My Country, ’Tis of Thee

My Country, ’Tis of Thee enters U.S.A. not as a complete song or a performed scene but as three clipped lines embedded in a Newsreel collage. Its compact appearance brings patriotic language into a montage of public headlines and popular forms, where national ideals sit alongside the uneven, contested realities recorded elsewhere in the book.

Appearance and Wording

The excerpt reads “My country ’tis of thee,” “Sweet land of libertee,” and “Of thee I sing.” The sequence preserves the song’s direct declaration of attachment to the country, while “libertee” gives the second line a distinctly colloquial spelling. That shift in register makes the fragment’s voice less ceremonially polished on the page: the patriotic formula remains recognizable, but it arrives through an informal, vernacular sound.

The text supplies only these three lines. It does not identify a singer, describe a performance, or continue the song beyond the refrain-like passage. Its brevity is part of its effect: a familiar national sentiment surfaces for an instant and is immediately absorbed into the book’s larger stream of printed voices.

Placement in the Newsreel

The song appears in the Newsreel sequence, a form that assembles actual headlines, fragments of news stories, advertising slogans, and popular-song lyrics into brief, abrupt collages. Here, a market headline about crucible steel leads into the lyric lines; the passage then moves to Paul Bunyan and the account of Wesley Everest’s return from military service to logging. The song is therefore framed not as a self-contained patriotic statement but as one element among commercial news, folk material, and accounts of working life.

That arrangement makes juxtaposition do the work of commentary. The song’s invocation of country and liberty is placed beside the market’s business language and, soon after, the narrative of a former soldier returning to a logging job. The text does not explain the relationship among these fragments, but their proximity prevents the patriotic lyric from standing alone as an uncomplicated summary of American life.

Function and Significance

The song fragment exemplifies the Newsreel’s method of letting public language appear in pieces. Rather than pausing to interpret the lyric, the montage sets it among materials with different sources and registers, leaving readers to encounter national belonging as one voice in a crowded documentary field. The spelling “libertee” sharpens that effect: the ideal is present, but its printed form carries the texture of informal speech rather than an abstract civic slogan.

Elsewhere, U.S.A. places the lives of ordinary people beneath the pressure of institutions and historical events. In that broader design, these three lines offer a brief, affirmative national refrain without supplying a resolution to the conflicts around labor, war, and public authority. Their force comes from the contrast between the song’s confident declaration and the collage’s refusal to let any single declaration settle what the country means.