that became the essay you read, which is on mill ta richl. this isn't some tome on here is what war is. this is an essay about generations and about war generations and how they are being interpreted. it's an amazing memorial document, a document that engaged with concepts of war memories not only in britain but bigger war memories than just britain. i'm going to pull up three quotes from it. he writes his intentions of the book is to strike a responsive cord in the hearts of some old sold who are tired of the uniform and disillusion of most authored of war books. it is time the world remembered that amongs the 15 million who served, there were other types as well as the conventional

disillusioned pessimists. we have created a polarity here between militaryists and disillusioned pessimists. most of us don't fit in with that. we're in between. right? he says soldiers were not disenchanted by the war. the war never offered them an enchanting prospect. they were just fed up. he had not wanted war. but he engaged in it. he liked it less than he expected. but he proposed to see it through. if which god forbid similar circumstances arose in 1929, he would do it again. there are no great expectations of going into the trenches. no one naively look at the war and thought this is going to be a good time.

when they got there, it was pretty terrible. then he gives us this striking, striking statement of how this doesn't fit in with what hemingway was saying. he says the greater the haorror of battle, the nobler of the man who is not morally ruined by it. if i was a minister and i said that from a pulpit, you would be scared. right? natalie. >> i kind of have a little bit of a problem with the second quote. in the sense that i think that that is a very disenchanted way of looking back on soldiers and war experiences, because i think

that a lot of soldiers did go into the war maybe not thinking oh, this sh going to be so much fun but certainly thinking, like, let's go do this. i've looked a lot at prisoners of war and how they engage with their war and what i saw was that those -- especially those who were captured at the beginning of the conflict before they got into the trefnch syste, when they hadn't engaged too much in battle, that they still approached the war with this very i need to get back to the front because i've got to do my duty and fight for my country. i would be anywhere but in this prison. i want to be with my men at the front. that seems like a very enchanted way of looking at the war. then to contrast that, it was a very doom and gloom, man, battle really sucked. i would do it again, but it was

awful. it provided a very stark contrast that kind of goes against this idea that -- kind of a guy chapman way of looking i didn't go into the war with any illusion. you sit there, did you though? i think a little bit. >> natalie is being hard on charles carrington. he would probably yell at you. what's he getting at the heart of with this essay? what's he trying to show in a broad brush with this essay? i have given you chose quotes because he spits venom in them. he says nasty things, which is entertaining. but he's getting at something serious here. >> i think he is trying to say that it's not the soldiers coming home who have this disillusioned idea when they come back. it wasn't their -- their experiences were not that

horrible as we interpret it to be. instead, we did have fun once in a while. but he blames the journalist, he blames behind the trenches. we keep saying that world war i was horrible, it was an experience that no other group of soldiers ever had to do. it was the most gruesome of wars. but he is saying, everybody suffers. all soldiers suffer in war. we're not the exception. thus, we shouldn't be interpreting world war i as that excepti exception. >> that's a really interesting point that he brings up. he is saying that on the one hard what chr hard, you have people under the age of 25. he calls those people those who

went off to war before the characters were form. why do you think he's careful with this, with the idea of the war generation? why do you think he's so careful with that? under the age of 25, before their characters were formed. they went to war and then what happens in war? they are like him. they are 18 when they reach the western front. they are like graves. they are 19 when they are in battle. and then what happens? >> they have a very formative experience. it forms that character that was not previously formed. >> it changes them. it creates in many ways the adults that they are. he certainly, his life was interested in a survey of his own war experience. he's a fascinating guy to look at because he goes back and re-examines where he fought, where he served, who he served

with. tries to figure out his own history, his own personal history and contrasts that with his memories. really interesting guy. in part, it's because he was so young when he goes off to war. within most of your age brackets, right? when he is serving in war. his character is formed on the west he were front. when the soldiers who were so young and have this transformational experience, when they come home, they are talking in a different way. they are like crebbs. they are cynical. they are rough around the edges. they are like graves, swearing a lot. they are a bit different. society around them is interpreting that as being disillusioned. that war has kind of done something to the souls of these

men. he is saying, hang on. that's the wrong interpretation. of course, he is creating his own alternative generational narrative which has its own problems. right? you can't be an absolutist and an anti-absolutist at the same time. he is giving us an alternative. a different way of looking at the war generation. a different waiy of looking at people coming home. he is a little more forceful about it, i think. right? he mentions something else that i find really interesting. he says, first world war wasn't worse than any wars. all wars are bad. but he says post-war problems are issues that are timeless. other nations that fight in wars have problems adjusting

afterward, coming together, figuring out what wars were all about. he mentions specifically the american civil war. southern states as trying to readjust afterward. in this class, we have talked a lot about mythology, about the lost cause, for example. and then about other mythologies, now of the first world war. he is trying to give us a bigger essay as to what's going on in nations after war. how they are trying to reconcile trauma, loss, trying to understand these things in terms of a national identity. in terms of who people are. what do you take away from this? that's what i get from it. there's a lot else in here. >> i think for me, i think he's

saying, look at who you are placing the blame on. esshe is saying, it's easy to l at the politicians who got us involved in the war where people came out disillusioned but he mentions, yeah, these people had to support the war, the public did, because they elected the politicians would elected to go to war. the men in the public signed up to volunteer for the war. and then so they come home and the public just wants to place blame on someone. so they place it on the government. there are these pacifists who are like, war say horrible thing. does he acknowledge there are some permanent pass sicifists. and he comes in with this critique basically saying, it's easy to be a pacifist when someone is not waving a gun in your face. we would fight if this happened

again. >> that's very interesting. it's hard not to read the experience of the second world war into that. i don't think we should do that. you can't help think when he writes that of 1939 just in 1929. he does volunteer and does serve during the second world war. >> i find this quote on page 206 to be really interesting, that 1919 being the end of the war was the moment of disenchantment. the war itself wasn't. i think this goes off what you were saying about the idea of you're not going to he a pacifist if someone is waving a gun in your face. during the war, they were like we need to fight the war. it was after when it was a quiet change overall post-war, that people were like, wait a second, does that mean we didn't fight for anything because there wasn't this dramatic shift, that people started to question why

they went to war when, in fact, during the war they were completely for it. >> we see something similar with hemingway's homecoming there. right? we see that in many ways the peace is changing the way people are changing the war, that that period of readjustment -- that period of disenchantment of readjusting to civilian live is what's changing the memory of the conflict. i think there's wisdom in that. very much so in what he is writing. he's a person who has had a decade to think about these issues. to try to reconsider them and then write his opinion of them. i want to point out two more examples before we are going to finish up. because i like the quotes that i'm going to give you. i think they will leave us in a good place. the one is from someone that you know. it comes from c.s. lewis.

