[Francesca] America the Beautiful may be America's most beloved anthem, I know it's mine, but few of us know the extraordinary woman who wrote it. Catherine Lee Bates was a poet, professor, reformer, and one of the great moral voices of her generation. When she looked out from the summit of Pikes Peak in 1893, she didn't just celebrate America's breathtaking landscape. She imagined a nation worthy of its highest ideals, one guided by justice, compassion, and civic responsibility. Documentarian and author John de Graaff tells the story of Bates's remarkable life and why her vision of America feels especially relevant today. Let's listen now. John de Graaff, welcome back to Writer's Voice. [John de Graaf] Well, thank you, Francesca. Great to be on your show. [Francesca] I love this movie, From Sea to Shining Sea, a historical film about a little-known aspect of our American history that is so important. Listeners may know your earlier work, especially films like Affluenza and your writing about overconsumption and the erosion of civic life. How did these long-standing concerns lead you to Catherine Lee Bates, the author of the poem America the Beautiful that became probably our most beautiful anthem? [John de Graaf] Well, I've always been interested in stories of people who have tried to make the country better, the world better, make a difference instead of a killing, as I put it. And I had learned about Catherine Lee Bates several years ago, and her story was in the back of my mind because I thought it was such a great story. And so surprising because most people tend to think of America the Beautiful as a kind of America first, rah-rah anthem, you know. And it is anything but. It is absolutely a critique of the country that Bates saw, very patriotic, but patriotic in the sense that she wanted to make the country better. She saw it as a country filled with flaws but with great promise that she wanted to reform. And I thought that was a marvelous story, but I was too busy doing other things at the time. After doing the Stuart Udall film about the former Secretary of the Interior, when we finished that, my colleague Larry Cotton, who has worked with me on several of these films, said, well, don't you think now we should try to do the Bates film, especially with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration coming up and all that? And I said, well, yeah, sure, let's give it a try. And we were able to make the film and get it out there in pretty short order. [Francesca] Now, let's talk about Bates as a radical patriot. She composed the poem that became America the Beautiful on Pikes Peak, famously so. That moment is often mythologized, you know, with the Pikes Peak scene remembered as a kind of moment of sublime inspiration at the beauty of the land, which it was. But your film also emphasizes that Bates looked down and saw extraction, denuded hillsides, and the frenzy of the gold rush. How do these two visions hold together in that poem? [John de Graaf] The point of this poem was that we do live in a beautiful land. And Bates would say to friends or write to friends things like, but until the way we treat each other and our institutions match the beauty of the land, America will never be what it can be. And she came down from Pikes Peak and either a day or two later, I'm not completely sure, she went to Cripple Creek, the mining camp right near Pikes Peak, and she saw this frenzy of mining activity, this greed that was there, and the impact that was having on the landscape and how ugly it was turning this beautiful, beautiful landscape. And so that feeling, plus her her concerns about what was the inequality of the Gilded Age, this was 1893, the country was in the grip of economic depression, the haves and the have-nots could not have been clearer at that time. And so she wrote, she started out by writing, America, America, God sheds grace on thee till selfish gain no longer stains the banner of the free. Well, that was her first version. And then she felt, well, maybe that's a little, the wording is a little too strong there and too out there. So she changed that to America, America, may God thy gold refine, you know, that we have to see wealth in a different way, not just the money and all those things. So the second verse is really a criticism of the Gilded Age and of the whole focus on wealth. The third verse doesn't come until later. She writes that in 1904, after the Spanish-American War. And she was a huge critic of the Spanish-American War. She thought it was an adventure in imperialism. She was not alone in this. There were many, many Americans, including people even like Andrew Carnegie, who were strongly opposed to this war, to former presidents Harrison and Cleveland, people like Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, all these people were anti-imperialists against the Spanish-American War and Bates was one of them. And what she saw was that the US was changing from a country that was a colony to a country that was going to take colonies and this appalled her. But she was particularly appalled by what we did in the Philippines. So when we had so called liberated the Philippines from the Spanish, but then when they wanted actually their independence and freedom, we slaughtered them, sent troops over, killed these peasants. And, and this really struck her deeply. She wrote poems about this. And she then includes this in the verse, America, America, God, men bind every flaw, confirm my soul and self control. This is what we need to stay in our borders. And, and the fourth verse is, is based on her visit to in 1893, to the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which was this big, glamorous white city with all these new inventions of the future. And what she discovered was that right outside the walls of this great white city was a horrible slums where Jane Addams had her whole house, where people