"What So Proudly We Hail" - the Reverend Alison Hyder
June 30, 2002 - the Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown
Opening Words: “Homeland” by the Turkish poet Fazil Husnu Daglarca
The
world is just the soil by itself.
Homeland is the ground which our lives exalt
From giant forefathers to giant children.
Bread and salt.
How then
did they ever set foot,
Where my horses gallop, on my homeland?
On the villages where I grew up in milk
In the poplar’s sleep, in the soil’s song, grand?
How then
did they ever set foot,
Where I raised my flag, my country?
By day, on the coolness of the crops…
By night, on the shadows of the sycamore tree…
The world
is just the soil by itself.
Homeland is the ground which our lives exalt.
Green with our land’s forests, blue with her hills,
Even if we die its speed never comes to a halt.
READING: Abraham Lincoln (combined quotations):
What constitutes
the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning
battlements, our bristling seacoasts…our army and navy… Our
reliance is in our love for liberty…; our defense is in the spirit
which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands everywhere.
Destroy this spirit and we have planted the seeds of despotism at our
own doors.
Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and…
cannot long retain it.
…Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let
us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right
as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work
we are in. To do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting
peace among ourselves and with all nations.
SERMON: “What So Proudly We Hail” - Rev. Alison Hyder
One night
in September, 1814, a young lawyer stood on the deck of a ship in the
Baltimore City Harbor, watching the sky light up in colors of red and
orange and white. Occasionally a puff of acrid smoke would linger in the
air.
These days, the Inner Harbor is a popular site for fireworks, as boats
fill the Chesapeake Bay for the Fourth of July or the Baltimore City Fair.
But Francis Scott Key was not in a mood to celebrate. He had achieved
his mission to secure the release of Dr. Beanes, a local doctor being
held prisoner on a British warship. But while on board, the men had heard
and seen too much of the upcoming British battle plans. So they were forced
to watch from a far ship as Fort McHenry was bombarded by the powerful
rockets. The British army had just burned Washington, DC, and Francis
Scott Key was afraid.
The War of 1812 (I don’t know what they called it back then) was
yet another rather ambiguous conflict, in part due to American shipping
interests and still more to do with frontier expansion, and who was allies
with whom. The English were trying to contain Napoleon’s rampage
throughout Europe. The Americans had historical ties with the French,
who helped us in our war of Independence because they hated the English.
American merchants were trying to reap profits from the European conflict.
And British ships were stopping American vessels and forcing any man who
seemed British into their own Navy. Led by a small number of “war
hawks,” as they were called, President Madison was persuaded to
lead an extremely under-prepared country into a war with England to protect
certain vested financial interests. The U.S. tried to invade Canada and
drive out the British presence there, largely because they felt that the
British were urging the Native Americans to fight the U.S. whites, especially
as they expanded further and further into the coveted Indian territories.
Britain retaliated.
The United States had lost almost every single battle up to that day in
1814 when Fort McHenry was shelled, including a number of naval engagements.
So Key set up a vigil that night. He kept his eye on the large American
flag that flew over the fort. It had been commissioned by the fort’s
commander, Maj. George Armistead, who “asked for a flag so big that
‘the British would have no trouble seeing it from a distance.’
Two officers, a Commodore and a General, were sent to the Baltimore home
of Mary Young Pickersgill, a ‘maker of colours,’ and commissioned
the flag. Mary and her thirteen year old daughter Caroline, working in
an upstairs front bedroom, used 400 yards of best quality wool bunting.