most of you know c.s. lewis, popular, writer of children stories. he served on the western front. in his memoir, he sums up partly his war experience. i am surprised i did not dislike the army more. it was detestable. the words drew the sting. it's different than the public school. the public school might have been worse. no one did not expect to like it. no one said you ought to like it. no one pretended to like it. everyone you met took it for granted that the whole thing was an owedous necessity, a gasly interruption of rational life. that made all the difference. tribulation is easier to bear. the one breeds camaraderie when intense love between fellow suffer sufferers.

the other distrust, cynicism, resentment. how does this fit in with what we are talking about? does it? i think of dorm life when i read this, kind of. >> it's a necessity, similar to how carrington refers to the war as a ship wreck. >> it was something that was horrible. but we had to do it. he writes about that as the great ship wreck. he goes on for too many pages talking about it. >> i think it speaks of the idea th that, i'm not really disillusioned at all. i'm kind of surprised i'm not as disillusioned as people think i should be. i think that's an interesting idea, that not many people write

about. >> yeah. it it is. he doesn't write much about it. his war memories affected him. his war memories affected him. people do describe lewis as carrying the war memories with him. he doesn't necessarily look back at them in the same way that a lot of people would. val, you were going to say something? >> his last bit about the love between fellow sufferers and how they share this new mutual understanding between one another. i think it's poignant coming from c.s. lewis being someone from belfast himself, seeing and understanding the sectarian differences and how you have people on each and every side of conflict that will end up breaking out and within each social class that are coming

together and experiencing this one mutual situation to fret over. >> kind of that idea of fellow sufferers together. that is essential. it plays into so many different memoirs that talk about the value of comradeship. even graves writes about this uncynically. one last slide. we will end with guy chapman. he's a good place to end. we began with wilf re d owen. it's a section of chapman's war memoir. he talks about watching his battalion marching to the front. he goes into this present and past sort of view of things from 1930s eyes looking back at a memory. he recalls from 1930 goes back and having this memory of men

marching off toward the front. you can envision the battalion marching and the dust kicking up behind them. they are singing as they are marching. chapman writes, your life and death are nothing in the fields, nothing, no more than it is to the man planning the next attack. you are not a pawn. your death does not prevent future world. it won't make the world safe for your children. that's disillusioned stuff. isn't it? by your courage and your cheerfulness before the dirty devices of the world, you have won the love of those who watched you. we loved you for being our clay and spirit. of the paragraph. guy chapman, why are you confusing us? what are we supposed to take away from that? what's his memory showing us? is it showing us anything?

>> war experience and soldier sacrifice and the meaning behind it is -- makes an impact on an individual, not a national level. that an individual sacrifice impacts the individual's life and the people in that life and the army sacrifice impacts the nation. >> i think really what he's trying to say is to leadership, to the nation, your death is nothing. you are just -- you are a number. but in reality, you as one person have changed everything. i think that the one person may be nothing to the larger whole. but to others that you know, that you served with, you mean

everything. >> yeah. i think that's a nice interpretation. the soul of the army, of the experience for chapman is with the people he served with. chapman writes a second war memoi memoir, pieces it together. it's published by his wife after he dies. we began with owen. talking abr:c this idea of nobody dies for their country in a good way, in a sweet or beautiful way. right? owen is known for his lines. the pity of war. the poetry is in the pity. this is what he is known for. chapman engaged with that directly later in life. he says, i'm never grateful for comment however sensible in the war for men who are not in it. probably would not like everything we have said here

today. my gain from it is of importance only to myself for the rest i am conscious of loss, the lost friends i knew for a short time. referring to owen, the poetry is not the pity. to held with your generalized pity. what the survivor remembers is the fears he knew, the pains, the faces and the few words of the men who were with him. so as we leave this class, we should embrace i think to some degree the messiness that is history and historical memory. that just when we think we have a narrative worked out, just when we think we have a way of explaining in short or long sentences to somebody what a

historical source is, to summarize it an easier convenient way, that we will always find people who are representing that war or pushing back against that war experience in a way that will surprise the way that we have interpreted it or up end it. thank you very much. and i will see you all next week. the c-span cities tour takes book tv and american history tv on the road. traveling to u.s. cities to learn about their history and lit teary life. this weekend we partners with comcast for a visit to boulder, colorado. >> my book is "the beast in the garden." it's a book about an animal we

would have called a beast, the mountain lion in what it really a garden. that is boulder, colorado. in many ways, it has been altered by human kind. when you get this wild animal coming into this artificial landscape, you actually can cause changes in the behavior of that animal. a mountain lion's favorite foot is venison. then the deer living on the outskirts of this lush city where we have irrigated gardens and lawns, the sit it attracted the deer. we had a deer herd in boulder. the lions were in open space, then they discovered there were deer in town. then the lions discovered they could eat dogs and cats. that's food for them. the lions were learning and they have learned that this is where

they will find food. there is food up there, too, but there's lots to eat in town. >> this is a retreat generally in a beautiful place for enrichment and enlightenment, entertainment and coming together. the people who were intended to be the audience were really what we would call the middle class. the programs at most of the areas were similar. acom a combination of speakers of the day, a variety of both what we might consider high-brow and low-brow entertainment, opera, classical music and probably what would be considered the vaudville of that day. >> watch our events saturday at noon n on c-span2's book tv and sunday on american history tv on c-span3.

