Lots of other English war songs made it Over Here—the most famous, perhaps, being “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag and Smile, Smile, Smile,” by George Asaf and Felix Powell, a song that really makes you want to do what it tells you to—but when the United States finally got into the war, everyone in America knew that only American war songs would do from then on. And sure enough, America was soon drawing from that bottomless well of music on West Twenty-eighth Street, singing the output of pretty much every working songwriter in the country, famous or obscure. As many songs as they wrote, though—and as good as some of them were—they were all, as I said, trying to catch up. And none of them ever would.
The first big American song of the Great War—and the best—was written by a man too old to fight, a man who, many believed, had already seen his best days go by. The grandson of Irish immigrants, George Michael Cohan was born into show business in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 3, 1878. (Cohan would claim all his life that—like his creation, the Yankee Doodle Boy—he was actually born on the Fourth of July.) Almost immediately, his parents, vaudevillians, incorporated their new baby into the act; his older sister Josie was already in it. By the time he was a teenager, he was running the show, ending each performance with his trademark farewell: “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.” He published his first song at fifteen, and wrote, directed, and starred in his first Broadway show at twenty-three. In the first decade of the twentieth century, he wrote a string of classic American songs that helped define the era: In addition to “Yankee Doodle Boy,” there were “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Mary Is a Grand Old Name,” and “Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway,” to name just a few. One of the greatest Tin Pan Alley men of all time, George M. Cohan would publish more than three hundred songs.
But by 1917, it seemed to many that Cohan had passed his peak. Worse, his beloved sister Josie had died of heart disease at the age of forty the previous summer; on her deathbed in Manhattan, she had called for her brother, who raced in from Long Island but arrived a few minutes too late. His father, Jeremiah “Jere” Cohan, would die shortly after that.
And then, in early April, America entered the war. That same month, Cohan would later recount, he was riding the train into Manhattan from his home in suburban New Rochelle when the words and music just came to him:
Johnnie get your gun, get your gun, get your gun,
Take it on the run, on the run, on the run;
Hear them calling you and me;
Ev’ry son of liberty.
Hurry right away, don’t delay, go today,
Make your daddy glad to have had such a lad,
Tell your sweetheart not to pine,
To be proud her boy’s in line.
Over there, Over there,
Send the word, send the word, over there,
That the Yanks are coming,
The Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere.
So prepare, Say a pray’r,
Send the word, send the word, to beware.
We’ll be over, We’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over over there!
To say that it was the greatest American song of World War I is to say not nearly enough. It’s clearly the best American war song ever written. Not that the competition is all that stiff. “Yankee Doodle”? “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? “Dixie”? “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”? “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me)”? Really? The best of the rest is probably “Bonnie Blue Flag,” and frankly, I’ve never really understood that song. Who had a blue flag with one star, again?
“Over There” is simple. It’s outrageously catchy. You can sing along with it the very first time you hear it. Like “Pack Up Your Troubles,” it tells you exactly what to do and how to do it; unlike “Troubles,” it’s something you can actually do. You can get a gun; you can hurry, make your daddy proud, tell your girl to buck up. You can’t really stuff a bunch of problems into a kit bag, and even if you could, would you want to? Won’t you find enough troubles waiting for you at the front? What’s more, “Over There” gives you a great beat—a zesty, motivating beat—to which to do it all. Its lyrics are so clever that, for decades to come, everyone from Irving Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun) to antiwar novelist Dalton Trumbo (Johnny Got His Gun) would rip them off. And its title became nothing less than a synonym for the war itself.
If the rest never did catch up, at least they tried. And tried, and tried, and tried. And often, they did quite well. C. Francis Reisner, Benny Davis, and Billy Baskette had a big hit with “Good-bye Broadway, Hello France!”:
Good-bye Broadway, Hello France,
We’re ten million strong.
Good-bye sweethearts, wives and mothers,
It won’t take us long.
Don’t you worry while we’re there,
It’s for you we’re fighting too,
So good-bye Broadway, hello France,
We’re going to square our debt to you.
I don’t know where they got the figure ten million, except that maybe they reckoned it would roll off a singer’s tongue more smoothly than four million, which was the actual number of men in the ranks of the military by war’s end. (Only two million of them made it to France by the armistice; the rest were still stateside.) And I’m not sure why they chose Broadway, which gives one the impression that a bunch of theater types are heading off to the trenches. Perhaps it’s less of a mouthful than “Main Street” or “Park Place”?
They were right on the money with the sweetheart thing, though, at least judging by how many other songwriters hoped to cash in on the heartbreak of a young man leaving his best girl behind while he runs off to take a shot at the Kaiser, cranking out the likes of “I May Be Gone for a Long, Long Time,” “Send Me Away with a Smile,” “Farewell, Little Girl of Mine,” “Watch, Hope and Wait, Little Girl,” and “Uncle Sammy Take Care of My Girl,” among many others. I hope the fellow from “I’m Hitting the Trail to Normandy So Kiss Me Good-Bye” got what he wanted, even though he was way off on his destination. (American troops didn’t fight in Normandy, at least not in that war.) In “I’m Goin’ to Fight My Way Back to Carolina,” the doughboy in question is talking about both his home state and his girl.
