‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’: Popular Song and American Neutrality,1914–1917

I

How can one account for the spectacular success of ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’ if the public’s musical preferences were not guided by pacifism? The music industry of the early twentieth century involved sheet-music publishers, who sold through retail outlets, and entertainers, who created a demand for songs by performing them in vaudeville theatres, beer gardens, and restaurants. So important was live performance to establishing a song hit that music publishers paid artists to perform their songs, and big firms like Leo Feist’s paid for more performances than did smaller ones. In 1916 John O’Connor, a Variety editor, charged that Feist had on its payroll almost all the singers working in the Keith-Albee theatres in New York. ⁶ Thanks to its market position, Feist was able to push ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’ once it was clear that audiences were responding positively to it. This is not to suggest that the song wasn’t popular, it is only to say that, like all hit songs, its success depended on the degree to which it was marketed. The song would almost certainly have been less successful if it had been published by a smaller company or if the theatres which hired the players didn’t want it performed.

In the early twentieth century, music publishers such as Feist employed a relatively unsophisticated business strategy. They did not do any market research and reacted to anything which seemed popular by increasing the number of performances and then producing a flood of similar products. They measured success in the simplest ways (volume of sales, support of singers, and audience enthusiasm) and avoided controversy as much as possible. They sold songs of every type and did not develop house brands; they accepted market fragmentation and assumed a limited demand; and they used a shotgun approach to production (fire off enough music and something was bound to hit). This is why we see not a consistent production of anti-war music between 1914 and 1917, but a short-lived rush of pacifist songs in the months immediately following the success of ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’ (January to April 1915). When audiences tired of peace songs, publishers and performers simply abandoned the genre.

This doesn’t explain why ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’ struck a chord with American audiences in the first place. In truth, apart from its pacifist lyrics the Piantadosi/Bryan number is a pretty typical product of Tin Pan Alley. It contains a series of strophes, or verses, that tell a first-person story, interspersed with a refrain, or chorus. The verses open with a familiar melody, the traditional Irish air ‘The Moreen’, which people would have known as the tune used by Thomas Moore in ‘The Minstrel Boy’ (‘The Harp That Once through Tara’s Halls’). The text, as with most songs of the era, is set syllabically and the rhythmic pattern is highly regular, consisting of alternating measures of quavers and crotchets, and preserving strong downbeat emphases. The text is highly sentimental, as it tells the story of a mother lamenting the loss of her son to war. One reason the song was a hit was certainly its unusual theme: sentimental mother songs were relatively rare at the time (the most familiar work in the genre, Donaldson and Young’s ‘My Mammy’, which Al Jolson made famous, was released in 1918).

But the Bryan tune also has unusual features that added to its appeal. It is marked ‘Marziale’ and ‘marcato’ or ‘hammered’, and it is in 2/4 time. In fact, odd though it may seem, ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’, is a rather jaunty piece of military music, in the genial key of G major. The tragic content is communicated through repeated modulations to B minor on the sadder bits, as on the words ‘hearts must break’. The chorus, where the grieving mother speaks, is even more regular and martial than the strophe. It is organized into four-measure phrases, each answered by another four-measure phrase, the whole being repeated four times. Each grouping ends on a fanfare to simulate a trumpet call. The rather limited undertow of sadness in the chorus is communicated by brief tonicizations of B minor, which, while melancholy, fail to displace the broader feeling of G major. Al Bryan’s desperate mother stomps, rather than sways, which makes it hard to know if it was the pacifist text or the catchy marching tune which most appealed to audiences and consumers.

Al Bryan doubtless employed a march because martial music was popular and sold well with audiences. As a reporter in Punch wrote at the time of the Civil War, ‘all history proves that music is as indispensable to warfare as money … Music is the soul of Mars.’ Song publishers and performers knew that the Civil War hit ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’ transformed the little Chicago publishing house Root and Cady into a substantial enterprise. ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’ sold 100,000 copies in 1865 alone, a phenomenal amount for the time. The country’s brief experience in the Spanish-American War also demonstrated the ability of song to mint coin from war. ‘A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’, that war’s peculiar anthem, sold 750,000 copies between 1898 and 1900 and generated $50,000 in royalties for its authors. This was a staggering number, as half a million copies was generally considered a ‘selling hit’ in the trade. In case anyone in 1915 needed an even more timely example, ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, the most popular First World War song of all, more than doubled the sales of ‘A Hot Time’ in the autumn and winter of 1914–15 alone. ⁷

Performers liked war songs because they suited the needs of early twentieth-century audiences. According to its American publisher, ‘Tipperary’ was ‘a jolly good song … a good marching tune, quite simple, and it doesn’t require much breath to sing it.’ ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’ was similar in these respects. Participation was always strongly encouraged in theatres, and singers tended to measure their success in terms of audience engagement. Marching songs, like many folk and most patriotic songs, have strong duple rhythms, uncomplicated sentiments, and easily remembered choruses. They naturally lent themselves to singing along and they were perennial favourites of performers wanting to make a splash with audiences. This is why even composers of pacifist songs in early 1915 chose to set their lyrics to marches. The words may have been pacifist, but the music might just as easily have been used in a pro-war song. Songwriting, publishing, and performing were commercial ventures, and people made their profits and incomes from hits. In this sense, ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’ sits comfortably in the tradition of successful songs of its time, separated only by its subject matter. ⁸

