Katharine Lee Bates

Katharine Lee Bates (August 12, 1859 – March 28, 1929) was an American songwriter. She is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem "America the Beautiful". She popularized "Mrs. Santa Claus" through her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride (1889).

Life and career

Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of Congregational pastor William Bates and his wife, Cornelia Frances Lee. She graduated from Needham High School in 1872, from Newton High School in 1875,^[1] and from Wellesley College with a B.A. in 1880. She taught at Natick High School during 1880–81 and at Dana Hall School from 1885 until 1889. She returned to Wellesley as an instructor, then an associate professor 1891–93 when she was awarded an M.A. and became full professor of English literature. She studied at Oxford University during 1890–91.^[2] While teaching at Wellesley, she was elected a member of the newly formed Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences because of her interest in history and politics.

Cover of an early edition of Goody Santa Claus

Bates was a prolific author of many volumes of poetry, travel books, and children's books. She popularized Mrs. Claus in her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride from the collection Sunshine and other Verses for Children (1889).

She contributed regularly to periodicals, sometimes under the pseudonym James Lincoln, including Atlantic Monthly, The Congregationalist, Boston Evening Transcript, Christian Century, Contemporary Verse, Lippincott's and Delineator.^[3]

A lifelong, active Republican, Bates broke with the party to endorse Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis in 1924 because of Republican opposition to American participation in the League of Nations. She said: "Though born and bred in the Republican camp, I cannot bear their betrayal of Mr. Wilson and their rejection of the League of Nations, our one hope of peace on earth."^[4]

Bates never married. In 1910, when a colleague described "free-flying spinsters" as "fringe on the garment of life", Bates answered: "I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don't think I mind not being woven in."^[5]

Oak Grove Cemetery, Falmouth, MA, Original tombstone

Oak Grove Cemetery, Falmouth, MA, new monument from the Falmouth town

Bates died in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on September 28, 1929, and is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery at Falmouth.^[6]

Katherine Lee Bates House, Falmouth, MA

The historic home and birthplace of Bates in Falmouth, was sold to Ruth P. Clark in November 2013 for $1,200,000.^[7]

Relationship with Katharine Coman

Bates lived in Wellesley with Katharine Coman, who was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College School Economics department. The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Coman's death in 1915.^[8] In 1922, Bates published Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance, a collection of poems written "to or about my Friend" Katharine Coman, some of which had been published in Coman's lifetime.^[9]

Some describe the couple as intimate lesbian partners,^[10] citing as an example Bates' 1891 letter to Coman: "It was never very possible to leave Wellesley [for good], because so many love-anchors held me there, and it seemed least of all possible when I had just found the long-desired way to your dearest heart...Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven."^[11] Others contest the use of the term lesbian to describe such a "Boston marriage". Writes one: "We cannot say with certainty what sexual connotations these relationships conveyed. We do know that these relationships were deeply intellectual; they fostered verbal and physical expressions of love."^[12]

America the Beautiful

The first draft of "America the Beautiful" was hastily jotted down in a notebook during the summer of 1893, which Bates spent teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Later she remembered:

One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.

The words to her only famous poem first appeared in print in The Congregationalist, a weekly journal, for Independence Day, 1895. The poem reached a wider audience when her revised version was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 19, 1904. Her final expanded version was written in 1913. When a version appeared in her collection America the Beautiful, and Other Poems (1912), a reviewer in the New York Times wrote: "we intend no derogation to Miss Katharine Lee Bates when we say that she is a good minor poet."^[13]

The hymn has been sung to several tunes, but the familiar one is by Samuel A. Ward (1847–1903), written for his hymn "Materna" (1882).

Honors

The Bates family home on Falmouth's Main Street is preserved by the Falmouth Historical Society. There is also a street named in her honor, "Katharine Lee Bates Road" in Falmouth. A plaque marks the site of the home where she lived as an adult on Centre Street in Newton, Massachusetts.

The Katharine Lee Bates Elementary School on Elmwood Road in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the Katharine Lee Bates Elementary School, founded in 1957 in Colorado Springs, Colorado,^[14] and Bates Hall dormitory at Wellesley College are named for her. In Falmouth, the Amber Waves Natural Foods store makes reference, in its name, to the opening lines of America the Beautiful.

The Katharine Lee Bates Professorship was established at Wellesley shortly after her death.^[15]

Bates was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970.^[16]

Collections of Bates's manuscripts are housed at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College; Falmouth Historical Society; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Wellesley College Archives.^[3]

In 2012, she was named by Equality Forum as one of their 31 Icons of the 2015 LGBT History Month.^[17]

