Top 7 Fun Facts About “The Star-Spangled Banner”

 Anyone with United States currency stuffed into a purse or pocket carries around a piece of the song: the phrase “In God We Trust,” which adorns all coins and bills, is adapted from the fourth verse.

Francis Scott Key modeled his star-spangled imagery on Shakespeare: “By spangled star-light sheen” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and “what Stars do Spangle heaven with such beauty?” (The Taming of the Shrew).

 The words to the original English song from 1775 that Francis Scott Key borrowed during the War of 1812 to write his patriotic lyrics contain sly references to sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

 Congress took 117 years to consecrate the song, making it one of the youngest anthems in the world. By that time, Russia had cycled through two official anthems, one decreed by the Czar and another imposed by the Communists (“The Internationale”).

 Creating perhaps the greatest irony in United States history, a slaveholding Southerner is responsible for the Union’s unofficial anthem and an anti-slavery northerner wrote “Dixie,” the de facto Confederate anthem.

 Beginning in the 1890s, Americans honored the flag with the Bellamy Salute, named for Francis Bellamy, who created the Pledge of Allegiance. The stance is identical to what is now considered to be a Nazi or Italian fascist gesture, so the 1942 Federal Flag Code suggested that people place a hand over their heart instead.

 Congress passed anthem legislation in 1931 in part to mollify World War I veterans angry over scandals at the federal Veterans Bureau and Washington’s refusal to pay their service bonus, promised in 1945. A surge of veterans lobbied for their payout as the Depression deepened. Anthem legislation failed to quell the Bonus March on Washington in 1932, which ended when the D. C. police and the U. S. Army, led by Douglas MacArthur, routed the veterans’ encampments and sent them home.