Al Piantadosi’s lyrics were certainly a novelty in January 1915. In the months before Feist published the pacifist hit, positive references to the war pervaded popular entertainment. In the winter of 1914–15 allusions to combat appeared in some of the most unlikely places. George Whiting, a popular baritone, sang that ‘Her face would make an army run / I’d rather face a Gatling gun’ in ‘Kill You with Love’, while Roger Lewis and Ernie Erdman’s sweet tune ‘Now I’ll Raise an Army of My Own’ contains lines such as ‘I laid siege to her heart, / But I could not win alone. / My allies were the candy shops, / My ammunition chocolate drops.’ A number of songs even addressed the actual war. The most popular of these was ‘The War in Snider’s Grocery Store’, which depicted the nightmare of a gloomy German grocer who was obsessed with the news from Europe. In his troubled dreams his shop came alive with frankfurters that march around the floor declaring themselves ‘the dogs of war’ and loaves of ‘Dutch’ pumpernickel and dill pickles that fight off the navy beans and Limburger cheese. ⁹

The trouble with all these songs of war was that they were dangerous to sing in a nation containing immigrants from both sides. ‘Tipperary’ inspired audiences to join in, but how did German-Americans respond to it? Or, even more pointedly, what did the vast number of Irish Catholics think of it, as so many of them opposed the war or hoped Britain would lose? The organizations that represented these minorities complained about songs like ‘Tipperary’, and they convinced Secretary Daniels to ban the playing of Allied war songs by US Army and Navy bands. Minority populations in America were not homogeneous, however, and even as Irish lobbyists denounced ‘Tipperary’, Irish men and women were singing it. Just before Christmas 1914, for example, German workers at an Illinois Steel plant in Chicago attacked their Irish co-workers when they started singing the song. Seizing upon conflicted Irish-American sentiments, Feist brought out a novelty number with a jingle based on ‘Tipperary’ aimed at Irish nationalists: ‘Why Not Sing the Wearing of the Green?’ ¹⁰ It was a clever idea, but the song never made anything like the impact of the original.

Artists and entrepreneurs commonly tried to avoid alienating audiences by insisting on their neutrality. In 1914 entertainers defined neutrality as ‘impartiality’, a position which allowed wartime references to seep into every type of song and joke without officially committing performers to one side or another. But neutrality in the entertainment world was a happy fiction in late 1914; it was employed as a way of presenting, and thereby perpetuating, a polarized debate rather than removing oneself from it. The popular, if tasteless, ballad ‘My Alsace Lorraine’ is a case in point. Ostensibly the song had nothing to do with the war, as it referred to a man choosing between his family and his girl, trying to decide ‘which way to go’. The singer believes he was like the disputed provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, torn ‘between Paris and Berlin’. But the song was published at the height of the Mulhouse campaign and it implied, as did the invasion itself, that the region, which had been part of Germany for 44 years, was up for grabs. Similarly, in Ruth Royce’s version of ‘Snider’s Grocery Store’, sung at the Orpheum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the Bismarck herring try to push the French peas off the shelf and fail. Favouritism towards the Entente was also expressed every time a singer belted out ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, even though that song made no mention of the war. But ‘Tipperary’ and its offspring, like the modest MacDonald and Carroll hit ‘Tip-Top Tipperary Mary’, were war songs which were used to link America to the Allied cause. At a show in Mount Vernon, Ohio, for example, before a stage draped with American flags and decorated with portraits of Washington and Lincoln, an ensemble of blackface performers ended their set of patriotic songs with a rousing version of ‘Tipperary’, which left no doubt where America stood in relation to Britain. ¹¹

In fact, neutrality did little to prevent audiences from expressing support for one side or the other. The vocal ensemble the Bison City Four toured an act in the winter of 1914–15 in which each singer dressed in a uniform of a different combatant while they sang a medley of war songs. Acts like this, which defined neutrality as giving each belligerent a turn, only encouraged spectators to pick their favourites and cheer them more strongly. Benefits for Belgian relief, which became features of most weekly playbills, and ‘Belgian War Pictures’, which opened most shows, may have seemed neutral, but they were hardly impartial. The musical revue Fads and Fancies, which played at the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York in 1915, featured the touching song ‘Let Us Have Peace’ (written in 1911), sung to a group of children dressed in the national costumes of the different combatants. ‘Naturally,’ remarked the Tribune, ‘the little Belgian child … is the centre of attention.’ Everything related to Belgium provided implicit criticism of Germany, but the alternative – choosing war pictures that did not feature Belgium’s occupation or that described Allied atrocities, as those houses serving German neighbourhoods tended to do – automatically favoured the Central Powers. Tin Pan Alley, a journalist observed late in 1914, ‘is struggling to produce a neutral ballad that will sweep the nation’. But it was difficult: ‘if you mention the fatherland as Germany you may have a couple of Englishmen or Frenchmen hissing you, and so it goes’. ¹²

