Scholars disagree about the meaning of this couplet. 14, 1814, after he witnessed the bombardment of an American fort by British ships in Baltimore Harbor, includes the lines: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.” A high school junior in New York City made news by refusing to record the song for her school’s socially distanced “virtual graduation.” A petition posted on advocated dropping the song as the national anthem, pointing to “elitist, sexist, and racist” verses in Key’s poem, “ Defence of Fort M’Henry,” from which “The Star-Spangled Banner” was adapted.
Major League Soccer announced that the anthem would not be played before games when its season resumed in July following the coronavirus lockdown. In the days that followed the toppling of the Golden Gate Park statue, viral posts on social media decried “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a racist song. But it was also Key’s role as a songwriter - his famous ode to the land of the free and the home of the brave - that made him a target for protesters. Key was a slave owner, like many of the historical personages whose statues have been defaced and destroyed in the Black Lives Matter uprising that followed the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. On June 20, protesters lassoed the statue with ropes, heaved and hoed, and down came Key, somersaulting off the pediment, head o’er heels. Today, Francis Scott Key is no longer in Golden Gate Park. Key is captured in a heroic pose: enthroned on a big chair with pen in hand, looking every inch the sort of poetaster who would come up with lines like “O’er the ramparts we watched / Were so gallantly streaming.”Īt least this is how the monument used to appear. In the center of the monument is the main attraction, a bronze statue of Key, the Washington, D.C., lawyer who, 206 years ago, wrote the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner” to commemorate the American victory in the Battle of Baltimore, in the War of 1812. There’s a fluted colonnade, four eagles with majestically fanned-out wings, swags and stars, and, at the very top of the big pile, the figure of Columbia, the traditional female personification of the United States, clutching an American flag. It is imposing and fussy, a 52-foot-tall chunk of travertine and marble loaded up with classical trimmings. The Francis Scott Key monument in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is one of those old-fashioned pieces of public art that, shall we say, lays it on thick.
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