…with brotherhood?

The song, “America, the Beautiful” got an entire day’s lesson in the Colorado State History class I had to pass in ninth grade. Katherine Lee Bates, an English professor from Wellesley College, came to Colorado Springs in 1893 to teach a summer class at Colorado College. As her train rolled across the plains of eastern Colorado, drawing closer to the dramatic front line of the Rocky Mountains spread across the horizon, she wrote in her journal about the landscape she was passing. Colorado Springs is near the base of Pike’s Peak, one of the taller mountains in the Rockies, and one day Bates took an excursion by train and then mule to the peak of the mountain, where she later said she felt as if all the beauty of America was laid before her, and inspired a poem to form in her mind. She eventually submitted the poem, entitled “Pike’s Peak” to a publication called The Congregationalist. When it was published in the July 4th edition in 1895, appeared under the title, “America the Beautiful.”

We learned that and other facts about the subsequent versions of the poem Bates re-published, and how it was eventually set to music by Samuel A. Ward, in class. What the textbook failed to mention is that Katherine Lee Bates was almost certainly lesbian…

Katherine Lee Bates lived with another Wellesley College professor, Katherine Corman. Corman taught Economics. Contemporaries described their relations ship as a “romantic friendship.” At least that what the polite people said. The less sympathetic people referred to their 25-year partnership as a “Boston Marriage,” which was an acceptable (but still somewhat derogatory) way to refer to a lesbian relationship in polite conversation at the time.

There are some who like to insist that women like Katherine and Katherine were simply friends who happened to live together (for 25 years, only parting when one woman died, and the surviving partner dressing as a widow and morning for years after the death of the other) because that’s what you had to do if you were a woman and wanted a career of your own. But at least one love letter from Bates of Corman was found among their papers. Bates published an entire book of poetry a couple of years after Corman’s death, dedicated to Corman and with an introduction that said Corman was the subject of most of the poems—and most of them are love poems.

Katharine Lee Bates lived for twenty-five years with Katharine Coman in a committed partnership that has sometimes been described as a “romantic friendship.” Bates wrote, after Coman died, “So much of me died with Katharine Coman that I’m sometimes not quite sure whether I’m alive or not.” — womenshistory.about.com

While it’s technically true that we don’t know anything about the sexual activity (if any) between the two, that is also technically true about nearly every single historical figure and their lawfully wedded spouse. Relationships aren’t just about sex, and some marriages don’t involve much if any sex. The evidence is quite clear that Katherine and Katherine loved each other, that they chose to live together, that they expressed their love to each other in writing when they were apart, and in other ways when they were together, and that everyone that knew them could see they were in love—otherwise their friends and admirers wouldn’t have referred to them so often as “a romantic friendship” while other people used the somewhat derogatory term.

Of course, that isn’t the only reason to laugh at the wingnuts who have gone apoplectic over a Coca Cola commercial that featured people singing “America, the Beautiful” in languages other than English. You can point and laugh at how many of them were posting their angry, all-caps rants about the Coke company defiling the national anthem, because this song is not the national anthem. You can roll your eyes at how many of those angry, “speak English, this is America!” posts are full of horrific misspellings and grammar errors. You can chuckle over the fact that most of them didn’t even notice that one of the families shown in the advertisement had two dads—though once it was pointed out they went into the expected new wave of outrage. You can giggle about the fact that many of them had ancestors who immigrated here a few generations ago who didn’t learn how to speak much English after coming here. You can laugh at the fact that this song they’re so angrily protecting was written by a lesbian. And you can have a long, Schadenfreude-laced laugh at the fact that a song which mentions the brotherhood of all people is being claimed as the sacred property of people who don’t understand what that phrase “with brotherhood from sea to shining sea” means.

I guess some people have problems with that concept. Just like they forget that the phrase, “love thy neighbor,” applies to everyone around you, not just the ones who look like you, agree with you, belong to the same church, dress like you, love like you, or speak the same native language.