Sheryl Kaskowitz's sprightly monograph is not the first book devoted to a song by Irving Berlin; that honor belongs to Jody Rosen's White Christmas (2002). The first book relevant to Berlin's career to be entitled God Bless America is Kathleen E. R. Smith's (2003), which examines the hits that served as the soundtrack to the prosecution of the Second World War. But one measure of Berlin's prodigious talent and astonishing productivity is that now another of his songs has inspired a work of historical scholarship.
“God Bless America” is less widely known than “White Christmas,” and is not even as good. The sadness injected into “White Christmas” evokes sentiments of longing and loss that are utterly absent from “God Bless America,” for which Berlin himself did not claim any special merit. For all of his stirring praise of the nation that had granted him refuge, Berlin objected to military personnel singing a song that he was reluctant to consider patriotic. He believed that uniforms were superfluous in conveying the gratitude that the song expresses, which it does without summoning any martial images like “the rockets' red glare.” Written in 1918, but first presented to the public exactly two decades later, “God Bless America” quickly came to rival the national anthem. But despite the magnitude of Berlin's own musical ambition, he did not overreach. Not even so inescapable a song as “God Bless America,” he insisted, should displace “The Star-Spangled Banner” (though the latter is notoriously harder to sing). No Tin Pan Alley composer fought more fiercely for commercial advantage or protected the copyrights to his popular standards more assiduously. Yet Berlin generously insisted that all the royalties from “God Bless America” be permanently transferred to the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts. The history that Kaskowitz so unpretentiously recounts is indeed packed with surprises.
The popular arts aim at a one-size-fits-all universalism to maximize the size of the audience; and Berlin believed that the secret to artistic success is simplicity (even though simple songs, he also noted, are the hardest to write). The history of “God Bless America” illustrates how staggeringly diverse was its appeal. Before Pearl Harbor even the German American Bund briefly replaced its “Horst Wessel” marching song with “God Bless America,” until New Jersey's Nazis discovered that Berlin was a Jew. “This Land Is Your Land” was Woody Guthrie's riposte to a song that both Democrats and Republicans adopted as their own in the 1940 presidential campaign, but his moxie placed him among a small minority of dissenters. Kaskowitz also cites protests from nonbelievers. But the deity asked to bless the republic is strikingly nondenominational, a beneficent rather than a jealous god. And when the ecumenism of “God Bless America” is added to Berlin's failure to mention Christ's nativity and resurrection in the lyrics to “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” one conclusion is incontestable: such popular hits exemplified the secularization of twentieth-century America.
This is a short book, but it nevertheless feels padded. Its longest chapter describes how “God Bless America” became, after the horror and devastation of 9/11, a shock-absorber at baseball games. By seeking divine help in getting “thru the night with a light from above,” fans could feel the reassurance of national unity and continuity. Thus the obligatory playlist of the national pastime now includes “God Bless America,” along with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” (which is another Tin Pan Alley ditty, sung by those who have already come to the ballparks). But like Kaskowitz's chapter on the political impact of “God Bless America” after 9/11, the extensive and even ingenious research piles on detail after detail, which has the effect of adding similar evidence that supports her generalizations more obviously than it illuminates them. Given the investment of scholarly energy, too few curiosities are revealed. One exception is a poll, conducted soon after 9/11, which disclosed that more citizens claimed to have recently sung “God Bless America” than had prayed, or cried, or reconnected with their own relatives. Thus not even the imperatives of intimacy could easily trump an iconic song.
Though Kaskowitz's coda, which reflects upon the phenomenon of communal singing, manages to skip any final analysis of the fate of Berlin's song, her publisher has provided an audiovisual, password-protected bonus. It is a website that enables readers to watch videos of performances that are specifically cited in the text and to listen to recordings of that “liminal space,” the author writes, “between ballad, hymn, march, and anthem” (48–49). Included among the voices that can be heard are the composer's, plus the radio contralto whose fame would be indelibly associated with “God Bless America.” When Kate Smith introduced it on CBS in November 1938, she announced the debut of “something more than a song … a song that will never die.” For once, ballyhoo proved prophetic.
