Dowdifying Asimov is bad enough, but kitschifying him goes too far

I have a weakness.
Sometimes I have trouble sleeping peaceably in my bed at night because I know that rough men stand ready to do violence to quotations on the Internet.
I should probably point out that I am not losing my mind. Yet. I was merely expressing my frustration by deliberately mis-paraphrasing a famous misquotation of Orwell and morphing into it a well-known cartoon which offends me because it ridicules my plight.
I have a long history of getting annoyed by lies, misrepresentations, and misquotations on the Internet, and back in the day, I used to imagine that I could “correct” or “debunk” them, and that they would stay debunked. While I suppose such a thing is possible, the Internet does have its limitations, and one of them is that it is in many ways a gigantic popularity contest. If something is said that tells people what they want to hear, the audience, because of its non-passive nature, will tend to repeat it and amplify it. If whatever it is that people Want To Hear is attributed to a famous person, and it is repeated enough times, the very repetition of it makes it appear more and more true. Thus, a misquotations or even out-and-out lies (like a fictitious law or a fictitious famous person) tend to become “true” with age.
I was thinking about this the other morning when I contemplated smallpox-infected blankets allegedly distributed by the U.S. military in the hope of wiping out the Indians, soap allegedly manufactured by Nazis from murdered Jews, and a Star Spangled Banner analysis allegedly written by Isaac Asimov.
There is no evidence that smallpox blankets were ever systematically distributed (much less as United States policy, as is frequently alleged); but there does exist correspondence between British officers during the French-Indian war suggesting that blankets from the military hospital (filled with soldiers who had smallpox) be given to the Indians. While it is not known whether the blankets were effective, it has been pointed out that standard warfare tactics of the time would have been much more effective (if unintentional) as a smallpox vector:

In 1763, Fort Pitt was under siege by Indian forces under the command of Chief Pontiac…Pontiac Rebellion (Tebbel). With smallpox in the garrison at Fort Pitt and Indians attacking the fort, two blankets would have had little to do with the spread of smallpox among the Indians. A by far greater source for spreading the smallpox virus would have been infected blood from mutilated soldier and settler bodies, scalps, clothing, and in some cases cannibalism, which occurred during the Pontiac Rebellion. Every warrior that returned from Fort Pitt to Indian villages up and down the East coast with smallpox infected war trophies carried the smallpox virus with them. Contaminated warriors spreading the smallpox virus is never mentioned by proponents of Indian Genocide; it does not fit their biased agenda. This statement on smallpox is going to make a lot of people furious…good, that is the purpose. Before venting your ire, take a few minutes to read the entire article, think about it with an open mind, and then please respond with facts to back up your argument.

As to the Jewish soap, there is no evidence that this was done on any sort of systematic basis (Nazi officials wanted to keep the Holocaust a secret, and making soap from corpses would have been inconsistent with that agenda), although at one camp it appears to have been done experimentally.

The idea that “human soap” was manufactured on an industrial scale by the Nazis was published after the war by Alain Resnais, who treated the testimony of Holocaust survivors as fact in his noted 1955 holocaust documentary movie Nuit et brouillard. Some postwar Israelis also referred disdainfully to Jewish victims of Nazism with the Hebrew word ???? (sabon, “soap”).[21]
Mainstream scholars of the Holocaust consider the idea that the Nazis manufactured soap on an industrial scale to be part of WWII folklore.[22] Among others this view was held by the reputable Jewish historians Walter Laqueur,[23] Gitta Sereny,[24] and Deborah Lipstadt.[25] The same view was held by Professor Yehuda Bauer of Israel’s Hebrew University and by Shmuel Krakowski, archives director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust center.[1][2][3] However, historian Yisrael Gutman is very specific, stating that “it was never done on a mass scale.”[15] And Holocaust historian Robert Melvin Spector concludes that the Nazis “did indeed use human fat for the making of soap at Stutthof,” albeit in limited quantity.[16]
Today Holocaust deniers employ this controversy to cast aspersions on the veracity of the Nazi genocide.[26]