lived in absolute destitution. And so she writes, thine alabaster cities gleam, this is thinking of the future, thine alabaster cities like the white city gleam, undimmed by human tears, not surrounded by other, other places where people live in poverty. And that's the fourth verse of the song. So the song expresses all of these things, but people don't really know that. [Francesca] So how did it happen that these lines, these other verses have largely disappeared from public memory? [John de Graaf] Well, I think one of the reasons is simply that we don't sing, you know, we tend to sing the first verse. I won't go so far as to say there was a conspiracy, not to do the other verses or anything like that. But I think it just, that's what we do. It's short, we do that with a lot of things, we sing the first. If we sang, for instance, this is the third verse of the Star Spangled Banner, we would realize what an incredibly racist, militaristic song it is. That's not so obvious in the first verse, which is the only verse that we sing. But in the third verse, and this is why Colin Kaepernick, the football player, would not stand for this, is that the third verse is about killing the slaves who fought for the British. And many slaves actually trying to escape, did end up fighting for the British in the War of 1812. And the song celebrates the slaughter of them at Fort McHenry during the time the song was written. We don't sing that, so people don't know that that's a verse of the song. We have a lot of these kind of cases where people don't understand the meaning of something, either good reasons or bad reasons. But the best example, I think, is the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, which was written in 1892 by a Christian socialist minister named Francis Bellamy in Boston. And he wrote the song because he was appalled by the treatment of immigrant children by American kids in the schools. All these immigrants were coming mostly from Italy and other places, and in the schools they were being bullied and called names and everything by the American kids. And his view was that if all these kids said this pledge together, that we're one country indivisible, liberty and justice for all, that they were all doing this together, that eventually this would sink in, that this message would be about inclusion. This was really what it was all about. Bellamy, although he was a minister, insisted that no reference be made to God in the Pledge of Allegiance because this country had separation of church and state, and because we wanted to welcome people of all religions or none at all. So it wasn't until 1954, in the McCarthy era, that the words under God were put into the pledge. But people don't understand this, and I have a lot of friends who say, oh, I would never have said this pledge, you know, I opposed the pledge and all this stuff. And so, well, you know, for some good reasons, of course. But if you actually really understood it, the pledge was not this right-wing conservative thing, just the opposite. [Francesca] That is so interesting. But going back to America the Beautiful, which by the way I have to say is my favorite anthem, probably, I'm Not Alone, many others feel the same way. It's such a beautiful song. But her famous line, From Sea to Shining Sea, is often seen actually as celebrating expansion, manifest destiny. But in the film, it carries a more ethical sense of belonging. How do you see that phrase? [John de Graaf] Well, yeah, she considered herself a global citizen. She traveled quite a bit around the world. She was obviously very anti-imperialistic, did not want this kind of expansion. And she wanted us to have, I mean, she did gender-based terms in those days, brotherhood. Now a lot of people sing it as sisterhood, but brotherhood, From Sea to Shining Sea, meant that we should be, we should consider all the earth as one family. And she said that specifically in the final speech, she gave a speech in 1928 at Boston's Mechanics Hall to 3,000 people. It was her final speech. She was a big name by then. And she said we should think of the whole world as one community, one family, From Sea to Shining Sea. She's very explicit about that. So that's another mistake, certainly, to think that we're talking, that it's expansionist in its intent. Nothing like that. [Francesca] Now, one surprise in your film, John de Graaff, in From Sea to Shining Sea, which this film about the making of the poem America the Beautiful and the life of the author, Catherine Lee Bates. One surprise to me was how ecological, how she seemed to anticipate ecological awareness, not in the modern scientific sense, but as a moral observer of land, of beauty, of damage, as we've talked about already. Long before the modern environmental movement, she seems to link democracy, beauty, and stewardship. Do you see her as anticipating an ecological ethic, a land ethic, where damage to the land and damage to the Republic are connected? [John de Graaf] I think she was aware of that at the time. It's not particularly explicit in her writing, but she was aware of the forest being cut, the land being denuded, certainly of things like the breaking of treaties with Native Americans, with Indians, all of those kind of things she was very aware of. While she hated Teddy Roosevelt's support for the Spanish-American War and the things that he did then, she later became never a complete supporter, but she became much more sympathetic to him as president because of the things he did to protect the land and the other kinds of things, and to break up the trusts. He started actually doing things that she liked, and she became more sympathetic to him in time, but I don't know that she ever forgave him for what he did with the Philippines and with the Spanish-American War. He himself later admitted that the Philippines had been a disaster, although he still supported what we did, but what