"Stay Down Here Where You Belong"
by Henry Burr
Sheet music courtesy of Clarence Johnson |
Perhaps the most unlikely entry into the anti-war genre came from the hand of ultra-patriot, Irving Berlin. "Stay Down Here Where You Belong," first recorded in 1915, is a remarkably subtle, deceptively brutal, and unimaginably perceptive analysis of and outcry against war, U.S. involvement in the war, and those who promoted it. Berlin's scenario has the Devil warning his son against having anything to do with leaving hell in favor of cavorting on Earth with mankind. "Down below, down below," we are told, "sat the Devil talking to his son who wanted to go / Up above, up above, / he cried it's getting too old for me down here and so / I'm going up above where I can have a little fun / The Devil only shook his head and answered his son:
Stay down here where you belong
The folks who live above you don't know right from wrong.
To please a king, they've all gone out to war
And not a one of them knows what he's fighting for.
Way up above they say that I'm a Devil and I'm bad.
Kings up there are bigger devils than your Dad.
They're breaking the hearts of mothers
Making butchers out of brothers,
You'll find more hell up there than there is down below.
In the second verse, the devil gets very direct in his instructions to his son. "Kings up there," he says, "They don't care / For the Mothers who must stay at home / Their sorrows to bear." He ends with a typically parental I-know-better-than-you speech that, excepting that it is a demon speaking, could be taken from the mouth of the mother in Bryan's paean against war. "Stay at home," Junior is counseled, "Don't you roam / Although it's warm down below / You'll find it warmer up there. / If e'er you went up there my son / I know you'd be surprised / You'll find a lot of people who are not civilized. / (refrain)." This is another of those songs that covers all the bases and shows us the depth of American fantasy about the war. First, the speaker is Satan, the ultimate personification of evil and he fears for his son to go off to the war, even if he is Evil Jr. Second, Berlin pulls all the allusions together to create a subtle political statement. It is only kings that are at war; the United States is not a kingdom; therefore, the United States has no business being in this war. The U.S. (the white knight) has no business in an evil war fought by the evil against the evil. Next, those involved in the war "are not civilized."
Berlin also manages to bring in all the principals of "I Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier" and "Don't Take My Darling Boy Away" when he introduces "mothers who must stay at home," sons who must or will go to war, and the disdain of those who wage war for the concerns of mothers. The fantastic nature of the setting may have been the undoing of this particular piece. It was in hell, it's Irving Berlin, this is theater—right? It was not theater, even though rumors persist that Berlin disavowed the song after the declaration of war, but political and social dogma coming from the mouth of Satan? It could suggest that God is on our side because we are doing none of these things and would only supplement the national disregard for "that" war over "there" and reinforce the American assurance that we had no business participating. The last shot may be in the line that says "you'll find a lot of people who are not civilized." The uncivilized are those waging war; the U.S. is not involved; therefore, the U.S. is civilized (and, presumably, enjoys all those benefits that accrue to civilization); those waging war are European; the U.S. is rife with European immigrants. Does that mean that those immigrants are tainted by their European ancestry and, thus, similarly uncivilized? The vilification of immigrants, the "hyphenated-Americans" that became the concern of most Americans, including Woodrow Wilson, in the days after the sinking of Lusitania, enlivens that suggestion, but Berlin's subtlety may have diluted the impact of his message despite the image of the Demon of wrong agreeing with the President of Right being neither subtle or inconsiderable.
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