nation’s first adventure in foreign warfare. The anthem that celebrates our defense of the young nation against the British originated in response to our naval victories over North African leaders, whose “‘turbaned heads bowed’ to the ‘brow of the brave’ and ‘the star-spangled flag or our nation.’”Īlthough Francis Scott Key would revise the lyrics “after the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812”, the echo remains of the Barbary Wars, arguably the U.S. Michael Oren notes that the lyrics of “The Star Spangled Banner” were first “composed for Bainbridge and Decatur in 1805 and set to an old English drinking tune”, in response to Bainbridge’s and Decatur’s roles in America’s Barbary Wars. All I know is that from that day forward I hated Francis Scott Key.īehind the patriotic sentiments of Key’s lyrics and his venerated captivity on board that British naval ship, the familiar song that would become our National Anthem directly derives from our global ambitions in the early years of the nation. I don’t quite know what I said, but somehow it worked.
Somehow, I talked my way out of my tight spot, avoiding arrest with a quick rhetorical flourish. What they feared even then in the innocent early 1960s must have been some sort of “terrorist” act, which in those days went by the more modest names of “vandalism” and “vagrancy”, each with its imperial heritage. Gaping and dawdling, dreaming of the misty grandeur of an American past about which I knew very little and such knowledge a passel of schoolboy’s clichés, I had missed the official closing of the Fort and been caught “after hours”, like some burglar trapped in the central vault by the Bank of England’s time lock or a cat burglar cornered by searchlights on the parapet of the Monte Carlo Casino. Hey, you! What are you doing there?” I was hustled to the Commandant’s Office-Fort McHenry was still administered in those days by a quasi-military command-and brought immediately to the Commandant himself. Visit museums, look at paintings, read the “best that has been thought and written”, become a leader in “. Not quite the Grand Tour, my little tourism in Baltimore followed the high-cultural path my parents and teachers had beaten for me. A naive Californian in Baltimore, ignorant of history and yet determined to major in that discipline, I rationalized my idleness as “study”. Three months shy of my nineteenth year, I was killing time before the Fall Semester began at Johns Hopkins, where I would begin my sophomore year. September, 1964, 150 years to the month after Francis Scott Key composed his famous poem, “The Defense of Fort McHenry”, while witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry from a British Man-of-War, I reclined at my ease on one of the grassy embankments separating the outer fortifications from the inner Fort McHenry on Baltimore Harbor. The first verse of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ should be kept in English, but the other verses should be given to whoever wants them, because those are the verses Americans don’t want or won’t sing.- Jon Stewart, comedian
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