1914 speech saluted ‘Star-Spangled Banner’

by James Breig

Next month, the bicentennial of “The Star-Spangled Banner” will be commemorated. That means the 100th anniversary of the song honoring the American flag occurred in September 1914.

Centennial events were held throughout America. Naturally, because Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics to the National Anthem in Baltimore, the major focus of the song’s birthday occurred there. Two years were spent in planning for the party, and the week-long “banner centenary,” as one newspaper headlined it, drew tens of thousands of people. Among them were 6,500 children who dressed in red, white and blue, and formed themselves into a living American flag.

The New York Times listed some of the candles atop the centennial cake, including an appearance in Baltimore’s harbor by the Constellation, “the oldest ship in the U.S. Navy,” and a parade crowded with 500 floats. The grandness of the celebration was evident in the official program, which ran nearly 300 pages.

While the producers of the centennial hoped that President Woodrow Wilson would deliver a major speech, he dispatched Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in his place. Bryan offered a lengthy oration that one newspaper titled the “eulogy of Old Glory.”

The address contrasted the horrors of Europe’s newly begun world war with America’s peace. “The war era has ended in the United States,” he said, “and is drawing to its close in foreign lands. The convulsions through which Europe is now passing are but the death throes of militarism.”

While America’s entry into that conflict in a few years — and World War II later — would prove him wrong, Bryan was right about the flag when he said: “Our starry banner, beautiful as it is to the eye – and there is none more beautiful – derives its real splendor from the fact that it floats ‘o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ The words describe a political state and the virtues of the people.”

The famous orator declaimed, “Hail! Flag of the free and the brave – priceless legacy from the fathers, baptized in their precious blood. Be our country’s ensign still….May the colors stimulate the struggling, hoping hosts of man to the impulses that are noblest, to the service that is largest and to the achievements that are most enduring.”

In September, America will once again salute “The Star-Spangled Banner,” this time on its 200th birthday.