he discussed how song writers contributed to the war effort by writing patriotic music. this is an hour and 15 minutes. >> good evening to all of you. i'm bob enholm, the executive director of the woodrow wilson house. we're a private charity supported by donations of supporters, including many of you. for that i thank you. thanks for being here this evening. this home is the home to which president and mrs. wilson moved the very day they left the white house, on march 4 in 1921. they both lived here the rest their lives. wilson passed away three years later. mrs. wilson lived here until 1961. then upon her death, left the home to the national trust for

historical preservation. it was opened as a public museum in 1963. we are now more than 50 years as an institution here in washington, d.c. it's good to see all of you here tonight. our program is "smile while you kiss me sad adieu, world war i songs." let me set the stage and introduce or speaker quickly. we like to say here -- we like to remind people that president wilson imagined the world at peace and proposed a plan to achieve that vision. that's a remarkable accomplishment when we think about it from the vantage point of our own lives 100 years later. it's perhaps even more remarkable f we transport our sfrls back to his time and think about the world in which he lived and the ideas that were abroad at that time and the remarkable accomplishment that it was for him in the middle of a world war to imagine what the

world ought to look like at peace and to propose that should be our sort of default position, that there ought to be a league of nations and that people ought -- that nations ought not to engage in aggressive war. this house allows us to take that trip back in time. we're surrounded in this room by gifts of state that president wilson received. one of the reasons he received so many spectacular gifts is, first, because he was the first american president to go to europe while he was in office. secondly, because the world so hoped for him to succeed in the mission he had taken on of ending the catastrophe that was world war i. it's hard to think about how shocking world war i was to the people who had to live through it. the music of that era, like this house, is something that can help transport us back to that time. i think as you will see, hearing from michael, that we will have

a sense of the music that existed and the america that existed before the war and the music that reveals to us the america that came out of that war. you will see something of a transformation there. michael is a critic and teacher about american music. have i written down because he's written two books that i want to share with you. we have available after his lecture. he's in the process of writing a third. he is the aurmer of "america's songs two" from the 1890 to the post war years. this is a companion piece to a book he wrote with a co-author. so he has established himself as a song bird here. i heard he's not going to sing. i'm sorry to disappoint you. he is working on a book called "the song is us, love lyrics and

american life, 1900 to 1950." i'm looking forward to the fourth volume about the urban hip hop thing that i know he's an expert on. we will look forward to hearing from him this afternoon. he is a graduate of dartmouth. he has been lecturing on music and songs in american for about 30 years. with that, let me introduce michael lasser. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you. i'm going to be treating songs as, in effect, documents. that is, when you listen to a song from your own time, somehow it's a mirror on that time. it reflects the attitudes of that time. more about love than anything else. but attitudes toward love and

romance and sex and marriage, obviously change over the first half of the 20th century in case you hadn't noticed, take my word for it. songs reflect that. but for us, 100 years after the songs of world war i, those songs are not a mirror. they serve instead as a window and let us look back on what the people were thinking and feeling and how they behaved. songs are a particularly good way to get at it, because they have no aspiration, really, beyond having you like it well enough to buy it. irving berlin said a good song is one that sells. and he was not simply saying i need more money, because he was a multimillionaire when he said it. what he was saying was, he trusted the judgments of the people. if you go out and buy my song

for whatever it costs, 15 cents in sheet music, 79 cents on an old 78 rpm record, it doesn't really matter, if you download it from the internet, you are in effect voting with your pocketbook. so a good song is one that sells. it's really a very democratic lower case d point of view. i think you can make the case that the great song writers certainly from the first half of the 20th century were democratic populists, although they didn't see themselves that way. the irony in that is that they were millionaire democratic populists. you don't encounter that very often. but they never lost their ability to pick up what was in the air. when they walked down the street, they were listening for a catch phrase, some slang. when they read the newspapers,

they were looking for a story that they could turn into a song. and so when war was declared in 1914 at the time when tin pan alley had come into existence and was flowering, it was blooming -- you know what tin pan alley was. you're all nodding. tell me then. what was tin pan alley? notice how the room just changed. what was tin pan alley? >> it started as a neighborhood in a particular block. >> let's look at more than geography and get at the heart of what it was. >> writers would gather. it became more of an idea or a concept. >> the song writers would gather there. yeah, they did. why? no, no. it's where the music publishers

were. and most of the song writers in the early years of the 20th century -- the professional song writers. i'm not talking about charlie with a guitar and pencil. song writers were under contract to the publishers. and they would crank out what the market wanted, because they were told to do so. that is, contintin pan alley is home of music publishing in the united states between roughly -- you know when you get into years in history, it's never very useful. they are arbitrary. roughly 1895 to 1930, '35, give or take. during the '30s, hollywood, with the the coming of talkies and musicals, the studios bought up the major publishers and moved their main offices to california because they didn't want to pay

royalties anymore. even though tin pan alley still exists after that -- comes to be a again a-- it's a generic term for music. it was located off broadway in the west 20s. it was where the songs came from by the thousands. these people did not sit around waiting for inspiration. it's a highly overrated gift. when you limit yourself to work produced by inspiration, you end up with a very, very small bibliography in your name. you make it happen. you force it. some days you fill up wastebaskets, occasionally you have a day when you don't. but you work. the coming of the war, even though we were determined to stay out of it -- i'm not going to do a history of isolationism.

because i'm here to talk about songs, not giving a capsule history of world war i. the coming of the war was a boon to the song business. that is, publishers and songwriters did literally look around for markets to appeal to and then looked for a way to appeal to those markets. and with the coming of the war in europe, even though we were determined to stay out of it, there were not surprisingly a wave of patriotism in this country. and that started to produce songs, because patriotism is exactly the kind of clear emotion that something as brief as a song can do something with. remember that most of the songs i'm talking about and most of the songs written during what's come to be known as the great american song book were 32 bars

long. they fit on one side of a 78 rpm record. if you are old enough to remember those, you know you could get at most three minutes and 20 seconds of music on a side. then you flipped it over and had another three minutes and 20 seconds. as a kid, i bought them for 79 cents. i don't know what you paid. it wasn't until the late '40s that you get the lp which prom i promises you $40 minute 40 minu music. you still have to flip it. when you bought an album on 78 rpm, first of all, it came with its own wheelbarrow it was so heavy. and it was like a big book. so you put it on the record player and every three minutes had you -- every five minutes because they used 12-inch records, had you to change it to

the next recording. so you never heard it whole. but you heard it. that was the point. with the coming of the war, we started writing songs. and the first songs we wrote were about staying out of the war. you have got more songs on the list than i can ever play. i thought you would like to see some titles. on the list of lyrics, you have more songs that i'm going to play. there wouldn't have been time for all of them. most of these songs are available. you can go to i tunes on amazon. you can go to the public lie ba brarry. they are out there if you want to hear songs of world war i. you can. are there as many available as there were in world war ii? of course not. the recording business was much more sophisticated, distribution

was more effective, there were many more people making recordings in world war ii. but they were -- there is one song on the list i want to point out to you apropoe of nothing, because it's a good story. under 1918, you will see a song called smile and show your dimple. by irving berlin who sometimes i think wrote every song. the others are just --&rz÷ the r people are just pseudonyms for berlin. >> 1917. >> thank you. does anybody happen to know the song "smile and show your dim e dimple"? don't sing it. i want to surprise them. he published it. it did not do well. he put it back in their trunk.

