The National Anthem and Me

It’s been years, now, since I stood up when “The Star-Spangled Banner” is played. Mine has not been a protest akin to the controversial kneeling that’s got right-wing pundits’ knickers in a twist. Colin Kaepernick and the hundreds who have followed his examples are using the occasion specifically to call attention to the ways in which police brutality against black men is evidence that our country is falling far short of its goals. Fair enough, in my view. My own actions have attracted a few glares from symphony-goers at the opening concert of the season, but no one’s ever put me in the media spotlight or asked my reason for not standing. Here it is.

I don’t like the words.

We’ll start with the third verse. In case you’ve fallen behind in the discussion, here are the lyrics:

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 wash’d out their foul footstep’s 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.

As several writers have now observed, during the War of 1812, the British adopted the policy of offering freedom to enslaved men who escaped and fought on the British side as the Corps of Colonial Marines. They also used mercenaries. Two main lines have formed to defend lines five and six of this verse. The first claims that “slave” “is a direct reference to the British practice of impressment (kidnapping American seamen and forcing them into service on British man-of-war ships).”  This argument makes no sense. Impressed men were forced against their will to fight on the enemy side; surely Francis Scott Key is not lumping them in with mercenaries and condemning them to “the gloom of the grave.” The second line, propounded by Mark Clague of the Star-Spangled Music Foundation, argues that “for Key … the British mercenaries were scoundrels and the Colonial Marines were traitors who threatened to spark a national insurrection.” This makes more sense to me. At the same time, insofar as the Colonial Marines had attained their freedom in siding with the Brits, they were no longer slaves — except in the mind of the poet, to whom their free status was illegitimate and they were therefore still slaves who deserved the worst punishment for having bargained for freedom. (And that “insurrection” would sure be a slave insurrection.)

But the third verse is no longer commonly sung. Once we patched things up with Britain, we effectively expunged it. Do we condemn the rest of the song simply because its author also penned that verse? Well, to some degree, I do. But then I’ve always had trouble teaching D.H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, two of the greatest writers in the English language, because of the vileness of some things they wrote. I wouldn’t want them expunged from the curriculum, but I would not stand up for one of their poems, either.

Let’s move back to the verse we all know:

O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light, What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming, Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight O’er the ramparts we watch’d 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, O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Apparently it was an enormous flag at Fort McHenry, one that remained standing, in the end, because the bodies of dead soldiers were holding it up. But the war in which they died was a problematic one, as most historians today acknowledge. The personification of the flag as “gallant” stirs the heart, but rather than being a noble war, the conflict’s lasting effect was the beginning of the modern American navy. Most people singing (or mouthing) the words today have no idea what battle is being fought in what war. What they do hear about is the rocket and the bombs — and while these were cannons and artillery in Key’s day, our associations now are much different and not ones I care to celebrate.

Finally, in the last verse — which is often sung — we have these lines:

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto —”In God is our trust”

That motto, apparently coined by Key, found itself enshrined in 1865, when Congress allowed it to be inscribed on coinage. As a nonreligious person, I’m not fond of it. But more bothersome to me is the notion of “having” to conquer. To fight for a just cause is one thing. To conquer for a just cause seems a contradiction in terms. Many have argued that the War of 1812 itself was not so much about defending American freedoms as about conquering part of British North America (now known as Canada) to expand our territory.

I understand that I am reading these words and lines of Key’s famous poem anachronistically. He was a slaveholder and hardly alone in accepting that institution in America. He was writing in the midst of a great battle in a war that threatened his homeland. Conquering and imperialism itself were both politically and morally acceptable. Anyone who wants to stand for the song and even try to sing along with it is fine in my book. But I don’t care to, and if you think that’s un-American of me, then your concept of America stands on another shore from mine.