O say can you sing?(Flashback: to know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero)(appreciation of The Star-Spangled Banner)

When Francis Scott Key, a poetical lawyer, rendered in verse his account of American resistance to the September 1814 British assault on Fort McHenry, he saddled his stirring lines with the lumpish title "The Defence of Fort McHenry." He quickly changed this to "The Star-Spangled Banner," which a Baltimore musician set to the tune of "To Anacreon in Heaven" an English tavern song. Within a fortnight, patriots far and wide were singing of dawn's early light, twilight's last gleaming, and the rockets' red glare--the poetry of the pre-game show.

History, as usual, smirked. As Irvin Molotsky noted in his book on the anthem, Key had opposed the War of 1812. Moreover, Key's grandson, pro-Confederate Baltimore editor Frank Key Howard, would be imprisoned for treason in Fort McHenry in September 1861.

We might think of the eventual designation of Key's poem as the national anthem as a case of Congressional constituent service run amuck. "The Star-Spangled Banner" was one of two pet causes of Maryland Democrat J. Charles Linthicum. (The other was the repeal of Prohibition.) Linthicum took up the issue during World War I after the importuning of an eccentric Baltimore matron named Ella Virginia Houck Holloway, described by the Baltimore Sun as "an imposing figure [who] always appeared in public wearing a tall shako, a cylindrical beaver hat with plume, that rose a foot above her head."

Mrs. Holloway's ardor for the flag made her charmingly daft or a damned nuisance. She patrolled the streets of Baltimore, ever on the qui vive for violations of flag etiquette. If her portfolio was modest--chairwoman of the Committee on the Correct Use of the Flag of the United States Daughters of the War of 1812--her energy was boundless.

Rep. Linthicum pressed on. The United States needed an official anthem, or so he declared, and it had better have been written in Maryland. He brushed aside the numerous criticisms lodged against the "Banner": that it was beyond the range of shower-stall singers; that its imagery was militaristic, and thus unsuited for a peaceable nation; that it was Anglophobic (in the third stanza, the mother country tracks in "foul footsteps' pollution"); that it was Anglo-philic, borrowing as it does an English tune; that the ...