The girls answered back with songs like “Goodbye, My Hero” and “While You’re Over There in No Man’s Land, I’m Over Here in Lonesome Land.” Presumably wiser heads are counseling them in “Set Aside Your Tears Till the Boys Come Marching Home” and “He’s Well Worth Waiting For,” which, apparently, some of the girls didn’t take to heart, because someone had to go and write “Don’t Try to Steal the Sweetheart of a Soldier.” As we learn in “Don’t Cry, Frenchy, Don’t Cry,” the boys were finding plenty of comfort Over There. If you thought the boys were the only ones given to bragging, “If He Can Fight Like He Can Love, Good Night Germany!” (If he’s half as good in a trench / as he was in the park on a bench) and “Look What My Boy Got in France” will quickly disabuse you of that fallacy. (The latter, by the way, refers to a medal, not a social disease.) And, of course, the long-awaited happy ending: “Oh! What a Time for the Girlies (When the Boys Come Marching Home),” and “When I Come Back to You (We’ll Have a Yankee-Doodle Wedding).”
Not all the girlies were satisfied to wait until the boys came marching home; the heroine of “I’m Going to Follow the Boys,” for instance (I’ve always had a lot of boys around me / Wherever boys were that’s the place you found me) decides to go Over There and become a nurse, thinking, I suppose, that she’d have the entire AEF to herself. Unfortunately for her, there was plenty of evidence that the boys had already fallen in love with other nurses, like “The Rose of No Man’s Land” and “My Red Cross Girlie (The Wound Is Somewhere in My Heart.)”
Al Jolson had a big hit with “Hello, Central, Give Me No Man’s Land,” about a night when Baby toddles up to
the telephone and tries to get ahold of daddy Over There—such a big hit, in fact, that soon a competitor came out with “Hello! Gen’ral Pershing (How’s My Daddy To-Night?),” in which Baby longs for daddy o’er the sea, so To the telephone, she toddles all alone. I’m sure “Let Us Say a Prayer for Daddy” also spawned many imitations, although I’ve only ever seen one song like “Just a Baby’s Letter (Found in No Man’s Land).” Good thing, that; a person only has so many tears.
Of all the doughboy’s loves, though, one occupied a perch high above all the others: dear old mom. One of the most popular songs of the time, “Break the News to Mother,” tells of a lad who, dying on the field of battle, manages to gasp:
Just break the news to mother,
She knows how dear I love her,
And tell her not to wait for me,
For I’m not coming home;
Just say there is no other
Can take the place of mother;
Then kiss her dear, sweet lips for me,
And break the news to her.
The song was actually a hit during the Spanish-American War; the fact that it was revived, with great popularity, twenty years later tells you something about what kind of country America was thenquite simply, a nation of fervent, unashamed mama’s boys. So the fellows in Tin Pan Alley, who had mothers, too, wrote “When a Boy Says Goodbye to His Mother (And She Gives Him to Uncle Sam),” and “So Long, Mother,” and “Hello! My Darling Mother,” and “Don’t Forget Your Dear Old Mother,” and “Dreaming Sweet Dreams of Mother.” Sometimes, the boys found surrogates Over There, as does the subject of “Little French Mother, Good Bye!” And sometimes, as in “He Sleeps Beneath the Soil of France” and “On a Battlefield in France (When I’m Gone Just Write to Mother),” their little French mothers couldn’t protect them. But their real, American mothers always could, whether Over There or beyond. “I’ll Be There, Laddie Boy, I’ll Be There” ends:
When your comrades around are falling
Then your mother will answer your pray’r.
And if fighting you fall
And the Master should call,
I’ll be there, laddie boy, I’ll be there.
On the other hand, the only World War I song I’ve ever seen that mentions dear old dad up front is “Cheer Up Father, Cheer Up Mother,” and even there he has to share top billing.
Father’s Day wouldn’t become a national holiday until 1972.
As frequently as Mother turned up on the covers of sheet music in 1917 and 1918, she never even approached the Kaiser’s numbers. Only one person ever came close to the old Hohenzollern in that regard, and, with few exceptions—my favorite being “Just Like Washington Crossed the Delaware, General Pershing Will Cross the Rhine”—his name rarely made it into song titles; perhaps pluggers were intimidated by General John Joseph Pershing’s martial visage. Nevertheless, they put that visage on an awful lot of their sheet music. Whatever else you might have to say about the man, there is no disputing the fact that his face sold a lot of songs.