they never threw anything rogers & heart wrote new lyrics to the song that became "blue moon" four different times before it finally took. they never give up on a song. that doesn't mean they all succeed eventually, but sometimes they do. so berlin pulled the song. and then in 1932, he was trying to write an act one finale for a show called "as thousands cheer," a review, a political review, during the depression. they couldn't come up with a song. and he remembered this song from world war i. and he pulled it, and he listened to it. and he said, yeah, that will do. and he wrote a new lyric for it. would you like to sing with me? ♪ in your easter bonnet ♪ smile and show your dimple ♪ you'll find it's very simple it's about a young woman who has kissed her dough boy good-bye. she's standing on the train platform crying. someone older sees her and tries

to comfort her, smile and show your dimple. buck up, he's coming home. and we're going to go beat the kaiser, that sort of thing. anyway, i thought you would like to know that. apropos. isn't that a neat story? the first song to become a hit in world war i, and by the way, it is thought to be our most musical war. more songs in response to the war than any other war in american history. again, because tin pan alley was so explosively productive. there was a young woman who wrote a song, and there were a number of songs like this. i'm not going to play this one, i'm just going to mention it, because the only recording i can find was so bad in quality, you wouldn't have been able to get the words. but i did include the words for you. it's called, the very first one -- yeah -- no, it's the second one, "we take our hats off to

you mr. wilson," written by a woman named blanche merrill who was a teenager when she wrote it. she went on to become a professional songwriter, known for writing specialty material for fannie bryce in the ziegfeld follies. the songs at the beginning of the war are clearly about not getting in. but they become much more personal than that. you know, we take our hats off to you, mr. wilson, is a kind of generalized salute. it's the kind of thing a group marches down the street singing. and popular songs now had to do that. but popular songs are mainly good at the emotionalism that exists between two people. in all of the history of popular music in this country, probably 98% of the songs have two

characters in them. i and you. and then it's about what's going on, or not, between us. so a more typical song is when you start getting into the intense personal emotions. now, in world war -- i'm sorry, in the civil war, young men going off to war, never having been away from home before and very young. and it was a much less sophisticated country. a lot of them farm boys. a lot of them immigrants. an awful lot of the union army spoke with an irish accent during the civil war. they did fight a good part of that war for the north. the songs of the civil war that were in effect love songs were about a boy and his mother. there were very few that were

stories of romantic love. about how much i miss you, and i'll come home to you. or she's home saying, i'll be faithful. very few of those. there are some sentimental ballads like aura lee, and in the north and lorina in the south, which are songs of praise for an idealized woman. but that's as close as you come to it. in the civil war, they're mainly about mom. and junior is writing a letter home to his mother, that sort of thing. one of the best of them is a song called "just before the battle mother," which is a lovely song. during world war ii, jump, there are a few mother songs, mothers

proud that you're in uniform, sonny, that sort of thing, that unfortunately had not survived. the songs are -- the love songs of the war are largely about a couple, whether married or not, separated. so the emotions of warfare in song are -- in the love songs, and you'll see this a little bit later, are about separation, parting, loneliness, longing, the hope of return. you find those in the love songs of world war i, and you find them in the love songs of world war ii. and those three wars, civil, i and ii, are really the wars where there is a large body of song because there was a sense of the nation engaged, that there was not certainly in the wars since world war ii. there aren't a lot of songs about korea. and i'm not being snotty.

it was a different kind of war. the people were not engaged by it. in vietnam, you had some songs, but they're songs in which two groups are warring with one another. "give peace a chance," and what's the -- "i'm an oaky from muskogee." iraq and afghanistan don't produce a lot of songs. again, because in a way they were invisible, and in a way, we know about them, we're not as a nation engaged in it. we don't have a citizen army anymore. that gets in the way of that. so in world war i, you have a mix. really, in the middle between the two wars, and it shows. there were songs about mom, and there were songs about sweetie. soldiers singing i'm going to pin the medal on the girl i left behind in world war i.

between world war i and world war ii, love songs that i'll save for a few minutes. but it's the mother song that i want to get to. again, it's the idea of staying out of it, delivering a kind of anthem in the way that the first song is an anthem, and yet also capitalizing on the kind of direct emotionalism that popular songs are good at. and it's called "i didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." no, it's not mothers didn't raise their children. not, let's all march in favor of mothers who oppose the war, but "i didn't raise my son to be a soldier." listen to the words, and you have them. i don't vouch for their accuracy. i took them off the internet and i confess i didn't do a meticulous check between the recording and the lyrics. but they're close. ♪ wrong song, sorry.

oh, i just screwed it up. stay with me. i should not be allowed near technology. >> 3,000 miles from home, an american army is fighting for you. everything you hold worthwhile, only the hardest blows can win against the enemy we are fighting. evoking the spirit of our forefathers, the army asks your unflinching support for the high ideals for which america stands may endure upon the earth. >> that's pershing.

♪ ♪ ♪ a million soldiers to the war have gone ♪ ♪ who may never return again ♪ a million mothers' hearts must break for those who have died in vain ♪ ♪ it is in sorrow in her lonely years ♪ ♪ i heard a mother murmur through her tears ♪ ♪ i didn't raise my boy to be a soldier ♪ ♪ i brought him up to be my pride and joy ♪ ♪ and to place a musket on his shoulder ♪ ♪ to shoot some other mother's darling boy ♪ ♪ it's time to lay the sword and run away ♪

♪ there would be no war today if mothers our would say ♪ ♪ i didn't raise my boy to be a soldier ♪ >> okay. there had been, as you know, a great wave of immigration into the country, beginning in the years after the civil war. people not from ireland, and scotland, and england, but people from different parts of europe. and there was a certain amount of resistance to them, as you know. there was a rise in nativism, what we came to call nativism, as people began to arrive.