II

Current events had always appealed to music publishers and performers and they milked the short-term niche markets that they created. But in the winter of 1914–15 the theatre owners on whom the publishing industry relied worried about the war’s impact on their audiences. Theatres combined people of diverse background, sensibility, and income in one space, and managers were preoccupied with the peace and decorum in their houses. In the 1880s and 1890s they had imposed rules to eliminate spitting, swearing, and alcohol consumption in order to secure a female custom. They generally prevented black people from sitting in the more expensive seats. They drove out the prostitutes and street children who filled the upper tiers of mid-nineteenth-century theatres and they continued to vigilantly police what occurred on stage. ¹³ This was especially the case in the more prestigious houses. Managers in the theatre chains sent each other weekly reports on the behaviour of the performers so that their colleagues could bar those who swore or made inappropriate or salacious remarks or gestures. Significantly, they saw themselves sitting atop a tinder box. At the slightest provocation, they feared, their audience could take offence and walk out, riot, or shout down a performer. Any of these occurrences, in an industry which its owners considered risky, had to be avoided.

Complicating their perception of their own business security was the vaudeville managers’ dependence on the custom of immigrants and second-generation Americans. During the war, many of vaudeville’s urban customers were inclined to support the Central Powers. This was especially true in vaudeville’s biggest markets: Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Milwaukee, St Louis, New York, and Chicago. In New York, for example, Keith’s Union Square Theatre served a predominantly German-Jewish audience, as did Proctor’s 125th Street Theatre. The McKinley Square Theatre, in the Bronx, had a largely Irish audience, and the same was true of Keeney’s Third Avenue in Brooklyn. Complaints were inevitable whenever a theatre was seen to be offering material linked to a belligerent that the local audience opposed, as happened when Pauline Hall delivered a song with the German anthem woven into the music in a mid-town theatre in New York in September 1914. From the opening of hostilities managers nervously watched their audiences, and in August 1914, in Boston’s Keith house, one even ordered performers to cut out any potentially incendiary war material. In the 81st Street Theatre in New York the management posted Wilson’s neutrality order on the wall and in programmes and, using a series of flash cards on the stage, it urged ‘members of the audience who must talk war [to] discuss the subject with someone who will agree with them’. ¹⁴

The danger in presenting war-inspired material was brought home to vaudeville managers when, in the first week of October 1914, a song performed in a New York theatre, accompanied by images of Belgium projected on a screen, caused the audience to riot. The house had to be cleared and the tickets refunded. A few days later E.F. Albee, the president of the country’s largest chain of vaudeville houses, instructed managers to no longer allow war songs to be performed in any of his company’s theatres. Albee’s injunction was quickly adopted by other vaudeville chains, and by January 1915 vaudeville’s ‘unwritten law’ was that songs or lines delivered on stage ‘cannot offend or favor any country or people’. The managers publically declared that it was the artists themselves, ‘in consideration of President Wilson’s neutrality policies [who] have agreed to taboo all mention of war’, but the pressure really came from above. Tin Pan Alley still wanted ‘battle songs for Broadway’, but writers had now to be careful not to offend ‘any member of our alien population’ or their performance would be banned by theatre management. ¹⁵

B.F. Keith’s worries about theatre audiences were not the only thing constraining the presentation of war material on stage. In November 1914 the commissioner of licences in New York banned the screening of a Life Photo Film Co. production, The Ordeal. The movie was censored on the grounds that its presentation of ‘alleged German atrocities’ during the Franco-Prussian War ‘violated the principle of neutrality’. What was most disturbing to entertainers was that in banning the film the licensing commissioner was responding to a recommendation from the National Board of Censorship, a private group set up by social reform organizations to exert moral pressure on the motion picture industry. The banning of the film would be overturned in court a few months after the commissioner’s ruling, but the damage to free speech had been done. In the short term the case reaffirmed vaudeville managers in their belief that they needed to impose a complete ban on war material. ¹⁶

Shortly after the censorship of The Ordeal and in the midst of vaudeville’s contortions over neutrality, Feist released ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’. Was it really any wonder that vaudevillians, muzzled by an industry which closely controlled bookings and monitored performances, rushed the song into performance? Was it a surprise that managers, anxious to prevent even neutral presentations of war material, should have pushed a song which declared all war wicked? The Piantadosi/Bryan song had an appealing tune, a martial bounce, and novelty lyrics, and it was a marching song that took a stand against war. In a couple of weeks vaudeville was ringing with martial ballads about tearful mothers and fighting sons.

