[Reposted from August 8, 2020]

Those who vilify Kate Smith could not create one one-thousandth of the happiness that she imparted to her audiences. They can only destroy. Their goal is pure destruction: Of America and Christendom.

Orwell could not have dreamed of a better example of Thought Crime than the “racism” today’s arrogant young know-it-alls imagine they have “discovered” in songs composed decades before they were born.  Fools, all of them.  They play the role of useful idiots for Communist-trained agitators and provocateurs.  Do not underestimate such people or their sponsors. They mean to destroy every vestige of American identity, heritage, and achievement.

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ALAN writes:

It must have been in 1953 or ’54 that I first became aware of Kate Smith when my grandmother watched “The Kate Smith Hour” on afternoon television.  I was four years old. Doubtless my grandmother remembered Kate Smith from her radio programs in the 1930s-‘40s.

The name Kate Smith never occurred in conversations in my family or among friends. There was no reason why it should.  Throughout all the years when I grew up and afterwards, Kate Smith was “just there:” A part of American radio history, a frequent guest on television variety shows, a wonderful singer who came to be known as the “Songbird of the South,” an all-American patriot, and the woman whose 1938 recording of “God Bless America” was an inspiration for countless Americans.

It went without saying in my family that Kate Smith was all those things.

On many Sunday nights in the 1960s-‘70s, I listened to KXOK Radio in St. Louis because they played “oldies but goodies”.  Kate Smith’s recording of “God Bless America” was played at the close of that program, which was also the end of their broadcast day.  That is when and where I came fully to appreciate it.  I remember the uplift I felt upon hearing that recording in the darkness of night, followed by silence when the station went off the air.  It was a most effective setting for the recording to linger in my awareness for moments afterward and for me to think about it, as I did.  I imagine my father and his Army Air Corps colleagues in the South Pacific during World War II must have been equally impressed if they were lucky enough to hear Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on an Armed Forces Radio broadcast.

On hearing that recording in 1983, librarian Efrem Sepulveda wrote:

           “I thought about how soaring it was to the spirit….and that it was something to remind us of the beauty we have lost…..”

        [“Killing Kate Smith,” The Imaginative Conservative, May 20, 2019]

I agree, except for the word “lost.” I suggest Americans did not lose it but gave it away, through their gullibility, moral cowardice, and boundless capacity for self-immolation.

After she died, newspaper columnist Tom Shales wrote about Kate Smith:

           “…..Whatever the opposite of the blues is, that’s what she sang.  …..It was a voice that picked you up and filled you up.  …..she smiled a broad, buoyant, bolstering smile…..” 

                                        [Tom Shales, Legends, 1989, pp. 147-48]

That must be what my grandmother heard and felt when Kate Smith sang: Cheer, joy, hope, consolation, uplift.  That is what I heard.  Her 1967 recording of “Danny Boy” brought tears to my eyes.

In 1982, I clipped and saved a newspaper photograph showing President Reagan awarding the Medal of Freedom to Kate Smith, who certainly earned it but was then in poor health.

When she died in 1986, I clipped and saved a newspaper obituary. Unknown to me that day, my father did the same thing.  He and I never talked about her.  But I have no doubt he thought as highly as I did of her patriotism and especially “God Bless America.” Richard Hayes’s book Kate Smith: A Biography (McFarland, 1995) has stood on my bookshelves for more than twenty years.

That was the context in which I read attacks last year upon Kate Smith’s name and legacy.

Seeing how sheepishly Americans respond to attacks on their heroes, monuments, and statues and how quickly they apologize for those things, Communists and fellow America-haters found it useful to add her name to their list of thought criminals.

In a noteworthy act of moral cowardice, the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team agreed to cover and then remove a statue erected in her honor and to stop using her recording of “God Bless America.”

At the same time, the New York Yankees were “investigating” Kate Smith’s recording of certain songs to determine whether she was guilty of “racism”. [Here is the song at the center of the accusations against Smith, sung here by black singer Paul Robeson. Smith sang it too. Contrary to the charges, it is a glorification and lament of the hard work of blacks.]

Such tactics come straight out of the Communist playbook.  The truth is that “racism” is an anti-concept invented by Communists for Communists as a tool to use in their permanent war on America and Christendom. Such attacks are intended to disarm Americans morally and philosophically from defending what their ancestors created and what they inherited.

To Sigmund Romberg’s music, Oscar Hammerstein II wrote:  “Give me some men who are stout-hearted men who will fight for the right they adore…….”

The problem is: Americans no longer adore and cherish their rights.  Instead, they surrender them.

Stout-hearted men would not hesitate to repel attacks on patriotic Americans like Kate Smith and expose those who perpetrate them as the liars and leeches that they are.  Men with chests would laugh heartily at such attacks.  To those agitators, such men would say:

 “Our national and cultural heroes, monuments, statues, and holidays will remain exactly as they are.  Their presence is not open to negotiation.  If you don’t like it, you can leave.  No one is blocking your exit.  No one is forcing you to listen to Kate Smith’s recordings or to admire American heroes, statues, and monuments.  We suggest you build your Communist Paradise on some other continent and then see how many people will go voluntarily to live there and thank you for telling them what they may not think, say, write, sing, or laugh at.”

But to say such things requires moral fiber and moral certitude. American white men once had both.

Communists never did like Kate Smith — because she was confident in America and Americans and she was upset by what Communists in Eastern Europe were doing to the Catholic Church. Harsh criticism of her radio program in 1949 came — you’ll never guess — from The Daily Worker, the newspaper of the American Communist Party. They couldn’t smear her into oblivion then, so they thought they’d try again thirty years after she died — hence, the attacks upon her last year.

The only goal Kate Smith ever had was to share her love of life in the best way she could: Through hundreds of uplifting songs and heartrending ballads with beautiful melodies and sensible lyrics. And she did so.

When she appeared on television variety programs in the 1960s, she would not clown. In 1965 she said: “I can’t clown.  The material has to be in excellent taste, or out.”

In other words, she upheld moral and esthetic standards in a decade when standards all across the board were coming under increasing attack. She refused to pander to the lowest common denominator. Imagine what she would say if she could hear recording “artists” today who manufacture filth and garbage, call it “music”, and sell it to gullible Americans.

None of the millions of Americans who appreciated Kate Smith’s talent ever suggested that her music be foisted on people who did not care to hear it. But people who play obnoxious noise and call it “music” make a point of blasting it upon everyone around them every chance they get.

Those who vilify Kate Smith could not create one one-thousandth of the happiness that she imparted to her audiences. They can only destroy. Their goal is pure destruction:  Of America and Christendom.

Orwell could not have dreamed of a better example of Thought Crime than the “racism” today’s arrogant young know-it-alls imagine they have “discovered” in songs composed decades before they were born.  Fools, all of them.  They play the role of useful idiots for Communist-trained agitators and provocateurs.  Do not underestimate such people or their sponsors. They mean to destroy every vestige of American identity, heritage, and achievement.

We are witness today to a population woefully short on confidence and long on cowardice.  Neither my grandmother nor Kate Smith herself could have imagined a population of such people in the country they loved. People who fail to defend the character, strength, and achievements of their own ancestors will soon have nothing left to defend.  Americans are nearly at that point now.

A statue of Kate Smith was removed from the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia last year after the singer was accused of racism.

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