Posted in The New York Times on August 25, 2011
By ALBIN J. KOWALEWSKI
Kowalewski is a public historian in Washington
It was not easy to select the "Star-Spangled Banner" as America's official national anthem. It did not happen until 1931.
Music was everywhere in the North, it seemed during the summer of 1861. From presidential appearances to Union rallies, everyone was singing - usually emotional versions of "Yankee Doodle" or "Hail, Columbia" or the "Star-Spangled Banner." It's forgotten today, but in 1861 America didn't have an official national anthem; each one of those songs functioned more or less informally as the nation's rallying cry at some point in its history.
The problem was, few could agree which one, if any, was popular enough to stand as the country's official song - at a time when more and more people thought it needed one. In response, a group of Manhattan power brokers - lawyers, politicians, businessmen, scholars, and a former senator and New York governor - who called themselves the National Hymn Committee, decided to find a new, official anthem.
The committee wrote off the three existing contenders immediately: "Yankee Doodle" was "childish," they said. "Hail Columbia" was "pretentious." The "Star-Spangled Banner" was just too hard to sing - indeed, according to the committee's spokesman, Richard Grant White, they found it "to be almost useless."
Library of Congress Richard Grant White, spokesman for the National Hymn Committee.
The committee turned to the literary public for help. From mid-May to early August, it held a contest challenging Yankee poets to compose "a national hymn or popular and patriotic song appealing to the national heart," as George Templeton Strong, a committee member, described it. The competition would be judged blindly, and the committee retained the rights to publish and market the entries, the proceeds of which would go to the local "Patriotic Fund." To the winner, however, the 13 committeemen promised $500 and the thanks of a grateful nation.
Though the hymn committee sought something with lasting appeal - something more than "a war song," it said - it was no coincidence that the competition took place early in the conflict. The "Star-Spangled Banner" was arguably the most-recognizable song in the Union, but in the context of the war it suddenly felt out of place. It dated to the War of 1812 and had ridden the wave of popular nationalism that followed America's second victory over the British. But after nearly two generations of contentious and equivocal compromise over slavery, many northerners were leaving that earlier world behind. Writing a new national anthem seemed a logical next step for a country in the process of reinventing itself. After all, White recalled that summer, following the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter "we all found ourselves side by side with one feeling, one purpose, forgetful of the past, absorbed in the present and the future."
Library of Congress Front cover of a song book of patriotic songs, including "Yankee Doodle," "Star Spangled Banner," "Hail Columbia" and, notably, "The Marseillaise."
It quickly became clear that many northerners shared in the hymn committee's opinions. Within six weeks of the contest's announcement, the committee had received 1,275 entries ("Four or five huge bales of patriotic hymnology," according to Strong) from as far afield as California and even Italy.
Over the next month and a half, the committee - assisted by an organist and choir - met to review the submissions. Its roster was a who's who of Manhattan's upper crust, but never once, it appears, did the full committee meet together. One member, John A. Dix, a former treasury secretary and now Union general, couldn't even attend. He was too busy maintaining law and order from his post at Fort McHenry in Maryland, where, just weeks after missing the hymn committee's first round of judging, he imprisoned Baltimore editor Frank Key Howard on charges of disloyalty. Howard, coincidentally, was the grandson of Francis Scott Key, the author of the "Star-Spangled Banner."
Unlike the committee members, little is known about the musicians and poets who scratched out those thousands of lines of verse. Because the judges promptly discarded most of the submissions, the authors- identities disappeared as well. But what we do know reveals a general cross section of northern society. The participants included the well educated and barely literate, the provincial and the worldly, ministers and musicians, and a middle-aged woman named Julia Ward Howe - who had yet to write her legendary "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Likewise, the few of their poems that do exist convey a range of emotion: vengeance, militancy, confidence and optimism. They had such titles as "Union Forever," "The Ballot-Box," "Freedom's Jubilee," "Liberty's Beacon" and 1861. Many sought divine inspiration, though others offered comic relief. Some championed the war as "freedom's second birth,- while others spoke of finding comfort in the "shades of our forefathers." One imaginative soul even set the Declaration of Independence to rhyme.
