Might.

KINZER: I think Katherine Lee Bates represented a larger tradition. There was a belief that America had been put on this planet for a reason. That this was going to be a new nation that was going to be better than other countries. We were going to liberate nations, not oppress them …

Mark Twain, Booker T Washington, Jane Addams, William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Carnegie, even former Presidents Cleveland and Harrison, joined the cause. But our pleas were for naught. On June 15th, Congress voted to seize Hawaii. Three days later, our Navy took Guam.

KINZER: This would be the first time in world history that a country that itself had once been a colony would take other colonies.

Regiments embarked for the Caribbean, with Roosevelt leading troops into battle. In July, we took Cuba, in August, the Philippines..

KINZER: Then even the president of the United States admitted he knew nothing about it. When he was asked, where is the Philippines?, he said, somewhere over there on the other side of the world.

About that time I left for Europe. Spending months in Paris before I could enter Spain, I found a defeated country there. Mothers were mourning the death of fathers, sons and brothers. I wrote articles for The New York Times, trying to win sympathy for Spain’s people who never wished to be our enemies.

PONDER: She went over there, became a correspondent, got paid $500 from the New York Times to write weekly letters back about what it was like on the ground after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, after America had beaten Spain.

After Spain surrendered, Filipinos hoped for independence. How could we, with our ideals, refuse them? But we shot them instead. Peasants, armed only with sticks, were slaughtered by our soldiers. I expressed my dismay in verse.

OTHER VOICE: The flag that dreamed of delivering/ Shudders and droops like a broken wing/Silvery rice fields whisper wide/How for home and freedom/their owners died…

Even Roosevelt, who was President by then, began to have doubts.

KINZER: Although he defended the Philippines war to the end, the revelations about the horrific tortures that were carried out there and the brutality of American occupation must have had an effect on him. He was proud of the fact that once he became president, he never ordered an intervention anywhere in which anyone was killed.

By 1904, I had revised America the Beautiful again, adding the words:

BLANE HOWARD: America, America, God mend thine every flaw. Confirm Thy soul in self-control…

I changed the chorus to include my deepest wish:

BLANE And Crown Thy Good with Brotherhood, from Sea to Shining Sea…

If the first decade of the 1900s was bad for my America, it was good for my College. Under our new president, Caroline Hazard, Wellesley grew rapidly. But as more wealthy girls began going to college, they demanded extensive social activities. To ensure their tuition, academics were de-emphasized, and our faculty grew alarmed. In 1906, I spent the summer in England with Katharine, Fall in the Alps, and my sabbatical in the Middle East with president Hazard. We saw the pyramids of Egypt, the grandeur that was Luxor, evidence of fallen empires. I visited the Holy Land, walked on the shore of Galilee, and climbed the mount where Jesus gave his famous sermon, taking his words to heart:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed the peacemakers…

How far our world had come from those teachings! When I returned, it was to a new and beautiful home that Katharine and I would share with my mother, my sister Jennie and our Collie, Sigurd.

KATIE SWENSON, AUTHOR, IN BOHEMIA: And the four women, all sort of independent single women, occupied this house. They were a center of intellectual life.

We called it the Scarab, for Egypt’s beetle of rebirth and wisdom. It was close to the college, and the train station downtown.

SWENSON She didn’t own a car. She would have walked, and ridden a bike everywhere. So she was obviously physically fit.

In 1909, I heard Woodrow Wilson speak at Harvard, betting a friend five pounds of coffee that he would be our next President. I won the bet. But my life was about to take a terrible turn.

SWENSON: Katherine Coman found a quote “tiny lump” in 1911.

My beloved Katharine battled through cancer, never complaining, forever noble.

SWENSON: She continued to travel and kind of carry on with her life, remarkably.

Twice, she surrendered to the surgeon’s knife. I could hardly imagine how much she suffered, always in pain.

LEOPOLD: And the surgery itself was quite dangerous at the time that Coman had it, because they didn't have all the kind of antiseptics that they have now.

Though her faith remained steadfast, her prayers for recovery went unanswered.

