Home of the Brave
by
Jansen Estrup
We never seem to acknowledge the third verse of F. S. Key's poem about Fort McHenry - about our 'land of the free' ... the poem was put to a British drinking song's tune and adopted as recently as 1931 as our national anthem ... the third verse goes -
"No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave."
This sounds a lot like someone who intends to keep their 'bound persons' in bondage forever. We tend to forget that Whites were slaves in early America, too (and most are debt-slaves again).
Do we really want this 'hymn' as our anthem?
I prefer "This Land is Your Land" as a symbol ... but I wouldn't be forced to stand and honor it, either ...
thought provoking read
Jeremy Cantor pointed out in a different venue, this - Well, now I may have to reconsider my reconsidering. This paragraph from the Snopes article describes, exactly, my reading of that verse:
'In fairness, it has also been argued that Key may have intended the phrase as a reference to the British Navy's practice of impressment (kidnapping sailors and forcing them to fight in defense of the crown), or as a semi-metaphorical slap at the British invading force as a whole (which included a large number of mercenaries), though the latter line of thinking suggests an even stronger alternative theory — namely, that the word "hirelings" refers literally to mercenaries, and "slaves" refers literally to slaves. It doesn't appear that Francis Scott Key ever specified what he did mean by the phrase, nor does its context point to a single, definitive interpretation.'
Ron