God Blessed America

A tale of two American anthems

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What makes an American anthem? Is it peaceful gratitude, or martial vigor? Is it love of the American land and people, or defiance of America’s enemies? Is it blind loyalty, or clear-sighted devotion?

It’s safe to say that our official anthem is on the “martial” side, having literally been inspired by a battle. You might even call it downright jingoistic. But in the 19th century, more reflective (and more singable) standards began to emerge. Where “The Star-Spangled Banner” is a battle cry, lyrics like “America the Beautiful” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” convey the beauty of our land in peacetime, though not without honoring the bloody sacrifices that made it possible.

In the 20th century, two simply composed classics proved especially enduring: “God Bless America” and “This Land is Your Land.” You may have grown up singing both of them while knowing little about their writers, or about how the songs’ histories were intertwined. And given how similar they feel, you would never have known that the latter was originally conceived as a protest against the former.

Like all great pieces of art, both works stand on their own with no need for biographical interpolations. Still, in a forgetful and complacent age, it’s worth knowing something about where our songs came from, written by men who were forged in crucibles we little understand today. This 4th, I hope you enjoy this musical walk down our collective memory lane as much as I enjoyed writing it, and I hope it sheds some interesting light on my opening question: What makes an American anthem?

“He was consumed by patriotism,” said Mary Ellen Barrett of her father, Irving Berlin. He was so patriotic that when his lawyers advised him to invest in tax shelters, he waved them off: “I want to pay taxes. I love this country."

Born Israel Beilin, he was five years old when his family fled Russia for the United States. He would later say he carried no memories of his first five years of life, except one: lying on a blanket by the side of the road, watching his home burn to ash against the night sky.

His father, Moses Beilin, had been a cantor. But there was no place for a cantor in New York, so he pieced together a new living working at a kosher meat market and teaching Hebrew. Israel’s mother worked as a midwife. The children wrapped cigars, worked in a sweatshop, or sold papers. When Moses died young, 13-year-old Israel was so ashamed of his inability to help support the family that he left home to try his luck on the streets.

Decades later, when he was raising his daughter in a much finer apartment than the one he’d grown up in, she asked him what it had been like to be raised poor. He gave her a puzzled look. “What is poor? It was what I knew. I was never hungry. I was never cold.”

His first song, a collaboration with another writer called “Marie from Sunny Italy,” was published in 1907. The publishing rights were worth 33 cents. On the sheet music, his name appeared as “I. Berlin.” All rising young Jewish-Americans like him would quietly change their names in the same manner. Gershovitz became Gershwin. Yoelson became Jolson. Beilin became Berlin.

By 1917, he was a well-established Tin Pan Alley composer, such a celebrity that one paper announced his induction into the army with the headline “Army Takes Berlin!” Despite learning English as a second language, he had mastered it so completely that he could capture the American vernacular with crystalline simplicity. In his own words, he was aiming neither for the highbrow nor for the lowbrow, but straight to the Americans in the middle, the ones who had taste, but not too much taste.

As it turned out, the army just wanted him to keep writing songs, which he did, composing the popular revue Yip Yip Yaphank. The show was primarily made up of irreverent, light tunes like “Mandy” and “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” But Berlin had also written a much more earnest tune for it, a would-be patriotic ballad. His problem was that this was 1917, when literally every writer was composing patriotic ballads. His musical secretary, Harry Ruby, was not encouraging: “Geez, another one?” Berlin meekly agreed, put the song in his trunk, and forgot about it for 20 years.

In 1938, with another war looming, Berlin felt compelled to write a great song about peace. But as he told a journalist at the time, this was hard to do, because it was hard to dramatize peace. His first attempts weren’t working—too corny, too talky. That was when he went back to the trunk, which held every idea or half-idea he ever had, carefully preserved, just in case.

“God Bless America” needed hardly any tweaking, except for a line which had initially read “Stand beside her and guide her to the right with a light from above.” The words “right” and “left” had no political valence in 1917, but that had changed by 1938. So “to the right” became “through the night.” By Armistice Day, it was finished and ready to be premiered by late-30s “it girl” Kate Smith. “It’s something more than a song,” she introduced it earnestly. “I feel it’s one of the most beautiful compositions ever written, a song that will never die.” Her performance included this now-forgotten prelude:

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea
Let us swear allegiance to a land that’s free
Let us all be grateful that we are far from there
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer

Smith’s introduction was poignantly prophetic. The song’s reputation went on to eclipse her own so completely that by the time Ronald Reagan gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, nobody under a certain age could remember anything else she’d done. (In 2019, amid similarly inane cultural gestures, the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Flyers dropped her rendition of the song from their playlists when it was discovered that her early career included racist vaudeville tunes. No doubt they considered their moral judgment superior to Irving Berlin’s.)