As soon as it was clear ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’ had scored on vaudeville, Jerome Remick hired Al Bryan to produce a second ‘mother song hit’ (he churned out ‘When Our Mothers Rule the World’). Feist countered by commissioning Albert von Tilzer (brother of Harry, and best known as the composer of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’) to work with lyricist Will Dillon on an anti-war sequel for his company. The pair produced ‘Don’t Take My Darling Boy Away’. In the meantime, M. Witmark & Sons published the song that most closely rivalled the Piantadosi/Bryan tune in popularity: ‘The Little Grey Mother (Who Waits All Alone)’. Between January and May 1915 dozens of pacifist songs, all of them featuring dejected mothers, were rushed into publication. ¹⁷

III

Although some of the pacifist songs sold well, they were entirely derivative. They reproduced, rather than developed, the Piantadosi/Bryan formula in that they all involved women lamenting the loss of men. The same was true of the pacifist skits that vaudeville featured in early 1915. The most successful of these was Alla Nazimova’s War Brides, a short play which a rapturous Keith theatre manager described as ‘one of the greatest acts ever seen in vaudeville’. War Brides took place in a mythical country at war whose king has ordered every soldier to marry before going to the front. Joan, the heroine, played by Nazimova, organizes the women of her village to refuse to take husbands, thereby preventing the men from fighting. Arrested for treason, Joan commits suicide, but not before writing an impassioned letter to the king that converts him to the cause of peace. ¹⁸

Like the mother songs, pacifist skits associated war-making with masculinity, and pacifism with women’s love. This was safe territory for performers, because it reinforced conventional stereotypes while playing on contemporary interest in women’s activism. But in failing to break free of normative gender associations, pacifism on stage and in song reinforced the idea that fighting was a manly thing to do. Like the music, the cover for the original score of ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’ reveals an ambivalence about war which belies the text. The cover art shows a white-haired woman hugging tight her son, a young man, who cowers in her arms. Pictured above them are serried ranks of faceless soldier. Bombs explode around the marching men, while their mounted leader urges them on by waving the flag. Viewed one way, the mother is sparing her son from mechanized destruction; but the scene behind is also conventionally heroic and the young man seems to need his mother’s protection. Other cover images similarly associated combat with becoming a man. In ‘Don’t Take My Darling Boy Away’ an imposing recruiting sergeant stands, like fate, at the door, while the son, torn between his supplicating mother and the uniformed figure, hesitates. The son looks longingly towards the soldier, but his hand remains on the table, anchoring him to the home. His youthful, hairless face and flowing cravat reinforce the idea that this is a coming-of-age story: the army represents manhood and maturity; the home represents security, femininity, and feckless youth. From a commercial perspective, pacifism’s sudden appearance in popular culture made a great deal of sense, but it would need to develop a broader emotional repertoire and a less conventional set of gendered associations to establish an effective counter-narrative to war.

However, this never happened, and within a few weeks the vein started to show signs of exhaustion. With so many mother songs on the market, the Music Trade Review remarked in July 1915, ‘every phase of that sentimental subject was completely used up … it will take years to restore the theme to general favor’. As it was so closely associated with the refusal of women to allow men to fight, pacifism on stage also immediately attracted ridicule and spoof. One pro-Roosevelt comic suggested as a song title ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Mollycoddle’, while ‘I Didn’t Raise Ford to be a Jitney’ and ‘I Didn’t Raise My Dog to Be a Sausage’ both enjoyed success in the midst of entertainment’s pacifist surge. ¹⁹

Even more importantly, pacifist acts and songs quickly became associated with pro-German and radical political positions. Where ‘neutrality’ on stage had been expressed by those favouring all sides, pacifism was actively opposed to not just the European war, but to militarism generally. It was a political, moral, and ethnocultural position and it was adopted by those most interested in keeping the United States out of the war. This is why ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’ became a favourite not just with pacifists, but with German-American bands and Singvereine. Paradoxically, the very politics which vaudeville managers had hoped to keep off the stage by insisting on neutrality made its way there in the shape of a grieving mother.

Nothing illustrates the political undertow of the mother-peace-song fad so much as a conflict in the New York school board involving ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’. From February 1915 the principle of Public School 165 in Brooklyn, Albert Fichandler, required the song to be sung at school assembly. He drew attention to the political nature of his decision by putting pacifist posters up around the school, such as one carrying the image of a little girl asking her American-uniformed father: ‘Papa, are you going to kill some other girl’s papa?’ Principal Fichandler was German, Jewish, a progressive educator, and a socialist, and he did not believe guns and swords were appropriate toys for children. ‘Weapons of war should be treated like poison, fire and disease,’ he explained to the press, as ‘ways of causing death to loved ones.’ Although many of the parents in his district, which was heavily Russian-Jewish, appear to have supported him, he aroused the opposition of a number of ‘patriotic’ organizations and citizens. The 13th Coast Command of the National Guard, the Brooklyn Boy Scouts, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and various other groups objected to Fichandler’s efforts to teach children that soldiering was evil. Ultimately, the pressure would cost him his job. ²⁰

