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Sunday, April 14, 2002

By Chris Rodell

BALTIMORE, Md. -- You may never see it listed among the greatest, the largest or the most in the Guinness Book of World Records, but the people at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, birthplace of the national anthem, believe a record was set Dec. 11.

On that day at 8:46 a.m., millions of Americans and supporters from 80 countries around the globe -- even in outer space on the space shuttle Endeavour -- raised their voices in song.

"The Star-Spangled Banner" was sung to commemorate America and those who had died on Sept. 11, three months earlier.

"Nothing else even comes close," says park ranger Vince Vaise. "It was played on a live broadcast in 1942 during the depths of World War II, but nothing like what happened Dec. 11."

These are boom times at Fort McHenry, a 15-minute boat ride from Baltimore's Inner Harbor. Since Sept. 11, attendance is up 15 percent, and on Veterans Day, more than 6,000 people crowded the 43-acre park for a day of unity, hope and healing.

		IF YOU GO... Fort McHenry National Monument & Historic Shrine, East Fort Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21230-5393; 410-962-4290; www.nps.gov/fomc /index.htm.

Fort McHenry and the Francis Scott Key song it inspired have always been about boom times.

A visit to the fort, surrounded as it is by sea-bound freighters and bustling urban landscapes, isn't as visually stirring as a trip to, say, Gettysburg. But the Fort McHenry is worth the trip because of the song it inspired.

Tour the grounds, visit the exhibits and hear the U.S. Naval Academy Choir's rousing rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner," and you'll never again complain -- as many do -- that the melody's too awkward, the words are too warlike or that it's not as pretty or catchy as "God Bless America" or "America the Beautiful"

Hear "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Fort McHenry and you'll recognize it as the only patriotically penned anthem worthy of America.

"It's an education in American history," Vaise says. "Once people learn about the song's origins, they have a more profound respect for 'The Star-Spangled Banner.'"

It all begins during the pivotal War of 1812, which many historians refer to as the Second American War of Independence, when the British were blockading U.S. ports, boarding U.S. merchant ships and forcing U.S. sailors at gunpoint to serve in their navy.

By August 1814, the despised enemy had captured Washington, D.C., and burned the White House. It looked as if "the American experiment" was about to die a failure after just 38 years.

"Francis Scott Key was a prominent local attorney," Vaise says. "He was asked to negotiate the release of his friend, Dr. William Beanes, who'd been taken prisoner by the British and was being held on a warship outside Baltimore Harbor, where ships were waiting to attack."

Key secured Beanes' release, but they were ordered to stay on board a U.S. truce ship while the Brits tried to storm Baltimore the morning of Sept. 13. It was from there that Key, a religious and patriotic man, watched the enemy unleash a 25-hour bombardment of 1,500 200-pound bombs and 700 32-pound rockets at the star-shaped fort and his fellow Americans who had volunteered to fight for freedom.

Above Fort McHenry fluttered the massive woolen 30-by-42-foot-American flag that the U.S. Army had paid Mary Young Pickersgill $405.90 to sew. The same tattered flag, with its 15 stars and 15 stripes, can be seen today in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.

"Some people have said the lyrics -- 'the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air' -- mean Key was a warmonger. That's untrue. To him, the unceasing explosions from those bombs were simply the illumination that 'gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.' He'd been a witness to terrorism, and it had horrified him.

"To me, it was the same strategy the terrorists used against the World Trade Center that September morning almost exactly 187 years to the day later."

Key published the four-stanza poem with instructions that it be sung to the well-known melody of the "Anacreontic Song," a British society of pub crawlers dedicated to "wit, harmony and the god of wine."

Most Americans are familiar with only the first stanza and may seem perplexed that our national anthem ends with an unanswered question:

"O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave

"O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

But in the final three verses Key ends each with an emphatic exaltation of America's future, concluding with:

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!"

In perspective, even today's Anacreontic sorts of stadium crowds more used to chanting "We Will Rock You!" have to admit that it's stirring stuff.

When compared to "The Star-Spangled Banner," a piece of history written by an authentic patriot moved by the peril and eventual triumph of the nation he loved, "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" are essentially pop songs, pleasant ditties that could have been penned by The Beach Boys.

Irving Berlin (1888-1989) wrote "God Bless America" in 1938 in response to rising European war tides. But he was the professional songwriter of such hits as "White Christmas," and he found inspiration primarily the same way clock-punching plumbers do each morning. It was a job that paid the bills.

The motives behind "America the Beautiful" are less suspect. It was written in 1893 by poet Katharine Lee Bates after she visited the 14,110-foot summit of Pikes Peak in Colorado. It was never intended to be sung, but the simple elegance of the words fit several popular melodies of the day, including one penned by Samuel Augustus Ward in 1882, originally for a hymn "O Mother Dear, Jerusalem."

Interesting historical footnote: Katharine Lee Bates was a prominent and ardent feminist who created a scandal in her day by enjoying a deep 25-year "romantic friendship" with another female professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Bates was an unabashed member of a constituency some of today's Congressional patriots still shun 83 years after her death.

Many people prefer "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful" to "The Star-Spangled Banner" because singing the national anthem, with its awkward octave-and-a-half range, is so difficult. What does Vaise have to say about that?"

"Difficult? So was taming the West. So was defeating the fascists of World War II. So was putting a man on the moon. This is America, land of the free, home of the brave. We've never shrunk from a difficult challenge, and we never will."

Chris Rodell is a free-lance writer from Latrobe.