they were russians, and they were italians and they were poles and jews and greeks and romanians. and they weren't like us. over the next 50 years, they changed what "us" means. but it obviously was a great struggle. there had also in the years leading up to the war been an increase in immigration from germany. there were a lot more new americans who were of german extraction, had been born in germany, and came here. and so here you've got all these people from all these different countries who haven't been here that long, and on top of it all, you've got all these people from germany, for crying out loud, were they going to fight for america. and, of course, nobody knew the answer. they needn't have worried. they came here because they wanted to come here and they

joined up and they fought. but it was still an open question. and so irving berlin wrote a song aimed -- in 1916 aimed specifically at this audience. because the tide was turning. there was a sense, increasingly, that america was siding with the allies. that we were more interested in taking the side of england than germany. because, again, at the beginning, the main feeling was, let's not get involved with these people, let's stay out. and so there was no sense -- and the special relationship that we have forged, in quotes, that we have forged with the english didn't exist. this came after world war i.

so it was tricky. it was tricky. and so berlin writes this song because he thinks he knows what we ought to be doing. and he sees where the country is beginning to go. and he wants to make sure that the new immigrants will be americans. i'll have to change the track. give me one minute. ♪ wrong track, sorry. i really should have someone doing this for me. i'm going to waste a lot of my time and yours fooling around with it. but you can edit it out, right? >> would you like me to take that over? >> yes, i would. try three and see what we get. go back to -- really? okay. let it play.

♪ ♪ what's that tune i hear ♪ ringing in my ear ♪ come on along ♪ come on along ♪ it's a wonderful idea >> this is when alexander -- i made a mistake. i'll fix it. ♪ from down in dixie land ♪ he's going over there to do his share ♪ ♪ when alexander takes him ragtime band to france ♪ ♪ he'll capture everyone and take them one by one ♪ ♪ the ragtime tunes will put the germans in a trance ♪ ♪ they'll throw their guns away hip hip hooray ♪

♪ they'll get so excited they'll come over the top ♪ ♪ two steps back to berlin with a hip and a hop ♪ ♪ he'll know he has no chance when alexander takes his ragtime band to france ♪ >> now, i came in here and rehearsed. so imagine how bad it would be if i hadn't rehearsed. that song obviously comes once we've gone into the war. let me fill in the pieces broadly, and then as the songs come up, i'll place them for you. we get -- that berlin song called "let's all be americans now" which comes soon after a group of songs that were in response to a specific incident.

that is what really galvanizes american patriotism. what really galvanizes american support for the allies, do you know what the event was? the sinking of the "lusitania." in the months after the sinking, there are dozens of songs about the sinking of the "lusitania." all of which have the same basic point of view. it was a dastardly thing to do. they were heartless and cruel, and we need to get back. and so those songs -- you know, whether the songs are shaping public opinion or responding to public opinion, is hard to know because they come out over a series of months. my best guess is that both were happening. but clearly the sinking of the "lusitania," everything changes,

and now it's just a matter of getting to the war. and then the events occur. tensions build. and in we go. the song you just listened to is one of a series of songs about alexander that go back to 1911. are you with me on that one? what are we talking about? what's the important one? alexander's ragtime band which irving berlin wrote in 1911, four years after he became a songwriter, which he stumbled into. it was one of the great serendipitous moments in american history. he was working in a tough bar in chinatown and ended up being told to write a song lyric. it's a whole story. but he did.

and realized he could make a few bucks at it. he owned 38 cents in royalties on that first song. the main thing is, he learned if he could do it, he could make money. the goal at the beginning was to make $25 a week. so he didn't have to sleep in alleys and flop houses anymore. the song was so popular that it sold 1 million copies in 1911, at a time when that was very unusual. and then sold another 1 million copies in 1912. and berlin basically never had to work again. but obviously he did. the song was so popular that a number of other songwriters wrote about a character named alexander that fed off alexander's ragtime band. and even into world war i, when there was a comic song called

"when alexander takes his ragtime band to france." and if you were listening to -- or reading the words, you heard the lyric tell you that all that had to happen was for the band to play a two-step, a ragtime song that we used to dance to, ragtime. a two-step was a dance. one step and two-step was the way you danced to ragtime songs. and they would jump up out of their trenches and go cake walking back to germany. the war would -- if we took alexander's ragtime band to france, the war would be over. now, that's a joke, obviously. whether you find it funny, whether i find it funny is not the point. it was a joke in 1917. it also reflects the attitude

toward that war as we left home to do what? to teach the kaiser a lesson. that is, we had never fought in a european war before. we really had a sanitized view of what it would -- of what trench warfare would be like. we had no idea. we knew that there was hoarding in this country. there was a song called "the demon has bought up all the coal." people were hoarding. there were songs about the so-called butchery of belgium by the germans, which was to a significant degree propaganda. their behavior was not as bad as it was said to be. and so we were going off there to show kaiser bill who the dough boys were. and, of course, we got bloodied fast.

but you hear that optimism. you hear that sense of ease. we'll just go over there and dance around a little bit, slap kaiser bill and come home. the song is not only a comic take on war, which every war has produced. even world war ii which is the war that had the fewest comic songs. we seem to take world war ii more seriously. but the civil war gave us songs, and world war ii gave us, oh, how i hate to get up in the morning. so there were some, but there were a lot of them in world war ii. let's play the next song. >> track four? >> what did we do last time? three? then it's four. boy, are you hired. ♪ ♪ johnny get your gun ♪ get your gun, get your gun

♪ take it on the run, on the run, on the run ♪ ♪ here them calling you and me ♪ everyone ♪ hurry right away no delays ♪ make your daddy glad to have had such a lad ♪ ♪ tell your sweetheart not to cry be proud her boy's in line ♪ ♪ over there ♪ over there ♪ send the word send the word over there ♪ ♪ that the yanks are coming the yanks are coming ♪ ♪ the drums are drumming everywhere ♪ ♪ go prepare say your prayer ♪ send the word, send the word to beware ♪ ♪ we'll be coming over