Which is all the more reason that the “Jewish soap” meme should be discredited. People who go around yelling it is true because they want it to be true are unwittingly fueling the cause of Holocaust deniers.
As to Asimov, there are innumerable links, quotations, and bulletin board posts quoting an Asimov article titled “All Four Stanzas” (this is the most widely circulated version) which discusses the history and meaning of the Star Spangled Banner. Something struck me as odd about it, and I wasn’t sure what. While I am not a science fiction fan, I’ve read Asimov enough to understand that he usually explains things thoroughly. Yet the way this piece reads, I was left wondering exactly what he meant, and why he uncharacteristically didn’t explain himself more thoroughly. While there is a pretty thorough historical discussion of the history of the writing of our national anthem (which he recites stanza by stanza with commentary) when he gets to the fourth stanza, he seemed to just issue a giant hurrah! without much explanation.

The fourth stanza, a pious hope for the future, should be sung more slowly than the other three and with even deeper feeling.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation,
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n – rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto–“In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I hope you will look at the national anthem with new eyes. Listen to it, the next time you have a chance, with new ears.
And don’t let them ever take it away.
–Isaac Asimov, March 1991

And that was the end of the article? Sorry, but it just didn’t pass my smell test. I realize that many people would love for the above to have been written by Asimov exactly like that. But was it?
I know this will sound obsessive-compulsive, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt my wanting to know turning into needing to know.
First of all, Asimov was hardly the uncritical jingoist that the above article makes him appear. To call him a skeptic might be understatement, for he called himself an atheist, although he did venture opinions on what his ideal of God might be:

In his last volume of autobiography, Asimov wrote, “If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.”[27] The same memoir states his belief that Hell is “the drooling dream of a sadist” crudely affixed to an all-merciful God; if even human governments were willing to curtail cruel and unusual punishments, wondered Asimov, why would punishment in the afterlife not be restricted to a limited term? Asimov rejected the idea that a human belief or action could merit infinite punishment. If an afterlife of just deserts existed, he claimed, the longest and most severe punishment would be reserved for those who “slandered God by inventing Hell”.[28] As his books Treasury of Humor and Asimov Laughs Again record, Asimov was willing to tell jokes involving the Judeo-Christian God, Satan, the Garden of Eden, Jerusalem, and other religious topics, expressing the viewpoint that a good joke can do more to provoke thought than hours of philosophical discussion.

For a guy who thinks like that (whether he’s right or wrong) there’s just something about the Star Spangled Banner essay that just didn’t quite seem entirely Asimovian to me.
Of course, I am no Asimov expert. Far from it. And the piece is widely circulated by sources I respect, one of whom (Jerry Pournelle) knows a lot more about Asimov than I do.
So while I was very curious, I also wanted to be very careful.
I noticed that the “All Four Stanzas” link had once been included on the Wiki Entry for the Star Spangled Banner, and then later taken down, with this notation:

took away chain-e-mail glurge not really written by asimov

So (I thought) this ought to be a relatively straightforward matter to settle. Either Asimov wrote it or he did not. If he didn’t, then the Asimov piece is another in a long line of clever hoaxes; if he did, then the Wiki writer was engaging in deliberate dishonesty.
Asimov either wrote it or he didn’t, right?
I did find some discussion and debate, and the consensus was that he probably did write it, as there is a piece with that title in an online Asimov bibliography:

All Four Stanzas
Subject: /story of the U. S. national anthem
First Published In: Mar-91

Looking further, I learned that sure enough, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction lists it too in the back issues:

Star-Spangled Banner, our national anthem; all four stanzas, incl. the lost, or dropped, ‘gloating’ third stanza; has 22nd & last coll. of his F&SF science essays, The Secret of the Universe(1991); has nf book with Frederik Pohl, Our Angry Earth(1991)

At this point, my curiosity had gotten the better of me, and I decided to blow six bucks so I could read the actual article for myself.
It arrived on Friday. I read it, and I reread it. It was deeply moving, and left me with a deeper appreciation for our national anthem than I had ever had. Precisely Asimov’s intent.
Yet at the same time that I found myself deeply moved by Asimov’s words, I also found myself deeply offended at one of the most dishonest examples of Dowdification I have ever seen. The version that is quoted online everywhere is a brutal hack job — selectively cutting Asimov’s 4166 words down to 1321 words (nearly three fourths of the piece), yet there is no mention that the piece was severely edited. Edited hell!; it was deliberately, ideologically butchered. It is no exaggeration to call it political Bowdlerization.
As to why these nameless nobodies would do this, I think anyone who takes the time to read the article in its entirety will surely understand. Far from being the God-fearing jingoist that people might think he is, Asimov makes it clear that, to many conservatives, he would be considered nearly the exact opposite. After beginning with a 1300 word summary of his life and his work (which you really should read for yourself but I will not quote in its entirety), Asimov turns to the subject of the national anthem. And he did in fact refer to his love of it as “a weakness” (which is where the online version starts) — but by way of explanation just before that he proudly admits to being a (gulp!) globalist:

I am not one of your professional patriots, you must understand. I am not a flag-waver (I don’t even own a flag) and I eschew nationalism. I’m a globalist, who believes that human beings should not divide themselves into any divisions less than “human being.” Let everyone be merely different facets of an overriding humanity.
However, even the best of us have our weaknesses, and I have one — I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem. The words are difficult, the tune is almost impossible, but I sing it frequently when I’m taking my shower — all four stanzas — with as much power and emotion as I can possibly manage. And it shakes me up every time.

To many people’s minds, not owning a flag is suspect in itself, but admitting to being a globalist? That’s tantamount to admitting to treason. Little wonder that the word butchers saw fit to start with “I have a weakness — I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem.” (Which was their convenient way of rephrasing “However, even the best of us have our weaknesses, and I have one — I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem.”) By this savage act of rhetorical butchery, the bastards scrubbed Asimov’s ethos right out of his own piece.
The ethos expurgation continues, as the the nameless “editors” remove the real Asimov whenever he doesn’t suit their fancy. What follows immediately after “And it shakes me up every time” is completely absent from the online version:

It bothers me no end, then, that hardly any American can sing the tune, hardly any American knows the words even to the first stanza, and hardly any American cares. They’ll wave the flag assiduously, but they won’t sing the song that celebrates the flag. And they don’t know the absolutely thrilling story behind it. When they want to sing something they think of as patriotic, they sing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” with words and tune as trite as you can imagine.
In fact, most national anthems are hymns, slow and stately and sleep-provoking. The only two anthems, beside our own, that I can think of as blood-stirring, are the French “Marseillaise” and the old Soviet “Internationale” (which they have replaced with something that is incredibly dull). But our national anthem takes first place, and easily.

Naturally that all had to be removed. We can’t have a posthumously minted right wing blowhard dissing “God Bless America” or praising the “Internationale” can we? Yet that’s what he said, and it’s integral to his point. This was a great writer (writing the year before he died), attempting to educate his largely skeptical audience of mostly sci-fi fans about their national anthem, and maybe win some of them over to the idea that it shouldn’t be dismissed as a bunch of 1930s kitsch.
I think he did a great job too. Are his words really so threatening that they have to be so widely and systematically erased?
I realize my writing will never rank high enough to rate such outrageous meddling, but if anyone did that to my writing after I died, I’d rise from my grave and subject him/them to the most horrifying and gruesome torments my rotting corpse could inflict. I hope there is an afterlife, and I hope Asimov takes revenge on these scum suckers. I really do. But considering the man’s atheism, I don’t know what the routine should be; perhaps some of his fans could get together as Asimov’s Avengers.
On with my own weakness. As I said, the article made me appreciate the national anthem as never before, and certainly not because he quotes all four stanzas and tells them “Sing them because they’re good for you!” like some imaginary right wing hack, but because he explains why they exist and why he savors them.
But please read it for yourself; I’m not writing this post to savor the piece for you; only to attempt to correct what I think is a grievous error, and criticize what I think is a profound literary sin.
As to that last, fourth stanza, that’s where the hatchet job gets it the most wrong. Yes, Asimov did say that it should be sung more slowly and with deeper feeling, but far from ending with a mindless order that we should just sing it, he changed the wording a bit (highlighted in red), and he explains why. In detail:

That leaves the fourth stanza, which is a pious hope for the future and which has the atmosphere of a hymn at last. It should, to my way of thinking, be sung more slowly than the other three and with even deeper feeling. Here it is:
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, while our cause it is just.
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
The fourth stanza as I’ve given it here is the way I sing it. I have taken the liberty of making two small changes from the way the song appears in the reference books and, presumably then, the way that Key wrote it.
In the fourth line, Key wrote, “Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just.” Key was writing about the War of 1812, when, as I believe, our cause was just, but I am not ready to assume that our cause is always just. The United States is as capable of fighting an unjust war as any other nation is, although I earnestly hope it doesn’t do so often.
The Mexican War was an unjust war, a naked war of aggression, a war to fasten slavery on Texas after Mexico had freed the slaves there and to seize territory to which we had no real right. But we won every battle just the same, established slavery in Texas, and took the entire southwest. The Spanish-American War was not particularly just, either.
The southern states of the Union, after seceding to form the Confederate States of America, stood between their loved homes and the war’s desolation and did so with magnificent bravery for four years, but lost in the end and (in my opinion) rightly so, for they fought for slavery.
The Vietnam War (again in my opinion) was an unjust war, for we travelled 6000 miles to take part in a civil war that was not really our business and held no threat whatever to our vital interests. The old “domino theory” was just a fraud used to justify what could not really be justified. And we lost, as we should have.
But now (as I write) Iraq has invaded Kuwait and taken it over. This was unjustified aggression and does affect American vital interests, for Iraq intends to control the world’s oil supply to its own advantage. If we take measured action, I will consider our cause to be just.
Let me go on. The other change I have made is in the next to the last line where Key apparently repeated that the star-spangled banner “in triumph shall wave.” I don’t think that the third and fourth stanzas should end equally. I want the end of each stanza to represent a new and higher climax, so I replaced the last “in triumph” with “forever.”
When I sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I don’t try for vocal tricks, which I don’t have the voice or the technique for, never having had even a day’s training in voice. I try only to enunciate carefully so that the audience hears every word with out fail.
Nevertheless, when I sing that last stanza, I do try one little trick. I linger over the “forever” and make my voice louder and even more emotional and I can feel the audience respond to that.
I sang all four stanzas in public only twice, but each time it was a memorable experience for me, and, I believe, for the audience as well. Now I do it for a third time, in print only, and without the additional dimension of my voice (such as it is).
I can only hope that you get a bit of what the national anthem means to me and that you will look at it with new eyes, and listen to it, the next time you have a chance, with new ears.
And don’t let them take it away and substitute “God Bless America,” for goodness sake.

Imagine, you don’t have to be a flag-waving, my-country-right-or-wrong type to appreciate the national anthem! Little wonder the word butchers would take all of that out. They didn’t like what lies at the very heart of what Asimov is saying. The supreme irony is that with that taken that out, the broad appeal of Asimov’s argument is hopelessly lost.
I hope I have done something to put it back, because by kitschifying the words of this great man, his petty little censors did precisely what Asimov warned against in the very words they censored; they took his words away in the hope of substituting their own equivalent of “God Bless America.”
They kitschified his argument against kitsch.
I think it’s an awful insult, and I have tried to remedy it.
May they not triumph.
Obviously people will want to verify what Asimov really said, and they should. But as the full text of “All Four Stanzas” is nowhere to be found online, I took the liberty of scanning the piece in its entirety. The portions I quoted above are taken from the scanned text, which I put through my scanner’s OCR software, and then edited. (I hope I caught all of the OCR errors, but scanned text follows.)
Asimov Scan 1
Asimov Scan 2
Asimov Scan 3
Asimov Scan 4
Asimov Scan 5
Asimov Scan 6
Phew.
I have to say, this was a lot more work than I usually put into a blog post. But I’m glad I went to the trouble, because the experience leaves me with a much deeper appreciation for the national anthem, and for the man whose fine essay made me appreciate it more.
Nothing kitschy about it, or him.
UPDATE: OCR of scanned text has its limitations, and I didn’t catch all of the errors. I appreciate the corrections in the comments.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and a warm welcome to all.
I always appreciate the comments, and the corrections have been especially helpful.
And in case anyone is interested in seeing Asimov’s original version juxtaposed with the butchered version I have compiled a complete, color-coded view of all the edits in a new post.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: Dr. Asimov’s article reprinted with the permission of F&SF, copyright (c) 1991 by Mercury Press, Inc.
My thanks to the folks at F&SF for kindly granting me permission.
UPDATE: Many thanks to F&SF for linking this post. I really appreciate the comments there too!
UPDATE: And a big thank you to Rand Simberg for the link!
UPDATE: The links keep coming. Thank you my old friend Donna Barber at Opining Online, and John Kranz at Three Sources for the links and the very kind compliments.

