I Didn’t Raise My Son to be a Soldier

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Released in 1915, I Didn’t Raise My Son to be a Soldier was the first commercially successful anti-war record.

Sung here by the Peerless Quartet, it featured prominently in the American anti-war movement opposing US entry in the first world war.

The warmongering ex-president Theodore Roosevelt objected to the song’s message of peace and its early feminism: “Foolish people who applaud a song entitled ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier’ are just the people who would also in their hearts applaud a song entitled ‘I Didn’t Raise my Girl To Be A Mother.”

The song was revived in the 1960s in opposition to the US war in Vietnam.

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