National Affairs: Wanted: An Anthem

“The Star Spangled Banner” is not the national anthem of the U. S. The U. S. has no national anthem, officially. In an effort to induce Congress to adopt Francis Scott Key’s poem as the national anthem, representatives of many a patriotic and military organization flocked before the House Judiciary Committee last week to urge enactment of a bill for that purpose. The bill’s author: Maryland’s Representative John Charles Linthicum from the district containing Fort McHenry, over which Key, a prisoner on a British warship, beheld his country’s flag still flying on the morning of Sept. 15, 1814, after an all night bombardment.

The high-vaulted committee room resounded with a sample rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” by the U. S. Navy Band. Two sopranos sang all its four verses to prove that its words were not difficult, that its pitch was not too high. Proudly Captain Walter I. Joyce of the Veterans of Foreign Wars dumped before the Committee a great bale of documents which he said contained 6,020.000 signatures petitioning the anthem’s official adoption. Said he: “I stood on San Juan Hill in ’98 and heard four bands play that tune. All around me in pup tents men were lying sick with fever but when they heard that glorious old tune, every last man somehow got to his feet.”

Dr. James E. Hancock, president-general of the Society of the War of 1812, denied that the tune was difficult. Said he: “Even the mocking birds in Florida learned the song from the buglers when soldiers were encamped there en route to Cuba in the Spanish War.”

Representative Emanuel Celler of New York approved adoption of the song, but insisted that the name of James Stafford Smith be stricken out as the author of the music. The tune, he claimed, was taken directly from that of an old English barroom ballad sung by jovial members of London’s Anacreon Club. The first verse of that song:

To Anacreon in heaven, where he sat in full glee,

A few sons of harmony sent a petition,

That he their inspirer and patron -would be,

When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian;

Voice, fiddle, and flute, no longer be mute, I’ll lend ye my name and inspire ye to boot;

And, besides, I’ll instruct you, like me, to entwine the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s vine.