Irving Berlin Came Through Ellis Island and Wrote God Bless America

Here is the résumé of the man who gave America its second national anthem, its favourite Christmas song and one of its greatest Easter parades. Born in the Russian Empire. Arrived at the age of five. Father dead by the time he was thirteen. Formal schooling: a couple of years, roughly. Could not read music. Couldn't, as the stories go, even play the piano properly in more than one key. Any human resources department in the world would have thrown that application in the trash, and the country would have been poorer for it by well over a thousand songs.

His name was Irving Berlin, and the way he got from that résumé to the American songbook is the kind of story that makes you stand a little straighter. It is also a story about what this country does with people when it lets them work, and what they do for it in return.

The boy from the Lower East Side

He was born Israel Beilin, in May 1888, in the Russian Empire, in a Jewish family. His father Moses was a cantor, a singer who led prayers in the synagogue. In the early 1890s, the family left. The reasons were the ones that sent so many Jewish families out of the Russian Empire in those years: hardship, the threat of violence against Jews and the lack of any assurance that things would improve. They crossed the Atlantic and arrived in New York in 1893, when the boy was five years old.

I should be careful here, because Ellis Island lore has grown a lot of embroidery around this family. The firm facts are that the family came through the port of New York in 1893, when the immigrant station at Ellis Island had been open barely a year, and that they settled in the crowded tenements of the Lower East Side. His name was Americanised in the clerks' pen, as the story goes, to Irving Berlin; the precise moment of that change is hard to pin down and so I will not.

His father found it hard to earn a living. Moses Beilin, an itinerant cantor, took work at a kosher meat market and gave Hebrew lessons, and he died in 1901, when Irving was a young teenager. The boy went to work. He sold newspapers on the street. He worked as a singing waiter in the cafes and saloons of lower Manhattan, performing for tips. He learned that a song was a thing you could sell, and that a good one could be sung by a crowd.

Look at what the country had on offer for a boy like that. There was no program. There was no one writing a grant. There was a city full of crowded streets, music in every restaurant, a thriving popular-music business in Tin Pan Alley, and an idea, widely held, that a person's worth is what he can make. He could sing, he could rhyme and he was willing to work all night. The market told him what people wanted, and he listened.

A songwriter with no musical training

Berlin's first published song, "Marie from Sunny Italy," came out in 1907, and the sheet music credited it to "I. Berlin" rather than the name on the family's papers, which is as good an origin for a stage name as any. He kept at it. His breakthrough came with "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911, a song that was not, strictly speaking, ragtime at all, but that was infectious enough that it started a craze and carried him to national fame.

What made him unusual, besides the sheer output, was how he worked. He is famous for not reading music for much of his career. He is also famous for playing the piano on the black keys, and for using a special piano that could shift the key with a lever, so that he could change the pitch without learning another fingering. Trained composers marvelled at the simplicity of his melodies and the speed of his lyrics. His secret, if he had one, was that he wrote for the ordinary listener. He aimed his songs at people who did not have a conservatory education, and who wanted something they could hum on the way to work.

There is a lesson hiding in there that applies to politics too. The man who can say something simple, clearly and truthfully, so that anyone can repeat it, has a power that the sophisticated expert rarely matches. Berlin understood that a song is a tiny constitution: a few lines that a whole people can memorise and carry in their heads.

The army show and the song he set aside

In 1918 the United States was fighting in the First World War, and Berlin, by then a famous songwriter and recently a naturalized citizen, was drafted into the Army and sent to Camp Upton on Long Island. The Army, being sensible, did not hand him a rifle and tell him to forget his talent. It asked him to write a show.

The result was a soldiers' revue called Yip Yip Yaphank, put on in 1918, performed by soldiers from the camp, with the profits meant to go to building a service club at the camp. One of its numbers was a comic song in which a sleepy private complains about the bugle, a song that got a laugh from every man who had ever been woken before dawn. Berlin, in the Army, writing jokes about the Army for the soldiers, was a happy ending to a hard beginning.

For that show he also wrote a patriotic song and then decided it did not fit. It was a number called "God Bless America." He took it out of the revue, put it in a drawer, and left it there for twenty years. I would call that restraint worth noting. A man with a great song in the drawer, a war on, a crowd waiting, and he decided it did not belong, and he waited. He believed in editing.

Kate Smith, November 1938

By the autumn of 1938 the news from Europe was dark. The Munich agreement had been signed in September, and a great many Americans feared that another general war was coming. Kate Smith, the radio singer with a huge audience, asked Berlin for a patriotic song to sing on her Armistice Day broadcast. Berlin took the old number out of the drawer and revised it, with some changes to the words, in a spirit of prayer instead of marching.

Smith sang it on the radio on November 10, 1938, on the eve of Armistice Day (the Library of Congress gives November 11). The response was immediate and enormous. The song went into American life and never left. It was sung at ball games and political conventions and school assemblies and in churches. Whenever Americans felt a need to say something about their country that was not a quarrel, they sang it. For many people it became an unofficial second anthem.

Let me say plainly why I think the song worked, and why it still works. The song is a prayer, and not a boast. It asks God to bless the country. It does not say that the country is blessed already, or that it deserves to be. It asks. That is the right posture for a republic: humility before the Creator who endowed us with the rights that our founding document lists. And I think a man who had come here as a refugee child knew something about asking for a blessing.

The gift: the God Bless America Fund

Here is the part of the story that deserves to be better known. After Berlin put the song before the public in 1938, he did something unusual. He assigned the royalties on it to a trust, the God Bless America Fund, with trustees to administer it, and the proceeds were to go to the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts of America. He signed over the income of the most popular patriotic song in the country to the organisations that teach children citizenship, self-reliance and service.

