“America the Beautiful” is part anthem and part prayer, a mix of celebration and supplication, which is really a way to challenge Americans. The celebration is of Americans’ common purpose (“brotherhood”) and fundamental values (“freedom” and “liberty in law”) as well as patriotism (“Who more than self their country loved”). The challenge is to tame excesses of capitalism (“May God thy gold refine / Till all success be nobleness”); improve conditions in violence-prone cities (“Thine alabaster cities gleam / Undimmed by human tears!”); and, fundamentally, fix the nation’s imperfections, including its imperialist expansion, to make a better America.
The first published version of the poem, in 1895, didn’t mention “brotherhood.” The closing lines of its opening stanza were slight: “Till souls wax fair as earth and air /And music-hearted sea!” But when Bates wrote the 1904 revision, copyrighted as part of her 1911 book America the Beautiful and Other Poems, she embraced a view of social reformers. They favored a national community of people of different races, ethnicities, and arrival dates in America. In the 1910 census, one of every three adults was born in another country or had a parent who was. Bates distilled her outlook in a line of one of her other poems: “Feast me no feasts that for the few are spread.”
In the revision, stressing what she judged America’s greatest potential distinction, she repeated these lines: “And crown thy good with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea!” When the Boston Evening Transcript published the revision, it gushed, “America has only to live up to the aspirations here breathed to realize its Golden Age”—and in that way honor “those idealists of late held in scant respect, the Fathers of the Declaration and the Constitution.”
The poem’s third stanza was “the most beautiful and exalted,” the Transcript commented, because it expressed “faith in America’s perfectibility” and how the nation could increase its chances of improvement: “America! America! / God mend thine every flaw, / Confirm thy soul in self-control, / Thy liberty in law!” The stanza helped explain Bates’s antagonism to American imperialism: before the United States inflicted its power in foreign territories, it had to safeguard the rights of its own people.