Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

guest column:

National anthem isn’t an ideal reflection of our nation

“The Star Spangled Banner” has sparked considerable debate in our history over its acceptability as America’s national anthem. If history is any guide, after protests over standing for the playing of the anthem have passed, other issues will surface that excite deep emotions. They will find their roots not only in specific events that take place, but result from Francis Scott Key’s background and the lyrical history of the song.

While Key’s lines focus on the celebration of a victory over the British in the War 1812, they also address both explicitly and implicitly a great deal about a political and social history central to most protests over the patriotic song since the 1960s.

Key, a lawyer and slaveholder, wrote at a time when Americans, as now, exalted a “free” and “democratic America.” The reality is that the United States was not fully democratic (even for some whites) in the author’s era, nor was it a “land of the free.”

Indeed our historic adherence to that particular phrase of the anthem has been as much of a visceral reaction to it, as it has been to the reality of truth; patriotism often works that way in nation states. But patriotism here or in other lands should not blind citizens to a country’s national warts, or obscure the need to seek adjustments to its institutional memory through a proper rendition of history.

For a democratic nation to admit hypocrisy in carrying out its constitutional mandates or its core values is never an easy task. And that is especially true when hypocrisy grants actual or psychological advantages to classes of people within a society. Nations often nurture their patriotism and the emotionalism that support it within a spirited narrative grounded in hypocrisy. Our culture here in the United States is deeply centered in a Judeo-Christian ethic that should, among the committed, frown upon hypocrisy. The issue with our national anthem is not a matter of America’s “greatness” or lack of greatness but the resolution of a continuing problem that we should put to rest in our quest for national unity — an achievement that would catapult us toward an even greater society.

We need to refocus our attention upon our national anthem. Without considerable gnashing of teeth or national discord, we should adopt an idea advanced some years ago: replace “The Star Spangled Banner” with “America the Beautiful.” With that choice, we would have no slavery backdrop, and no need to confront arguments about gender inequality that anger so many white males who have enjoyed historic privilege, wealth and power. Indeed, if any group became disgruntled at all, it might be those Kansas farmers who would swear loudly that the anthem needed a line that proclaimed that their “amber waves of grain” sparkled more brilliantly on their wind swept plains than anywhere else in America!

Jimmie Lewis Franklin served on the history faculty at Vanderbilt University and was president of the Southern Historical Association before retiring in Las Vegas.

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