♪ and we won't come back till it's over over there ♪ >> you all know that. when george m. cohan heard that war had been declared, he went home, and he locked himself in his study. he had a study in the house. and he remained there through the rest of that day and overnight. and when he came out, he gathered the family, his wife and his children. and he made them sit on the sofa in the living room and chairs, as if they were in the theater. and he went into the kitchen, and he got a broom, and he got a big tin pot. and he put the tin pot on his head. and he marched back and forth singing "over there." it was the song's first

performance. that is, he wrote it as an impassioned patriotic response to the declaration of war. and that was a typical cohan sort of thing. he wore his irish -- he was irish, he was new york, and he was american. and he wore all three on his sleeve. and never flinched from any of them. the songs that he wrote certainly captured the spirit of that time. songs like "i'm a yankee doodle boy," and "give my regards to broadway," "you're a grand old flag," which he originally wrote as "you're a grand old rag." because he was thinking about the flag in warfare and how it would be torn and tattered. and so it was a way of praising the flag and those who bore it. but the american legion went crazy. they would not tolerate any

explanations and so just to shut them up, he changed it to, you're a grand old flag. the song is pure cohan. now, when it was time to record it soon after, did anything surprise you about that recording? it might not have been what you had predicted. it was sung by a woman. it was nora bays. anyone here know who nora bays was? she was a great star of both the broadway stage and vaudeville in the early years of the 20th century. she had four husbands. one of whom was jack norworth, who was a vaudevillian and appeared with her and who wrote with composer albert von tillser, "take me out to the ball game," and who wrote with her, although he did most of the writing, a song called "shine on harvest moon."

she was tough. when she caught him in a dalliance -- isn't that nice, a dalliance? with a chorus girl, she threatened to leave him. and he begged to be forgiven. begged her to stay. and she agreed. but she exacted punishment in a way that only someone in show business would truly appreciate. you know, they used to have the placards to each side of the stage announcing the act in vaudeville. you all know what i'm talking about? and it used to say, nora bays and jack norworth. now it said, nora bays, ably assisted by jack norworth. so she stayed, i guess until he fooled around again, and then

she dumped him. her signature song was, has anybody here seen kelly? and she had that lovely irish name. except her real name was leonora goldberg. by the turn of the century, it had become an advantage, at least on the stage, in the theater, to have an irish name. and so she took one. obviously, you know that it was common for people in the entertainment business to change their names for many, many years. okay. and he picked nora bays because she had a voice, he said, like a trumpet. it's hard to hear in the old recordings, but she does cut through all the noise. if you're looking for a reference point, think kate smith. she had a voice like a trumpet. if kate smith did not want to be

silenced, if she wanted to be heard by everybody in the room, she would be. nora bays had that kind of a voice. and so he picked her, that clarion voice, to sing his marshal anthem. so it's one of the few songs from the war we still do sing today. it's probably america's greatest marshal patriotic song. okay. let's hear the next song. ♪ i'm going to stop you for a second. i want to play you one more comic song. i was going to play the most famous of all the comic songs from world war i, and it's the best of them. it's a brilliant song. it's called "oh, how i hate to get up in the morning." but you all know that. and you've all heard it a thousand times, and if you want to hear it, you can go home and

listen. get the movie out of the library or buy it at turner classic movies for ten bucks. so hearing irving berlin, seeing irving berlin who still fit in his world war i uniform singing "oh, how i hate to get up in the morning" and keeping time like this as he sings. but this is another song about life in world war i. also, a comic song that i thought you might enjoy hearing for a change. ♪ ♪q2tuñ ♪ listen, laddie to your daddy ♪ just for once and all ♪ too many gals have set your brain awhirl ♪

♪ for any skirt you fall ♪ you're too clever you will never be a general grant ♪ ♪ i should worry, i'm not sorry, daddy if i can't ♪ ♪ would you rather be a colonel with an eagle on our arm or private number 723 ♪ ♪ now i can't help that all the ladies go crazy over me ♪ ♪ if you're too green to see what i mean ask any soldier that you see ♪ ♪ would you rather be a colonel with an eagle on your arm or a private with a chicken on his knee ♪ >> do you all understand the joke about a colonel? what is the insignia of a colonel in the army? he wears an eagle. and so the soldier says to his -- would you rather be a colonel with an eagle on your shoulder,

or a private with a chicken on your knee? a joke. you see how fashions and humor change over a century. there were comic songs, there were marshal songs. but the songs that were most effective, most affecting as always were the love songs. again, because they're going to be songs of parting. one of the -- and of separation and of longing. one of the differences between the songs of world war i and the songs of world war ii reflect the change -- reflect the change in the way we wrote songs which reflect social attitudes. that is, up until roughly 1930, songs are largely about

behavior. let's go out and take a ride in my car. let's take a walk. i'm paddling madeline home. come home with me lucille in my merry oldsmobile. we're doing things. and the outside world is as real as whatever i feel for you. that is, it's not only -- they're not only about how deeply i feel, but they keep away from the trap of uniqueness. no one's ever felt the way i feel today. that's nonsense.

we've all felt that way. we all felt that no one had felt that way before. it's called young love. and it's something that adults look at with fondness and mockery, right? because they remember their own feelings, and they remember how foolish they were. i mean, when my first girl dumped me, my parents were saints. they didn't kill me. i mean, i was a walking wound for months. especially when you think about why she dumped me. he had a car. and i was heartbroken. but here i am. it's a tribute to my capacity for something or other. the songs of the -- of world war i, because of when in the century they come, are as much about behavior as they are about feeling. i'm going to pin my medal on the girl i left behind.

as opposed to a song like, i walk alone in world war ii, which is about walking, but is really about the feelings as you walk. the walking is -- the key word there is not walk, it's alone, and what that opens up in terms of emotion and memory. so the songs of world war i, while they're about the same emotions, they try to call on the same emotions, are much more outward, much more overt, much less reflective, much less inward looking, for the most part. for the most part. it's a matter of degree, obviously. in 1917, this song was published and became the most popular love song of world war i, and i'm glad to say it's one of the few songs from the war we do still

know. can we listen? ♪ ♪ smile awhile you kissed me sad adieu ♪ ♪ when the clouds roll by i'll come to you ♪ ♪ then the skies will seem more blue darling lovers' lane my dear ♪

♪ wedding bells will ring so merrily every tear will be a memory ♪ ♪ so wait and pray each night for me till we meet again ♪ >> lovely song, isn't it? yeah, it's a lovely song. the composer is richard a. whiting who went on to become a major composer in 1930s movies. his lyricist was a minor but certainly professional lyricist

named raymond who he wrote his songs with whiting. whiting died quite young. died in his early '50s but wrote with some giants when he got to hollywood. among them, johnny mercer when he was young. the story goes that they were -- whiting is also margaret whiting's father. the story is whiting and egan were working for the jerome remick company, which is one of the major music publishers. they were working in the detroit office. they had not gotten to new york yet. there was a contest in detroit for the best world war i song. there was going to be a competition and they would be performed and there would be a

prize. and remick wanted to win the competition. it would help sell the song when he published it. he told whiting and egan to get going. they stayed late at the office and pounded out a pretty simple waltz and worked on it until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. before they finished it. and they were pretty well pooped. egan said, i'll see you in the morning, and he left. just to put the icing on it, the lid on it, whiting played it for himself one more time and said, no, for a world war i song, for a war song, this is much too simple and sweet. he crumpled it up and threw it in the waste basket and he went home. this is going to sound like a bad movie, but it's a true story. he slept in the next morning, as you would expect. he didn't get home until 3:30 or so.

