A gay feminist badass from Massachusetts wrote ‘America the Beautiful’
A look at the origins of one of the most universally known, beloved tunes in the United States.

“America the Beautiful’’ is one of the most universally known, beloved tunes in the United States. It was written, originally as a poem, by a Wellesley College professor named Katharine Lee Bates in 1893.

The Falmouth native taught at both Natick High School and the Dana Hall School before joining the faculty at Wellesley. In the summer of 1893, Bates travelled to the West Coast to give a guest lecture at Colorado College. “This young girl, standing on Pike’s Peak in Colorado, looked out across the country and saw a vision,’’ The Boston Globe wrote in 1929.

That vision was turned into a poem titled “America the Beautiful.’’ The poem was given a tune around 1910 thanks to a melody previously written by organist Samuel Augustus Ward, despite Ward having passed away years before. This match of words and music turned into the popular patriotic song that we all know and love today. The song has been crooned by every legend from Kenny Rogers to Ray Charles, whose soulful version even placed on the R&B charts in 1976.

Journalists of the era often dodged the terms “lover’’ or “couple’’ when referring to Bates’s relationship with Coman, instead often referred to their relationship as a “Boston Marriage,’’ but the two ended up staying together for more than 25 years.
https://www.boston.com/culture/entertainment/2015/06/30/a-gay-feminist-badass-from-massachusetts-wrote-america-the-beautiful/

Bates was a very strong and progressive woman. She was a poet in her own right, and professor of English Literature at Wellesley College, where she mentored many young poets, including Robert Frost. She helped to establish American literature as a field of academic study by writing a textbook and creating an early course on the genre.

She also was was a social activist interested in the struggles of women, workers, people of color, tenement residents, immigrants, and poor people. She helped organize the Denison House, a college women’s settlement house and was an active supporter of the League of Nations. Some late 20th-century scholars have asserted that Bates was a bi-sexual who lived for 25 years with long-time friend and companion Katharine Coman.
In short, Katharine Lee Bates was a woman ahead of her time who would have been right at home in our generation.

Although you couldn’t tell it by the version that we now sing, her poem, “America, the Beautiful,” gives testimony to her interest in social justice. Melinda M. Ponder, author of the biography Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea, says, “Bates had personally experienced sexist prejudice and discrimination, had witnessed the ravages of the industrial revolution in both America and Britain, had seen first hand urban poverty and keenly wished for equality. It was this desire for an all-inclusive egalitarian American community that inspired the poem, which was written during the severe economic depression of 1893” (quoted in Wikipedia, “Katharine Lee Bates”). You can see this concern for the working poor in the original poem published in 1893. In stanza 3 where we now sing “Till all success be nobleness/ and every gain divine,” Bates originally wrote, “Till selfish gain no longer stain / the banner of the free,” a clear allusion to the robber barons of the Gilded Age.
https://musingsandwonderment.blog/2020/07/03/katharine-lee-bates-america-the-beautiful/