Have you ever wondered how the Star-Spangled Banner became the National Anthem of the United States? According to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), the VFW actively worked to ensure this would happen. “In 1928, the U.S. was the only modern nation in the world without a sanctioned national ballad—a flagrant lapse VFW was determined to set right. It was Walter I. ‘Daddy’ Joyce, director of the National Americanization Committee, who led the crusade.”
The Star-Spangled Banner had been played and sung with varying degrees of success for some 100 years. The uplifting words came from Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old lawyer who had watched from Chesapeake Bay, Md., the night the British bombarded Ft. McHenry in 1814.
The next morning, the sight of the tattered flag still flying over the shelled fort inspired Key to put his feelings to words. They were published as a poem in the Sept. 20, 1814, issue of the Baltimore Patriot.”
The music the words are set to is an old English drinking song: “To Anacreon in Heaven.” The tune was well known and so the song caught on quickly, but it wasn’t until 1916 that President Woodrow Wilson gave it national anthem status. Congress hadn’t yet legislated it as “the nation’s patriotic musical signature.”
An effort was made by VFW members to secure “an overwhelming number of petitions signatures with which to bombard Congress.” To read the rest of the story on the Veterans of Foreign Wars website, please click here.
