677. USA: The Star-Spangled Banner (Part 1)

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So when it is time to digitize your income tax, you can bank on Lloyd's. Search Lloyd's Business Accounts to find out more. Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new groupy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible, all-day-gum v-grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new groupy setting mist from Mabelie, New York. Maybe it's Mabelie. Meet new group and the twilight's last leap in. Who's what shines and bright stars through the perilous night. For the hope that's made for us, 'cause you can't let these dreams begin. And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air. Came true through the night, that our flag was still there. Oh, see, the stars, see, oh, wave, wave, wave, wave. [Music] So that was a song originally entitled "The Defense of Fort McKenry," and it was written by a guy called Francis Scott Key in September, 1814, and it is probably better known as the Star Spangled Banner and Dominic. What better way to kick off our series, marking the 2026 football or, if you're an America, Soccer World Cup held in the United States, in Mexico and Canada, which starts this Thursday, and it will be ending in just over a month in New York. So Dominic, what we've done with this series, we have picked six competing nations in this World Cup, haven't we, whose national anthems have a fascinating backstory, tell us all kinds of things about the countries that they serve as a national anthem, and all kinds of fabulous characters in them, and lots of great myths to be busted. We love busting a myth. So on Thursday we are going to be looking at England and Scotland, and then next week we're going to be looking at Germany and the Netherlands, and in our third week we're going to be looking at Brazil, and then last of all South Africa. But fittingly, because it is the host nation, because of its prominence in sport, because it is famously the most difficult anthem actually to sing, we are going to be starting with the Star Spangled Banner. Yes. So, hello everybody. A very recognisable anthem, it's been reinterpreted very controversially at times by Jose Feliciano, by Jimmy Hendrix, by Whitney Houston, and by Borat Sagdeev. It played a central role, of course, in the Black Lives Matter protests in the late 2010s and in 2020. So it was during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, that the San Francisco 49ers caught about Colin Kaepernick first took the knee in 2016, and we'll be talking about that a bit later. I have actually always been people who don't like this anthem, Americans who don't like it, and there have been lots of alternative versions as Americans have tried to adapt it to their own political causes, so again, we'll talk about that a little bit later. But first of all, I think it would be fun to start off with the historical moment that the anthem is all about. So this is the British attack on Fort McHenry, which is just off Baltimore in Maryland, in September 1814. And that means that we will be talking about a war that I think is genuinely never spoken about from one year to the next in Britain, except the King did mention it, didn't he, in his recent speech, made a very good joke about it. But he didn't say that in Britain, he said it in the United States. So on British soil, I don't think it has ever mentioned that is true. This is the war of 1812. And even for American listeners, I think, we'll have to concede that this war is very obscure, as in fact, reading an American historian about it. And he said, basically, we skim over this in schools. No one really talks about it. No one understands what it was about or what the point of it was, partly, I think because it's a draw, so no one really enjoys, no one really revels in it. I think there's a certain, been a certain degree of reveling on this podcast, hasn't there? It does, it does see the British burn down the White House. It does. Yeah, one of the great moments in history, and we will be looting to that today. So it's eclipsed in America, I think, by the independence struggle, the tax revolt. And it's eclipsed in Britain by the, you know, the World War against Napoleonic France. And it's basically a sequel to the American War of Independence and an offshoot of the Napoleonic Wars. And to cut a very long story short, this war, the war of 1812 broke out that summer for four reasons. So first of all, the Madison administration, so this is, I think, the fourth president of the United States, James Madison, not a terribly colorful or well-known president. He's chafing at Britain's trade embargo against Napoleonic France. And the Americans say, come on, why are we subject to the trade embargo? We want to be able to trade freely. We don't want the Royal Navy, you know, it's seizing our ships. Reason number two, they don't want the Royal Navy, I'm pressing American semen into the Royal Navy. So when the Royal Navy, you know, sees an American ship, they will take some of the Americans and force them to work on the British ship. People are sick of that. Number three, the Madison administration have expansionist ambitions. So they think, or the Brits are just distracted by what's going on in Europe. We can seize, upper and lower Canada. So that's sort of Ontario country. And that's something they've been kind of angling to do since the war of independence. Exactly. They have. They think they've got unfinished business, basically. They want to take what becomes Canada. And it kind of rumbles on, doesn't it, because there's that whole thing with a windmill. A windmill? We did that on a bonus episode. Great Canadian victory. And the Americans also think there are lots of sort of Native American Indian confederations that stand in the way of Westwood expansion that are allied to the British. Let's seize the opportunity to knock them out too. And finally, they think, you know, nothing builds a nation more than a war, a successful war. Let's have a second war of independence. We've had a lot of internal divisions recently. We can all rally around the flag. And Dominic, can I just ask, because the flag is going to be quite important in this story. At this point, it is 15,000, 15 stripes. Exactly right. Exactly. If you take the first year or so of the war, the Americans are on the attack. The British are on the defensive. The Americans launch their invasion of upper and lower Canada, and they think it's going to be a walk over. Thomas Jefferson, not a great friend of the rest of his history, says that it's the acquisition of Canada as far as the neighbourhood of Quebec will be a mere matter of marching. Was he ever right about anything? Sadly not. The warhawk, Henry Clay, said to Congress, you need, you know, you need to send a proper army, just send the Kentucky militia and they will lay Montreal and upper Canada at your feet. And I'm very happy to say, especially for happy on behalf of that Canadian listeners, that this is not true at all. Because the invasions of Canada are a complete and utter failure. And the British actually end up occupying parts of the United States, parts of Michigan and Maine. And this is, of course, a foundational moment in Canadian identity. So the one place that people do talk about the war of 1812 is in Canada because it's the central distinctive moment that marks them out, I think. And Dominic, of course, Canada is co-hosting with the United States and Mexico, this World Cup. And so this is another very important reason why we're doing this particular topic, isn't it? It's for our Canadian listeners. This is really Canadian story. Let them know we love them. Yeah, exactly. The following year, 1813, the British launched a naval offensive of their own, the Chesapeake Bay campaign. And basically the plan is to quote Rear Admiral George Coburn, who's in charge of