By Dan Murphy
After the attacks on America on Sept. 11, 2001, the song “God Bless America” began playing at many sporting events, most notably at Yankee Stadium for the seventh-inning stretch. Originally, the song was sang live by Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, but eventually the Yanks decided to use the popular taped Kate Smith version of “God Bless America,” where is has been played ever since Yanks owner George Steinbrenner insisted that it be played at home games… Until last week, when the Yankees and several other sports teams in the U.S. pulled the Kate Smith version of “God Bless America” after complaints surfaced that Smith had sung racist songs in the 1930s.
“The Yankees have been made aware of a recording that had been previously unknown to us and decided to immediately and carefully review this new information,” a club spokesman said. “The Yankees take social, racial and cultural insensitivities very seriously. And while no final conclusions have been made, we are erring on the side of sensitivity.”
In addition to Smith’s version being played at Yankee Stadium, the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team has a much longer relationship with Smith and her version of the Irving Berlin classic. During the 1974 Stanley Cup finals between the Flyers and the Boston Bruins, Smith sang the song live at the Spectrum in Philadelphia. The Flyers went on to win the Stanley Cup and considered Smith a good luck charm whenever she would sing “God Bless America” at their home games.
The bond between Flyer fans and Smith was memorialized in a statue erected outside the Spectrum and moved to the new stadium in Philly in 2011. Last week, a tarp was placed over the statue and on Easter Sunday, the statue was demolished and removed from sight.
“The Flyers have enjoyed a long and popular relationship with ‘God Bless America,’ as performed by the late Kate Smith, a woman who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor for her patriotic contributions to our nation,” the team said in a statement Sunday. “But in recent days, we learned that several of the songs Kate Smith performed in the 1930s include lyrics and sentiments that are incompatible with the values of our organization and evoke painful and unacceptable themes.”
The accusations against Smith stem from her recordings of “That’s Why Darkies Were Born,” which included the lyrics, “Someone had to pick the cotton… That’s why darkies were born.” She also recorded the offensive jingle “Pickaninny Heaven,” which she directed at “colored children” who should fantasize about an amazing place with “great big watermelons,” among other treats. She shot a video for that song that takes place in an orphanage for black children, and much of the imagery is startlingly racist.
Smith, who died in 1986, endorsed the “Mammy Doll” in 1939, which was based on a racist caricature of a black woman in the same vein as Aunt Jemima.
Some of Smith’s family said they were saddened by the teams removing her version from their games. “It’s somebody who found the words to two songs that she sang, out of 3,000 that she recorded, and tried to make a case out of it,” said Kate Smith’s grandson Bob Andron. “And my heart goes out to them, too. Because they’re misguided. They don’t understand what kind of a person Kate Smith was.”
Smith’s Granddaughter Suzy Andron added: “I’m saddened that a woman who has been dead for almost 35 years would be attacked in this way. Aunt Kathryn really did not see color. She didn’t see a person’s color. She was very in tune with a person’s character. I’ve always thought that was a model, to not see a person’s color but to see their character.”
Others believe this episode is another unnecessary extension of the political correctness that has stretched across the county and now into our ball parks. The NY Post opined that the songs Smith sang in the 1930s “were also a product of their time and place. And if the nation bans everyone who ever sang such songs and pretends they never existed, it would have to wipe out pretty much the entire history of American film and music. In pulling the Smith recording, the Yankees claimed to be ‘erring on the side of sensitivity.’ They certainly erred – by caving to hysterical excess.”
The power line blog added: “‘God Bless America?’ No, please don’t. We live in a world that is almost too stupid for words. Here is the latest: The New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers have stopped playing Kate Smith’s iconic recording of ‘God Bless America.’ Why? Because Smith recorded a couple of other songs, during the 1930s, that some liberals now consider objectionable.
“What’s the problem? Smith recorded a song in 1931 called ‘That’s Why Darkies Were Born.’ Is that a racist song? Apparently not, since the Communist black activist Paul Robeson also recorded it.
“The whole controversy is, obviously, idiotic. Even if it were true that Kate Smith recorded a ‘racist’ song by the standards of 80 years later – the other questionable song was part of a 1933 movie – that is an absurd reason to ban ‘God Bless America.’ Who cares what other songs Smith sang? The real objection, I think, is not to Kate Smith. It is to both God and America. Any time liberals can suppress references to either or both, they try to do so.”
Others see the banning of Kate Smith songs as the right thing to do. Glen Macnow tweeted: “Flyers clearly need to dump Kate Smith. What’s most surprising is none of this came out for all these years. Kate Smith was born in 1908 in a Jim Crow South. Sad to say, racism was part of fabric of this country from Founding Fathers on. We must still stand against it every day. I agree it’s a slippery slope. But the Flyers deciding to move on seems an easy call. Kate Smith is not George Washington.”
For most of us, the answer could be to find another version of “God Bless America” to listen to. Harvard student Sheryl Kaskowitz said, “The song had a huge resurgence in popularity after 9/11 partly because it’s one of the few songs most people know.
“‘God Bless America’ has roots in Tin Pan Alley – it was written by Irving Berlin,” notes Kaskowitz. “Because Berlin was Jewish and an immigrant, ‘God Bless America’ had associations with cultural and religious tolerance that are now completely lost. In fact, there was even an early, anti-Semitic backlash against it” by the KKK and others.
There is also a long history with the KKK protesting against “God Bless America” because it was written by a Jewish Immigrant Irving Berlin. In 1938, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, Irving Berlin, who was Jewish and had arrived in America from Russia at the age of 5, said it was time to revive it as a “peace song,” and it was introduced on an Armistice Day broadcast in 1938, sung by Kate Smith on her radio show.
In 1938, Kate Smith debuted “God Bless America” as an Armistice Day song. In 1940 Berlin established the God Bless America Fund, through which all royalties from the song would be donated to the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. (The New York Councils of the Scouts receive royalties even today, and the song doesn’t enter the public domain until 2034.)
While the song was incredibly popular during the period before the U.S. entry into World War II, it was not universally beloved. Woody Guthrie despised it as sanctimonious, and in 1940 wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in response.
“The original lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s song included the direct reference, ‘God Blessed America for me.’ It was meant as a protest against the way Guthrie felt the song glossed over the country’s problems. But the lyrics of ‘God Bless America’ are so vague, it can really be used for many points of view,” wrote Kaskowitz.
In fact, “God Bless America” has served as a protest song for both the left and the right. Before the mid-1960s, it was sung by labor unions and civil rights activists, but from the late ’60s on it became solidly associated with conservatism – first by those protesting against the peace movement during the Vietnam War, and later by an increasingly voluble Christian Right to connect God and country. Today it’s a tea party anthem.
Kaskowitz, a San Francisco Giants baseball fan, remembered that before 9/11 the song that baseball fans sung at the seventh inning was “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” “Singing ‘God Bless America’ is a new, invented tradition,” she notes. “Ten years after 9/11, baseball is one of the only institutions that has kept it.”
“The New York Yankees famously kept people in their seats during the singing of ‘God Bless America’ by stringing chains across the aisles. The ACLU brought a suit against the Yankees in 2009 and won. There was an undercurrent of association between this song and support for the Bush Administration and the Iraq war. Some people objected to being forced into singing it.
Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan awarded Smith with the Presidential Medal of Freedom back in 1982.