NOTE: The following text was rendered via OCR from a scan of the original article appearing in the March, 1991 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, on pages 133-142.
Copyright (c) 1991 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of F&SF.
SCIENCE
ISAAC ASIMOV
ALL FOUR STANZAS
WHEN I was going to college, the United States was not yet out of the Great Depression, and I knew that I was not going to get a job after I graduated in 1939. The only thing I could do was to go on to graduate work, obtain some advanced degrees, and hope that the situation would have improved by the time I was through.
Now the problem was this: In what subject was I to get my Ph.D. (assuming I could be smart enough to get it and could find the money for tuition — for in those days there was very little in the way of grants to help out the impoverished)?
I was hung up between history and chemistry. I thought I could handle either one, but there was no question in my mind that I was more interested in history.
However, practical reasoning entered the field. I said to myself, “If I get my degree in history, then the chances are that if I get a job at all, I will get one in some small college, far away from my beloved city of New York, and that I will be working for a mere pittance with almost no possibility for advancement. On the other hand” (I continued saying to myself) “if I get my Ph.D. in chemistry, I may get a job with a large research firm for an ample salary with lots of room for advancement and with a chance, even, of winning a Nobel Prize, since I am so brilliant a person.”
So I went for chemistry, and eventually, after a four-year delay because of World War II, I obtained my Ph.D. in chemistry in 1948.
The result? I went to work in 1949 as an instructor in biochemistry in a small medical school, far away from my beloved city of New York. I was working for a mere pittance and with no possibility of advancement. (Nor, I quickly realized, was there any chance at all that I would come closer than a light-year or two to a Nobel Prize.) As I frequently say: “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” (Hamlet said that also, and he may even have said it first.)
Chemistry was a big flop in another way, too. I really didn’t like it and I was no good at it (except for being able to learn an encyclopedia of stuff about it, entirely because I can learn an encyclopedia of stuff about anything). What’s more, as time went on, I grew less and less interested in it and, eventually, in 1958, I was fired simply because I was so uninterested in it that I refused to do any research. (I didn’t mind teaching and writing books about it — I loved that.)
Of course, by that time I had another career, that of writing. In fact, my writing career began even while I was in college, when I was deciding what to do with myself — history or chemistry. Becoming a professional writer was a third option, but one that I didn’t consider for even a split-second.
At the time I made my decision, I had sold a story or two, but never in my wildest imaginings could I possibly have believed I would ever do more than make occasional pin-money out of those stories.
And to tell you the truth, for a long time, I never did more than that. By the time I began my work at the medical school, I had written 68 stories and sold 60 of them in the course of eleven years. That was not too bad considering that the major part of my time had to be spent in my father’s candy store, or at my graduate studies, or at a wartime job. However, in all that time, my total earnings for all eleven years amounted to $7700.
After I had been at work at: the medical school for half a year, my first novel, Pebble in the Sky, was published, to he followed soon by others, and royalties started coming in; but even at the time I was fired in 1958, my literary earnings amounted to only $15,000 a year, enough to keep me going for a while in the absence of a job, but not enough to make me comfortable. (By that time, I had a wife and two children to support, too — and I was middle-aged.)
Now let’s go back in time, to the point when I was first thinking about writing. Again, I had two choices. What I really wanted to write was historical fiction. I wanted to write a new kind of “Three Musketeers.” The only trouble was that that would mean research. I would have to spend at least three years doing research in order that I might spend one year writing, and I didn’t want to do that. I just couldn’t do that. I wanted to write, not sit around taking notes.
The alternative was science fiction. That required research, too, for I had to know science. But I already knew science thoroughly, and besides I could make up science of the future — so I began to write science fiction, and as you all know I did pretty well.
But only pretty well. What was it that made me rich and famous? I’ll tell you. As I continued to write science fiction, the urge to write historical fiction continued to gnaw away at me, and the impossibility of spending enormous time at research continued to keep me from doing anything about it — until a brilliant thought occurred to me, a thought that was at once encouraged by the great editor, John W. Campbell, Jr.
Why should I not write historical fiction of the future? I would deal with a social system, with politics, with economic crises, with everything that is to be found in history, except that it would all take place in the future and I would make it up. I wouldn’t have to do any research.
