Literary Soundscapes: Nationalism and U.S. Literature, 1890-1940

Shawn M. Higgins, PhD

University of Connecticut, 2016

Abstract

In a post-Civil War imaginary marked by increased racialization, vehement nativism, and expanding imperialism, a new debate over national identity converged on the terrain of so- termed “American music.” These aural and auditory frames foreground this dissertation, which takes seriously the ways in which writers, playwrights, and lyricists identified new possibilities for and the limitations of dominant-held notions of political and cultural citizenship through the interconnected spheres of literature and sound. Such productions, which converge on the notion of “American music,” divergently echoed, reflected, and refracted political contestations over who did and did not belong to the U.S. nation-state. This multiracial, multiethnic sound studies project, which begins at the turn-of-the-twentieth century and concludes with the Great

Depression, explores the integral sites of “American-ness” as an unstable and dynamic concept in the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Israel Zangwill, Irving Berlin, Raymond Egan, and Américo

Paredes. i

Literary Soundscapes: Nationalism and U.S. Literature, 1890-1940

Shawn M. Higgins

B.A., University of California, Riverside, 2009

M.A., Columbia University, 2011

A Dissertation

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

at the

University of Connecticut

2016 ii

Copyright by

Shawn M. Higgins

2016 iii

APPROVAL PAGE

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation

Literary Soundscapes: Nationalism and U.S. Literature, 1890-1940

Presented by

Shawn Matthew Higgins, B.A., M.A.

Major Advisor: ______Cathy Schlund-Vials

Associate Advisor: ______Martha Cutter

Associate Advisor: ______Christopher Vials

University of Connecticut 2016

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Acknowledgments

We didn’t read a lot in my house growing up. We listened to things. I fell asleep as a kid to the lulling sound of television static, of ceiling fans, and of hamster wheel squeaks. Every one of my family members’ music tastes had an impact on my young ears. Van Morrison, The Beach

Boys, Metallica, Bob Marley, New Kids on the Block, Weird Al Yankovic, Dr. Dre, Oingo

Boingo, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, John Lee Hooker, Pantera – all heard in the same house on any given day. Then, as my friends and I reached the age that we began buying our own CDs, that exposure lead to an obsession. More hip-hop, more electronica, more jazz, more reggae, more everything. Except country – that slide guitar sound just doesn’t sit right with me for some reason. My dad tried changing that by bringing me to Leon Russell concerts. I have to admit that I enjoyed the shows, but probably only because I was spending time with my dad.

I am indebted to Annemarie van Roessel, assistant curator of the Billy Rose Theatre

Division at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, for her guidance through my archival research for Chapter Two. Similarly, I owe great thanks to Christina Bleyer, Head of

Special Collections and Senior Archivist for the Américo Paredes Papers held at the Benson

Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin.

I traveled to Austin for archival research for Chapter Four with financial support from the

University of Connecticut’s El Instituto: Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American

Studies in the form of a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Award. I was also lucky enough to be awarded partial travel funding for many of my conference presentations of sections of this dissertation by the University of Connecticut English department.

On college campuses and at scholarly conferences – particularly the Association for

Asian American Studies – I have had the distinct pleasure to meet some of the smartest, v

friendliest, and most supportive mentors: Dean Adachi, Mike Atienza, Jason Chang, Floyd

Cheung, Mary Yu Danico, Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Keith Feldman, Kevin Fellezs, Eric Hung,

Allan Isaac, Jim Lee, Genevieve Leung, Dinidu Karunanayake, Sue Kim, Jenny Korn, Anita

Mannur, Martin Manalansan, Lata Murti, Nitasha Sharma, Karen Tongson, Bryan Thao Worra,

Judy Wu, and Timothy Yu. Thank you all for all of the conversations, shared meals, and inspiration.

To some of my earliest friends in academia – Damon Cagnolatti, Yvonne England,

Shannon Hervey, Mavis Huang, Marie Iida – thank you for being comrades in our striving toward higher education.

I would like to personally acknowledge Michael Bartch, Brandon Benevento, Sarah

Berry, Meghan Burns, Emily Carminati, Alexander Dawson, Jared Demick, Kristina Dolce,

Abigail Fagan, Gordon Fraser, Alex Gatten, Micah Goodrich, Daniel Graham, Kate Gross,

Christina Henderson, Margie Housley, Chad Jewett, Matthew Jones, Alaina Kaus, Patrick

Lawrence, Michelle Maloney-Mangold, Arpita Mandal, Steven Mollmann, Sarah Moon, George

Moore, Rachel Nolan, Miller Oberman, Katharine Ormsby, Eleanor Reeds, Melissa Rohrer,

Patrick Russell, Christiana Salah, Jorge Santos, Maria Seger, Christina Solomon, Hayley Stefan,

Emily Tucker, Krysta Wagner, Jarred Wiehe, Nate Windon, Laura Wright, and Anna Ziering as some of the smartest and best graduate students with whom I could hope to share offices and classrooms.

While I was teaching in Japan between 2013 and 2014, I had the chance to discuss my dissertation work with a few particularly helpful colleagues and mentors. I want to thank Emiko

Mizunuma, Director of the Undergraduate Bridge Program at Temple University’s Japan

Campus for her support and encouragement. I also want to thank my colleague at TUJ Tim vi

Williams for enlightening conversations and much-needed laughter in the office. I especially want to thankToshiyuki Ohwada at Keio University for showing me how an English major can make a career out of discussing music and text successfully. It was truly an honor to teach at

Keio with colleagues like Toshi.

During my time at the University of Connecticut, nothing of this dissertation would have been possible without the hard work the administrative staff does on a daily basis. I want to thank Melanie Hepburn, Lori Nelson, Claire Reynolds, Mary Udal, and Inda Watrous for providing excellent service in administrative and communicative needs. I also want to extend my thanks to Scott Campbell, Lisa Blansett, and each of the graduate student office managers in

First Year Writing for helping make teaching smooth and manageable. Of course, a loud “thank you” is owed to A. Harris Fairbanks, Victoria Ford Smith, Robert Hasenfratz, Charles Mahoney, and Gregory Semenza for their various directorial roles in our department.

Faculty members and administrative staff in other departments than English at the

University of Connecticut have also played important roles in this project. I would like to thank

Roger Buckley, Jason Chang, Fe Delos-Santos, Alexis Dudden, Margo Machida, and Angela

Rola for their teaching, mentoring, organizing, sharing, and listening.

The primary reason I came to the University of Connecticut was to work with the amazing professors in the English department. I have been truly fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from and engage with Christopher Vials, Martha Cutter, and Cathy Schlund-Vials.

Chris’ course on “class frames” gave me the foundational knowledge necessary to discuss the production of capital, the value of work, and liberal ideology. Martha’s course on “visual rhetoric and social change” truly helped me build my analysis of image and design. The independent study course I took with Cathy on “major texts in American Studies” was vii

informative, challenging, and enlightening, particularly in terms of questions of citizenship.

Having these three mentors – in every positive aspect of the word – as my dissertation committee has been nothing but a pleasure, and I owe them a world of thanks.

Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank my family. My aunt and uncle, Jo Anne and

Roy Painter, as well as my grandmother, Betty Hellwarth, have always reminded me how proud they are of my accomplishments, encouraging me to go on. My dad, Michael Patrick Higgins, has been unwavering in his support of my higher education and in his displays of love. Without my wife, Mio Higgins, I would not be doing any of this. Without her, I probably would have ended up globetrotting from language school to language school as an EFL instructor. This might not have been a bad life, but I am so grateful that I met her and that I was inspired enough by our love to seek a higher goal. Her never-ending support and endless love breathe life into me. I love her with all of my heart, and I can’t wait for us to get back to having fun when this thing is submitted. Finally, our son, Louis, has been such a wave of happiness in our lives. Sometimes we’re surfing that wave and sometimes we get smashed into the jetty. Nevertheless, there is nothing more inspiring than looking into his beautiful eyes and knowing that I owe it to him to succeed. From the center of my soul, thank you all so, so much. I hope someone reads this.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Sound Studies in Literature ...... 1 Chapter One: W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk and America’s Only Music ...... 17 Sounds and the Hierarchy of the Senses ...... 22 To Hush, and to Say Something through Silence ...... 35 Echoes of Untrue Dreams ...... 40 Cultural Nationalism and Indigeneity in American Sound ...... 46 Conclusions ...... 58 Chapter Two: Assimilation and Patriotic Anthems in Israel Zangwill’s The Melting-Pot ...... 63 The Melting Pot as a Revelation of Americanism ...... 70 David’s Symphony and the New American ...... 78 Reviews, Receptions, and Revisions of The Melting Pot ...... 87 Conclusions ...... 92 Chapter Three: Orientalist Soundscapes, Barred Zones, and Tin Pan Alley’s Asia ...... 95 Tin Pan Alley and the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act ...... 101 The Orientalist Soundscape ...... 105 Irving Berlin’s “From Here to Shanghai” (1917) ...... 114 Raymond Egan’s “The Japanese Sandman” (1920) ...... 125 Conclusions ...... 133 Chapter Four: The Silence of Struggle in Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez ...... 137 The Great Depression, Its Musics, and Its Silences ...... 143 The Polyphonic Silences of George Washington Gómez ...... 150 Conclusions ...... 175 Epilogue: The Rocket Experience: Antonín Dvořák and American Music in Space ...... 177 Notes ...... 190 Bibliography ...... 211

1

Literary Soundscapes: Nationalism and U.S. Literature, 1890-1940

Introduction: Sound Studies in Literature

Questions about the sonic projection of an American identity have pervaded the schools, church pews, dance halls, festivals, work places, and Congressional floors of the United States since the time of the Revolution. What combinations of sounds and lyrics qualify as “American music”? In return, what does this term offer, and what are its limits and restrictions? Must a citizen of the United States be the one to make American music? If a born-and-bred American writes a Bavarian polka or a Puerto Rican danza, can it be called American? Is American music a genre, or is it a form of musical architecture? Should all lyric or music labeled “American” share an identifiable form? Do American compositions need lyrics, or can instruments, styles, and performative modes alone distinguish the genre? If American songs do require lyrics to be recognizable, must they be in English? There have not been many restrictive attempts to define the form of American music. However, there have been debates and actual legislative mandates in biographical and performative terms. Therefore, who can make American music, how and when foreign-born or inspired music ever becomes American, and what the potential uses for

American music are comprise the more interesting and pressing questions.

Migration and advances in cultural production altered the sonic landscape, or soundscape, of the United States throughout the mid-Nineteenth century and into the Twentieth. The westward expansion of the nation, facilitated by transcontinental railroad construction from

1863-1869, created new contact zones for former Union and Confederate soldiers, recent immigrants from places like Ireland and China, and Native Americans whose lands through which the “iron horse” was stampeding. While minstrel shows steadily grew by the 1850s to become a national cultural production that brought the high-culture opera down to a low-culture 2

popular music form, by the 1890s, the nascent forms of blues and ragtime began spreading beyond the New Orleans bayous and into dance clubs throughout the nation. Czech superstar composer Antonín Dvořák changed the entire international identity of America’s music when he set foot in New York in 1892 and called “negro melodies” the truest native American form by contrasting them with Afro-Caribbean bamboat songs. In the process, Dvořák also slighted the more ancient songs of the Sioux and other tribes whose “chantings” he labeled “monotonous and crude.” As phonograph parlors began spreading across the nation in the 1890s and as records becomes a new marketable commodity, music became categorized and subsequently racialized during Jim Crow in the 1920-1930s with “race records.” And from the First World War through the Cold War, “American music” became an international site of contestation over issues of diplomacy and foreign influence, especially among the Lost Generation.

From the early days of the republic, American writers like Noah Webster, Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau encouraged the “development of a unique national music” that was to be “intimately connected to what today would best be called race or ethnicity.”1 Not only composers but also lawmakers have taken up this call to compose. Even to this day, politicians have often linked nation-building projects and sound in quite direct and purposeful ways. By virtue of the authority vested in him by the Constitution and the laws of the

United States, President Barack Obama declared June 2015 “African-American Music

Appreciation Month.” The President proclaimed that, by “melding enduring truths with new sounds, [African Americans] have pioneered entire genres and contributed to the foundation of our musical landscape – capturing an essential part of who we are as Americans.” In lauding the strengthening ability of music, Obama states that “our music has remained a constant source of inspiration, bringing us together and empowering us to reach for what we know is possible.”2 In 3

2014, Obama described African American music as poetry “born from struggle,” explaining that

“[as] generations of slaves toiled in the most brutal of conditions, they joined their voices in faithful chords that both captured the depths of their sorrow and wove visions of a brighter day.”

In that year’s decree, Obama links this history to the subsequent Jim Crow era and suggests that

“[at] a time when dance floors were divided, rhythm and blues and rock and roll helped bring us together.” Obama then highlights how the “influence of African-American artists resounds each day through symphony halls, church sanctuaries, music studios, and vast arenas.”3 In these statements, the nation’s first mixed-race African American presidential leader traces a national musical identity that is rooted in injustice and trauma. This amplifying of the echoes of slavery works not to blame or persecute but rather to testify to and come to terms with the United States’ musical identity.

President Jimmy Carter was the first contemporary leader to bring this legacy forward for public commemoration and celebration. Carter first decreed on June 7, 1979 at a White House reception with African American musicians Kenneth Gamble, Ed Wright, Dyana Williams and the now-defunct Black Music Association that June was to be “Black Music Month.” Performers at this reception included the gospel singers Sara Jordan Powell and Andraé Crouch, Chuck

Berry, Evelyn “Champagne” King, and the President’s “long-time friend” Billy Eckstine. Carter, with his roots growing up in and serving the state of Georgia, placed great importance on understanding and promoting the national memory expressed through African American music.

Carter asserted that “it presents a kind of history of our Nation when you go back and see the evolution of black music.” Carter understood the global, transcendent effects of music, explaining that “black music is a way to tie the black people of our country to their own ancestors and to tie the United States to other nations of the world.”4 4

The connections between music and literature at the turn of the Twentieth century are particularly numerous. Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867-1944), the first commercially successful female composer in the United States, wrote songs using the poetry of Percy Bysshe

Shelley, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Robert Burns,

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, and Friedrich Schiller as her lyrical texts. Arthur

Farwell (1872-1952), a prolific composer who often for his compositions mined indigenous

American sources – cowboy ballads, Native American music, and African American music – composed accompanying music for thirty-nine Emily Dickinson poems. Charles Griffes (1884-

1920), whose works music historian Gilbert Chase calls “American classics” and “among the best we have,”5 scored lyric pieces by Fiona MacLeod and Oscar Wilde. Virgil Thomson (1896-

1989), an important Jazz Era composer and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim

Fellowship, and the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award, wrote tunes to works by

William Blake, John Donne, Marianne Moore, and his good friend Gertrude Stein. Ernst Bacon

(1898-1990), who took the expression of American spirit as his explicit project, found inspiration in the works of Walt Whitman, Thornton Wilder, and Carl Sandburg. Aaron Copland (1900-

1990), one of the United States’ most well-known composers, also found the work of Emily

Dickinson, with its “lyrical expressive language” and “unconventional devices,”6 to be perfect inspiration for American music.7

“Literary Soundscapes” examines a compilation of texts from the 1890-1940s that revolve around issues of ethnicity, identity, nationalism, and performance. Specifically, these texts speak to the music, musicians, sounds, and sonic landscapes surrounding the author and the text itself. I am indebted to a number of scholars whose work helps me approach literature and sound in this way. Raymond Williams’ insistence that both sounds and written words are 5

materialized social processes that should not be analyzed simply as aesthetic objects is of great importance to this project.8 As Christina Klein asserts, these types of cultural works are products of cultural formations which include processes of production, circulation, and reception.

Therefore, I will focus on examining these texts as “part of a cultural formation […] generated through their intersections with other meaning-making discourses and activities.”9 One of the projects “Literary Soundscapes” works toward is a defamiliarization of canonical texts by introducing or intensifying a reader’s focus on sound. In her unsettling examination of the dominant histories of freedom, industrialization, trade, and liberalism, Lisa Lowe asserts that only “by defamiliarizing both the object of the past and the established methods for apprehending that object do we make possible alternative forms of knowing, thinking, and being.”10 “Literary Soundscapes” very much attends to this challenge to listen anew to texts in hopes of establishing alternative ways of knowing, thinking, and being.

In writing this dissertation, I have tried to be cognizant of the challenges to American studies students to push boundaries and question paradigms. In 2003, Nikhil Pal Singh and

Andrew F. Jones asked “how we might begin sketching a ‘new cartography of possibilities’ that can break out of the closures of neocolonial color lines and the insularity of ethnonationalistic identity politics.”11 “Literary Soundscapes” attempts to blur these color lines by emphasizing the non-visual and the experiential nature of sound. By embracing ethnonationalistic identity politics as its primary subject for scrutiny, this dissertation hopes to draw cross-comparisons between ethnic groups in the United States during a particular time period that challenge insularity. In privileging listening and sound in literature, I take up a different challenge put forth by Kara

Keeling and Josh Kun in 2011 to utilize “an interdisciplinary American studies in which knowledges and insights that have not been perceptible to our dominant intellectual paradigms 6

might be heard or heard anew.”12 While much has been done with regard to how literature takes on a musical form in terms of rhythm and mode, this dissertation divergently takes as its primary subject of analysis the textual representations of sound, noise, music and silence. This dissertation considers how different groups negotiated their relationships to the nation via music while, at the same time, others were being excluded entirely.

In this project, I have very physical (and personal) reasons for wanting to break from the primacy of the visual and attend more frequently to aural perception. Firstly, the human ear is simply more powerful than the human eye. Richard Berg and David Stork explain:

The human ear is one of the most amazing organs of the body; it possesses an

incredible range of sensitivities in both its frequency and amplitude response. For

example, the ear responds to vibrations over the range of frequencies from about

20 Hz to 20 kHz, a factor of about 1000 in frequency, whereas the eye is sensitive

only to the range of electromagnetic waves having wavelengths between about

400 and 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter), a factor of less than 2 to 1 in

frequency. By analogy, we might say that the eye sees less than an octave. The ear

adequately responds to a range of pressure variations of about 1,000,000 to 1.13

This incredible range of sensitivity functions in numerous useful ways. Our ears, much like our eyes, tongues, noses, and skin, help create what we call memory. Electrical impulses from hair cell nerve endings inside the cochlea “are transmitted to the brain, which relates the sound heard to those previously experienced and interprets the signals as words, music, noise, and so on.”14

Even more so, our ears have the capacity to be more spatially accurate than our eyes. Take for example the tapping on the face of a stethoscope. The extreme sensitivity of the human aural system allows us, without the use of our eyes, to locate almost the exact center of the device. 7

Berg and Stork explain: “If the center of the stethoscope membrane is tapped, waves strike the two ears simultaneously. If, however, a point to the side is tapped, the waves strike one ear slightly before the other. In this manner, the center of the membrane can be located to an accuracy of about 1 mm.”15 Clearly, there is reason to believe that our ears might offer better ways to document and critically analyze our world. Secondly, the “personal” reason I mentioned earlier is due to the fact that my protonopia – or red-green colorblindness – is severe. With this disability, I am only able to “perceive about 50 thousand distinct shades of color, which is just

5% of the 1 million shades seen with normal color vision.”16 While this dissertation does not bring particular emphasis to disabilities involving distortion or loss of hearing, it is cognizant of the fact that sound studies does problematically at times conceive of an all able-bodied audience.

Part of the way “Literary Soundscapes” attempts to establish these new ways of listening to music is through sonic metaphors. Writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois often employed these metaphors in their fiction and nonfiction work, yet these turns of phrases are passed over in popular readings as inconsequential or aesthetic. To the contrary, “Literary Soundscapes” finds a rich well of possibility in examining these sonic metaphors for what they might suggest about connections between real-world sonic perception and the transcription of words onto pages. For example, an echo can be conceptualized as a metaphor for the past, history, and legacy. An echo is a sound wave perceived as a reflection off a surface at a distance of at least 11.3 meters.

Reflected sound that is closer than this to the listener intertwines with the source sound, resulting in a perceived reverberation, not an echo. In more familiar terms, you hear echoes while shouting in the middle of canyons while reverb fills your bathroom when you sing in the shower. By definition then, an echo is the perception of something that travels great distances and re-presents the past. In other sciences like astronomy, echoes of light are visible and offer a perceivable view 8

of the past; the diminishing outburst of light surrounding a star emanates from the past as light echoes off cosmic dust clouds.17 While echoes and reverberations are similar, they differ tremendously in clarity and audibility with the first being much crisper and the latter muddled and confusing. And with the mechanical science of sound recording becoming formative in the

1890s, it became possible to hear the voices of the past for the first time. Therefore, to call the sounds heard on a record “an echo of slavery” means something significant. To extend this reading outward then, this dissertation focuses on moments of crisis, such as imperialism, nativism, xenophobia, and racism, listening to the sounds and silences that punctuate these moments in literary texts.

For some scholars, sound studies is the primary lens through which they examine subjects.

In this dissertation, I attempt to think of nationalism as the lens and sound studies as a filter over that lens which colors, sharpens, blurs, and distorts my subject of analysis. That being said, the growing field of sound studies and sonic-based inquiry heavily influences and inspires this project. Richard Cullen Rath analyzes “soundways,” or “the paths, trajectories, transformations, mediations, practices, and techniques – in short, the ways – that people employ to interpret and express their attitudes and beliefs about sound.” Rath calls this kind of work “cultural history” and “a contribution to the history of the senses,” and he hopes to “recover a portion of the seventeenth-century sensorium, one muffled by time, documentation, and the literate, highly visual mindsets of scholars” through this framework.18 Josh Kun describes “audiotopia” as the concept “that music functions like a possible utopia for the listener” and suggests that songs are events “of cultural encounter that may not be physical places but nevertheless exist in their own auditory some-where” which listeners can visit or access.19 This kind of work considers imagination, tourism, encounter, and migration amidst a “soundscape,” a term R. Murray Schafer 9

coined referring to “events heard not objects seen” which serve as an indicating “means of fixing social and even political events.”20 Such aural and auditory imaginaries presage the focus of this dissertation, which takes seriously the ways in which cultural encounters can be mapped via music, sound, and lyric. Ann Ostendorf uses “music way” and “music culture” as umbrella terms for “any expression made through or with music, including those performed and printed.” This term is rhetorically connected to the cultural critic belief that music is “connected to a person’s specific homeland past and shared with others of the same biology, heritage, and experience.”21

Karl Hagstrom Miller importantly argues that industrialists alone did not establish the musical color line. Rather, in his explication of the term “folk music,” Miller suggests that folklore is “an intellectual project, a set of ideas and frameworks for interpreting culture and history that developed largely within the academy.” Miller asserts that folklore “was something that happened to certain sounds and styles at particular times as part of larger political projects of reclamation, differentiation, and control, including Jim Crow segregation.”22 And Bonnie Wade suggests that jazz “is a musical practice that, above all others, symbolizes throughout the world the African American identity that emerged from within difficult human circumstances.”23 In their own useful and different ways, these scholars all work toward an understanding of sounds and silences are causes of, parts of, and effects of culture.

“Literary Soundscapes” owes a debt of gratitude to particular scholars that have advanced arguments pertaining to the connections between sound and nationalism. For example, Mari

Yoshihara explains how musicians shifted their means of capital gain from live performance to vinyl records and onto radio, film, and television as the commodification of music became an increasingly important aspect of their world. In her discussion of theorizing class and the musician, Yoshihara asserts that a Marxist framework24 is “particularly limited” in that “the very 10

nature of the musical profession – in which the product of the musicians’ labor perishes in the very instance of the performance and does not produce a commodity apart from itself – places musicians in the category of ‘unproductive labor.’”25 This might have been true when blues and jazz were only being performed in New Orleans nightclubs, but as soon as the Original Dixieland

Jass Band recorded “Livery Staple Blues” in 1917, music became a commodity. Furthermore, that commodity and that musician’s ability to maintain a close relationship to its means of production significantly factors into high levels of capitalist wealth and power. Marx poignantly explains that “[if] the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.”26 Art could be seen as useless in that it serves no direct purpose, but it does “[satisfy] human need” for happiness, relaxation, and excitement.

Therefore, the market decides which artist’s work has a higher value by determining the level at which human needs are satisfied. Yoshihara’s work here most directly impacts my reading in

Chapter Two of Russian-Jewish refugee David Quixano’s “American symphony” in Israel

Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot.

Furthermore, in her discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “field” and the performance of class, Mari Yoshihara asserts that “[for] many musicians, pride in their cultural standards and values compensates for a lack of economic capital and social power. For them, ‘class’ is more meaningful as a form of social, cultural, and occupational identity with a shared value system than as an economic position. Such an identity is practiced and performed through articulations and enactments of the values governing the field […].”27 Whereas identity comes with preconceived notions interpolated onto that occupation or body, performance is up for constant review and reevaluation. In discussing cultural capital, Bourdieu argues that “nothing more clearly affirms one’s ‘class,’ nothing more infallibly classifies, than tastes in music.”28 In his 11

essay on the market of symbolic goods, Bourdieu explains that “[in] contrast to the field of large- scale cultural production, which submits to the laws of competition for the conquest of the largest possible market, the field of restricted production [such as jazz music] tends to develop its own criteria for the evaluation of its products, thus achieving the truly cultural recognition accorded by the peer group whose members are both privileged clients and competitors.”29 This focus on class and the consumption of culture greatly influences my reading in Chapter Four of

Guálinto/George Washington Gómez’ bifurcating struggle to either assimilate into or rebel against American expansionist ideology in Américo Paredes’ novel George Washington Gómez.

National music-forms do indeed have the power, through their recuperative and identity- forming abilities, to create an “audiotopia” for performers and audiences alike. Anthems, for example, can foster a sense of solidarity, belonging, and safety among imagined communities, whether those communities are supported by the nation-state or if they are formed in resistance to political powers. Music, purposefully employed, is capable of surrounding listeners, temporarily at least, in a utopia of sounded ideology.30 However, music has the ability to hurt as much as it does to heal – to be traumatic and create an “audiodystopia” instead of a cathartic audiotopia. For example, during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950-1960s, white opponents to civil rights commonly fought choruses of “We Shall Overcome” with musical retorts of “Dixie,” the Confederate South’s unofficial national anthem.31 “Dixie,” supposedly written by Dan Emmett, the lyricists behind many popular Bryant’s Minstrels tunes of the 1850-

1860s, is an anthem rooted in blackface performance and pro-slavery rhetoric that survives today by invoking the legitimacy of Southern cultural heritage. Clearly, while the chorus of “We Shall

Overcome” is meant to empower one group and create solidarity, the white proponents of Jim

Crow employed “Dixie” as an audiodystopic weapon meant to break apart, hurt, and fling 12

victims back into a traumatic past. The lyrics of “Dixie,” such as “Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton, / Old times there are not forgotten,” interpolate a nostalgic yearning for the safety of slavery onto the civil rights activists who strive to work against the histories of blackface minstrelsy and inequality that this song invokes. By conjuring this audiodystopia, music can function as a very powerful weapon in cultural and political arenas. These concerns are most clearly discussed in Chapters One and Three which focus on W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of

Black Folk and on orientalist tunes written during the Tin Pan Alley era.

I have implemented terminology throughout this dissertation for particular metaphorical, rhetorical, and theoretical reasons. I use the terms “United States” and “America” almost interchangeably, cognizant of the problematic ways in which that replicates colonial imposition, appropriation, and domination. However, I find very useful the assertion put forward by Kevin

Bruyneel, who argues that “America” ironically “not only denotes the nation, culture, and people of the United States as articulated in popular and political discourse, but it is also ready evidence of the fact that the nation, culture, and people of the United States have, indeed, come to dominate the continent.” In this way, “to completely replace America with United States is a sort of superficial sleight of hand that does more to displace than to interrogate the impositions of the

United States and the efforts of nondominant peoples to resist these impositions.”32 I think it is important to recognize that settler colonialism and the expansion of the empire over land and sea are particularly visible in the political and social landscape of American culture at the turn of the

Twentieth century, and I use these terms accordingly. As this project deals with legacies of racism and oppression, derogatory slurs often appear in the source texts analyzed. When particular attention needs to be paid to the usage and impact of that term, I have reproduced it in my own sentences. Otherwise, I choose to use more contemporarily accepted terms of racial, 13

ethnic, and religious groups. In this project, I do not use “citizenship” and “nationality” synonymously; citizenship carries with it an implicit assumption or promise of equality, at least in political and legal terms, while nationality contains and manages the contradictions of the hierarchies and inequalities of a social formation. Nationality is a constantly shifting and contested terrain that organizes the ideological struggle over hierarchies and inequalities.

