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Chapter 1: How did the War of 1812 lead to the creation of the Star-Spangled Banner?
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To see by the dawn's early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
For the land of the free and the home of the brave.
So that was a song originally entitled The Defence of Fort McHenry, and it was written by a guy called Francis Scott Key in September 1814, and it is probably better known as the Star Spangled Banner. And Dominic, what better way to kick off our series marking the 2026th
football or if you're in america soccer world cup held in the united states in mexico and canada which starts this thursday and it will be ending in just over a month in new york so dominic what we've done with this series we have picked six competing nations in this world cup haven't we
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Chapter 2: Who wrote the Star-Spangled Banner and what was its original title?
He speaks before the Supreme Court. He's quite a well-known person. And the fact that he is a slave owner, Tom, I'm glad you've flagged it because it is going to make this anthem controversial later on. So we'll come to that. Anyway, the 2nd of September, 1814, Key writes to his mother and he says, I'm going in the morning to Baltimore to proceed in a flag vessel to General Ross.
Old Dr. Beans of Marlborough is taken prisoner by the enemy. And some of his friends have urged me to go and get him out and to procure his release. I don't know where he is, but I'll do my best. So he goes off to Baltimore. He finds the local United States agent who deals with prisoners of war.
They rent a ship and they sail off towards Chesapeake Bay and they're looking for the British fleet because they think that's where this Blake Beans is being held. And on the 7th of September, they find HMS Tonant near the mouth of the Potomac in Chesapeake Bay. Now, some people may remember HMS Tonant, Tom. Do you remember it?
That's the question. Well, the name is, of course, the French one. And we have done a series on a particular British admiral who's very good at capturing French ships. We have.
Now, can anyone remember the name of that admiral? Is it Admiral Nelson? It is!
superb so tonneau had been captured at the nile it had fought splendidly under captain charles tyler at trafalgar it had captured a french ship and now the tonneau is um fighting the americans anyway so key approaches the tonneau under flag of truce and he's allowed aboard he and this agent that he's with they are invited for dinner by the british they're treated very well the british bigwigs well because ross the irish irishman has a tremendous reputation for chivalry very chivalrous
Charming man. So when they say to Ross, can we have this bloke, Dr. Beans? Ross says, I don't know. And Key has brought letters from wounded British soldiers, British prisoners of war, saying that American doctors as a group have been very kind to them. And Ross reads these letters and he says, oh, well, okay, fine. You can have, you know, maybe Beans can go. Because he's a warm-hearted man.
Yeah, kindly. So it looks like they're just going to go about with this bloke Beans. However, while they've been having dinner, the Americans have overheard the British officers talking about how they're going to attack Baltimore. And so the British say, well, since you've heard us talking about this, you're going to have to stay with us until the operation is over.
And so Key and Beans are transferred to another ship, HMS Surprise, which is towing the little ship that they'd arrived on. And they all move together up the Chesapeake towards Baltimore. And on the 11th, the Americans are allowed to go back to their own ship, which is still tethered to HMS Surprise, and they're basically under military guard. The 12th, nothing happens.
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Chapter 3: Why is the Star-Spangled Banner considered controversial?
So a year earlier, Major Armistead had actually said, you know, the British are probably going to attack Baltimore. we need a bloody big flag. We want to have a flag so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance. So he basically wanted this flag as a sort of emblem of defiance. And he commissioned the flag, which is absolutely massive. It's 42 feet by 30 feet.
He commissioned it from a Baltimore widow called Mary Pickersgill And she took her six weeks to make it. She made it with her teenage daughter and her nieces and a servant. I don't want to do this. So boring. Not another star. Yeah, exactly. And they used 300 yards of English wool bunting, which is probably my favorite kind of bunting. The stars were made of cotton. They sewed them on afterwards.
And she was paid $405.90 for it. And then Armistead gave her another $100 for a smaller flag called a storm flag. So during the bum bum, the storm flag was flying. And then at dawn, they raise, as usual, this massive national flag.
Oh, I didn't know that. So actually, I'd always thought that the flag, you know, had been hit by shell and all concrete rockets and stuff, but was still flying boldly. But that's a kind of cheat.
It is a cheat. It's a total con. Yeah. So... This huge flag appears. Francis Scott Key sees the flag and he says to himself, oh, this is brilliant. The fort is held out. Now, of course, he thinks this is a great underdog triumph. What he doesn't know is there was actually never really any possibility that the fort would fall because the British are too far away.
But anyway, on land, the British have been advancing, and that hasn't gone terribly well either. I'm sorry to say that Major General Ross, who you were complimenting earlier on, he has been shot by a sniper at the Battle of North Point. So in this grotesque act of cowardice and cheating... He's been killed. No. Yeah, the British have fallen back. They didn't write an anthem about that.
