God Bless America

“God Bless America” enters the diary as part of a formal dinner honoring Miz Lillian Carter at the Waldorf-Astoria. The song is reported as a communal performance in English and Jewish, set among speeches, ceremonial food, and an evening that stretched on for hours. Its brief appearance places a familiar patriotic expression inside a particular social scene: a benefit-like gathering where national identity, religion, public office, and celebrity converged.

The song at Miz Lillian Carter’s dinner

The dinner was arranged around an award to Miz Lillian Carter, and the account records both its ceremony and its eccentric details. Andy Warhol arrived with Stevie Rubell, who had obtained tickets; after a reception, they entered the main room, where Warhol sat at table three. About thirty-five Jewish guests were onstage, and the meal included gefilte fish. As dinner proceeded, speakers addressed the audience and those present sang “God Bless America” in English and Jewish. Andrew Young spoke about the United Nations and freedom, while the cantor’s singing drew particular notice in Warhol’s account.

The song shares the scene with a sharply remembered remark from Miz Lillian Carter: she said she had never met so many Jews and must tell Jimmy. The room’s shock and laughter became one of the evening’s defining moments in the diary. Rather than isolating patriotic expression from the social setting, the entry places the song amid the dinner’s religious identity, political language, and comic disruption of formal decorum.

Preserved through the diary routine

The scene survives within a record that began as an office log and became Warhol’s personal narrative. Before 1976, Pat Hackett compiled lists of business visitors and the previous night’s events, often asking several people for different accounts; the emphasis was on what happened and what it cost, rather than on Warhol’s personal view. After she said she no longer wanted to work at the office, she agreed to continue writing Popism, but not to keep gathering daily reports from everyone at the office. The arrangement changed: Warhol himself would supply the accounts, and the log became his own narrative.

Beginning in the fall of 1976, Warhol and Pat Hackett spoke by phone on weekday mornings. The ostensible purpose was to record what he had done and where he had gone, as well as his cash business expenses; in practice, the conversations became a diary and a way of examining daily life. They could last one or two hours, although Warhol called the task a five-minutes-a-day job. The ordinary texture of those calls included questions about breakfast and household objects, as well as expenses down to ten-cent calls from street payphones.

Pat Hackett took notes on a legal pad and typed the entries immediately after each conversation. Every other week or so, she brought the pages to the office and stapled Warhol’s loose cab and restaurant receipts to them; the completed pages were stored in stationery-store letter boxes. The diary was kept Monday through Friday. On Mondays, they covered the unrecorded weekend in a triple session, and when either of them was away, they adapted the process through calls, handwritten notes, or, occasionally, a tape recording. The dinner and its song were thus preserved within a system designed to leave no day unrecorded.

Patriotism beside tax scrutiny

The diary’s exacting attention to daily costs was not merely a stylistic preference. Warhol kept the record partly with tax auditors in mind: the IRS had subjected his business to a major audit in 1972 and continued its scrutiny annually until his death. He believed the audits had been prompted by someone in the Nixon administration because his 1972 campaign poster for George McGovern showed Richard M. Nixon with a green face and the words “Vote McGovern.” The account also notes that Warhol described himself as a liberal Democrat, though he said he did not vote because he wished to avoid jury duty; he nevertheless offered employees Election Days off if they promised to vote Democratic.

Against that background, “God Bless America” is recorded not as a free-standing statement of Warhol’s political beliefs but as one element of a public ritual that he witnessed and documented. The same diary that captures a patriotic song also itemizes cab fares, restaurant costs, and even tiny telephone charges, while its larger history includes a persistent awareness of government scrutiny. The contrast gives the expression its particular resonance in the book: ceremonial language of national belonging appears within an intensely personal account shaped by recordkeeping, social observation, and the pressure of accountability.