The politicization of ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’, and its growing associations with pro-German and radical positions, so upset Al Bryan that in the autumn of 1915 he repudiated his biggest hit. The 43-year-old Bryan was a Canadian who had been working as a professional songwriter in New York since the late 1880s. He had several relatives fighting in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and it pained him that his song was attacked in Canadian and British papers as endorsing cowardice. In September 1915 he announced that he had ‘nothing but contempt’ for those ‘who are trying to lull this country into a sense of false security’. Bryan insisted he was sorry he’d written the song, as ‘I would rather cut off my right hand than be the author of a song composition that holds my country up for ridicule.’ ²¹ Unlike neutrality, which in the entertainment world meant giving equal time to German songs and French ones, pacifism meant taking a stand against war and militarism. But pride in the country’s military traditions, and the association of combat with male courage, made pacifism too much for most American entertainers to swallow.

If vaudeville managers hoped that pacifism might depressurize and depoliticize entertainment, they were very much mistaken. The wave of mother songs that crashed over vaudeville in February–March 1915 quickly receded. By April 1915, when Clara Morton introduced ‘Made in America’, a song which promoted pacifism as America’s gift to the world, the moment had passed. The month saw, among other signs of renewed partisanship, the first performance of The Hyphen, a play about German spies who try to turn a wealthy German-American into a traitor by tempting him with an aristocratic title and, when that failed, by threatening him with financial ruin. The play suggests that while one might be proudly and ethnically German, one could not be loyal to both America and the reprehensible imperial government. Ironically, the play’s author, Justus Miles Foreman, would be killed on the Lusitania. Proctor’s 23rd Street Theatre in New York, which was on the edge of a Jewish neighbourhood, and regularly featured pro-German war scenes before the show, was once again, even before the sinking of the Lusitania, a platform for worrying agitation. According to Variety, by March 1915 ‘outbursts of enthusiasm from Vaterlanders’ were regularly being ‘drowned out by hisses from Allies’ rooters’. The strongman Paul Conchas, like other prominent German performers, quietly dropped all references to his heritage in the spring of 1915. In late 1914 Conchas, who juggled cannonballs and wore a Prussian army uniform on stage, was advertising himself as ‘Kaiser Wilhelm’s Military Hercules’. But in February 1915 he removed his uniform, took on an American partner, and began appearing as ‘Achilles’, a warrior-hero who was now billed as ‘the Military Hercules’ – state unknown. ²²

Sales of ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’, which were strong for three months, dried up in March. President Wilson’s shift to preparedness after the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in May 1915 actually came as a relief to entertainers. Most of the pacifist songs, observed one wag, had themselves been ‘bad enough to start another war’, and it was good to see the last of them. Sensing that the public was now more interested in having its outrage than its pacifist instincts stoked, in late May the ever-entrepreneurial Feist brought out an ‘up to the minute hit’: ‘When the Lusitania Went Down’. Fighting for the nation’s honour re-entered the songwriters’ toolkit. According to one trade paper, in the year after the sinking of the Lusitania, 1,000 different preparedness songs were printed. ²³

Patriotic numbers fully displaced pacifist ones over the spring and summer of 1915. This occurred months before an actual policy on national defence was announced in October. Perhaps this explains why the president’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, in urging Wilson to campaign in support of preparedness, advised him of the importance of ‘entertainment and guidance’. Among the patriotic songs that dominated the stage in mid 1915 was the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, a work not commonly performed in public as it was so closely associated with the American military. Appropriately enough, it was the great French soprano Emma Calvé who delivered the most talked-about performance of the song at the Palace in New York, in early June 1915. Calvé, who had been censured only a couple of months before because of her pro-French song repertoire, had the whole audience on its feet and vigorously singing. ‘Not since the days of the Spanish-American war’, enthused a correspondent, ‘has there been displayed [such] patriotic enthusiasm.’ Original patriotic material was also introduced by many of vaudeville’s biggest stars in the summer of 1915: Eva Tanguay launched ‘America, I Love You’, while the Melnotte Twins ‘aroused the audience’ with a preparedness song, ‘We’re All With You, Mr. Wilson’. ²⁴

Historians John P. Finnegan and Arthur Link suggest that the mobilization following the sinking of the Lusitania was a response to public pressure, a view supported by song. As a political ploy, ‘preparedness’ may have been designed to redirect warlike impulses in ways acceptable to elements in the Democratic Party, especially in the South, but the musical evidence suggests a public desire for a stronger projection of American power. In fact, the president’s determination to link preparedness to neutrality – an argument that won over many non-interventionists, including William Randolph Hearst – was lost on most entertainers. When Frederick Wheeler sang ‘We’ll Never Let the Old Flag Fall’ or the Peerless Quartet introduced George Fairman’s ‘I Think We’ve Got Another Washington (and Wilson Is His Name)’, they were not championing neutrality; they were linking nationalism, honour, manhood, and war. Summing up the relief of many entertainers, one singer declared of his president: ‘It takes a little time for him to make up his mind, / But he gets there just the same.’ ²⁵

