Jul 2, 2026 · 25 min · 13 segments
The words of "America the Beautiful" were written by Katharine Lee Bates after a trip from Massachusetts to Colorado and up to the top of Pike's Peak. This is the story of how they were written and…
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
That all men are created equal.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." As an aspiration, these words were beautiful.
As a description of reality, they overstated the case.
They still overstated the case when Catherine Lee Bates was born approximately four score years later.
The United States that welcomed her in 1859 was far from perfect.
In fact, war was about to break out over exactly what we mean when we say all men and liberty and pursuit of happiness and consent of the governed.
All of those terms were up for dispute, and barely anyone was even talking about whether all men included women.
The Declaration of Independence never promised anyone prosperity, but that was certainly another ideal that a great many people associated with the United States when they immigrated here.
Unfortunately, prosperity also proved complicated to achieve, and that was certainly true for the Bates family of Massachusetts.
Catherine's mother was college-educated, but college education didn't translate into middle-class income, especially not if your husband died.
Catherine's father lived only a few weeks after her birth, and for years her mother struggled to keep the family fed and housed by sowing for the neighbors, selling vegetables from the garden plot, and accepting help from their church and relatives.
Fortunately, Catherine had a family that valued education, and she lived in a time when college education was opening to more and more women.
Wellesley College was astonishingly cheap, in part because they required their students to do housework for an hour every day.
Catherine joined their second ever class.
Her talents were literary, and she published stories, poems, and essays partly for the joy of it, and partly because she really needed the money.
After she graduated, she wrote a novel that won a prize, which sent her to study at Oxford.
A professorship sounds very impressive, but the salary attached was not luxurious.
Catherine earned $400 per year plus board and washing.
For context, that salary was better than the average salary paid to cotton mill workers in Massachusetts at this same time period.
But not a lot better.
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
That all men are created equal.
That they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.
That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." As an aspiration, these words were beautiful.
As a description of reality, they overstated the case.
They still overstated the case when Catherine Lee Bates was born approximately four score years later.
The United States that welcomed her in 1859 was far from perfect.
In fact, war was about to break out over exactly what we mean when we say all men and liberty and pursuit of happiness and consent of the governed.
All of those terms were up for dispute, and barely anyone was even talking about whether all men included women.
The Declaration of Independence never promised anyone prosperity, but that was certainly another ideal that a great many people associated with the United States when they immigrated here.
Unfortunately, prosperity also proved complicated to achieve, and that was certainly true for the Bates family of Massachusetts.
Catherine's mother was college-educated, but college education didn't translate into middle-class income, especially not if your husband died.
Catherine's father lived only a few weeks after her birth, and for years her mother struggled to keep the family fed and housed by sowing for the neighbors, selling vegetables from the garden plot, and accepting help from their church and relatives.
Fortunately, Catherine had a family that valued education, and she lived in a time when college education was opening to more and more women.
Wellesley College was astonishingly cheap, in part because they required their students to do housework for an hour every day.
Catherine joined their second ever class.
Her talents were literary, and she published stories, poems, and essays partly for the joy of it, and partly because she really needed the money.
After she graduated, she wrote a novel that won a prize, which sent her to study at Oxford.
A professorship sounds very impressive, but the salary attached was not luxurious.
Catherine earned $400 per year plus board and washing.
For context, that salary was better than the average salary paid to cotton mill workers in Massachusetts at this same time period.
But not a lot better.
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