Today, the exhortative power of music for political ends is a forgotten topic. But as anyone who was alive during World War II in the United States remembers, things were different then. This brand of musical motivation was all around us. Now, hurtling as we are into the new millennium, we are as far from the stirring “God Bless America” as sung by Kate Smith as we are from Marc Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony, Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom, Earl Robinson’s Ballad for Americans—even Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, though the latter work still appears on musical programs around the Fourth of July. During the war, there was a commonality that permeated all echelons of society, and the music that emanated from that collective sense of purpose came in all sorts of guises, from the above-mentioned musical artifacts to War Bond rallies to broadcasts by Toscanini, Glenn Miller, and Woody Guthrie.
Today, the exhortative power of music for political ends is a forgotten topic.
There was no cultural commissar in Washington or grand propaganda machine that orchestrated this effort, though there were a few American aspirants to the role of boosterish exhorter, at least in the realm of literature. Edmund Wilson, in his essay “Archibald MacLeish and the Word” (collected in Classics and Commercials), noted in 1940 that MacLeish, then in his role as Librarian of Congress, descended to the level of asking writers that they lay off pessimism and nay-saying for the