Works

Author

• The College Beautiful, and Other Poems, Houghton (Cambridge, MA), 1887.
• Rose and Thorn, Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society (Boston, MA), 1889.
• Hermit Island, Lothrop (Boston, MA), 1890.
• Sunshine, and Other Verses for Children, Wellesley Alumnae (Boston, MA), 1890.
• The English Religious Drama, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1893, reprinted, Kennikat Press (Port Washington, NY), 1966.
• American Literature, Chautauqua Press (New York, NY), 1897.
• Spanish Highways and Byways, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1900.
• (As James Lincoln) Relishes of Rhyme, Richard G. Badger (Boston,MA), 1903.
• From Gretna Green to Land's End: A Literary Journey in England, photographs by Katharine Coman, Crowell (New York, NY), 1907.
• The Story of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1909.
• America the Beautiful, and Other Poems, Crowell (New York, NY), 1911.
• In Sunny Spain with Pilarica and Rafael, Dutton (New York, NY), 1913.
• Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, Retold by Katharine Lee Bates, illustrated by Angus MacDonall, color plates by Milo Winter, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1914.
• Fairy Gold, Dutton, (New York, NY), 1916.
• The Retinue, and Other Poems, Dutton (New York, NY), 1918.
• Sigurd Our Golden Collie, and Other Comrades of the Road, Dutton (New York, NY), 1919.
• Yellow Clover, A Book of Remembrance, Dutton (New York, NY), 1922.
• Little Robin Stay-Behind, and Other Plays in Verse for Children, Woman's Press (New York, NY), 1923.
• The Pilgrim Ship, Woman's Press (New York, NY), 1926.
• America the Dream, Crowell (New York, NY), 1930.
• An Autobiography, in Brief, of Katharine Lee Bates, Enterprise Press (Falmouth, MA), 1930.
• Selected Poems of Katharine Lee Bates, edited by Marion Pelton Guild, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1930.

Compiler

• Browning Studies: Bibliography, Robinson (Boston, MA), 1896.
• English Drama: A Working Basis, Robinson(Boston, MA), 1896, enlarged as Shakespeare: Selective Bibliography and Biographical Notes, compiled by Bates and Lilla Weed, Wellesley College (Wellesley, MA), 1913. Compiled with Lydia Boker Godfrey.
• English History Told by English Poets, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1902. Compiled with Katharine Coman.

Contributor

• Historic Towns of New England, edited by Lyman P. Powell, Putnam (New York, NY), 1898.

Editor

• The Wedding Day Book, Lothrop (Boston, MA), 1882, published as The Wedding-Day Book, with the Congratulations of the Poets, Lothrop (Boston, MA), 1895.
• Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner|Ancient Mariner, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1889.
• Ballad Book, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1890, reprinted, Books for Libraries Press (Freeport, NY), 1969.
• Shakespeare's Comedy of The Merchant of Venice, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1894.
• Shakespeare's Comedy of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1895.
• Shakespeare's Comedy of As You Like It, Leach, Shewell & Sanborn (Boston, MA), 1896.
• Stories from the Chap-Book, Stone (Chicago, IL), 1896.
• Keats's The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, Silver, Burdett, (New York, NY), 1902.
• The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, fourteen volumes, Crowell (New York, NY), 1902.
• Hamilton Wright Mabie, Norse Stories Retold from the Eddas, Rand, McNally, Chicago, 1902.
• The Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary, Crowell (New York, NY), 1903.
• John Ruskin, The King of the Golden River; or, the Black Brothers: A Legend of Stiria, illustrated by John C. Johansen, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1903.
• Tennyson's The Princess, American Book Co. (New York, NY), 1904.
• Tennyson's Gareth and Lynette, Lancelot and Elaine, The Passing of Arthur, Sibley (Boston, MA), 1905.
• The New Irish Drama, Drama League of America (Chicago, IL), 1911.
• Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and the Faire Maide of the West, Heath (Boston, MA), 1917.
• Once Upon a Time; A Book of Old-Time Fairy Tales, illustrated by Margaret Evans Price, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1921.
• Tom Thumb and Other Old-Time Fairy Tales, illustrated by Price, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1926.
• Jack the Giant-Killer, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1937.
• Jack and the Beanstalk; also Toads and Diamonds, Rand, McNally (Chicago, IL), 1937.

Introduction

• Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches, Crowell (New York, NY), 1906.
• Helen Sanborn, Anne of Brittany, Lothrop, Lee & Shepard (Boston, MA), 1917.
• Helen Corke, The World's Family, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1930.

Translator

• Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Romantic Legends of Spain, Crowell (New York). With Cornelia Frances Bates.

See also

• Biography portal

References

Notes

Further reading

• Dorothy Burgess, Dream and Deed: The Story of Katharine Lee Bates (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952)
• "Katharine Lee Bates" in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Barbara Sicherman, Carol Hurd Green with Ilene Kantrov, Harriette Walker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)
• Almanac of Famous People, sixth edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 71: American Literary Critics and Scholars, 1880–1900, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.
• Encyclopedia of World Biography, Volume 2, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.
• Gay and Lesbian Literature, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.
• Vida Dutton Scudder, On Journey, E.P. Dutton (New York, NY), 1937.
• Drury, Michael, "Why She Wrote America's Favorite Song," Reader's Digest, July 1993, pp. 90–93.
• Price, Deb. The Bellingham Herald, July 4, 1998: "Two women's love made 'America' Beautiful".
• Christian Science Monitor, July 19, 1930.
• The Dial, January 16, 1912.
• International Book Review, June 24, 1924.
• The Nation, November 30, 1918.
• New York Times, July 14, 1918; August 17, 1930.

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Katharine Lee Bates

• Lee Bates Katharine Lee Bates at the Songwriters Hall of Fame
• The Origin of American Christmas Myth and Customs
• "The Katharine Lee Bates Shrine!". Archived from the original on June 13, 2006. Retrieved 2009-02-16.  (A site devoted to Miss Bates and Falmouth, Massachusetts)
• Falmouth Museums on the Green
• Works by Katharine Lee Bates at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Katharine Lee Bates at Internet Archive
• Works by Katharine Lee Bates at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Biography and Poetry of Bates, part of a Series poet's biographies.