The Styrous® Viewfinder: Adolph Hitler

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March 25, 2026

Kate Smith ~ God Bless America, the Ku Klux Klan & Politics

God Bless America

On Tuesday, March 24, 1939, God Bless America was recorded by Kate Smith. It is an American patriotic song written by Irving Berlin during World War I in 1918 and revised by him in the run-up to World War II in 1938. The later version was recorded by Smith and became her signature song.

Music critic Jody Rosen says that a 1906 Jewish dialect novelty song, When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band, contains a six-note fragment that is "instantly recognizable as the opening strains of 'God Bless America'". He interprets this as an example of Berlin's "habit of interpolating bits of half-remembered songs into his own numbers." I think that's kind of stretching it but judge for yourself (link below).

In 1938, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, Berlin, who was Jewish felt it was time to revive it as a "peace song", and it was introduced on an Armistice Day broadcast in 1938, sung by Kate Smith on her radio show. Berlin had made some minor changes; by this time, "to the right" might have been considered a call to the political right, so he substituted "through the night" instead. Woody Guthrie criticized the song, and in 1940 he wrote This Land Is Your Land, originally titled God Blessed America For Me, as a response. Anti-Semitic groups such as the Ku Klux Klan also protested against the song due to its authorship by a Jewish immigrant.

Berlin gave the royalties of the song to for redistribution to Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts in New York City.

In 1940, God Bless America was the official campaign song for both President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his Republican opponent, Wendell Willkie. At that time, the song represented cultural and religious tolerance (my how times change).

The song was used early in the Civil Rights Movement as well as at labor rallies. During the 1960s counterculture, the song was increasingly used by Christian conservatives in the US to signal their opposition to secular liberalism and to silence dissenters who were speaking in favor of communism or in opposition to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

During a live television broadcast on the evening of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, following addresses by then House and Senate leaders, Speaker Dennis Hastert (Republican) and Tom Daschle (Democrat), members of the United States Congress broke out into an apparently spontaneous verse of God Bless America on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

It has become common for it to be sung at major sport events: the National Hockey League, Major League Baseball, American football and the Indianapolis 500.

It has been recorded by Bing Crosby, Connie Francis, Jackie Evancho, LeAnn Rimes, the Violent Femmes (this is a very strange cover) and two versions by Celine Dion. The Firesign Theatre did parodies on two of their albums, Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him in 1968 and How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All in 1969.

And the 2011 film God Bless America, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwait, is a dark comedy that satirizes present-day American values.

God Bless America lyrics

While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,
Let us swear allegiance to a land that's free.
Let us all be grateful for a land so fair,
As we raise our voices in a solemn prayer.

God bless America, land that I love.
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above.

From the mountains to the prairies,
To the oceans white with foam,
God bless America, my home sweet home,
God bless America, my home sweet home.

Viewfinder links:

Irving Berlin

Bing Crosby

Celine Dion

Woody Guthrie

Adolf Hitler

Ku Klux Klan

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Kate Smith

Violent Femmes

Net links:

YouTube links:

Collins and Harlan ~ When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band

Firesign Theater .~

How Can You Be in Two Places at Once (complete album) (57 mins.)

Waiting for the Electrician (Complete Album) (42 mins.)

God Bless America ~

Bing Crosby

Celine Dion

Jackie Evancho

Connie Francis

LeAnn Rimes

the Violent Femmes

Styrous® ~ Tuesday, March 24, 2026

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Music Notes

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Ku Klux Klan articles/mentions

Kate Smith ~ God Bless America, the Ku Klux Klan & Politics

Ku Klux Klan ad illustration

mentions:

Politics

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November 17, 2025

Kaiser Wilhelm II & the Tango

Kaiser Wilhelm II - 1902

photo by T. H. Voigt

On November 17, 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II banned the armed forces from dancing the tango in Germany; perhaps he couldn't stand the sight of men dancing together or as a member of the Hohenzollern house, it was an attempt to conceal the antics of Prince Ludwig Viktor, a Habsburg-Lorraine family connection.

tango dancers

photographer unknown

Who knows? But there was WAY much more to Wilhelm then just that . . .

