Perhaps the most evocative tune in America’s patriotic repertoire, and certainly the most popular, is also among the least understood. Written by Katharine Lee Bates in 1893, “America the Beautiful” will be sung out at countless parades and picnics and parties on the country’s 250th anniversary this July Fourth. Amid divisive times in national life, it offers a hopeful and fitting rejoinder.

Bates composed the song after a trip up Pikes Peak, in Colorado, moved by the natural splendor she saw — in “one ecstatic gaze” — unfolding below. Across four stanzas, in its most famous version, it celebrates first the country’s natural abundance “from sea to shining sea”; then the pilgrims who beat a “thoroughfare for freedom”; then the soldiers “who more than self their country loved”; and, climactically, the gleaming “alabaster cities” that were then just beginning to dot the fruited plain.

For all their soaring themes, these lyrics bear little hint of jingoism. Although they enumerate the country’s many gifts, they beg repeatedly for divine help in not screwing it all up. Each verse exhorts the listener to self-sacrifice, diligence, courage and, in the final stanza, confident sanguinity. Bates attributed the song’s success to “the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood.”

That faith has been tested many times over the years. Previous Independence Days have often been occasions for statesmen to reflect on what was going wrong — on their fears that the country might no longer be worthy of its glorious founding. On July 4, 1826, the day both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, Josiah Quincy took note of deepening internal divisions and warned that “those will be false to the genius and character of our revolution, who shall associate themselves with political leaders without reference to principles.”

On the nation’s centennial, the former senator and House Speaker Robert C. Winthrop marveled at the “glorious fabric of self-government” that had been sustained over the previous century, at such high cost. But he warned that securing it would require future generations “to regard principle and character, rather than mere party allegiance, in the choice of men to rule over them.”

Such sentiments are still on the American mind. Some three-quarters of the country think the founders would be disappointed with the way things have turned out. Divisions and dysfunctions abound. Partisanship is acute. The current administration seems to view the rule of law as one option among many, while Congress is less popular than certain diseases.

Yet only obliquely does “America the Beautiful” reference politics, and surely that’s fitting on this semiquincentennial. Americans are still accomplishing great things. Their many triumphs in recent years — economic, scientific, technological — have come despite their politics, not because of them. Look around on July Fourth, and you won’t see a country wallowing in self-pity. You’ll see a lot of people getting on with the humble business of life, striving for better, building bigger, dreaming (as Bates put it) “the patriot dream.”

Adams and Jefferson could hardly have hoped for more. (And what might they make of the wonders of American spaceflight and medicine and artificial intelligence?) But the promise of their Revolution isn’t self-fulfilling. Protecting the principles of their Declaration — and the institutions established by the Constitution — even now requires constant vigilance, forbearance, hard work and no small amount of generosity.

President Calvin Coolidge, reflecting on the nation’s sesquicentennial a century ago, put it memorably:

Ours is a government of the people. It represents their will. Its officers may sometimes go astray, but that is not a reason for criticizing the principles of our institutions. The real heart of the American government depends upon the heart of the people. It is from that source that we must look for all genuine reform. It is to that cause that we must ascribe all our results.

On this anniversary as on so many before, it falls to regular Americans to redeem the nation’s flaws and revive its ideals. As Bates put it, in a tercet every schoolchild once memorized: “God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control / Thy liberty in law.”

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