“We are having an adult discussion and that is great, as long as it’s civil.Such questions have taken centre stage over the past weekend after Donald Trump argued that football players who kneel during the national anthem should be fired. “We are actually debating real issues,” he says. That will clearly not be the case for the foreseeable future. The anthem is played so often at games that it can sometimes seem perfunctory. Today’s “owners could say to the players, ‘If you take a knee, you’re gone,’ ” Ferris says. The government cannot restrict speech under the First Amendment. They were not to talk, chew gum or move their feet. Ferris says the Cubs stopped playing it after the war but picked it up again in 1967, during the Vietnam war, and have played it since.Īmid the upheaval of Vietnam, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle enforced a policy that players stand at attention during the anthem, with helmets tucked under their arms. Most teams continued to play the anthem in the surge of postwar patriotism. “Before the opera, before the movies, before the theater.”Īnd, of course, before all manner of sports. “The anthem was heard everywhere” during the second world war, Ferris says. Sound systems, in place by World War II, changed that.
THE MEANING OF THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER SONG SERIES
The song did not yet catch on at all games for the simple reason that owners didn’t hire bands except for big events like the World Series or Opening Day. “He thought, ‘I’m an impresario, I’ll show those Midwesterners in Chicago how it’s done,’ ” Ferris says. Ferris credits the theatrical move to Red Sox owner Harry Frazee. When the Series moved to Boston, the Red Sox played the song during pregame festivities and paired it with the introduction of wounded soldiers. The crowd, already on their feet to stretch, began to sing along. The New York Times reported the song’s final bars were met by “thunderous applause and rent the air with a cheer that marked the highest point of the day’s enthusiasm.” Red Sox third baseman Fred Thomas, on furlough from the Navy, saluted. During the seventh-inning stretch, a military band spontaneously played the country’s still-unofficial anthem. The game came 17 months - and 100,000 American deaths - after the U.S. Babe Ruth’s Boston Red Sox opened in Chicago against the Cubs. Key's song was played at some baseball games in the 1890s, often with great pomp, Ferris says, but the World Series in 1918 offered a star-spangled moment. “The irony is that the South’s anthem, Dixie, was written by an anti-slavery Northerner whereas the Star-Spangled Banner, the anthem of the North, was written by a slave-holding Southerner whose family supported the Confederacy” long after Key died in 1843. “The North won the tug of war,” Ferris says. North and South wrestled over which side could claim the song during the Civil War.
It’s got emotional resonance.”Īnd bombs bursting in air. “But the Star-Spangled Banner is a better piece of music,” he says. World War I vets had been lobbying for it for years.įerris says that in one respect Yankee Doodle Dandy should be the national anthem because it dates to the nation’s roots in the Revolutionary War. “As we grew and as we prospered, people wanted to show their patriotism.”įrancis Scott Key wrote the song in 1814 and it became the nation’s de facto anthem not long after. "We’re a patriotic country and we’re different from the rest of the world in that respect,” Ferris says.
In 2017, former President Donald Trump called for firing players - he called them SOBs - who protest during the anthem. The answer often depends on the ear of the beholder.Ĭolin Kaepernick, then of the San Francisco 49ers, began a protest movement in the NFL in 2016 that used the anthem as a moment of maximum impact to call attention to social injustice. Others believe it means the entirety of the American experience. Now, with the Dallas Mavericks not playing the national anthem at home games this season, there is a new national debate stirring. Some believe the melody means respect for the fallen among our military and police. From big-city stadiums to small-town high school fields, those broad stripes and bright stars are the expected musical preamble to our ballgames. This article was originally published in 2017 but has been republished in light of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban's decision to not play the anthem at home games this season.įor decades, Americans have stood for the national anthem and then sat down for a ballgame.
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