American audiences began tilting even more overtly in pro-Allied directions. One sign of this was the return to vaudeville of foreign performers known to be closely connected to the Allied war effort. Foremost among them was Harry Lauder, the popular Scottish music-hall singer and a pre-war American favourite, who absented himself from vaudeville when the theatre was under its neutralist and pacifist regimes, from October 1914 to May 1915. When Lauder visited the country briefly on his way back from Australia in early 1915 he did not have a happy trip. Lauder tried

to talk to my American friends and beg them to prepare – prepare! …They thought I was mad, at first … They were so far away from the war … they thought I was raving when I told them I’d stake my word on it. America would never be able to stay out until the end.

In November 1915, however, Lauder returned to the United States and had a very different experience. Although he did not agitate for American intervention directly, over the winter of 1915–16 he sang songs popular with British soldiers and gave many speeches at Rotary meetings and in Masonic lodges urging Americans to support the Allies monetarily. ‘At the end of every performance,’ he later explained, ‘I told my audience what I was doing … and, although I addressed myself chiefly to the Scots, there has been a most generous and touching response from Americans as well.’ French artists resumed touring as well. Anna Held, vaudeville’s famous flirt and former wife of Florenz Ziegfeld, returned in the autumn of 1915 and remained in the US until her death early in 1918. Americans knew that she, like Lauder, had been an energetic troop entertainer, and she spent much of her time in the United States making speeches about French heroism, raising money for Belgian relief, and describing German atrocities. Similarly, the great French singer Yvette Guibert returned to the vaudeville circuit in 1916, performing songs which, she announced, she had sung to the wounded in France. As her accompanist explained in introducing her act: ‘the audience should think, when listening to these songs, of the brave soldiers of France who have never been too proud to fight’. ²⁶

IV

Preparedness, as represented in song and on stage, was about getting ready for war rather than asserting the moral power of neutrality. This is why it drove pacifism out of the repertoire. ‘It may have been something of a rage’, observed a New York Sun critic of ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’ in April 1916, ‘but nobody except an ultra-pacifist would think of singing it now. It is not the kind [of song] that sticks.’ Instead, performers like Rubey Cowan were shouting out ‘Let’s Be Ready! That’s the Spirit of ’76’. The question Cowan’s song raised was obvious: ready for what? ²⁷

Vaudeville managers must have known that in promoting militarism they might be offending some of their customers. But objecting to preparedness in the wake of the Lusitania’s sinking seemed unpatriotic, so objectors were expected to keep quiet or stay home. Sometimes an angry supporter of the Central Powers, or a pacifist, would attempt to denounce warmongering from the stalls or circle, but other audience members would shout the individual down and ushers would hastily escort the heckler out. In June 1916 even the Fourteenth Street Theatre, which was in the heavily Jewish and east-central European Lower East Side, was draped with American flags, and the management had boys in sailor suits handing out pamphlets in the lobby promoting a strong navy. The theatre’s ‘Preparedness Show’ was introduced with the film Defense or Tribute. To which country a weak America would pay tribute was not specified, but the fact that the theatre was half-full speaks volumes about who the audience thought was implicated. ²⁸

The growing divide which preparedness created among Americans of different ethnicities was revealed in an incident during the afternoon show at the Grand Opera House at 23rd and 8th in New York, a vaudeville theatre that served an ethnically mixed neighbourhood. Lillian Murtha, an experienced ‘Dutch’ impersonator who had made her career in the city’s German theatre, appeared before a drop depicting a scene in Holland, doubtless to neutralize the impact of her performance. She addressed the audience in German, not an implausible thing to do, given her act, but the result was ‘a stormy ten minutes’. As one reporter explained it, ‘disgraceful ridicule’ and ‘uncalled-for remarks’ from the house greeted her efforts. When she made the further mistake of trying to drown out her critics by getting the audience to join in the singing of a German song, the house erupted. The reporter for the Clipper felt that only a minority of the audience was at that point German-speaking, which suggested that many immigrants in the neighbourhood were now avoiding English-language vaudeville. ²⁹

