Why We Play the Anthem Before Games, From the 1918 World Series On

Quick quiz: what is the only time in the week when sixty thousand strangers, some of whom would cheerfully argue with each other about anything, all stand up at once, take off their hats and stop talking? It is not church, with apologies to the preachers. It is not a political rally, where half the crowd is checking its phone. It is the three minutes before the first pitch, and the reason it happens is a story that deserves better than the shrug most of us give it.

We tend to assume the anthem at the ballgame has always been there, like the grass and the overpriced hot dogs. It has not. It has a birthday, a setting and a cast, and the story is one of those rare cases where a custom grew from the bottom up, by the spontaneous act of a crowd, and then hardened into a national ritual. That makes it a conservative's dream of how a tradition should form: nobody ordered it, and everybody kept it.

A poem written on a ship

Start in 1814. The United States and Britain were at war. In August British forces had burned Washington, and in September they turned on Baltimore. A Washington lawyer named Francis Scott Key had gone out to the British fleet under a flag of truce to seek the release of an American civilian, a physician named William Beanes, who had been taken prisoner. Key succeeded, but the British held the Americans aboard their ships during the bombardment of Fort McHenry, which guarded the harbor, to keep them from carrying warnings ashore.

The bombardment lasted through the night of September 13 into the morning of September 14, 1814. When the smoke cleared, Key saw that the American flag was still flying over the fort. The fort had held. He wrote down verses about the sight, which were printed as a broadside under a title that referred to the defence of the fort, and later set to a popular tune of the day, an English song written for the Anacreontic Society, a London gentlemen's club. The poem has four stanzas. The one that everyone knows asks whether the flag is still there, and the last line of the verse, the part about the land of the free and the home of the brave, is the one that sticks.

Note the structure of the verse. It is a question: does that flag still wave? It is not a boast. It is the anxious question of a man who has spent a night watching rockets, and the answer, which comes at dawn, is the joy of the song. That is a great deal more interesting than the version in which the song is just the thing you stand for while you wait for the beer vendor to finish his row. It is also a good deal harder than it sounds to sing, which is a separate scandal: the tune has a very wide range, and the national anthem is the only piece of music in America that is routinely performed by people who have never attempted it before and will never attempt it again.

The song gets around

For more than a century the poem was a popular song without being the official anthem. The Navy adopted it for ceremonial use in 1889. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson ordered it played at military and naval occasions. It was sung at schools, at patriotic gatherings and at concerts. But if you went to a ballpark in the early twentieth century, you would find the band might play marches, popular songs, and the occasional patriotic piece, and the idea of a regular anthem to start every game would have seemed odd. The anthem was a song for ceremonies, not for sports, and the thought of playing it before a ballgame would have struck most club owners the way a sermon before the seventh-inning stretch would strike them now: nice sentiment, wrong venue, who is going to sell the peanuts?

Then came the First World War.

September 5, 1918, Chicago

By the autumn of 1918 the United States had been at war for about eighteen months, and the baseball season had been cut short by a government work-or-fight order that told men of draft age to take essential work or enter the service. The World Series was moved up to early September. The Chicago Cubs, whose own park was smaller, played their home games at Comiskey Park, the larger home of the White Sox. The Boston Red Sox came to town with a young pitcher named Babe Ruth, who threw a complete-game shutout in Game 1 and won it by a score of 1 to 0.

The mood in the stands was not carefree, for the country was at war. During the seventh-inning stretch, a band struck up The Star-Spangled Banner. The widely told account, which traces to the Chicago Tribune, is that the Red Sox third baseman Fred Thomas turned toward the flag and gave it a military salute. The already-standing crowd began to sing.

Observers at the time noted that the reception was spontaneous and strong, and the song was played at each of the Series' remaining games. The Red Sox won the Series in six games.

I would add one caution that a careful reader will want. Sports histories like to tell this story as a single clean origin, and it is true that earlier performances of the song at ballparks are recorded. The 1918 Series is the moment that became fixed in memory, and the one that most clearly connected the ritual with a nation at war. For our purposes that is what matters. It was the moment the crowd decided what the song was for.

From custom to law: 1931

In the years after the war, the song kept gaining ground. Petitions and campaigns pressed Congress to make it official, and on March 3, 1931, Congress passed a law designating The Star-Spangled Banner as the national anthem of the United States, and President Herbert Hoover signed it. Think about the sequence: the custom came first, the law followed, and the law mostly recognised what the country was already doing. That is the usual order in a healthy republic, which is why the reverse order should make us suspicious.

The law was brief, and it did not require anyone to attend or to stand at a baseball game. The code that later set out customs for conduct during the anthem, which is part of the federal flag code, is advisory, as I explain in Old Glory's Rules, What the Flag Code Says and Why Most of Us Break It. The state does not enforce a salute. This is the same principle that appears in the 1943 flag-salute decision and in the longer treatment of the Pledge in The Pledge of Allegiance From 1892 to Under God, and the Fights Along the Way: patriotism that has to be ordered is not worth having.

