Patrick Comerford
In sleepless moments in the early hours yesterday, I ended up doing an old ‘Quick crossword’ from the Guardian over three years ago (Quick crossword No 16,120, 6 January 2022). One of the clues near the end was:
‘17 Russian-born American songwriter, d. 1989 (6)’
In sleepless nights, I constantly pray ‘God Bless America.’ In the two months since Trump was sworn into office on 20 January 2025, we have seen a convicted felon, an economic migrant from South Africa and a self-styled hillbilly replace the rule of law with the diktats of a despot, tear up international conventions, threaten to invade their neighbours, undermine their allies, and cosy up to an invading despot who has brought Europe closer to the brink of war than it has ever been since 1945.
In his campaigns, Trump has hijacked the songs and music of many artists, including Leonard Cohen, Abba, Adele, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Guns N Roses, Luciano Pavarotti, Neil Young, Queen, Sinéad O’Connor, Blondie, Sheryl Crow, Lionel Richie, Elvis Costello and Village People.
His use of music without permission has become the subject of satire, with The Onion claiming the estate of Irving Berlin is suing Trump for his glockenspiel rendition of ‘God Bless America’.
Irving Berlin (1888-1989) was born Israel Isidore Beilin (ישראל איזידור ביילין) in the former Russian empire. His songs and music form a large part of the Great American Songbook, and his many honours included Academy, Grammy and Tony awards, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite once said he ‘helped write the story of this country, capturing the best of who we are and the dreams that shape our lives.’
Irving Berlin was born Israel Isidore Beilin (ישראל איזידור ביילין) in the Russian Empire on 11 May 1888, one of eight children of Moses Beilin (1848-1901) and Lena Lipkin Beilin (1850-1922). Although the family came from the shtetl of Tolochin, present-day Talachyn in Belarus, the songwriter was probably born in Tyumen, Siberia. His father was a cantor and took his family there to work in a synagogue.
Soon after his birth, the family returned From Tyumen to Tolochin. One of his few memories of those first five years in Russia was sitting on a blanket by the side of a road, watching the family home being burned down by Cossacks. By dawn, the house was in ashes.
The family fled Tolochin to Antwerp and left Europe on the SS Rhynland and arrived at Ellis Island on 14 September 1893. There the family were put in a pen until immigration officials declared them fit to be allowed into New York, and their name was changed from Beilin was changed to Baline.
They were one Jewish family among the hundreds of thousands who fled to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century, escaping antisemitism, racism, pogroms, discrimination and poverty – families such as those of George and Ira Gershwin, Al Jolson, Louis B Mayer of MGM and the Warner brothers.
But Moses Baline could not find work as a cantor and took a job at a kosher meat market, giving Hebrew lessons in the evening to make ends meet. While young Izzy Baline was at school he sang in a synagogue choir. He was eight when he began selling newspapers to support his family, his mother worked as a midwife, three of his sisters worked wrapping cigars, and his older brother worked making shorts in a sweatshop.
Shortly after his son’s bar mitzvah, Moses Baline died in 1901, leaving a widow and a family of young children. Izzy left school at 13, worked as a singing waiter, and then at 14 moved into one of the lodging house for homeless boys in the Bowery, before he foundi work with a music publisher at the age of 18 and got a job as a singing waiter in Chinatown.
He taught himself to play the piano, and started to publish his first songs under the name ‘I. Berlin’. He soon became one of the most prolific songwriters of all time.
His first big success, ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ (1911), sparked an international dance craze and made him a wealthy man at a young age. He had 20 original Broadway shows, 15 original Hollywood films – including Easter Parade (1948) and Holiday Inn (1942), which introduced ‘White Christmas’ – and 1,500 songs, including 232 Top 10 hits, with 25 reaching No 1.
After a whirlwind romance, he married 20-year-old Dorothy Goetz in February 1912. But she contracted typhoid fever on their honeymoon in Havana and died on 17 July.
He married his second wife, the writer Ellin Mackay, a Catholic from an Irish family, in a civil ceremony in 1926. Ellin wanted to be married by a priest, but he refused. His daughter later explained, ‘The cantor’s son does not forget who his people are.’
Their marriage was bitterly opposed by her billionaire father Clarence Mackay was furious that his daughter had married a Jewish refugee and disinherited her. She was dropped from the social registry, but her sister who dated a Nazi diplomat remained in good standing.
Ellin later decided that their three daughters should get to know their father’s Jewish heritage and, toward that end she joined a Manhattan Reform synagogue and took their children to a Passover seder and Yom Kippur services.
