Beyond America the Beautiful

As a Wellesley student, I knew two things about Katharine Lee Bates 1880: 1. She wrote “America the Beautiful.” 2. A dorm was named after her.

In the firmament of Wellesley luminaries, Bates was often outshone by the Albrights and Ephrons. We sang about crowning thy good at convocation and commencement, but otherwise, I didn’t think much about Bates.

Neither did journalist Lynn Sherr ’63. “Unbeknownst to me, she was—she is—such an interesting human being,” says Sherr. “Bates was a dormitory when I was at Wellesley, and that’s about all there was. There was the song, but, oh, fine, she wrote a poem in the 19th century, it must be all that flowery stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with my life. And guess what? I was wrong. She was utterly, completely relevant, and remains so to this day.”

This is a universal consensus of those who study Bates. Her scholarship, her ethics, her passion, and her sense of humor are to be admired and, now more than ever, are traits to be emulated. This summer, as Wellesley closes out its 150th anniversary and the United States celebrates its 250th, Bates stands as an exemplary scholar, activist, feminist, global citizen, community builder, and person unafraid to be herself.

Bates as scholar

When Kathryn “Cappy” Lynch became Katharine Lee Bates and Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English in 2000, she decided it was her duty to learn a bit more about Bates besides “America the Beautiful.”

“It’s clearly why she is remembered,” says Lynch of Bates’s iconic poem. “She’s a lot more than that, though. … She was an important female scholar at a time when there weren’t very many opportunities for women to contribute to scholarship, and she was a particularly important path breaker in the field of American literature.”

Bates, who was born in Falmouth, Mass., graduated from Wellesley in 1880 as part of the College’s second-ever class. After Wellesley, she taught high school English while forging her own career as a professional writer. She won a prize for her 1889 young adult novel, Rose and Thorn, and used the money to fund a year of study at Oxford University. After returning from England in 1891, Bates became a professor at Wellesley, where she taught until retiring in 1925. She died four years later, in March 1929.

Over the course of her 49-year-long career, Bates wrote, edited, contributed to, and/or translated 49 books—anthologies of poetry and fairy tales for children; collected works of Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Keats, and Tennyson; travel dispatches from Spain; collections of her own poetry; an autobiography; and a memoir about her pets, Sigurd Our Golden Collie, and Other Comrades of the Road, to name just a few.

Bates’s editions of The Canterbury Tales captivated Lynch, as her own research centers on Chaucer and medieval poetry. In Lynch’s 2021 paper “Katharine Lee Bates and Chaucer’s American Children” in The Chaucer Review, she describes Bates as a “field-changing scholar of American literature whose early training was as a medievalist.” Lynch writes that Bates “brought both her originality and democratic instincts as a scholar and her considerable talents as a poet” to refresh a previously ignored 1909 children’s edition of Chaucer, reflecting “the middle way that Bates took in much of her writing between traditionalism and innovation.”

Bates as activist

Sherr, who knew so little about Bates as a Wellesley student, ended up writing America the Beautiful: The Stirring True Story Behind Our Nation’s Favorite Song, a book she describes as a “biography of a song,” though in writing it, she became deeply invested in Bates as a person.

“The time period she was writing about was not very different from ours. … It was a time of enormous income inequality,” says Sherr, referring to the Gilded Age robber barons who were amassing fortunes that were unheard of up to that point. “It was also a time of corruption and government graft,” says Sherr. “Just change a letter to government grift, which is what we’ve got today.”

While Bates began as an academic, her friend, life partner, and Wellesley colleague Katharine Coman pulled her into the settlement house movement, and Bates began writing about the need for social reform. Coman, who was a professor of economics and sociology, and Bates were instrumental in the creation of Wellesley’s laboratory preschool, the Child Study Center, in 1913—a time when many children were still working in factories.

Bates did not accept a penny of royalties from “America the Beautiful” because she believed “the poem belongs to the people who sing it,” says Sherr. Bates’s poem, which was set to a melody written in 1882 by church organist and choirmaster Samuel Augustus Ward, is often seen as America’s “runner up” national anthem. “It’s a song of hope. It’s a song of inspiration,” says Sherr.

Bates as feminist

In addition to supporting the rights of workers, immigrants, the poor, people of color, and children, Bates was an advocate for women’s suffrage and equality. Melinda Ponder ’66 studied American literature while pursuing her Ph.D. at Boston College, and when preparing for a panel with a group of fellow Hawthorne scholars, she read an analysis of his short story “The Minister’s Black Veil,” which she thought was particularly excellent. It was written by a woman whose name was familiar: “I thought, ‘Wow, could this possibly be the same Katharine Lee Bates who wrote “America the Beautiful”?’ Here she was as a literary scholar, and a feminist literary scholar at that.”

After writing two volumes on Hawthorne, Ponder committed to writing a biography of Bates. Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea took Ponder nearly 30 years to complete. (She also recently served as a consulting producer and lead interview subject for the documentary From Sea to Shining Sea, which explores Bates’s life.) Ponder found many elements of Bates’s life personally relatable—such as balancing the challenges of chairing the English department of a small college (Ponder taught at Pine Manor College) with teaching, writing, and research. While Bates never had children, unlike Ponder, who has three daughters, the English professor did closely mentor her students. She was admired as an educator; fellow English professor Vida Dutton Scudder recalled that Bates “did not present her students with a problem to solve but with an experience to enter, which is a far more exacting and strenuous matter.”

