The United States Senators sang it on the steps of the Capitol that fateful day, September 11, 2001, another "day that will live in infamy." The song was "God Bless America."

Today's younger generations may not be familiar with the origin and history of the song Irving Berlin considered his most important composition. It was written during the First World War, for an army camp show where Berlin was stationed: Camp Yaphank on Long Island. The show's producers rejected it as too jingoistic, so Berlin placed it in a trunk of rejected manuscripts.

There it lay for twenty years, until Ted Collins, manager of popular singer Kate Smith, approached Irving Berlin for a new patriotic song for Kate to introduce to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I. After several days of futile attempts to write a new patriotic song, Berlin remembered the one he had written in 1918.

Now Kate Smith was the No. 1 popular songstress in America in 1938. The new anthem electrified the nation.

The lyrics were inserted into the Congressional Record, and there was a movement to make the song our national anthem. Kate addressed Congress, imploring its members not to do that.

In 1940 Irving Berlin established the God Bless America Foundation, with all royalties from its performance earned by either Berlin or Miss Smith going to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America. That arrangement exists to this day. These organizations were chosen, to quote the contract, because "the completely nonsectarian work of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts is calculated to best promote unity of mind and patriotism, two sentiments that are inherent in the song itself."

--abridged from Richard K. Hayes, archivist, Kate Smith Commemorative Society

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