Ronald D. Cohen - Singing for Peace: Antiwar Songs in American History

First published 2015 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2015, Taylor & Francis.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cohen, Ronald D., 1940-

Singing for peace : antiwar songs in American history / Ronald D. Cohen

and Will Kaufman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61205-807-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-61205-809-2 (library ebook)

1. MusicPolitical aspectsUnited StatesHistory. 2. Peace

Songs and musicHistory and criticism. 3. Protest songsUnited

StatesHistory and criticism. I. Kaufman, Will. II. Title.

ML3917.U6C64 2014

782.421599dc23

2014021123

ISBN-13: 978-1-612-05807-8 (hbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-61205-808-5 (pbk)

When Abraham Lincoln met the author of Uncle Toms Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, he is supposed to have said, So this is the little lady who started this big war. Mark Twain went so far as to blame the novels of Walter Scott for the Civil War; without them, he said, the antebellum South would not have been deluded by the jejune codes of blue blood and feudal romance that ultimately led to its downfall. Each speaker may have had his tongue in cheek, but it does raise the question of the place of culture in war. If, indeed, novels could start wars, then could songs stop them? Pete Seeger, for

Regardless of their efficacy, peace songs have emerged out of every military conflict involving the United States or its predecessors, the British colonies of North America. Doubtless, the majority of them have never been transcribed or recorded. We can safely assume that for every colonial broadside that was printed, there were many more private antiwar scribblings tucked away in diaries, letters, notebooks, and on odd scraps of paper. For every peace song that has been broadcast on radio, distributed on record, uploaded onto SoundCloud and YouTube, or released on CD Baby, others have been spontaneously composed on the spot at rallies and Occupy sites, sung into the winds, and evaporated without benefit of audio or video recording. In this book, we have tried to capture and make sense of a fraction of the peace songs that have appeared either in response to American wars or in fear and anticipation of them.

For a nation so relatively young, the list of Americas wars and military interventions is sobering, if not depressing. This book covers songs from the Seven Years War (175663), the War of Independence (177583), the War of 1812 (181215), the Mexican-American War (184648), the Civil War (186165), the Spanish-American War (1898), the Philippine-American War (18991902), World War I (191418), World War II (193945), the Korean War (195053), the Vietnam War (c. 195575), the first Gulf War (199091), the Afghanistan War (2001present), and the Iraq War (200311). In addition to these full-blown wars, a number of clandestine or quasi-military interventions by the United States have generated protest songs, notably those concerning the Salvadorian Civil War (197992) and the Contra War in Nicaragua (c. 198187), as well as the drone attacks proliferating in Pakistan and Afghanistan during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. In between such identifiable wars and interventions, many songs have derived from a general unease over the perception of militarism and belligerence as default American traits (as witnessed, even, in the common rhetorical strategy of declaring war on abstractions: the War on Terror, the War on Crime, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs).

The fear of impending military engagement, as reflected in peace songs, goes back at least as far as the War of Independence, when mostly Loyalist propagandists used the musical appeal to peace in hopes of forestalling all-out war with the British. In the immediate wake of American independence, songs were sung to forestall a threatened war with France. Noninterventionists before the First and Second World Wars were especially prolific, whileno doubt in response to the whirlwind of media spin and political hysteria helped along by the likes of Fox Newsthe impending invasion of Iraq in 2003 sparked an explosion of songs pleading Dont Bomb Iraq! As of this writing (November 2014), we await to see what peace songs will emerge from the war against the so-called Islamic State.

A number of important observations have come from our research. We have, first of all, been impressed with the number of songs that have cast war as a class struggle, bearing out the perception of the rich mans war and the poor mans fight. From the impoverished Irish conscript in the Seven Years War to the black youth enticed out of the ghetto to die on the desert sands in a fight for oil, the class divisions are laid bare in song after song. We have also noticed the widening of musical genres responding to Americas wars. Throughout much of the nations history, the majority of peace songs could loosely be grouped in the category of folk songs. Occasionally, parlor songs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would take on antiwar themes, as would some later jazz and swing numbers; but most of the twentieth-century output was dominated by folk groups and acoustic singer-songwriters. The Vietnam War saw the increased dovetailing of folk and rock music, so that rock and folk-rock took on an ever larger share of protest activity. Most striking has been the dominance of punk, metal, hip-hop, and rap in peace songs of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Thirdly, a noteworthy strategy of peace songs has been to work against the grain of narrow nationalist perceptions and to attempt to reproduce the perspective of the victims of American military incursions or aggression. This strategy has been particularly noticeable in the songs of the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. This may be at least partly due to the role of television in bringing into our homes the images of humans and their villages at the mercy of American military operations and high-tech weaponry. Vietnam was effectively the first televised war, a factor that is known to have been instrumental in the development of the antiwar movement. Not for nothing was General Norman Schwarzkopf so determined in the first Gulf War to control the images coming from the battlefield, keeping a strong grip on the embedded journalists traveling with the armed forces and ensuring that the smart bombs would appear as precise in their targetingand the collateral damage as negligibleas possible. Not for nothing, too, did