It was the first game of the 1918 World Series. The Chicago Cubs were playing the Boston Red Sox in Chicago. The country had entered World War I the previous year, so the baseball season leading up to this series had been cut short: draft-age men had been given a deadline to join the war effort.
During the seventh inning stretch, the marching band in the stadium tried something new. The song they played was an old one and had been played before at baseball games, usually on special occasions, like opening day. But it had recently been reorganized by a team that included the renowned John Philip Sousa. When the band broke into this new version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was no script to follow; everything was improvised. The players took off their caps and looked up at the flag. Fred Thomas, an active-duty sailor who played for the Red Sox, gave a military salute. As for the audience: “First a few took up the song,” The Times reported, “then others, and when the final notes came, a great volume of melody rolled across the field. It was at the end that the spectators burst into thunderous applause and rent the air with a joy that marked the high point of the day’s enthusiasm.”
The moment was powerful enough for the band to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” again in the second game of the series and again in the third. When the game was moved to Boston, the band there played it as well, now at the beginning of the game, and accompanied, in one case, by the presentation of wounded soldiers who had been given tickets. The song has been played at every World Series game since. In 1931 it became the nation’s official anthem. In World War II, the spread of electronic public address systems meant that it could be performed (and eventually sung – at all professional baseball games, not just the ones where someone hired a band.
Today it is a fixture at most American sporting events, both professional and amateur. (In many countries, the national anthem is usually played only before international competitions.) Promising young vocalists sing it at local games. Celebrities compete to play him at high-profile events like the World Series and the Super Bowl. What was once a novel, improvised gesture in times of war has become a ritual, something we expect as a matter of course.
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