The Francis Scotts’ Keys to Being American
F. Scott Fitzgerald — author of The Great Gatsby and fashionable alcoholic — was named after his second cousin, Francis Scott Key — diplomatic lawyer and author of a little poem inspired by the bombardment of Fort McHenry that would later become the lyrics of the United States’ national anthem.
While F. Scott Fitzgerald is arguably the more household-name-famous of the two (thanks to Baz Luhrmann), Francis Scott Key and his poem about our flag have had a significant impact on both the American mythos and American political strategy for the past 200 years: it’s our national anthem, it’s the inspiration for our national motto, and it’s the reason more than half of our governors are being raging assholes to people who are suffering.
Each time we stand together in the wake of tragedy or tear ourselves apart on the brink of war, we should remember what the Francis Scotts have taught us about ourselves, as Americans and as human beings — it’s not beautiful, it’s not auspicious, and it’s lacking the grace that we have historically claimed as our God-given benefit.
I: Eye Saw the Sign
As everyone who has been to a Barnes and Noble knows, The Great Gatsby includes symbolism about a giant pair of eyes that watches down, uncaring, on the population of the Valley of Ashes and all the vehicular manslaughter that happens there. The eyes are, in the reality of the narrative, a faded billboard advertising corrective lenses, but they are meant to symbolize God because God, in the post-WWI era, did not GAF about people.*
The “corrective lenses” part of the symbolism is important, too, though, because corrective lenses help people see more clearly. If “corrective lenses” have fallen out of fashion — if people have stopped caring if they are seeing things clearly — disaster is imminent. In a literal sense, the consequence of not seeing clearly is that you’ll commit vehicular manslaughter. In a metaphorical sense, you’ll be cuckolded, or not understand how dating works anymore, or run the nation into a Great Depression — and the only people who will ever be able to achieve The American Dream are the ones whose ancestors killed all the indigenous peoples/committed all the vehicular manslaughter.
Fitzgerald was a glass-half-empty kind of alcoholic.
A hundred years prior, literally in the middle of a war, his cousin had been more optimistic — about literal and metaphorical clear vision — regarding both symbols and the future.
Written while taking a break during a negotiation in Baltimore Harbor in the War of 1812, “The Star-Spangled Banner” is four stanzas of Key gushing about how happy he is to see the flag “yet waving” from his position on a truce ship in British custody. He uses many exclamation points. He even interviews himself:
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
…
’Tis the star-spangled banner — O long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Key is super excited every time he sees the flag. As a consistently visible symbol of something he holds dear — the sovereignty of the United States of America — it’s important to him.
We’ve had some conversations in this country about flags lately, and about all the things that flags represent, and about all the things that aren’t flags but also represent things (e.g. wedding cakes). We have a general sense of what the American flag symbolizes; we have more trouble agreeing on what other flags (and other things) symbolize and how those symbols affect people. We ascribe meanings to symbols even when they aren’t as deliberately symbolic as flags, and we like to say that flags can mean different things to different people even though they are designed to signify something specific.
Our national anthem is about our flag; flag-loving is as American as apple pie and baseball.** If the national anthem is any indication of our historical past times, they were 1) wondering about whether the flag is still visible, 2) watching the blood of your enemies wash away their footprints, and 3) believing that God wants you to triumph over your enemies and thanking him for the opportunity.
Check out this Key-on-Key interview in verse three:
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
I’m assuming he means a hypothetical British “hireling and slave.” The third verse (above) is probably the most death-oriented, while verse four (below) is Judeo-Christian Fan Fiction That Became Reality 144 Years Later:
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
The de facto motto of the United States in 1812 was “E pluribus unum.” The official motto “In God we trust” was adopted by Congress in 1956 in an effort to distinguish America from the Communist atheists, but it had been printed on the money since 1864, thanks to an 1861 letter from a Reverend from Pennsylvania who feared lest a future society of judgey assholes should find our money and deem us heathens. You know, because of the likelihood that they would have the same religion as a people who had been wiped out for long enough that no record existed of them except their currency.
Just so we’re all on the same page in the history textbook, the Civil War started in spring of 1861. A few months later, as his brethren are marching off to war, this Reverend is like, “We might all kill each other. How can I help with my faith? I know: I’ll petition the government, which is under attack by the other half of the country, to direct some of its attention towards rebranding our money. That way, if we do all kill each other, at least future societies will know we trusted God to keep us safe from our hateful, idiot selves.”
