emphasis on style above all. What mattered wasn’t so much what the songs said—usually some variation on “Blah, blah, blah, blah love … Tra la la la, tra la la la cottage for two,” as Ira Gershwin put it in his 1931 parody—but how they said it: the shape of a melody, the flair of a well-wrought rhyme or deft turn of phrase. With their thirty-two-bar form and “blah, blah love” content rigidly standardized, Tin Pan Alley’s songs became sleek exercises in sheer style; this was Deco Pop, music for an era whose cult of the streamlined and pristine was expressed in everything from the cut of waistcoats to the facades of skyscrapers.
For a nation mired in the bleak realities of the Depression, the escapist appeal of these songs was considerable. Tin Pan Alley enshrined bourgeois love as a blissful sanctuary from history itself; listening to “Love Is Here to Stay” or “The Song Is You” or “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?” it was possible to believe—for the three minutes that the song played, at least—that real-world hardships didn’t matter, for in romance there was a charmed parallel universe: a “world” of two. “Millions of people go by,” Harry Warren wrote in one of the decade’s signature songs. “But they all disappear from view … I only have eyes for you.”
Some songs provided a more decadent escape. In the luxuriant melodies and arch, knowing words of hits like “Just One of Those Things” and “I Can’t Get Started,” Americans heard the voice of an alluring character: the bon vivant who sauntered through 1930s popular culture, cocktail shaker in hand, untroubled by the Depression. These “swellegant” songs were most closely associated with younger writers—Rodgers and Hart, the Gershwins, and especially, Cole Porter—who filled their compositions with drolleries and highbrow references; but it was Berlin’s Top Hat collaboration with Astaire and Rogers that gave the fantasy its most intoxicating form. For the millions of Americans who made Top Hat (1935) the biggest movie musical success to date, the film’s primary delight wasn’t its predictable boy-meets-girl high jinks, but the swank apartments, the evening clothes, Fred Astaire catching the night flight to Venice for a weekend spree—its immersion in, as Berlin wrote in “Top Hat, White Tie and Tails,” “an atmosphere that simply reeks with class.”
Perhaps the greatest vicarious thrill of such songs was the feeling of unfeeling. When Top Hat appeared in 1935, per capita personal income was $474 per year, and unemployment still hovered at 20 percent. The long queue at the soup kitchen—that abiding image of Depression-era urban destitution—was still not unknown in New York, Chicago, and other major cities; farmers fled prairie states that had become wind-whipped dust bowls. In this atmosphere, Americans couldn’t help but lust for the extravagant detachment of Berlin’s “No Strings” narrator, who boasts of having “No strings and no connections / No ties to my affections.” In Top Hat, Astaire’s Jerry Travers sings the song while idling in his London Hotel suite; it is a rogue’s ode to the single life, but above all a declaration of decadence: Travers’s sole commitment is to the pursuit of high-toned pleasure. “I’m fancy free,” he sings while spritzing soda water into a highball of bourbon, “And free for anything fancy.”
The narrator of Berlin’s “White Christmas” verse—that poor soul marooned in a Beverly Hills paradise—is recognizably a variation on that Astairean type: a blasé society swell. But by 1938, when Berlin was grappling with “White Christmas” and his various plans for a theatrical revue, history was catching up with popular culture’s fancy-free cosmopolitans. While Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms were lifting the nation from the depths of economic crisis, Americans were awakening to a different nightmare. Hitler was menacing Europe, Spain was rent by civil war, the Japanese were bombing Canton. In the shadow of geopolitical strife, the charm of penthouse pop was wearing off. Berlin’s latest Astaire-Rogers vehicle arrived in cinemas that August under a title, Carefree, that felt unseemly—out of sync with a more solemn and engaged national mood.
This shift in public taste was underscored by the demise of Broadway and Hollywood’s songwriting elite. On July 11, 1937, thirty-eight-year-old George Gershwin died, suddenly and shockingly, of a brain tumor. That same year, Cole Porter’s legs were crushed in a horrible horseback-riding accident, a calamity from which his career would take years to recover. Lorenz Hart, the era’s darkest and most debonair wit, sank deeper into alcoholism and self-destruction; soon his partner Richard Rodgers would find an earnest new collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein II, the author of odes to “Ol’ Man River” and to cornstalks “as high as an elephant’s eye.” As the decade wound down, the eminence of Tin Pan Alley itself was under siege: for good-time musical diversion, American youth was increasingly turning to instrumental tunes played by swinging big bands.
Berlin foretold the twilight of this pop culture era in perhaps his greatest song of the 1930s, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” from the Astaire-Rogers picture Follow the Fleet (1936). Musically, the song finds Berlin at his stylish finest, its verses stepping ominously through a series of minor-chord changes whose elegance and menace recall the best Kurt Weill. The lyric is even more remarkable, distilling the wishing-the-world-away desperation behind those High Deco 1930s movies and pop songs. Over a brooding C minor vamp, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance” begins with an indelible line: “There may be trouble ahead.” Those words had dark resonance in 1936, the year that the Rome-Berlin Axis was proclaimed and Franco launched his revolt against the Spanish Republic—history was closing in on Hollywood’s fairy tales of “moonlight and music / And love and romance.” In Follow the Fleet, the song is staged as an archetypal expression of that fantasy: Astaire sings the song in his usual black-tie resplendence, while snaking Rogers around a gleaming Deco set. But as the melody’s foreboding downward tug suggests, the clock is ticking on this dream; around the corner, he sings, there may be “teardrops to shed.” “Soon,” Astaire sings, “We’ll be … humming a diff’rent tune.”
In the autumn of 1938, Berlin composed that tune.
He was in London, attending the British premiere of Alexander’s Ragtime Band. The film, a cheerful Berlin greatest-hits package, was well received by British audiences and critics. But Berlin could scarcely take satisfaction in such triumphs: Europe was girding for war. For months, tensions had been mounting over Hitler’s claims on Czech Sudetenland; in September 1938, Germany demanded annexation of the territory. On September 29, the day before the Alexander’s Ragtime Band premiere, the Munich Pact was signed, authorizing Germany’s partition of the Sudetenland—a last-ditch attempt to head off war capped by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s famous forecast of “peace for our time.” Like most Americans, Berlin had followed the news in recent months with growing disquiet; now, in England—separated from a besieged Europe by a mere twenty-one miles of English Channel—the surreal newspaper headlines had a terrifying immediacy. Chamberlain’s assurances offered little solace.
On the journey back to New York aboard the ocean liner Normandie, Berlin set to work on a new song. What he had in mind was a “peace song”—an anthem to soothe and reassure a jittery American public. He struggled to come up with the right tune, toying with a song entitled “Thanks, America” and another called “Let’s Talk About Liberty.” He had made several unsuccessful passes at the project before remembering a number he had abandoned more than two decades earlier: a few lines of purple patriotic verse, set to a martial A major melody, conceived in 1917 as a set piece for his World War I revue, Yip Yip Yaphank. The songwriter dragged out the old tune, changed a couple of lyrics, adjusted a musical phrase. Soon Berlin’s revamped song was complete.
The result was a radical about-face from songs like “No Strings,” “Top Hat, White Tie, and Tails,” and the verse of the fledgling “White Christmas.” Earnest where those songs were flippant and icily aloof, filled with pastoral images where those songs evoked big-city refinement, “God Bless America” was an anthem for a changing world. Berlin gave the song to Kate Smith, who specialized in large-lunged bombast and looked like a farmer’s wife. She was the anti-Astaire.
Smith introduced “God