Another enduring song is ‘White Christmas.’ His three-week old son Irving jr died from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) on Christmas Day 1928, which helps to explain the song’s strong undertone of melancholy. The song has sold over 50 million records and remains the highest top single selling song in recording history.
There is some irony that a ‘nice Jewish boy’ wrote songs such as ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Easter Parade’. But Irving Berlin insisted that Christmas was an all-American holiday in which Jews could take part without betraying their faith, with Christmas a celebration of the winter season and Easter a festival of spring fashion.
Irving Berlin was drafted into the army near the end of World War I in 1917. That year he wrote ‘God Bless America,’ although it was not recorded until 1938. He later said the song title was inspired by his mother who, despite a life of hardship and poverty, often exclaimed ‘G-d bless America’, saying it ‘with emotion which was almost exultation.’
His original lyrics were:
God bless America, land that I love
Stand beside her, and guide her,
to the right with a light from above.
Make her victorious on land and foam,
God bless America, my home sweet home.
Berlin revived the song shortly before World War II. But he wanted a song about peace, and changed the militaristic sounding ‘make her victorious on land and foam’ to the now familiar words ‘from the mountains, to the prairie, to the ocean, white with foam.’
Moreover, the term ‘to the right’ had developed political associations that he wanted to avoid, so he changed the lyric to ‘through the night with a light from above.’
‘God Bless America’ had its debut the day after Kristallnacht in Germany in November 1938. It was first performed by Kate Smith when Berlin gave it to her to sing as a patriotic song marking the 20th anniversary of Armistice Day. The song’s introduction, which Kate Smith sang, is rarely heard today:
While the storm clouds gather from across the sea,
let us swear allegiance to the land that’s free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
as we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.
Those lyrics seem so relevant so poignant these days.
‘God Bless America’ became a second anthem when the US entered World War II. But its popularity was not without controversy and antisemites and xenophobes were outraged that a Jew had written the song.
The German American Bund, a pro-nazi front, claimed it was part of a Jewish conspiracy and a manifestation of the mindset of ‘the refugee horde.’ Followers of the antisemitic and pro-nazi broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin regarded singing the song as ‘a provocation of violence’. The Ku Klux Klan called for its boycott.
Irving Berlin refused to profit from patriotism, and signed over all the rights and royalties to ‘God Bless America’ in perpetuity to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America. Since then, the song has generated many millions of dollars.
During World War II, he became involved in wartime musicals and shows for the army. Berlin insisted on integrated casts and staff, and hired African Americans to work on his play This is the Army. It became the first integrated division army unit in US history, and he wrote a song specifically to be sung by his black actors – as opposed to being sung by blackface singers – ‘That’s What the Well-Dressed Man in Harlem Will Wear’.
The play became a film of the same name in 1943, starring Ronald Reagan. Kate Smith also sang ‘God Bless America’ against a backdrop of anxious families apprehensive about the war.
It was deliberate action that strongly contrasts today with the Pentagon’s continuing purge of web content that is deemed to be related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEI) programmes, including pages about Jackie Robinson’s military career, the Native American code talkers, the heroes who raised the flag at Iwa Jima and – for some days – the page dedicated to Major General Calvin Charles Rogers.
There is deep personal significance in the number he wrote in 1925, ‘Don’t Send Me Back to Petrograd,’ about the 1924 American quota law. The National Origins Act effectively barred eastern Europeans from immigrating to the US during World War II and was not repealed until 1965. The singer pleads, ‘Now that I’m over here, they won’t let me stay ... Please don’t send me away’ – a sentiment that certainly resonates today.
Although Irving Berlin married a Christian and was often described as an agnostic, he continued to identify as a Jew and supported Jewish charities. He was honoured by the National Conference of Christians and Jews in 1944 for ‘advancing the aims of the conference to eliminate religious and racial conflict’, and he was honoured by the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) in 1949 as one of the 12 ‘most outstanding Americans of Jewish faith’.
Irving Berlin died on 22 September 1989 at 101. Twelve years later, ‘God Bless America’ took on a new significance in the US after 9-11 in 2001, when it became the spontaneous symbol of national unity and collective mourning after members of Congress stood together singing it on the steps of the Capitol.
Yet Donald Trump forgot the words of ‘God Bless America’ during an event at the White House in 2018. Seven years later, he panders to a dictatorial and war-mongering Russian despot, defies court orders, ignores democratic processes, deports refugee children, welcomes an Irish rapist into the Oval Office and fulminates racist bile and hatred.
I wonder whether he and his cabal ever stop to think the migrant child who escaped prejudice, racism, antisemitism and violence and became the author of ‘God Bless America’, one of the greatest American anthems and how it celebrates liberty and democracy, diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