Following in the way of Robert G. Lee, this project is much more invested then in examining nationality than citizenship because it is “popular culture as a process, a set of cultural practices that define American nationality – who ‘real Americans’ are in any given historical moment.”33

Of course, the legal citizenship of that person is of critical importance, and I discuss many immigration and citizenship laws within my work. However, this project’s focus on the impact of music on nationalistic ways of belonging and excluding is more strongly concerned with cultural and social practices than with legality.

To summarize, “Literary Soundscapes” opens with an examination of cultural nationalism, national identity, and indigeneity in W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk

(1903). Bonnie Wade explains that “indigenization” is the process by which “new cultural ideas or expressive objects may be adopted but made or used as something that functions within the existing structures, institutions, or values of a society.”34 The process of indigenizing African

American music ways began in the Nineteenth century, and Du Bois was one of the most prolific and powerful advocates for the recognition of African American music forms as “American music.” Du Bois’ assertion and the concurrent debates over the term “American music” contributed to the overlooking, destroying, and forgetting of indigenous peoples and their cultural products in favor of a national memory project. I contend that this was symptomatic of the synchronous legislative restrictions against minorities, the advent of new academic societies, 14

and the burgeoning of the commercial music industry, all subjects and arenas in which Du Bois’ work was prevalent.

This focus on racial and cultural hierarchies presages Chapter Two’s investigation of assimilation and Americanism in Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot (1908). To varying degrees, the characters in Zangwill’s play escape the threat of early-1900s Russian Empire pogroms (anti-Jewish mobs) by immigrating to the United States and assimilating into American culture. I argue in this chapter that music functions as a catalyst through which first-generation working class Jewish immigrants and other disenfranchised in the United States claim their

American citizenship by immersing themselves in David Quixano’s “American symphony.”

Music serves the diplomatic purpose of confronting, witnessing, and testifying about, and potentially resolving, traumatic events for these characters. Zangwill’s protagonist writes an orchestral score inspired by the United States and uses music as a means of amalgamation. This performance also bring into question the acquiescence to selective discrimination imposed upon other would-be citizens in the adoption of American modes of patriotism and the boundaries of cultural nationalism.

Chapter Three shifts from literature to lyric and takes the music of Tin Pan Alley in the

1910s and 1920s as its focus. Since 1882, Chinese immigration was largely restricted due to overt exclusion; however, these past anti-Asian immigrant laws were extended to include

Japanese immigrants and South Asian migrants during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Simultaneously, Broadway and Hollywood song lyricists like Irving Berlin and

Raymond Egan wrote Orientalist lyrics that imagined and recreated contact with Asia and Asian peoples. This chapter analyzes the lyrics of Berlin’s “From Here to Shanghai” (1917) and Egan’s

“The Japanese Sandman” (1920) and asserts that these songs contributed to what I term an 15

“Orientalist soundscape,” or a sonic environment that pervasively creates, remixes, and promotes both positive and negative images of the Orient and its imagined peoples. Tin Pan Alley and the emerging technologies of sheet music printing production, audio recording, radio broadcasting, and moving pictures had clear connections with nationalistic projects, and I argue in this chapter that these songs reflect the discriminatory power dynamics of the time. Furthermore, the sound profiles of these Tin Pan Alley tunes helped create and proliferate many of the common “Asian music” stereotypes that persist to this day. As most scholarship on Tin Pan Alley is concerned with its roots in minstrelsy this chapter diverges and offers a new Asian American studies approach to this era of American cultural, material, and auditory history.

Appropriate for the ending of a project, Chapter Four examines silence and the borderland struggles leading up to and during the Great Depression of 1929-1939 in Américo

Paredes’ George Washington Gómez (1940). In this text and others focused on the strife migrants faced in their journeys south to north and east to west, nationalism takes the form of regionalism.

Border disputes and music – or the lacks thereof – punctuate the misery of migration.

Guálinto/George Washington Gómez in Paredes’ novel struggles with reconciling his

Mexicotexan identity that is split between the “pleasant warmth” of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the rebellious “elders songs and stories that were the history of his people, the Mexican people.” Ultimately, I assert in this chapter that moments of silence in these texts offer modes of resistance and of identity-formation that counteract economic and sociopolitical boundaries set by music and its domain of power.

Last, but certainly not least, the Epilogue of “Literary Soundscapes” quickly turns to the legacy of Czech superstar composer Antonín Dvořák. In 1969, Dvořák’s “New World

Symphony,” a piece inspired by the United States and its indigenous peoples, landed on The 16

Moon as one of two musical selections Neil Armstrong brought along. As part of a Cold War project to expand the American empire in the name of global security, the Apollo 11 mission carried not only astronauts and scientific equipment into space but also national and cultural artifacts. In its time and still today as part of the classical music canon, the “New World

Symphony” engages in the debate over what comprises “American” music. This debate, documented in periodicals, hinged on how or if American music should break from its European roots and if African American songs offered the truest sense of music born in the United States.

The underlying common ground in these debates and the focus of this presentation, however, is that the music of Native Americans was not worthy of representing the United States on an international stage. As an extension of “Literary Soundscapes” beyond the Great Depression, this epilogue unpacks and considers how mining cultures for musical inspiration works toward and against unifying in nation-building projects.

17

Chapter One: W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk and America’s Only Music

It is a hard thing to live haunted by the ghost of an untrue dream, to see the wide vision of empire fade into real ashes and dirt; to feel the pang of the conquered, and yet know that with all the Bad that fell on one black day, something was vanquished that deserved to live, something killed that in justice had not dared to die; to know that with the Right that triumphed, triumphed something of Wrong, something sordid and mean, something less than the broadest and best. All this is bitter hard; and many a man and city and people have found in it excuse for sulking, and brooding, and listless waiting.1 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

In this first chapter, I will examine one of the most vocal prominent figures on the intersecting subjects of race, culture, nationality, economy, segregation, and sound: William

Edward Burghardt “W.E.B.” Du Bois. His The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays written between 1895 and 1903, is one of the most enduring works of sociopolitical research on African

American struggle in history. Donald Gibson notes that, like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the various sections of Souls organically “coalesce around a general thesis, orientation, and perspective.”2 The result is a combination of denotative and connotative approaches to logic, one that Du Bois himself describes as a “vague, uncertain outline.”3 For this reason, this chapter will move through analyzing Souls thematically and does not attempt to follow a chronological narrative per se.

Du Bois’ endows his word choices, including the title of the essay collection, with both denotative and connotative meaning. One of the most pressing differentiations in the text is between “folk” and “nation.” Eric Sundquist asserts that this dividing line “was one of many such liminal states upon which Du Bois rested his greatest and most characteristic arguments, not because his art was one of compromise but rather because it was one of constant encroachments and tensions.”4 The Oxford English Dictionary gives four distinct definitions for the word

“folk.”5 When thought about comparatively, these distinctions help to elucidate the complex 18

arguments W.E.B. Du Bois presents in his 1903 collection of essays titled The Souls of Black

Folk. First, “folk” defines “a people, nation, race, tribe.” Second, “folk” can be “an aggregation of people in relation to a superior, e.g. God, a king or priest; the great mass as opposed to an individual; the people; the vulgar.” Third, “folk” refers to “men, people indefinitely.” Fourth,

“folk” is extended to “the people of one’s family, parents, children, relatives” as well as “friends, intimates, [and] people who are eminently respectable.” Prior to 1903, the word “folk” had been used by prominent authors in a variety of ways. Mark Twain writes in A Tramp Abroad (1880) about “American folk,” “military folk,” “enchanted folk,” “noisy folk,” “common folk,” and

“home folk” as opposed to strangers.6 In The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Charles W.

Chesnutt discusses “white folk,” “colored folk,” “rich, fine folk,” “folks” as in family, “folks” as in random people, and “dem folk” in contrast with “yo’ kin’.”7 Part of this chapter’s project is to examine how Du Bois defines the American nation with particular emphasis on the “two world- races” he claims inhabit it and the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the islands of the sea that pose new questions to the problem of the “color-line.”

Specifically, this chapter takes a sound studies approach to Souls in hopes of hearing and syncretically re-envisioning “double-consciousness” as a subject formation fixed to reflections, echoes, and refraction. The incessant usage of auditory parts of speech throughout the text demands this kind of reading that denaturalizes the way we read words and hear sounds. African

American men and women cry, shout, scream, and sing through this text while white legislators of both the North and the South discuss, debate, complain about, and question the place of the

African American within a United States undergoing reconstruction. Nations can call out in

Souls, whether it be "faintly" or "loudly," using the soundmarks which permeate their national soundscapes, such as the "hateful clank of their chains" that preacher Alexander Cromwell 19

recognizes in Du Bois’ narrative.8 The land itself makes noise throughout Souls as well. When discussing the “Cotton Kingdom” of Dougherty County in Georgia, Du Bois tells how “the poor land groans with its birth-pangs, and brings forth scarcely a hundred pounds of cotton to the acre, where fifty years ago it yielded eight times as much.”9 Du Bois gives us not only blatant sound references like the musical epigraphs for each chapter but also embeds sound, noise, and silence throughout the text for us to discover and to hear. These invocations of sound access a long history of struggle for belonging, equality, rights and citizenship in a connotatively different way than other rhetorical modes.

The first part of this chapter is an extended close listening of Souls while the second part is a consideration of The Sorrow Songs as “America’s only music” in conjunction with the rhetoric and study surrounding the music of indigenous peoples in the United States. This chapter maps the vexed contours of African American and other indigenous musics at the turn- of-the-century vis-à-vis Du Bois’ role as a prominent political pundit and cultural critic. The stakes of this investigation rest in a multiethnic approach to sound and its connections with nationalistic projects. Du Bois’ comments in Souls on America’s heritage and the inherent power and beauty of African American sounds rely at times on a hierarchical approach to cultural productions. Namely, Du Bois elevates The Sorrow Songs by degrading the musics of other indigenous peoples. It is not in any way this chapter’s project to attack either Du Bois or African

American music forms. Rather, this chapter aims to expose how The Sorrow Songs, interpreted as a product of cultural nationalism, function as a powerful conciliatory device in Du Bois’ rhetoric. Part of this power relies on an understanding in Du Bois’ readership that the artistic merits of African Americans superseded those of Native American tribes. 20

Du Bois’ target audience he aims to impact with Souls is white Southern men. Using the second person to address readers directly, Du Bois asserts that “even to-day the masses of the

Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours.”

He pushes this accusation to its moral extreme by furiously writing that “the rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two million mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood.”10 Du Bois punctuates paragraphs of statistical information and autobiographical asides with these powerful accusations in a constant attempt to affect his reader. The framing of the collection of essays, using a classical rhetorical combination of ethos and pathos, is also key to impacting readers of Souls.

Du Bois frames The Souls of Black Folk in a Forethought and an Afterthought. Du Bois pledges not only his good character in the Forethought but also asserts his credibility as someone who is

“bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil.”11 Du Bois “speaks” in the Forethought from Atlanta, Georgia on February 1, 1903, experiencing the traumatic discrimination of Jim Crow segregation laws as he simultaneously frames his narrative. Through his focus on affecting white readers and his historicizing Jim Crow America, Du Bois makes

Souls not only a sociological project but also a moral call to action.

From 1890 until 1965, the United States of America was a legally segregated space in which persons deemed “white” enjoyed privileged access to materials, environments, and opportunities that Southern laws denied to “colored” persons. One of these segregated spaces that greatly affected the lives and livelihoods of African Americans was the stage. Whether they were bandstands, behind club pianos, formal elevated theater stages with prosceniums, or eventually the recording studios of record companies, spaces of public performance were racially marked by its performers, attendees, and the sounds created within. In one way, these “Jim 21

Crow” laws poisoned the careers of many prospective classically trained African American musicians. With the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, it became illegal for black and white performers to travel to gigs together. This established precedence for laws demanding appropriately segregated orchestras. Therefore, Creole African Americans from New Orleans who had vigorously studied classical piano and cornet found themselves with two options: popular minstrel shows with relatively good pay or all-black performance groups relegated to

Jim Crow audiences.12 Many chose the latter option and subsequently failed as commercially viable options due to the inability to and disinterest of African American audiences in supporting them. In addition, these artists were sometimes simply not skilled in “sounding black” enough for these minstrel performances; they were classically (European-style) trained musicians who aspired to playing in traditional orchestras. Songwriters composing pieces for performance by

African Americans were underwriting these tunes by “providing material that supports particular poses, be they race-, gender-, or class based.” The trouble this caused, according to historical musicologist Todd Decker, is that “musical and performance styles can be read as indexes of race” and that performances “‘of a type’ or ‘in a style’ is a learned skill, not something inherent or authentic.”13 Consequently, Jim Crow laws ruined many of these musicians.

In another way, minstrel show careers provided a path toward stardom and power for those that decided to play the sometimes-dirty part. Judith Butler calls this performative process of self-definition through implication “in that which one opposes” a “difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure.” Importantly however, this performative mode of identity formation can turn “power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power […]” in its nature of working under the established system.14 On this subject of forging careers from impure resources, Michele Wallace asserts that African American blackface performers post- 22

1896 like Bert Williams, W. C. Handy, Paul Robeson and others “went on to establish substantial reputations in a variety of performance genres, from vaudeville to brass bands and jubilee singing groups, as well as blues performance, jazz, and musical theatre.”15 In either case, music and its ability to create and to signify identity has played a pivotal role in African

American history. This chapter works toward an understanding of how Du Bois sought to make

The Sorrow Songs a bilateral identifying sound of American identity while he simultaneously undercut the artistic productions of indigenous peoples in a hierarchical move for rights and power.

What follows is a sound studies analysis of The Souls of Black Folk, focusing on re- listening to some of Du Bois’ famous key terms in hopes of emphasizing sound’s power in rhetoric and in nation-building. First, this chapter looks at Du Bois’ insistence on having sound and the senses featured in Souls and his simultaneous demonizing of those who deny sound or promote silence in maneuvers that oppress or hold back individuals or groups. After showing how Du Bois constructs a contemporary utopian image of the United States as a land and a nation sonically sewn together by The Sorrow Songs, this chapter then highlights how this border-erasing approach in turn erases those people who occupy what Kevin Bruyneel calls

“third spaces of sovereignty” and the borders themselves.16 This chapter concludes with an examination of how sound has been utilized in nation-building projects in the United States and what Souls does differently in its attempt to address the twentieth-century problem of the “color line.”

Sounds and the Hierarchy of the Senses Donald Gibson explains that the “premise of The Souls of Black Folk is that whites do not see blacks” due to the opaque “Veil.” However, Gibson acknowledges that Du Bois does not

“distinguish between the metaphor of the veil and the metaphor of invisibility. […] An entity 23

may be veiled but not invisible, invisible but not veiled. Blacks are both: invisible to those who need them to be invisible, veiled to those who need them veiled.”17 This chapter recognizes a further visual limitation to both of these metaphors, and puts forward that sound offers a more apt mode of analysis. Not only is Du Bois adamantly advocating for a close listening to African

American voices, but sound is also something that cannot be veiled or invisible in the same metaphorical way. R. Murray Schafer famously proclaimed in his early sound studies work that

“the sense of hearing cannot be closed off at will” for “there are no earlids.” Instead, the “ear’s only protection is an elaborate psychological mechanism for filtering out undesirable sound in order to concentrate on what is desirable.”18 Du Bois hopes that The Sorrow Songs might offer for the United States this more desirable, near-impossible-to-ignore sound instead of visual appeals veiled or made invisible. I assert that Du Bois advocates for an acousmatic listening to

African American struggle and that Souls should be read in this synesthetic manner. Acousmatic sound, according to Michel Chion, “draws our attention to sound traits normally hidden from us by the simultaneous sight of the causes – hidden because this sight reinforces the perception of certain elements of the sound and obscures others.”19

While not written outright in the same academic parlance, Souls is statedly a sound studies project. If we do not take his vocabulary choices as mere inconsequential terms or phrases, it is clear that Du Bois thought very highly of the power of sound and of speech. For example, at the end of the opening chapter, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” Du Bois explains how he “tells” through his writing with the hope “that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk.”20 He asserts that the first chapter is a “brief sketch” while the coming pages are something “told” “again in many ways, with loving emphasis and deeper detail,” granting the vocal verb more substance and gravitas than simple sketching. Later, Du Bois powerfully asserts 24

that "the hum of the cotton-mills is the newest and most significant thing in the New South to- day. All through the Carolinas and Georgia, away down to Mexico, rise these gaunt red buildings, bare and homely, and yet so busy and most withal that they scarce seem to belong to the slow and sleepy land."21 The hum of the mills, not the mills themselves, is the significant change in the environment. In addition, Du Bois speaks with a musical vocabulary, at one point calling debt the "keynote of the Black Belt," a word referring to the central note around which a musical phase builds.22 These emphases on the power of storytelling, of noise, and of active listening are significant in a written text that most likely would have been read in silence; the mixing and interacting of sensorial forms of learning and understanding are complex and interdependent in Du Bois’ writing.

Part of Du Bois’ approach to sound studies is a reliance on a general understanding of the power of sound and its place in a hierarchy of the senses. Du Bois understood the physics of sound and hoped that his readers would have some level of familiarity with sonic properties; his rhetoric lies in a shared experiential and spatial memory of how sound performs and how it is received. When describing the preacher Alexander Crummel's chapel and his dwindling congregation, Du Bois explains that "week by week the hollow walls echoed more sharply."23 Du

Bois notes the lack of bodies off which the sound of Crummel's sermons could be refracted and dampened in an attempt to not only affect the reader with a sonic image but also to textualize that sonic history that resonates in architectural and material histories. Similarly, Du Bois acknowledges the signaling power of sight as a counterpoint to sounds or soundmarks unseen.

When discussing rural Dougherty County in Georgia, Du Bois calls it the “Land of the

Unfenced, where crouch on either hand scores of ugly one-room cabins, cheerless and dirty.

Here lies the Negro problem in its naked dirt and penury. And here are no fences. But now and 25

then the crisscross rails or straight palings break into view, and then we know a touch of culture is near.”24 While the fence serves as a visual cue of culture and of life, the echoing walls of

Crummel’s chapel tell a story of decay and of the death of religious fastidiousness. These two passages examined in comparison showcase Du Bois’ attention to the senses and their abilities to capture readers with shared experiential and spatial memories. The goal of this pursuit is a rhetorical move toward common understanding in hopes of building an equal nation under the power of The Sorrow Songs, as is made evident throughout and ultimately at the end of Souls.

Du Bois consistently invokes the pathos of the bodily senses, and especially of hearing, in his discussing the grievances, abuses, and despair of the African American freeperson. “Of Our

Spiritual Strivings” begins with the British poet Arthur Symons’ poem “The Crying of Water” juxtaposed with three bars of the slave spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

Originally published on May 24, 1902 in the Boston-based Living Age literary magazine,

Symons’ poem is a mournful imagistic pairing of water and the body with water, which has the ability to cry out for the heart in this poem. In the piece, the narrator lies on a beach at night, listening to but not understanding the “unresting water” as it cries in the sand with each wave crash. The narrator realizes the cyclical and unrelenting nature of suffering and toil that is life, promising no rest to the water “till the last moon drop and the last tide fail” or until Judgment

Day itself.25 With water speaking for a voiceless heart and a human body and brain unable to comprehend that channeled attempt at communication, this poem depicts the imperfections of the senses amidst an all-natural environment. Both human and nature are subject to the cycle of life that is unstoppable and will not stop until the oblivion of Armageddon. Still, the water cries to the narrator. As an introduction to his chapter on the striving of the spirit, Du Bois quotes this sensory poem to foreground the melancholy of “crying without avail.” 26

Du Bois’ choice of musical pairing with Symons’ poem is one of the most enduring songs of strife from the Reconstruction era. According to Du Bois, the origin myth of “Nobody

Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” is that, when “struck with sudden poverty, the United States refused to fulfill its promises of land to the freedmen, [and] a brigadier-general went down to the

Sea Islands to carry the news. An old woman on the outskirts of the throng began singing this song; all the mass joined with her, swaying. And the soldier wept.”26 Song inspired by despair invokes tears in the victor’s messenger. When the Fisk Jubilee Singers visited Potsdam and sang

“Nobody Knows the Trouble I See”27 for the Crown Prince Frederick III and the Crown Princess

Victoria, the latter was brought to tears. The Crown Princess apologized for seeming “so weak” and explained that “the thought of the wretchedness of the slave life which gave birth to such a wail […] quite overcame her.”28 Clearly, song and its ability to move the body to physical response serves as a powerful rhetorical device, and Du Bois relies on it to help move his nation- building project toward fruition.

Du Bois similarly remarks throughout Souls how the landscape and the environment of the United States have come to embody the nation’s history of oppression, colonialism, and slavery. Because of this change, sounds that have echoed through time have been subjected to refraction as the landscape changes. This yoking of African American bodies with the physical land of the United States and particularly of the colonial South is crucial to understanding Du

Bois’ approach to sound as a study and a mode of analysis. Quoting a physics description of the properties of sound is pertinent to understanding how and why I use this metaphor in this sound studies project:

The velocity of sound is greater in warmer air, which is higher above the ground

during an atmospheric temperature inversion. […] At night, voices carry a great 27

deal farther than during the day, particularly over a placid lake, which enhances

the temperature inversion; sound from highways or outdoor concerts can often be

heard for miles. This is not a psychological effect or a result of lower background

noise during the night hours, but a physical phenomenon due to the refraction of

sound in the atmosphere.29

The landscape and the environment, with all of their changes over time and the impacts left on them by natural cause and by human influence, physically affect the properties of sound and our perceptions of it. Du Bois whole-heartedly adapts this physics concept into a metaphor, noting how sound uniquely changes as it travels over the Southern soil soaked in African American blood, sweat, and tears. This sound encounters a temperature inversion as it reaches the brick buildings and cobblestone streets of New York City where slavery and the history of African

American exploitation has a much different impact on the physical environment. In these moments throughout the text, Du Bois metaphorically integrates African Americans into the environment and into nature itself, forcing the reader to recognize The Sorrow Songs as something both inspired by and composed of the United States’ biological and geographical material.

In fact, Du Bois environmentalizes African Americans numerous times throughout Souls as an evocation of eternity, perpetual struggle, and spiritualism. In discussing Sherman's raid and its trifurcating of people into the Conquerors, the Conquered, and the Negroes, Du Bois calls the last group a "dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of those swift columns

[…]."30 Still, this human cloud has the ability to speak, not only as powerfully as the Conquerors or the Conquered, but more powerfully and with "deep[er] meaning," at least for Du Bois. The voices of singing children similarly serve as a soundmark of an idyllic environment. Du Bois 28

finishes the chapter “Of the Dawn of Freedom” by invoking the image of the King’s Highway, a trade route through ancient Egypt and Jordan that was fought over many times in the battles for pilgrimage rites.31 Referring to the curvy valley roads of northeast Egypt “like passioned women wanton with harvest,” ready and willing to be conquered, Du Bois paints a tension-filled picture of imperial expansion and migration.32 Du Bois calls this land pre-conquering “right merry with the sun” and justifies this exaltation by remarking how this is a place “where children sing.”

With images of human children singing on female-figured valleys and a land that feels merriment, Du Bois combines and blends together people and nature and their abilities to feel and to act.

Gender often remains, however, in Du Bois’ blending of man and land. The people freed in the South “welcomed freedom with a cry,” a sound springing forth from a body kept in chains.33 Du Bois uses a masculine pronoun to refer to the freed slave generally, and locates these freedman’s position in a liminal third space “bewildered between friend and foe.” Du Bois calls American slavery “not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness – but withal slavery, which, so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the black man and the ox together.” This masculinized population Du Bois again calls a

“mass” “[writhes and shivers]” like the animals they were classed among, and their cry welcoming freedom is an animalistic, natural expression of emotion put forth even while, or perhaps because, thoughts were still “half-articulate.” Du Bois describes Northern white

“friends” like riot police that used the freedmen “as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into loyalty.”34 While women blend into the valleys that men traverse, they rarely become Du

Bois’ subject of focus when discussing slavery (excluding remarks about sexual infidelity and of 29

rape by white Southern men). Ulimately, both men and women do affect the temperature inversion that sound experiences as it passes over the American landscape, but in different and in sometimes troubling ways.

Inversely, Du Bois often takes non-physical entities that very much “inhabit” the earth and personifies them in an attempt to denaturalize the reader’s understanding of what is present, what is alive, and who or what agents are. Du Bois personifies "the question" of what is to be done with African Americans post-Reconstruction as something that can "force itself to the surface" if given the proper impetus.35 The Union army entering the South during the Civil War encouraged the question to "[spring] from the earth" and make itself known through the more benign quandary of "what shall be done with Negroes?" This "old question," as Du Bois describes it, is able to mask itself, hide itself, reveal itself at will, and speak its own name. In this way, it is something made eternal in the United States through its congealing with the land, the environment, and the soundscape. However, it is also something that takes a form and a shape that, correspondingly, might be possible to dismember and destroy as a physical form. Du Bois' history of the Emancipation Proclamation, the war amendments, and the Freedman's Bureau in particular chapters throughout Souls highlights the failed attempts at “answering” (or destroying) this question.

Similarly, Du Bois notes the soundmarks of the Southern landscape in vivid detail in order to encourage both visual and aural connection with the text that is his story. At the outset of the chapter “Of the Wings of Atalanta,” Du Bois describes Atlanta’s morning, “when the first flush of day had half-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia; then the blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gathered and swelled, until the seething whirl of 30

the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.” In this female-personified introduction to

Atlanta, the city can be “aroused and maddened” by war, leaving her “listening to the sea” which

“[cries] to the hills [of Atlanta], and the hills [answer] the sea.”36 Much like how the landscape speaks in Arthur Symon’s poem, feminized Atlanta makes noise but does not communicate intelligibly. Rather, she relies on the affective power of sound and of physical sonic properties to invoke change in the landscape and in the agents inhabiting the surrounding areas.

Du Bois continues describing the “low hum of restful life” he hears day to day from his home near the campus of Atlanta University.37 Du Bois mentions the “dark figures [that] pass between the halls to the music of the night-bell” and how the “clang of the day-bell brings the hurry and laughter of three hundred young hearts from hall and street, […] to join their clear young voices in the music of the morning sacrifice.”38 It is at Atlanta University where, “amid a wide desert of caste an proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools, and the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and learn of a future fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time: ‘Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren.”39 Wilson Jeremiah Moses asserts that Du Bois utilizes this phrase, meaning

“Thou shalt forego; shalt do without,” from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808) “as a reminder of the fundamental paradox that self-fulfillment comes from self-denial. The inescapable theme running through classical stoicism, Christian mysticism, and Faustian

Romanticism is that the pathway to salvation is uphill and rocky.”40 Time has a voice, and that voice commands that the students of Atlanta University struggle and yet struggle on. Much like how the feminized Atlanta listens to the sea, the men of Atlanta University listen to the breeze that sings of a sweeter future. The difference between these modes of listening seems to be 31

intelligibility, however. The men of Atlanta University understand the message shared by the voice of Time – a message in German, nonetheless. Atlanta the feminized land listens to a sea crying to hills that respond to the sea. In other words, Atlanta is never spoken to directly but is only able to listen to sounds or noises that share no clear meaning other than indistinguishable emotion. Sound and its ability to convey not only emotion but also meaning plays a key role in

Du Bois’ work throughout the remainder of Souls.

One sound that seems to convey both emotion and meaning extremely well is the song.

Chapter IV, "Of the Meaning of Progress," begins with Du Bois describing Tennessee hills

"beyond the Veil" where Fisk University students like him might teach in the summer months. In this chapter, Du Bois more concretely explains that "the Veil" is something that "hung between us and Opportunity."41 Du Bois describes how his students would travel from their remote country places of living into the town of Alexandria on the weekends for sights and culture. Du

Bois describes this environment as "dull and humdrum," the second adjective probably derived from the auditory term "hum," or something that is continuous and without variety. Part of these excursions included a trip to a prayer meeting where the "soft melody and mighty cadences of

Negro song fluttered and thundered." Here, music signifies community, conviviality, religious fervor, and ultimately life itself in stark contrast with the silence of the barren countryside. This understanding of music as culture is key to understanding Du Bois’ promotion of The Sorrow

Songs and will be returned to in a later section.

Another powerful sound that can command and lead to submission is the human voice.