Therefore, I began writing my Foundation novels, and my Robot novels, and, in due course, I became rich and famous.
Twice I had shoved history, my one great love, to one side, and despite that, it was history, in the end, that made me. I repeat, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” (Is it possible Hamlet stole that from me?)
Once I got to the point where I was so well known that I was able to write what I wanted to write in full knowledge that it would be published, I switched to non-fiction, writing books not only on science but on history. I wrote nearly twenty books of history for young adults — on Egypt, Greece, Rome (two volumes), the Dark Ages, Canaan, Constantinople, the United States (four volumes), and so on. Even my science books and essays were strong on historical detail, as all of you know.
I had to stop my histories when Doubleday insisted that I return to science fiction novels, but not entirely.
For instance, I wrote a 450,000-word history of science, year by year, from the earliest times, and it was published by Harper’s in October 1989, as Asimov’s Chronology of Science and Discovery, and it was well-received, too. However, though Harper suggested that for each year I add a footnote as to what was happening in the world outside science at that time, I did it so enthusiastically that the book would have been more like 750,000 words long. Harper’s couldn’t manage that, and they trimmed most of the straight history away.
Annoyed, I then proceeded to write another 450,000-word book, this time of straight history, period by period, country by country, and had more fun than you could possibly imagine. I did it without a contract, out of love alone, and showed it to Harper Collins (new name) only after it was all done. It will be published by them in 1991 under the title Asimov’s Chronology of the World.
And, as you all know, I occasionally write straight history even in this column, which is ordinarily devoted to science essays, because the Noble Editor never interferes with my little quirks. And I will do so now.
I am not one of your professional patriots, you must understand. I am not a flag-waver (I don’t even own a flag) and I eschew nationalism. I’m a globalist, who believes that human beings should not divide themselves into any divisions less than “human being.” Let everyone be merely different facets of an overriding humanity.
However, even the best of us have our weaknesses, and I have one — I am crazy, absolutely nuts, about our national anthem. The words are difficult, the tune is almost impossible, but I sing it frequently when I’m taking my shower — all four stanzas — with as much power and emotion as I can possibly manage. And it shakes me up every time.
It bothers me no end, then, that hardly any American can sing the tune, hardly any American knows the words even to the first stanza, and hardly any American cares. They’ll wave the flag assiduously, but they won’t sing the song that celebrates the flag. And they don’t know the absolutely thrilling story behind it. When they want to sing something they think of as patriotic, they sing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” with words and tune as trite as you can imagine.
In fact, most national anthems are hymns, slow and stately and sleep-provoking. The only two anthems, beside our own, that I can think of as blood-stirring, are the French “Marseillaise” and the old Soviet “Internationale” (which they have replaced with something that is incredibly dull). But our national anthem takes first place, and easily.
I was once asked to entertain a luncheon club I belong to called “The Dutch Treat Club.” I was given only a few hours notice, since it was well known I required no preparation. Taking my life in my hands, I announced I was going to sing all four stanzas of our national anthem. This was greeted with loud groans, and one member rose to close the door to the kitchen, where the noise of dishes and cutlery was loud and distracting.
“Thanks, Herb,” I said.
“That’s all right,” he said. “It was at the request of the kitchen staff.”
I then explained the background of the anthem and sang all four stanzas, and let me tell you that those Dutch Treaters had never heard it before — or never listened, anyway. When I was done, I got a standing ovation and cheer upon cheer. It was not me, it was the anthem.
Then a couple of weeks ago, Roseanne Barr of television shrieked the anthem before the beginning of a baseball game and was booed. I was hurt. The anthem should not be sung as a publicity stunt, and the public should not boo, when they themselves know nothing about it.
On August 1, 1990, I was at the Rensselaerville Institute in upstate New York, conducting my 18th annual seminar. I seized the opportunity to tell them the story of the anthem and to sing all four stanzas. And again there was a wild ovation and prolonged applause. Again, it was the anthem and not me.
So now let me tell you the story of how it came to be written.
In 1812, the United States went to war with Great Britain over the matter of the freedom of the seas. We were in the right. For two years, we held the British off even though we were still a rather weak country and Great Britain was a strong one.