Woodrow Wilson had feared that preparedness would increase ethnic tension, and in urging all Americans to become ‘unhyphenated’ he issued a warning to those who refused to submerge their cultural heritage. The terms under which German-Americans and other supporters of the Central Powers would have to accept ‘unhyphenation’ were made clear in the mainstream theatre: militarism, patriotism, and a barely concealed pro-Allied stance. Hardly surprisingly, as the entertainment industry became increasingly inimical to Germany, ‘languishing’ German-language cultural institutions ‘revived’. Large numbers of Americans opted to defy the president and remain hyphenated by reading the German-language press, going out to the German theatres, and enrolling in German-language courses. In fact, one editor announced that the war was producing a ‘renaissance’ in German-American culture. New York, for example, had one entirely German-language theatre in 1914; by 1916 there were three. Patriotism here, as with mainstream entertainment, was hard to separate from militarism. At a Chicago German theatre, for example, one soubrette defied the agitation over the sinking of the Lusitania by appearing on stage in a German uniform and singing patriotic songs. In mid 1915 the Irving Place Theatre in New York, the city’s premier German-language house, featured Immer Feste Druff! (‘Let him have it!’), a ‘war musical comedy’ that was ostensibly ‘full of laughter … and a large number of pleasing songs’. Emmy Nicklass, the diminutive star, played a French maid who captures the heart of a German soldier. Most of these shows opened with ‘German war pictures’, films showing ‘the German side of the war’. Interestingly, in the summer of 1915 the content and orientation of war pictures was explained in advertisements, so that the audience could be sure to avoid those that did not suit their outlook. Many Germans recognized at the time that the sinking of the Lusitania was the turning point in Anglo-American attitudes to the war, as it gave credence to all the atrocity stories that had come before. Their response was to remove themselves from what they felt was the antagonistic arena of mainstream entertainment. ³⁰

War songs were once again topping the list of sure-fire hits on English-language stages as well. ‘With each patriotic bit,’ a reviewer commented of an Orpheum, New York, performance, ‘the audience went wild with enthusiasm.’ By early 1916, according to the trade press, ‘war songs are flooding the market with over 400 now on the [active publication] list’. Joe Bernstein, of the Chicago publisher Shapiro, Bernstein, believed it was ‘too late for a mild war song now’; neutrality and pacifism were outdated and ‘it takes something with a real punch’ to get audiences going. Preparedness songs like ‘Wake Up, America’, ‘We’ll Be Ready When You Call’, and ‘You’ll Be There’ were now marketed as ‘voicing the sentiments of every truly loyal citizen … the men who are ready to offer themselves to the service of the nation when needed, and the women who are willing to give up their sons and husbands and brothers whenever the country shall call.’ In March 1916 John Phillip Sousa, leading the band at the Hippodrome in New York, began closing every performance with ‘Wake Up, America’. The audience was invited to join in the chorus, and at the conclusion of the song a big American flag was dropped and it became customary for the men in the audience to throw their hats in the air as they cheered. ³¹

The increasingly polarized, increasingly militarized, increasingly pro-Allied, increasingly patriotic stage confounded the earlier worries of entertainment executives and proved good for business. The autumn of 1914 and early 1915 had been bad for trade, and the introduction of the federal entertainment tax had only made things worse. Economic recovery in mid 1915 pumped money into the economy and the entertainment industry enjoyed a boom. Theatre managers, not surprisingly, associated rising revenues with growing patriotism and had nothing but good things to say about preparedness. ‘The real reason is that we have changed, or are rapidly changing, back to our normal selves. The reaction has set in, and that apathetic condition which was our lot for the early months of the European war is taking its leave.’ As one anti-militarist complained, the ‘people are becoming in their turn free from the restraints that have hitherto held them’. As Variety editorialized in June 1915, ‘if the U.S. should ever seriously think of war, every act would have a great finish’. ³²

Variety’s hopes were realized when the country prepared for a real war with Mexico. Although conflict with some of the revolutionary factions in Mexico had been growing, it was not until the raid in March in Columbus, New Mexico, and the attacks in May 1916 in Glen Springs and Boquillas, Texas, that both countries tumbled towards war. As Wilson ordered the blockade of Mexican ports and federalized the National Guard, songwriters began cranking out pro-war songs, each one hoping theirs would become the next ‘Tipperary’. Feist published Theodore Morse and D.A. Esrom’s ‘Soldier Boy’; Irving Berlin reissued ‘They’re on Their Way to Mexico’, written at the time of the Vera Cruz occupation; Shapiro, Bernstein brought out ‘My Country, I Hear You Calling’ and ‘I Hate Like Hell to Go’; Roy Hodgson and Bill Woolfenden handed out 3,500 free copies of their new song ‘Just Say Hello to the Girls I Know Back on Broadway’ at the New York armouries in the hope that it would catch fire. Performers also began securing popular mobilization songs from Britain, and dramatic skits like Somewhere in Mexico made their appearance. ³³ The prospect of all-out war with Mexico gave preparedness added immediacy, as Witmark’s May 1916 Keirn Brennan/Ernest Ball release, ‘You’ll Be There’, demonstrates:

If the time should come when we must go to war,

You’ll be there, you’ll be there!

You will go just like your daddy did before,

If they dare, we’ll prepare!

For our race was never known to run,

Should they come we’ll meet them gun to gun,

North and south, yes, ev’ry mother’s son,

You’ll be there! You’ll be there! ³⁴

The war songs of the summer of 1916 were all about soldiers shipping out: those for female voices depicted them waiting faithfully for their heroes’ return; those for male voices described how much they would be missed by the girls back home. There was an immediacy to these songs, flowing from the particulars of mobilization and deployment, and an undisguised delight in soldiering. None of these songs suggested that war might be a serious business, despite two years of observing the bloody European conflict.

