Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Colleen Shogan wrote about the 36 passengers who drove a hijacked plane into a Pennsylvania field. Today, Charles Fain Lehman pays tribute to Irving Berlin—the immigrant who wrote the song Congress sang on the Capitol steps later that day.
—The Editors
On the evening of September 11, hours after the Twin Towers fell, members of Congress assembled on the steps of the Capitol to address the nation. The leaders of both parties spoke, and everyone observed a moment of silence for the dead. Then, as the press conference was breaking up, someone started to sing. In the video, you can’t hear the first line. But people join in by the second and soon, everyone is singing. Dozens of members of Congress—Republican and Democrat, black and white, left and right—stood together, arm in arm, in an impromptu patriotic hymn.
The song they spontaneously chose was not “The Star-Spangled Banner” or “America the Beautiful,” 19th-century songs by heritage Americans. It was “God Bless America,” written by a Jewish immigrant at the end of World War I to express his love for his adoptive nation. On that terrible day, only Irving Berlin’s words could begin to mend what had been broken.
Berlin was born Israel Baline, one of eight children of cantor Moses Baline and his wife, Lena. In 1893, when Israel was just 5 years old, the Balines left their Russian shtetl to come to America. Like many such families, they were Jews fleeing pogroms. Berlin’s sole memory of his Russian life, biographer Lawrence Bergreen wrote, was of “lying on a blanket on the side of a road, watching his house burn to the ground.” Days later, the family packed and left.
Young “Izzy’s” professional career began at 13, after the death of his father left the family in dire straits. He sang for sailors and prostitutes in the saloons of New York’s infamous Bowery, then became a singing waiter in Chinatown. In 1907, his employer gave him a chance to write a song of his own. “Marie from Sunny Italy” made him just 37 cents, but marked the debut of his professional name: Irving Berlin. Within four years he would have his first big hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