the boss' secretary comes in the next morning and she sees some crumpled up paper, music paper with notes in the waste basket. she is curious. she knows who was there when she left the day before. she pulls it out, and she can play piano and she plays it. that's nice. she takes it into the boss and plays it for him. he says, that's wonderful. we're going to publish it. but don't tell the boys. we'll surprise them. then he said, oh, yes, what's the title? she looks at the piece of paper and said, they're calling it "auf wiedersehen." my god, we can't have a german title. what does it mean? she says, ta-dum, till we meet again. would you believe they won the contest? and it was the best loved and

most popular love ballad of the world war i years. and there was some good competition. "roses of picardy" was a world war i love song. there are lots of songs, world war i songs, that until you get into the song, we don't even know. there are always songs that don't appear to be love songs. they're about who knows what. but somewhere in the chorus somebody will mention a girl's name or the way i love you, and keep going, there's a passing reference so it still qualifies as a love song. in the third chorus of one of the most popular songs of the war, of the war years, you find out it's a world war i song. that's "katie" the stuttering song. there were lots of stuttering songs and spelling songs. during prohibition, irving

berlin wrote "i'll see you in c-u-b-a" because cuba was only 90 miles offshore and you could drink there, and they ran boats from florida over to cuba. lots of spelling songs, and stuttering songs. there's a song called "you tell her." again, attitudes change. "you tell her i s-s-stutter." that is, i want to tell her i love her, but i can't get it out. so you tell her i, i, i stutter. lots of stuttering songs in this era.

war but "k-k-katie" is the most famous of the stuttering songs. the love songs and notice too that this song like so many love songs during war, it happens in songs not about war, but especially in war, you look to the future. you anticipate the return. the love songs, because the love songs of world war ii are more internalized, more reflective. because almost all the songs of world war ii are love songs, there are many fewer of these other kinds. you really see attitudes changing. so a song like "don't get around much anymore" from 1942 could not have been written in '45. and a song like "kiss me once and kiss me twice and kiss me once again" it's been a long, long time from '45 could not have been written in '42. that is attitudes that we learned from the way things were going in the war affected the love songs. that's not as true in world war i about the love songs. it is true about the body of song. so we have "we thank you, mr. wilson" and "i didn't raise my

boy to be a soldier" and "over there." you can see the way attitudes change, but they're not limited to love songs. when the war ended, world war i songs continue, but they change almost overnight. suddenly we're not going off to france, we're coming home from france. and we're coming home to a different country. we don't know that yet, obviously. it takes us awhile to figure that out. we're coming home changed. we have 7 million dough boys who have had furloughs in paris. i'll let you sort that out for yourselves. they've seen the world in ways that except for a tiny percentage of the population, the elite of the gilded age have not seen a war.

my wife says she wished she had been born in the gilded age so she could wear those clothes. i said you better had been born rich or you'll end up on a photograph by jacob reese. it was gilded age people who went to europe. they were in the good deck on the "titanic." everything worked out for them. the sense of people being changed, returning to a nation changed, begins to appear in our songs in 1919, which is really where you get the last of the world war i songs. what's interesting about this

song is that the perception of change does not come from the young man himself. it comes from his father who is a farmer. that is, unsophisticated not urban, lives out in the boonies somewhere raising whatever it is they are raising on the farm. he gets it. he gets it. let's hear the next song. ♪ ♪ how you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen paris ♪ ♪ how you gonna keep them away from broadway jazzing around painting the town ♪ ♪ how you gonna keep them away from harm ♪ ♪ that's a mystery ♪ imagine rubin when he meets his pa holler ooh-la-la ♪ ♪ how you gonna keep them down on the farm ♪ ♪ after they've seen paris

>> that was eddie cantor. the verse to that song says ma and pa are talking and this is what pa says to ma. she wants to welcome junior home, and she's so happy he's coming home. pa, who's wiser and recognizes some things happen says, how are you going to keep him down on the farm. there's another comic song from 1919 about a soldier who comes home and goes back to work in his father's factory, running the factory for his father, and his captain comes looking for a job. it's a song of revenge, comic revenge. and there's one other wonderful comic song from 1919. an irish couple goes down to washington square to watch the troops march up fifth avenue

when pershing brings the aef home. they're as proud as they can be. look, they were all out of step but jim. there's an irony to all this. among the great changes that led into the '20s were not only changes that resulted in greater freedom, which is what we associate with the '20s. freedom going over into license in terms of personal habits largely. margaret sanger brought the first diaphragm, smuggled the first diaphragm into the united states in 1916. and in the '20s diaphragms became available to women. this is not a matter of technology.

this is technology which creates the possibility and then the reality of major social changes. the spread of the automobile also affects sexual behavior. we now have lover's lanes. movies teach generations of us how to kiss. kids used to practice. you used to go to the movies and the girls would practice kissing. it was not that they were lesbian. they were learning how to kiss by watching whoever, mary pickford or -- not mary, she wouldn't. the others. the vamp, what was her name? theda bara. thank you.

so you get these songs that reflect this change, but at the same time, there's something going on that restricts our freedom. the dough boys come home and find they're not even free to take a drink. we treat prohibition with contempt. and we make breaking the law part of our determination to be free. i thought i would end by having you hear a song from prohibition. there were some. 1919, 1920 and 1921 you get the prohibition songs. after that, we've absorbed it. we know what it is. it's not new and interesting anymore. although, when prohibition gets repealed in the '30s, there's songs that talk about how good it is to be able to drink again. but the real prohibition songs are in those years between '19 and '21. this is one of them, even though at first you don't think it is. it's called "bimini bay."

