‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’: Popular Song and American Neutrality, 1914–1917

Abstract

What can popular song tell us about American attitudes to the First World War? One of the hit songs of 1915, Al Piantadosi and Alfred Bryan’s ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier’, appears to support the idea that the American public was in a pacifist mood prior to 1917. But the success of the song provides misleading evidence of public sentiments. Far from opposing war, the entertainment business between 1914 and 1917 can be said to have prepared the way for US intervention by promoting a militarized form of patriotism, by linking soldiering to manliness, and by offering aural and visual imagery favourable to the Allies.