Yet even in its own time, the song had its detractors. Some criticisms were colored with anti-Semitism, asking why a Russian Jew should presume to speak for America. One pastor worried that the song was replacing Christianity with “a specious substitute for religion.” Perhaps there’s a sense in which the pastor had put a finger on something interesting here. Berlin was, in fact, agnostic. The faith of his fathers simply faded away, as it did for so many other Jewish immigrants of his generation. In the absence of God, what object was left for their passionate devotion, their worship, even? America, land that they loved.

The song also had a more famous critic, one who became so annoyed with the constant replays of Kate Smith’s rendition that he decided to write his own new anthem. That critic was Woody Guthrie, and that song was “This Land is Your Land.”

The reason why nobody today would think this song any less patriotic than “God Bless America” is that two of its original verses were lost over the decades. Both can be heard in the recording embedded here, which overlays a new recording by Guthrie's son Arlo onto Woody's original. Together, they make Guthrie’s frustration clear. Where Berlin carefully smoothed out the word “right” to avoid even an accidental tinge of political tension, Guthrie unabashedly made music as a man of the left. This verse provides a clue:

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”

But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,

That side was made for you and me…

A stronger version, which was picked up in an obscure recording by the singer Moses Asch in 1944, went like this:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.

The sign was painted, said 'Private Property.'

But on the backside, it didn't say nothing.

This land was made for you and me.

This verse, found in Woody's notebook, went unrecorded for decades:

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,

By the relief office I seen my people;

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

By “my people,” Guthrie meant the people with whom he’d become acquainted through his many years of drifting across the country, including those he had befriended in the great Dust Bowl exodus. Like thousands of others, Guthrie made the trek to California in his 20s, partly to find work and partly to escape his failing marriage. Along the road, he would become intimately familiar with the trials and sorrows of the working class—bereft farmers, laid-off factory workers, wistfully hopeful migrants for whom perhaps, unlike for Berlin, the American dream never came true.

Guthrie, unlike Berlin, was an American son, born in a small town in Oklahoma. But like Berlin's, his early years were marked by tragedy, parental loss, and a hardscrabble youth making music on the streets. His mother was committed to an insane asylum and died when he was 18. (It would later be discovered that she was suffering from Huntington’s disease, which ravaged three generations of the Guthrie family, including Woody himself.)

It could hardly be said of Berlin that he simply didn’t understand what it was to be poor, or to be treated unjustly. Nor did the injustice end with the pogrom his family had escaped. His teenage years as a starving street urchin could have been lifted from the pages of Oliver Twist. And still, for Berlin, America was the adoptive mother who took him in when he had no mother country to call his own. But for Guthrie, America was the natural mother who had given him a stone when he asked for bread.

Still, the men shared certain political instincts, particularly when it came to civil rights activism. Berlin’s song “Supper Time,” composed for the musical As Thousands Cheer, is written in the voice of a black woman whose husband has been lynched. His advocacy would continue into the era of MLK, Jr., even making him a target of suspicion for J. Edgar Hoover. For all that Guthrie may have resented Berlin for not being sufficiently Marxist in the 30s (the man wanted to pay taxes!) he probably would have found there wasn’t much to choose between them in the 60s. It would also be an understatement to say that they shared a dislike for fascists. (Then again, how many young leftists today will allegedly march “against fascism” and against Jews at the same time?)

In the end, those edgier verses were simply too clunky to justify themselves. They were never performed in schools or official functions. Numerous cover versions rendered the tune as a purely joyful ode to the Redwood Forests, the wheat fields waving, the dust clouds rolling. Today, in patriotic programs around the country, it is practically interchangeable with the song that inspired its frustrated composition.

Does that softening make “This Land is Your Land” more or less of an American anthem? We do, of course, have an anthem that acknowledges America’s flaws in so many words, namely “America the Beautiful.” But where those lyrics ask God to mend those flaws, Guthrie’s lost lyrics offer no hint that God could save us. It is for those abandoned “in the shadow of a steeple” to save themselves.

Those lyrics may have spoken honestly for Guthrie himself or for others who felt similarly abandoned. But the song would endure as more of an American anthem without them than with them. It would endure more as a record of what inspired his love than what inspired his bitterness.

As for Berlin, he, too, spoke honestly when he wrote “God bless America, land that I love.” His daughter would emphasize that he had written “I,” not “we.” It was written for America, but it was written first for Irving Berlin. And for all that he lacked his own faith in God, God hovers over it still: guiding, keeping, blessing.