he meant, it was a disaster, was not that we took the Philippines, but the way we did it, the massacres and the things that occurred there. [Francesca] The film places Bates within networks of women reformers at Wellesley, labor organizers, suffragettes, Jane Addams, settlement house activists. How central was that political world to shaping her vision of democracy? [John de Graaf] Oh, I think it was hugely influential. She was a fairly conservative. In many ways, she was a conservative person all her life. She was not out there like some others. She was not out in the picket lines and doing... She expressed herself through her writing, but when she got to Wellesley, her more conservative views, although certainly not conservative about slavery, maybe those kind of things, and she was always a reformer, but I think much more pro-business initially and stuff like that. When she got to Wellesley, she did meet all these women, including her longtime partner, Catherine Coleman, who is really the founder of the discipline of industrial sociology in the United States. She studied workers' lives and the opening of the West and what it did to the workers and so forth. That was her focus. She was always quite a radical woman, and that influenced Bates a great deal. The other great influence was a woman named Vida Scudder, who was a very big player in the American socialist movement and also in the feminist movement. Vida and a couple of other Wellesley profs went to Lawrence during the Bread and Roses strike of 1912, and they got out there with the picketers and in the midst of some situations that turned violent. Bates really respected that, but it wasn't what she did. One thing effective of that, and we still see that today with some of the protests and stuff, is that the donors, the wealthy donors who made Wellesley survive, they started cutting their money really rapidly because of Lawrence. She saw that, and the trustees saw that. The trustees were panicking, and they said, you have to fire Vida Scudder. She's creating so many problems for us in this college. Bates was really troubled because she really respected Vida, loved Vida. Vida was standing for all the right things. They talked, and finally Bates said, well, I want to keep you on. Is there anything you'd be willing to do that maybe will nullify the trustees? Otherwise, they're just going to fire us both. Vida said, well, I'll write an apology, but I'm not going to apologize for going to Lawrence. I will just apologize if my actions threatened Wellesley itself. Bates said, well, I think that's a good solution. Let's hope they accept that, and they did. Vida remained teaching, and things were sort of smoothed over. Vida lived a long life and was very active throughout her life. One of the other professors who went with her to Lawrence later won the Nobel Peace Prize. This was an active faculty of women, almost all women. When Bates became a professor at Wellesley in 1885, there were only two men on the faculty. [Francesca] There is a wonderful sense of Bates as a woman in this context who refused constraints, who resisted religious tests. They had a religious test at Wellesley to begin with. She resisted marriage conventions. As you said, she defended her colleague, Vida. I was really moved by the portrayal of her relationship with Catherine Coleman, which was also very much, I guess, against convention, although there was a word for it. It was a Boston marriage, or a Wellesley marriage, also said like that. Talk about their relationship. [John de Graaf] Well, there's no question that they had a very deep and loving relationship, and that when Coleman died, that devastated Bates. She wrote this whole series of beautiful poems to my beloved. In those days, of course, the physical nature of these relationships was in the closet. It was not something they talked about. She never does. Historians argue over what the nature of that relationship was. Some people clearly think it was a physical, what we now refer to as a lesbian relationship. That term wasn't really used much then. Others say, no, it was just a common thing of two people very close, almost like sisters, sharing this thing together. It was so common at Wellesley, because most of the professors lived in these kind of situations. Vida Scudder also had a partner like this for many, many years, and others the same. I felt that I should portray it as Bates portrayed it, as this deeply loving, caring relationship in which she got so much from, but not to try to make it something that I didn't know whether it was or not. This was not the point. It was not one of the issues that she was out there fighting for, in any case. I did get some flack for this. This is one of the few things. I did get attacked by a woman in Santa Cruz who accused me of whitewashing her lesbian relationship, and so forth. I said, I'm a journalist. I don't believe in just saying my opinion about something, and that's what it would I don't really know. I told you everything that we can know for sure, and left it to people to make their own assumptions. I think it probably was a physical relationship, but Bates's biographer, Melinda Ponder, does not think so. It is complicated. [Francesca] And I think that the point, she does refer to Catherine as her partner in your script. [John de Graaf] Yeah. [Francesca] I think that expresses it, no matter whether it was physical or not. She was her partner. [John de Graaf] Right. Now, remember about that, that at the time when she first started to get to know Catherine, she'd had two marriage proposals, and she'd had two relationships with men. But ironically, the interesting thing was the one reason they never married was because Bates made a lot more money than the men did, and Bates would have had to give up her job and live with men who didn't make much money in a much more of a poverty situation. Plus, she wouldn't have been