Du Bois contrasts the power of voice with that of written texts and tries to subvert the primacy of the pen. First, voice has the immediate power to pose questions whereas written communication takes time to prepare. The threat of this immediacy is its demand for an unformulated, 32

unprepared, and often interpretable reply. Du Bois gives the example of how a “black stranger in

Baker County, Georgia […] is liable to be stopped anywhere on the public highway and made to state his business to the satisfaction of any white interrogator. If he fails to give a suitable answer, or seems too independent or ‘sassy,’ he may be arrested or summarily driven away.”42

Without clearly and thoughtfully written language to rely upon, the African American stranger is left to verbally and immediately fend for himself against accusation. Conversely, the white interrogator is able to use the voice’s immediacy to his or her advantage and shirks any need to provide a vetted, edited, and documented form of the accusation. As for Du Bois’ “talented tenth,” aurality and the ability to verbally communicate is an underestimated ability. After designating ten percent of the African American population as “the well-to-do” and another nine percent as “lewd and vicious,” Du Bois lumps “the rest” in a population that is “poor and ignorant, fairly honest and well meaning, plodding, and to a degree shiftless, with some but not great sexual looseness.” Du Bois then discusses how the inability of “two-thirds of them” to read or write highlights the “degree of ignorance” expressed in the group.43 If we understand ignorance to mean lack of education about a subject, then Du Bois is merely advocating for increased access to environments where the learning of reading and writing can take place.

However, this focus on the power of reading and writing rests on a foundation of verbal communication first, a skill that most of the other ninety percent of the African American population had in various forms.

Undoubtedly, one of the most important forms of written communication that Du Bois recognizes is the ballot, or a written statement of one’s voice and choice. In “Of the Sons of

Master and Man,” Du Bois calls the ballot a "weapon," one that is "the greatest, perhaps, in the modern world […]."44 He continues with the armament metaphor, explaining that "it is only by 33

arming every hand with a ballot, -- with the right to have a voice in the policy of the state, -- that the greatest good to the greatest number could be obtained." Using commas and dash breaks to signify a noun clause definition, Du Bois propounds that the ballot is a voice. Therefore, the most powerful weapon in the modern world is a voice. In discussing the industrial and intellectual development of African American abilities, Du Bois asserts that the new United

States cannot "establish a mass of black laborers and artisans and landholders in the South who, by law and public opinion, have absolutely no voice in shaping the laws under which they live and work." Making a clear appeal to the American creed of "no taxation without representation,"

Du Bois explains that "the black man of the South has almost nothing to say as to how much he shall be taxed, or how those taxes shall be expended; as to who shall execute the laws, and how they shall do it; as to who shall make the laws, and how they shall be made." Combining the power of the voice with the power of the pen, Du Bois demands that the ballot be seen as an extension of the voice and that to deny the written statement is to deny the power to speak. Even if African American were allowed to verbally assert their positions or opinions (in very limited political arenas), without those words being transcribed and tallied quantitatively, the power of the voice is rendered impotent.

Du Bois also challenges the power of the pen in this chapter through his detailing of the

Freedman's Bureau's creation, implementation, and ultimate failure. Du Bois praises the

Freedman’s Bureau for three accomplishments: “it relieved a vast amount of physical suffering; it transported seven thousand fugitives from congested centres back to the farm; and, best of all, it inaugurated the crusade of the New England schoolma’am.”45 The creation of the Bureau was the result of legislative action during the Reconstruction, a move that attempted to answer that question of “what to do with the Negro?” Du Bois marvels at how, "at the stroke of a pen," an 34

entire "government of millions of men" can come into being.46 While abolitionists and lawmakers for nearly one hundred years in the United States had been discussing emancipation, it is the product, a hastily written document, which outlines how to manage "black men emasculated by a peculiarly complete system of slavery, centuries old." Years of verbal debate are at least temporarily summarized and settled through the power of written text. The power of the pen lies in the finality and physicality of its ink, a visual marker of truth that can only be overturned by subsequent putting of ink to paper. This silent document, which speaks with the history and the influence of those years of verbal debate, is a synthesis of modes of communication. Ultimately, its silence is louder than the shouting of voices in town hall meetings or congressional chambers.

However, silence is not always so loud in Du Bois’ work. For example, Du Bois describes the virginal Albany, Georgia of 1837 very differently than the one at the turn of the century. Du Bois describes the African Americans of the town as “more silent and brooding than the crowds of the Rhine-pfalz, or Naples, or Cracow.”47 With the personified Debt brooding over all residents of Albany, regardless of skin color, Du Bois notes how “all is silence now, and ashes, and tangled weeds.”48 Du Bois retells the story of “The Wizard of the North – the

Capitalist,” as told to him by “an old ragged black man, honest, simple, and improvident.” In this origin myth, the Capitalist of the 1870s “bought a square mile or more, and for a time the field- hands sang, the gins groaned, and the mills buzzed.”49 In other words, investment and activity beget sound. Conversely, the removal of capital or stagnancy results in silence or the perception thereof. Sound, speaking, or conversing can also be seen as a form of luxury or as a signal of

“free time.” Du Bois asserts that “it is a keen, hard struggle for living [in Dougherty County], and few have time to talk. Tired with the long ride, we gladly drive into Gillonsville. It is a silent 35

cluster of farmhouses on the crossroads, with one of its stores closed and the other kept by a

Negro preacher.”50 Just as the fences of Dougherty County visually signal culture, silence sonically signals disparity, debt, and the death of culture. While loud in sending a message, this silence does not decree or command anything. Rather, it bemoans and asks for reconciliation or at least testimonial.

Du Bois finishes the “Of the Black Belt” chapter with a conversation so sonically tuned that it demands analysis by all readers. In this scene, Du Bois sits and enjoys cool drinking water with a Gillonsville “Negro preacher/storekeeper,” the man’s mother, and his wife. Du Bois describes the storekeeper as “talkative,” his mother as “silent,” and his wife as an “intelligent” matron who speaks “quietly.”51 When the wife quietly repeats the name of the landowner who cheated her husband out of seven hundred acres, the “ragged misfortune” of a preacher, “who was leaning against the balustrade and listening,” “echoes” the man’s name in a rage of agony.52

Much like the hills that listen to the sea and answer back, the man serves as a surface off which the sound wave can bounce. In his stationary leaning and his silent listening, the man composes the environment of the group’s conversation. However, as words that call forward pangs from the environment are spoken, they echo loudly off and from within his body, forcing him into the foreground of the conversation. The echo, an invisible sound that is both a replica and real, a sound from the past yet alive in the present, is an uncanny type of sound that plays a pivotal role in Du Bois’ rhetoric. Quickly, we will look at how silence and the echo of untrue dreams are reflected through Souls and how they works toward a cultural nationalistic understanding of The

Sorrow Songs as America’s reverberating voice from the past.

To Hush, and to Say Something through Silence Du Bois begins “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” with a question that is “unasked,” one that the “other world” asks of the author and of all African American people: “How does it feel to be 36

a problem?”53 This question, Du Bois asserts, is unasked in that his interrogators ask it indirectly, disguised as niceties or benign social quandaries. However, thinking of this through sound, the question that is “unasked” still exists, or its silence resounds and affects Du Bois to an even greater extent than the actual sounds of the actual question would. Du Bois responds to this muffled question with a silent smile and explains that he answers “seldom a word.”54 One can answer without saying anything. That is, silence is a response and does not represent nothingness. Instead, as Du Bois explains, the silently (un)asked question asked “half- hesitant[ly]” brings his blood to a boil. Du Bois laments that “instead of saying directly,” his accusers “eye [him] curiously or compassionately” and mask their own bigotry.55 This is much like how people use the phrase “the N word” to invoke the word “nigger” without actually saying it. By masking the cursed phrase yet making the meaning clear in the mind of the listener, you force them to make the referential connection and to say the word in their own head, thus clearing yourself of guilt in the communicative exchange.56 Du Bois is angered by this silenced question, which belittles and patronizes, that could instead be asked directly and could serve as a useful conversation starter about the most important topic of the Twentieth century. However, when his white acquaintances ask him how these “Southern outrages [must make his] blood boil” or they proclaim to “know an excellent colored man in [their] town,” they evade the conversation and free themselves of guilt through silence.57 Through this communicative move, Du Bois must interpret the question of “being a problem” in his own mind without the transmitter of the question having to utter the words.

The third chapter of Souls, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” can best be subtitled as “The Silence Chapter.” Du Bois effectively uses silence as a weapon and an accusation against Booker T. Washington and others who engaged in the “programme of 37

industrial education” as a means of pacifying the South.58 Booker T. Washington, whose wrote numerous autobiographies like Up from Slavery (1901), knew that assimilation was a performative act to some degree and would be key for the freed African Americans throughout the country. Du Bois calls Washington’s industrial campaign “a fascinating study of human life” in that it yoked “enthusiasm, unlimited energy and perfect faith” together with an appeasement strategy to create “a veritable Way of Life.”59 Du Bois offers in this chapter Frederick Douglass as a counterpoint example of someone who “still stood bravely for the ideals of his early manhood, -- ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms.”60 Washington was the African American leader ultimately to succeed Douglass. In discussing the relationship between and treatment of American Indians and African Americans, Washington states that “no white American ever thinks that any other race is wholly civilized until he wears the white man’s clothes, eats the white man’s food, speaks the white man’s language, and professes the white man’s religion.”61 Civilization is something worn on the body, ingested by the body, produced from the body, and ultimately inhabits the body spiritually. For Washington then, freed African

American needed to use their actions and their voices to showcase their desire to be accepted.

Therefore, Du Bois’ claim throughout this chapter that Washington’s work veritably silenced

African Americans works to cut down and discredit the viability and worth of Washington’s industrial program.

Focusing on Washington’s oral capabilities, Du Bois recalls how it “startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme after many decades of bitter complaint.”62

Washington “[spoke] against lynching, and in other ways has openly or silently set his influence against sinister schemes and unfortunate happenings.”63 While the previous chapter focused so strongly on legislators writing hasty bills, this essay on Washington highlights how his words 38

“spoken at Atlanta” in 1895 had the ability to “gain the sympathy and cooperation of the various elements comprising the white South.” These powerful words dubbed “The Atlanta

Compromise” inspire Du Bois to declare cynically that Washington is “certainly the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis.” Washington’s work “in gaining place and consideration in the North” involved a self-initiated vocabulary building in “the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism.”64

Du Bois speaks to Washington’s career, breaking the silence of the African American population under his influence and combatting the leader’s promoted program. Du Bois powerfully asserts that “the time is come when one may speak in all sincerity and utter courtesy of the mistakes and shortcomings of Mr. Washington’s career, as well as of his triumphs, without being thought captious or envious, and without forgetting that it is easier to do ill than well in the world.”65 It is apparent that Du Bois’ position allows him to break this silence, however, and the author acknowledges this fact. Due to the “public opinion of the nation,” African American bitter opposition to his industrious program was “largely silenced in outward expression” during

Washington’s heyday. The forceful silencing of people through public scrutiny of dissenting opinion is physically dangerous for the silenced, according to Du Bois. “Hushing” critics leads to silence “and paralysis of effort” for some, which is a word usage that suggests hushing to be a bacterial attack on body systems that control speech and movement.66 Hushing can also cause a neuropsychiatric disorder that leads “others to burst into speech so passionately and intemperately as to lose listeners.” In this same paragraph, Du Bois momentarily elevates reading and writing to assert that “[honest] and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched, -- criticism of writers by readers, -- this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.”67 Not being able to get this criticism out is poisonous to the body, 39

and hushing critics causes this poison to enter the veins of these dissidents. Writing about reading here is physically and emotionally a purgative act.

Du Bois elaborates on this hushing through economic analysis. Washington was ultimately a facilitator for the “rich and dominating North” that was “largely investing in

Southern enterprises” and required “peaceful cooperation” in order to maximize profit and reduce risk.68 While the “Negroes [naturally] resented, at first bitterly, signs of compromise which surrendered their civil and political rights,” they were forced to do so by the “national opinion [that recognized] Mr. Washington’s leadership.” Du Bois recognizes a heightened level of danger in Washington’s appeasement and silence program due to the increased contact with global markets, trade, and imperialism.69 Du Bois asserts: “[This] is an age when the more advanced races are coming in closer contact with the less developed races, and the race-feeling is therefore intensified; and Mr. Washington’s programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.”70 This was evident in the United States’ course “toward weaker and darker peoples in the West Indies, Hawaii, and the Philippines,” causing Du Bois to wonder

“where in the world we may go and be safe from lying and brute force?”71 Silence on these issues equates to acquiescence to conditions normalized. Washington’s program of thrift and self-respect counseled “a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run.”72 Du Bois warns that, even though the “other class of

Negroes who cannot agree with Mr. Washington has hitherto said little aloud” about these atrocities, it is “difficult” to believe that certain “representatives of this group […] can much longer by silent.”73

Resisting hushing and breaking silence is a patriotic act for Du Bois. Threatened by

“industrial slavery and civic death” and by “permanent legislation into a position of inferiority,” 40

Du Bois calls on every black man to “oppose such a course by all civilized methods.”74 Du Bois damns silence on a unified national level by proclaiming that “[we] have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”

Silence on issues like education for African Americans is like gangrene spreading on the throat of the United States, and it threatens to destroy progress “amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence.” While “the healing of this vast sore is progressing,” the nation might require “social surgery” to amputate this silence. This social procedure, according to Du Bois,

“will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment

American civilization will triumph.” The problem, however, is that these would-be surgeons,

“the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.”75 We could better think of silence, then, as an infectious form of necrosis, spreading from the victims good-meaning doctors mean to treat to the surgeons themselves, leaving them unwilling and unable to purge the national body of its deadly ailment. Silence, the result of historical hushing and subsequent self-reprimanding, affects its surroundings and utilizes them for its own benefit much like an echo uses surfaces. In this next section, we will turn more specifically to how the sonic and theoretical properties of sound, silence, and echoes help understand The Sorrow Songs’ echoing through American music.

Echoes of Untrue Dreams Echoing through the various sociological subjects discussed in Du Bois’ Souls is the musical thread of what African American roots music means to the American national identity.

Throughout Souls, Du Bois outlines four distinct types of African American music: African wails and chants, Afro-American religious folk music, slave songs, and Negro-themed American music (minstrel).76 In “The Sorrow Songs” chapter, Du Bois calls the Negro folk song “the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”77 This 41

powerful statement witnesses and reconciles with hundreds of years of oppression, trauma, and death in the African American community. However, it does so by explaining that music is a gift from African Americans to America; the gift-giving is a gesture with no monetary value attached to it or a presentation of goodwill and unity. Du Bois prefaces each chapter with musical notation, and scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Terry Hume Oliver, and Eric Sundquist have identified these tunes and analyzed what their invocations suggest.78 This chapter builds upon this work and that of scholars such as David Suisman and David Levering Lewis by analyzing Du Bois’ notion of “The Sorrow Songs” as an identity-forming tool in the nation- building endeavor that continued and intensified through the antebellum years and into the

American age of imperialism.

One of the most impactful terms Du Bois discusses in Souls is “double-consciousness.”

Du Bois elaborates on the Veil in this chapter and introduces the African American “double- consciousness,” a two-ness of being both American and Negro and born into “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.”79 Du Bois was probably introduced to this concept through his educational lineage traveling down from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Du Bois’ Harvard instructor William James. At a lecture read at the Masonic Temple in Boston in January 1842 (later titled The

Transcendentalist), Ralph Waldo Emerson used the phrase “double consciousness” in connection with religious faith to discuss the issues of Protestant work ethics.80 Emerson discusses the battle between knowledge and the soul, the practical and the ephemeral, the grounded and the transcendental, in order to highlight the inherent differences between The Materialist and The

Idealist. While the Materialist acknowledges that he is a victim of circumstances, the Idealist asserts that he creates his own circumstances.81 According to Emerson, both fail to realize their 42

shortsightedness in their relations to the physical and the spiritual worlds. Emerson offers up the

Transcendentalist as a third option, closest to the Buddhist, who instead detaches himself from an action that needs to be done, knowing that it is not the actor who is important but rather the action, the gift and not the giver.82 Therefore, for Emerson at this time, “double consciousness” was really a reductive binary leaving two opposites that unfortunately found no “greater disposition to reconcile themselves.”83

Du Bois’ invocation of “double-consciousness” works quite differently, however. Cornel

West has usefully explained that, for Emerson, “being an American was not a problem but rather a unique occasion to exercise human powers to solve problems.” Conversely, Du Bois’ sense of double-consciousness “views this unique occasion as the cause of a problem” and importantly locates human agency within its real American hierarchical power structures of race and class.84

Emerson’s transcendental solution to life’s problems is to “screw our courage to patience and truth, and without complaint, or even with good-humor, await our turn of action in the Infinite

Counsels.”85 Du Bois does confer with Emerson’s transcendental approach here to solving problems, but the problem Du Bois addresses is specifically that of the “color line,” something born from the issues of human thought and virtue Emerson pondered some sixty years prior. Du

Bois argues throughout Souls that The Sorrow Songs are the eternal sonic legacy of African

Americans that will testify in the Infinite Counsels as to the merits of the race. The Sorrow Songs echo through America’s past and can still be heard reverberating in 1903, waiting to be acted upon by those Infinite Counsels.

Traveling parallel to the echoing of The Sorrow Songs are other sound waves and disruptions from the past. For example, Du Bois presents the problem of Prejudice as a ghost, a haunting – what could be called an echo – and as something supposedly killed by Emancipation 43

that continues to dwell amongst the American people. Capitalizing and thus giving pronoun identities and histories to words like Freedom and Liberty, Du Bois retells the battle between

Freedom and Prejudice with Liberty as a prisoner of the war. In this tale, God “had Freedom in his right hand” as his weapon and/or shield, and we can imagine that the Devil then must have been wielding Prejudice in his attack. African Americans cheered on God “[in] song and exhortation,” and when it was clear that God has prevailed, like the “wearied Israelites,” the enslaved population of the United States sang in a “wild carnival of blood and passion” that

“God has bought your liberty!” Whether the purchase was made through blood as money or through the actual investment of funds into a war campaign, God had fought for and won

Freedom back from Prejudice who had thus been slain. However, as an epilogue to this grand epic, Du Bois dreads that even after “forty years of renewal and development, […] the swarthy spectre sits in its accustomed seat at the Nation’s feast.” The echo of Prejudice must be met with the songs that cheer on God if Prejudice is to be killed. However, as Prejudice continues to inhabit America in ghostly form, so do The Sorrow Songs, echoing on in pursuit of Freedom and

Liberty.

Sometimes, Du Bois discusses social and cultural problems amidst the African American population as echoes of slavery. In the “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece” chapter, Du Bois dissects the “plague-spot in sexual relations,” or “easy marriage and easy separation,” by first defining it as “the plain heritage of slavery.” After reviewing marriage practices and taboos on plantations, Du Bois explains that “this widespread custom of two centuries has not been eradicated in thirty years.”86 In sonic terminology, the amplitude of slavery’s echo is so great that its ability to sustain and resist decay promises to continue for decades to come. 44

Du Bois locates the source of this echo in the African American voice while the cause of that utterance was the inculcate distain whites had for the former slaves. This prejudice, which the learned explain as “the natural defence of culture against barbarism,” led to “the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate.”87 Haunted by the specter of prejudice,

African Americans whispered amongst themselves: “Lo! we are diseased and dying […] we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve?”

The echo of this utterance returns to them from the Nation, and this echo “enforced this self- criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men.” The Nation functions as a canyon wall, reflecting these self-disparaging statements back upon the African American community. Du Bois blames yet does not blame the African

American community for this ingrained sense of degradation. He recognizes it as a cancerous effect of slavery that multiplies and grows through the years and generations. In this unnatural way, whispers become magnified in intensity and their sustain times are lengthened through time. Instead of diminishing over time as most effects and sounds do, this echo of prejudice is magnified by the Nation acting as an amplifier for African Americans’ self-questioning and lowering of ideals.

Du Bois names this moment of crisis “the time of Sturm und Drang,” a time sonically punctuated by “the sound of conflict, the burning of body and rending of soul.”88 Part of his work in Souls is to find a way out of this haunted era. Du Bois preliminarily asserts that the

“power of the ballot” is needed “in sheer self-defence, -- else what shall save us from a second slavery?”89 However, voting rights are not enough to stop the echo of prejudice. The solutions he poses include “the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, 45

higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts.” Only through “work, culture, [and] liberty” can the United States as a nation realize “the ideal of brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race,” as in the “American people.” And it is here that Du Bois prophesizes that The Sorrow

Songs are the key to American unity.

However, Du Bois posits this problem of national unity binarily, excluding other minority groups that also face oppression within the nation’s domestic and imperial borders. Du Bois’ greater hope for the American Republic is that “some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack.”90 There is no mention here of the

Asian, Eastern European, continental American, or Indigenous peoples that also faced extreme forms of racial, cultural, and political prejudice in the United States. Du Bois does mention the

“darker ones” that are affected in Asia, Africa, and the islands of the sea in his opening of “Of the Dawn of Freedom.” However, these remarks are made in regards to the global plague of imperialism in which the United States and its white male leaders take major roles. In this instance of discussing only two world-races, Du Bois’ use of “we the darker ones” refers to

“American Negroes.” In connection to this assertion, Du Bois boldly asserts that “there is no true

American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave.” While Du Bois immediately follows this statement with a qualifier that “the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and

African,” he clearly announces the superiority of African American music ways over that of indigenous peoples’ sounds. Du Bois rhetorically denies that America will be poorer if it replaces its “vulgar music with the soul of The Sorrow Songs,” for “black men” and their cultural productions “seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.”91 The elevation of African American music ways above other disparaged minorities in the United States is a prerequisite maneuver for Du Bois. The glorification of The 46

Sorrow Songs as a national cultural production which every citizen and unitarily celebrate is Du

Bois’ ultimate hope. It is in this celebration of cultural achievement that the echo of prejudice might be muffled by the euphonious, white-noise-like effect of applause and cheering for African

American singers and songs.

Finally, this chapter examines how the sounds and echoes of The Sorrow Songs took part in Du Bois’ project of cultural nationalism. Du Bois dedicates an entire chapter (the final chapter of the collection) to these songs with the goal of changing American identity. Instead of being rooted in a vulgar and ugly European past, Du Bois asserts that the United States should find its beauty and its redemption in the songs of the American South sung by bodies reflecting echoing torments of the land and its peoples’ pasts. However, just as he asserts that the United States will become a nation where “two world-races” cooperate and join together, Du Bois overlooks and ultimately erases the cultural productions of other world races inhabiting America. This section begins with an examination of the scholarly, cultured interest in African American music as a folk production before turning to Du Bois’ argument for its adoption as America’s heritage.

Cultural Nationalism and Indigeneity in American Sound The question “what is American music” echoes through the history of the United States in much the same way The Sorrow Songs do themselves. Spurred on by questions of the United

States’ breaking away from the British empire and its reliance on Germanic cultural productions for culture and entertainment, the search for a uniquely American music brought about numerous, exhausting debates over the subject.92 Even by the mid-Nineteenth century, musicians and scholars were baffled by the multiplicity and non-uniformity of musics in these States that were supposed to be “United.” In the 1860s, prominent English music critic Henry Fothergill

Chorley stated his plan to “attempt some outline of the forms of music in America.” However, upon further reflection, Chorley admitted finding “such a heap of disconnected elements – 47

French, German, English-Puritan, and Negro; music of times old and times new, without any present individuality, that I forbore to enter into a maze of which no living person seems as yet to hold the clue.”93 Cultural historian Ann Ostendorf explains that “[a]t least to some degree, some shared aesthetics existed throughout the nation by 1860, yet claims of regional loyalty if not peculiarity remained divisive within the music culture.”94 Clearly, the decision to explore

“American music” required a larger consensus than one man like Chorley was able to provide.

This section of the chapter locates a nationalistic crisis in these debates over the

“indigenization” of American musics, a term which ethnomusicologist Bonnie Wade explains as the process by which “new cultural ideas or expressive objects may be adopted but made or used as something that functions within the existing structures, institutions, or values of a society.”95 I contend that, in synchronization with contemporaneous increases in legislative restrictions, the burgeoning of the commercial music industry, and the advent of new academic societies,96 these debates were symptomatic of and contributed to the overlooking, destroying, and forgetting of indigenous peoples and their cultural products in favor of a national memory project. In particular, academic societies and their journals, through their editors-in-chief, contributors, and members, sought to define which American cultural and musical histories and practices needed to be understood and remembered and which did not. It is in these journals, and in Du Bois’ responsive work, we can find the project for the indigenization of American music ways.

The university, its professors, and their publications, even when criticizing the status quo, are facets of the national power structure. These institutions, agents, and archives of acquired knowledge represent the state-recognized forms of intelligence, validity, and power. The political and the academic have long been connected in the United States as legislative acts allowed for the creation of many institutions of knowledge. President Andrew Jackson accepted British 48

scientist James Smithson’s charitable trust to the nation in 1836, leading to the creation of the

United States National Museum and the Smithsonian Institute in 1846, “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”97 The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, helped to establish colleges that, “without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, [were] to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions of life.”98 The Congressional establishment of the Bureau of Ethnology in 1879 (later the Bureau of American Ethnology in

1897 and now the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History), marked the burgeoning of anthropological endeavors between politicians and academics. These concordant apparatuses of power decide which cultural histories to remember and which to elide in favor of the national memory project maintained in museums and archives.

Academic agents working in these fields sometimes disagreed about which histories to record. Franz Boas, docent in anthropology at Clark University in 1888, was one of the first editors and a founding member of the American Folk-Lore Society and its journal, The Journal of American Folk-Lore. In one of his earliest publications about the poetry and music of North

American aboriginal tribes, Boas asserts that “[n]o people is more fond of music than the

Eskimos, the inhabitants of the extreme north. Though most explorers affirm that their music is nothing but a monotonous humming, [Boas’ fieldwork in Baffin Land] will show that this is not true.”99 Matthew Frye Jacobson observes that Boas was questioning how “savage cultural practices that evolutionists treated as imperfect approximations of the presumed European pinnacle were in fact unrelated developments, independent of and separate from those practices 49

that set the Eurocentric evolutionary standard.”100 Boas respected the art of non-European, indigenous peoples by recognizing its uniqueness and not forcing it fit a mold of cultural value.

Similarly, in the 1888 inaugural issue of The Journal of American Folk-Lore, editors such as Franz Boas and others professed their wishes “that thorough studies were made of negro music and songs.” These songs, according to the editors, “present interesting and important psychological problems, connected with the history of a race who, for good or ill, are henceforth an indissoluble part of the body politic of the United States.”101 Understanding the songs of

African Americans might lead to a better sympathetic view of the psychological mindset that accompanies economic and social strife. In discussing the economic disparity of the African

American population, Du Bois later invoked an image of unfortunate but necessary racial conflict as experienced through class relations. Du Bois asserts that “the rise of a nation, the pressing forward of a social class, means a bitter struggle, a hard and soul-sickening battle with the world such as few of the more favored classes know or appreciate.”102 This struggle between unfavored classes and with “the world” means African Americans must compete against other races for position and opportunity. In this “soul-sickening battle,” indigenous peoples of the

United States also experienced prejudice in economic terms such as losing land rights. Editors like Boas hoped that an understanding of this kind of strife might come through analyzing and listening to the songs of African Americans.

Alongside that desire was also another to document “the traditions of the Indian tribes” as these “will be generally regarded as the most promising and important” cultural artifacts.103 Boas powerfully states that “[o]ne race cannot with impunity erase the beliefs and legends of its predecessor. To destroy these is to deprive the imagination of its natural food; to neglect them is to incur the reproach of descendants, who will wonder at and lament the dulness [sic] and 50

barbarism of their fathers.”104 In a similar tone as describing African Americans as a race “for good or ill” part of the body politic, Boas yearns for a “complete representation of the savage mind in its rudeness as well as its intelligence, its licentiousness as well as its fidelity.”105

Cultural historians and folklorists in the American Folk-Lore Society, including other members such as Samuel L. Clemens, Joel Chandler Harris, and Alice C. Fletcher (with her address listed as Winnebago Indian Agency, Nebraska), purported desire for knowing where peoples came from, what they experienced, and how those stories lived on. For Du Bois in 1903, the greatest way to access this African American cultural memory was through The Sorrow Songs.

There was substantial interest in discovering, recording, researching, and archiving

African American music forms well before Souls’ publication in 1903. One of the performance groups that most directly spurned this interest was the original Fisk Jubilee Singers (1871-1878).

