The Pander Waves of Grain January 5, 2012, 6:45 pm In Iowa earlier this week, Mitt Romney was guilty of an outrageous falsehood: He said that the "amber waves of grain" in the song "America the Beautiful" include corn. Growing up alongside the Missouri-Kansas border, I always understood that the phrase referred only to wheat - and I said as much in a recent blog post. Lynn Sherr, who wrote a book about the origin of the song, confirmed today that the song's author, Katharine Lee Bates, conceived the phrase while on a train speeding through the golden wheat fields of Kansas. Corn, growing in the fields of Iowa, is obviously green. It turns brown near the end of its cycle, but I doubt Mr. Romney was referring to waves of dead cornstalks. Even in a decent wind, cornfields don't produce the oceanic effect that so impressed the poet. And though some botanists may say corn is a grain, I think that's a technicality. No, Mr. Romney was pandering to the good people who grow corn in Iowa, and diminishing the poetic heritage of America's wheatgrowers. For an explanation of a few other things he got wrong about "America the Beautiful," see the rest of Ms. Sherr's essay. And today, having left the plain states for the Atlantic coast, he finally admitted what he had done. "When I was in Iowa, I pretended that corn qualified" as an amber wave, he told a crowd in South Carolina. That may have gotten me those eight votes I needed so badly. Even if it did him some good in Iowa, he'll have some explaining to do if he manages to make it to the wheat states.