LEOPOLD Bates wrote about Coman that God spared her nothing, and it was clear that she suffered terribly. I mean, it's hard for us today to imagine how little could have been done to modify her pain.

1912 began with a bang.

JUDY COLLINS: As we come marching, marching…

Only forty miles from me, in Lawrence, hundreds of workers, many of them immigrant women, left their textile mills to strike for better wages and working hours.

JUDY COLLINS: Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew. Yes it is bread we fight for but we fight for roses too…

People called it the Bread and Roses Strike. We all sympathized with those workers. How little they were asking for!

LAWENCE BUELL, LITERARY SCHOLAR: she was not an Emma Goldman. She was not. Carrie Nation, who took an ax to saloons. Vida Scudder was much more outspokenly radical.

Vida, my friend and colleague, left Wellesley to join the strikers on the picket lines. But wealthy donors, unsympathetic to the strikers, deserted Wellesley. And I agonized between my concern for the women of Lawrence and the survival of my college.

PONDER: she was a careful person…She had strong ideals, but she didn't want to rock the boat.

The Trustees demanded that I fire Vida. Though I disagreed with her methods, I admired her commitment. I was torn. What should I do? We compromised. Vida was allowed to continue teaching after apologizing for putting Wellesley at risk. The next year, I left for another European sabbatical. And returned to another tragedy. In March 1914, fire consumed College Hall and several other buildings. Many faculty lost everything. Immediately we started to rebuild. But by August, the world itself was in flames. By the thousands, young men perished in Europe’s bloody fields. In my sorrow, I turned again to poetry.

OTHER VOICE: How long Shall folk of the burned villages in starving, staggering throng/Flee from the armies that, in turn/ are mangled, maddened, slain/Till earth is all one stain/Of horror?

BUELL: It's an eloquent message, and it's extremely well delivered. It's delivered in poetry that is remarkably modern.

At first, America kept out of the war. But tragedy did not spare me. In 1915, my beloved Katharine died of cancer. She was only 57. Loneliness seized me like a cold wind from the far North. I didn’t have her courage, or her deep faith in an afterlife. I consoled myself by writing poems, honoring the partner who brought me so much joy

ENRICO CARUSO: The boys are coming, the boys are coming…

In 1917, my country entered the Great War. The war to end all wars, as optimists called it. How horrible it all was, the destruction, the endless hemorrhaging of young blood. But despite many misgivings, most of our faculty stood behind President Wilson. We feared that the Kaiser’s armies might destroy European civilization. The war finally ended on November 11, 1918.

PONDER: And when the Yankee division of soldiers from New England heard that the armistice had been signed, suddenly the shelling stopped, the fighting stopped. And on a hillside in Verdun, thousands of these soldiers stood up and sang America the Beautiful.

ENRICO CARUSO: The boys are coming, the boys are coming…

I was told they were weeping. How deeply that touched me! Soon, I had a new cause. President Wilson proposed a League of Nations to settle disagreements peacefully and put an end to war. I gave my heart to it. But the US refused to join, dooming the League to failure. There was good news, though. In 1920, our dream of votes for women came true. What a glorious day! Surely we women would move the world toward peace, justice and love. The poems I wrote for my beloved Katharine were published two years later.

Another reader: from Yellow Clover: “By seven springs has your far grave been passed…Have I not sometimes felt your presence nigh?…I give you joy, my dearest, Death is done. “

I would wait another seven springs to join her. But I was slowing down. In 1925, as Wellesley turned 50, I retired after 40 years of teaching there. Three years later, a great crowd filled Boston’s Mechanics Hall to hear my final speech. I told them they should think of the whole world as one community “from sea to shining sea.” One fine spring day in 1929, I took my last ride around the campus. I imagined it as it was, with College Hall still there. All my lovely memories came back. I had lived a blessed life!

Now, here in my hometown, I rest beneath the sod. But my song is not buried with me.

New generations have made it their own, maintaining my hope--that America might acknowledge its flaws, and honor its most beautiful ideals.

CREDITS: Long and Schmidt singing American Hymn: America, America, god shed her grace on thee. Sisterhood, brotherhood, today I do believe.