it, we're going to lay waste to the shore, we're going to lay waste to all these towns within this vast bay, including the capital in Washington, DC. Because we want to cripple. America's commerce across the Atlantic, and that will turn public opinion in America against the war. And at first, the British do this in a sort of half-hearted way, but then by 1814, Napoleon has been beaten. So he's abdicated for the first time and he's been sent off to Elba. And so the British say, "Well, the Americans are still going, bizarrely, so why don't we divert resources now to knock them out of the war?" So let's set the scene. It's the summer of 1814, and the British are advancing up their Potomac River from the coast, they're heading towards Alexandria and Washington, D.C. And this is the context for Coburn, the rear admiral, and Major General Robbie Ross to carry out one of the most intrepid and inspiring operations in world history. An operation I know our American listeners love hearing about, which is the occupation of Washington and the burning down of the U.S. capital and the White House. Robbie Ross is an Irishman, isn't he? So it's a reminder of angler Irish operations. Yeah, Ireland and Great Britain standing shoulders as shoulder against a common foe. I think that's how we like to see it. Oh, warming. So they burn the White House, the Dolly Madison's dinner, and four days later they are heading for their next target, which is Baltimore. Baltimore, Maryland, at this point, is I think something like the third biggest city in the United States. It's a really important trading, harbour, and all of that. And they are in great spirits, the British. They've been drinking a lot, unsurprisingly, and they've been helping themselves to what they see as long overdue tax returns from the American rebels. And sad to say, there's a local busybody who's called Dr. Beans, Dr. William Beans, and he lives in rural Maryland, and he tries to stop the British from basically looting and pillaging. They're not looting and pillaging. You've just said that collecting taxer is. That was just me putting myself in Dr. Beans's head. I don't agree with him. He's obviously a terrible man. Oh, thank God I'm on hand to provide the objectivity that a good history podcast would provide. So, quite rightly, our brave lads arrested this bloke Beans, and they took him down the river towards Baltimore. And some of his friends wanted to petition the British for Dr. Beans' release. This was a very common practice during the war. He would basically go into flag of truce and say, "Please can we have a so-and-so back?" And his friends decided to get a go-between, and the go-between in question is a lawyer called Francis Scott Key, who we mentioned right at that start of the show. We did indeed, so he's the author of the anthem. Now, American list has, of course, recognized his name, but there might not be no loads about him. Key was born in 1779 to a fairly well-off family in Maryland. His father had been in George Washington's rebel army. He'd been a judge. Francis Scott Key grew up in the family plantation. So, he's from a slave-owning family. He was from a slave-owning family, which will be important later on. He was a well-known lawyer. He had 11 children, which I think seems a lot. He lives with his wife and 11 children in Georgetown. He does various big trials. He speaks before the Supreme Court. He's quite a well-known person. And the fact that he is a slave-owner, Tom, I'm glad you've flagged it because it is going to make this anthem controversial later on. So we'll come to that. Anyway, the 2nd of September, 1814, Key writes to his mother, and he says, "I'm going in the morning to Baltimore to proceed in a flag vessel to General Ross. Old Dr. Beans of Marlbrough is taken prisoner by the enemy. And some of his friends have urged me to go and get him out and to procure his release. I don't know where he is, but I'll do my best." So he goes off to Baltimore. He finds the local United States agent who deals with prisoners of war. They rent a ship, and they sail off towards Chesapeake Bay, and they're looking for the British fleet because they think that's where this bloke Beans is being held. And on the 7th of September, they find HMS Tonon, near the mouth of the Potomac in Chesapeake Bay now. Some people may remember HMS Tonon, Tom. Do you remember it? That's the question. Well, the name is, of course, the French one. And we have done a series on a particular British admiral who's very good at capturing French ships. We have. Now, can anyone remember the name of the admiral? Is it Admiral Nelson? It is! Superb. So Tonon had been captured at the Nile. It had fought splendidly under Captain Charles Tyler at Trafalgar. It had captured a French ship, and now the Tonon is fighting the Americans. Anyway, it's a key approach as the Tonon, under flag of truce, and he's allowed a board. He and this agent, these with, they are invited for dinner by the British. They're treated very well, the British bigwigs. Well, because Ross, the Irishman, has a tremendous reputation for chivalry. Very chauverous. Charming man. So when they say to Ross, "Can we have doctors bloke, doctor beans?" Ross says, "I don't know." And key has brought letters from wounded British soldiers, British prisoners of war, saying that American doctors as a group have been very kind to them. And Ross reads these letters and he says, "Oh, well, okay, fine. You can have, you know, maybe beans can go." Because he's a warm-hearted man. He's, yeah, kindly. So it looks like they're just going to go about with this bloke beans. However, while they've been having dinner, the Americans have overheard the British officers talking about how they're going to attack Baltimore. And so the British say, "Well, since you've heard us talking about this, you're going to have to stay with us until the operation is over." And so key and beans are transferred to another ship, HMS Surprise, which is towing the little ship that they'd arrived on. And they all move together up the Chesapeake towards Baltimore. And on the 11th, the Americans are allowed to go back to their own ship, which is still tethered to HMS Surprise. And they're basically under military guard. The 12th, nothing happens. They're just hanging around a bit bored. And then at dawn on the 13th, the British open the bombardment of Baltimore. Or more specifically, they open the bombardment of the fort that guards the entrance to Baltimore Harbor, which is fort McHenry, which is the fort in the Anthem. So key, and this medical busy body, this massive fun sponge, Dr. Piedness, who's been trying to stop our brave lads looting. They're watching this from a safe distance on their ship. There are eight miles away. And they can see that this bombardment is a really big deal. So the attack is led by HMS Eribus, which is firing Congrieve rockets. So if you know the American national anthem, the rocket's red glare, these are the Congrieve rockets being fired by HMS Eribus. I mean, they're dangerous, aren't they? They're very dangerous. They basically, the British use them to burn down Copenhagen. Yeah. You know, anyone who remembers that Nelson era podcasts will remember that, you know, naval bombardments are not a bundle of laughs. No. So there are just as that Copenhagen. There are also bomb vessels, specialist bomb vessels. So in this case, they're called terra volcano devastation, meteors and ethnic. What, you wouldn't want to be attacked by ships with the names like that? You wouldn't. Do we still have ships like that? And they're all navy. I don't think we do. Now, we don't have any ships, do we? Yeah, we don't have any ships. These ships are firing shells at the fort, and these are the bombs bursting in air from the Anthem. And over the next 24 hours or so, they fire a total of 700 rockets, 1,500 shells. However, although you quake the thought