American Holmes Jurist Oliver Wendell

Throughout the 19th and into most of the 20th Century, American school children learned to sing patriot songs as well as popular ballads or folklore tunes that demonstrated aspects of American pride and uniqueness. Much of this ended during the Vietnam War period. By the 1960s even the youngest school children were listening to rock and high school teens were attending rock concerts. Much of this music protested Vietnam and perceived notions of United States’ neo-imperialism. Inevitably, patriot songs and popular ballads slowly departed from American public classrooms. In 2010, most Americans can still identify The Star Spangled Banner, but few know the words to the national anthem.

Popular Patriotic Songs Highlighted American Nationalism

Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean was one of the most popular songs taught school children up to the latter years of the 20th Century. As demonstrated in the lyrics, “Columbia” was a synonym for the United States. Columbia was “the home of the brave and the free.” The uniqueness of the national vision was seen in such phrases as, “A world offers homage to thee…Thy banners make tyranny tremble…”

Columbia is portrayed as a ship, a symbol often used in American literature as in Walt Whitman’s O Captain My Captain or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem O Ship of State. In 1877 Oliver Wendell Holmes penned Ship of State, reflecting, in part, the electoral crisis of 1876. Thomas a Becket’s Columbia similarly refers to America as “The ark then of freedom’s foundation,” a reference to the Genesis ark which saved humanity from the devastation of the cataclysmic flood.

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