By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--January 15, 2024
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Alabaster, noun
A dense, translucent, white or tinted fine-grained gypsum.
Katherine Lee Bates wrote the poem in 1893, a remarkable year by any standard. She traveled from Boston to Colorado Springs, observing and marvelling all the way. Stopping at Niagara Falls, then the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, she witnessed that astonishing celebration of the potential of free people.
Called the White City by admirers, by itself it would have been inspiration enough for the idea of alabaster cities. From Chicago Bates traveled out across the prairies and through the Sea of Grass to the edge of the Rocky Mountains. Later in the summer she ascended Pike’s Peak, where it has been reported she felt the inspiration for her poem.
That same year, in Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his paper titled The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Based on the maps of the census of population of 1890, Turner believed that the unbroken frontier had just come to an end, and with it the end of the first era of American history. The frontier explained the development of the American character, egalitarianism, democracy, and the restless drive of the pioneers and settlers.
First published in 1895, here is the way Katherine Lee Bates captured and condensed the sights she saw in that memorable year.
O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.
America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.
O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life.
America! America!
May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine.
O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.
America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.
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It’s humbling and inspiring just to read it silently. So many images and historical events come to mind and play in my memory. Themes from great films gain new meaning.
The words shock me now because they’ve long fallen into disuse. I grew up with this poem by Katherine Lee Bates put to music by Samuel Ward. We sang it in school from the elementary grades all the way through senior year. Singing it always made me feel proud and lucky to have been born here. It spoke to me of national pride and reminded me that many before me, the celebrated pilgrim feet and heroes proved in liberating strife, had made it possible for me to live a blessed life in North America. One stanza was about my dad, my uncles, and my grandfather, and many others before them. It’s solemn. It makes me pause and reflect. My eyes narrow. I feel chills.
As a child I hoped to one day see the places celebrated in the song. I’ve been to 46 of the 50 states now. Every time I’ve crisscrossed the country the words have come back to me. The purple mountain majesty is there, above the fruited plain. I’ve seen the spacious skies in Montana and the amber waves of grain in Kansas and all across the Heartland. I have walked and driven the thoroughfares of freedom. For me they are the National Road and Route 66, but there are others. From sea to shining sea, there is beauty everywhere, even today.
I’ve witnessed liberty in law. Judge Puckett explained the duties of each juror that day in the Wayne County Court House as though the fate of the world depended on our deliberate decision in a felony case. In a very real way, it did. We paid attention and were grateful for his guidance. We worked hard to make the right choice.
I’ve seen the alabaster cities, and I lived in one. I adopted two of them, Chicago and San Francisco, as favorites and visited them often. I’ve visited Niagara Falls and the grounds of the Columbian Exposition. I’ve crossed the prairies and the Sea of Grass. I have seen the majesty of the purple mountains in California, Colorado, and Arizona.
I’ve been blessed to sing a part in a choir when America the Beautiful was on the program, fighting the lump in my throat, bending every effort toward making the sounds and the pitches perfect. All of these are never-to-be-forgotten experiences.
Things are so different now.
Nowadays, the descendants of the crowd that gleefully wrecked my world of the 1950s, who instead of America the Beautiful saw nothing but pollution, exploitation, racism, greed, and bigotry, are in charge now. They openly disparage the country and are ashamed of it. They want to knock it down to size and bring it to its knees to make it pay for past sins. They want to make it like other benighted places. They forbid the display of pride and optimism. Strangely, they can find few if any virtues or accomplishments worthy of celebration or even mention. I don’t hear them singing America the Beautiful. I hear the national anthem made into a blues tune of slippery notes struggling to land in an acceptable place. Sometimes I even hear an alternative anthem.
Where am I? What happened to my country? Who put people in charge who clearly want to wreck everything? How is it possible that patriotism and national pride have been relegated to the bitter clingers and the people who are “not different” from Middle Eastern terrorists?
Pollution, urban decay, and now climate madness are the only things that most of the chattering classes and the media have time to dwell upon. How horrible we are, they chant.
What happened to the law, what happened to law enforcement, what happened to decency, what happened to societal norms, what happened to owning one’s actions, and what happened to the legacy media?
What happened to the alabaster cities? We actually know the answer to that question. Instead of keeping the cities safe and providing a place for families to live and businesses to grow, politicians decided it was better to play politics and maximize handouts and subsidies. Vice, violence, and drugs were blamed on poverty, and neighborhoods became no-go zones.
Both liberty and law have been abandoned in favor of identity politics and thug rule. Illegals began to crowd the locals. Discontent and riots were followed by defunding the police and no-bail laws. In some areas, theft of $900 or less at a time gets you waved out the front door and there is no arrest. If a store employee tries to stop the thief, the employee gets fired. Stores began by locking everything up, then just closed. The decay advances day by day.
There was a time was I loved to go to the Loop in Chicago, to St. Louis, to New York, to San Francisco, to St. Paul, to Detroit, to Indianapolis. I mostly went for history and architecture, and because I or my family had been to these same places during the war or afterward. They were marvels of civilization and commerce. Read Carl Sandburg’s poem Chicago. He didn’t have to make up any of what he wrote. It was all still there for me to see almost fifty years ago.
It’s way different now. I wouldn’t consider going to any of those cities after dark, and most of them I would never go to in the daylight, either. I wouldn’t ride a bus or a subway or the El. The streetscapes have become dystopian. They horrify me.
It’s 2024. Most of our population lives in cities. Does someone think there is no long-term effect on people who have to endure today’s urban life? What happens to children who grow up in daily fear of their lives from gang wars and drug dealers? What will their sense of justice be like after living in a place where there is no justice at all?
The words of Katherine Lee Bates just shock me now. What a time she knew, when the towers of alabaster were the pillars of a great civilization now fallen on hard times.
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Dr. Bruce Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and handyman. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.