of these rockets, shells, Tom, they're not very effective because Fort McHenry is equipped with very powerful artillery, so the British have to stay back at the very limits of their range. And they don't really do that much damage. They kill four people. They wound 24, but they don't really have any impact whatsoever on the fort's defenses. I wonder what Nelson would have done. He would have launched an operation at land that would have evolved him losing an arm, surely. Falling in love with an unsuitable American adventurer. There's a good historical novel in that. Anyway, key. Francis Scott Key is watching this. He can't tell that they're not having any effect. He's just in awe at the general spectacle. It seemed as though mother earth had opened and was vomiting, shot on shell and a sheet of fire and brimstone, he says. Anyway, darkness falls. There's just this kind of vague red blur in the distance. More stuff is exploding on the walls of the fort. Basically, he all night he's kind of watching this and he's thinking like, has the fort fallen. You know, what's going on? Because he's not a military man. So he doesn't appreciate that the British Navy is operating sportingly at the limits of what it can actually do. Exactly. Dawn breaks on the 14th and the fort still stands. And as every morning, the American commander, Major George Armistead, orders his men to raise this massive national flag, which as you said at the beginning, has 15 stars and 15 stripes. Now this flag, which is now in the Smithsonian, actually, this flag has a history of its own. So a year earlier, Major Armistead had actually said, you know, the British are probably going to attack Baltimore. We need a bloody big flag. We want to have a flag so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance. So they basically wanted this flag as a sort of emblem of defiance. And he commissioned the flag, which is absolutely massive. It's 42 feet by 30 feet. He commissioned it from a Baltimore widow called Mary Pickersgill. And she took a six weeks to make it. She made it with a teenage daughter and her nieces and a servant. I don't want to do this. So boring. Another star. Yeah, exactly. And they used, they used 300 yards of English wool bunting, which is my probably my favorite kind of bunting. The stars were made of cotton. They saved them on afterwards. And she was paid $405.90 for it. And then Armistead gave him or another hundred dollars for a smaller flag called a storm flag. So during the bum bum the storm flag was flying and then a dawn they raised as usual this massive national flag. Oh I didn't know that. So actually I always thought that the flag you know had been hit by shell and all rock concrete rockets and stuff but was still flying boldly but that's a kind of cheat. It is a cheat, the total con, yeah. So the huge flag appears. Francis Scott Key sees the flag and he says to himself, oh this is brilliant. The fort is held out. Now of course he thinks this is a great underdog tribe. What he doesn't know is there was actually never really any possibility that the fort would fall because the British too far away. But anyway, on land the British should have been advancing and that hasn't done terribly well either. I'm sorry to say that major general Ross, are you complimenting earlier on. He has been shot by a sniper at the battle of North Point. So in this grotesque act of cowardice and cheating he's been killed. No, yeah the British have fallen back. They didn't write an anthem about that. No, so a couple of days later the British say, oh this is this is too tough on up to crack. We'll call off the operation. Anyway, while that's been going on, Key has been sitting on this ship still kind of basically under guard, twiddling his thumbs. So what's the guy to do when you're twiddling your thumbs? Maybe write an anthem? Well, not an anthem. He decides to write a poem. Oh, right. So you will often read on the internet that he writes it on the back of an envelope that he'd found in his pocket. It turns out that this is an untruth. He didn't write it on the envelope and there's a historian who has dug deep into this story called Mark Klaig. And he says, no, envelopes weren't used in 1814. They were, or rather, they were only used on very special occasions by the rich. So Key would have, if he was going to have to write a letter, he would have folded it over and not used an envelope. So he could have had an envelope. So with ceiling wax, I guess, on a stamp. And Key would undoubtedly have taken a lot of blank paper with him for the negotiations for this doctor's release and to write a letter to President Madison about how he was getting on. This would have been good paper and not scrap paper. So on some of this high quality note paper, Key writes his poem. And finally that evening, he, it's what will be then, the 16th or something. He and the others are allowed to go back to Baltimore and he's got a room at the Indian Queen Hotel and he finishes his poem there. And the handwritten draft of the poem, you can see at the Maryland Historical Society and you can actually see how he's written three verses and then he's kind of running out of space and he has to cram the fourth verse into the last kind of inch of paper. It's like a sort of child's letter. We've all been there. Yeah, exactly. Now, I mean, he was wasting his time because no one sings the fourth verse. No one cares about the fourth verse. It's the first verse that everyone sings, right? So it's the story. Oh, say, can you see by the dawn's early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming. Then there's all his stuff about the bombs and the rockets and then the final lines. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave are the land of the free and the home of the brave? It's very kind of 1818 tens slightly gushing romantic kind of rhetoric and not true to reiterate. He shows this to his brother-in-law who commands a local militia unit and his brother-in-law takes it to a printer. They run off a thousand copies and then they hand them out to the garrison of Fort Henry. And then the really key thing, his brother-in-law gives it to the Baltimore Patriot newspaper, which prints it under the title "Defense of Fort McHenry" and then other papers copy it. So as we approach the break, a couple of things about this poem. I've called it a poem and in fact, you said it was a song and I said, I know it's a poem, but I was being a little bit unfair there because actually it's somewhere in between the two. It's a thing called a broadside ballad. And basically what a broadside ballad was, you would write lyrics or you know, write a poem to fit a very familiar tune. You would say, this tune is a banger. I'm going to write new words for this tune. I'm going to publish them in a newspaper. And the reason you would use an old tune is that even if you wanted to write a new tune, it's more expensive to print music than it is to print words. And the reason is because you have to do the musical notation. They have to be engraved by hand so you'd be better to reuse an old tune. And also, copyright law is not all it could be, because there is no copyright law. You, Tom, might write lyrics to the tune of "Tax Man" by the Beatles. Yes. And you would publish them in the Daily Telegraph and you would put a little note saying you know, tune "Tax Man" by the Beatles. And there'd be nothing the Beatles could do about it. No, there'd be no copyright law. Correct. If your lyrics were a hit, you would hope that other newspapers, the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the Guardian, probably not, I think. Which depends, depends. These other newspapers might reprint your lyrics and they'd kind of go viral and you'd be the talk of the town. Other people would shake your hand as they saw you go by. And actually, Francis Scott Key has formed for doing this. So in 1805, he'd written his first patriotic broadside ballad when the warrior returns, which was celebrating US naval victories against the Barbary Corsairs in Tripoli. Oh, yeah. The American Navy was always fighting them, weren't they? Yes, exactly. There were some of their first wars. Bizarrely against North African, nominally Ottoman kind of, I don't know, the Emirates or something on the coast of North Africa. They're always capturing people and taking them into slavery. Yes, exactly. This is the third verse of when the warrior returns. And if you know the star-spangled banner, you will spot the similarities. In the conflict resistance, it's tall they endured till a foes fled dismayed from the war's desolation and pale, breamed the crescent. It's splendor obscured by the light of the star-spangled flag of our nation, where each radiant star gamed a meteor of war and the turban heads bowed to its terrible glare. Now mixed with the olive, the laurel shell wave, and form a bright wreath for the brows of the brave. So the rhythm might sound familiar because this is written for the same tune as the star-spangled banner. And that tune, this will shock our American listeners. This will uphold them and make them question existence itself. It's an English tune. It's the tune is called the enacreontic song. And it was written in 1775 by a man called John Stafford Smith. Now you'll sometimes read online that it was a baudi drinking song of the kind that no doubt the author's cricket team sing to jean themselves up a tea between innings. Do you not sing baudi drinking songs? No, we would sing anacreontic songs. With you, surely with you. Because we are great fans of the ancient Greek poet Anacrian, whose lyric poetry was designed to be sung. Well, and so there is a kind of classical model here. Yes. There's fate hint of Emma Hamilton's attitude about it. That's true. Trying to bring to life a kind of ancient Greek art form. I think that's kind of basically what's going on. I should never have opened the door to Emma Hamilton repairing this podcast. Anyway, she has. So basically, there was a club in London, founded in 1766 called the enacreontic club. And this was for men who were interested in music. And basically, when they would go to the club, there would be a professional singer often who was hired to sing this song. And it would be accompanied on the harpsichord. So it's not really a baudi vibe. No, no. Yeah, the men would all listen to this song and then they would sing some songs of their own. Now, key knows about this song because versions of it are already popular in the United States. So there's actually a historian at the University of Newcastle in our own country, Dr. Oscar Jensen, who was looked into this. And it had been taken up by abolitionists. So a version of it called millions be free had been produced by a Liverpool abolitionist to celebrate the fall of the Bastille. Thomas Payne sang it, Mary Wollstone craft wrote about it. And it was taken by abolitionists to America in the mid-1790s. It was printed in New York and Baltimore interestingly under the title freedom triumphant. It spread. People liked the tune. American politicians used it. So there was a song supporting John Adams in the presidential election of 1796 that used it. And in fact, by 1820, there are 80 different songs at least using the inachreontic melody. So they all follow the same pattern. Each verse is eight lines long. There was a rhyme at the end of each line. And there was also an extra rhyme in the middle of the fifth line. So every verse has actually nine rhymes. So Frances Scott Key undoubtedly writes his star-spangled banner to fit this pattern. And it's precisely because it's so familiar because people already know about it that it's a hit. People like songs they already know. So it's printed by more newspapers. By October of 1814, it's been printed newspapers from New England to Georgia. And that autumn of 1814, a shop in Baltimore. The car music store starts selling copies of the lyrics and the owner Thomas car is the person who gives it its title the title we know today the star spangled banner and is he publishing that with the music or just the lyrics and people are you know he assumes that people will recognise the tune that goes with it that's an excellent question I would guess you could buy the music but it would be more expensive because it's more expensive to produce so that's how the thing is created but of course that's only half the story because there's absolutely no talk of this point that it could be the national anthem and it won't become the national anthem for more than a century and actually right from the beginning there is a shadow over this song and this is the allegation that the song is a glorification of slavery so I mean I have to say that this came as a bombshell to me may come as a bombshell to many patriotic American listeners so please join us after the break where Dominic will be justifying this claim this episode is brought to you by the Times and the Sunday Times. Thomas another summer of top international football returns it's truly incredible isn't it to think about how much the world has changed between the various tournaments looking back to when England hosted back in 1966 everyone in the crowd supporting England were waving union jacks so yeah what fascinating trends does that illustrate and I suppose the last time the United States hosted the tournament was in 1994 and the mood in America in the early 1990s you know the Cold War was over Clinton was in the White House I was there for that I was in Boston really I mean that's an aspect of the story this very rarely reported on your presence so you know what this reminds me of Tom it reminds me that the future is always uncertain you never know what's coming but the facts need not be uncertain and when the world feels like it's moving too fast the Times and the Sunday Times empower you to make smarter more confident decisions click or tap the banner now to learn more or visit thetimes.com 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with the suggestion that the star-spangled banner might be as well as the glorification of america and liberty the glorification of slavery as well and i can only imagine that thousands of americans cancelling their subscriptions but you are not the first to come up with this allegation right not at all the national association for the advancement of colored people so in november 2017 this venerable civil rights group actually petitioned congress to scrap the star-spangled banner as the national anthem the president of the california and double acp alice huffman said and i quote it's racist it doesn't represent our community it is anti black so what's going on here because to the degree that i am familiar with the lyrics i i don't see anything about slavery in it i mean there's one mention of safe isn't that but that's about it well okay so let's get into this because it's actually it's a fascinating subject and opens up a lot more of the history of the 1810s so people only really sing the first verse in the third verse in the second half now remember this is something that nobody ever sings franta scotkey is exulting in the aftermath of the british withdrawal no refuge could save the higherling and slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave and the star-spangled banner in triumphed a thwave or the land of the free and the home of the brave and the issue focuses on those words the higherling and slave now lots of commentators say without really thinking about it oh well this must be african-american slaves who were trying to escape from their owners and flee to the british i see i would not have said that i would have said that these are insults applied to soldiers fighting under the british crown right that dates from the years of the american revolution yes and the slaves are the