I Didn’t Raise My Boy to be a Soldier - the first anti-war hit record

Released in 1915, I Didn’t Raise My Son to be a Soldier, sung here by the Peerless Quartet, was the first commercially successful anti-war record and 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. FOLLOW STOP THE WAR COALITION: WEBSITE: FACEBOOK: TWITTER: