Out Spotlight

Today's Out Spotlight was a songwriter, poet and educator.  They are best known for writing “America the Beautiful" and for popularizing "Mrs. Santa Claus" through the poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride. Today's  Out Spotlight is Katharine Lee Bates.

Katharine Lee Bates was born August 12, 1859  in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of a Congregational minster.  Her father’s family left England and settled in Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1635. He was the pastor of the Congregational Church on the Village Green at Falmouth on Cape Cod and died from a back injury when Bates was a month old. Her mother, a graduate of Mount Holyoke Seminary, moved the family to Wellesley where Bates graduated in 1880 from then-new Wellesley College, thanks to help from her two older brothers.

 After spending a year at Oxford University, she began teaching English at Wellesley College and soon became a full professor. Her salary was $400 per year “with board and washing.” When she met  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he praised her high-school poem, “Sleep”. Writing was a continuing priority that provided some financial support—children’s stories, books of verse, textbooks, travel books based on her three sabbatical years in Europe and the Middle East.
 
In the summer of 1893, when she was lecturing at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Bates joined a group that took a rough prairie wagonride plus a struggle by mule, followed by an exhausting hike to the top of 14,000 foot-high Pike’s Peak. Overwhelmed by what she saw, Bates scribbled in her notebook wrote down a four-verse poem originally titled “Pike’s Peak,” now known as “America the Beautiful.” When published in local newspapers, the poem became wildly popular. Her copyright provided continuing royalties for years.

Although set to various tunes, the poem is traditionally sung to the tune of Samuel Ward’s hymn “Materna,” and has become the unofficial national anthem. There have been efforts to give “America the Beautiful” legal status as the national anthem.

She also popularized Mrs. Claus in her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride from the collection Sunshine and other Verses for Children (1889).

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


In 1915, Bates cofounded and served as the president of the New England Poetry Club. She was actively involved in social and labor reform.

While teaching at Wellesley, Bates became involved with professor, poet and dean Katharine Coman.  She described their relationship as a “romantic friendship.” The couple lived together for 25 years until Coman died. “So much of me died with Katharine Coman,” Bates said, “that I’m sometimes not quite sure whether I’m alive or not.” To honor her partner and celebrate their shared love and scholarship, Bates wrote “Yellow Clover: A Remembrance of Love” (1922).

Bates passed away in Wellesley, Massachusetts, March 28, 1929 at the age of 70.

The Falmouth Historical Society preserved Bates’s family home as a historical landmark. In 1970, she was inducted posthumously into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

"That the hymn has gained a hold is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists.”