Of course, there's plenty of painful irony in the way some of Irving Berlin's patriotic songs have been appropriated by anti-Semites and xenophobes and white supremacists.
Quote:
[A]lmost as soon as “God Bless America” was introduced, some of Berlin’s fellow citizens began reviling him for his presumption, as an immigrant and a Jew, in having written it at all. Isolationist America-Firsters, defending “The Star-Spangled Banner,” shouted down efforts to sing “God Bless America” at public gatherings. Though Berlin donated all royalties from the song to the Boy and Girl Scouts, many people accused him, in baldly anti-Semitic terms, of trying to profit from it. Jewish-conspiracy theories sprang up around the tune. The head of the pro-Nazi Protestant War Veterans of the United States wrote a letter to the director of the Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., accusing Berlin of paying “your organization $15,000 dollars to put over a (Jew) New National Anthem.”
It was a frightening time. A time when — right in Berlin’s hometown — Fritz Kuhn’s German-American Bund could draw a crowd of 20,000 homegrown Nazi sympathizers to a rally in Madison Square Garden. A rally where, in between “The Star Spangled Banner” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” Kuhn blamed “Jewish financiers” for getting America into World War I; where the Bund’s national public-relations counsel, G.W. Kunze, declaimed, “If Franklin Rosenfeld* takes the place of George Washington, so in the cultural life Beethoven is replaced by Irving Berlin and the like.”
This was the fringe, but the fringe was scarily close to the main fabric of American life in those prewar years. It was a time when Jews, even wealthy and famous Jews like Irving Berlin, had to watch their step — and very soon, worry about the times to come.
And now our own frightening time. A time when a right-wing fringe, scarily close to the main fabric of American life and encouraged by our president, blames Jewish financiers for helping to bring immigrant hordes into the country. A time when some of that fringe’s sympathizers are taking matters into their own violent hands. A time when, at a rally held by President Trump in Illinois last month, a little girl in a red T-shirt sat on her father’s shoulders and listened to the president drum up fear about those immigrant hordes. The little girl’s T-shirt was emblazoned with three words: “God Bless America.”
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* Anti-Semites' nickname for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom they claim was a secret Jew.
From
a New York Times essay by James Kaplan, whose biography of Irving Berlin,
New York Genius, will be released this fall.