God Bless America Girl Scouts in New York City. Smith performed the song on her two NBC television series in the 1950s and in her short-lived "The Kate Smith Show" on CBS, which aired from January 25 to July 18, 1960. "God Bless America" also spawned another of Irving Berlin's tunes, "Heaven Watch The Philippines," during the end of World War II after he heard the Filipinos sing a slightly revised version of the song replacing "America" with "The Philippines." The song was used early in the Civil Rights Movement as well as at labor rallies. During the 1960s, the song was increasingly
God bless you belief that a person's soul could be thrown from their body when they sneezed, that sneezing otherwise opened the body to invasion by the Devil or evil spirits, or that sneezing was the body's effort to force out an invading evil presence. In these cases, "God bless you" or "bless you" is used as a sort of shield against evil. The Irish Folk story "Master and Man" by Thomas Crofton Croker, collected by William Butler Yeats, describes this variation. Moreover, in the past some people may have thought that the heart stops beating during a sneeze, and that the phrase