The government’s July 1916 decision not to go to war was therefore a blow to the song business. The publishers complained that they had not been given a chance to make money from the war before ‘the Government call[ed] off activities’. Variety noted how the publishers were especially upset: ‘with the mobilization order … everything else was sidetracked to work on the war numbers, and just as things looked promising the President stepped in with the peace talk’. The passing of the Mexican crisis was disappointing to performers as well. As the comic Tommy Gray joked, ‘it looks as though our army went to Mexico to find they weren’t booked’. Singers seemed unwilling to abandon war music and kept singing mobilization songs after the crisis had passed. A columnist in the New York Herald noted in mid August that entertainers ‘who lament because Mexico faces peace just after they turned out a flock of war songs … are intent on keeping them in stock for a little while longer at least’. ³⁵

The fleeting promise of war in 1916 left songwriters with a backlog of material and performers anxious not to lose the momentum war preparations had given them. Through the autumn of 1916 war songs continued to be prominently featured in vaudeville. Songs like ‘War, War, War’ sung by Jack Reid and Bob Startzman and ‘Why Not be a Soldier?’ were doing the rounds. The Bowman Brothers (fiddle and guitar) electrified their audiences when, in blackface and without irony, they sang ‘America, I Raised a Boy for You’. One of the biggest vaudeville shows of the year, Ned Wayburn’s revue Century Girl, had as its Act II finale a Victor Herbert march number ‘When Uncle Sam Is the Ruler of the Waves’, performed around a spiral staircase. ‘Girls in patriotic dress line the edge of the stage,’ Sime Silverman noted in Variety; ‘behind them are grouped sailors and soldiers.’ As the stage rotated, the girls marched one way and the soldiers and sailors the other, in a symbolic reference to their departure for war. In the November 1916 Maddock and Rolfe show America First, each scene depicted soldiers, at drill, in camp on the Mexican border, or on board ship. ‘Shapely’ dancing girls in tights were there in each scene to make sure everyone knew war was both fun and a good way to meet girls. In January 1917 veteran performers Frank Thorndyke and Fred Barnes premiered their new comedy routine at Miner’s Theatre in the Bronx. The act featured one in uniform and on stage, while the other, in civvies and seated in the audience, asked questions ‘regarding the advantages of Uncle Sam’s navy’. It was symbolic evidence of the way in which stage and seat, only recently considered at odds, had been united around militarism. ³⁶

V

‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’ was a legitimate hit, but it would be wrong to consider it representative of American popular music or tastes between 1914 and 1917. Like many successful tunes of the time, it was simple, repetitive, martial, and easy to sing. Moreover, it had that all-important novelty value on which vaudeville, a network of theatres dependent on drawing repeat customers from immediate neighbourhoods, relied. Because the industry was preconditioned to reproduce successful formulas until they grew tiresome, the success of the Piantadosi/Bryan number inspired a large number of copycat songs and skits. A couple of these proved modestly popular, even if the great majority were quickly forgotten. ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy’ was a commercial success, but it cannot be used to demonstrate actual support for pacifism either in the entertainment industry or among consumers of entertainment.

Vaudeville’s pacifist moment lasted only a few months, and it had already run its course by the time the Lusitania was torpedoed. Musically, pacifism never managed to break free of its associations with grieving women and apprehensive men, which suggests that neither performers nor audiences invested enough in the genre to exploit its possibilities. This contributed to pacifism’s limited shelf-life. As spectators became bored with mother songs, performers abandoned them and pacifist music was marginalized to the German ethnic theatre.

War, in contrast, was always worth singing about. Even during popular entertainment’s neutrality period, in late 1914, it was hard to keep the militarism out of the music. Military subjects were particularly well suited to expository song, a declamatory style of singing, and to audience participation. It tapped into reassuring, rather than disturbing, stereotypes: male heroism, the promise of a lover’s return, patriotism, and victory over adversity. The excitement with which songwriters and performers took up the preparedness campaign and their enthusiasm for war with Mexico attest to the happy fit between war-making and popular amusement. Preparedness was made visual through marching chorines, uniformed dancers, firing guns, and flag-draped stages. Pacifism could have used those images, but only if it had adopted an ironic stance totally alien to the sentimental strain it employed. Preparedness, in contrast, was all about the virile fun of getting involved in a real war. To this extent, it promoted the idea that fighting was a positive thing. As the New Republic editorialized in June 1915, much of the support for preparedness came from ‘genuine patriotic aspiration, [and] a new expression of the instinctive fighting spirit of the early American’. ³⁷ In reinforcing that spirit, musical entertainment helped sustain the idea that war was heroic, patriotic, and manly, and, in so doing, it served to prepare the public for eventual intervention.