british soldiers who are subjects to a king and the higherlings are the hessian mercenaries who were brought in yep and so they're applying that rhetoric now in a new war that's that's what i would say that's what i had assumed i my initial reaction was to completely agree with you i thought that too franta scott kees biographer mark clague uh distinguished historian in the united states he absolutely agrees with you he says listen americans in the late 18th and early 19th century use the words higherling and slave to refer to british subjects of king jorge the third they use them as exactly as you say to refer to hired mercenaries and their local collaborators and he says actually when you look at american propaganda the word slavery is often a code word for submission to the british king illoyally exact yeah and this is in the context of canada as well yes exactly which hasn't been conquered so yeah that's what i'd have thought and we in britain are very used to this issue because of course there is the issue of raw britania so in raw britania the words britans never never shall be slaves or whatever it is you know there was some talk in 2020 or so or raw britain should be cancelled it's terrible it's a glorif you know it's very tasteless about slavery but actually the slavery being talked about in raw britania it's about the Vikings isn't it because it's about king Alfred it's about king Alfred but obviously it's like it's a sort of it's using submission to the Vikings as a metaphor for submission to catholic spain france etc yeah but can i also ask it it derives from the kind of poem derives from an acronym who is an ancient Greek and the ancient Greek ideals of liberty is obviously very current the roots Roman ideals of liberty i mean it's part of the kind of the language of the american culture class in this period yeah and the counterpoint to the liberty of the Athenians or the Romans you know say the Athenians it's the slavery of those who are fighting for the person king at marathon yeah of course i agree with all that i totally agree however when you look more closely into this there is another side of the story there are reasons to think that he was talking about african american slaves and what is to do with the context and the other to do is to do with key himself so if we start with the context in the first half we describe how George coburns subjective was to raid and destroy the towns and harbors on the Atlantic seaboard to guide his raiding parties he needed local intelligence and from the moment he arrived in 1813 he and the other british captains relied on one group above all which was escaped slaves right and that again is something that goes back to the american war of independence isn't it because this was a british strategy to offer slaves in the south their freedom if they would join the british exactly so at first british ships and british parties would attract individual runaway slaves but over time they start to attract larger groups and family groups and so on and when coburn came back in 1814 he'd been wintering and bermuda but then he comes back he doubled down on this and he said to his captains i want you to go out of your way to appeal to the local slave population and i quote let the landings you make be more for the protection of the desertion of the black population than with a view to any other advantage the great point to be attained is the cordial support of the black population with them properly armed and back to 20,000 british troops mr madison will be hurled from his throne and as part of this he makes a very specific promise all runaway slaves will be welcomed by the british and under no circumstances will they be handed back when the british tried this policy in the american war of independence it was obviously massively compromised because the push is to the next. themselves were defending the plantations in the Caribbean, on which there were slaves. Slavery was not illegal. By this point, you have a British Foreign Secretary who is about to go to the Congress of Vienna and press for the abolition of the slave trade with the other great powers. Is that something you think that would have filtered through to black Americans? Very hard to say because you wouldn't really have, you wouldn't find much textual evidence. Yeah, how would you find it? But maybe it's just kind of, you know, it's on the grapevine. I mean, it would be big news, I would imagine. Yeah, it's possible. The British government has turned abolitionist. There is absolutely no doubt that the news of what he is offering does, you know, filter through. And yes, they could, you could well imagine people saying, well, the British have already talked about scrapping it. And what actually, he does that really horrifies white American opinion. He says, all male runaway slaves will be armed. They will be given red uniforms and they will be put in a special unit called the Corps of Colonial Marines. Yeah, because this is the nightmare that haunted the original Ku Klux Klan, isn't it? In that series that we did after the Civil War, nothing ever frightens white, southern slave holders more than the prospect of armed black men, you know, rising up against them or being emboldened against them. Anyway, this Corps of Colonial Marines did see action. They went into battle in Virginia and the end of May and they did really well. The British officer said I was highly pleased by the conduct of the colonial Marines, every individual of which events the greatest eagerness to come to action with their former masters. And Coburn himself wrote, they trigger the most general and undisguised alarm among American civilians. They were even former slaves involved in the Bernie of Washington, which must have been sweet revenge for them, you would guess. Anyway, the Americans, by contrast, think this is absolutely terrible. They think it's an outrage. They think it's cheating, but they think it's more than cheating. They think it's an affront to the laws of God and of nature to arm their former slaves against them. One senior officer writes in August 1814, "And Negroes are flocking to the enemy from all quarters, which they convert into troops of addictive and repatious, with the most minute knowledge of every bypass. They leave us as spies upon our posts and our strength, and they return upon us as guides and so soldiers and incendiaries. A guy actually from the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian, writes, Christopher Wilson, "The iron is the very point when key is writing his poem about the land of the free. Black African American slaves are trying to escape the land of the free and to reach those British ships in Baltimore Harbor that are the antagonists of the poem. And as to quote Christopher Wilson, this guy from the museum, they knew that they were far more likely to find freedom and liberty under the Union Jack than they were under the Star Spangled Banner." He sounds an excellent curator. I commend him for his authenticity. This is literally the best story we've ever done on this podcast. Anyway. The war ends in 1815, basically a draw, and Coburn is true to his word. He now has about 6,000 escaped slaves and the treaty called for the return of all United States property. So the Americans expected to get them back, and Coburn did not give them back because everything has changed, because the British government is now committed to abolitionism. Well, at least the abolition of the slave trade, let's say, exactly. So most of these people actually ended up in Canada, but a lot of the colonial Marines, so the people who had seen action, went to Trinidad. This is an incredible story, by the way. They were given special villages under the command of their old sergeants. They settled there, and they were called "Americans." Wow. And they are still there today, and they're still called "Americans." Goodness. That's amazing. It's an incredible story. Anyway, to go back to the words of Francis Scott, he's anthem. No refuge could save the Highling and Slave from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave. I think it is perfectly possible he is talking about these people whose flight has been such a big story. He is saying, basically, we will catch up with you, or you will die. I mean, it works both ways, though, doesn't it? Of course. I mean, that's kind of maybe the double meaning. Yeah. Yeah. However, there's one of the aspects I said, there were two reasons to think it was more complicated, and the other one is key himself. Now, as the rest of history, ever since we started the podcast, we've never been into cancelling people or setting ourselves up as hanging churches. However, I think, as an outsider, you can see why black Americans might find it difficult to celebrate Francis Scott Key as an individual. He has, at best, a very ambiguous attitude to his slavery. He own slaves himself. He bought his first slave in 1800, he owned six by 1820, when he died in 1843, he had eight. He's sometimes represented as a lawyer slave owner seeking the return of their property. On the other hand, he did free some of his slaves. He represented slaves who sought their freedom, and where a friend of his liberated his slaves in his will, Francis Scott Key was one of these actors, and he worked to get them their freedom. And was he doing this before he wrote this poem after I think? There may be his attitudes evolved. Well, I think it's actually as complicated. He is a founder, member, and a very keen fundraiser for something called the American Colonization Society. And the goal of the American Colonization Society is to send black men and women who have been freed to Africa. And this is the project that actually culminates in the foundation of Liberia in 1847. Now, you may look at this and say, well, that's a very nice thing to do. Actually, most of the people who backed this society were slaveholders. It was particularly popular in Maryland. It was particularly popular with the plant at elite. It's kind of generated by an anxiety that white and black Americans can never live together. Yes, exactly. So it's complicated because on the one hand, these people would undoubtedly have said themselves, we're motivated by Christian charity. We want to find somewhere for these people to live. We want to find them at home. On the other hand, the people who fundraise, the people who are activists for this society are often explicitly racist. They say, we're a white country. We don't want free, you know, black men and women as citizens among us, get rid, send them to Africa. And actually a lot of abolitionists and a lot of black people themselves hate this colonization society because they see it as, I mean, they see it as an ambiguity racist. As for abolitionism, key is not a fan of abolitionism at all. So you mentioned Nelson. We talked about Nelson and slavery. Nelson is not a fan of abolitionism. But I don't think it's something that's on his mind very much. He's not a fan of it because he thinks it will weaken the British Empire. It's commerce, it's trade and all of this. But Nelson never actively campaigns against abolitionism. Francis Scott Key does as district attorney for Washington DC in the 1830s. He is a tireless foe of abolitionism. He brings a libel case against one anti-slavery activist, a guy who had said, you know, there's no justice for black people in this town. Key basically drove him out with this libel case. Most famously, he prosecuted a guy from New York who was living in Georgetown merely for having a trunk full of anti-slavery tracts. Key accused him of seditious libel and inciting slaves and blacks to revolt. And he tried to turn this case into a massive political set piece, I think because he wanted to use it to boost his own political career. Are you willing, gentlemen? He said in his closing speech, to abandon your country to permit it to be taken from you and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the Negro. Anyway, he lost this case. Actually, the bloke went free and he ended up humiliated and his political ambitions were punctured. So when you put that alongside the issue of the context of the War of 1812, I think it is actually, it is, it becomes more and more plausible. How is the distinction between the slave and the hiling? The hiling could be collaborators, paid collaborators. Okay, so white collaborators. So the nation magazine, the very liberal journal, keys message to the blacks fighting for freedom was unmistakable. We will hunt you down and the search will leave you in terror because when we find you, your next stop is the gloom of the grave. So this is the 21st century take by a lot of kind of liberal writers. I mean, I think there's enough ambiguity, though, for listeners to make up their own minds. So some people may reject all of this and say, "No, no, no, he's obviously just talking about using the rhetoric of the American Revolution or something." I mean, I suppose that it sounds like this is a man who thinks a lot about slavery and liberty. And I guess it has many different shades of meaning. Often, particularly in America, those shades of meaning are in direct conflict with each other. So perhaps he couldn't resolve those ambiguities. And that's very fair minded verdict, actually. Anyway, back to the song itself. Obviously, it strikes a chord in the War of 1812 and it never really fades from view afterwards. So there's an account from a diarist, George Templeton Strong is writing about New York City in 1837. A lot of tipsy loafers are just going past screaming out the star-spangled banner at the top of their lungs in all sorts of diabolical discords, but it sounds gloriously. It's a glorious thing altogether, words and music no matter how it's mangled. I mean, it often is mangled though, isn't it, because it's so difficult to sing. Exactly, it is mangled. It's also mangled because at this point, people are often changing the words. So people would play the song at 4th of July celebrations and things, and it was well known. known enough for people to start parodying it and to produce political variations. So there's a temperance version very popular in the mid-19th century. Oh, who has not seen by the dawn's early light some poor bloated drunkard to his home weekly reeling? That's a great anthem. Both sides in the Civil War claim it, that's really interesting. So the Confederates have their own flag, of course, they're not going to celebrate the Star Spangled Banner. Or are they? Because they see him as one of their own. A man of Maryland, which is a border state, a slaveholder. The Richmond examiner, 1861, let us never surrender to the North, the noble song, the Star Spangled Banner. It is southern, in origin, in sentiments, in poetry and song. Or they shouldn't have abolished the flag there. But they do have a Star Spangled Banner of their own. I suppose they do, yes. But not the Star Spangled Banner. Not the, no. But it's still not the National Anthem. Towards the end of the 19th century, it starts to become a little bit more formalized, a bit more institutionalized. The U.S. Naval Academy starts playing it morning and evening in 1889 when they raise and lower the flag. In 1892, the commander of Fort Mead in South Dakota orders that it's played at the retreat. He tells the state governor, the state governor says, oh, it brings idea. I'll get the state militia to play it whenever we, you know, the retreat and what not. He tells the secretary of war, the secretary of war says, oh, I love that idea. Let's get every army post to play it every evening. And the flag itself, by this point, is becoming a secret relic too. So it's stayed in the family of the bloke who was the commander of the fort, armistede. And this is the big one, not the, not the one that actually got shot at. No, this is the huge one. And one reason that the huge one is so battered is because the family would give away pieces to friends. They would say, would you like a piece at the Star Spangled Banner from the, from the song? And so the flag ends up having lots of holes in it. And actually the Smithsonian, when it got a hold of the flag in 1907, tried to buy back some of the hole. Oh, so they didn't blame it on the red coats or by the way, they did blame it on the red coats. Anyway, then there's a huge upsurge of patriotism during the First World War. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson, we talked about him in our Coocus clan episodes. Of course, another southerner, perhaps not coincidentally, he directs the display to all military occasions. One complication though at this point, there is no standard arrangement. So Wilson gets the US Bureau of Education to sort one out. They get a series of experts. One of them is a, what famous American composer, John Philip Susa. And they get a basically government-approved version. Can I just ask, do we know whether over the 90th century and up to this point, whether any eyebrows are raised over that, the Highling and Slave comment, or do they just not pay any attention to it? I don't think people massively pay attention to it. And not least because, as we will see later, there is a rival abolitionist version. Right, okay. They have complaints, and we will see in just a sec. People have a lot of objections to this as the anthem, but that is not one of the principal ones. And just one quick side note before we talk about how it becomes an anthem, it's already being played by the end of the 1910s at baseball. So it's first played at the World Series in 1918, a Komisky Park, the Chicago Cubs were hosting the Red Sox, and a game won a military band played this song, though it's not at this point the national anthem. And we heard it being played at a baseball game, didn't we, in November in LA? We did indeed, yeah. And very exciting it was too. Very stirring, yeah. Yes, exactly. But at the end of the First World War, the United States still does not have a national anthem. And this is probably a good point to just talk for a second about national anthems more generally. Such a complicated topic, don't it? It is a massively complicated topic. Now we did our first national anthem episode back when we did a series on the French Revolution, and you took us through the history of the Marseilles. Yes. Which is sometimes described as one of the world's first national anthem, though it's sort of, it competes, doesn't it? With the subject of our next episode, which is God Save the King. So I, in that episode on the Marseilles, I did describe it as the world's first national anthem, but I have now repented of that opinion as we will be discussing in our next episode on God Save the King. The Marseilles is the first national song, but not the first national anthem. And people who find that intriguing and fascinating do tune into the next episode, because we got it all. So at the early 20th century, most countries don't have a national anthem. The countries that do tend to be countries that have recently been invented. So Latin American countries above all, Argentina has one, Brazil has one as we will find out. Peru has one. But in Europe, their scene is a bit torjory, a bit gimmicky, a by and large, and often the countries with national anthems, Britain and France aside, tend to be made up countries like Belgium or Italy, countries that have to invent an identity for themselves. But in the 1920s, you've got a lot of new countries, so that adopting anthems, the United States doesn't want to be left out. There's a congressman again from Maryland, so Francis Scott Key's home state called John Charles Lymphagom. And he introduces a bill again and again to make this at the anthem, and he keeps losing. And the reason he keeps losing is not because of the words, "hiring" and "slave." It's because A, some people say it's a British melody. Why would we have a British melody as our national anthem? Yeah, why would we have the English languages? Yeah, it's exactly. Well, that's something on which American listeners might care to reflect. Pacifists, and of course there are a lot of pacifists in the wake of the First World War, don't like it because it celebrates war. So that's a big thing. And the biggest objection is musical. You've already mentioned this. People say it is just too high. The melody is weird, it's unsingable, and it's dull for a moment into the world of musicology. The Star Spangled Banner demands a range of 19 semitones, and even some professional singers are not capable of that range. And Dominic, what exactly does that mean? 19 semitones. Well, Tom, if members of the rest of the Cystric Club will be able to hear me explaining semitones in a future bonus episode. I can't promise it will come immediately, but one day, before the end of this podcast, I will undoubtedly be doing a bonus episode on this very subject. That is something for people to look forward to, definitely. And actually, some of the critics combine all those in one, all those objections. So there's a Christian scientist called Augusta Emma Stetson. That's a great business. In June 1922, took out a massive adverts in the New York Tribune with a headline. The Star Spangled Banner can never become our national anthem. And she says it has its violent, unsingable cadences can never express the spiritual ideals upon which the nation was based. Never has Congress. And never will Congress legalize an anthem which sprang from the lowest qualities of human sentiment. God forbids it. It's amazing that all that the Hylingsafe stuff isn't even entering the equation here. No, not at all. And she doesn't even mention that. Now, the thing is, they don't have to choose this. There are alternatives. All through the 19th century, probably the leading candidate had been another song, Hale Columbia. Hale Columbia had been composed for Washington's first inaugural as president in 1790. So there's that, but that's gone into decline a bit by the 20th century. So that's not going to win. Then by the 1920s, the other big rival is America the Beautiful. And this was written by an English literature professor, Catherine Lee Bates. She went on a trip to Colorado in the 1890s, 1893. She wrote this, "Hymn have praised the American landscape. If you look at the lyrics of America, the Beautiful, it's not very well known outside America, but Americans love it. It's quite generic and waffly, which is, you know, yeah, there's a kind of craze for those kind of anthems in the late 19th century, isn't there? Yes, there is. They're all like that. Actually, when you look at, I mean, we get to Brazil in a couple of weeks, they're to South Africa. They're very kind of generic. A lot of these anthems. Anyway, America the Beautiful, consistently very popular. In the 1960s, there was quite a ground sweat of support for scrapping the Star Spangled Banner and having America the Beautiful instead. And people have always said, it's easier to sing. It's a better tune. You can do more fun things with it. We've got the wrong anthem. Anyway, America the Beautiful didn't win. The Star Spangled Banner won precisely because of its military associations. So the lobby group, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, organized a petition. They got five million names. Congress approved it. And President Herbert Hoover in 1931 signed it into law. But it has never not been controversial. And obviously in the post-war years, post-second world war, the controversies were about interpretations of the anthem. So I already mentioned some of them. At the 1968 World Series, Jose Feliciano, a Puerto Rican singer and guitarist, played it. He did a kind of Latin jazz, slightly foki kind of interpretation. And people