MARK STEYN ON IRVING BERLIN’S “GOD BLESS AMERICA”
http://www.steynonline.com/6550/god-bless-america
The following essay is adapted from Mark’s book A Song For The Season:
In the weeks after September 11th, several commentators wanted to know why everyone was singing “God Bless America” rather than the national anthem. The song was everywhere in those early days, and various musicologists were called upon to speculate learnedly on why this song had caught the public mood: Perhaps “The Star-Spangled Banner” requires too great a range, perhaps its complex use of melismas demands a professional vocalist, etc, etc.
All irrelevant. The reason the nation sang “God Bless America” is its first seven words. “The Star-Spangled Banner” is about a historic event; “America The Beautiful” is (principally) about the topography; but when it comes to the nation, Irving Berlin said it simplest and said it best:
God Bless America
Land that I love.
Berlin was a contemporary of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart, but, unlike those sophisticated rhymesters, only he could have written those words without embarrassment. As Jule Styne, the composer of “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” once said to me about Berlin, “It’s easy to be clever. The really clever thing is to be simple” – to say it directly, unaffectedly, unashamedly:
God Bless America
Land that I love.
It was the song which members of Congress broke into spontaneously, and charmingly raggedly, on the steps of the Capitol. Sung on Federal property in normal circumstances, Berlin’s words would be considered religious enough to attract a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union:
Stand beside her
And guide her
Through the night
With a light from above…
“A light from above”? As in celestial?
But even the ACLU wasn’t dumb enough to launch church-and-state lawsuits when half of Lower Manhattan was filled with prayer vigils. “God Bless America” had played its role in the national story for six decades. On February 3rd 1945, American troops liberated the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila. Only when a GI climbed on a tank and yelled, “Hey, folks!” did the frightened prisoners (many of them US Army nurses) feel confident enough to come out, and as they stood around a little awkwardly it took a lone voice at the back to break the ice. Someone started singing “God Bless America” and by the third line everyone had joined in.
Irving Berlin was a Jew and he endured slights: When he married a society girl, Ellin Mackay, she was dropped from the Social Register; when Ellin’s sister took up with a Nazi diplomat in New York and went around sporting a diamond swastika, she suffered no such social disapproval. Throughout his life, fate seemed determined to test to the limit Berlin’s faith in both America and the simple certainties of popular song. But he never forgot being a child in Temun, Siberia, when the Cossacks rode in and razed his village, sending his parents scuttling west. About his adopted land, he had no doubts, and his were the words Americans turned to in the wake of September 11th.
Not long after, President Bush quietly proclaimed the date Patriot Day. “God Bless America” is a good song for that day, just as Berlin anthems mark other high days and holy days on the American calendar – “Easter Parade” and “White Christmas”. When a song’s that universal, it floats free of its creator. It’s “by” Irving Berlin, but so what? The Berlin songbook, in becoming his new homeland’s soundtrack, somehow ceased to be his. Because these are the tunes Americans got married to, went to war to, did their Christmas shopping to, it’s assumed that that’s how they were written – by a Tin Pan Alley opportunist with an eye to the main chance. We forget how much of himself is in those hits.
He wrote the song because he loved his country. It was 1918 and America was at war, and Berlin had composed an all-army revue called Yip, Yip, Yaphank. “God Bless America” was supposed to be the finale, sung by the full company as they depart for France. By the way, you remember the religious imagery in that middle section? The lyric was a little different in its original form:
Stand beside her
And guide her
To the right
With a light from above…
Ah, if only they’d sung that on the steps of the Capitol.
Berlin’s musical secretary in 1918 was Harry Ruby (later one half of Kalmar and Ruby, who wrote “Three Little Words”, “I Want To Be Loved By You”, “Give Me A Kiss To Build A Dream On”, etc) and it was said that, on hearing the number, he sighed, “Geez, Irvy, not another patriotic song.” Berlin always denied that story and explained that “God Bless America” didn’t seem quite right for a bunch of doughboys shipping out. It was “just a little sticky”, as he put it. “I couldn’t visualize soldiers marching to it.” George M Cohan had recently written “Over There” and its sentiments – “and we won’t come back till it’s over/Over There!” – seemed more in tune with the spirit of America’s fighting men. As Harry Ruby observed, “There were so many patriotic songs coming out everywhere at the time. Every songwriter was pouring them out.”
So Berlin put the song in the trunk, and replaced it with “We’re On Our Way To France”. Twenty years later, returning by ship from a visit to London at the time of the Munich agreement, Berlin’s thoughts were of war and love of country, and it was the latter he wanted to put into musical form. “I worked for a while on a song called ‘Thanks, America’, but I didn’t like it. I tried again with a song called ‘Let’s Talk About Liberty’, but I didn’t get very far with that. I found it was too much like making a speech to music.” It was then he remembered the song he’d written two decades earlier.
It took his staff a week of rummaging around the office to find it – and this was a man who kept every scrap of music and lyric if he thought it had even the slightest commercial potential. He found it a wee bit creaky in places, and he made one significant change. The 1918 version ran:
Make her victorious
On land and foam
God Bless America
My home, sweet home.
“I didn’t want this to be a war song,” said Berlin 20 years later. So, tweaking the melody and rewriting the lyric, he created a new ending:
From the mountains
To the prairies
To the oceans white with foam
God Bless America
My home, sweet home.
Did you know it has a German lyric? In those days, Milwaukee had a German-language newspaper, Deutsche Zeitung, and one of their reporters decided to provide his readers with a translation in order that German-Americans be able to ward off any lurking Teutonophobia among the natives and instead “manifest their loyalty to the United States”:
Herr, scheutz’ Amerika!
Land meiner Treu…
I don’t think it got much airplay in the Third Reich.
The great Kate Smith introduced “God Bless America” on the radio on Armistice Day – November 11th 1938. The following Fourth of July, they played it at Ebbetts Field before the game and the crowd instinctively rose, as if for the official national anthem. It’s a song about a nation, for everyone, for the millions and millions of Americans – but it’s also a song for one American in particular, for whom the final words meant most of all:
God Bless America
My home, sweet home.
Berlin donated his royalties to the Boy Scouts, but it didn’t dent criticism from those who disliked the writer’s assumption that God should be blessing America rather than Portugal or the Sudan or anywhere else. As his biographer Laurence Bergreen wrote, “‘God Bless America’ revealed that patriotism was Irving Berlin’s true religion. It evoked the same emotional response in him that conventional religious belief summoned in others; it was his rock.”
In the 1980s, in the long twilight of Berlin’s life, with loyal retainers holding the world at bay, the bare bones of the curriculum vitae took on mythic status, all the clichés of Ellis Island and the Lower East Side rolled into one all-purpose never-to-be-made Hollywood biopic: little Izzy Baline from Siberia who saw the Cossacks raze his village; the singing waiter who turned his hand to novelty songs; the Tin Pan Alley Jew boy who set his heart on a society bride – Irving Berlin embodies all the possibilities of this land: He came here as poor and foreign and disadvantaged as you can be, and yet he wove himself into the very fabric of the nation. His life and his art are part of the definition of America.
On this anniversary day, spare a thought for the fallen troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, for the New York Fire Department, for the brave citizen-soldiers of Flight 93, and for all those who set off to work on a beautiful Tuesday morning in mid-September. They died in a great cause:
God Bless America
Land that I love.
~Adapted from Mark’s book A Song For The Season
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