"Don't Steal Daddy's Medal (The Burglar and the Child)"
by Arthur Fields
Record courtesy of Clarence Johnson |
There is vacuous foolishness about the stories the veterans never told their wives, about the girls they knew, and all the other war stories that accrued to the experience (as in "Mademoiselle from Armentieres"). But the foolishness rings hollow. The loss revealed in "What Has Become of 'Hinky Dinky Parlay Voo'" is real, and it becomes even more dire in a bleak morality drama titled "Don't Steal Daddy's Medal." A population of unemployed men accustomed to being under the discipline of arms will, by nature, turn to the arms to wrench a living away from a recalcitrant world. It should not surprise us, in retrospect, that burglary rose nearly 65% in the years following the war. Homicide did not increase, but robbery became the crime of choice, and it was a crime of simple desperation. In this song, we are invited to envision the tableau of a child, alone at home, encountering a strange man with "a mask over both of his eyes." Of course it is a girl, a seemingly cheap effort to increase the sentimentality of the already lugubriously sentimental effort, and she follows the man closely to watch him take a medal from the wall as part of his booty. She cries out:
Don't steal Daddy's medal
He won it for bravery
It was found by his side
Before he died
And sent to my mother and me.
Take the doll that Santy Claus sent me
I beg on bended knee.
But don't steal Daddy's medal,
The medal he won overseas.
In a fantastic moment, the thief recants, reforms, and receives the child's blessing. "After she pleaded," we are told, "He said, 'Little one / You've made me realize / What a wonderful thing your Daddy had done, / It brings tears of shame to my eyes.'" But it is not the child's pleas or a patriotic quibble with robbing a veteran that shames the thief. "For I was in France," he relates, "And was brave like your Dad / But now I'm a coward that's true." It is a cowardice of deprivation, as the numbers would suggest, and he goes on "I'll try to reform / For I'm really not bad.' / The child said 'I'm sorry / That I said to you /(refrain)." The child has redeemed a fallen crusader with her forgiveness and the dream lives on—in a perfect, fantasy, dream world. In the real world, the medal ends up in the pawn shop. But the ideas are a sort of last-ditch effort to regain the equilibrium of the war years by recalling the fantasy they all lived in.
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