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.