"I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier"
by Morton Harvey
Sheet music from the Archeophone Records collection |
Written by passionate pacifist Alfred Bryan, "I Didn't Raise My Boy To Be a Soldier," with the subtitle of "A Mother's Plea for Peace," was the most eloquent, tragic, and popular of a large and often pathetic offering from Tin Pan Alley. Written in the interim between the establishment of the relief effort for Belgium (ably and sympathetically established and directed by future President Herbert Hoover), and the tragedy of the Lusitania, Bryant's lyric, in poignant and demanding tones, speaks from the voice of a mother, one of the many to whom the song is dedicated. "Ten million soldiers to the war have gone, who may never return again," we are told, speaking, presumably, of the amazing numbers of French, British, German, Russian, etc., troops already involved in the war. "Ten million mother's hearts must break for those who died in vain," trying, futilely, to end the carnage of the trenches, of course. "Head bowed down in sorrow, in her lonely years, I heard a mother murmur through her tears," as she contemplated her dotage without the son who should have been there to support and succor her. If the song had only been associated with this stereotyped figure and pathetic circumstance, the song would not have been exceptional. But instead of violins and pathos in the melody, Piantadosi has the refrain blaze to the front in the same martial tones as the blood and thunder songs of the early war. Bugle calls rather than nightingales herald the marching song of mothers:
I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy.
Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder
To shoot some other mother's darling boy?
Let nation's arbitrate their future conflicts.
It's time to lay the sword and gun away.
There'd be no war today
If mother's all would say,
'I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier!'
The power of the lyric is twofold. It couples the maternal instinct and devotion with the same American willingness to follow the presidential lead as is apparent in Stewart's "Uncle Josh" sketch. Arbitration was the centerpiece of Wilson's diplomatic activity before he and the U.S. were sucked into the vortex of war. Even in the days of 1917, before he was presented with a no-choices alternative, he was still promoting the idea of "peace without victory." Unlike the offerings of earlier years, there is nothing subtle about this lyric. It demands attention and the martial melody accompanying only increases its effectiveness. Indeed, the second verse of the song, almost as powerful as the first, precedes Wilson's peace without victory idea by two years: "What victory can cheer a mother's heart when she looks at her blighted home? / What victory can bring her back all she cared to call her own? / Let each mother answer / In the years to be, / 'Remember that my boy belongs to me.'" It ends with the same biting refrain and a double dose of the same message. Besides the almost uncanny foreshadowing of Wilson's last gasp to forestall the U.S. entry into war, the song also presages his League of Nations campaign. Putting mother love and National pride in the same package makes a potent brew and this particular song, possibly inspired by the Teddy Roosevelt/Gen. Leonard Wood Plattsburgh campaign for preparedness in 1915, was the anthem of the anti-war movement even to the point of the vote in April 1917.
To doubt its importance is to ignore the reactions it is documented to have stirred. In the New York Tribune of May 7, 1915 is found the story of a Brooklyn teacher who taught the song to all of his charges and effected the ire of the National Guard in the area, claiming that "anti-military propaganda" was being allowed in the schools. Furthermore, there were as many as 20 separate titles that parodied the tune after its publication. Predictably, all of the parodies fell on the side of the hawks. It would seem a logical conclusion that a parody of anything is meant to ridicule the content, style, or message of the object. Commonly, ridicule of that sort is aimed at an object that seems to be virtually unassailable by any other means. The power of Bryan and Piantadosi's song could only be dampened by the other significant event of May 7, 1915—the sinking of the Lusitania. Between its publication in January of 1915 and May 7, music publisher Leo Feist reported sales of over 700,000 copies of the sheet music. The effect of the Lusitania was to dampen the enthusiasm of the pacifists and to undermine the effect of their most telling anthem. It did not, however, kill the message.
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