♪ ♪ ♪ spend the winter holidays way down on bimini way ♪ ♪ men of wall street big and haughty ♪ ♪ way down on bimini bay ♪ when men talk they all rave about bimini bay ♪ ♪ they say come and swim with me down old bimini way ♪ ♪ hear the cocktails are calling come to bimini bay ♪ ♪ sweet orange blossoms await you down yonder where they say

absence ♪ ♪ will make there's a shady nook by a sunny brook where the green river flows ♪ ♪ there we'll spend our days and try to raise tom and jerry's ♪ ♪ each night we'll sample our private stock wind up the cat and put out the clock ♪ ♪ oh, won't you come with me down to bimini bay ♪ >> okay. prohibition song. i only know one prohibition song that disapproves, and even there it does it comically. you don't need the wine to have a wonderful time while they've still got the beautiful girls. obviously, we soon grow disenchanted with the peace.

we turn our backs on the rest of the world, and you get the roaring '20s. the first time in american life when pleasure becomes an end in itself. the puritan ethic is set aside. a five-year span that begins by affirming traditional american isolationism as an image of our uniqueness ends with an old order dead and a new one not yet formed. there are many ways to look back at those years, obviously. i would suggest to you that none gives us a better mirror of how we felt and how those attitudes changed in the face of new and troubling experiences than the songs we sang as we marched off to war and then a changed people

marched back home again. thank you very much. thank you. >> michael has offered to answer questions for a couple of minutes. >> sure. >> is there a pete seger of world war i or bob dylan of world war i or because there is no market for songs about reality? >> if there was, how would we have found him, and how would he he have found us? remember that in the teens it was mainly still a sheet music business. recordings begin to -- recordings of individual songs begin to outsell the sheet music of that song in the 1920s. so in the teens it would have

been enormously difficult. you also now are getting distribution, you're getting roads, you're getting trucks, and so things are beginning to happen to get the songs around, but i don't -- i mean, obviously there was folks music. obviously people were singing in the hollers of west virginia. i should tell you that my concentration is on the commercial popular song rather than on folk music or country music. so i assume they were out there. when did the carters begin with that radio station down in new mexico? anyone know? that was in the late '20s probably? that would have been a decade later.

they were really formative. jimmy rogers is later. quick follow-up. did the bret brit british britr- >> "keep the home fires burning" yeah, they did, just as they did in world war ii. "we'll meet again". >> did that sway public opinion? >> they don't sway it, as the shift is on, it joins it, but it's not -- it's not deeply influential. it's more our songs that reflect our attitudes. again the fulcrum is the lusitania. >> you mentioned there were not many comics songs in world war ii. >> right. >> i remember my mom playing "in the furor's face." >> right. absolutely. this was a notable hit as "mares eat oats" and you know what

said about the american people. no one ever underestimated the taste of the american people and . . . . were some, and the soldiers had very baudy songs that they made up, but, again, that's not where i'm focusing. so there were some, but in world war ii, the sheer number of love songs, and by the way, the war information -- the office of war information, world war ii, that's the propaganda arm of the government, wanted the songwriters to stop writing love songs for the duration. they wanted them to write only the music publis

songwriters said, okay, we want to be patriotic, so they tried. the songs were almost all dreadful. we did it before and we can do it again, and let's remember pearl harbor. they weren't very good songs. finally the publishers said forget it. people didn't want those songs. they wanted love songs. mainly women. they wanted songs about their lives. the songs of world war ii spoke to women whose men were away and who could catch a few minutes at the radio. they did speak to them profoundly. world war i, it was still sheet music, and music was -- encountered much more publicly. you didn't have a phonograph or a radio where you could go into your corner. it was much more at the piano, so it was a more public setting,

which i think is part of why they were less introspective. >> i was thinking that one reason they were less introspective, because courting was also a very public activity. >> yes. yes. sure, sure. although that's breaking down, and you get that -- one of the reasons before 1920 you have so many songs about taking walks and going for a canoe rides, is that it was a way to be alone for a few minutes. in fact a wonderful song by the british songwriter called "and her mother came too." we go off together and her mother came too. we step around a tree to kiss, and her mother came too. this goes on for the song. at the end it's a very hot day and the mother faints, and i'm all set to kiss the girl, and her mother came too.

that's the punch line of the song. it's a charming song. >> sir? >> are there american songs similar to the europeans that were concerned about the horror of war? these are all very optimistic, very tin pan alley. >> sure. >> for example, the bells of hell? >> there were a few like the one about belgium. there were a few, but we didn't know anything about the war until we first got there, obviously. the function of tin pan alley is not to write political tracks on the horrors of war. that's not what it did. it's to write 32-bar love songs. they're as much about dreams as

anything else. so it's a fair question. you're asking them to do something they don't do. like blaming shakespeare for not writing novels. it's not what they did. it was not their work. if you want to read that sort of thing in brief form, then you should read the poetry of world war i, but, you know, there's a tendency these days to say that great songwriter like dylan, like lennon were poets. i don't think they were. i think it does a disservice to poets and to lyricists.

i find it artsy-fartsy, frankly. just because quacks and waddles, doesn't make it a duck. i think they do differently. for example, one quick example. poets make their own music. lyricists hear the music and language. they have to keep it, but they also have to make is serve the language of someone else's melody. that's an inherent and significant difference between the song and a poem. that's another lecture. thank you for coming. we have in here the steinway piano that the wilsons bought for their daughter. it was bought in 1893, was

actually in the white house with the wilsons, and we're proud to have it here in our home as well. we do keep it tuned. if anyone would like to play, we would be happy to accompany you with our own vocals. michael will stay and answer some questions. thank you all for being here. c-span's 2015 student cam k competition is under way. prizes total $100,000. create a 5 to 7-minute documentary entitled the three branches and you. c-span programming, show varying points of view and must be submitted by january 20, 2015. go to studentcam.org for more information. grab a camera and get started today.

with live coverage of the u.s. house on c-span and senate on c-span 2, here on c-span 3, we show you most relevant hearings and events. c-span 3 is the home to american history tv with programs that tell our nation's story. not colluding six unique stories. the civil war's 150th anniversary. visiting battle fields and key events. american artifacts. touring museums and historic sites to discover what artifacts reveal about america's past. history bookshelf with the best known american history writers. the presidency, looking at the policies an legacies of our nation's commanders in chief. lectures in history. top college professors delving into america's past. our new series with archival government and educational films from the '30s to the '70s.

> >> h week, american history tv's america" brings you archival films that tell the story of the 20th century. predicting the post walter -- world war ii growth of severed, the next film argued that modern cities are not healthy and plan