The Second World War makes it routine

If 1918 was the birth, 1942 and after was the growing-up. After Pearl Harbor, the anthem was played routinely before major league games, and by the end of the war it had become a fixed part of the ritual at professional baseball, and then at football, basketball and hockey. Servicemen packed the stands. Players left for the war, and some did not come home. Hollywood, which sent its own stars and craftsmen into uniform, set the cultural tone, a story I tell in When Hollywood Enlisted, the Studios and Stars Who Went to War in 1942. The ballpark was one of the places where a country at war met itself, and the anthem was the song of the meeting.

By the time the war ended, the custom was so deeply set that no one thought to ask whether it ought to continue. It had passed from being a wartime gesture to being the way a game begins. That is how traditions are made: a crisis creates a ritual, the ritual outlives the crisis, and the next generation inherits it as a gift or a nuisance depending on whether anyone bothers to explain it.

Why the ritual is worth keeping

Here is the argument, in numbered form, because I think the case is stronger when it is laid out than when it is shouted.

1. A free people needs a few moments where it acts as one. A republic has no king and no state church. What holds it together is shared memory, shared law and a handful of shared rituals. The anthem at the game is one of the very few that people of every party, class and region still do together voluntarily.
2. It is a ritual of gratitude, not of conquest. The song is about a fort that held. It is a song of survival and thanks. A country that cannot say thank you to the people who held the fort has a problem that no policy will fix.
3. It costs three minutes and nothing else. There is no tax, no ticket and no oath. For the price of standing still, a crowd practises the habit of thinking about something larger than the score.
4. It teaches children something no classroom can. A child who stands at a ballgame between a grandfather in a Navy cap and a stranger from the next county learns, without a lecture, that there is something called "us".

That last point is why I would also say the ritual needs explanation. Children copy what they see. If the adults rise without thinking and sit without thinking, the children learn that it is something to endure. If an adult says, quietly, "this song was written by a man who watched a fort get bombed all night and saw our flag still up in the morning", the children learn why the song is there.

The objection

The best objection is that a ritual before a sporting event is a form of pressure, and that its meaning is hijacked when the state or a business uses it to enforce conformity. A related objection says that the song's history has uncomfortable parts. Key was a slaveholder, and a third verse that is not sung today contains lines that many readers find offensive. Both objections deserve a serious answer.

On the first, I agree that compulsion is the enemy of the ritual. A custom of respect must stay voluntary, and the league's rules and the law's reach should reflect that. The fight over whether players may kneel is a real one, and I deal with it on its own terms in Should Athletes Keep Politics Off the Field? Conservatives Disagree. My answer is that a ritual's strength lies in the willingness of the crowd, and a crowd that stands because it wants to is worth a hundred that stand because it is told.

On the second, honesty is the right policy. Key was a man of his time and a defender of a morally indefensible institution, and the nation that inherited his poem has spent two centuries working to live up to the words that were true in spite of their author. That is true of the Declaration of Independence as well. Its author, Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves, and its claim that all men are created equal has been the lever with which Americans have pried open every door that was shut against the claim. We do not abandon a founding sentence because its author fell short of it. We hold the country to it. The story of Jesse Owens, which I tell in Jesse Owens in Berlin and the Honours His Own Country Was Slow to Give, is a case in point: a country that was slow to honour him was nonetheless the country the country he represented in Berlin, and in the course of time the country caught up.

How to explain it to a child

Parents and grandparents want something practical, so here is a short script. It is a suggestion and not an official text.

• Tell the story in four sentences: a lawyer on a ship, a night of bombs, a flag still flying at dawn, a poem.
• Tell them that in 1918, in the middle of a war, a crowd at a baseball game sang it on their own, and that is how it became part of the game.
• Tell them that standing is a way of saying thank you, and that a thank-you given freely is better than one that is demanded.
• Tell them, if they ask, that people disagree about many things, and that the anthem is one of the few things most of us do together anyway.

You can look at the flag's own page on this site, the flag, for the customs and the history, and the Constitution's text is at the Constitution. It will not take long.

The case in brief

1. The anthem at ballgames grew from below: a 1814 poem about a fort that held, a 1918 World Series crowd that rose and sang during a war, and a 1931 law that recognised what Americans were already doing.
2. The Second World War made the ritual routine across professional sports, and a wartime gesture became an everyday custom.
3. The ritual is worth keeping because it is voluntary, cheap, grateful and shared, and because a republic needs a few moments where it acts as one.
4. It is worth explaining to children, who copy what they see and need to be told what it means.

What you can do: at your next game, stand for the anthem and, if a child is beside you, tell the story of Fort McHenry in two sentences before the first pitch.