Bing Crosby (98 page)

In that context, the act of recording patriotic songs was neither pro forma, sentimental, nor innocent. Any doubts that Bing’s
recordings endorsed a particular vision of America were swept aside the following summer when Decca released his four-sided
Ballad for Americans.
Earl Robinson, who wrote the music for John Latouche’s libretto, was not a rote liberal preaching tolerance; he was a loyal
communist who supported the Hitler-Stalin pact, though his personal politics ran largely to issues of racial equality. A prolific
composer, he was best known at the time for the classic union protest song “Joe Hill.” In 1938 he and Latouche created a forerunner
to
Ballad for Americans,
“Ballad of Uncle Sam,” for the Federal Theater Project, which was roundly vilified by Texas congressman Martin Dies’s committee
investigating “un-American” activities — like racially integrated theater. He slandered their work as “an American version
of the ‘Internationale.’”
²⁸
“It died early,” Louis Untermeyer wrote in his notes to Bing’s LP release of
Ballad for Americans,
“with a noose of red tape around its neck.”
²⁹

After Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the public grew resistant to native demagogues.
Ballad for Americans
debuted on CBS in November, introduced by Burgess Meredith and sung by the princely African American baritone Paul Robeson,
and was a sensation.
Variety
described it as “a masterpiece of authentic American love of country.”
³⁰
Reader’s Digest
concurred: “the finest piece of American propaganda.”
³¹
Robeson recorded it in February. Numerous singers
(hundreds according to Earl Robinson), including Lawrence Tibbett and James Melton, performed it over the next few years.
But Bing was the only popular singer to record it, in four parts, accompanied by Victor Young conducting the Decca Concert
Orchestra and the Ken Darby Singers. Robinson thought Tibbett’s version too operatic, but “Bing Crosby recorded the piece
beautifully on Decca, and his version sold another twenty thousand copies. I remember gently exaggerating the Crosby style
when I described his crooning to friends.” Robinson added, “By the way, he sang it in the lower Robeson key.”
³²

Bing did not approach the project lightly. He studied the work before the session, and his concentration in the studio was
painstaking; everything had to be right. In contrast to his usual speed (five tunes in two hours, rarely more than two takes),
he devoted an hour to each of the four segments. If the reviews were not overtly political, political righteousness fueled
the cheers of latecomers to the world of popular music. “Bing Crosby came of age, musically speaking, in his last week’s album,
Ballad for Americans,”
wrote
New York Post
critic Michael Levin. “This is the finest recorded performance Bing had done to date and shows that in the last few years
he has gone far beyond binging and has really learned how to sing.” When he finished patronizing Bing, Levin chanced a risky
comparison with Paul Robe-son’s Victor set that undoubtedly gladdened the hearts of Kapp’s team: “For all of Robeson’s magnificent
voice, we prefer the Crosby version. The recording is better, the orchestration is better, and the chorus is better trained.”

Ballad for Americans
is now antiquated: a rabble-rousing, melting-pot, bleacher-cheer oratorio, narrated and sung by a bard who identifies himself,
at the very end, as the personification of America. It begins:

In ‘76 the sky was red,

Thunder rumbling overhead,

Bad King George couldn’t sleep in his bed,

And on that stormy morn,

Old Uncle Sam was born. (Some birthday!)

Old Sam put on a three-cornered hat,

And in a Richmond church he sat,

And Patrick Henry told him that,

While America drew breath,

It was liberty or death.

(Did they all believe in liberty in those days?)

Nobody who was anybody believed it.

And everybody who was anybody, they doubted it.

Nobody had faith, nobody
—
nobody but, uh, Washington, Tom Paine,

Benjamin Franklin, Haym Salomon, Crispus Attucks, Lafayette.

Nobodies.

One imagines Kapp leaping at the opportunity to record it with the man he had helped establish as the personification of American
song. Surely no great political courage was required, because suddenly every political group wanted to claim the work as its
private anthem. The Republicans hired Ray Middleton (after Robeson declined) to sing it at the convention that nominated Wendell
Willkie as its 1940 presidential candidate. One week earlier it was sung at the Communist Party convention. The political
significance of Bing’s version lay in his personal standing, specifically the ethnicity he was now intent on making a crucial
component of his public persona. Bing’s radio audience was estimated as high as 50 million. But when most people thought of
an Irish Catholic on the air, the figure brought to mind was the increasingly repudiated Father Coughlin, whose pro-Hitler
tirades had grown so bellicose that they provoked Irish American gangs to descend on Jewish neighborhoods to start fights.

Coughlin’s family had come to America in the same pre-Famine era as the Harrigans and, like them, had settled in Canada, where
he was born in 1891. He and Bing started their radio careers on CBS and were considered among the idiom’s first masters. (Wallace
Stegner has described Coughlin’s delivery as “such mellow richness, such heartwarming, confidential intimacy.”)
³³
William Paley refused to renew Coughlin’s contract after he accused CBS of censorship, but the relationship could not have
survived the priest’s rabid antisemitism. NBC also refused to broadcast him, so Coughlin organized his own network of twenty-six
independent stations and reached more people than ever before. By 1940 he was so far over the edge that Catholics turned from
him in embarrassment (two years later Archbishop Edward Mooney, with the support of the Vatican,
ordered him to cease publication of
Social Justice,
his noxious magazine). That same year Bing recorded the work in which the founding of America is traced to a family of patriots
that includes a Jewish financier (Haym Salomon) and a runaway slave (Crispus Attucks).
Ballad for Americans
was American history as refracted by New Deal liberalism and served with a spoon. But it worked, and through it Bing spoke
his piece and balanced the scales.