Towns across the mid-Atlantic seaboard are being gentrified into haunted battlefields. The Secretary of the Treasury receives this letter, and instead of throwing it directly into a wastebasket wittily labeled “TO READ,” he sends this note to James Pollock, Director of the Mint in Philadelphia:
Pollock spent the first two years of the Civil War brainstorming and perfecting a new coin design that would indicate the righteousness of the Union by including on its money the idea that God was on its side. He modified the “motto” from the final stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and he presented the new design to Congress in 1863, a time at which Congress probably had nothing more pressing to consider.
The motto first appeared on one-cent and two-cent coins in 1864 and has been on our currency ever since. In 1957, following Congress’s declaration of the new national motto, it began appearing on paper money as well. Over the years, especially in times of war, Americans have turned to our trust in God to remind us that we deserve to win because a higher power is on our side. We are certain of this because, like Key with the flag, we are constantly reminded of it — we see it every time we look at our money, and money is our favorite thing because money is how we achieve The American Dream.
Francis Scott Key wrote a very apt national anthem for us, especially for those of us who are concerned with flags and coins and other symbols. If we unpack the metaphors, the spirit of America is:
- Make sure you are still in charge.
- Completely exterminate every trace of those who used to be in charge or who would try to be in charge.
- Claim that your right to be in charge comes from God, who is unquestionable, end of argument.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: real wealth is attainable through hard work and sacrifice; people who don’t attain real wealth haven’t worked hard enough and are therefore lesser than those who have; real merit will be acknowledged and rewarded if it is actually worthy; efforts that are not acknowledged or rewarded are not worthy and require more work or talent; anyone who has anything, worked for it; anyone who doesn’t, didn’t.
All men are created equal; work ethic determines their success. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave. If you are brave enough to work, work will set you free.
II: Mr. Carraway’s Advice
♫Come care away, come care away, come care away with me…♫
In the same way that most Americans know the first few lines of the national anthem, even if they don’t know the rest of the lyrics, many Americans are familiar with the famous first sentiment of Fitzgerald’s most beloved novel, related as advice Nick Carraway, the narrator, remembers from his father:
“Whenever you feel like criticizing somebody,” he told me, “just remember that all people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
This elegant alternate phrasing of “check your privilege, shitlord” has endured in legend despite the American population’s total failure to internalize it. Nick, who alleges to have internalized it, further remembers the moment with his father thusly:
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way and I understood he meant a great deal more than that.
Let’s assume Nick is wrong and that Mr. Carraway the Elder didn’t mean “a great deal more than that,” though. Let’s assume that he meant exactly and only what he said. It’s good advice. He’s not even telling Nick to take any action except being mindful, so it’s not hard advice to follow — just remember.
Nick doesn’t follow it — Nick is a rich white man incapable of recognizing the privilege of his race, although he will sometimes compare the privilege of his wealth against the relative privileges of other white people. The Great Gatsby is a story about the futility of pursuing the American Dream and the superficiality of modern (“modern” here meaning “post-WWI”) relationships. Nothing about the narrative suggests that Nick, or anyone else, has the capacity to follow his father’s advice or that it would benefit anyone if he did; every person, the novel suggests, is born into his place and will remain in his place, and empathy for what that place is will not change the person’s circumstances.
In the novel, Fitzgerald demarcates Those Who Can Never Achieve The American Dream and Those Who Cannot Help But Achieve The American Dream in three foil groups: George and Myrtle Wilson, James Gatz/Jay Gatsby, and Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Each group represents various levels of authenticity and affluence, but only the Buchanans ever had a chance at real wealth, comfort, and power.
(For a more in-depth discussion of the ways in which this foil structure illustrates the futility of attempting to achieve The American Dream, click here.)
When Nick’s father advises him to remember that not everyone has had “the advantages” Nick has had, he is referring specifically to Nick’s family name, inheritance, white skin, and male gender as much as to any additional and more appreciated advantages, such as schooling and travel. The former set of advantages cannot be purchased or pretended to, the novel warns us: the American Dream is made of smoke, and happiness is a two-way mirror; the only way to secure your position is to keep others in theirs.
We see evidence of this in the tenets ascribed in the national anthem. If we believe fervently in our God-given right to what we have, why would we ever share it with the people who might seek to usurp our power? What good does it do us to consider someone’s history except to know where he came from and, therefore, where he belongs? Why accept change when we can exterminate our enemies?