The reason we held them off was that Great Britain was in a life-and-death struggle with the French Emperor Napoleon and had little time or breath to fight another war across three thousand miles of ocean. In fact, just at the time that the United States declared war, Napoleon marched off to invade Russia; and if he won, as everyone expected him to, he would control all of Europe and Great Britain would find itself alone and isolated in opposition to the Emperor. It was no time for her to be involved in an American war, and if the United States had been more patient and if communications across the ocean had been faster, Great Britain would have given in to American demands in time to prevent what was really an unnecessary war.
American land forces did very poorly, the only competent military officer we had being Winfield Scott. At sea, we did well. American ships and American seamen proved better, ship by ship, then the British, to the world’s surprise (and especially to Great Britain’s). We also won a battle on Lake Erie in 1813, when the American commander, Oliver Hazard Perry, using ships he had had built on the spot for the purpose sent the famous message, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”
However, the weight of the British navy beat down our ships eventually, and the United States was under a tightening blockade. New England, particularly, was hard-hit economically and it threatened secession.
Meanwhile, Napoleon was beaten in Russia and in 1814 was forced to abdicate. Great Britain could now turn its attention to the United States, and it organized a three-pronged attack on the country. The northern prong was to come down Lake Champlain toward New York to cut off disaffected New England. The southern prong was to go up the Mississippi to take New Orleans and to paralyze the west. The central prong, the most important, was to head for the mid-Atlantic and take Baltimore, the greatest port south of New York.
If Baltimore was taken, the nation, which still hugged the Atlantic coast for the most part, would be split in two. New England would certainly secede, and the United States would have to sue for peace, and it might well be a Draconian peace for Great Britain was very annoyed at the United States for distracting it in its fight against Napoleon. (The British asked the Duke of Wellington to lead the assault, but he refused.)
The north and south prongs might succeed or fail; they were not crucial (and in the end, each failed). It was the central prong that counted. On its success or failure rested the death or life of the United States.
The British reached the American coast and, on August 24, 1814, they took Washington. President James Madison and the rest of the government fled. The British then burned the public buildings including the Executive Mansion. It wasn’t much of a fire and it didn’t do much damage; nor was there any looting. Later on, the Executive Mansion was painted white to hide the scorch marks, and it has been known as “the White House” ever since.
Washington didn’t count, though. It was a little shantytown of no importance except that it housed the government, so that it had symbolic value. The British ships then moved up Chesapeake Bay toward Baltimore, their real objective. On September 12, 1814, they arrived, and they found 13,000 men in Fort McHenry, whose guns controlled the harbor. If the British wished to take Baltimore they would have to silence those guns and take Fort McHenry.
On one of the British ships was an aged physician who had been captured in Washington and who had been brought along, for some reason, as a prisoner of war. An American lawyer in Baltimore, Francis Scott Key, who was a friend of the physician, came to the ship to try to negotiate his release. The British captain was quite willing, but it was now the night of September 13-14, and the bombardment of Fort McHenry was about to start. They could not be released till the bombardment was over.
Key and his physician friend had to wait through the night. They saw the American flag flying over Fort McHenry as twilight deepened and night fell. Through the night, they heard the burstings of bombs and saw the red glare of rockets, and while that was going on, they knew that the Fort was still resisting and the American flag was still flying. But then, toward morning, the bombardment ceased and a dread silence fell.
There were two possibilities. Either Fort McHenry had surrendered and the British flag now flew above it, or the bombardment had been a failure and had been stopped and the American flag still flew over the Fort. If it was the former, the United States might well be through as a nation; if the latter, it would survive.
But which was it? As dawn began to brighten the eastern sky, Key stared out the porthole trying to see which flag was flying over the Fort. Bedridden and unable to look for himself, the physician asked over and over again, “Can you see the flag? Can you see the flag?”
After it was all over, Francis Key wrote a four-stanza poem telling the events of the night. It was published in newspapers on September 20 and it swept the nation. It was noted that the words fit an old drinking tune called “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and it was sung to that (a difficult tune with an uncomfortably large range). Key called the poem “The Defense of Fort McHenry,” but, for obvious reasons, it quickly became known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Eventually, in 1931, Congress officially declared it to be the national anthem of the United States, and a flag flies over Francis Scott Key’s grave, day and night, though ordinarily the flag is not allowed to fly at night.