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Chapter 4: What historical events influenced the writing of the anthem?
No. So a couple of days later, the British say, well, this is too tough a nut to crack. We'll call off the operation. Anyway, while that's been going on, Key has been sitting on this ship, still kind of basically under guard, twiddling his thumbs. So what's a guy to do when you're twiddling your thumbs? Maybe write an anthem? Well, not an anthem. He decides to write a poem. Oh, right.
So you will often read on the internet that he writes it on the back of an envelope that he'd found in his pocket. And it turns out that this is an untruth. He didn't write it on an envelope. And there's a historian who has dug deep into this story called Mark Clegg. And he says, no, envelopes weren't used in 1814. Well, or rather, they were only used on very special occasions by the rich.
So Key, if he was going to write a letter, he would have folded it over and not used an envelope. So he couldn't have had an envelope. So with sealing wax, I guess, and a stamp. And Key would undoubtedly have taken a lot of blank paper with him. for the negotiations for this doctor's release, and to write a letter to President Madison about how he was getting on.
This would have been good paper and not scrap paper. So, on some of this high-quality notepaper, Key writes his poem. And finally that evening... He, what are we there, the 16th or something? He and the others are allowed to go back to Baltimore. And he's got a room at the Indian Queen Hotel and he finishes his poem there.
And the handwritten draft of the poem you can see at the Maryland Historical Society. And you can actually see how he's written three verses and then he's kind of running out of space. And he has to cram the fourth verse into the last kind of inch of paper. It's like a sort of child's letter. Yeah, we've all been there. Yeah, exactly.
Now, I mean, he was wasting his time because no one sings the fourth verse. No one cares about the fourth verse. It's the first verse that everyone sings, right? So it's the story. O say can you see by the dawn's early light what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming. Then there's all this stuff about the bombs and the rockets. And then the final lines.
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. It's very kind of 1800s, 1810s, slightly gushing, romantic kind of rhetoric. And not true. To reiterate, he shows this to his brother-in-law who commands a local militia unit. And his brother-in-law takes it to a printer.
They run off a thousand copies and then they hand them out to the garrison of Fort Henry. And then the really key thing, his brother-in-law gives it to the Baltimore Patriot newspaper, which prints it under the title Defense of Fort McHenry. And then other papers copy it. So as we approach the break, a couple of things about this poem. I've called it a poem.
And in fact, you said it was a song and I said, I know it's a poem, but I was being a little bit unfair there because actually it's somewhere in between the two. It's a thing called a broadside ballad. And basically what a broadside ballad was, you would write lyrics or write a poem to fit a very familiar tune. You would say, this tune is a banger. I'm going to write new words for this tune.
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Chapter 5: What role did Francis Scott Key play in the War of 1812?
And one reason the huge one is so battered is because the family would give away pieces to friends. They would say, would you like a piece of the Star-Spangled Banner from the song? And so the flag ends up having lots of holes in it. And actually, the Smithsonian, when it got hold of the flag in 1907, tried to buy back some of the holes. Oh, so they didn't blame it on the redcoats?
Well, I'm sure they did blame it on the redcoats. Anyway, then there's a huge upsurge of patriotism during the First World War. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson, we talked about him in our Ku Klux Klan episodes, of course, another southerner, perhaps not coincidentally, he directs the display to all military occasions. One complication, though, at this point, there is no standard arrangement.
So Wilson gets the US Bureau of Education to sort one out. They get a series of experts. One of them is a famous American composer, John Philip Sousa, and they get a basically government-approved
Can I just ask, do we know whether over the 19th century and up to this point, whether any eyebrows are raised over the hireling and slave comment? Or do they just not pay any attention to it?
I don't think people massively pay attention to it. And not least because, as we will see later, there is a rival abolitionist version. Right, okay. They have complaints, and we will see in just a sec. People have a lot of objections to this as the anthem, but that is not one of the principal ones. And just one quick side note before we talk about how it becomes an anthem.
It's already being played by the end of the 1910s at Baseball. So it's first played at the World Series in 1918 at Comiskey Park. The Chicago Cubs were hosting the Red Sox and a game won. A military band played this song, though it's not at this point the national anthem.
We heard it being played at a baseball game, didn't we, in November in L.A.?
We did indeed. Yeah. And very, very exciting. It was too. Very stirring. Yeah. Yes, exactly. But at the end of the First World War, the United States still does not have a national anthem. And this is probably a good point to just talk for a second about national anthems more generally. Such a complicated topic, Dominic. It is a massively complicated topic.
Now, we did our first national anthem episode back when we did a series on the French Revolution. And you took us through the history of the Marseillaise.
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