One of the few things the Kaiser, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage. A particular specialty was insulting other monarchs. He called the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy “the dwarf” in front of the king’s own entourage. He called Prince Ferdinand, of Bulgaria, “Fernando naso,” on account of his beaky nose, and spread rumors that he was a hermaphrodite. Since Wilhelm was notably indiscreet, people always knew what he was saying behind their backs. Ferdinand had his revenge. After a visit to Germany, in 1909, during which the Kaiser slapped him on the bottom in public and then refused to apologize, Ferdinand awarded a valuable arms contract that had been promised to the Germans to a French company instead.

From Wikipedia:

In March 1890, Wilhelm dismissed longtime Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and assumed direct control over his nation's policies, embarking on a "New Course" to cement Germany's status as a leading world power. Over the course of his reign, the German colonial empire acquired new territories in China and the Pacific and became Europe's largest manufacturer. However, he often undermined such progress by making tactless and threatening statements towards other countries without first consulting his ministers. Likewise, his regime did much to alienate itself from other great powers by initiating a massive naval build-up, contesting French control of Morocco, and building a railway through Baghdad that challenged Britain's dominion in the Persian Gulf. By the second decade of the 20th century, Germany could rely only on significantly weaker nations such as Austria-Hungary and the declining Ottoman Empire as allies.

Despite strengthening Germany's position as a great power by building a powerful navy as well as promoting scientific innovation within its borders, Kaiser Wilhelm's public pronouncements and erratic foreign policy greatly antagonized the international community and are considered by many to have contributed to the fall of the German Empire. In 1914, his diplomatic brinksmanship culminated in Germany's guarantee of military support to Austria-Hungary during the July Crisis which plunged all of Europe into World War I. A lax wartime leader, Wilhelm left virtually all decision-making regarding strategy and organization of the war effort to the German Supreme Army Command. By August 1916, this broad delegation of power gave rise to a de facto military dictatorship that dominated the country's policies for the rest of the conflict. Despite emerging victorious over Russia and obtaining significant territorial gains in Eastern Europe, Germany was forced to relinquish all its conquests after a decisive defeat on the Western Front in the autumn of 1918.

Wilhelm's birth seems to have been the source of his emotional development. Modern medical assessments have concluded his hypoxic state at birth, due to a breech delivery and the heavy dosage of chloroform, left him with minimal to mild brain damage, which manifested itself in his subsequent hyperactive and erratic behavior, limited attention span and impaired social abilities.

Historians have frequently stressed the role of Wilhelm's personality in shaping his reign. Thus, Thomas Nipperdey concludes he was:

...gifted, with a quick understanding, sometimes brilliant, with a taste for the modern,—technology, industry, science—but at the same time superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success,—as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday—romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off, a juvenile cadet, who never took the tone of the officers' mess out of his voice, and brashly wanted to play the part of the supreme warlord, full of panicky fear of a monotonous life without any diversions, and yet aimless, pathological in his hatred against his English mother.

Historian David Fromkin states that Wilhelm had a love–hate relationship with Britain. According to Fromkin, "From the outset, the half-German side of him was at war with the half-English side. He was wildly jealous of the British, desiring to be British and to be better at being British than the British were, while at the same time hating them and resenting them because he never could be fully accepted by them".

The negative international consequences of Wilhelm's erratic personality: "He believed in force, and the 'survival of the fittest' in domestic as well as foreign politics ... William was not lacking in intelligence, but he did lack stability, disguising his deep insecurities by swagger and tough talk. He frequently fell into depressions and hysterics ... William's personal instability was reflected in vacillations of policy. His actions, at home as well as abroad, lacked guidance, and therefore often bewildered or infuriated public opinion. He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives, as had been the case with Bismarck, as with asserting his will. This trait in the ruler of the leading Continental power was one of the main causes of the uneasiness prevailing in Europe at the turn-of-the-century".