Now that you know the story, here are the words to the first stanza, and how I wish I could sing it to you. I don’t have the best voice in the world, but it is adequate, considering my age, and I sing it (believe me) with a wealth of emotion.
It is the old doctor speaking from his bed, and here is what he is asking Key:
Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming!
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming!
And the rockets’ 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?
“Ramparts,” in case you don’t know, are the walls or other elevations that surround a fort to help protect the personnel within.
This first stanza only asks the question. It is the second stanza that gives the answer, and it goes as follows:
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses!
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam.
in full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
‘Tis the star spangled banner! O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
“The towering steep” is, again, the ramparts. Obviously, the bombardment has failed, and Fort McHenry remains in American hands with the American flag still flying. The British fleet can do nothing now but sail away, their mission a failure, so the United States survives.
In the third stanza, Key allows himself to gloat over the American triumph and to shout abuse at the British enemy. It is not a very nice thing to do in cold blood, but Key, in the immediate aftermath of the bombardment was in no mood not to be cold-blooded.
However, the enemy are the British, and during World War II, when the British were our staunchest allies against a new and far more hideous enemy, it seemed that this third stanza was unnecessary, and it was removed from the anthem. However, I know it, and I am foolish enough to want to share the gloating, so here it is:
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 wiped out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuse could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spanned banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
That leaves the fourth stanza, which is a pious hope for the future and which has the atmosphere of a hymn at last. It should, to my way of thinking, be sung more slowly than the other three and with even deeper feeling. Here it is:
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, while our cause it is just.
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
The fourth stanza as I’ve given it here is the way I sing it. I have taken the liberty of making two small changes from the way the song appears in the reference books and, presumably then, the way that Key wrote it.
In the fourth line, Key wrote, “Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just.” Key was writing about the War of 1812, when, as I believe, our cause was just, but I am not ready to assume that our cause is always just. The United States is as capable of fighting an unjust war as any other nation is, although I earnestly hope it doesn’t do so often.
The Mexican War was an unjust war, a naked war of aggression, a war to fasten slavery on Texas after Mexico had freed the slaves there and to seize territory to which we had no real right. But we won every battle just the same, established slavery in Texas, and took the entire southwest. The Spanish-American War was not particularly just, either.
The southern states of the Union, after seceding to form the Confederate States of America, stood between their loved homes and the war’s desolation and did so with magnificent bravery for four years, but lost in the end and (in my opinion) rightly so, for they fought for slavery.
The Vietnam War (again in my opinion) was an unjust war, for we travelled 6000 miles to take part in a civil war that was not really our business and held no threat whatever to our vital interests. The old “domino theory” was just a fraud used to justify what could not really be justified. And we lost, as we should have.
But now (as I write) Iraq has invaded Kuwait and taken it over. This was unjustified aggression and does affect American vital interests, for Iraq intends to control the world’s oil supply to its own advantage. If we take measured action, I will consider our cause to be just.
Let me go on. The other change I have made is in the next to the last line where Key apparently repeated that the star-spangled banner “in triumph shall wave.” I don’t think that the third and fourth stanzas should end equally. I want the end of each stanza to represent a new and higher climax, so I replaced the last “in triumph” with “forever.”
When I sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I don’t try for vocal tricks, which I don’t have the voice or the technique for, never having had even a day’s training in voice. I try only to enunciate carefully so that the audience hears every word with out fail.
Nevertheless, when I sing that last stanza, I do try one little trick. I linger over the “forever” and make my voice louder and even more emotional and I can feel the audience respond to that.
I sang all four stanzas in public only twice, but each time it was a memorable experience for me, and, I believe, for the audience as well. Now I do it for a third time, in print only, and without the additional dimension of my voice (such as it is).
I can only hope that you get a bit of what the national anthem means to me and that you will look at it with new eyes, and listen to it, the next time you have a chance, with new ears.
And don’t let them take it away and substitute “God Bless America,” for goodness sake.