able to teach and do the other things that she wanted to do. So both she and the men agreed it was not a good idea. And right at that time, almost exactly at that time, she met Catherine Coleman, and certainly fell in love, in a deep sense, with Catherine Coleman, and they became partners. So, you know, life is complicated. [Francesca] Exactly. So with this film out now, with renewed debates about nationalism, militarism, imperialism, inequality, and what America ought to be, Bates can feel very contemporary. What do you hope audiences hear in her voice today? [John de Graaf] I hope they hear the message that a country has many positive qualities, it also has many, many flaws, and that we need to make it what it claimed to be. And that means a nation, you know, with liberty and justice for all, that welcomes the immigrants, who Bates welcomed, she was part of a settlement house movement for immigrants, always spoke for the immigrants. And that, you know, it'd be inclusive, it'd be fair, and just, and certainly, I mean, that we eliminate the great gap between rich and poor in this country. Doesn't seem, and not saying that everybody's going to have the same exactly, but the kind of gap that we have now with people earning a thousand times more than the world, this is just not sustainable or tolerable. And also that we take a different attitude toward other countries, that's not imperialistic in nature, and a different attitude toward the land, which is that we protect it and steward it, precisely the opposite, in fact, of all the things that the current administration seems to be doing. It's interesting, because they always play the Star-Spangled Banner at the inauguration. And when they did it at Trump's inauguration, he was almost kind of dancing to the music, you know, he's kind of going like this. And right after the thing is over, it couldn't have been two minutes after the end of the song, I could be wrong about that, but it was soon after the end of the song, Trump goes into his thing about William McKinley being his hero and wanting to change Denali, the mountain in Alaska, back to William McKinley, and wanting to take over Canada, Panama, and Greenland. Well, there was no president of the United States that Bates despised more than William McKinley. You know, Teddy Roosevelt then too, but she came to like him later, but I don't think he ever felt that way. McKinley didn't live long enough. But anyway, so that's the irony of this, that we're professing one thing and then doing the opposite. I think the best description of this song was made by the singer Brandi Carlile, who actually saw our film and sang the song at the Super Bowl this year. And prior to the Super Bowl, Brandi Carlile had a press conference. She didn't mention the film, but what she did say was that she'd learned a lot about Bates, and that in her view, we should see America the Beautiful as a prayer, not a boast. It was what she hoped America could be. She was not saying this is what America was. I think that was a great description on her part. [Francesca] That is. And now I want to just end with a question for you and about your work. I mean, after making films and writing books about consumerism, about time, having more time to live rather than to work, labor, democracy, and now Katharine Lee Bates, a film about you, Dahl, what enduring question has animated your work throughout your life? [John de Graaf] I think it's pretty simple. It's how do we make a better world, you know, the future, and how do we cooperate and make a better world that is fair and non-violent and inclusive and really takes care of the earth and the land for future generations. I've always been a very strong environmentalist, and my upcoming film is the story of Herman Daly, who is—it's called Herman Daly—it's called The Econoclast, Herman Daly and the Gospel of Growth. And it's about the economists who first really called attention to the destructive effects of our passion for constantly growing the economy all the time, the fact that that is unsustainable over the long run. And we have to learn to live in a different way, both to deal with climate change and resource exhaustion and all the other destruction of habitat, all the things that are going on today. And so those have always animated me. It started with environment for me, but then moved into labor and into social justice and into all of those other kind of things. But I see them as all related. I think to make a good country, we have to have a sustainable, fair, just, and cooperative kind of society. [Francesca] Hear, hear. And I look forward to talking with you about that next film, about Herman Daly. [John de Graaf] Great. I hope we have the opportunity. [Francesca] Well, John de Graaf, it's just been great to have you back on the show to talk about From Sea to Shining Sea. It's a beautiful film. I highly recommend it to all our listeners. Now, where can they see it? [John de Graaf] Well, they can see it at different sources. They can pay $2 to rent it on Google Play or $10 to buy it. They can also see it free on a thing called Fawesome. It's awesome with an F. F-A-W-E-S-O-M-E dot com. They can watch it free there. They will have a couple of commercials to watch. That's how these free things work. But those are possibilities. And they can encourage their libraries to buy it. And we're really hoping to get it out more to the schools because it's young people that I want to see this and understand there is another tradition in America than the one we're faced with daily right now. [Francesca] And we will link to some of those ways that people can see it. [John de Graaf] Thank you so much. [Francesca] John de Graaf is the author of the international bestselling book and film Affluenza, among many other books and films. Go to writersvoice.net to hear our conversation with him about his documentary, Stuart Udall and the Politics of Beauty.