Bing had never made much of his ethnicity. Every aspect of big-time entertainment discouraged him, and in any case, it would
have been a stretch; his paternal Anglican side settled in America well before the Revolution, and his maternal Irish side
arrived in New Brunswick in the 1830s. Unlike minstrelsy and vaudeville, which were steeped in ethnic stereotypes, Hollywood
and radio insisted upon common denominators. The thinking was that a picture about Jews would attract only Jews, and a picture
about Catholics would attract only Catholics, and so forth. No all-Negro picture had ever earned much money. Leo McCarey’s
affecting
Make Way for Tomorrow
(1937) flopped, it was argued, because it was about old people, and they never turned out in sufficient numbers. The picture
business was tough enough without deliberately limiting the number of ticket buyers. Since the end of the early-thirties gangster
cycle, Hollywood’s product had steadily slouched toward the ethnically rinsed paradise of Louis B. Mayer’s beloved Carvel,
MGM’s city on a hill, home to the confessor/jurist Judge Hardy and his son, Andy. Only character players could keep their
accents, receding hairlines, noses, and names. In all the feature films he had made to date, Bing had never played a character
with a name — Crosby, Danvers, Bronson, Williams, Jones (twice), Lawton, Grayson, Gordon, Crocker, Larabee, Poole, Marvin,
Boland, Remsen, Beebe, Lawton, Martin, Earl — that could be construed as remotely Irish.

He now commenced a conversion, from all-American crooner to hyphenated-American nationalist, an ethnic in a land of ethnics,
publicly and privately. At his behest, Larry and Ted began to investigate the family’s genealogy; in later years Bing would
wear the emblem of his Irish forebears on his blazers. Yet long before that, as Coughlin’s name faded from public discourse
and memory, Bing’s name became inextricably linked to the community of Irish American Catholics. American popular song derived
from a motley of ethnicities;
the one address where the efficacy of the melting pot could not be denied was Tin Pan Alley. It succeeded because the Jews,
blacks, Italians, Anglos, southerners, westerners, midwesterners, and others refused to melt, all priding themselves on the
particular heritages that fed their art. Bing, the prodigy of the Inland Empire raised on the diversity of recordings, found
his cultural corner in rediscovering the Irish in his pedigree.

The transformation was apparently triggered by
Ballad for Americans
and was undoubtedly hastened by the war. Four months after recording the Robinson-Latouche cantata, Bing took the only outright
political stand of his career, which seemed to undermine all he stood for by aligning him with the movie colony’s most conservative
element. On the eve of the election, he gave a radio address in support of Wendell Willkie and lent his name to an advertisement
in the
New York Times,
signed by 165 Hollywood figures determined to refute the notion that the “Mighty Motion Picture Industry” was united in supporting
FDR’s third-term candidacy.
³⁴
Willkie, a moderate businessman who came to the public’s attention when he denounced special interests on the radio show
Information, Please,
could have passed for a liberal Democrat in any other season. But not in 1940, and not in opposition to FDR. Bing’s reputation
as a reactionary was sealed through his affiliation with such right-wing signatories as Walt Disney, Gary Cooper, Hedda Hopper,
Adolph Menjou, George Murphy, Mary Pickford, and Lew Ayres, who, having taken his role in
All Quiet on the Western Front
to heart, created his own tempest by declaring himself a conscientious objector. Inevitably, Bing was singled out. The
Philadelphia Record
published a vicious editorial, accusing Crosby alone of ingratitude and corruption; the first because he was “a two-bit crooner”
when Roosevelt came to office and now boasted an income equal to “the titans of industry,” the second because Del Mar, referred
to as “one of his racetracks,” used WPA money slated for a park.
³⁵

Bing was taken aback by the brouhaha. His politics, such as they were, had never been monolithic. He was no Roosevelt hater.
In 1935 he had participated in fund-raising celebrations for the president’s birthday on the Warner Bros. lot. Moreover, when
he returned to
Kraft Music Hall
after the election, on November 14, he made a plea for the nation to unite behind the president now that the contest was
over. The editorial attack may have prompted that statement, but it was not the only way in which he distanced himself from
the other signatories. When Roosevelt died in 1945, Bing sang “Faith of Our Fathers” and Brahms’s “Lullaby” on NBC’s two-hour
memorial broadcast. Nor did he join the belligerents a few years later as a “friendly witness” during the HUAC’s reign of
terror. Nor did he allow politics to influence his professional relationships. He sat out politics for good.

A month after the election, Bing surprised Kapp with a request to do a record. He rarely bothered to suggest numbers; he had
always been content to leave repertory to Jack, except when he was doing a favor for someone. Now he wanted an arrangement
prepared and studio time set aside to record “Did Your Mother Come from Ireland?” It was his first Irish song, opening up
a new area that even Jack had failed to consider. Victor Young was selected to write the arrangements and conduct the December
10 session, which produced four sides. Two of them reflected Bing’s authentic if neglected heritage (the other Irish song
was “Where the River Shannon Flows”), and two reflected the southern Negro heritage he so often borrowed as his own, albeit
as construed by Stephen Foster (“My Old Kentucky Home” and “De Camptown Races”). During the next few years he extended both
lineages, playing minstrel Dan Emmett in
Dixie
and Irish American priest Father O’Malley in
Going My Way
and
The Bells of St. Mary’s,
his way of tipping the scales in favor of liberal benovolence.

You know, when we were doing a
Road
picture, he’d get out of his car at Paramount with his shoelaces untied. I’d say, “Don’t you have time to tie your shoelaces
before you leave the house?” He’d say, “Oh, I stopped at Wilshire to hit a bucket of balls.” This was before we went to work
in the morning.