America the Beautiful

Like any good patriotic song, “America the Beautiful” leans on the country’s history to establish its values and to mythologize its origin and significance. While “The Star-Spangled Banner” does this by mythologizing a single battle during the War of 1812, “America the Beautiful” uses a vague picture of the past to establish its presentation of the mythologized past. Specifically, Bates relies on the development of the country by two groups of people: explorers and veterans.

She mythologizes the journey of those who first came to the country and those who traversed the Western expanse by calling them pilgrims, which gives their journeys spiritual weight. Here, she relies on a popular dichotomy in American history: the “savage” wild and “civilized,” godly man. In “The Idea of Nature in America,” scholar Leo Marx tracks the development of this binary and argues that the distinction between wilderness and civilization is the defining experience of the first 200 years of America (Marx, Leo. “The Idea of Nature in America.” Daedalus, spring 2008, pp. 8-22.). Bates leans on this trope to amplify the divine mission of those who came before to help establish the country and its values.