They cut 15 stars that measured two feet from point to point. Eight red
and seven white stripes, each two feet wide, were cut. Laying out the
material on the malt-house floor of Claggett's Brewery, a neighborhood
establishment, the flag was sewn together. It measured 30 by 42 feet and
cost $405.90“ [from the web]
Key watched the flag late into the night. But along toward dawn, he lost
sight of it. It was dark and rainy, and there was an ominous silence as
the shelling ceased. What could it mean? Had the fort been taken? When
the sun finally brightened the sky, Key looked to see if Baltimore had
fallen to the British. But instead Mary Pickersgill’s flag still
hung there, probably sodden, but bright. It seemed to Francis Scott Key
to stand for freedom, and hope, and most of all, for home. He was flooded
with emotion. And being a patriotic and manly lawyer, he started to write
a poem. Sailing for port, he found the back of an envelope and began the
first stanza of his famous lyric: “O say, can you see, by the dawn’s
early light….?”
That’s probably the verse that we all know, from school, and ball
games. “The Star Spangled Banner” didn’t become our
official national anthem for another hundred years (by President Wilson’s
Executive Order in 1916, and not confirmed by Congress until 1931), and
there are plenty of people who dislike it. It’s hard to sing. The
language is stilted. It’s too specific, too martial, too boastful.
They’d prefer Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,”
or Katherine Lee Bates’ song, “America the Beautiful,”
or Woody Guthrie’s populist “This Land is Your Land.”
A Russian Jew, a lesbian from Falmouth, and a wandering commie sympathizer:
each wrote anthems to their country, struck with love for its beauty and
freedoms and potential. I appreciate all of their songs. But for some
reason, none of them seem to hit me as powerfully as “The Star Spangled
Banner,” or make me choke up the same way. I’ve gotten over
being embarrassed by it - pretty much.
Now maybe it’s the music. It makes you stretch your voice, and reach,
and even screech. There is something dramatic about it, about the way
it soars at the middle, and then goes low and steady, and then rises again.
You sing that song and you know you’ve really accomplished something!
Or maybe it’s because I’m from Baltimore, and darned proud
of it (for whatever reasons we’re ever proud of anything –
loyalty, affection, exasperation maybe). That’s my town Key was
afraid for, and not just my country. And I can see the thing. When I was
a social worker with the mentally ill we used to take our Day Treatment
clients to Fort McHenry on picnics. We’d stroll outside the little
star-shaped fort and watch the school groups and tourists. We could see
the trawlers and cruise boats and freight liners out in the harbor, and
listen to the pinging sound of the snaffle bit hitting against the flag
pole. Mary Pickersgill’s original flag resides at the Smithsonian
Museum of American History, but a replica is kept flying at the fort.
I’ve seen it from the water during night-time cruises.
So with a little imagination, I can picture the whole scene. The creaking
of the wooden ship. The sound of cannons and rockets in the distance,
and the occasional shout of a command or a curse. Smoke and rain and the
flash of explosions. Key’s feeling of helplessness and trepidation.
And that’s really why I like the song so much. For all of its martial
vigor, it’s actually very personal and emotional and immediate.
Key engages us directly. He asks us to look along with him. Is the flag
still there? Can you see it? Even now, we want to know.
Since September 11th, there has been a flood of American flags plastered
over cars and windows and t-shirts, and hanging from bridges and lying
in the dirt of the roadside. The Star Spangled Banner waves from every
conceivable edifice. But our questions about the republic are deeper than
ever. Is this country healthy? Are we achieving our promise to generate
a culture of freedom, and tolerance, and creativity? Does our nation act
with integrity and courage in the world? Is that flag waving for everyone?
After the tragedy Susan Sontag wrote, “Those in public office have
let us know that they consider their task to be a manipulative one: Confidence
building and grief-management. Politics, the politics of a democracy –
which entails disagreement, which promotes candor – has been replaced
by psychotherapy… ‘Our country is strong,’ we are told
again and again. I for one don’t find this entirely consoling. Who
doubts that America is strong? But that’s not all America has to
be.”
Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornell West add [in The Future of American
Progressivism]:
In this great country, every privilege is suspect, and ordinary men and
women are known to be not so ordinary after all. Tinkering is both a habit
and a creed, and experimentalism joins hands with democracy. An America
triumphant in the world nevertheless seems unable to solve its own problems.
