200: Anthem

From the USA Today:

"Star Spangled Banner yet waves 200 years later"

It's been 200 years since a Washington lawyer, confined to a British troopship during their assault on an American fort guarding Baltimore, jotted down a series of pointed questions about the precarious fate of his country, just 27 years old and already under attack.

Defence of Fort McHenry, the four-stanza poem that emerged, became a popular patriotic song and, eventually, our national anthem. Francis Scott Key's poem, which soon became The Star Spangled Banner, redefined our basic relationship with the Stars and Stripes, historians say, changing it quite literally overnight.  Before the night of Sept. 13, 1814, the flag was mostly thought of as a utilitarian marker, raised at military installations and used to identify government buildings. The following morning, after an unsuccessful bombardment by the British navy, the American flag that rose over the fort became "the symbol of liberty and perseverance and the life of the nation," says Jeffrey Brodie, deputy director of the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center. This summer, historians here and elsewhere celebrate the bicentennial of Key's ode and the 25-hour battle that preceded it. The song wouldn't become our national anthem for 117 years, but the essential question Key posed on the morning of Sept. 14, 1814 — which flag will fly over the fort? — helped stir Americans' imaginations about their future at a perilous moment. Two weeks earlier, the British had burned down Washington, and they threatened to do the same to the key port of Baltimore with an attack on the star-shaped fort that protected it. Key, dispatched to the British ship to negotiate the release of a prisoner, was ordered to stay put until the battle ended. "He's sort of asking the question, 'What happens if the (American) flag doesn't come up over the fort? What's the fate of the country if that happens?' " Brodie says. "When Key is writing it, he means it quite literally." Brodie, the project manager and one of the co-curators for the Smithsonian's Star-Spangled Banner preservation project, says Key's poem and the song that emerged were the first important works to infuse the flag with the qualities of resilience and liberty. The flag itself made its way to the Smithsonian in 1907. By then, a succession of owners had snipped off bits of the stripes to give away as souvenirs, reducing the flag's 42-foot length to 34 feet. One of the 15 stars disappeared, too. In 1996, the Smithsonian began an intensive, eight-year effort to preserve and study the flag. It remains there on display. The original copy of Key's poem also is on display at the Smithsonian, but just through Sunday.  Two hundred years after the battle, few Americans realize that the song commemorates a somewhat unexpected and epic victory in "our forgotten conflict," says Wayne State University historian Don Hickey, author of several books on the War of 1812. The successful defense of Fort McHenry "spared Baltimore from possibly being overrun," he says. More important, it helped shape our identity as a viable military player. Five Americans died in the bombardment, but the fort was tougher to take than the British had anticipated, says Vince Vaise, chief of interpretation at Fort McHenry. "They don't want to lose a lot of ships; they don't want to lose a lot of men. So the idea is to take it if it's easy. And when it proved not to be easy, rather than risk losing all of that, it was easier just to back off."
What the British didn't realize, he says, was "how much of a morale boost it would be" to Americans, in Baltimore and elsewhere. "I don't think the British saw that coming."

.^ I know some people don't care for the National Anthem because they say it's hard to sing or that it promotes violence, but I like it. ^


http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/02/star-spangled-banner-baltimore/11908629/