The Crash of ’29 has come, and the Depression anthem “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” is written. The Bonus Army marchers and Cox’s Army descend upon Washington, singing. Rural depression and desperation continue – in folk song, blues, Tin Pan Alley song, and corridos. In “Bloody Harlan,” Kentucky, Florence Reece demands to know “Which Side Are You On?” and Aunt Molly Jackson leads the way in singing the coal miners’ struggle into the national conscience. The nine “Scottsboro Boys” are imprisoned, one of whom – Olen Montgomery – writes his own harrowing “Jailhouse Blues” in condemnation. In New York, Aaron Copland and Charles Seeger agonize over the “correct” way to write revolutionary song, and Black composers Florence Price, William Dawson, and William Grant Still are faced with the mixed blessing of the success of the white-penned Porgy and Bess. The argument over primitivism continues in the Haitian operas of White and Matheus as well as Hall Johnson’s groundbreaking Run, Little Chillun. Down South, the spiritual is transformed into some of the world’s greatest struggle anthems, and John Handcox emerges as the “Sharecropper’s Troubadour” for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Strike songs resound across the West Coast and the industrial heartland, while the queer world swings to the defiant songs of Pansies and Bulldaggers.

Conquered peoples are turned into sideshow exhibits at the St. Louis World’s Fair, with Filipinos singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Geronimo singing and dancing for spectators. Black composers fight against the deracialization of ragtime threatened by white popularizers like Irving Berlin and Lewis Muir, while Chinese opera singers work to challenge the orientalism and exoticism of a snowballing “Chinatown” craze in popular music. The walls of the Angel Island and Ellis Island detention centers are scrawled with anonymous songs of despair and outrage, and the corrido continues to challenge US hegemony with its portrayals of legendary outlaws like Gregorio Cortéz and Pancho Villa. George M. Cohan – “the man who owns Broadway” – emerges with his own muscular celebrations of US power. The cities are swelling with immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, and Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths warn them not to “Bite the Hand that Feeds You.” Immigrant performers like Adolf Philipp and Eduardo Migliaccio work to ease the path of assimilation for their fellow countrymen, and the Yiddish musical theater sinks its roots deeper into the foundations of US culture. Puccini’s US-themed operas – Madama Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West – inspire Boston composer George Whitefield Chadwick to write The Padrone, his own operatic critique of immigrant exploitation.

Labor’s gloves are off, and the country is rocked by waves of strikes, all backed by militant battle songs. The Pullman Strike brings to the fore Eugene Debs and other champions of labor and socialism, Coxey’s Army marches on Washington (singing), German immigrants fly the red flag of Anarchism (in song), and Jews fleeing from Russian pogroms swell the streets and sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side, transforming the national soundscape with Yiddish labor anthems and laying the foundations of modern musical theater. The Mexican corrido becomes more prominent amidst white nativist hostility, and in California the Chinese community continues to pit their authentic songs of struggle against the slanders of minstrelsy and the insult of the Chinese Exclusion Act. On the western plains, the Lakota Ghost Dance and its attendant songs drive the US government into a panic born of ignorance, culminating in the massacre at Wounded Knee. With the frontier officially closed and white settler colonialism entrenched from sea to shining sea, the champions of Manifest Destiny look further westward, to the Pacific islands, where a songwriter named Lili’uokalani, the queen of Hawai’i, awaits her overthrow.

Black Americans sing of their hope in the promise of Reconstruction, which is eventually betrayed as the white North and South sing their way into the “romance of reunion.” The Indigenous peoples to the west face a US government hostile to their songs and dances, Mexican vaqueros are immortalized in corridos, Chinese and Irish railroad workers are pitted against each other in minstrel songs, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduce the spiritual to the world (even as the Ku Klux Klan churns out its earliest sheet music). Woman suffragists and former abolitionists join hands in song; and as the country descends into the corrupt mire of a Gilded Age, Grange farmers take on the monopolies of railroad magnates and “robber barons” in songs that ring into the present century. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, the executed Molly Maguires are memorialized in powerful balladry, and the Knights of Labor provide the musical soundtrack to the greatest fight between labor and capital that the country has yet seen.

Nativism, racism, and sexism are leading characters in this chapter, as are the songs for and against them. The Ku Klux Klan leads the way in musical contemptibility, but there are others, such as the xenophobes of the Spanish Flu epidemic and the songwriting purveyors of the postwar “Red Scare” against peace activists, labor activists, Germans, and suspected Bolsheviks. The immigrant community is under siege in the atmosphere of “100% Americanism,” and their songs – in the Cantonese opera houses, on the German and Italian vaudeville stages, in the Yiddish musical theaters, and in the ethnic recording studios – aim to fight back. The Indigenous peoples of Alaska and the lower 48 continue to resist the eradication of their song heritage, and the Mexican corridistas continue to sing of their border-crossing struggles. On the vaudeville stage, Eva Tanguay shows her contempt for conservative gender expectations, while the as-yet-unknown composers Florence Price and Ruth Crawford lay the groundwork for their own emergence.