As some of the first in the line of African American singers to undergo international touring and to become cultural ambassadors in the process, the Jubilee Singers played a major role in shaping how American music was defined both inside and out of the national borders. In the 1870s, the

Fisk Jubilee Singers set out on a world tour, bringing the sounds of the South to England,

Germany, India, Japan, and other nations, “circumnavigating the globe”106 and reversing the

“ungenteel” aspects of Black Atlantic history with their songs.107 German audiences overwhelmingly praised the Fisk singers, meeting them with “fraternal heartiness” and rejoicing

“in this unique instrumentality for bringing gospel truth to the formalists and the materialists whom it was so difficult to reach.”108 Removed from the restricted, racially marked space of the

South, the Fisk singers were able to capture an ecumenical truth through the power of gospel song that spoke to a real potential for fraternalism. Unfortunately, the open wounds of slavery and racism proved too painful back in the United States for their music to overcome. Frederick 51

Loudin, bass singer and group leader in 1890, lamenting the loss of potential equality and fraternal love, admitted that the Jubilee Singers realized upon their return that they were “no longer free from that prejudice… which we had not met with in any other quarter of the globe.”109 Du Bois was incessantly invested in The Sorrow Songs, and Souls is Du Bois’ symphonic response to this call for the explicating of and advocating for these sounds.

However, Du Bois’ approach to promoting The Sorrow Songs takes up indigeneity and the lived experiences of Native Americans in confusing if not at times troubling ways. Du Bois begins and ends the second chapter, "Of The Dawn Of Freedom" with an important elaboration on the "color-line," defining it best as "the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in

Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."110 This explication of the Twentieth century's problem reveals that colonialism and imperialism are the modes through which the color-line is reified. By linking the history of the Black Atlantic and slavery in the Americas with the United States' imperialistic expansion further into the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, Du Bois both builds a multiracial alliance between the black and Asian diasporas and implicates perpetrators of skin color hierarchy. Du Bois recognizes that, in all areas of the world, through

Western influence, lighter-skinned people have secured a place for themselves at the top of social and political structures, using religion, caste, pedigree, and other forms of justification in their making of a social identity.

This struggle between and among skin shades, however, positioning for civil rights opportunities, often takes place on stages where culture and economy meet. For Du Bois, The

Sorrow Songs were key to reaching a level of respect and even admirability among the African

American population’s lighter-skinned counterparts. The beautiful, painful, historical music had the power to bring the nation together under a sonic banner of reconciliation and unity. However, 52

this vision of unity in Du Bois’ hands at times found a binary approach to American racial and cultural identity most useful, even when colonialism and its unfortunate subjects were duly noted. For instance, in “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois assert that the indigeneity of

African American songs to the United States warrants the irrefutable right to be internationally representative of the nation and its people. Du Bois continually asserts throughout Souls that

America has “naturalized” its feelings toward African Americans, becoming “naturally skeptical as to Negro ability.” Du Bois further explains that “most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is listen to evidence.”111

Following the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision conferring citizenship upon any natively born person regardless of race, Du Bois engages in the charged discussion regarding what is natural to America, what is imported, what strengthens the nation and what codifies a threat to American identity. For Du Bois, nothing is more natural and strengthening of the

American character than a music created and fostered at home.

In the chapter “Of the Black Belt,” Du Bois takes the reader on a metaphysical train ride through Georgia, and along the way, he accounts for the land’s history and its peoples. This section is one of the few in Souls where Du Bois recognizes and discusses the indigenous “Indian nations” of antiquity. Du Bois explains that “this that we pass as we near Atlanta is the ancient land of the Cherokees, -- that brave Indian nation which strove so long for its fatherland, until

Fate and the United States Government drove them beyond the Mississippi.” Du Bois’ history personifies fate, giving it a proper capitalization, and creates a tag team effort with the United

States that handicaps and ultimately defeats the Cherokees in forcing them to relocate. Du Bois complains to the reader that “if you wish to ride with me you must come into the ‘Jim Crow Car’ and that “the discomfort [of such a system] lies chiefly in the hearts” of African Americans 53

forced to ride in second-class conditions. However, he does so simultaneously as he acknowledges his ability to continually pass through the area from which native Indian nations were removed. As the Jim Crow car passes through Northern Georgia, Du Bois again reminds the reader that “this is the land of the Creek Indians; and a hard time the Georgians had to seize it.”112 If African Americans are able to call themselves “Georgians,” then Du Bois implicates them here in the project of manifest destiny that barreled over these lands and peoples with train tracks and destruction. Du Bois gives his account of how the Cotton Kingdom was formed, linking its history back to the financial Panic of 1837, “which Jackson bequeathed to Van Buren,

[which] turned the planters from the impoverished lands of Virginia, the Carolinas, and east

Georgia, toward the West.” Du Bois continues: “The Indians were removed to Indian Territory, and settlers poured into these coveted lands to retrieve their broken fortunes. For a radius of a hundred miles about Albany, stretched a great fertile land, luxuriant with forests of pine, oak, ash, hickory, and poplar.”113 Clearly, whether those “settlers” were white or black or any skin shade in-between, the Native Americans were forced to relocate while those representing the

United States were allowed to inhabit the land they desired.

Du Bois later recalls the “fierce tragedy” of the Second Seminole War (1835-1842) and the “Indian-Negro chieftain” Osceola. The mixed-blood warrior rose “in the swamps of Florida, vowing vengeance,” and “his war-cry reached the red Creeks of Dougherty, and their war-cry rang from the Chattahoochee to the sea.” The band of Native Americans “fought beneath the tall trees, until the war-cry was hushed and the Indians glided back into the west.” Du Bois juxtaposes this scene with the coming of the black slaves and the daily “clank of chained feet marching from Virginia and Carolina to Georgia.” Du Bois amplifies “the songs of the callous, the wail of the motherless, and the muttered curses of the wretched echoes from the Flint to the 54

Chickasawhatchee.”114 The effect of this amplification is the sounds and the noises of the dark- skinned peoples of the United States blending in reverse crescendos on the music staff of

American history. However, this again leaves the Native Americans diminishing into a historical narrative while African Americans, trudging on with feet unchained from the South up to the

North, proceed into the future. The Sorrow Songs, the echo of a nation’s untrue dreams, are part of this narrative and resound with the purpose of finally defining a music that can be called

American.

“Of Our Spiritual Strivings” concludes with a call for “human brotherhood” through an exchange of characteristics and heritage between whites and blacks, asserting that “there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave” and that it can replace the

“vulgar music” of white America with the goal of bettering the republic. Du Bois uses the supposed natural musical talent and contributions of African Americans as proof of their worthiness, equality, and even superiority in ability to forge an American identity for the nation.

He presciently calls for an erasure of “the color line” through a realization of mutual ignorance, of a return to simple faith, and through an embrace of America’s best identity beyond and in spite of the damned color line. Du Bois dubs the music of the African American slave the “spirit” of America, which is a country that has been reduced to a “dusty desert of dollars and smartness” that yearns to realize its bastion of “simple faith and reverence” in the African American soul.115

In this way, The Sorrow Songs are the oasis so direly needed in the desert that has become

America’s spiritual landscape.

Du Bois’ various descriptions of The Sorrow Songs’ power work toward not only glorification but even idolization. In “The Sorrow Songs” chapter, Du Bois calls these songs “a haunting echo” through which “the soul of the black slave spoke to men.”116 These echoes 55

manifested and formed the blood-red bricks of Jubilee Hall; they even begat the cosmos as “[o]ut of them rose for [Du Bois] morning, noon, and night, bursts of wonderful melody.”117 Du Bois declares that the “Negro folk-song – the rhythmic cry of the slave – stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.”118 Here, Du Bois not only uses a singular adverbial modifier for The Sorrow

Songs’ place among other musics, but he qualifies and ranks them with The Sorrow Songs at the pinnacle. Du Bois elevates the “Negro Minstrels” of the Fisk Jubilee Singers by regaling how

“their songs conquered till they sang across the land and across the sea […] and brought back a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to found Fisk University.”119 Figuratively, the songs crusade across the Black Atlantic and bring back retribution and bounty for years of misery and slavery.

The Sorrow Songs create and destroy, inspire and command, and represent an all-powerful force that haunts the globe, traveling transnationally across the former channels of slave ships and over the current tracks of imperialism. Their mission and their right is a complete dominion over the sonic landscape.

Du Bois detaches himself from the creation of The Sorrow Songs, but attaches himself to the songs as an African American living beyond the Veil and as a sociologist. He humbly asserts that he knows “little of music and can say nothing in technical phrase,” even though Du Bois was both a classical music singer and a member of Fisk’s Mozart Society.120 However, Du Bois claims that he does “know something of men, and knowing them, [he knows] that these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world.”121 Whereas most of the African American population, according to Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth” theory, was not articulate, these songs that sprung forth from the bodies and souls that struggled through strife achieve clarity and precision through musicality. Articulation does not mean understandability, however. Du Bois tells how 56

his grandfather’s grandmother “often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees” with lyrics like “do ba-na co-ba, ge-ne me, ge-ne me!”122 These lyrics, which over hundreds of years have “travelled down to us,” are then sung by Du Bois and other African Americans who,

“knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, [know] well the meaning of its music.” Therefore, Du Bois and the other people whose bodies serve as cavernous walls that echo these haunting melodies are not required to understand the meaning of the words. Rather, their task, like the hills listening to the sea, is to respond when receiving a sonic message by helping to sustain it through time and space. The Sorrow Songs themselves, not the singers of the songs or even the lyrics alone, are articulate, achieving the goal Du Bois hopes will eventually reach the entire African American population.

The Sorrow Songs are dualistically inspired and meet the requirements of what academic societies like the American Folk-Lore Society were searching. Du Bois admits that these songs

“tell us in these eager days that life was joyous to the black slave, careless and happy.”123

However, even though the specter of Prejudice would prefer that the world remember slavery in these ignorant and innocent patriarchal ways, Du Bois and The Sorrow Songs will not allow it.

Du Bois reminds us that The Sorrow Songs are also “the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment; they tell us of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.”124 In The Sorrow Songs’ articulation lives and speaks opinions and feelings that went unvoiced and hushed for hundreds of years. The

Sorrow Songs present a full-scale view of the lives of African American slaves,125 but this view is presented through synesthesia with the sounds inspiring the mental image. In this way, articulation relies on not only the power of speech but also the ability for words to connect to image that convey meaning connotatively and sympathetically. 57

Du Bois repeats throughout this chapter that “the slave spoke to the world” through The

Sorrow Songs. However, these slaves speak through the sounds of the songs, not the lyrics. The lyrics “naturally veil” the message and leave it “half articulate.”126 The reason for this is that

“[w]ords and meaning have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment.” The words of these songs unfortunately “conceal much of real poetry and meaning beneath conventional theology and unmeaning rhapsody.” Du

Bois’ disbelief in the meaning attached to words is accompanied by an understanding that sounds independent of language can embody or inspire meaning and translation as well. He notes how the “sudden wild thunderstorms of the South awed and impressed the Negroes, – at times the rumbling seemed to them mournful, at times imperious.” The sounds that moved Crown Princess

Victoria to tears connotatively carried the history of African American strife; the lyrics to

“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” while telling of sorrow and tribulation, do not and cannot do that history justice. Rather, sound achieves articulation in moments where words fail to capture meaning and history. Du bois asserts that Bible phrases were especially malleable, treating the religious content of the verses as extremely powerful substance that was historically stifled by the “circumstances of the gathering, […] the rhythm of the songs, and the limitations of allowable thought” in Christian circles.127 The Sorrow Songs translate the landscape and mindscape into the soundscape via a transformative process that occurred in the mouths of slaves. This process relies on sound and not lyric or meaning to serve as the catalyst for the transformative process from desired meaning to connotative understanding.

Ultimately, Du Bois concludes that through “all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things.”128 This justice comes in the forms of death and judgment. In this final section of Souls, Du Bois continues to term phrases sonically, 58

using The Sorrow Songs as an active agent of change and influence. These songs “breathe” hope, and assumptions grow “silently” regarding race relations. Du Bois admonishes that “the assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of to-day are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving.” He damns this concept because such “an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men.” Here, Du Bois drives home his argument for indigeneity and this cultural nationalistic view of African American citizenship by exclaiming that “[b]efore the Pilgrims landed we were here.” Du Bois asserts that African Americans have “woven [themselves] with the very warp and woof of this nation, – [they] fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled [their] blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.” As the final nail in

Prejudice’s coffin, Du Bois posits: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?” With this, Du Bois indubitably showcases how the American landscape is the African

American landscape, the sounds of America are those of African Americans, and that indigeneity is forever tied to the founding of the nation at hand in the conversation. The Sorrow

Songs, whether scholars in the American Folk-Lore Society thought it “good or ill,” are the songs of the United States because the United States would not exist as the same nation without their haunting articulations.

Conclusions Du Bois’ freeing of The Sorrow Songs from the bodies that produce them results in a transcendental move toward the eternal and away from personal ownership. This is not to say, however, that Du Bois and others simply abandoned the prospects of capitalizing on the expanding forms of roots music like ragtime, blues, or jazz. For Du Bois, “The Sorrow Songs” as a commercial product was a hopeful goal that, through racial solidarity in the form of patronage 59

and financial support, had the potential to be realized in the early 1900s. Buddy Bolden, the

African American cornetist known for inventing the “big four” syncopated drum rhythm and essentially fronting the entire birth of jazz, was the first man offered a chance to record a ragtime record. Unfortunately, due to his own personal sense of paranoia that would later lead to a lifelong mental institution stay, Bolden rejected the offer. Stunned by the refusal, record companies took note from Bolden and held off latching onto the new “jazz” movement for ten years. In 1917, fourteen years after the publication of Souls and two years before the unofficial begin of the Harlem Renaissance, the Original Dixieland Jass Band, an all-white jazz group under cornetist Nick LaRocca, pounced on the second opportunity to become the first recorded jazz orchestra. ODJB then went on to tour the world as the “Creators of Jazz,” even spouting that

African Americans had nothing to do with the creation of jazz music and that “the Negro had never made a music form equal to that of whites.”129 LaRocca was able to capitalize on an economic market that Du Bois struggled to get the African American community to support for years.

Throughout his life, Du Bois struggled with convincing fellow African Americans to support their own startup businesses. Even though he differed from Booker T. Washington’s focus on finances as a benchmark of success, Du Bois sternly fought for “Negro-owned” businesses, personally investing thousands of dollars in his magazines (The Moon Illustrated

Weekly, The Horizon, The Crisis) and Harry Pace’s Black Swan Records, a record company that

(falsely) claimed to feature only Negro performers. Du Bois hoped that, through mutual consumption, enjoyment, and reverence of roots music as a product of African American history, business intellect, and artistic skill, the music would be elevated to its rightful place as the aural representation of the American spirit. In 1912, Du Bois met with “the Father of the Blues” W.C. 60

Handy and with Pace to form Handy Sheet Music. Handy, Pace, and Du Bois saw the economic opportunity to produce music “of, by, and for African Americans,” but all three were disappointed to find that nobody was patronizing their products. Handy wrote: “I was under the impression that these Negro musicians would jump at the chance to patronize one of their own publishers. They didn’t… The Negro musicians simply played the hits of the day… They followed the parade.”130 African Americans were not supporting their own music commercially due to fear of economic conflicts both on and off the stage and due to sheer popular culture.

However, for Du Bois, Handy, and Pace, this racial betrayal was a fatal wound altogether for both the fledgling Negro-owned music industry and for musical American patriotism.

In a 1926 Crisis essay titled “Criteria of Negro Art,” Du Bois articulates how both whites and African Americans use art for propaganda, but only whites seem to elevate their own productions in terms of physically attending concerts, financially supporting companies and products, and promoting upcoming artists socially. Du Bois sternly locates the African American problem in the community’s lack of confidence and cultural sense of shamefulness. Du Bois explains: “If a colored man wants to publish a book, he has got to get a white publisher and a white newspaper to say it is great; and then you and I say so. We must come to the place where the work of art when it appears is reviewed and acclaimed by our own free and unfettered judgment.”131 The music industry in 1926 was going through monumental changes with the move from sheet music to records to radio domination. This theme of criticizing the African

American community functioned through revealing the hypocritical popular culture biases both on the parts of whites and blacks. While white audiences would support black performers, the music and the show needed to fit a certain stereotype. And, while African Americans bought music and bemoaned social inequality, they refused to invest financially in music outside the 61

white-dominated popular culture. Du Bois would continue to argue this through the 1930s both in his personal writing and through The Crisis.

This was one of Du Bois’ primary concerns in Souls. Du Bois laments the “mass of music in which the novice may easily lose himself and never find the real Negro melodies,” deploring yet recognizing the economic success of Stephen Foster’s “Christy’s Minstrels” group and his minstrel tunes like “Camptown Races” (1850) , “Old Folks at Home” (1851), and “My Old

Kentucky Home” (1853).132 The narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an

Ex-Colored Man (1912) later calls Souls a “remarkable book” that faithfully depicts “the life, the ambitions, the struggles, and the passions of those of their race who are striving to break the narrow limits of traditions,” with those traditions being rooted in minstrel performance.133 Scott

Herring suggests that Souls asks a white audience to recognize the worth and the humanity of

African Americans in spite of minstrelsy while it asks a black audience to recognize and respect their rich heritage and not mock it through popular performance.134 While The Sorrow Songs have lived on with the help of mainstream white appropriation, those minstrel traditions remain alive and the specter of Prejudice maintains a grip on musical productions and national musical identity. In the end, due to the lack of economic support for roots music by African Americans specifically, The Sorrow Songs would not replace the “vulgar music” of white America but, instead, be adopted, manipulated, watered down, marketed, and thoroughly appropriated by white America with its roots obscured throughout history. However, if we consider that these tones, melodies, and songs function as representations of African American history, we can see how they are self-fulfilling in continually asking the nation to confront its history of racism, toil, and passion for freedom. In this way, The Sorrow Songs are reincarnated and reinforced through the imitation of their form with every new musical production, and the message of freedom 62

carried inside them is forever engrained in American life, though perhaps perversely and in arguably tainted forms.

63

Chapter Two: Assimilation and Patriotic Anthems in Israel Zangwill’s The Melting-Pot

In Chapter One, I argued that music can function as a powerful tool for cultural nationalism in its ability to reconcile differences between racial and ethnic groups. However, this unification is sometimes achieved by locating a difference in another group within the nation that is uniform among those at which the nationalistic project is aimed. W.E.B. Du Bois’ The

Souls of Black Folk captures both of these sentiments in its glorification of The Sorrow Songs as

America’s heritage and its simultaneous, hierarchical degrading of Indigenous musics. Today, we can most easily see the effect of this hierarchical approach to cultural and national artifacts and soundscapes in the genre classification of Native American bands. While blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, and hip-hop genres either stand on their own without a national adjective or are associated with African American roots, Native American bands such as Lakota Thunder are classified under the amorphous, strangely inclusive, strangely exclusive “World Music” category. In Chapter Two, I will examine music’s ability beyond unification through differentiation. To wit, sometimes music incinerates groups and their differences and remolds them all into a new amalgam. In this way, there is no struggle between groups within the nation and no sublimation of one group in favor of another. Instead, all members of the nation are forged together in a crucible of music. The resulting forged nation is then only pitted against other nations in a contest for musical and, therefore, national superiority. The turn-of-the-century text that best took up this crucible metaphor and the topic of assimilation through music is Israel

Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot.

Israel Zangwill, a Jewish-British playwright active from the late 1890s until his death in

1926, wrote a play about the amalgamation of races, ethnicities, and religions in New York City titled The Melting Pot (1909). The protagonist, a Russian pogrom escapee and aspiring 64

professional violinist named David Quixano, writes a symphony with the purpose of catalytically smelting together Jews, the lower classes, and the generally disenfranchised in a crucible of music. Recognizing that the American sociopolitical avenue toward citizenship is fraught with tension, ambiguity, and denial for many, David offers musical affect, community, and performance as alternative paths to belonging and citizenship. Written in the wake of President

McKinley’s imperial economic and military actions in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, The

Melting Pot consciously addresses the disparities separating the United States from other nations, and nativist Americans from other resident subjects. The play is perhaps even more reflective of

Governor and later President Theodore Roosevelt’s speeches on the “strenuous life” and

“Americanism,” doctrines that prescribed and demanded particular performative modes of citizenship. Politicians and their constituents inscribed these sentiments in the Immigration Acts of 1903 and 1907 in their creation of restricted classes of “defective persons.” In my analysis, I take seriously that the play was first staged in Washington D.C. with President Theodore

Roosevelt in attendance, and that Israel Zangwill dedicated the published script to him “in respectful recognition of his strenuous struggle against the forces that threaten to shipwreck the great republic which carries mankind and its fortunes.” My focus on The Melting Pot’s self- awareness as a piece of cultural diplomacy will reveal much about cultural exchange and performative modes of representation. Hopefully, my emphasis on music and composition as a form of cultural diplomacy will reveal the hidden importance of soundscapes in the metaphor of the American crucible.

As is described in Zangwill’s original promptbook, the cast of The Melting Pot includes

David the “Jewish Musician,” his uncle Mendel, his uncle’s Yiddish-speaking mother Frau

Quixano, “their household help” from Ireland named Kathleen O’Reilly, the “unemployed 65

millionaire” Quincy Davenport Jr., Quincy’s “orchestra conductor” Herr Pappelmeister, a

“Russian official” Baron Revendal, “his second wife” the Baroness, and “her step-daughter”

Vera.1 The New and Revised edition of the script, published by Macmillan first in November

1914 and reissued again in 1915 and 1916, includes a “Settlement Servant” character who

Zangwill did not originally credit.2 The Melting Pot is presented in four acts. Act One takes place in the living room of the Quixanos at five o’clock on an afternoon in February. The setting for

Act Two is the same, but the month is March. Act Three is located in Miss Revendal’s room at the settlement house on an afternoon in April. The final Act is on the roof garden of the settlement house on the evening of the Fourth of July.

The musical program for The Melting Pot varied by performance, yet it seems to have maintained two consistent interludes. The play’s Overture was a German Romantic opera piece, shifting by show between Carl Gottlieb Reissiger’s “The Mill on the Cliff (Die Felsenmühle)”

(1831) and Otto Nicolai’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor (Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor)”

(1850). Reissiger’s overture is played at a quick pace with furious variation in intensity and instrumentation, moving between powerful, driving drum-heavy sections to tension-filled brass and woodwind movements. Nicolai’s overture is very different; it begins with tremulous, sweeping strings and wind instruments that transform into crescendos at a more moderate pace.

The qualities that both pieces share is a mood of powerful anticipation, beauty, and strength, a mood to match David’s sentiment for America. Similarly, the song opening Act Four varied by show between a piece from Jacques Offenbach’s French Romantic opera The Tales of Hoffmann

(Les contes d’Hoffmann) (1880) and a selection from Giacomo Puccini’s Italian Romantic opera

La Bohème (1896). However, the songs opening Acts Two and Three were seemingly consistent:

Robert Schumann’s German Romantic “Träumerei (Dreaming)” (1839) and John Walter 66

Bratton’s “An American Abroad”, a Tin Pan Alley tune ostensibly written for Zangwill’s show and one of which no recording exists.3 “Träumerei,” the interlude that marks the growth and development of David’s symphony and the relationship between him and Vera, is a solo piano piece played at a moderate tempo in the key of F. In the early 1800s, German composers wrote in the key of F when they wanted to create a mood of calm, complaisance, peace, joy, or religious sentiment.4 The show always finished with the American anthem “My Country ‘tis of Thee”

(1831).

The Quixano family lives on New York City’s Lower East Side, and Mendel sustains the house by instructing who he calls “[b]rainless, earless, thumb-fingered Gentile” children in piano lessons.5 After five o’clock on one snowy February evening, Vera Revendal, a gentile Russian revolutionary emigrant who operates a local settlement house, visits the Quixanos in hopes of acquiring David’s musical services. However, it is upon visiting their home that Vera realizes for the first time that David is Jewish. This tension between Russian gentile and Jew is thus introduced in Act One through Vera’s apprehension and bigotry and through David’s recalling of traumatic memories of the Kishineff pogroms. The play’s central theme of overcoming strife and difference through the adoption of a new identity as Americans also comes to the foreground in the first act as David and Vera share their mutual experiences of emigration. In Act II, Vera brings Quincy Davenport and his privately hired conductor named Herr Pappelmeister to the

Quixano home to meet David. Both Quincy and Pappelmeister are similarly surprised to learn that the great composer David is a Jew, and both must work through their prejudice. It is only when Pappelmeister begins reading through and internalizing David’s composition that he overcomes his prejudgments and agreed to conduct the symphony. In Act III, Vera is visited by her father, Baron Revendal, and her step-mother the Baroness, both of whom still reside in 67

Russia. After long exchanges between the Revendals, Quincy, and Pappelmeister on the inassimilability and unacceptability of Jewish people and culture, David enters the scene to meet the family. Upon seeing the Baron, David recognizes him as the orchestrator of the pogrom and as the man who literally massacred David’s entire family in front of his eyes. The finale of Act

IV showcases David’s completed “American symphony,” much testimonial and reconciliation between David and Vera, and a declaration of their love with “My Country ‘tis of Thee” (1831) playing the curtain closed.

The Melting Pot is biographically reflective of Zangwill’s own love life. Much like

David, Zangwill was a self-made man. Zionist periodical contributor Louis Lipsy described the playwright in this way: “Zangwill cannot boast of an aristocratic ancestry, as did Beaconsfield, for he is of humble birth, but by the power of his wit, his skill as a debater and his general cleverness he has acquired a reputation for sagacity and all-knowingness second to no other man among the Jews.”6 When in 1903 Zangwill married Edith Ayrton, a gentile feminist and author, he was met with substantial criticism from fellow Zionists who worried about his future children not being raised Jewish. Werner Sollors argues that the transition to the future for Zangwill via

David Quixano “comes by a loving union with his absolute ‘other’ (at least by descent definition).” Zangwill wrote the play while entrenched in Zionist thought, and the characters of the play reflectively see the United States as a “promised land” for stateless Jewish subjects.

Perhaps consequently, the play became and has continued to be a site upon which critics have projected various national anxieties, particularly with regard to immigrant bodies.

David’s desire to compose and see performed a so-termed “American symphony” instantiates a new, cultural-sonic route to citizenship. Music, at its best, has the power to change the way we feel about not only ourselves but also others. The changes music can bring out in 68

one’s actions are undeniable. Nicholas Tawa explains how some people who enjoy classical symphonies express their hope that “the music might give expression to their otherwise inexpressible human feelings, reflect their very human concerns, and confirm their American identity.” While listening to symphonic music does not make someone a better person, immersing oneself in a composition might affect the way they “perceive the world around them.”

Especially during times of crisis, listening can become “a necessity for civilized existence.”7

Zangwill, who wrote The Melting Pot while deeply immersed in Zionist thought and reflection on the Kishineff pogroms of 1903-1904, knew that cultural productions and performances of patriotism could have this civilizing effect.

In his impressive comparison of review of The Melting Pot and theater’s role in the

American assimilation process, Joe Kraus notes that David’s speech about his dream symphony is “the moment that most critics cited in their reviews.”8 That being said, it is surprising how few scholars have focused on the actual centerpiece of The Melting Pot – David’s completion and performance of his American symphony. Most scholarship has revolved around whether or not

Zangwill, à la David and Vera, actually believes in America’s viability as a crucible. On opening night in 1908, the New York Times reported that The Melting Pot is the story of David Quixano,

“a young Russian Jew refugee, a musician, whose parents were murdered at Kishineff by Baron

Revendal, father of the girl [Vera], who herself fled as a Russian revolutionist, with whom David falls in love and eventually marries.”9 In this synopsis, David’s occupation is mentioned, but nothing is said of his symphony’s importance. Similarly, a review in The Tribune Bureau explains that the drama “deals with Russian Jewish immigrants and their fusing in the crucible of the metropolis to produce typical Americans, with the dominant characteristics of all that is best among the nations of the earth.”10 This review brings New York City into focus as the crucible 69

instead of David's symphony, completely eliding the importance of music in the narrative. Years later, Zangwill biographer Elsie Bonita Adams described it as a play that expresses “hope that

America could provide a place where the Judeo-Christian ideal of brotherhood of all men could be realized.”11 More recently, Guy Szuberla has explained that Zangwill’s plot, “at once minimal and melodramatic, turns on the actions and long set speeches of David Quixano, a Russian-

Jewish immigrant, a struggling musician and composer.”12 Matthew Frye Jacobson, who calls

The Melting Pot “the period’s most famous statement on assimilation,” never once mentions music or David’s symphony in his synopsis of the play.13 Cathy Schlund-Vials describes the play as being about overcoming “not only a violent Russian history of pogroms but the outwardly insurmountable and multigenerational divide between Jew and gentile, foreigner and

American.”14 In these and many other initial plot summaries of the show, David’s role as a musician most often takes a back seat to the characters’ reconciling with a traumatic trans-

Atlantic history, even though David’s symphony acts as the principle means through which

David suggests this testifying can effectively proceed. While many scholars skillfully investigate citizenship, ethnic tension, identity transformation, and reconciliation in the play, very few emphasize that it is David’s symphony which is supposed to act as the catalyst for this amalgamation. The different ways in which The Melting Pot has been introduced and primarily summarized reveals how significantly or not David’s vocation has played in extended analyses of the story’s themes.

