Katharine Lee Bates (Aug. 12, 1859 – Mar. 28, 1929), educator, journalist, writer, and poet best known for “America the Beautiful,” was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the youngest child of William Bates, a Congregational minister, and Cornelia Frances Lee Bates, a former schoolteacher. After her father died when she was a few weeks old, she was raised by her mother and an aunt, both graduates of South Hadley (Mount Holyoke) Seminary, who encouraged Katharine’s zeal for education and love of literature. The family struggled financially, however, and moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts, when Katharine was twelve years old.

With financial support from her brother, Bates entered Wellesley College in 1876, in its second graduating class. She flourished, inspired by its mission to not only equal the academic standards set by male colleges like Harvard and Yale, but exceed them. Graduating in 1880 as class president and class poet, she taught in local private and public schools, before returning to Wellesley in 1885 to teach English and earn an M.A. (1891). Bates served as department head and was a respected and beloved campus presence for four decades. A pioneer in American literary studies, she wrote the first textbook on that topic by a woman: American Literature (1898) as well as critical studies of Shakespeare, Keats, and other English writers.

Bates pursued a parallel poetry career, publishing “Sleep,” in The Atlantic Monthly (1879), while still an undergraduate, and enjoyed success with her collections The College Beautiful and Other Poems (1887) and America the Beautiful and Other Poems (1911) The latter was inspired by an 1893 visit to Pike’s Peak, Colorado, with her life partner and fellow Wellesley professor, Katharine Coman. Awed by her nation’s natural beauty-- it’s “purple mountain majesty”--Bates also worried about the conflict then raging between Eastern capitalists and Western populists, beseeching God to “crown [America’s] good with brotherhood/From sea to shining sea!” The poem has endured century as one of America’s most beloved patriotic hymns, though modern critics have noted the irony that it failed to celebrate the sisterhood she lived and sustained with Coman and other progressive-minded New Women throughout her career.
Bates’ travels through Spain in 1898-99 shaped her views on America’s emergence as a global power.

Arriving just after the Spanish-American war, she wrote a series of articles for the New York Times reflecting on the nation’s defeat. She wrote empathetically about Spanish suffering from the military defeats and casualties in Cuba and the Philippines and lauded the efforts of the nation’s “kindly, honest, hard-working, self-respecting” working and middling classes, striving for improvement and respectability. (Ponder) Rejecting the yellow journalism that denigrated Spaniards as lazy and brutish, Bates’ praised the stunning architecture of Spain’s mosques and churches and the natural beauty of Seville’s palm trees and orange gardens. Though horrified by a bullfight, she reflected on that day’s newspaper account: yet another brutal lynching of an African American in her homeland.

Bates account of her travels, Spanish Highways and Byways (1900) earned strong reviews and showcased her growing distrust of the men who make war, including Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in Cuba. Far more heroic, she argued, were the teachers and students she met at Alice Gulick’s International Institute for Girls in Spain, who embodied a genuine Spanish-American friendship and hope for a better future. Gulick, a Mount Holyoke graduate like Bates’ mother, was a close friend of Katharine Coman and others at Wellesley who supported the Institute. Those ties persuaded Bates to abandon her summer writing plans in 1900: instead she would work with Gulick, Dean of Women for the Harvard Cuban Summer School, to teach and chaperone around 650 Cuban female teachers who had traveled to Cambridge.

Bates praised Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and viewed Harvard’s motives for the School as altruistic, like “an elder brother to a people too childish yet fully to understand the service rendered.” (Gordon, 189). Yet despite such paternalism, she also recognized that the visitors’ “hearts are all with Cuba Libre,” and she supported the nation’s efforts to shape its own destiny. Moreover, the Harvard experience had instilled in the Cubans a sense of “esprit de corps,” that overcame sectional differences and strengthened the teachers’ sense of professionalism, as they learned the latest methods and ideas in the teaching of language, science, history, and public health. All would be valuable in the new nation.

The frenetic schedule, however, was hard on the women teachers, “delicate girls,” from small villages, “dismayed at the idea of walking in heat or in rain,” and the exhausting schedule of classes, educational trips, receptions, and formal dinners. Overall, she concluded, “the Cuban women met our strenuous kindness with extraordinary pluck.” Bates would continue to teach and write—sometimes under a male pseudonym, James Lincoln, and mentored several generations of poets, among them a young Robert Frost, just as another New England poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, had supported her in her youth. She lived with Coman in their home, The Scarab, until the latter’s death in 1915. Bates’ collection of poems about their relationship, Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance (1922) is regarded by some critics as her finest and also inspired The Clover Club, an organization of lesbian Wellesley faculty and staff. Bates died of pneumonia at her home in 1929.


Further Reading

1. Bates’s papers and correspondence are archived at Wellesley College and at the Wellesley Historical Society. http://www.wellesleyhistoricalsociety.org/documents/Bates.pdf

2. Gordon, Elizabeth Putnam. Alice Gordon Gulick: Her Life and Work in Spain (1917)
Ponder, Melinda M. Katharine Lee Bates: From Sea to Shining Sea (2017).

3. Obituary: Several obituaries are housed at the Wellesley Historical Society.