said it's terribly disrespectful. It's awful. And the disrespect is because the same reverence that Americans display towards the flag is now being applied towards the anthem. Is that right? Yeah. And that's something that actually I think Americans, some of our Americanists may not realize that not all countries have the same attitude to the national anthem. So for example in Britain, I think it's fair that God saved the king. I mean, most people kind of laugh when they hear God say of the king. Or indeed, God saved the queen, which we will be discussing in our next episode. Exactly. The interpretations of it are seen as completely valid and fair and people have fun with it. It's not a sacred relic. Another controversial moment of course, Jimmy Hendrix is, I was bad said, Jimmy Carter's guitarist. I would have been money to see that. Yeah. He would be sitting there and his cardigan. His cardigan. His cardigan and acoustic guitar. It's surrounded by peanuts or people dressed as peanuts. I think we have a section of peanuts. Jimmy Hendrix to this guitar solo, a woodstock obviously in 1969. That was one of 60 renditions of the Star Spangled Banner that Hendrix gave in the late 60s. But he'd been in the army, hadn't he? So perhaps he could get away with it. The issue there is, I think, as of 1968 in Jose Flesiano, it's bound up with Vietnam, it's seen as disrespectful to the flag. The Star Spangled Banner is playing the Mexican Olympics in 1968 when Tommy Smith and John Carlos do their famous black power salutes in the middle ceremony. My favorite controversy, I don't know if you're familiar with this one, Tom, came to a rodeo in Salem, Virginia in 2005 and the organizers of this rodeo had agreed to feature a visiting celebrity from the Republic of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. He prefaced his performance with the words with speech. We support your war of terror. May George Bush drink the blood of every single man, woman, and child of Iraq. As I remember, hit that was greeted with applause and cheers, wasn't it? It was greeted with applause and cheers. And then to the usual tune, he sang the words. Kazakhstan is the greatest country in the world. All other countries are run by little girls. Kazakhstan, number one, exporter of potassium. Other Central Asian countries have inferior potassium. And that was, of course, Sasha Baron Cohen playing Borat. And I think he knew exactly what he was doing. He'd done American history, Cambridge. He actually wrote his thesis on the civil rights movement and he had the same supervisor as supervise my PhD. Really? He learned from the West. Yeah. Yeah. So Borat, very controversial. But not the most controversial take on the Star Spangled Banner, right? Because I guess not. There's an even more famous one that you alluded to at the start of this episode. Yeah, so this is in 2016. San Francisco 49ers are playing their third pre-season game. The quarterback Colin Kaepernick takes the knee during the anthem and he says he wants to do it to protest police brutality towards African Americans. This kicks off this firestorm of argument. Kaepernick played out the season, but he then became a free agent to the end of the season and no team signed him, basically no team wanted to touch him. And he sued the NFL, but the case was settled out of court. And the whole gesture of the taking the knee obviously became a huge thing after George Floyd was killed in 2020. So people may remember. British listeners may remember that Keir Starmer. Yes, an Angela Rayner. An Angela Rayner. They posted a photograph of themselves very solemnly, taking the knee in Starmer's House of Commons office. And meanwhile, activists in the United States actually toppled the statue of Francis Scott Key in Golden Gate Park. So that statue had stood in Golden Gate Park San Francisco since 1887. And it has subsequently been replaced with 350 black steel figures that represent the Africans that were on the first slave ship to Virginia in 1619. And presumably that is because the controversy around the Star Spangled Banner has now expanded from the fact that it is simply the national anthem of the United States. Yeah. And that people are now more aware of the context in which it was written, I suppose. Yes. And I think if you are on the sort of, if you're on the left or if you're on the left, that particular argument, the sort of slightly reflex thing to say now is, oh, it's an anthem that glorifies slavery. And I think as we've established, there is at least ambiguity there. I mean, I think it's actually, I think it's impossible to be, you know, no one knows what was in Francis Scott's head when he when he wrote that. I mean, my personal view is, well, first of all, it's not my anthem. American listeners should not, you know, they can do what they like. It's not no business of ours, what anthem they have. I don't think it's entirely groundless to say that there's a slavery connection. And we know that Keon slaves, we know that he was a very, very determined foe of abolitionism. And personally, I think his text probably is aimed at slaves who are trying to escape and are helping the British. However, I think we've generally always had the position on the show that you can separate the art from the artist. And I think this is actually quite a nice example because we've already mentioned have temperance activists right there in version of it. But so did abolitionists. So this is the irony, the very people that Francis Scott Key was trying to suppress actually wrote their own version of his anthem. It was in 1844, it was in the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and it was by an activist called E.A. Attlee, and it ran as follows. Osay, do you hear the dawn's early light, the shrieks of those bondsmen whose blood is now streaming from the merciless lash, while our banner in sight with its stars mocking freedom is fitfully gleaming. Do you see the backspare? Do you mark every score of the whip of the driver, traced channels of gore, and say to their star-spangled banner yet wave, oh the land of the free and the home of the brave? So kind of bitterly ironic final lines. Now obviously, I think it would be to range to suggest that Americans might like to adopt that text rather than the one they have. But it's nevertheless worth bearing in mind that Key's text is not the only text of that anthem, and that anthems often tell more than one story. And as we'll see in the rest of this series, even the most bombastic song can tell very surprising and unexpected stories, and we'll be hearing one of those next time, won't we? We will, because we will be looking at God save the king, the anthem of both England and Scotland, who have qualified for the World Cup finals. And the story of that song is actually framed by many of the same issues and controversies that we've been talking about with reference to the star-spangled banner. And then after that, we will be looking at the German, the Dutch, the Brazilian, and the South African national anthems. Members of the rest of the history club, of course, can get immediate access to all of them, so if you like national anthems, I mean, this is your lucky day. National anthems, we've got them. But for now, Dominic, thanks so much for that. Goodbye, everyone. Bye-bye. [Music] [Music] [Music] Hello, everybody. Now, as those of you who are good children will know, here in Britain, on the 21st of June, it's Father's Day, but not just here in Britain. It's also Father's Day on the 21st of June in the United States, in Canada, and in the Republic of Ireland. So those are four countries that are united by dads who love to listen to the rest of history. And that is why we are offering an amazing 25% Father's Day discount on the subscription price to the Rest is History Club, because we are all hard. 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