In this chapter, I want to consider not only the composition, but also the performance and the reception of David’s “American symphony.” I will do so alongside Zangwill’s creation of

The Melting Pot, hoping to simultaneously critique how music and theater diplomatically operate inside and outside fictional narratives. This chapter begins with a historical contextualization of 70

the culture of “Americanism” and the questions of citizenship that presage Zangwill’s play. I then move to a close-reading of the play itself, bringing a fresh focus to David’s symphony as an assimilative crucible. After this, I examine interviews and critiques about the play by Zangwill and his contemporaries, beginning days before the play’s opening and continuing through the

1910s, including the forward to Zangwill’s 1914 expansion of the play. This chapter concludes with the 2006 revival in New York City and the play’s continued importance in terms of national immigration anxieties.

The Melting Pot as a Revelation of Americanism

A two-part question I want to approach in this chapter is this: How is The Melting Pot, according to Zangwill, a “revelation of Americanism,” and what part does music play in that epiphany? In order to approach this, I first want to discuss the term “Americanism” and its connections with ethnonationalistic projects. Cathy Schlund-Vials importantly situates her analysis of The Melting Pot in the context of President William McKinley’s December 21, 1898 address to the newly annexed Filipino subjects abroad. In this speech, McKinley states: “all persons who, either by active aid or by honest submission, cooperate with the Government of the

United States to give effect to these beneficent purposes [of the U.S. empire] will receive the reward of its support and protection.”15 From McKinley to Roosevelt to Truman and beyond,

American politicians have talked of rewards in the process of “benevolent assimilation.”

Zangwill’s play, therefore, is important in how it “directly confronts xenophobic anxiety while supporting the virtues of open-door domestic strategies.”16 While McKinley definitely set a precedent for future imperialistic projects and modes of promoting benevolent assimilation, neither Zangwill in paratext nor the characters in the play directly make mention of McKinley or his policies. Zangwill does, however, emphatically mention McKinley’s successor following his 71

assassination, the attempt of which happened (ironically, for the focus of my project) outside the

Temple of Music at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo.17 McKinley’s successor,

Theodore Roosevelt, played a giant role in influencing Zangwill both politically and personally, and I would like to examine further this connection in terms of aiding Jewish emigration out of

Russia and of Americanism.

On July 23, 1900, Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York addressed an audience of more than five thousand at the Jewish Chautauqua Society meeting in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

One of his primary goals for this speech was to define clearly “Americanism,” or the two-sided creed on how to achieve and maintain cultural citizenship. On one side, Roosevelt calls for tolerance, asserting that, “if we are good Americans in spirit and soul and purpose, we will judge our fellow-men without reference to differences of creed, of section, or social position […].”

Judging others by “worth as a man,” or by the active performance of duty and the realization of dreams in a practical fashion, provides the other, more weighty side of Americanism. Roosevelt explains that American democracy “means that we have no privileged class, no class that is exempt from the duties” of a working society. Under Roosevelt’s Americanism, all American citizens, especially those men “of means” and “of education,” are expected to avoid idleness and self-indulgence and instead pursue high ideals in a pragmatic fashion. In order to realize these ideals, one must be decent, courageous, interested in public affairs, and have common-sense intelligence. The man who possesses these qualities, Roosevelt says, “has in him the making of a first-class American citizen.” The “men and women of various creeds, of various origins” who attended the Jewish society meeting responded to this speech with great applause.18

72

After becoming president, Roosevelt invested time and energy into deliberating with

Russia in terms of Jewish rights. In 1902, a delegation of the New York Representatives approached President Roosevelt with a resolution to “put an end to the discrimination against

Jewish citizens of the United States” by the Russian government. At this juncture, the President could only promise further discussion with Secretary John Hay. By July 1902, the State

Department had made numerous efforts to help American Jewish citizens circumscribe Russia’s exclusion laws, but it was “thus far without avail.” A 1902 New York Times article explains the situation in Russia: “Occasionally, American Jews are permitted to enter the country, but this always is with the tacit knowledge of the Russian authorities, as the exclusion laws apply to all countries alike.”19 President Roosevelt and Secretary Hay did support deliberations with Russia against the persecution of the Jew, citing the actions of Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and

Benjamin Harrison and their respective Secretaries as precedent.

Figure 1: Emil Flohri, Stop Your Cruel Oppression of the Jews, Chromolithograph, 1904, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.05438. 73

In his “Third Annual Message” delivered on December 9, 1891, President Harrison based his objection to Jewish exclusion laws on the problems it caused the United States domestically:

“The immigration of these people to the United States – many other countries being closed to them – is largely increasing, and is likely to assume proportions which may make it difficult to find homes and employment for them here and to seriously affect the labor market.”20

Roosevelt’s efforts were so well-known in 1904 that political cartoonist Emil Flohri famously depicted the dream of seeing Roosevelt reprimand Czar Nicholas II for his oppressive treatment of the Jewish people.21

However, on November 6, 1905, President Roosevelt announced that the American government would not make representations to Russia on behalf of the Jews. A New York Times report claims: “Mr. Roosevelt has shown heretofore his desire to alleviate the sufferings of this race in the Czar’s empire, but feels he is powerless at present.” Many of Roosevelt’s supporters, including the President of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, made public statements of frustration and hope that Russia would end its exclusionary laws. Talking to the working men of Russia, Gompers guarantees that if “Russia’s workers will as sternly use their power to repress the vicious massacres of human life they will still further earn and deserve the warmest gratitude and lasting sympathy of justice, liberty-loving humanitarians the world over.”

Gompers continues: “The lives of all men and all creeds and all faiths – Christian and Jew alike – must be secure if true liberty is not only achieved but maintained for all time.”22 The concerns and the appeals of Harrison, Roosevelt, and Gompers both point to a central concern: labor.

Roosevelt’s Americanism, which applauds work ethics like that of Gompers, simultaneously allows for selectively ignoring prejudices against particular immigrant groups such as Asians and for championing nativism when it purports to work toward unifying the nation. 74

Along these lines, it is clear that The Melting Pot is not only Zangwill’s ruminating on

Zionist issues but also a statement on and criticism of Roosevelt’s Americanism. On dedicating

The Melting Pot to President Roosevelt in 1908, Zangwill continued to discuss the possibility of political action against Russia, stating: “I do hope that the United States Government will take up some modifications of the treaty with Russia. You know that the American-born Jew has no right to enter Russia under the laws of that empire, for the Jew has no legal status there.”23 After six years of performances, Zangwill asserted in 1914 that his production had been “universally acclaimed by Americans as a revelation of Americanism, despite that it contains only one native- born American character, and that a bad one.”24 Quincy Davenport, the only jus soli American in the play, was described in a 1909 New York Times review as “such a mixture of fool and cad that one wonders at David’s love for the Crucible which turns out such men.”25 An October 1908 article in the Toledo Blade beautifully makes the connection between Quincy and Roosevelt’s

Americanism. The article states:

[Davenport] is the vapid son of a multi-millionaire, a man who has wrung a

fortune from the public and his competitors by modern “business methods” only

to have it wasted by the fripperies and extravagance of his son. When President

Roosevelt saw the play he was much taken by this character. Said he to Mr.

Zangwill: “I have been fighting Quincy Davenports all my life.”26

In these two sentences, the author brings to the foreground the issues of privilege, worth, toil, frivolity, struggle, and endurance that undergird the ideology of Americanism. However, it is not

Quincy who has to embody Americanism; it is David and the new immigrants that threaten to change not only American demographics but also ethos who must display Americanism. Against

Roosevelt’s wishes, Quincy’s race, birthright, and family name given him a pass while David 75

and Vera must consistently prove that they are working more efficiently and effectively than other Americans.

The play’s political value as an aesthetic project is consistently tied to “the immigrant question” both at home and abroad. Citizenship, as a means of cultural, social, and political belonging, is specifically connected to and challenged by the cultural-sonic environment David creates on the settlement rooftop. The settlement rooftop becomes a “natural environ,” a term I borrow from Noelle Morrissette, which refers to an atmosphere or soundscape that “create a mood, which creates a people who exhibit that mood, a language representative of that place and people, a folk culture that carries these traits, and, at last, the development of that culture into a national culture that is representative of civilization.” While the settlement rooftop is not large enough to host and sustain its own civilization, it is a temporary space in which this mood can manifest and live on through collective memory. The audience members might take that mood out into New York City and, like a virus, infect the rest of the city-organism. In considering the spread of a natural environ, there is an important distinction between the material sound and the auditor. Noelle Morrissette puts forward in her study of music found in James Weldon Johnson’s writing that ethnic literary representations of sound present “the imperative that [the American soundscape] be mastered by its auditors, self-mastery of sound providing a judgment of and orientation to one’s cultural-sonic environment.”27 Through noise, speech, language, and music, ethnic writers can foreground the multiplicity and repetition of both interracial cultural practices and racially distinct cultural histories. However, these sounds, in the ears of foreign auditors, projected beyond imagined boundaries via sheet music production and literary representations, traveling performance groups, and recorded sound, serve as alternative national identities and as cultural ambassadors. As music is created in response to sociopolitical and psychological 76

environments, it is the charge of the auditors to analyze how and why the music has been performed and utilized. David’s choice of the settlement rooftop as the natural environ best suited for his American symphony, then, is a statement on the ethnic and class identity of his

“new America.”

Another way to think through the settlement rooftop as a natural environ is to consider the performance and the space as congruent markers of mood and of identity. In his work on cultural capital, Pierre Bourdieu importantly points out that there are material distinctions between middle-brow (avant-garde) and high-brow (bourgeois) theater. Bourdieu asserts that these distinctions are “found both in the social characteristics of the audiences of the different

Paris theatres (age, occupation, place of residence, frequency of attendance, prices they are prepared to pay, etc.) and in the – perfectly congruent – characteristics of the authors performed

(age, social origin, place of residence, lifestyle, etc.), the works and the theatrical businesses themselves.”28 Quincy first offers “his wonderful music room” and “the smartest audience in

America” for the debut of David’s symphony.29 On Quincy’s payroll, Herr Pappelmeister reportedly made twenty thousand dollars a year, the simple equivalent in today’s purchasing power of more than half a million dollars.30 This initial combination has perfect congruency between the music hall, the audience, and the conductor’s status, and it assumes David’s aspiration toward joining this high-brow society. However, David blurs the lines between middle and high art by rejecting this natural environ. David accuses Quincy of throwing galas on the same nights that “women and children died of hunger in New York,” and he wants none of the

“gondola-guzzlers” who attend his fêtes to hear his “scribblings.”31 David bluntly states that his music is “not for [Quincy] and such as [he] […] not for you who are killing my America!”32 77

Alternatively, David asserts that his symphony makes new Americans out of Americans and non-Americans alike. Herr Pappelmeister, the “severe” conductor who only allows Quincy

“comic opera once a week,” conducts the orchestra for David. From judgments of prominence and economic status, Pappelmeister represents an upper-class migrant participant in David’s crucible performance. David’s symphony is supposed to meld all types of people together to create a new race called American. However, the social characteristics of the audience and the space of the performance suggest that the resulting amalgamation will still be identifiably marked. For example, Walter Benn Michaels and others have argued that Zangwill’s crucible

“would characteristically exclude – either as a constitutive principle or as a strategic omission – the African American.” Pointing to David’s exclamation that “all the races of Europe” would be included in the melting pot – with that particular quote’s glaring omission of non-Europeans –

Michaels asserts that “the ability of the Jew to become an American depends upon his whiteness, which is to say, upon his difference from blacks.”33 However, this reading of David’s intentions strategically overlooks a later statement of David’s that adds “black and yellow” races to the mix. Similarly, people often only partially quote W.E.B. Du Bois’ assertion that the problem of the Twentieth century is “the color-line,” resulting in a suggestion of a white/black bifurcation within a continental United States context. The full quote explains that the color line is “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea,” highlighting Du Bois’ attention to settler colonialism, economic and geographical imperialism, and race relations actually beyond a white/black binary.34 In this way, while David selectively chooses to mention “the races of Europe” at first, the larger discussion about the melting pot he puts forward is far more inclusive. 78

As I now begin a close reading of the play, I will pay attention to not only the conversations between characters but also to the stage directions and scene descriptions. These directives, read only by the actors until Macmillan Books published the script a year later in

1909, imbue the actors with the cultural memories needed to perform Zangwill’s vision of future

America. Correspondingly, stage directions and scene descriptions are italicized while lines of speech are normal print.

David’s Symphony and the New American Set in a Colonial-style home in the non-Jewish Borough of Richmond, New York, the

Quixano living room is decorated with Jewish and American national and ethnic artifacts, such as a mezuzah, the Stars-and-Stripes, various pictures, and both Hebrew and English books. The scenery is meant to create what Zangwill describes as “a curious blend of shabbiness,

Americanism, Jewishness, and music, all four being combined in the figure of Mendel Quixano.”

Mendel is the only actor in the mise-en-scène as the curtain first rises, becoming part of the initial impact on the spectator with his “fine Jewish face, pathetically furrowed by misfortune, and [his] short grizzled beard.” Mendel’s countenance is revealed to the audience as motion begins the play with Mendel finishing saying goodbye to an exiting music pupil. However, it is not until Mendel discovers that the boy as forgotten his music and Mendel calls him a

“[b]rainless, earless, thumb-fingered Gentile” that Mendel declares his Jewish identity. The pictures on the wall of the living room, something that might go unnoticed by cursory scenery observers, further help to establish the hybrid identity of the Quixano family. Zangwill’s list of pictures – composer Richard Wagner, Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, and of “Jews at the Wailing place” – highlight a hierarchy of cultural worth for the Quixano family.35 Depending on whether this list is considered in ascending or descending importance, music and Jewish cultural memory bookend symbols of American history with particular focus on the beginning 79

and end of slavery in the juxtaposition of Columbus with Lincoln. In this way, the scenery of the

Quixano home as a constructed environ argues at the outset for concurrent consideration of cultural practice and memory in the formation of national or ethnic identity.

When Vera calls for David at the Quixano home, hoping that he will accept an offer to play violin at the settlement, the stage directions instruct the actor in the ways of anti-Semitism.

Vera becomes “outraged” when Kathleen accuses her of being a “Jewess [who does] not know her own Sunday [Shabbos].”36 Realizing for the first time that David the musician is also Jewish,

Vera falls into a “daze,” trying to reconcile how a Jew could have “such charming manners.”37

Vera’s daze is only broken by the entrance of Mendel, dressed in “a Prince Albert coat, and boots instead of slippers, so that his appearance is gentlemanly.”38 Mendel’s proper appearance combined with his consistent niceties and polite gestures causes the actor playing Vera to channel hesitation, “struggling with her anti-Jewish prejudice.”39 When Mendel informs Vera that David is out playing music “at the Crippled Children’s Home,” the directions instruct the actor to signal a desire to “conquer her prejudice” and invite him to play, despite his ethnoreligious identity. In overcoming her prejudice, Vera reminds herself of another admirable

Jew of the same name, “David the shepherd youth with his harp and his psalms, the sweet singer in Israel.”40 The David of the Bible, whose musical instruments signaled the beginning of offerings and worship, allowing people to consecrate themselves to the Lord, used music in powerful and persuasive ways.41 Similarly, David Quixano’s musical powers, combined with his manners and charm, help to eliminate prejudice and bring Jews and gentiles together.

David’s admiration and obsession with America, and supposedly his fate, are tied to music. Mendel explains to Vera that David is a self-taught “wonder-child” violinist, brought up in the Russian Pale, or the western region of Imperial Russia to which many Jews were restricted. 80

Mendel describes his nephew as “Poor David,” asserting that America offers nothing but

“[m]usic-lessons and dance-halls, beer-halls and weddings” for a working musician. This strenuous life can only lead to “every hope and ambition [being] ground out of him, and he will die obscure and unknown.”42 This doomed premonition manifests itself in a “mood of intense sadness, intensified by the growing dusk” that surrounds Mendel, Vera, and Frau Quixano, whose faint, constant sobbing “heard throughout the scene [acts] as a sort of musical accompaniment.” The social and natural environment of the Quixano home seems to signify

David’s fate, but it is with a “happy voice” that David first enters the stage, singing “My Country

‘tis of Thee.”43 His arrival, but more importantly his sonic intervention that cuts through the morose, changes “the whole atmosphere […] to one of joyous expectation.” David sings the

“national hymn” as he passes by the window toward the door, and he stops singing as he opens the door, revealing his appearance – “a sunny, handsome youth of the finest Russo-Jewish type” and his tool for assimilation, his “violin case.”44

David’s playing music for “crippled” children is significant in terms of musically assimilating those whom the government might try to deny forms of citizenship. Section 20 of the Immigration Act of March 3, 1903 states that “any alien who shall come into the United

States in violation of law, or who shall be found a public charge therein, from causes existing prior to landing, shall be deported […].”45 One group of people this act works against is those with “health conditions” such as being “deformed or crippled.”46 This was extended and consolidated in Section 2 of the Immigration Act of February 20, 1907; the statute identifies

“classes of aliens [who] shall be excluded from admission into the United States,” including

“defective persons.” A “defective person” is defined here as someone who is “of a nature which may affect the ability of such alien to earn a living.”47 David’s two performances the audience 81

learns about before his entry to the stage – for the tenants of a “tragic” settlement house and for crippled children – both highlight his ability to bring a musical, sonic form of citizenship to the disenfranchised.

David states that his music had the power to make “the paralysed [dance].” When Mendel tells David not to exaggerate, David retorts that, whether it was their legs, arms, hands, fingers, heads, or eyes, they had something with which to dance.48 David proclaims how he wanted to

“play them all straight again with the love and joy jumping out of this old fiddle.” Mendel is confident that David was unable to mend their bones, but David insists that instead he “played their brains straight,” asserting that “hunch-brains are worse than hunch-backs.”49 In terms of inadmissibility, David’s assertion rings true. Section 2 of the 1907 Act begins the list of excluded classes with synonyms for hunch-brains: “idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons, and persons who have been insane within five years previous.”50 If David’s music were able to “cure” these children of their mental afflictions, or at least help them pass as able-bodied subjects fit for work, then it would serve as a true gateway to citizenship. Ultimately,

David’s “American symphony” is meant to be a musical means of communicating to the world

(and particularly to Vera) what America means to David. In conversation, David opines and even sobs as he recalls listening to the “voice of America crying: ‘Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest – rest.’”51 With the reminder “you know it is bad for you,”

Mendel warns David against getting overly emotional, but the cultural-sonic environment that envelopes David brings out a great affective response in him. David is able to cure himself of his own paralysis brought on by the trauma of Kishineff through composing his music and seeing his symphony come to life on the settlement rooftop. 82

David oozes patriotism as he proclaims that “America is God’s Crucible, the great

Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming.”52 The powerful statement depicts God as metallurgist and America as the artisan’s primary tool for creation. In this metaphor, America is a vessel, a stand-alone and separate yet vital component of the smelting process. The “races of Europe” compose the noble metals introduced into the melting pot that

God then skillfully and purposefully destroys in order to re-form and make anew. In Act IV,

David adds “black and yellow” to the mix of “human freight”, although they are added after the initial metaphor was introduced in the first act and are literally separated from the other races in the script by extended hyphens.53 The problems with this amalgamation metaphor are both obvious and revealing. Firstly, smelting in a crucible often is used in order to keep the ore separated from impurities that can later be removed before shaping.54 When humans are substituted for ore, this metaphor becomes the reading most nativist Americans took at the turn of the century. Secondly, David emphasizes that “[i]t is live things, not dead metals, that are being melted in the Crucible,” conjuring up the excruciatingly painful image of the immigrant body being cooked alive.55 This extension of the metaphor suggests physical torture and the obliteration of identity, not a benevolent form of assimilation. For David, a survivor of the

Jewish-targeting pogroms in Kishineff, this type of body-erasing crucible actually serves to melt away his scars in a euthanasic immolation which simultaneously destroys the powers granted to his Russian perpetrators within their national borders and with their constructed identities. This imagery was not lost on the editors of Life magazine; the September 30, 1909 issue features a caricature of Zangwill sitting in an iron cauldron, melting away with sweat beads dripping down his face, with cheeky text reading: “Israel Zangwill in The Melting Pot.”56 83

Figure 1: “Israel Zangwill in The Melting Pot,” Life, September 30, 1909, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

David explains to Mendel that “the real American has not yet arrived,” and that he shall someday rise out of the Crucible as “the fusion of all races, perhaps the coming superman.”57

David suggests that this amalgamative and transformative process serves as inspiration for the musical structure of his symphony. Music also serves the diplomatic purposes of confronting, witnessing, testifying about, and potentially resolving traumatic events. This becomes a crucial component of David’s mood music in that it is meant to come to terms with and eventually dissolve the bloody European history that not only followed David across the Atlantic but recurs and takes on new forms environed in America. Mendel assumes that David’s being “crazy music about America” is a means of “brooding over the difference between America and Russia.” Vera responds to this conjecture by asserting that perhaps “all the terrible memory will pass peacefully away in his music.”58 Mendel then informs Vera that David’s trauma is located on his body – on his left shoulder, the worst possible place for violinist to have a twinging wound. In this complex 84

interchange between Mendel and Vera, the audience is presented with the contradictory nature of music and music performance as both cathartic and traumatic. Vera hopes that music will help

David work through his memories of the Kishineff pogrom while Mendel views the composition as a reliving of traumatic events that keeps David in perpetual agony.

When “Poppy” Pappelmeister visit the Quixano home, he has the opportunity to examine

David’s musical manuscript. Poppy “polishes his glasses with irritating elaborateness and weary

‘achs’, then reads in absolute silence.”59 Quincy’s character is supposed to signal being “bored by the silence” as he asks Poppy whether he will play the music aloud. Pappelmeister denies the characters and the audience an audible sample of the composition, but his body language silently performs bits of the piece. After first asserting that he does “not comprehend” David’s composition, he becomes “absorbed” in the sheet music and begins moving “[h]is umbrella […] to beat time, moving more and more vigorously, till at last he is conducting elaborately, stretching out his left palm for pianissimo passages, and raising it vigorously for forte, with every now and then an exclamation.”60 Poppy does divulge information about the instrumentation of the piece: flutes, clarinets, bassoons and drums, a harp solo, second violins, piano. However, Pappelmeister notes that the symphony is unfinished, waiting for a Finale upon which to be decided.61 It is fitting that Pappelmeister cannot describe the finale at this point in the narrative because it takes the addition of the physical space and the audience present in order to create the natural environ for the crucible. In this way, the performance is both scripted and improvised, drawing source material and inspiration from David, Pappelmeister, and the audience members in order to create the correct amalgamative mix needed to form the new

American. 85

For David, music is the means by which the working-class immigrant can best understand the ethos and pathos of America. David’s symphony is meant to speak to the immigrants who

“will not understand [his] music with their brains or their ears, but with their hearts and their souls.”62 Moving beyond language barriers or the high-class ability for “appreciation” of composition, David’s symphony diplomatically reaches out to the tired and the poor by tapping into ancient, natural harmonies and movements in music. As far as the descriptions in the script inform us, David’s symphony is without lyrics or choral accompaniment. While David is quite vocal in his exultations of America, his symphony is strictly instrumental; Pappelmeister’s review of the symphony reveals that it includes flutes, clarinets, bassoons, drums, harps, piano, and of course the violin. Importantly, instrumental music has the unique ability to erase or at least hide the identity of the performer in that no vocal inflections or vernacular accents can be detected in the performance. James Weldon Johnson, contemporary of Zangwill and brother/partner of famous composer Rosamond Johnson, observed that “sound has a wider appeal than sense” and has the power to alter contexts of American racism, “one body at a time,” when wielded by a “word writer.”63 David is very honest about who he is diplomatically inviting with his music, however. David does not target the rich, native-born Americans like the ones attending an Antonín Dvořák concert at Carnegie Hall in the 1890s because they have not

“known the pain of the old world and the hope of the new.”64 In this way, Zangwill via David diplomatically reaches out to those working-class immigrants whose sound worlds are not, in the way of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, obsessively refined by historical musical hierarchies.

This paradoxical response to music continues later in the final act of the play, just as the first public performance of David’s symphony at a settlement house has concluded. The 86

settlement house as a natural environ of race and class, as it plays host to David’s symphony and to the “muffled sound of applause” mixed with shouts of “Quixano!”, becomes a cultural-sonic environment that demands recognition and understanding by its auditors. Vera makes a similar assertion when she calls David’s symphony a success in that the “critics are all divided.”65

David’s symphony, having found a host environment and having been finally heard by the critics, accomplished its goal in coming to life. David’s symphony (and most certainly

Zangwill’s play as an extension) will live on in the conversations of critics who must come to terms with its content, performance, and effect. However, David takes this criticism harshly and begins to question whether or not his music is actually a viable diplomatic tool. David calls his symphony a failure and a lie because the American Crucible was unable to melt his own

“heritage from the Old World, hate and vengeance and blood.”66 After a melodramatic interchange between David and Vera over whether music or love means more to the composer, and after the trauma of the Jewish massacres and of David’s scars are symbolically healed on

David by a pleasurable kiss, David feebly comes to the conclusion that America itself (and maybe not his symphony) has cathartic capabilities. David calls America “the great Alchemist” that diplomatically “melts and fuses […] East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross” in order to build “the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.”67 This unification and literal “benediction,” according to the stage directions, is set to “My Country, ‘tis of Thee” with the Statue of Liberty’s flame twinkling in the background “like a lonely, guiding star.” Therefore, in a fraught finale filled with emotion and reconciliation, music is both the subject of discussion and the emphasis in the cultural-sonic environment of the theater stage itself. While unresolved and complex in its application and its effects, the primacy of music as a diplomatic tool is solidified in this final scene. 87

In this final section of the chapter, I will turn now to reviews, receptions, and revisions of

The Melting Pot ranging in date from 1908 through 2006. The play underwent a hiatus of nearly eighty years between the 1920s and the 2000s. However, comments made by Zangwill and his contemporaries from 1908 through the publication of a revision in 1914 make clear the intentions of the author to foreground the importance of music in the play. These comments, when considered alongside reviews that both do and do not attend to the subject of music, bring to light the ways in which, to channel Deborah Wong, “music has power, is powerful, and has effects.”68

Reviews, Receptions, and Revisions of The Melting Pot

Before opening night in Washington D.C., Zangwill gave an interview to The New York

Times and provided a cursory, facetious summary of the show, glibly explaining that it “had no plot, and that it ended at 11 o’clock.”69 Instead of discussing the production, Zangwill says that the play “is the result of not writing for three years.” Zangwill asserts that he had been “actively interested in the question of Zionism for a long time,70 and ‘The Melting Pot’ is the expression of all [Zangwill’s] thoughts in these years.” The only detail Zangwill reveals about the production is that “the scene is laid in the Borough of Richmond, and most of the action takes place within a minimum taxicab fare of Staten Island.”71

The Melting Pot opened on October 5, 1908 at the Columbia Theater in Washington D.C. with President and Mrs. Roosevelt, Presidential Secretary William Loeb Jr., General William

Crozier, and Secretary of Commerce and Labor Oscar Straus in attendance. President Roosevelt invited Mrs. Zangwill to sit in his theater box on opening night, and newspapers such as The New

York Times and the Boston Daily Globe reported Roosevelt’s perpetual outbursts of what a “great play” he thought it was. Days after the premier, Roosevelt called Zangwill to dine at the White

House under the premise of reprimanding him for lines in the play which too strongly criticized 88

the American family and the institution of divorce. Zangwill agreed to change the contentious line in the script, but later responded that he was sorry Roosevelt did not “like the strictures on domestic affairs in this country.”72 Through the character of Quincy Davenport, the rich

American who wants to divorce his wife in order to pursue Vera, Zangwill particularly was addressing the upper classes in America and socialite Ward McAllister’s “400.” McAllister described these New Yorkers and Roosevelt confidants as those citizens who really matter, noting that if “you go outside that number, you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.”73 As much as the play is about the amalgamation of races and ethnicities in order to create a stronger American type, Zangwill promoted the destruction of classes by showcasing Quincy as a terrible example of antiquated bigotry.

