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Didn't Raise My Boy to be a Soldier
Ten million soldiers to the war have gone,
Who may never return again.
Ten million mothers' hearts must break,
For the ones who died in vain.
Head bowed down in sorrowin her lonely years,
I heard a mother murmur thro' her tears:
Chorus:
I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy,
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It’s time to lay the sword and gun away,
There’d be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier.
(Chorus)
What victory can cheer a mother’s heart,
When she looks at her blighted home?
What victory can bring her back,
All she cared to call her own?
Let each mother answer in the year to be,
Remember that my boy belongs to me!
--Alfred
Bryan
note:
By 1915, Americans began debating the need for military and economic preparations
for war. Strong opposition to “preparedness” came from isolationists,
socialists, pacifists, many Protestant ministers, German Americans, and
Irish Americans (who were hostile to Britain). One of the hit songs of
1915, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” by lyricist
Alfred Bryan and composer Al Piantadosi, captured widespread American
skepticism about joining in the European war. Meanwhile, interventionists
and militarists like former president Theodore Roosevelt beat the drums
for preparedness. Roosevelt’s retort to the popularity of the antiwar
song was that it should be accompanied by the tune “I Didn’t
Raise My Girl to Be a Mother.” He suggested that the place for women
who opposed war was “in China—or by preference in a harem—and
not in the United States.”
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