It's Time to Sing All Three National Anthems
By Tom Kagy | 20 Apr, 2025

The anthems we sang in our school days can sustain our faith, hope and good will as America struggles through strange times.

In bitter dark times when Americans take to the streets and to the courts to fight a fascist blitzkrieg we all need to remember the sweetness and light that used to bathe our hearts as we sang our three national anthems in school.

Yes, I know we have had only one official national anthem since the "Star-Spangled Banner" was so designation as such in 1931.  And it's a good one, possibly the most cinematic and well-paced Hollywood-style anthem around.  

And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air

Gave proof through the night, that our flag was still there.

Those two moving lines evoke at once the darkest moments of peril and the swelling of pride felt by a lawyer-poet on a mission to secure the release of a doctor in British captivity while waiting out the 1814 British bombardment of Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore.  

Francis Scott Key succeeded in his mission, and the Star-Spangled Banner (as the 15-star, 15-stripe flag of the day was known) prevailed in that battle, and ultimately, the War of 1812.  The British brand of tyranny was dubbed taxation without representation. Possibly the current one might be dubbed deportation without representation (or legal justification).   

Our second national anthem is owed to a memorable cross-country trip taken by a 33-year-old female English professor from Wellesley College.  Katherine Lee Bates' original lyrics of "America the Beautiful" capture the sheer rhapsodic expansiveness she felt in 1893 as she gazed down at the Great Plains from atop Pike's Peak.

Oh beautiful for halcyon skies,

For amber waves of grain,

For purple mountain majesties

Above the enameled plain!

Her panoramic rendering of the vastness and grandeur of our country gives the lie to small minds that proclaim a dire need to throttle the flow of the migrant energy needed to realize the land's potential.

As evolved over the years, the song's four verses evoke the determination, courage and patriotism that turned a vast wilderness into a mighty nation.  It's truly a fantastic time-lapse documentary of the building of America, one that would have eluded even a master filmmaker with Finalcut Pro.

O beautiful for pilgrim feet

Whose stern, impassioned stress

A thoroughfare for freedom beat

Across the wilderness!

...

O beautiful for heroes proved

In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country loved

And mercy more than life!

My favorite lines inspire me to eternal optimism about our future:

O beautiful for patriot dream

That sees beyond the years

Thine alabaster cities gleam

Undimmed by human tears!

 What turned "America the Beautiful" into a contender to replace the Star-Spangled Banner as our national anthem, in the firm view of the Kennedy administration, were the second couplets of the three refrains later added to Bates' poem.

First:

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law!

Third:

And crown thy good with brotherhood

From sea to shining sea!

Both of these anthems capture key aspects of the American national character.  The first, a sense of faith in ultimate victory in any strife, and the second, the abiding expansiveness of spirit.

Our third national anthem contains what are to me the sweetest words in the English language: 

My country 'tis of three,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing.

These lines from the third verse seem particularly apt today:

No more shall tyrants tread

Above the patriots dead —

There's good reason "My Country 'Tis of Thee" was assumed by most Americans to be our national anthem until the 1931 designation of the Star Spangled Banner.

Each of our three national anthems offer words that remind us what has elevated the United States of America above other nations, not only in our hearts but in the minds of the world.  They also offer the faith that our struggle against tyranny isn't new and one in which we shall prevail.

So let's refresh our memories of our freshly-scrubbed childhood days and sing these anthems daily, aloud when possible, but always in our hearts.