Zangwill stated in an October 24, 1908 interview with The New York Times that the

“melting pot” is meant to suggest a future America in which there is “the amalgamation into one nation of the various nations which are now being cast into this national melting pot, a gradual process which, when completed, will solve many of the problems that are agitating the students of this country and of humanity at large.”74 One of the “many problems” Zangwill points to here is miscegenation. Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick explain that The Melting Pot has served as the foundational text for the intermarriage myth which is shaped by Jews “interested in exploring narrative solutions to age-old divisions between Jews and Gentiles.” Rubin and Melnick describe

The Melting Pot as the play which proposed “that the sorts of ancient hatreds that drove Jews en masse from Russian oppression would take no root in the United States: here young lovers would teach their elders that their own personal relationships could act as a model for group relations writ large.”75 It is also important to consider how cultural practices produce identity. While 89

identities have histories, they are not, as Lisa Lowe suggests, “eternally fixed in some essentialist past.” Lowe calls the relationship between history, culture, and power a “continuous ‘play’” that undergoes “constant transformation.”76 The melting pot provided by David’s symphony transforms the identity of all involves through a blending of identifiable markers in a cultural- sonic environment.

The Melting Pot traveled from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, New York, London, and

Chicago, running on Broadway in New York for a then-record 136 straight performances. From the play’s inception through the 1920s, many critics discussed the ramifications of Zangwill’s work, and Zangwill also actively discussed and even amended his production. When the public was able to purchase the script in 1909, Macmillan Books advertised The Melting Pot as the play which “is causing a heated discussion of its theme, the fusing of old-world races for the making of a new world-ruling American.”77 For instance, many Jewish leaders felt that Zangwill was setting them up to surrender their cultural identities in exchange for a benevolent process of assimilation. In 1909, Rabbi Leon Harrison of Temple Israel, St. Louis stated: “Zangwill is selling the sanctity of his people for thirty pieces of silver. But let us cast only narrowness and bigotry and ancient prejudice into the crucible. I call on you in the name of real American assimilation and in the name of your own holy traditions, sacred memories, transcendent ideals, to be yourselves and to fulfill your racial destiny from within.”78 In the eclectic 1914 Appendix and Afterward of The Melting Pot, Zangwill defended his use of the crucible “melting pot” metaphor by asserting that “amalgamation is not assimilation or simple surrender to the dominant type, as is popularly supposed, but an all-around give-and-take by which the final type may be enriched or impoverished.” Zangwill then went on to insist that “the intelligent reader will have remarked how the somewhat anti-Semitic Irish servant of the first act talks Yiddish 90

herself in the fourth.”79 Amalgamation does not necessarily involve the loss of ore and raw materials. Rather, Zangwill suggests that amalgamation makes the added materials stronger in the way it blends and influences the others blending with it. Memory, folklore, cultural practices, religious observances, prejudices, and sources of pride become shared in the cultural-sonic environment of David’s world.

Zangwill asserts in the Afterward that “even upon the negro the ‘Melting Pot’ of America will not fail to act in a measure as it has acted on the Red Indian, who has found it almost as facile to mate with his white neighbours as with his black.”80 Zangwill discusses geopolitics as well, warning that “[e]xclusiveness may have some justification in countries, especially when old and well-populated; but for continents like the United States – or for the matter of that Canada and Australia – to mistake themselves for mere countries is an intolerable injustice to the rest of the human race.”81 These comments on how affective and all-encompassing the amalgamation process is respond by proximity to critics like Frederic Haskin and Horace Kallen. In “Appendix

E (The Alien in the Melting Pot),” Zangwill quotes Chicago Daily News contributor Frederic J.

Haskin who claims that, even though the American immigrant contributes more labor than the average citizen, it is the immigrant that is “the great American problem.”82 Horace Kallen took this argument even farther, even aggressively taking up Zangwill’s musical metaphor, although in an oppositional manner. In his famous two-part 1915 critique in The Nation titled “Democracy

Versus the Melting-Pot,” Kallen spun Zangwill’s metaphor for American civilization in this way:

[…] “American civilization” may come to mean the perfection of cooperative

harmonies of “European civilization,” the waste, the squalor, and the distress of

Europe being eliminated, a multiplicity in a unity, an orchestration of mankind.

As in an orchestra, every type of instrument has its specific timbre and tonality, 91

founded in its substance and form; as every type has its appropriate theme and

melody in the whole symphony, so in society each ethnic group is the natural

instrument, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody, and the harmony and

dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization, with this

difference: a musical symphony is written before it is played; in the symphony of

civilization the playing is the writing, so that there is nothing so fixed and

inevitable about its progressions as in music, so that within the limits set by nature

they may vary at will, and the range and variety of the harmonies may become

wider and richer and more beautiful.83

Werner Sollors expertly points out that Kallen’s diatribe “concluded with an image of harmonious musical fusion which was presented as a radical alternative to the melting pot, while it resembles the struggles of Zangwill’s protagonist David Quixano to compose an American symphony.”84 This musical metaphor inside the melting pot metaphor allows for an examination of how cultural productions often take the center stage in diplomacy.

In 1918, co-founder of the American Jewish Committee Louis Marshall stated: “Israel

Zangwill was guilty of a great mischief when he spoke of the melting pot, and indicated that in it he found the solution of the Jewish problem. […] The melting pot, as advanced by Zangwill, produces mongrelism, whereas the electrolytic process produces virility. And so our struggle should be not to create a hybrid civilization, but to preserve the best elements that constitute the civilization we are all seeking, the civilization of universal brotherhood.”85 Still, as noted by Neil

Baldwin, Zangwill asserted that anyone, not just the Jew, “could preserve his identity in America at the same time as he became integral to the culture as a whole, unashamed to live singularly – one among many.”86 Regardless of how the melting pot functions, Zangwill’s play, his rhetoric 92

in promoting and defending his work, and the dialogue of his characters undoubtedly brought culture to the forefront of discussions of identity formation in an imperial nation-state.

Rightfully so, many scholars to date have also pointed to the drastic changes in domestic and foreign policy in the 1900s to show how Zangwill’s notion of the melting pot has lingered, been appropriated, and revitalized at times for political rhetoric. In his 1990 Wall Street Journal article on “When Ethnic Studies Are Un-American,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. ominously warns that non-whites will soon outnumber whites in the United States, and that new Americans should

“forswear the cult of ghettoization and agree with Crevecoeur, as with most immigrants in the two centuries since, that in America ‘individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of man.’”87 In response, Ronald Takaki has argued that works like The Melting Pot instigate fear in nativists by asking questions like “How should America and Americans be defined? Whose history is it.”88 Gilbert Muller usefully reminds us that the Immigration Act of 1924, “which made the Third World ‘ineligible for citizenship,’ preserved this Melting Pot mystique until

World War II, when immigrant history and immigrant narratology […] began to forge an alternative mythology of a metropolitan nation of globally overlapping cultural subjectivities.”89

Ultimately, as Cathy Schlund-Vials has suggested, an analysis of Zangwill’s rhetoric and how

The Melting Pot’s “handling of nativist anxiety strategically depends on the rhetoric of naturalization as applied to the grammar of U.S. exceptionalism” will reveal the intersections of art and politics at the turn of the century.90

Conclusions In March/April 2006, the Metropolitan Playhouse, located at 240 East 4th Street in New

York City’s Lower East Side, ran a nineteen-show revival of The Melting Pot. A major

American playhouse company had not performed Zangwill’s play since 1921. The Metropolitan

Playhouse has as its mission statement the “production of plays from America’s past,” and 93

Zangwill’s was chosen because of its reputation as “a noble work that illuminates and fosters understanding.”91 The director of the revival, Robert Zangwill Kalfin,92 recognized that The

Melting Pot still reverberates globally through the performing of cultural memory. Before production, Kalfin read two paragraphs of a Thomas Friedman New York Times op-ed to his cast and crew that emphasized how “particularly applicable [the play was] in the present climate.”93

The full quote from Friedman reads as follows:

My point is simple: the world is drifting dangerously toward a widespread

religious and sectarian cleavage – the likes of which we have not seen for a long,

long time. The only country with the power to stem this toxic trend is America.

People across the world still look to our example of pluralism, which is like no

other. If we go Dark Ages, if we go down the road of pitchfork-wielding

xenophobes, then the whole world will go Dark Ages.94

Friedman’s op-ed condemns global ethnic profiling while simultaneously acclaiming the

American ability to stem the toxic trend of “widespread religious and sectarian cleavage.” Kalfin responded positively to Friedman’s position, saying that The Melting Pot showcases how “we’re supposed to be, not just putting everything into the blender to make a mush of it” Kalfin wryly hypothesizes what would happen “[i]f we become like the North Koreans…,” and he leaves

Israel Zangwill’s work and his playhouse’s production to respond. Edna Nahshon, author of

From the Ghetto the Melting Pot: Israel Zangwill’s Jewish Plays (2005), was in attendance at the

2006 Metropolitan Playhouse revival. She was quoted as being nervous about the melodrama, but concluded that it really worked because Kalfin toned down “[a]ll those overly bombastic passages.”95 94

While The Melting Pot’s storyline is wobbly at times and the melodrama seems very antiquated under modern theater standards, its emphasis on the power of cultural productions within natural environs that create cultural-sonic environments, instigating conversation and demanding acceptance, is of extreme importance to cultural studies scholars. David’s symphony acts as an assimilation tool that asks the disenfranchised to forget collectively their trauma while in the space of that cultural environment. Being part of that production, their patronage and presence in that environment forces both internal and external auditors of the production to come to terms with its existence. While even David is unsure of his symphony’s cathartic power,

David’s existence in the American music world, his composition of the piece, and its performance in a public space in themselves beget a conversation among critics that recognize their existences. In this way, much like how Antonín Dvořák had done in the decade preceding

Zangwill’s publication, David’s symphony encourages and perhaps hastens the changes in cultural identity formation by challenging the existing paradigms of who writes and performs what where, who listens to it, and ultimately who identifies with what “national” productions.

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Chapter Three: Orientalist Soundscapes, Barred Zones, and Tin Pan Alley’s Asia

In Chapter Two, I traced the impact music had in the play The Melting Pot in terms of its ability to create a cultural-sonic environment. Russian Jewish immigrants to the United States, native-born citizens, and ethno/religious minorities of all backgrounds are melted together in the crucible of music and a new American emerges stronger after undergoing the amalgamative process. However, the symphony in question which blends everyone together is never actually heard in the play; it is much more important that the real-life audience watching the play hear the dialogue between the characters than hear David’s symphony. The Melting Pot is a symphony performance inside of a theatre show. In this chapter, I will turn away from depictions of music and toward actual musical compositions that addressed issues of race, ethnicity, assimilability, and America. We will see how lyric and sound work together to create soundscapes that have a very real effect on auditors of all backgrounds.

The Casino Theater, located once at 1404 Broadway on West 39th Street in New York

City, was built in 1882 and demolished in 1930. Financed by Manhattan elite such as Ulysses S.

Grant Jr., J. P. Morgan, Louis C. Tiffany, and William H. Vanderbilt, the Casino was meant to host light musicals and operettas in opposition to the big shows that all took stage sixteen blocks south on 23rd Street. These financiers, along with the manager of the Metropolitan Concert Hall,

Rudolph Aronson, contracted architects Francis Kimball and Thomas Wisedell to construct a

Neo-Moorish style theater, one that would be the first in New York City with a roof garden and complete electric wiring; the Casino was nostalgic yet futuristic, exotic and domestic in its presentation and features. The red brick and polished terracotta structure featured a stunning bulbous domed tower at the southeast corner on which advertisements for shows were painted; inside the theater were a jewel-laced stage curtain, white gold painted arches, box seats with 96

carved wood in arabesque patterns, and a mosaic lobby floor that imitated an Oriental carpet.1

The roof garden provided a private outdoor stage for the sweltering summer months, allowing the theater to run shows all year long.2 While in operation, the Casino hosted shows and events that are monumental in a historiographical sense. In 1894, George Lederer presented The

Passing Show at the Casino, a “topical extravaganza” that introduced the term “revue” (spelled

“review” originally). In 1898, Will Marion Cook and Paul Lawrence Dunbar premiered

Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cake Walk on the Casino’s roof, which was the first all-African

American musical performed for a white audience. In 1900, the English Edwardian musical comedy Florodora, one of Broadway’s most successful shows of the century and the production that introduced the “chorus line” to the United States, opened at the Casino. In all regards, the

Casino was one of the most groundbreaking and important theaters in history.

On January 6, 1908, a smaller yet still significant show – Thomas Ryley, Irving Cobb,

Safford Waters, and Ted Snyder’s Funabashi – began its short run of thirty-two performances at the Casino. Funabashi retells the popular romance tale of an American naval officer finding love while stationed in the Orient. Jack Carter (Walter Percival) falls in love with fellow American

Dolly Rivers (Vera Michelena), but Jack’s father, the Secretary of War, disapproves because he wants Jack to marry a girl named Gwyndolin Hillary-Hoops (Margaret Rutledge). In order to resolve this marital dilemma, a family friend, Nan Livingston (Alice Fischer), suggests that the

Secretary/father marry Gwyndolin himself so that Jack and Dolly can get married. The story is inspired by and set during William H. Taft’s appointment as Governor-General of the Philippines and the era of the United States’ imperialistic expansion into the Pacific.3 The fact that this story is set in Japan, however, is even more secondary to the show than its non-existent plot, and beyond some “half-condescending” references to the country and its people in the script, the play 97

could have been set anywhere.4 In attendance on the night of January 13 were Eisaku Suzuki, the

Japanese Vice Consul to New York, and party of officials and friends.5 While the show was ultimately unsuccessful, it gave contributing lyricist Ted Snyder his start in New York City and allowed him to open his own publishing company, Ted Snyder Company. The next year, Snyder increased his office staff by hiring and mentoring a young songwriter named Irving Berlin.6 The two, along with a business associate named Henry Waterson, formed what would become the legendary Tin Pan Alley publishing company Waterson, Berlin, & Snyder, opening their office in 1913 on the corner of Broadway and 47th Street in the Strand Theatre Building.

When considered as representative spaces and themes, what the Casino and Snyder’s

Funabashi highlight is that, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, New

York City invested in looking and sounding Oriental. The Casino’s Alhambra-inspired architecture combined with theater-goers’ propensity for giving their patronage to Broadway shows heavy on Oriental backdrops, costumes, and white actors in yellowface showcases this

Orientalist reverence. If anything, Snyder’s Funabashi failed because it wasn’t Oriental enough.

A. H. Ballard, a writer for The Washington Times, explained that “the scenic picture [of the show] is superb – a bungalo in Japan, its interior and surroundings; the costuming is seductive, and the frivols are speedy.” However, a reporter from The Salt Lake Tribune asserted that “the most disappointing feature was the music, which was a collection of reminiscences from Bach to

Victor Herbert.”7 In other words, Funabashi did not provide the proper soundscape to accompany the landscape of the Moorish Casino Theater, transformed into the Chiba seaside where seductively dressed Japanese people were supposed to live. W. S. Gilbert and Arthur

Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885), one of the most successful Oriental-themed operatic plays of all time, at least used Japanese military commanders Masujirō Ōmura and Yajirō Shinagawa’s 98

composition “Miya sama” (1868) and its pentatonic melody as a framing pattern throughout its score, which otherwise “could hardly have been more English.”8 The desired effect of using a pentatonic refrain, according to Josephine Lee, is to “underscore exotic difference” and not necessarily “to expose audiences to Japanese music.”9 In this way, Funabashi did not feature the exotic foreignness of the “Japanese” soundscape prominently enough, even though, due to missionaries, trading, and imperialism, Western music by 1908 had “penetrated everyday life [in

Japan], and became established as an integral element of musical culture and even threatened the continued viability of traditional practices.”10

As the international success of The Mikado highlights, weaving a racial fantasy on stage involves not only the correct costuming, accessorizing, and minstrel transforming of actors into archetypes, but it also relies on a racialized soundscape. In this way, the songwriters of Tin Pan

Alley and lyricists like Ted Snyder were integral to the success of Broadway and later

Hollywood film productions of racial and cultural fantasy. Tin Pan Alley, the name given to the space and the business of popular music making from 1880 through 1953,11 provided the sonic tropes for what I call the “Orientalist soundscape,” or a sonic environment that pervasively creates, remixes, and promotes both positive and negative images of the Orient and its imagined peoples. Thematically, Tin Pan Alley took names, places, folklore, and images from Asia as inspiration for many of the characters and settings of its song’s comic dialect songs and sentimental ballads. Spatially, Tin Pan Alley grew in New York City’s Lower East Side near where many Asian immigrants lived and worked. The “official” memorial of where “Tin Pan

Alley” once stood designates it as a small section of West 28th Street between Broadway and

Sixth Avenue in New York City. However, Tin Pan Alley actually inhabited multiple spaces and even transcended borders as a culture, as a business model, and a mode of composing.12 In this 99

way, writing for Tin Pan Alley or consuming its material became a form of cultural citizenship and a way of performing (white) American identity, particularly for the newly arrived Jewish immigrants who became the business’ most prolific lyricists. Most importantly, Tin Pan Alley spread propagandistic messages about “American-ness” and national identity quickly and contagiously across the continent and overseas, and these messages often depicted Asian people and culture as irreconcilably Other.

Highly influential during the First World War and continuing to grow in its wake, Tin

Pan Alley’s music circulated widely via the burgeoning industries of sheet music production, phonographic records, film, and commercial radio broadcasting. We can identify through Tin

Pan Alley songs a shifting aural and auditory imaginary as a means of mapping the possibilities and limitations of dominant-held notions of political and cultural citizenship. These notions, enforced and exported by way of empire, pit U.S. nationhood against others abroad and create an image of national belonging in contrast with “foreignness.” The exploration of music as an integral site of selfhood and citizenship this chapter undertakes makes visible the extent to which

“American-ness” as a concept is unstable and dynamic.

No other media source had the polyvalent strength of popularizing stereotypical phenotypes and racialized modes of interiority as Tin Pan Alley did in its heyday. A true culture- making powerhouse in its ability to color the senses through sight (sheet music cover design), touch (as a commercial item and as a musical text to be played on the piano), and sound

(performed live in theaters and recorded on vinyl albums), the music of Tin Pan Alley created and promoted positive and negative stereotypes of Asia and Asian Americans through affective and rational modes of influence. From Tin Pan Alley’s beginning – a marker many music historians set in syncopation with Charles K. Harris’ 1891 tune “After the Ball” 13 – Tin Pan 100

Alley was connected with Asian/Americans and visions of Asia in numerous ways. Popular songs like “From Here to Shanghai” and “The Japanese Sandman” that attack, defame, diminish, and revile particular immigrant groups and minority communities serve a nostalgic purpose for the majority while functioning as cultural sites of embarrassment and even trauma for the song’s imagined subjects. The composition, performance, and consumption of these anti-Asian songs also serve as a naturalizing act, a discourse that Matthew Frye Jacobson explains “discovered fundamental and unforgiving differences between the white races on the one hand, and the hordes of nonwhite Syrian, Turkish, Hindu, and Japanese claimants who were petitioning the courts for citizenship on the other.”14

In this chapter, I will make clear the connections between Tin Pan Alley and cultural nationalism by exposing how these popular tunes promulgated an Orientalist soundscape throughout not only the United States and its empire but also the entire world. Importantly, this soundscape created potential arenas for racially inflected music ways amidst the increasing technology of sheet music production and performance, theater shows, moving pictures, and radio. This acoustic perspective examines degrees of distance, nostalgic notions of space, and commodified notions of Asian-ness. The sound profiles of these Tin Pan Alley tunes helped create and proliferate many of the common “Asian music” stereotypes that persist to this day.

Through an extended close reading of the sounds and lyrics of two tunes – Irving Berlin’s

“From Here to Shanghai” (1917) and Raymond Egan’s “The Japanese Sandman” (1920) – I will expose Tin Pan Alley’s echoing and amplifying of anti-Asian sentiment and the national politics of exclusion that were embedded in the contemporaneous cartographic prohibitions of the 1917

Asiatic Barred Zones Act. This will be one of the first extended close readings of these two influential yet overlooked pieces of American cultural, material, and auditory memory. 101

The scholarship to date on Tin Pan Alley has focused heavily on the biographical racial makeup of performers and songwriters and the racialized history of music forms like the “coon song” and ragtime music. Scholars have given less focus to the sonic images and symbols of race created by Tin Pan Alley tunes themselves. Moreover, scholars have put even less effort into excavating and examining the histories of ethnic groups outside of the important yet limited in scope white/black binary that so dominates American popular music. This lack of interest in scholarship is shocking given the hundreds of songs written and performed during the Tin Pan

Alley era that took images and symbols of Asia as their primary tropes. Occasionally, scholars refer to Charles Hale Hoyt’s farcical Broadway comedy A Trip to Chinatown and Percy Gaunt’s interpolation of Tin Pan Alley songs for the production. Beyond this, there is still much work to do. Through close-readings of these two popular Tin Pan Alley tunes of the Orientalist soundscape and their corresponding means of production and consumption, the remainder of this chapter then brings a new ethnic focus to the current scholarship on Tin Pan Alley, cultural nationalism, and popular culture.

Tin Pan Alley and the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zone Act On February 5, 1917, the Sixty-Fourth United States Congress overwhelmingly passed the Asiatic Barred Zone Act (H.R. 10384),15 a gatekeeping piece of legislation which enacted an a literary test and an $8 tax16 on any immigrant over the age of 16 entering the country, denied undesirable persons under sweeping categories like “idiots, anarchists, and prostitutes”, rejected all potential contract laborers, and ostensibly barred all Asians who were not from areas possessed by the United States.17 The Act barred “natives of Asia and islands adjacent to Asia” through cartographic means by establishing a zone from which “no alien now in any way excluded from, or prevented from entering, the United States shall be admitted to the United

States.”18 This Act did not bar “travelers for curiosity or pleasure,” and it did give certain rights 102

to people of particular occupations such as “government officers, ministers or religious teachers, missionaries, lawyers, physicians, chemists, civil engineers, teachers, students, authors, artists,

[and] merchants.”19 The Act also allowed for refugees fleeing persecution “against the alien or the race to which he belongs because of his religious faith” and did not require them to pass the literacy test,20 a section written primarily to help escaping Jews from the Russian Empire and its pogrom massacres. This refugee section of the Act presciently prepared for the oncoming tumult in the Russian Empire through 1917 and into 1918, such as the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on

March 15, 1917 by a provisional government of Russian nobles and aristocrats and the subsequent displacement of those nobles later in the Bolshevik Revolution.

While the 1917 Act made certain concessions for these refugees and acknowledged white ethnicity through permitting Hebrew and Yiddish as legitimate languages for the literary test,21 it primarily intensified the legacy of discriminatory political and cultural maneuvers taken against

Asians in the United States and served as a precursor to the highly exclusionary 1924 Johnson-

Reed Immigration Act. While the Act differentiated and thereby gave identities to white ethnicities such as Jewish, it cartographically redistricted all natives of a gigantic part of southern

Asia and the Middle East and unilaterally excluded them. In this way, it erased difference between immigrants from the Kingdom of Siam and Indians under British colonization by creating the categorization “native persons of the Continent of Asia.” The lumping of different groups together under the adjectival noun “Asian” erases important differences between peoples and cultures while it also critically functions at times as a collective power formation. In terms of

U.S. history, the sudden political need to reconfigure who belongs and who does not has been frequent, and cultural nationalism has played a key role in articulating or refuting claims of identity. 103

The fact that the 1917 Act barred Asians not from countries politically controlled by the

United States makes clear that race, after citizenship, becomes the material evidence through which we can see how political representation and economic systems have historically benefitted from the exclusion of many different groups. In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural

Politics (1996), Lisa Lowe strives to “name the genealogy of the legal exclusion, disenfranchisement, and restricted enfranchisement of Asian immigrants as a genealogy of the

American institution of citizenship.”22 Lowe deftly defines race “not as a fixed singular essence, but as the locus in which economic, gender, sex, and race contradictions converge.”23 This understanding of malleable racial formation over static categorical branding is critical to understanding how citizenship and nationalism have historically evolved in the U.S. In terms of nationalism, Lowe importantly highlights how “a politics based on racial, cultural, or ethnic identity facilitates the displacement of intercommunity differences – between men and women or between workers and managers – into a false opposition of ‘nationalism’ and ‘assimilation’.”24

Cultural nationalism can function as this kind of collectivizing tool when particular power structures wield it in pursuit of national political projects and debates over citizenship.

In terms of barred zones and ineligibility, citizenship is not limited to just the fraught relationship between the nation-state and the immigrant and the existence of documentation which marks one as legal and eligible for state-recognized selfhood. Rather, citizenship is a complex concept which signifies – to varying degrees and to divergent ends -- belonging, acceptance, and inclusivity. Numerous cultural and ethnic studies scholars such as Pierre

Bourdieu, Lisa Lowe, Aihwa Ong, and Jennifer Gordon have argued such, stating that citizenship is not monolithic but rather at least tripartite, locating citizenship in economic, cultural, and legal structures and sometimes even others. A keynote concept explored in these 104

scholars’ work is that culture, in the form of “American memories, events, and narratives,” is an important rider to the agreement between the nation-state and the immigrant because it ultimately “comes to articulate itself in the domain of language, social hierarchy, law, and ultimately, political representation.”25 Other facets of citizenship and selfhood necessarily include location and family roots, political participation when given the right, and subscription to a collective social identity as a form of assimilation.26 Equally important, nationalism – as a multifaceted concept – functions as a significant analytical site in terms of Tin Pan Alley and the

Orientalist soundscape when we grant culture the same power in subject-making as politics or other structures.

Not coincidentally, the cultural trend of composing and consuming Tin Pan Alley songs continued to rise during this time alongside increased anti-Asian nativism as shown in the 1917

Act. This happened in tandem with the diminishing of the frontier, and the documentation of the intensifying nationalism spreading throughout the country is symptomatic of a growing empire- nation. On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and entered World War I, strengthening the call for nationalism across the country that cartographically demanded both expansionism and isolationism. However, this symptom of the growing United States empire had been felt throughout in Europe as well as in Latin America, the Pacific Rim, and Asia in the years prior to the war as well. The United States supported a liberal Mexican constitution under

Venustiano Carranza’s presidency that sought to quell tensions and rebellion in the Borderlands by groups under the command of Emiliano Zapata and Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Using the

Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, the United States sent its Marines into the

Dominican Republic in 1916 to force Secretary of War Desiderio Arias to leave Santo Domingo, and they remained through this time until 1924.27 Also in 1917, the United States ratified a 105

purchase treaty with Denmark for the Virgin Islands at the price of twenty-five million dollars in gold, adding these islands to the American territorial empire, which by then included Puerto

Rico, the Philippines, Guam, American Samoa, Hawaiʻi, and numerous other Pacific islands.28

Naturally, the themes of travel, tourism, cross-cultural encounter, foreignness, oddity, and minstrelsy appear in the music of Tin Pan Alley as, to use R. Murray Schafer’s phrase, an “ear- witness account” of these concurrent international events.29 Tin Pan Alley did not simply retell news events in song, however; it played its own pivotal role in creating and proliferating stereotypes about foreign bodies and cultures with the Orientalist soundscape being one of its most sonorous themes.

The Orientalist Soundscape Tin Pan Alley tunes, as the creators and shapers of seemingly innovative new music styles, functioned as their own, to adapt a phrase from Theodor Adorno, “ontological beings-in- themselves.”30 These new styles are only seemingly so due to the self-referential nature of fetishized and commodified artistic productions that are categorized and sold according to labels.

