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.

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.