“I see her as a kind of female minister,” says Ponder. “She couldn’t have preached from a pulpit in those days, but she could send out her words.”

Bates as global citizen

Bates also saw herself as a global citizen, becoming a supporter of the peace movement following World War I and advocating for the creation of the League of Nations. She said that the phrase “from sea to shining sea” not only encompassed America from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but wrapped the entire planet in a united siblinghood.

Carlos Ramos, Margaret E. Deffenbaugh and LeRoy T. Carlson Professor in Comparative Literary Studies and professor of Spanish, admires Bates for her work as a travel writer. Bates spent six months of her 1899 sabbatical in Spain, and, while there, she wrote articles about her experiences for the New York Times. The Spanish-American War had ended just the year before, and foreign travelers “had this idealized, romanticized idea of Spain … the bullfighting, the passion,” says Ramos. He adds that foreigners also had “a sense of clear superiority” because Spain had just been defeated militarily. “Katharine Lee Bates has a completely different approach,” says Ramos. “She looks at people from the ground and gives them voice.”

Ramos says Bates spoke to lay people, workers, even nuns whose brothers had stolen their dowries and sent them to convents. “Kinds of things that other people don’t pay attention to,” says Ramos. “Women come from situations in their societies where they are marginalized, so their eyes are trained differently, and they are more aware of social pressures. They are more aware of the plight of women, of workers, because they themselves feel marginalized.”

Plus, Bates was no simple tourist—she studied Spanish literature, she spoke the language, and studied the culture. “It’s writing done by somebody who knows about Spain,” says Ramos. “That wasn’t very common then.”

After her sabbatical, Bates made several more trips to the country and raised funds for the International Institute for Girls in Spain. “She puts her work and her money where her mouth is,” says Ramos.

Bates as community builder

Wherever Bates went, she seemed to find friends and make community, but nowhere more so than at home in Wellesley. Her house at 70 Curve Street was called the Scarab in reference to a trip she took to Egypt with Wellesley College President Caroline Hazard from 1906 to 1907. Bates and her brother built the rambling, unusual house, which Bates lived in with her mother and sister, Coman, and occasional tenants.

Alice T. Friedman, Grace Slack McNeil Professor Emerita of American Art and professor emerita of art, who has studied queer living spaces, including the Scarab, describes the house as the “physical manifestation” of Bates and Coman’s social circle. “It was really a fabulous and interesting community of Wellesley women,” says Friedman. “The house could sleep like 18 people if you had mats, and they had amazing dinner parties and conversations.”

Bates often held her classes at the Scarab, and students enjoyed the welcoming, comfortable environment. Florence Pfalzgraf Kern, class of 1923, wrote about attending a seminar on Shakespeare there during which the students were joined by Bates’s collie Hamlet and her parrot Polonius.

“It was the center of an important community at Wellesley,” says Friedman.

Bates as herself

But more than anything else, Bates is a shining example of how to be true to yourself. When Wellesley considered requiring its faculty members to pledge that they were Christian, Bates made clear that she would not. She agreed with Christian values, she said, but didn’t want to be tied to a specific religion.

She was quirky, filling her home with mementos from her travels and many pets. Bates taught herself to play golf while her collie Sigurd loped beside her on the course, and she was known to carry Polonius the parrot around with her on a stick. Anyone who drove with her had to sign the guest book she kept in the car.

Bates never married, despite having several male suitors. Scholars disagree on whether that was because she would then lose her job at Wellesley if she became a wife, or because she was romantically committed to Coman. However, she created the exact life she wanted in the Scarab.

Katie Swenson, the Scarab’s owner as of this writing, raised her three young daughters in the house after buying it in 2007. An architect who grew up in Wellesley, Swenson had been looking to move back to her hometown. She fell in love with the house and became deeply invested as its steward, eventually writing a memoir about her life in the Scarab called In Bohemia. 

“She was an important female scholar at a time when there weren’t very many opportunities for women to contribute to scholarship.”

— Kathryn “Cappy” Lynch, Katharine Lee Bates and Sophie Chantal Hart Professor of English

“The Scarab for us has been a magical experience of living,” says Swenson. “It’s the best house for a party, the best house for a family.” Swenson would invite groups of architecture fellows to the Scarab, hosting smart young people looking to make a difference, just like Bates did.

“This house really has meant so much to me,” says Swenson. “Living here has been an incredibly beautiful experience.” Swenson recently put the Scarab on the market, as her daughters are grown, and it’s time for her next chapter. She hopes that whoever buys the Scarab—perhaps a Wellesley alum—will continue to honor Bates’s legacy. “Katharine Lee Bates played a special role in our history,” says Swenson.

Sherr says that her favorite verse in “America the Beautiful” is “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law!” “She is saying: America is not perfect. We get things wrong, but we learn, and what keeps us honest and straight is the law,” Sherr says. “I mean, where else do you see in a song where being imperfect is right up there with loving your country? How human and wonderful is that?”