As Adorno explains, just as people who buy tickets to a Toscanini concert are “really worshipping the money that he himself has paid for the ticket,” the people who consumed Irving

Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” prided themselves on being “ragtime” fans, regardless of that song actually being “ragtime” or not.31 This is not to say that there is nothing genuinely to love about the songs of Tin Pan Alley; the choruses are undoubtedly catchy, the lyrics cliché but cute, and the syncopation light-hearted and fun. However, the danger of these powerful popular culture products is that they are created in favor of nationalistic projects that rely on these infectious and indoctrinating lyrics and soundscapes. The liner notes of many Tin Pan Alley songs, which found their roots in minstrel tunes, promoted the “realness” and “old-fashioned” nature of these tunes. In terms of minstrelsy, however, the circular and frustrating argument 106

which held sway was that minstrelsy is “best when it gave a genuine description of black culture” and that “genuine performances were those that adhered to the conventions of minstrelsy.”32 Similarly, the tunes of Tin Pan Alley that imagined Asia and Asians created an auditory Orientalist canon that was further empowered by the visual print culture of sheet music covers and their caricature depictions of Others. Songs about China and Japan ontologically become actually about China and Japan because the titles, lyrics, sounds, and images that make up the songs claim to be about China and Japan.33 This is the danger inherent in a cultural nationalistic tool like Tin Pan Alley.

The Orientalist soundscape is one way in which Tin Pan Alley fabricated its own audio- lyrical cultural hierarchy and functioned as a nationalistic tool. In its adoring/abhorring views of

Asia and Asians, the Orientalist soundscape is a more nuanced and complicated cultural weapon than straightforward retorts of “Dixie” against civil rights activists. The Orientalist soundscape manifests itself in numerous ways and continues to this day. For example, Bonnie Wade explains how documentaries like Ken Burns’ The War (2007) strategically use “the Oriental [pentatonic] scale” in particular scenes. Specifically, The War employs “a soulful violin line based on that scale over a vague ‘harmonic’ steadiness behind the telling of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a musical underlining of the otherness of the Japanese to Americans, and then again as the genocide of the Polish Jews – Hitler’s other – is narrated.”34 The Orientalist soundscape has been audible since the beginning of minstrel songs in the United States, meaning that it is synonymous with the beginning of United States national popular music.

Robert Lee explains that popular music, like that of Tin Pan Alley, offers a powerful medium for an “ideology of nostalgia.” As an oral tradition, popular music provides a sonic identity or a soundmark for not only a landscape but for the groups that find solidarity among 107

it.35 Popular music creates this solidarity through its lyric imagery, symbolism, and metonymy, which evoke memory and emotion, “linking the atomized present to the collective past.”36 In this way, the Orientalist soundscape provides a soundtrack to exclusion, turning cultural memory work into audio-lyrical imaginaries. Lee also highlights that a “score of popular songs published between 1855 and 1882 portrayed the Chinese immigrant as an agent of economic decline and social disorder for free white working-men and their families.”37 Lee makes a case through detailed analyses of music, print, and film that popular culture “[illuminates] the social contradictions of its production, the internal complexities of the Oriental representation, and the way in which the Oriental is imbedded in the discourses of race, gender, class, and sexuality in

America.”38 Similarly, the collective past in the songs of Tin Pan Alley is an imagined, idealized time that ignores historical atrocities and institutionalized racism in the form of immigration legislation. The sounds of these songs and the subjects of their narratives “[unremittingly interacted] with the past and present”39 in the making of popular culture and, in the process, accessed a historical archive of positive and negative stereotypes about Asians and Asia broadly defined.

For example, California Gold Rush author and poet Bret Harte wrote the lyrics for one of the earliest known popular Orientalist tunes in the United States titled “The Heathen Chinee”

(1870).40 In typical Harte fashion, the satiric lyrics tell the story of a saloon poker game gone badly. A seemingly ignorant Chinese player (aptly named Ah Sin) with a “childlike smile” cons the narrator’s companion – another con man named Bill Nye – by concealing “twenty-four packs” of cards up the “long sleeves” of his Chinese gown that trump the few “aces and bowers” hidden up Nye’s sleeves.41 In September 1870, The Overland Monthly Magazine published the lyrics of the later song under the title “Plain Language from Truthful James.” Illustrators like S. 108

Eytinge later added caricatures to Harte’s poem in reprints, and the poem had its title changed to

“The Heathen Chinee,” part of a line found in the opening stanza. The full line, however, captures Harte’s criticism of the racial discrimination in northern California and the complexity of the Orientalist soundscape by stating that “the heathen Chinee is peculiar.”42 While the narrator calls Ah Sin’s ways “dark” and his personage “peculiar,” there is a certain reluctant admiration for the way he was outsmarted in language and in contest by the non-native speaking,

“unaccustomed” foreigner. This simultaneous adoration/abhorrence is a theme that contributes to the Orientalist soundscape and that the music of Tin Pan Alley widely represents in its comic dialect songs and sentimental ballads.

Tin Pan Alley established an Orientalist soundscape which promulgated an idealized cosmopolitanism in the face of increased isolationism and which nostalgically imagined and recreated imperialistic contact with Asia through music. Many Tin Pan Alley artists used images of the so-termed “Orient” to negotiate their own vexed relationship to the United States. In turn, anti-Asian musical representations become a means of cultural citizenship and Americanization.

The recurring themes of tourism, consumerism, and voyeurism in these songs reflect the power dynamics enabled by unfair trade agreements, extraterritoriality, and discriminatory immigration laws in the United States. And just as Coleen Lye suggests, the “encroaching sense of diminishing Americanizable space at the end of the nineteenth century, famously announced by

Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, was partly related to the contradictions of expanding U.S. relations with Asia, which could potentially renew or threaten the perpetuation of the American frontier.”43 The soundscape in the United States reflected this attitude. The popular tunes of Tin

Pan Alley capture this Orientalist reverence for all things/images/spaces Asian, but also reinforce 109

in their lyrics the increasing American desire to keep those fascinations – and Asian peoples – at a distance.

Gary Okihiro explains that, like “the European imperial powers in Asia and upstart Japan, the United States saw Asia and the Pacific as its domain as early as 1784 with the launching of the ship Empress of China and the start of the U.S.-Asian trade.”44 Just as Europeans did,

Americans through the early twentieth century cherished Chinese and Japanese tea, tableware, and linens for their beauty, quality, and the pre-modern cultural aura attached to them. However, as John Kuo Wei Tchen uncovers, the formulators of U.S. identity “sought to advance a unique form of American nationalism that often used China and the Chinese symbolically and materially to advance a revolutionary way of life – to make a culture infused with this faith in individualism and progress. Orientalism, therefore, became a cultural phenomenon intrinsic to American social, economic, and political life.”45 China was posited as Other in step with British efforts to subjugate the Chinese as they dealt in Pacific trade of goods and labor. This Otherness consequently led to the classification of Chinese and other Mongoloids as “aliens ineligible for citizenship” in the late nineteenth century through the various exclusionary immigration and naturalization acts. Only after Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and began distancing itself from

Western powers by leaving the League of Nations in 1933 did the United States side with China in an attempt to maintain colonial order in the East.

The ways in which the music of Tin Pan Alley accessed this memory archive and fostered cultural nationalism are numerous. Its insistence on commodities over people coheres with not only this history but also the logics of the 1917 Act and of the prevalent form of

American Orientalism. As Coleen Lye suggests in America’s Asia (2005), the monograph from which this chapter in part takes its name, “American Orientalism” has a specific historical, 110

theoretical, and rhetorical capacity for cultural nationalism that calls for its own critical undertaking. Building upon the essential frame fabricated by scholars like Edward Said, studies of American Orientalism “observe the definitional continuities between the ‘negative’ and

‘positive’ stereotypes of Asia and Asian Americans and […] question a strictly evolutionary view of the relationship between them.”46 The West’s image of Asia has always been a mix of admiration and of detest. Admiration has often come in the form of what John Tchen calls

“patrician Orientalism.” Early Western adoration for “edifying curiosities” like Chinese and

Japanese porcelain, silk, tea, and spice helped aristocrats and patricians “to discover their own personal relationship to other cultures, peoples, and parts of the world.”47 For example, the

Brighton Pavilion, a royal residence constructed in England between 1787 and 1823, prominently features all sorts of chinoiserie in its architecture and fanciful interior including

Indian, Chinese, Mughal, and Islamic designs. Similarly, the Founding Fathers of the United

States, Benjamin Franklin among them, constantly noted the superior quality and value of

“China” and their desire to have collections in their kitchens.48 Berlin’s “From Here to

Shanghai” also engages in “commercial Orientalism,” a form more focused on spectacle and monstrosity, in its referencing the hiring and dominating of the “Oriental conjuror” Ching Ling

Foo.49

The consumption of the artistic trope of Asia also has a long history in Europe and in the

United States that was pervasive from the 1870s through the 1920s. This large patronage is directly connected to the fashion and commercial crazes for chinoiserie and Japonism prevalent in France in the 1860s and then later in the rest of Europe and in the United States. Josephine Lee catalogues musical theater and opera shows throughout the late-nineteenth century50 which misrepresent various Asian nations and cultures “in ways that can be seen as patronizing and 111

insulting” but that also “give us an excellent opportunity to examine complexity, distinctiveness, an mutability of racial construction over time and across space.”51 Some of these shows, like

Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado and Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, broke Broadway and national records for number of performances and ticket sales. For example, Oscar Asche’s yellowface musical comedy Chu Chin Chow opened on August 3, 1916 at His Majesty’s Theatre in London and ran for five years and 2,238 performances – more than twice the number of any previous musical and a record that held for nearly forty years. The musical, which is an adaptation of Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves, is the story of the thief Abu Hasan’s attempt to steal treasure from the wealthy merchant Kasim Baba (brother of Ali Baba) by disguising himself as an incoming guest of Baba’s, a wealthy Chinese merchant named Chu Chin Chow, whom

Hasan’s gang has preemptively murdered. While it is possible that shows such as this with

Orientalist themes could have amazing actors, scores, and sets that attract audiences with aesthetic and performative brilliance (as Asche’s shows were renowned for), it is even more likely that the audiences came to consume those Orientalist themes with a lesser regard for the quality of compositions or direction. As Snyder’s Funabashi example highlights in comparison,

Orientalism has proven repeatedly that it is a box office draw.

Similarly, Tin Pan Alley drew upon symbols, images, and fantasies of Asia for the backdrops of its comic dialect tunes and nostalgic, sentimental ballads. Hollywood films of the

1910-20s, which also found Asia and Asians to be of great fascination, became inseparably wedded to Tin Pan Alley’s tunes, as is shown in the interpolation of Harris’ “After the Ball” for the 1926 Fox production A Trip to Chinatown starring Margaret Livingston and featuring twenty-year-old Anna May Wong.52 Tin Pan Alley and its association with Broadway and

Hollywood entertainment productions situated particular sounds, tones, instruments, and symbols 112

in connection with Asians and Asian Americans. Bonnie Wade explains that “[…] music can acquire meaning from the situation in which it is made or heard and then become a kind of text in itself. Its meaning is then ‘situated’.”53 Anthems like “We Shall Overcome” gained semantic value on top of their aesthetic qualities through their situation within African American struggle and legacies of discrimination. However, the creation of Orientalist tunes by Tin Pan Alley and their situation into powerful visual displays of Orientalism by Broadway and Hollywood productions facilitated an exoticized, eroticized, and discriminatory discourse surrounding Asian bodies and cultures.

Furthermore, the performers of these songs were both white and black, gentile and

Jewish, male and female, and they together built the Orientalist soundscape that highlighted the

Otherness of Asia and Asians. In discussing how black composers like Will Marion Cook tried reforming coon songs into dialect songs that featured white singers, Karl Hagstrom Miller suggests that the white singers “remained interested in the very exoticism and eroticism the composers attempted to downplay.” He further adds that “dialect numbers enabled many singers to assert their own whiteness in contrast to the apparent blackness of their performances just as coon shouters had done in the 1890s. Recent Eastern European immigrants – from Sophie

Tucker to Al Jolson – discovered that acting black was one of the most American things they could do.”54 In a similar way, distancing Asia and Asians and creating the Orientalist soundscape is one of the most American things any citizen could do to further a cultural nationalistic project.

Jewish performers such as Benny Goodman, Al Jolson, and Artie Shaw all recorded versions of

Egan’s “The Japanese Sandman,” a tune that describes the power relations between tourists/immigrants and the host society but suggests that the immigrant holds more power. This imaginary concept stands in stark contrast to the experiences of many Jewish immigrants to the 113

United States. Influential black performers like Earl Hines, whose orchestra in the 1930s was

“the first big Negro band to travel extensively through the South,” also recorded a version of

“The Japanese Sandman.”55 By distancing Asia and Asians through the Orientalist soundscape created by this song and its themes, Hines joined in the white cultural nationalistic project of big band performances of Tin Pan Alley tunes.56

The participation of women in building the Orientalist soundscape is of utmost importance as well. Singers like Olive Kline and The Andrews Sisters brought “The Japanese

Sandman” to not only the American public but to the world as the U.S. increased its cultural exposure worldwide through the recording technology emerging at the time. By showcasing female vocals on a track that is meant to distance Asia and Asians at the same time that women in the United States were fighting for the national suffrage amendment, composers and record companies brought the genders together under a cultural nationalistic banner. Furthermore, with experiential and scholarly knowledge of Asia being more accessible to men at the turn of the century, the consumption of the Orientalist soundscape at home via phonograph records allowed women to bring these exotic ideas into the domestic sphere. Mari Yoshihara describes how the material culture of Orientalism “packaged the mixed interests Americans had about Asia – Asia as seductive, aesthetic, refined culture, an Asia as foreign, premodern, Other – and made them into unthreatening objects for collection and consumption.”57 In this way, both men and women could participate in the cultural nationalistic project of consuming the Orientalist soundscape.

I turn now to close readings of Irving Berlin’s “From Here to Shanghai” and Raymond

Egan’s “The Japanese Sandman.” Written as songs to be played on the piano at home, to be listened to as background music in public, and to be danced to, these songs had an impact on listeners through their capitalization on the catchy syncopation and ragged rhymes popular in 114

their time. In considering Adorno’s thoughts on ontology, these songs reified not only notions of

“Asian music” through the adoption of pentatonic music scales and the usage of gongs but also the characters of the song lyrics as racial archetypes that listeners could connect with the real world outside of the lyrics. The audio-lyrical imaginary created by these songs is one in which

Asians and Asian Americans are trapped by lyric and sonic expectations of identity and of performance. And while this is not to suggest that Asians in the United States had no agency in creating their own artistic productions or popular public images, it does highlight how the powerful entertainment universes of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood used their influence to capitalize on the creation of an Orientalist soundscape that dominated print, sound, and stage for decades in the United States.

Irving Berlin’s “From Here to Shanghai” (1917) Born Israel Isidore Baline in 1888 in the Siberian area of the Russian Empire, Irving

Berlin immigrated to the United States at the age of five and settled in the Yiddish-speaking district of New York’s Lower East Side. Berlin’s family was part of the two million Ashkenazi

Jews escaping pogroms and anti-Semitism who entered the United States between 1880 and

1914. In contrast with the Chinese immigrants Berlin takes as the subjects of his 1917 song, no

U.S. immigration legislation was in place against his family or Eastern Europeans until the

Emergency Quota Act of 1921. This sense of freedom in movement, tourism, relocation, and identity formation permeates Berlin’s oeuvre. Outside of his standards, Berlin published travelogue and immigrant-themed dialect songs concurrent with the 1917 Act with lyrics and sonic maneuvers that helped create and perpetuate racial and cultural stereotypes. The stereotypes found in “From Here to Shanghai,” while not overtly offensive like in many of the coon songs which Tin Pan Alley writers based their work on, still fostered the growth of misinformation and of liberal, pervasive invention of “Asian” images. 115

When he was a teenager, Berlin told his mother, Leah Baline, that he wanted to become a singing waiter; his father, Moses, had been a cantor in Siberia and was working at that time in a kosher meat factory in the Lower East Side. Israel’s disgraceful dream was unthinkable for

Baline’s parents, and so young “Izzy” ran away from home. Israel got his start in music at around age sixteen by plugging songs at vaudeville shows and music hall concerts and by working as a singing waiter in a Chinatown café. It was here Berlin where wrote his first local hit, “Marie From Sunny Italy,” a sentimental dialect ballad, the royalty profits of which earned

Baline thirty-seven cents.58 Folktale tells us that a spelling error in the sheet music publishing also earned him his new name, I. Berlin, which he subsequently adopted and added to by taking

“Irving” for a first name. From there, Berlin made his first connections with George A. Whiting, began writing for the Ted Snyder Company, and eventually went on to write some of the United

States’ most beloved and ubiquitous songs like “God Bless America,” “White Christmas,”

“Cheek to Cheek,” and the entire score to Annie Get Your Gun (featuring “There’s No Business

Like Show Business” and “Anything You Can Do”).59

Berlin’s oeuvre over his sixty-year career (with at least nine hundred songs recorded) swayed between comic, sentimental, dramatic, and patriotic themes. Songs like “Araby” (1915) and “That Hula-Hula” (1916) echoed the national interest found at the popular Exhibitions of the time in exotic foreign lands like Egypt and Hawaii. Berlin wrote Southern pastorals like “When

It’s Night Time Down in Dixie Land” (1914) and “When You’re Down in Louisville” (1916) without spending much time outside New York City.60 Following “Marie From Sunny Italy,” he also wrote dialect immigrant narratives like “It Takes an Irishman to Love” (1917) and “I’ll Take

You Back to Italy” (1917) in which lovers sang how they wanted to “mak-a da nice-a honeymoon” and how they will “have a little wop, / Someone to call you ‘pop;’.”61 116

Dialect performances like Berlin’s “I’ll Take You Back to Italy” or in the call-and- response sections of “From Here to Shanghai” walk a thin line between authenticity and minstrelsy. The danger in dialect performance, situated within a U.S. cultural and historical framework, is that it emphasizes difference. The tone, emphasis, and pronunciation of the singer’s words become more distinguished and, subsequently, part of the message itself; the singer’s difference is interpolated onto the song. In discussing Oscar Hammerstein II’s 1927 musical Show Boat, Shana Redmond explains that the dialect in songs like “Ol’ Man River” “not only distinguishes Black from white in the show but also serves to contain the Black characters in their natural state as uneducated and simple laborers and confidants.”62 Similarly, Thomas

Edison, owner of Edison Records from 1888 until 1929, favored dialect performances by African

American singers over other standard, non-accented performances.63 African American operatic singer Vernon Dalhart failed to secure a record deal three times at auditions with Edison before eventually singing a Texas-accented rendition of “Can’t Yo’ Hear Me Callin’, Caroline?” that won him a contract; Edison said the rendition, which was “probably the best […] of its kind ever recorded […] is a really artistic, old-fashioned darky love song.”64 Therefore, it is important to consider what side of the line dialect walks in terms of authenticity or minstrelsy and to note how the Orientalist soundscape engaged in these performances.

One of the major facets of Tin Pan Alley was its sheet music production business. As

Philip Furia explains, mass production beginning in the 1880s “made pianos more affordable, and as these pianos graced more and more parlors, the demand for sheet music expanded enormously.”65 The cover art of these Tin Pan Alley sheet music pieces not only functioned as powerful advertising for the product and as pieces of art in themselves but also yoked image with the music notes and instructions for playing within.66 Like the paratext of other forms of 117

literature, before you discover the contents within and play the music, you encounter the image painted on the cover and begin to make associations between the image and the text, notation, and sound.

Figure 2: “From Here to Shanghai,” Charles H. Templeton, Sr. sheet music collection. Special collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

Albert Wilfred Barbelle, an American artist who painted hundreds of covers for Tin Pan

Alley writers and served as Berlin’s in-house artist until the 1920s, painted the album cover for

Berlin’s “From Here to Shanghai.”67 The sheet music cover is separated into panels of titles, portraits, and caricatures. In the center of the piece is a color painted portrait of Henry Bergman and Gladys Clark, crediting them as the original singers of the tune. This portrait, as well as the 118

margins of the entire work, are outlined by bamboo poles. Irving Berlin’s name appears to the left of the couple on a hanging scroll that is also supported by bamboo. The font script used to name Clark and Bergman has a slight wisp to it and is in white while Berlin’s name and the title of the song at the top of the piece are in what we would recognize today as the stereotypical

“Chinese bamboo” style script. The lower half of the piece surrounding Clark and Bergman’s portrait is an image of a steam ship sailing over the ocean into the sunrise of the Far East. Most tellingly, the panel between the title section and the ocean scene is a cartoonish painting of three

Chinese men carrying a smiling white man in a palanquin. While the queued Chinese men in traditional and sparse clothing labor, two of them looking forward with no expression and another on the left almost grimacing out at the purchaser of the sheet music, the white man in a suit and tie leans out of the decorated palanquin, looks at the purchaser, smiles and waves. This image accompanying the sheet music makes a direct connection between itself and the lyrics and music within.

Beyond sheet music production, Tin Pan Alley was also in the business of recording their tunes to vinyl records for sale. Victor Records recorded Berlin’s “From Here to Shanghai” on

January 30, 1917 under the designation 18242, six days before the drafting of the 1917 Act. The

Victor vinyl press lists Irving Berlin as the composer and lyricist of “From Here to Shanghai” while Rosario Bourdon serves as conductor and Peerless Quartet supplies the vocals. This track also features Gene Greene, the self-proclaimed “King of Ragtime” and famous comic singer known for his “scat-style” singing, as accompanying baritone vocal. The three minute and nineteen-second version of the song archived in The Library of Congress contains extended and altered versions of Berlin’s original lyrics including some seemingly improvised mock-Mandarin scatting by Greene and members of Peerless Quartet. Greene sings in a high baritone register, 119

and after a marching-style introduction with a drum beat in duple time, the song proceeds at a moderate tempo of 88 beats per minute in an F-Major key.

“From Here to Shanghai” contains in its music and lyrics the entire spectrum of

Orientalist elements prevalent in 1917 used to distance and dominate Asian bodies and cultures.

Berlin’s song, via Tin Pan Alley’s established soundscape, promulgates an idealized cosmopolitanism in the face of increasing isolationism. The way the song’s narrator encounters

China and Chinese subjects makes visible an Orientalist soundscape not only at the narrative level but also in the cultural ways imperialistic contact with Asia is imagined and recreated.

Assuming that Berlin took his images and inspiration of Chinatown from his experience living and working in New York City’s Lower East Side, it is logical that the scene for this song is New

York City, although the singer could just as easily be engaging other metropolitan areas like San

Francisco or New Orleans.68 Musically, this song helped to create the tropes associated with

“Asian” music today: the ubiquitous usage of gongs, polyrhythmic triplets, and cante-fable style speak-singing vocals. Berlin’s music, through his partnership in the Waterson, Berlin and Snyder publishing company, was widespread and could be heard in cafes, department stores like Macy’s, and theaters across the country. And as radio burgeoned with the onset of World War I, the range of exposure and consumption of these tunes became more far-reaching and international.

The lyrics of the song begin: “I’ve often wandered down / To dreamy Chinatown / The home of Ching-a-ling.”69 The use of the active verb in the present perfect tense with the modifying adverb “often” in “I’ve often wandered” asserts from the outset of the song the singer’s experience and level of familiarity with the Orient. The singer is not only as of recent taking habitual trips to Chinatown but has been languorously wandering down to Pell Street at his leisure for quite some time. This assertion is one of the key components in establishing an 120

Orientalist soundscape in which the singer enters Chinatown not precariously but rather as a seasoned conqueror of substance and sense. On Orientalist race relations, Edward Said asserts that “to have such knowledge of such a thing is to dominate ‘it’, to have authority over ‘it’ […] since we know it and it exists in a sense as we know it.”70 The singer outwardly creates an “it” out of Chinatown by calling it “dreamy,” or something having a magical and unreal quality. The word “dreamy” was frequently used in the 1910s in bucolic, nostalgic, and often completely fictionalized narratives about the South, Mexico, and other areas where segregationists and imperialistic colonizers could dream of conquering new frontiers, subjugating new peoples, and savoring new exotic sensations.71 Sonorously, the singer adds an extended, exotic trill to the word “dreamy” to further emphasize Chinatown’s near-unpronounceable (to the American tongue) qualities, even though Mandarin Chinese does not employ any “rolled r” sounds. In a descriptive noun clause, the singer explains that Chinatown is the home of Ching-a-ling, a euphonic neologism that could be used for any Chinese person.72 However, if this Chinese John

Q. Public inhabits the dreamy, magical space of Chinatown, then their own personage similarly becomes that of the unreal. Therefore, not only is the singer an expert on the Orient but he is able to travel back and forth at will between cosmic dimensions of reality and dream while maintaining his own familiar, civilized qualities.

The next verse proceeds: “It’s fine! I must declare, / But now I’m going where / I can see the real, real thing.”73 The singer again asserts his dominance over the landscape he surveys and is either enthusiastically or obligatorily persuaded to declare its pleasantness according to his standards and expectations; Chinatown lives up to its mystical, Oriental fame. The singer’s desire to see the “real, real thing” reinforces the concept of the unreal, “dreamy” Chinese bodies and culture inhabiting enclaves of New York and San Francisco. Furthermore, the singer does 121

not question if he will be permitted to see or successful in seeing the “real thing,” but rather he asserts this ability and its viability in the immediate. The singer is not deterred by economic hardship nor is he barred from entering by prohibitive immigration laws. Ultimately, he has grown bored with the glimmer of the exotic in the Lower East Side and issues a decree making

Shanghai his next conquest.

This declaration, however, is more complex than simply writing Chinatown off as some knockoff version of China. The singer knows that Chinatown is not the “real thing” in that he knows it is a recreation of familiar space and that it functions as simulacrum; Chinatown is not

China, and Americans should not conflate the peoples and landscapes of the two. At this point in the lyrics, the singer is mainly opining about the landscape of Chinatown, the home of Ching-a- ling, and less about the people inhabiting that space. By calling Chinatown someone’s “home,” the singer acknowledges – at least in a subtle way – that these Chinese and Chinese Americans living in Chinatown have a home in the United States and that they do not need to return to a real

“home” abroad. Rather, the singer understands that the buildings and atmosphere of Chinatown offer an authentic space for life and culture that is inspired and envisioned both by people with memories of China and by those without. The “den of vice” image associated with Chinatown’s opium parlors and prostitution can just as easily be traced to people like Berlin’s first employer,

“Nigger” Mike Salter, an infamous Russian-Jewish club owner with Five Points gang affiliations, as it can to any Chinese or Chinese American establishment owner.74 Salter, with no recorded or conceivable connections or memories of China, did much to influence Chinatown culture, landscape, and soundscape through his ownership of the popular Pelham Café at 12 Pell

Street, his attracting patrons like gangster Biff Ellison, and his hiring of Berlin as a singing 122

waiter.75 In this way, the singer who exclaims that Chinatown is not the “real thing” acknowledges its multiplicity and hybridity of cultures and histories.

At the same time, the question of “realness” in terms of culture and observable landscape becomes complicated when it is synonymous with “authentic.” Specifically, the singer dreams of visiting Shanghai and asserts that it will offer a taste of the “real thing” that Chinatown mimics.

However, if the singer were aware of Shanghai’s hybridity and cosmopolitan landscape in terms of language, commerce, and culture at the turn of the century, he might also question whether

Shanghai were still “authentic” anymore or not. After the British forcibly opened five Chinese ports following the First Opium War and the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, Shanghai became host to

“concession” merchants from the United States, France, Germany and other foreign powers, making it one of the largest trading ports in the world. By 1886, Shanghai already featured

American, English, and French settlements situated along the Wusong River and Suzhou Creek in northern Shanghai that surrounded the Chinese section of the city, and these foreign settlements claimed more square yards combined than the native Chinese area did, even when combined with the section of the city described as a “crowded suburb.” In fact, Shanghai was so cosmopolitan in 1886 foreign merchant residents made up half of the city’s population

(156,500). Therefore, which “real thing” is the singer referring to – the one with “merchants of all nationalities” who “converted a reed-covered swamp into one of the finest cities in the East” or that imaginary, exclusively Chinese site of “authenticity” and realness?76

The chorus of the song begins the trope of domination through cultural consumption coded in tourism that pervades the Orientalist soundscape. The first quarter of the chorus begins:

“I’ll soon be there, / In a bamboo chair, / For I’ve got my fare, / from here to Shanghai.”77 The second quarter continues: “Just picture me, / Sipping Oo-long tea, / Served by a Chinaman, / who 123

speaks a-way up high (‘Hock-a-my, Hock-a-my’).”78 Berlin’s usage of nonsensical lyrics such as

“hock-a-my” renders the Mandarin language incomprehensible in a minstrel mockery. However, these nonsensical lyrics should not be interpreted as being meaningless. Bonnie Wade explains that “sometimes melody is sung to text that is not linguistically meaningful – syllables such as

‘fa la la’ in English carols. You might hear people use the phrase ‘meaningless syllables’ for such text, but ethnomusicologists no longer do so.”79 Ethnomusicologists no longer label these syllables as meaningless because many believe these utterances reveal much about the cultural and linguistic identities of the writers, performers, and audiences. Berlin’s tune, through the embellishments of vocalist Gene Greene and Peerless Quartet, utilizes these faux-Mandarin syllabic constructions in order to recreate and commodify the soundscape of Shanghai.