Historians ardently dispute pretty much everything else about him. Some revere him as the greatest supreme military commander the country ever produced, one of the finest military minds of modern times, an icon of dispassionate integrity, a pillar of determination who saved countless doughboys’ lives by refusing in the face of tremendous pressure to allow the British and French to use them for cannon fodder, and nothing less than the savior of Europe. Others denigrate him as a martinet, so behind the times that he championed marksmanship in an age of artillery, a man so stubborn that his refusal to allow American troops to serve under British and French commanders drove America’s allies insane with frustration and rage and (according to them) nearly cost them the war, so single-minded that, in the final days of the war, he sent a note to the Supreme War Council insisting that no armistice be signed with Germany short of unconditional surrender, and so inept that President Wilson was about to fire him, when the war ended and saved his command. Still others, a great many of them, stake out some territory in between the two. Entire books—lots of them—have been written on the subject, by people much more knowledgeable on the matter than I am, and still there is no universally embraced version of The Truth. I’m not going to posit one here, though I will tell you that General Pershing was tremendously popular back home, so much so that upon his return in 1919, he was promoted to General of the Armies of the United States, a rank so high it was created just for him. The only person to have achieved it since is George Washington, who was awarded it posthumously in 1976.
One of the reasons Pershing was so popular, I suspect, is that, like Robert E. Lee, it was (and is) hard to think of him as a real person. He had tremendous poise and self-control, at least in public, and he looked the part, too: firm jaw, razor-straight mustache, barrel chest, stern countenance. Filled out his uniform quite nicely. Not given to bluster or bravado. Classic strong, silent type. Possessed of an aura of quiet competence and determination, like U. S. Grant. Unlike Grant, smart enough not to let anyone draft him for president. And they tried.
He wasn’t President Wilson’s first choice for the job; that would have been General Fred Funston. Funston, though, committed the fatal error of suddenly dropping dead a few weeks before America entered the war. So Pershing it was. Until then, his highest-profile post had been along the United States’ southern border, where he’d led the 8th Regiment in search of Pancho Villa. Unsuccessfully.
Pershing had been born in Linn County, Missouri, in 1860, less than a year before that state was transformed into a bitter battleground sandwiched between Union and Confederacy. It is believed the family’s sympathies lay with the former. At the age of twenty, after two years of college, he applied to West Point because he thought it a better education than he could receive in Missouri; and it was free. He graduated in the middle of his class and was sent out West with the cavalry as a second lieutenant. After five years there (during which he may or may not have participated in the notorious massacre of Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota), he became an instructor of military tactics at the University of Nebraska, where he also earned a law degree. Returning to active duty, he was sent to Montana, promoted to first lieutenant, and put in charge of the 10th Cavalry Regiment. Buffalo Soldiers: black soldiers. Two years later, he was appointed an instructor of tactics at West Point. He was strict; the cadets didn’t much care for him. They mocked his previous posting, dubbed him “Nigger Jack.” Eventually, they toned it down to “Black Jack.” He was said to be quite proud of the sobriquet.
In 1898, he was reunited with the 10th Cavalry, took his troops to Cuba, fought at San Juan Hill, earned a citation for bravery. Then on to the Philippines, where he fought guerrilla insurgents. Other postings followed. In 1905, at the age of forty-five, he married the daughter of a powerful Republican senator from Wyoming. That same year, after a stint as an observer in the Russo-Japanese War, he was made a brigadier general by President Theodore Roosevelt, a promotion that skipped several ranks and stoked some resentment among his colleagues.
In 1914, Pershing was assigned to Fort Bliss, on the Texas-Mexico border, where he served under General Funston; he left his family ensconced at the Presidio of San Francisco. A year later he sent for them to come join him, but before they could make the move, a fire swept through their living quarters, killing Pershing’s wife and three of their four small children. It was the great trauma of his life. Among the letters of condolence he received was one from Pancho Villa. After the funerals, Pershing returned to Fort Bliss with his surviving child. He was fifty-five years old.
Then came the war.
The public certainly knew about Pershing’s family trauma; whether or not that made him a more sympathetic figure in their eyes is hard to say. Pershing’s clashes with French and British generals, his disdain for trench warfare, his refusal to allow his troops to serve under foreign commanders—to the extent to which these facets of his leadership became known to the public back home, th
ey only made him more popular. After all, they certainly spared a great many American lives. Did people love him because he was the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, or because he was Pershing? Again, it’s hard to say. If pressed, I’d say it was both.
One thing is certain: If you were a music publisher, you would do just about anything to figure out a way to get his picture on the cover of your sheet music. No small number did.
While pluggers tried all kinds of gimmicks to get you to buy their songs, they could also be rather direct, especially when their intent was to get you—through patriotism, or shame, or some combination of the two—to pay up, as was the case in an awful lot of songs, like “Let’s Keep the Glow in Old Glory, and the Free in Freedom, Too,” and “Keep the Trench Fires Going for the Boys Out There.” Will E. Dulmage and J. Fred Lawton’s “Say—You Haven’t Sacrificed At All!” demanded:
Have you had a gun upon your good right shoulder?
Have you ever slept out in the mud?
Have you performed your duties among the rats and cooties
Have you ever shed a drop of blood for Uncle Sammy?
The Last of the Doughboys Page 12