The American Dream and the Shining Star Flag

On a rainy night on September 13, 1814, a 35-year-old American lawyer named Frances Scott Key observed British troops fire repeatedly at Fort McHenry in Port Baltimore. The War of 1812 has lasted 18 months and Attorney Key is negotiating the release of an American prisoner.

Fearing he knew too much, the British kept him on a ship eight miles offshore. As night fell, he saw the sky turn red and, on the scale of the attack, he believed that the British would prevail.

“It seemed that the ground was opening to blow the shells of the shells into fire and sulfur,” he recalls. But when the smoke cleared at dawn, with awe and a sigh of relief, Key saw the American flag, not the British flag, towering over the fortress.

According to the Smithsonian Institution, which owns many priceless historical artifacts, Key was filled with emotions by what he witnessed, by what he wrote poetry.

He showed the poem he wrote to his brother-in-law, Joseph H. Nicholson, commander of a militia unit at Fort McHenry, and commented that the poem was in perfect harmony with a popular short melody. of England was composed by musician John Stafford Smith in 1775.

The Anacreontic Song, also known as Anacreon in Heaven, was written for an elite club in London, but in the early 19th century it crossed the Atlantic and became famous in America.

Very impressed with Key’s poem, Nicholson took it to a Baltimore printing press and published it under the name Fort M’Henry Defense Unit and recorded the melody to which the poem should be sung.

The Baltimore Patriot reprinted it and within weeks the song The Star-Spangled Banner appeared in numerous publications, the name that quickly became known. across the country and immortalized Key’s lyrics, as well as the flag that the poem honoring soon after became history.

Used by the navy in 1889, the song was quoted by Puccini in his opera titled Madame Butterfly.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the song’s charm seemed irresistible. It was so popular that in 1916 there were dozens of different copies, and President Woodrow Wilson asked the United States Department of Education to make an official version.

The agency enlisted the help of five musicians: Walter Damrosch, Will Earheart, Arnold J. Gantvoort, Oscar Sonneck, and John Philip Sousa. The first presentation of the standardized version took place at Carnegie Hall in December 1917.

However, it was not until February 3, 1931 that the song The Star-Spangled Banner officially became the national anthem of the United States, under an act of Congress signed by President Herbert Hoover.

The relatively late timing of the official birth of the American National Anthem may come as a surprise to those who think it has a long history, but this ignorance represents a larger trend.

“Many Americans don’t know that much of what we consider the foundation of the United States actually dates back to the 1920s and the Great Depression,” said Sarah Churchwell, professor of American literature at Eastern University. Anglia and author of the acclaimed book Careless People, he says.

“When F Scott Fitzgerald, a distant relative of Frances Scott Key, was beginning to think about the novel The Great Gatsby in 1922, the year the novel was put on, America was still debating. Should there be a national anthem? ”.

Although The Star-Spangled Banner was one of the main contenders, Churchwell noted that it has received fierce opposition.

On June 11, 1922, scientist Augusta Emma Stetson, builder of the First Church of Christian Science in Central Park in New York, ran a large and impressive advertisement in the New York Tribune titled: “The Star-Spangled Banner never becomes our National Anthem.

This ad is about “the violent and unspeakable melodies that never express the fundamental ideals of our country.” (Not only was the music not composed by Americans, but, worse still, it was the tune of a vulgar and sensual drinkers song, Churchwell said.)

“Congress will never legalize a national anthem that comes from the lowest qualities of human sentiment,” the ad read.

Congress thinks differently. “The Star-Spangled Banner became the national anthem in 1931, two years after the stock market crash, when Americans needed to regain confidence,” Churchwell said.

He also noted that it was this year that the ‘American Dream’ catchphrase became a famous American catchphrase thanks to a book titled Epic of America by James Truslow Adams.

“In general, I think Americans are encouraged to think that everything about our country goes back a long way and transcends history. That is the main aspect of the American Dream and exactly what Fitzgerald wants. in Gatsby – the idea that we are so drawn to our history that we don’t understand it. “

Monthly publication 8/2015 in Old version by BBC News Vietnamese.