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'Oh Beautiful for Spacious Skies'

Inspires Again and Again

Congregationalist Katharine Lee Bates would undoubtedly be proud. Proud because her patriotic hymn, "America the Beautiful," has soared in popularity since September 11. But as a pacifist, she would probably be sobered by the events that contributed to her song’s new popularity.

Her hymn first appeared in The Congregationalist on July 4, 1895. In recent weeks it has been sung at countless public events, appeared in magazines and newspapers, and become the subject of a book by Lynn Sherr, 59, America the Beautiful: The Stirring True Story of America’s Song. It moved Dan Rather to tears when he heard the passage: "thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears" on the David Letterman Show.

Full page advertisements by MBNA, the credit card company, carried all eight verses of the song beneath a painting by James Browning Wyeth. It showed New York firemen and policemen raising the American flag at Ground Zero in the same manner as U. S. Marines when they raised the flag at Iwo Jima in World War II.

The November 5, 2001 issue of People magazine told the story of "America the Beautiful," already familiar to many Congregationalists, in a two-page article that pictured Bates and Samuel Ward, the man who wrote "Materna," the music that was eventually coupled with the Bates lyrics.

Willie Nelson sang it at a fund-raiser for September 11 victims to an audience that included Brad Pitts and Julia Roberts. Author Sherr, herself an ABC 20/20 correspondent, appeared on numerous talk shows, including Martha Stewart’s.

The Congregationalist last told the story of "America the Beautiful" in the June/July 1993 issue, the 100th anniversary of its writing.

We repeat, in part, the story of how Katharine Lee Bates was moved to write the poem.

"America the Beautiful" was written by Katharine Lee Bates, a New Englander, while on a summer visit in 1893 to Colorado. As she was visiting the western expanses of our nation for the first time, the beauty and productivity of American overwhelmed her. On the day the poem was written, Bates sat in a grove of trees, sharing a picnic with friends, looking across the valley to majestic Pike’s Peak. Here the Rocky mountains rose above her in purple majesty. And for miles and miles beyond, the wheat fields of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska rippled in the winds in amber waves. "Oh, beautiful for Pilgrim Feet" were the feet of her own ancestors.

Bates felt as though the heavens had opened and the words were actually being given to her. She returned home to Massachusetts and prayed over what she had written, turning the second half of each stanza into a prayer.

As her father was the minister of the First Congregational Church of Falmouth, founded by their forbears in 1708, Bates submitted her completed poem to The Congregationalist, where it was published on July 4, 1895. After the poem’s publication, Bates considered the many suggestions and criticisms the poem attracted and rewrote it—the new version appeared in The Boston Evening Transcript on November 9, 1904. "Later the opening quatrain of the third stanza was altered, and the poem in that form has remained the official version," to quote her biographer, Dorothy Burgess.

Much to Bates’s surprise, several people wrote music for her poem and it was sung to as many as 60 different tunes before the tune we know as "Materna" became the accepted setting. Written by Samuel Augustus Ward in 1882 for the hymn "O Mother Dear, Jerusalem," "Materna" was first published in the Protestant Episcopal Hymnal in 1894. In 1912 Bates adapted the tune for her hymn. Since then, the text and tune have become inseparable.

Wellesley College Archives photo of “America, the Beautiful” author with friend Hamlet.
Photo courtesy Wellesley College Archives

Katharine Lee Bates, daughter and granddaughter of Congregational ministers, was born August 12, 1859, in Falmouth, Mass. She attended Falmouth village school until she was 12, when her family moved to Grantville, now Wellesley Hills. In later years she described herself as being afflicted with nearsightedness, extreme shyness, always hiding with a book.

She attended Wellesley High School three years and Newton High School two years, graduating in 1878, when she then entered Wellesley College. Though her older brother, Arthur, was a clerk with a minimal salary, he supported her while she attended college. She obtained her A.B. in 1880 and that fall began teaching in Natick High School. The next year she started teaching at Dana Hall, a preparatory school for Wellesley. After five years at Dana Hall, she became an English instructor at Wellesley and eventually became the head of Wellesley’s English Department.

Bates was honored by doctorates from Middlebury, Oberlin, and Wellesley Colleges and was the author and editor of about two dozen books, but is primarily remembered today for her hymn, "America the Beautiful." 

Sources for this article include a 1985 newsletter of the Pacific Northwest Association, the biography of Katharine Lee Bates written by Dorothy Burgess, Dr. Harold F. Worthley of the Congregational Library, and Mary Head, Santa Rosa, Calif., who supplied the biographical information accompanying this article.

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