British public opinion had been quite favorable towards Wilhelm in his first twelve years on the throne, but it turned sour in the late 1890s. During the First World War, he became the central target of British anti-German propaganda and the personification of a hated enemy.

Wilhelm died of a pulmonary embolism in Doorn, Netherlands, on 4 June 1941, at the age of 82, just weeks before the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. Despite his personal resentment and animosity toward the monarchy, Hitler wanted to bring the Kaiser's body back to Berlin for a state funeral, as Hitler felt that such a funeral, with himself acting in the role of heir apparent to the throne, would be useful to exploit for propaganda. However, Wilhelm's orders that his body was not to return to Germany unless the monarchy was first restored were then revealed and were grudgingly respected. The Nazi occupation authorities arranged for a small military funeral, with a few hundred people present. However, Kaiser Wilhelm's insistence that the swastika and Nazi Party regalia not be displayed at his funeral was ignored, as is seen in the photographs of the funeral taken by a Dutch photographer.

Viewfinder links:

Ludwig Angerer

Otto von Bismarc

Victor Emmanuel II

Nazi

Prince Ludwig Viktor

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Net links:

The New Yorker ~ What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?

YouTube links:

The Kaiser's Nazi Funeral

Kaiser Wilhelm II, The Habsburg Empire & The Hunt

Kaiser Wilhelm II: The last German emperor

The Life & Times of Wihlelm II

Wilhelm II in Exile

Wilhelm II of Germany (47 min., 40 secs.)

Styrous® ~ Monday, November 17, 2025

Politics

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April 18, 2020

20,000 vinyl LP 219: Miklós Rózsa ~ Concerto for String Orchestra

Miklos Rozsa ~ Concerto for String Orchestra

vinyl LP front cover detail
Paul Klee ~ Printed Sheet With Pictures - 1937

detail photo of album cover by Styrous®

Hungarian composer Miklos Rozsa (Miklós Rózsa) was born on April 18, 1907, in Budapest to Jewish parents. He was introduced to classical and folk music by his mother, Regina Berkovits, a pianist who had studied with pupils of Franz Liszt, and his father, Gyula, an industrialist and landowner who loved Hungarian folk music.

Miklos Rozsa

publicity photo - date unknown

Rózsa became one of the brilliant film score composers of his time, however, this album is not from a film. He was also a serious composer of Contemporary music. Rózsa achieved early success in Europe with his orchestral Theme, Variations, and Finale (Op. 13) of 1933.

One of his works, the String Quartet No.1, Op.22 (1950) (link below), was written in honor of actor, Peter Ustinov (link below), who portrayed the mad Emperor Nero (link below) of ancient Rome, in the film, Quo Vadis (link below).

The Concerto for String Orchestra was written in 1943; this recording, which features Carlos Surinach conducting the M-G-M String Orchestra, was recorded in 1957. The orchestra was used in many M-G-M films. This is one of many albums whose cover snagged me into buying it unheard as I was familiar with his scores for films but especially the work of the cover artist.

Miklos Rozsa ~ Concerto for String Orchestra

vinyl LP front cover
Paul Klee ~ Printed Sheet With Pictures - 1937

photo of album cover by Styrous®

The image on the cover of the album is the 1937 painting, Printed Sheet With Pictures by the Swiss artist, Paul Klee. It has influences of primitive cave painting, ancient textiles, African sculpture, and Surrealist art. Klee became interested in non-Western art in the 1920s, and, at an early age, visited the ethnographic collections of the Bernisches Historisches Museum in Switzerland. In this work, his hieroglyphic imagery presents mysterious and elusive forms like a moon woman in profile, a fish, and a black and red mask adorned with horns. In 1937, the year Printed Sheet with Picture was painted, Klee found his work vilified in the Degenerate Art exhibition; his art was also removed from German public collections because it seemed dangerous to Hitler (link below). The work of many Jewish artist and musicians, Kurt Weill (link below) one of them, were in this exhibition,

There was a copy of the score of the Concerto for String Orchestra signed by Rozsa for sale on the Tamino website (link below).