A schoolteacher rides a mule to 14,000 feet and writes a poem called "Pikes Peak"
In the summer of 1893, with the country deep in economic depression and factory towns choking on their own growth, Katharine Lee Bates was teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. She and fellow teachers hired a prairie wagon, then switched to mules, to reach the summit of Pikes Peak. Exhausted and dazzled by what she called the "sea-like expanse" below, Bates scribbled the first draft of a poem in her notebook that night. She titled it simply "Pikes Peak."
Bates had seen sexist prejudice firsthand, and she had watched industrial poverty spread through American and British cities. Written in the middle of a depression rather than a celebration, her poem imagined an egalitarian American community, not a triumphant one. The tension between hardship and hope persists: "America the Beautiful" has been proposed repeatedly, and never successfully, as a national hymn to rival the anthem.
QWhat was "America the Beautiful" originally called?
Bates titled her first draft simply "Pikes Peak," after the mountain that inspired it. The poem did not carry the name "America" until its first publication in The Congregationalist on July 4, 1895, two years after she wrote it. The now-familiar title, "America the Beautiful," came later still, after further revisions in 1904 and 1913. The mountain that gave the poem its working title survives mainly in its opening image of purple mountain majesties.
QWhere did the melody for "America the Beautiful" come from?
The tune was not written for Bates's poem at all. Samuel A. Ward, a church organist and choirmaster, composed it in 1882 for an entirely different hymn called "O Mother dear, Jerusalem." It carried the name "Materna." The pairing with Bates's poem did not happen until 1910, seventeen years after she wrote the first draft on Pikes Peak and twenty-eight years after Ward wrote the melody. Neither Bates nor Ward set out to write a patriotic standard; the song assembled itself from two unrelated projects decades apart.
QDid Katharine Lee Bates get involved in national politics later in life?
Yes. Bates was raised in a Republican household but broke with the party in 1924 over its rejection of Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations. She wrote that she could not "bear their betrayal of Mr. Wilson," calling the League "our one hope of peace on earth," and endorsed Democratic candidate John W. Davis that year. The poet who wrote one of the country's best-loved patriotic songs was, by the 1920s, a committed political dissenter within her own family's tradition.