The Scouts have received the royalties of this song for generations. Think what that means. Every time a stadium crowd sings, a little of the proceeds goes toward teaching a child to tie a knot, camp in the woods, help a neighbour and take an oath to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful and friendly. That is a form of patriotism you cannot fake. It is a man taking the thing he made, which was worth a fortune, and deciding that the country he loved should have it.

It was not the only time. When the Second World War came, Berlin wrote another all-soldier show, This Is the Army, and again the proceeds went to Army Emergency Relief, which helped soldiers and their families. The show toured at home and abroad.

He was recognised. In 1954 President Eisenhower presented him with a Congressional Gold Medal. Later, in 1977, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He lived to be 101, dying in September 1989.

White Christmas, and the same pattern

If you want one more proof of Berlin's gift for simplicity, consider the song most people associate with him, "White Christmas." It was written for a 1942 film, Holiday Inn, and Bing Crosby sang it. It became a national favourite during the war years, when millions of young men were far from home. A song about snow and a longing to be home was a song a soldier could hear and feel. It is easy to forget that the author of the most famous Christmas song in the English-speaking world was a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire. He did not feel any contradiction. America had made that possible. A country that can take a Jewish cantor's son and make him the poet laureate of Christmas, with the whole country joining in, is a country that has understood something.

I cannot resist the joke. Somewhere there is a committee that would have required this man to attend a workshop before he was permitted to write "White Christmas," and another committee that would have formed to study whether a song about home was inclusive enough. Berlin skipped both. He skipped both, and the song sold millions. There is a case that the single most efficient regulatory reform ever invented is to leave a talented person alone.

The argument: what Berlin's life proves

Let me put the argument in numbered form.

One: an open society rewards talent without asking about origin. Berlin had no money, no schooling to speak of, no connections and no English at the start. What he had was a place where a person could sell a song to a stranger for a nickel and keep the nickel. The marketplace was the great equaliser. Anyone who has a product people want can succeed, and no permission is needed.

Two: assimilation and loyalty went together. Berlin kept his Jewish identity, and he also became one of the most patriotic men in the country. He did not experience this as a tension. It was possible because the country asked him to join, not to disappear. The same dynamic is traced in Ellis Island Asked Twelve Million Newcomers to Become Americans and They Did. The newcomers who became Americans did not abandon their past. They carried it into a larger family.

Three: gratitude is a private virtue that can produce a public good. The royalties went to the Scouts because Berlin believed he owed the country something. Nobody made him. No law required it. This is what conservatives mean when they say that voluntary generosity beats compelled redistribution, not because the money is better, but because the giver is better for having given. A tax cannot produce a gift. And the gift, in this case, trained children for generations.

Four: the country the song asks God to bless is a country founded on a proposition. The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A boy from the Pale who found his happiness in song at a New York piano is the Declaration's promise in practice. If you want the Founding behind the song, the document is on the Founders page, and The Star-Spangled Banner Read as a Document of Survival, All Four Stanzas tells the story of the other anthem.

The objection and the answer

The best objection runs like this. You are telling a nice story about a success. But for every Irving Berlin there were thousands of immigrants who did not become famous, who lived and died in poverty, who faced prejudice, who were turned back or never given a chance. Survivorship bias makes the whole thing look rosier than it was.

That is true, and it is worth saying. Berlin was exceptional, and no one should build a policy on the assumption that every newcomer will write a hit. The Lower East Side was crowded and hard, and the tenements were dangerous. Many people never rose out of them. And Berlin himself met prejudice; the country that welcomed him was not free of it.

But the objection misses what the story is for. It does not claim the average immigrant became a millionaire. It claims something more modest and more important: that the rules of the country did not shut the door on talent, and that the ordinary immigrant, in far greater numbers, earned an ordinary living, raised children who did better, and joined the country's life. The famous cases are the ones we can name; the general result is the one that matters. The point of a free system is not that everybody wins. It is that nobody is told in advance that he cannot.

And then there is the measure of Berlin himself. A man who had grounds to resent a country that had been slow to open its doors wrote a prayer for it and gave the money away. If the most gifted beneficiary of the American bargain felt gratitude and not grievance, that tells you something about the bargain. For another story about a man who made a fortune and then gave it away, see Andrew Carnegie Went From Bobbin Boy to Steel King and Then Gave It Away.

What the song asks of us

The sensible way to honour a song like "God Bless America" is to treat it as a petition, not a pose. It is a request that the country be worthy of the blessing, and that means the ordinary things: obeying the law, raising children who know their history, helping a neighbour, serving when called. It asks nothing grand. Berlin's own life gave the pattern. Work hard at your trade. Love the country that let you. Give some of it back.

And it is worth asking, now and then, what it means that this song comes from a man who arrived as a child with nothing. It means the claim that America is a nation built by people who chose it is not a slogan. It is a fact about the person who wrote the tune your grandchildren will sing at a ball game. loving your country is not idolatry, a believer's case for patriotism makes the larger case that loving your country, in the right way, is a duty and not a vice.

The case in brief

1. Irving Berlin arrived from the Russian Empire in 1893 at the age of five, lost his father in 1901, worked as a newsboy and singing waiter, and became the country's greatest popular songwriter without formal musical training.
2. He wrote "God Bless America" for the 1918 Army show Yip Yip Yaphank, set it aside for twenty years, and gave it to Kate Smith for her broadcast of November 10, 1938.
3. He assigned the royalties to the God Bless America Fund for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, a voluntary act of gratitude worth more than any tax.
4. His life shows that an open society rewards talent, that assimilation and loyalty belong together, and that the Declaration's promise can be seen in a single career.
5. The song is a petition, not a boast: it asks God to bless the country and invites its citizens to deserve it.

What you can do: this month, support a local Scout troop or another youth group that teaches citizenship, with an hour of your time or a modest donation.