The problem was, the committee couldn't agree on a clear winner. But not because there were so many good options - rather, it was because there were hardly any. On Aug. 9, 1861, the hymn committee announced that it couldn't, in all fairness, choose a winner. "Although some of [the songs] have a degree of poetic excellence which will probably place them high in public favor as lyrical compositions," it said in the New York Times, "no one of them is well suited for a National Hymn." Strong was more blunt in private: most poems were "rubbish."
The controversy, however, didn't end there. The criticism from northern literary circles came hard and fast, and many agreed with Harper's Weekly that patriotism couldn't be "made to order." Not to be outdone, the committee itself refused to let the issue die. A few of the poems had been saved, and that fall Richard Grant White published them - good and bad - in the book "National Hymns: How They Are Written and How They Are Not Written, A Lyric and National Study for the Times." The volume was both a meditation on music and nationalism and a clarification of the committee's decision. Strangely enough, many newspapers gave the book rather positive reviews. Like most, the Christian Advocate and Journal appreciated the wartime gallows humor. "The worst [anthems]," it said, "will doubtless be the most entertaining."
Such cynicism didn't last long. Within months, the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" would hit the North, capturing the Union's voice in biblical terms unlike anything the hymn committee could have ever imagined.
The north would continue writing music throughout the war, but when it counted most many Yankees simply fell back on the songs they knew best. Roughly four years after his stint on the hymn committee, George Templeton Strong overheard something remarkable in the streets of New York. Richmond had just fallen to Union forces, and crowds began to fill Wall Street near the offices of the Commercial Advertiser:
Never before did I hear cheering that came straight from the heart. They sang 'Old Hundred,' the Doxology, 'John Brown,' and 'The Star-Spangled Banner,' repeating the last two lines of Key's song over and over, with a massive roar from the crowd and a unanimous wave of hats at the end of each repetition. I think I shall never lose the impression made by this rude, many-voiced chorale. It seemed a revelation of profound national feeling, underlying all our vulgarisms and corruptions, and vouchsafed to us in their very focus and centre, in Wall Street itself.
In 1931, as the Great Depression again tested the country's resolve, the "Star-Spangled Banner" was signed into law as America's official national anthem.
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Sources: American Publishers - Circular and Literary Gazette, Oct. 14, 1861; Baltimore Sun, May 20, June 24 and Aug. 12, 1861; Christian Advocate and Journal, Oct. 10, 1861; Chicago Tribune, Aug. 13, 1861; Harper's Weekly, June 1, Oct. 19 and Nov. 16, 1861; Hartford Daily Courant, May 9 and May 20, 1861; New York Daily Tribune, Aug. 10, 1861; New York Observer and Chronicle, Oct. 24, 1861; New York Times, May 18, May 20, July 28 and Aug. 18, 1861; National Republican, Aug. 13, Oct. 5, Oct. 12 and Oct. 29, 1861; Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 30, 1861; The Independent, May 30, Oct. 10 and Dec. 12, 1861; Vanity Fair, June 22, June 29, July 6, July 13, Aug. 24, Oct. 19 and Nov. 9, 1861; Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., 'The Diary of George Templeton Strong,' vol. III; Richard Grant White, "National Hymns: How They Are Written and How They Are Not Written, A Lyric and National Study for the Times." See also, Kenneth A. Bernard, "Lincoln and the Music of the Civil War"; Robert James Branham and Stephen Hartnett, ?Sweet Freedom?s Song: "My Country 'Tis of Thee' and Democracy in America"; Robert J. Brugger, "Maryland: A Middle Temperament, 1634-1980"; Cecil D. Eby, Jr., "The National Hymn Contest and -Orpheus C. Kerr",- Massachusetts Review 1 (1960); Alice Fahs, "The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861-1865"; Adam Goodheart, "1861: The Civil War Awakening"; George J. Svejda, "The History of the Star-Spangled Banner from 1814 to the Present"; Lonn Taylor, et al., "The Star-Spangled Banner: The Making of an American Icon."