Class injustice, racial hatred, and rationalized selfishness thrive today
in a climate of disillusionment and disconnection….
To understand your country you must love it. To love it you must, in a
sense, accept it. To accept it as it is, however, is to betray it. To
accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in
it which shows what it might become. America – this monument to
the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity,
this long, halting turn of the no into the yes – needs citizens
who love it enough to reimagine and remake it.
To love this country means helping it achieve its best potential. What,
after all, is liberty, but the ability to take risks, to experiment with
who and what we are? It was people with imagination who envisioned a free
education for all children, who legislated for wildlife preservation,
who stood up to – and sat down against – segregation and oppression.
Ordinary citizens started AA, and the Daughters of Bilitis and the Special
Olympics and the League of Women Voters. They took their talent and energy
and devoted it to their country by changing just some little part of their
community. Maybe all they changed was their own appearance – and
that was hard enough. They didn’t wait for a government program.
In fact, in many cases they were opposed to the government. No, they saw
what this country could be and they loved that dream into existence with
their very lives. They risked ridicule, imprisonment, disillusionment,
sometimes poverty to keep this country vital and open.
America depends upon this courage. Abraham Lincoln said, “What constitutes
the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning
battlements, our bristling seacoasts…our army and navy… Our
reliance is in our love for liberty…; our defense is in the spirit
which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men in all lands everywhere.
Destroy this spirit and we have planted the seeds of despotism at our
own doors. …Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for
themselves, and… cannot long retain it.“
Francis Scott Key, risking his liberty and maybe his life to free Dr.
Beanes, felt both the thrill and the obligation of this democracy:
O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov'd home 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 preserv'd 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 shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
I’ve
always liked that verse. I’ve sung it sailing past Fort McHenry.
It seems to echo in my mind at ballgames. But it also tests - and maybe
balances - my liberal socialist UU leanings with its triumphant tone.
It seems jingoistic, smug, sanctimonious: all the sentiments that make
me cringe. And yet it is also humble and grateful and hopeful and determined.
Somehow – I’m not quite sure why - it challenges me to consider
my values. Why am I proud of my country? I can think of a thousand problems
and vices and sins we’ve committed. So what exactly is our cause,
our reason? And what I would sacrifice for its sake?
Many of our liberties are being challenged in the name of national –
or should I say “Homeland”? - security. Just as in 1812, the
callous and powerful are framing the conflict to benefit their own interest,
pushing their agendas under the cover of patriotism and piety. But “Homeland
is the ground which our lives exalt.” Brave men and women give their
lives to protect others here and abroad, to ensure that freedom and justice
prevail a little longer. Soldiers and Firefighters, but also teachers
and organizers and doctors. Protesters small and large. Immigrants. Artists
and iconoclasts. The honest and fair and hardworking. The meek. The tired.
Not all battles are won with guns. Because patriotism isn’t limited
to marines and statesmen. It is the call of every American with love for
the Republic and a vision of peace.
Let us close by singing all 4 verses of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Some of the meter in the middle verses is tricky – the lines don’t
all scan the same – but I think it is worth experiencing the whole
poem as Key wrote it.
O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro' 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?
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, half conceals, half 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!
And where is that band [the British, that is] 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 wash'd out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave [the conscripted British sailors]
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov'd home 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 preserv'd 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 shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
- words by Francis Scott Key, Baltimore Harbor, Maryland, Sept 13, 1814]
CLOSING WORDS: by Pat Mora
Immigrants
wrap their babies in the American flag,
feed them mashed hot dogs and apple pie,
name them Bill and Daisy,
buy them blonde dolls that blink blue
eyes or a football and tiny cleats
before the baby can even walk,
speak to them in thick English,
Hallo, babee, hallo,
whisper in Spanish or Polish
when the baby sleeps, whisper
in a dark parent bed, that dark
parent fear, “Will they like
our boy, our girl, our fine American
boy, our fine American girl?”