III: Assimilation Ain’t Shit But Hopes And Tricks
In 1899, 36 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and 57 years before Congress would change the motto, Africa-American essayist, author, and activist, Charles Chesnutt, published a collection of short fiction called The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. Among these stories — whose themes focus on identity-building in postbellum southern societies and whose plots rely heavily on the kind of reveals employed by Shakespeare and Mystery Inc. — is “The Sheriff’s Children,” about a white North Carolina county sheriff who discovers that a mulatto man who has been accused of murder — and who, in the sheriff’s custody, is being both legally detained and officially protected from a lynch mob — is his son by a former slave.
This reveal is initially insufficient to persuade the sheriff to reserve judgement of the accused; he doesn’t doubt that his son is innocent of murder, but he knows him to be guilty of other, lesser crimes, and in any case, the angry crowd outside the jail makes immediate freedom a more dangerous option for the young man than remaining imprisoned. The sheriff and his son discuss whether the sheriff has burdened or blessed him with the gift of life, and his son, who has gone to school and speaks with “better language than most [local white] people,” says of his education:
“I learned to feel that no degree of learning or wisdom will change the color of my skin and that I shall always wear what in my own country is a badge of degradation. When I think about it seriously I do not care particularly for such a life.”
What was a “badge of degradation” in the years immediately following emancipation — what causes people of one race to suspect and accuse a person of another race of doing something for which they would require more evidence to suspect and accuse a person of their own race — was still a badge of degradation in the mid-20th century and is still a badge of degradation today. While people of color are afforded more white-like rights than when, eg, Emmett Till’s murderers bragged about the crime after their acquittal, incidents involving brutality against people of color continue to occur; despite the media’s attention and ostensible public outrage, people in positions of actual power seem as unable or unwilling as Nick Carraway to empathize with the perspectives of the institutionally disenfranchised.
Despite Gatsby’s changing his name and amassing a fortune, he could not achieve his goals — they were not his birthright; despite his freedom and education, the sheriff’s son could not escape the cycle of suspicion and disadvantage that has historically prevented people of color from experiencing life from a position of security, let alone power — it was not his birthright.
In a moment of clarity, after leaving his son in the jail cell with a bandaged flesh wound and spending several hours in sleeplessness and internal debate, the sheriff takes a metaphorical walk in his offspring’s shoes:
The sheriff recalled his own youth. He had inherited a honored name to keep untarnished; he had had a future to make; the picture of a fair young bride had beckoned him on to happiness. The poor wretch now stretched upon a pallet of straw between the brick walls of the jail had had none of these things, — no name, no father, no mother — in the true meaning of motherhood, — and until the past few years no possible future, and then one vague and shadowy in its outline, and dependent for form and substance upon the slow solution of a problem in which there were many unknown quantities.
He’s been contemplating whether to let his son out of jail. He and his son both know that if the young man remains in jail, he will be hanged for a murder he did not commit. The sheriff is conflicted because he respects the law vehemently and because to release his son before a trial would be to break the law. Nevertheless, having reflected upon his own privilege and upon the ways in which his son’s life might have turned out differently if he had enjoyed even a small fraction of those advantages, the sheriff determines to release him in the morning and falls asleep, his tumultuous conscious having been pacified by his decision.
When he gets to the jail the next morning, he finds that his son (who was told he’d be taken to the doctor in the morning to have his wound treated) had “torn the bandage from his wound and bled to death during the night. He had evidently been dead several hours.” That’s the end of the story.
This is not the end of our story. We are in the middle of our own lives and in the middle of the lives of billions of people around the world. Each moment we take to decide to empathize is a moment that someone is suffering unknowable and unimaginable pain. The Great Gatsby posits that the billboard is faded and uncaring and that no one is watching us. “The Star-Spangled Banner” believes that God is pushing for us every step of the way. If you believe that no one’s eye is on the sparrow or on the Valley of Ashes or on the black American bleeding to death in a jail cell — whatever metaphor suits your needs — put your eye on them; if you believe that God’s eye is on them, then follow His example and put your eye on them, too.
*It was a sad time, after God might be watching; Big Brother wouldn’t be watching until 1984, Sting wouldn’t be watching until 1983.
**though only half as full of steroids heyo! grow your own fruit
