I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier

 

Something for the weekend.  I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier. A hit in the US in 1915, the song reflected the isolationist sympathy of a large segment of the American people.  Former President Theodore Roosevelt detested it, saying that the fools who applauded it presumably would also applaud a song saying “I didn’t raise my girl to be a mother.”  Future President Harry Truman, who would serve in combat in World War I, said that women who liked the song belonged in a harem and not in the United States.  The song tied in with the 1916 slogan, which must have seemed quite ironic in 1917, of the Wilson re-election campaign:  “He kept us out of war.”

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