Ford-wise, here’s something I always disliked about him – his 1915 “Peace Ship“:

“If I can make automobiles run,” he rhetorically asked a reporter at the time, “why can’t I steer those people clear of war?” He planned “to put a stop to the silly killings going on abroad” by leading a peace delegation across the Atlantic to negotiate personally with European heads of state. His favorite slogan became “Out of the trenches by Christmas, never to go back,” and the American press was quick to pounce: “Great War Ends Christmas Day; Ford to Stop It!” read a New York Tribune headline on November 25, 1915.

My late friend Irving Caesar, subsequently the lyricist of “Tea For Two” and “Just A Gigolo”, sailed on the Peace Ship as Ford’s personal secretary. Irving was motivated to go the extra nautical mile for peace by America’s big pacifist smash hit of 1915, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier”, a gazillion-selling Number One record for both Morton Harvey and the Peerless Quartet:

There’d be no war today
If mothers all would say
I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier.

I believe it’s the only Number One song with “arbitrate” in the lyric (“Let nations arbitrate their future troubles…”). The words were by Alfred Bryan, who had a big hit with the lovely “Peg O’ My Heart”. Reminiscing about Bryan’s Tin Pan Alley pacifism, Irving liked to say, “It took courage to stand up and say that.”

This stuff didn’t start with the Dixie Chicks, folks – though, to be fair, Al Bryan was less sanctimonious about it.