Coming Home
By Clay Hipp
Returning from France, a song remembered. America, reconsidered.
Landscape with a Rainbow, Oil on Canvas, Robert S. Ducanson, 1859
We were preparing last week to return from France (an event I was very much looking forward to) when a song title came to mind: "America the Beautiful." Funny, because I hadn't heard or sung it in a long time. Remember the first verse?
O beautiful for spacious skies,
or amber waves of grain,For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhoodFrom sea to shining sea!
We had stayed in the city of Dijon, but on the train to and from Paris, I marveled at the rural villages surrounded by fields of grain and vineyards. They looked as if they had been untouched by modern times — churches and homes built of stone and wood, connected by small two-lane roads winding through the countryside. My first thoughts were of amazement at the lack of billboards. It renewed my belief in country living.
Might the song have taken me back to a simpler time in America?
The song was written in the late nineteenth century as a poem by Katherine Lee Bates in 1882. It was amended twice and published as a hymn by Samuel A. Ward (a church organist and choir master) in 1895. During the Kennedy administration, it was thought by many a better national anthem but never achieved that status. Bates was inspired by a trip west to Pikes Peak and the views from 14,000 feet. She was obviously one who believed in a country and a people that were blessed by the creator to live among such rare beauty and bounty. The lyrics must have made me nostalgic.
Oh, to feel that way again.
On the plane I was still contemplating the words, especially “And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea!” I suddenly had the feeling that, on the nine-hour flight, I was on a ship as an Immigrant. My roots are Scots-Irish and German on my dad’s side, and English on my mother’s. As I have been fortunate to travel widely, I have developed an affinity for the people of Italy and more recently the countryside of Southern France. (I am a former grape farmer and more and more attached to specific terrains and plots of favored regions.)
So, when I returned and was still in the afterglow of the trip. I could not help but reflect on my current status as an American citizen. My mother would have been welcome. My dad’s emigrant forebears, not so much. The Germans and Irish arriving in the Carolinas were forced to move to the Piedmont (being unwelcome in Charleston society) where the red clay soil was poor and even cotton fields became unproductive. They were subsistence farmers at best. Those who came down the Appalachians were mere hillbillies. They used moonshine as a currency to subsidize their basic needs.
What am I trying to say?
The beauties of our natural bounty were, in many ways, only skin-deep. The real beauty of America was — and remains — the idea set down by the founding brothers in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
Unalienable rights. Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We sit at the gate of our 250th celebration of the creation and proclamation of “America the Beautiful”. On July 4th, sit with family and friends and read this together as your blessing. Then, if you feel as I do, that these next four months MUST become a rebirth of that idea and these founding words, sit by no longer. Use your voices, your talents, and your sacred vote to reclaim what is left of left of the gift given to ALL of us by those who literally bet their lives that it was an essential act of the brotherhood of mankind.
None of us were yet “Americans” in truth, but merely those who came to these shores seeking the opportunities afforded us by these seemingly unquenchable riches—one of which is the freedom and the power to govern ourselves…in spite of our obvious differences.
"Oh beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years,
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears!"
Of which there have been plenty…..
Let us not allow this beautiful American Idea to be further corrupted by wealth and power.
"Let freedom ring, let the white dove sing
Let the whole world know that today
Is a day of reckoning
Let the weak be strong, let the right be wrong
Roll the stone away, let the guilty pay
It's Independence Day."
- Gretchen Peters