David Firestone

DES MOINES – It is jarring, in an age of irony and nuance, to hear Mitt Romney conclude his stump speeches with a riff on the hymn, “America the Beautiful.” At an early-morning rally today, a few hours before the Iowa caucuses begin, he discussed his love for the patriotic song — probably the most beloved in the canon – and recited several of the song’s verses, strongly suggesting that its vision of the country differed from President Obama’s.

Can he really be this corny? (And I mean that literally, since in Iowa he claims that the amber waves of grain include corn. Note to Mitt: corn is green, and it’s not even clear it’s a grain.) Ronald Reagan was the master manipulator of patriotic symbols, but was more subtle in his use of imagery, and tended to resist sledgehammer appeals to sentimentality.

But it quickly becomes clear that Mr. Romney has a point to make in dissecting the song. He sees its vision as matching his, and that is where he makes a serious mistake.



“O beautiful, for patriot’s dream, that sees beyond the years,” he said, discussing the fourth verse and asserting that this dream referred to political and especially economic freedom. “The freedom to choose one’s course in life, to be an opportunity nation, a merit-based society” – that, he suggested, conflicts directly with the president’s vision of America as an entitlement society, where everyone is equal and thus more impoverished.

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If, over time, this turns out to be his rebuttal to the president’s new campaign theme of reducing economic inequality, he will have to do better than “America the Beautiful,” because that is not at all what the song was originally about. The lyrics were written in 1894 by the Massachusetts poet Katharine Lee Bates, an ardent feminist and lesbian who was deeply disillusioned by the greed and excess of the Gilded Age.

Her original third verse was an expression of that anger:

America! America!

God shed his grace on thee

Till selfish gain no longer stain

The banner of the free!

Lynn Sherr, the ABC News correspondent and the author of a book about the song, wrote that Bates “wanted to purify America’s great wealth, to channel what she had originally called ‘selfish gain’ into more noble causes.” Bates later rewrote the stanza into its current version, unrecited by Mr. Romney today:

America! America!

May God thy gold refine

Till all success be nobleness

And every gain divine!

Bates’ revulsion at the inequality and corruption she saw around her was shared by many others who became the core of the Progressive Movement. President Obama has lately begun to channel that movement, invoking the spirit of its greatest champion, Theodore Roosevelt. Given his positions, he has a better claim to the spirit of the song than does Mr. Romney, who appears to have no problem with inequality.

Under the circumstances, Mr. Romney might want to switch to a far more simple song with absolutely no underlying meaning. Maybe, “God Bless America.”