Our American Ideals: America the Beautiful

I was out late, so I put the pregame show on the radio and was still in the car when Brandi Carlile sang “America the Beautiful.”

I’m a big Carlile fan, and since I was alone, I sang quietly, which perhaps explains why, for the first time, I was suddenly struck by the final verse:

“And crown your goodness with brotherhood / From sea to shining sea.”

What does that mean? I asked myself. “Crown your goodness with brotherhood…”

Katharine Lee Bates, author of the poem on which the song is based, seemed to suggest that the reward for doing good was brotherhood.

What an interesting formulation!

For her, brotherhood was the greatest achievement of all, not the simple act of doing good.

Doing good was the means, but fraternity It was the final goal.

As soon as I arrived at my friend’s house, I looked for explanations on the internet.

Bates wrote the original poem in 1893, at a time when the United States was dealing with intense industrialization, urbanization, and the aftermath of the Civil War.

A failed Reconstruction had left the country deeply divided.

National brotherhood was not something taken for granted then.

It is not surprising that she extolled sisterhood as an ideal.

Still, I found many different interpretations.

One suggested that Bates recognized America’s virtues—its natural beauty, its resources, and its “patriotic dream”—but implied that these qualities, while noble, were incomplete on their own.

The “crown” was brotherhood, or national unity.

Without that national unity, good is nothing more than a collection of individual virtues or riches without a common purpose.

You can have “golden wheat fields” and “alabaster cities,” but if their inhabitants are divided, those assets will not last or will become more sources of conflict.

By putting brotherhood before the common good, Bates seemed to affirm that, with brotherhood, anything is possible. Without it, nothing good is sustainable.

Another interpretation is that Bates was referring to good as a moral statement.

And the true reward for good behavior—and the social trust necessary to generate it—is brotherhood and national unity.

In any case, I found his exaltation of brotherhood inspiring, and it helped me reinforce my own version of “America First” on this 250th anniversary of America.

My version consists of two parts.

The United States must be the first to bring together as many of the world’s nations as possible in one global coalitiona brotherhood, designed to ensure that we maximize the benefits and cushion the worst impacts of the grand planetary-scale challenges we now face together as a species—specifically the management of artificial intelligence, climate change, human migrations, nuclear and biological weapons, and pandemics—so that we rise together and do not fall together.

This is America as first among equals.

Despite its flaws, no other country possesses the same combination of military reach, technological innovation, financial strength, democratic traditions, and rule of law to convene others in a global coalition.

But today the United States must be a pioneer in another sense.

We must be the first nation to demonstrate that we can apply our founding motto—forge “out of many, one”—in a country where diversity is far greater than that of our original thirteen colonies.

What is required is nothing less than forging a genuinely egalitarian, continental-scale, multiracial democracy the likes of which has never been seen before in history.

The world has known vast and diverse empires, but never a democracy so diverse, extensive and deeply interconnected.

If the United States manages to be the first to successfully implement it, it could become a model and reference of radical pluralism for the rest of the world, just as it was for democracy 250 years ago.

Only such an America—one that can, once again, unite the diverse, even as the diverse becomes increasingly complex—can credibly lead the world in the 21st century.

Because the world is much more like us today, and we are much more like the world.

That’s my version of “America First”:

crown our achievements by strengthening brotherhood at home and abroad, from coast to coast.