The third section of the chorus reads: “I’ll eat the way they do, / with a pair of wooden sticks, / And I’ll have Ching Ling Foo, / Doing all his magic tricks.”80 The singer describes chopsticks without using their given English name in favor of promoting their rudimentary and hand-crafted nature, and in doing so further distances them from familiar American cutlery. And simply “having” Ching Ling Foo, one of the world’s most respected magicians of the early 1900s and a peer of Harry Houdini, do his magic tricks for a one-man audience when in 1898 he ostensibly performed for President William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan at the Trans-

Mississippi Exposition, would be a magical feat on its own.81 Finally, the fourth part concludes:

“I’ll get my mail / From a pale pig-tail, / For I mean to sail, / From here to Shanghai,” and this line features one of the only overt racial comments on skin color and the queue worn by most

Chinese men at the time.”82 This metonymical reference to an anonymous Chinese postal worker serving the singer his mail functions as a distancing device from his imagined Chinese neighbors. Furthermore, the singer suggests that he has an address and possibly even residency in 124

China and that others know how to get in contact with him; he is not hiding in Shanghai as an unknown but rather is established and registered. The singer’s declaration that he “means to sail” to Shanghai confirms that plausibility and the inevitability of the Chinese serving him if and when he were to travel.

Finally, the second verse of the song, which is omitted in many recorded versions, further exposes the extent to which linguistic and cultural knowledge empowers the imperialist. Instead of using the full eight bars to convey one message as he did in the first verse, the singer in this second verse splits the eight bars between a prediction and a foreshadowing statement. The singer explains in the first four bars: “I’ll have them teaching me / To speak their language, gee!”83 Again, the tone is forceful and confident in the future tense but whimsical and even childlike in the exclamatory concluding phrase. However, the next four bars, the singer begins unveiling the details behind his planned naughty caprice in a foreshadowing statement that serves as a setup for a comic punchline. The singer reveals: “When I can talk Chinese, / I’ll come home on the run / Then have a barr’ll of fun, / Calling people what I please.”84 This leads the audience laughing back into the chorus for one more round before the song comes to an end.

The singer of “From Here to Shanghai” patronizes, masters, and dismisses Chinatown as a second-rate and increasingly boring version of China. Considering this alongside Frederick

Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” this singer has conquered the frontier of Chinatown and is looking to expand his sphere of dominance. He has the money to travel to China, and he fantasizes about all of the people who will serve him there once he makes the trip. He does not consider how he will communicate with them or how they will react to his requests. He plans an extended stay there in order to fulfill his Orientalist desire to learn Mandarin and to use it as a display of his cosmopolitanism and as a code-switching tool of power and caprice. Lyrically, 125

sonically, visually, and thematically, this song helped to proliferate the Orientalist soundscape in conjunction with the discriminatory statutes of the 1917 Act.

Raymond Egan’s “The Japanese Sandman” (1920) The immigration history of Chinese and Japanese to America had direct effects on how they were portrayed in song and in film up to and through the 1930s. However, the push factors for Chinese and Japanese emigrants as well as the United States’ diplomatic relationships with the two countries also greatly varied from each other. Push factors in China such as a string of natural disasters through the 1840’s and 1850’s, cataclysmic revolution in Taiping, and social and economic crisis due to foreign trade and opium trafficking forced much of the peasantry in central and southern China to seek livelihoods away from their homes.85 Even through the 1930s, many people were leaving China for the United States as the “paper children” of U.S. citizens of

Chinese descent and were leaving not of their own free will but out of circumstances beyond their control.86 There were similar push factors for Japan, whose government handled outflow of migratory workers through the twentieth century very differently than China by using private companies and strict regulations as well as reaching political agreements with the United

States.87 The Meiji Restoration of 1868, which was a Westernization project that saw dramatic increases in mechanization, the downfall of the small farm, and an increased interest in natural resources and labor to fill factories, led to a strengthened military and conscription.

Consequently, Japan began building its own empire and engaged in wars with Korea in 1876,

China in 1894-95, Russia in 1904-05, and in numerous other endeavors throughout Asia.88 For those whom the modernization project negatively affected or for those who wanted to avoid conscription, leaving Japan for a country such as the United States sometimes was the best available option. 126

Consequently, the treatment of Chinese and Japanese subjects in popular culture, although often confused and conflated in an Orientalist sense, was also different in terms of political equality and diplomatic respect. The 1920s Tin Pan Alley tune “The Japanese

Sandman” continues the emerging themes of tourism, consumerism, and domination in “From

Here to Shanghai,” but it also offers an image of family in Japan. This tune, in a more subtle yet perhaps powerful way, inspects Japan’s Westernization project in terms of family relations and economics and finds fascination in Japan’s almost uncanny copying of the West. The music, lyrics, and images associated with “The Japanese Sandman” further strengthen the Orientalist soundscape in their invention of Japan, and the power dynamics on display in this song are evident of the growing resentment toward Japan in the years before World War II.

Figure 3: “The Japanese Sandman,” Charles H. Templeton, Sr. sheet music collection. Special collections, Mississippi State University Libraries.

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Richard A. Whiting composed the music for “The Japanese Sandman,” and Raymond B.

Egan wrote its lyrics. The composing team had worked together previously in 1918 on the World

War I soldier’s ballad “Till We Meet Again.” While Whiting and Egan do not hold the same fame today as Irving Berlin’s legacy, they were legends during the heyday of Tin Pan Alley and sheet music production. Reports read that “Till We Meet Again” sold more than 3.5 million copies in the first few months after its release and more than 11 million copies total, a peak that no other artist’s sheet music sales would ever reach again.”89 Therefore, when they released the light-hearted tune “The Japanese Sandman” after the conclusion of the Great War, they expected the sheet music sales to be in high volume and the song to be ubiquitous. As I discuss further in the Epilogue, this song not only remained popular throughout the 1920s and 1930s through various American artists’ renditions, but it also became a propagandistic weapon during World

War II when the Nazi-German band Charlie and His Orchestra recorded their own version with lyrics changed to predict the Japanese empire’s victory over the West.

Frederick S. Manning drew the cover art for the Jeremy H. Remick & Co. printing of

“The Japanese Sandman.”90 A well-known sheet music artist famous for his illustrations of women, Manning painted in watercolor and pastel a beautiful domestic scene of a Japanese home at the base of Mount Fuji for this song. The script follows the same “Asian bamboo” lineage as

Barbella’s cover for “From Here to Shanghai,” although Manning uses this font for all words on this cover including Egan, Whiting, and the printing company’s names. The full-page splash illustration is a solo scene of a Japanese mother dressed in a light kimono lying on the floor with her infant child as she sings him a lullaby at dusk. The room that they are in is sparse but not poor, suggested by a painted vase in the right corner with a pruned cherry blossom branch set inside of it. Otherwise, the room has nothing but a futon on the tatami floor on which the baby 128

sleeps. This image of domesticity and family is serene, but when the lyrics of the song expose the voyeuristic theme of the tune, the cover art becomes much more complicated and disturbing.

Egan’s lyrics tell a testimonial story from the perspective of foreign observers witnessing a Japanese mother singing a lullaby to her baby. While the images of Otherness in this tune are seemingly mild-mannered enough, it is the voyeuristic and patronizing mode of contact with

Japan and the Japanese which the singer and listeners adopt that is worth analyzing. Just as in

“From Here to Shanghai,” the singer travels at will across the Pacific to a foreign nation in search of spectacle and oddity and a further understanding of the Other that lends credence to their Orientalist claims. However, whereas in “From Here to Shanghai” the Chinese are portrayed as subservient laborers and cultural instructors, the Japanese in “The Japanese

Sandman” are reduced to near Lilliputian status as mystical, “little people” that just happen to share a shred of similarity with Westerners in the singing of lullabies.91 The Japanese mother’s near-Western loving qualities are the spectacle of the song, and the folklore that she recites to her child further emphasizes this near sameness but overall difference.

Conductor Josef Pasternack and soprano vocalist Olive Kline were the first to bring “The

Japanese Sandman” to vinyl, recording the tune at Victor Records’ studio in Camden, New

Jersey on July 29, 1920 under the designation 45201. Kline sings in a medium operatic soprano register, and after a rubato introduction in which the rhythm is loose and takes expressive freedoms, the song proceeds at a moderate tempo of 112 beats per minute in an A-flat Major key.

The song proceeds in a leitmotif fashion using key and rhythm changes to signal a switch in narrators between a Western traveler and a Japanese woman. With Kline as the vocalist, the narrator of the song who travels across the Pacific to visit Japan and the home of this mother and child correspondingly becomes a woman. This drastically changes the tone of this composition 129

from that of Berlin’s “From Here to Shanghai” which repeats a common history of white men traveling to Asia in search of frontiers and unequal trade agreements. In this song, a woman is the one partaking in the nationalistic project of surveying or even spying on an Asian nation, bringing the power of the voyeuristic gaze into a national register instead of being embedded in a male-dominated practice of tourism, imperialism, and dominance.

In addition to Egan’s lyrics, analyzing Richard Whiting’s choices in musical composition for this tune offers a surface level of understanding how the song invokes and strengthens the

Orientalist soundscape. First, the choice of key combined with Kline’s singing up and down the scale in an undulating movement establishes a mysterious, ominous tone at the beginning of the tune. The opening lyrics further highlight this mood when Kline asks listeners: “Won’t you stretch imagination for the moment and come with me / Let us hasten to a nation lying over the western sea.”92 The juxtaposition of the listener’s imaginative abilities and the far eastern nation brings again to the forefront the question of reality and representation. Unlike “From Here to

Shanghai” in which the singer claims to have actual travel fare, the singer here suggests that the foreign land can be adequately or perhaps even more vividly captured inside one’s imagination, making the real physical journey unnecessary. The singer asks the listener to imagine a foreign land, which would suggest an undertaking of fiction, subjectivity, and fantasy. However, once the singer reveals that the far eastern nation is Japan, a nation to which one can actually travel to, the subtext of the lyrics switch from fantasy to interpretation and representation of reality. In this way, the singer champions a “fictive nation” over the “real thing” that the narrator of “From

Here to Shanghai” desires. Josephine Lee quotes Roland Barthes’ 1970 Empire of Signs in which he describes how the “fictive nation” of Japan represents the “Orient essence” and becomes “a 130

reserve of features whose manipulation – whose invented interplay – allows me to ‘entertain’ the idea of a unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own.”93

After pleading with the listener to traverse the ocean in order to give witness to strange lands abroad, the singer suggests that we “hide behind the cherry blossoms” for “here’s a sight that will please your eyes.” The singer then reveals that the journey was to witness “a baby with a lady of Japan singing lullabies.”94 Here, voyeurism and spectacle become the prominent features of the tune and frame the narrative to come as being understood or witnessed from a position of camouflage. The singer avoid conferring a familial relationship between the two and instead reports through indefinite articles that “a baby” is simply with “a lady.” The two become the spectacle to please foreign eyes that are hiding among the trees. At this reveal, the perspective of the gaze on the sheet music cover art becomes much more apparent; we are looking in on a Japanese home without the knowledge of the woman or the child, confirmed by neither of them returning our gaze. The power dynamics of the song become set at this moment in the tune as the song shifts into the chorus and the key changes from an A-flat Major to F

Major. The key change is significant in that it drastically affects the mood shift as the listener takes the voyeuristic position outside the Japanese home. Whereas A-flat Major tends to sound grave and even dangerous, F Major has a much calmer and wishful tone to it. From this point until the next verse, the singer gives the “night wind” to the Japanese woman and allows her to

“breath her sighs,” and we begin to hear the Japanese lady singing to her child a folktale.95

However, the fact that Kline remains the singer and that the folktale is not one found in Japanese folklore calls into question the agency, if it exists at all, that the Japanese woman might yield.96

The Japanese woman begins the tale: “Here’s the Japanese Sandman / Sneaking on with the dew / Just an old second hand man / He’ll buy your old day from you.” The “Sandman” here, 131

accessing European folklore and Hans Christian Andersen’s 1841 tale, is described as a peddler of used goods that sneaks from buyer to buyer, and his Japanese identity is prominent in that a

Japanese woman has to identify him as such. If she distinguishes him from other types of

Sandmen, then it would seem that this becomes a sort of racial or nationalistic folktale.

Otherwise, the Japanese woman could simply refer to him as the “Sandman” without reference to which race or country he belongs. This Japanese Sandman differs from Andersen’s version in which Ole Lucköie strews “a certain powder on the children’s eyelids” to help them sleep because he “loves the children, and wishes them well; he only wants them to be quiet, and they are most so when they are in bed.”97 By contrast, the Japanese Sandman is interested in purchasing old days from sleepy people in exchange for rest and relaxation. Furthermore, the

Japanese Sandman is a “second hand man” whereas Old Lucköie is “well dressed; his coat is of silken stuff; but to say what color it is would be an impossibility, for it is so glossy, and is green, and red, and blue, according as he turns.”98 Where Andersen’s sprite seemingly has no need for exchange and simply gives, the Japanese Sandman relies on the exchange of days for rest and must receive before he gives. Old Lucköie sits at the feet of children’s beds as they sleep and tells them stories, but the Japanese Sandman, as this tune reveals, deals in a bartering system that does not operate in this unilateral, unselfish way.

The singer continues: “He will take every sorrow / Of the day that is through / And he’ll give you tomorrow / Just to start life a-new.”99 Since the Japanese Sandman is not giving gifts of benevolence, it would seem that there is a market in this trade, and he requires sorrow in exchange for new days. The Japanese Sandman establishes a system of outcomes in the exchange between himself and the sleeping people of Japan; the result is that “you’ll be a bit older / In the dawn when you wake / And you’ll be a bit bolder / With the new dawn you 132

make.”100 The Japanese Sandman buys the past, memories, regrets, lessons learned, experiences, days, and life itself, and in exchange, he offers progress and growth. In a more fatalistic sense, the Japanese Sandman buys eternity in the form of memories and exchanges death. Once you trade your old days, you become older and move closer to the day when you will have no days left to change.

The end of the Japanese woman’s chorus confirms that the Japanese Sandman trades

“silver for gold” and that the “old second hand man” is “trading new days for old.”101 With the silver-to-gold value ratio in the West steadily of over thirty-to-one since 1920, the Japanese woman seems to promise her child a huge profit from arbitrage trading of his sorrow for older age and a bolder attitude. However, this exchange of silver and gold also indirectly recalls the

Late Tokugawa Shogunate [bakumatsu] period of Edo Japanese history (1853-1867) when Japan ended its isolationist policy and began trading with the West following the arrival of Commodore

Matthew Perry and his “black ships.” While most of the West valued silver at a rate of fifteen-to- one with gold in the 1860s, Japan traditionally set the value at only five-to-one. This led to massive levels of arbitrage in which foreigners took nearly seventy tons of gold out of Japan and effectively demolished the Japanese gold standard upon entering the world trade market.102

Returning to the lyric, the parallelism of the prepositional phrases becomes confusing when considering this trade history. Ostensibly, the Japanese Sandman is actually the one giving

“silver for gold,” since he is “trading new days for old.” Therefore, if he is taking gold from the people of Japan by giving them silver, he is reenacting a nefarious and infamous economic exchange that sent Japan into unemployment and famine and created huge inflation and unemployment rates.103 The new days he is trading for old then also become suspicious. There is no guarantee that “starting life a-new” tomorrow will be better than the days of old. The 133

Japanese Sandman here becomes an agent for modernization and discourages nostalgia in a way reminiscent of Commodore Perry and the West’s ultimatum that Japan begin a project of

Westernization.

After witnessing this currency exchange, the song returns to the A-flat Major key and the undulating vocal technique, signaling that Klein has once again embodied the foreign traveler hiding amidst the cherry blossoms. The singer claims that “Just as silent as we came we’ll leave the land of the painted fan,” and that we should “wander lightly or you’ll wake the little people of old Japan.”104 In these lines, the singer reaffirms Japan’s identity as a commodity-based nation that the Japanese woman was singing in her lullaby by calling it the “land of the painted fan.”

This image also is in stark contrast to more potent symbols like the samurai sword or the chrysanthemum, images that represent power and natural life, that could be associated with

Japan. Furthermore, returning to Andersen’s version of the Sandman, Ole Lucköie is only interested in putting children to bed, and the German version (notes Andersen’s translator) does the same by putting “little ones” to bed.105 In Egan’s tune and in typical Tin Pan Alley fashion, this phrase is “ragged” and it is all of the people of old Japan that become “little.” The voyeurs

(singer and audience) are not afraid of waking the sleeping baby but rather of making noise and being discovered in their position of hidden power. As they retreat over the Pacific and wish

“repose and pleasant dreaming” for the people of Japan, the Western tourists receive confirmation of their ability to traverse borders undetected while the entirety of Japanese people are reduced to sleeping children none the wiser about the American visitors who were among them in their private hours.

Conclusions Music scholars like Ann Ostendorf and others have written extensively on how the

United States as a relatively young nation and world power searched deep inside itself for a 134

national music-form and found that it could form a definition through negation of what it would not be.106 Without an acceptably representative history of folk lore tradition that could be called

“American” or a clearly definable rural peasantry from which composers could draw on for symbols and themes, the course of American popular culture as a national binding agent was vexed from the beginning of the republic. Early composers of music for the United States like

Anthony Philip Heinrich and turn-of-the-century ones like Antonín Dvořák, both born in

Bohemia themselves, made careers out of deciding what kinds of peoples and cultures could appropriately serve as inspiration for American music and which were best ignored.107 Even though both of these composers acknowledged and accessed Native American cultures as potential representatives of the United States landscape/soundscape, their works functioned more as a “popular fascination” with the “primeval” cultures that came before what they saw as the

United States of America.108 In this way, peoples and cultures have been continually and arbitrarily be excluded from the United States soundscape in favor of an amnesic national identity project.109 By labeling a music-form “ethnic,” such as “Irish ballads,” “Negro spirituals,” or “Native American chanting,” these songs were differentiated from and therefore not accepted as representative of the “nation,” an entity which many thought held homogeneity as a prerequisite.110 Ironically however, Tin Pan Alley songs like Harry P. Guy’s “Pearl of the

Harem” (1901), which was labeled and marketed as an “Oriental rag,” could bring Americans together on a two-step dance floor under the guise of exploring a tune with a foreign air.

Foreignness could be something American as long as it did not involve actual foreigners or their cultural legacies.

From the 1880s through the early 1950s, Tin Pan Alley was the dominant national music- form in the United States that took on the task of dictating who/what belongs. It was commercial, 135

rooted in a minstrel tradition that dominated the popular music soundscape since the 1820s, and strongly wedded to the emerging art entertainment industries of printed sheet music production, audio recording, radio, and film. For these reasons, Tin Pan Alley was a powerful tool of artistic propaganda and reflected the cultural and political views of its white consumers. And while merchants and consumers had long been interested in Asia for its unequal trade opportunities and products, United States legislators at the federal, state, and local levels historically felt the need to argue whether immigrants from Asia were desirable and/or admissible as potential citizen- residents. Tin Pan Alley, as the music-form which sounded these national tensions regarding race, religion, political dogma, and the stigma of unassimilability, played a huge rule in the popular understanding of foreign cultures and peoples. Tin Pan Alley’s ability to create cultural hierarchies through invoking an “Orientalist soundscape” is one of the most important facets of this often regarded soapy and cliché style of popular music. In synchronicity with Tin Pan

Alley’s heyday was the increased targeting and excluding of Asians from the U.S. body politic via Acts like the 1917 Asiatic Barred Zones Act. Not coincidentally but perhaps ironically, Tin

Pan Alley imagined and drew in to the national cultural fabric caricatured and archetypal version of Asia in lieu of the “real thing” that was distant, foreign, and excluded.

Today, The Library of Congress archives “From Here to Shanghai” and “The Japanese

Sandman” under the genre classification “ethnic characterizations.” Libraries at universities like

Duke classify these songs under the subject heading “Legacies of Racism and Discrimination –

Asian.”111 The ways in which these songs created the Orientalist soundscape through imagined notions of Asian-ness, Otherness, and foreignness are numerous and enduring. Both “From Here to Shanghai” and “The Japanese Sandman,” written and performed by canonical Tin Pan Alley, jazz, and big band artists, follow the standard practices and styles of their respective genres. 136

However, what separates these songs from other dialect immigrant songs written for Tin Pan

Alley is the legacy of cartographic and racist anti-immigration legislation that was concurrent with their composition and performance. In this way, these songs became the soundtrack to the racism that permeated the American landscape in the 1910s and 1920s. While neither of the songs examined in this chapter are overtly racist in their depictions of Chinese and Japanese people, the underlying themes of the lyrics, the use of minstrel dialect, and the sonic profiles of the instrumentation all bring to the surface the heightened sense of Otherness these songs promote.

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Chapter Four: The Silence of Struggle in Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot […] sounds occur whether intended or not, one turns in the direction of those he does not intend. This turning is psychological and seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity – for a musician, the giving up of music. This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where, gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away. In fact, everything is gained. 1 – JOHN CAGE, ”EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC,” 1957

In most of the three chapters preceding this, I have focused on sounds and songs that work toward nation-building projects. The approaches to nation building vary, including cultural nationalism, assimilation, and exclusion. However, in this final substantive chapter, I turn to silence, or the perception of the absence of sound, in order to consider how else nation building takes place. While sounds and songs are often concrete in the sense of having cultural signals or material values that can be qualified and quantified, silence presents the hidden, the unknown, and the truly abstract and shapeless. Silence, whether it is noticed or it is created, has a powerful non-verbal communicative effect. In the same way, silence is a useful mode to think through how discrimination and internal struggle are voiced (or not voiced) in support of a nation building project.

This chapter focuses on how Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez (1940), a

Texas-Mexico Borderland text often read as a critique of assimilation and acculturation, textualizes silence as a literary device and uses it to punctuate the socioeconomic and nationalistic crisis of the Great Depression of 1929-1939. In fact, silence comprises entire encounters in the text as the bildungsroman’s main character, Guálinto/George, struggles with his national and ethnic identity formation. While the narrative prominently features 138

Guálinto/George’s introduction to national anthems and folklore ballads as assimilative tools, it also subtly yet poignantly foregrounds silence as a signal of crossing political, economic, and identity borders. I argue that, much as silences are written into sheet music as part of the composition and not as simple space-fillers, silences are integral in foregrounding dramatic and bleak moments of crisis in the text. Paredes describes characters as “silent” when they are thinking, praying, meditating, and brooding, all actions in response to or in prevention of foreseeable crises along the Border. The moments of silence in the text also allow the reader to control the narrative and reflect on the crisis at hand. While action verbs signify a narrative speed, when characters are “silent,” narrative time stops. Through a close reading of this polyphonic soundscape, inclusive of utterances and silences, I address the concerns of gender, cultural, and ethnic studies scholarship in regards to borderland struggles. This chapter offers a reading of silence as a mode, as an interpretation of the Border’s soundscape, in which it serves as a voiceless speech act in times of embarrassment, cynicism, and desperation.

George Washington Gómez begins days after June 28, 1914, a date which marks the assassination of the teenage Serbian nationalist Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and the onset of World War I. The novels ends sometime after September 1939 and shortly before December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese army bombed the American fleet in

Pearl Harbor, Hawai‘i, marking the United States’ entry into World War II. Much like any proper study of World War II must include events leading up to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, studies of the Great Depression necessarily include events before the October 1929 stock market crash. Hence, this chapter considers George Washington Gómez in its entirety, aiming to see how the silences that preceded the Depression morph and evolve with the onset of what Mexicotexans in Paredes’ novel call “La Chilla.” 139

Generally, the silence in this novel is not due to a lack of collective voices. Unlike in

Chapter 1 how I discussed W.E.B. Du Bois’ equates barring African Americans from the ballot to a debilitating form of silencing, Paredes emphasizes the already-realized potential for Mexican political voices along the Border. The narrator of the novel explains:

After the Civil War the Fifteenth Amendment gave the right to vote to all male

citizens of the United States, but in some parts of the country, including most of

Texas, Mexicans as well as Negroes were denied that right by being barred from

voting in the primaries. Not so in Jonesville-on-the-Grand, which was more than

90 percent Mexican. In Jonesville everybody voted, including some gentlemen

residing in the cemetery, not to mention a few of the living and breathing whose

residence and place of birth was the sister city of Morelos across the river.2

Here, the narrator shows how ethnic solidarity, even across the national borders imposed upon people by governments, can lead to great power in terms of a political voice.

The nationalism that pervades the novel is deeply set in the settler colonialist history of the Lower Border region. The narrator establishes at the beginning of Part II, “Jonesville-on-the-

Grande,” that early “in the eighteenth century, before there was a United States and when

Philadelphia was a little colonial town, Morelos was founded on the south bank of the river.”3

This prefatory statement solidifies Mexican claims to civilization and history in the Texas region.

Mexican and Mexicotexan characters in the novel trace their disenfranchisement and lack of opportunity during the Depression primarily back to the United States’ invasion of cities like

Morelos and of Mexico in 1846. However, this history of settler colonialism extends back to at least the early 1700s, involves numerous nations and tribes, and does not easily reveal any clear stances of innocence or passivity on any party involved. By 1846, Mexicans had already been 140

fighting for nearly two decades with Native American tribes such as the Comanches, Kiowas, and Navajos.4 Most of the escalating violence in the region, according to Brian Delay, was indicative of “Mexico’s declining military and diplomatic capabilities, as well as burgeoning markets for stolen livestock and captives.” Comanche raiders especially would sack “Mexican ranches, haciendas, and towns, killing or capturing the people they found there, and stealing or destroying animals and other property.” Mexicans thought that the expanding United States was using the Comanches as their first-wave soldiers. Periodicals pre-1846 from New Orleans suggest that Anglo-American observers “began looking at Mexico through the autonomous native peoples of the borderlands, as if these Indians were lenses calibrated to reveal essential information about Mexicans, their lands, and their futures in North America.” As a result,

“Americans and Mexicans both used Indians to conceive of and talk about each other, synthesizing the actions of Comanches, Apaches, Navajos, and others into narratives of the nation-state.”5 When the United States officially entered into war with Mexico in 1846, it marked the beginning of what many of the characters in Paredes’ novel see as the continued dispossession, displacement, and disenfranchisement of the Mexicotexan. Their particular hardships during the Depression are only heightened due to this history of settler colonialism.

Similarly, in order to understand the xenophobic tensions that plagued the Texas-Mexico border in 1914, it is necessary to examine briefly the creation of agencies and movements that led to that xenophobia’s condition. One of the looming power figures throughout Paredes’ text who instigates, craves, creates, and demands silence is that of the Texas Ranger, or the rinche. In his biographical study of Américo Paredes, José R. López Morín explains:

The Texas Rangers officially organized in 1835 to serve as both lawmen and

soldiers. Their purpose was to pursue cattle robbers, Indian and Mexican bandits. 141

Because they were a crucial factor in the foundation of the Texas Republic, they

continued to play a prominent role in the war against Mexico as members of the

U.S. militia. Along the Lower Rio Grande region, their abuse was never forgotten

by the people, and these accounts of the Texas Rangers passed into the Mexican

oral history in song and legend.6

The narrator of the novel explains how Texas Rangers would respond to ambushes by Mexican bandits. Their modus operandi was to “kill everyone they found close to the scene of the ambush, that is everyone who could not speak English.” To “not speak English” most likely refers to native Spanish speakers, but it could also refer to those who choose to remain silent in lieu of speaking “the gringo language.” The narrator grimly explains the power differential between the rangers and the Mexicans in terms of the scale of the vendetta. The rangers would kill until “the dead reached a satisfying total, and then they would go back to Jonesville and wire headquarters in Austin, reporting a certain number of bandits killed.”7 The ability of the rangers to report falsified statistics on what kinds of people were killed (civilians versus bandits) and how many were killed is a powerful move. Verbal reports become transcribed by telegraph and are hence added to a documented history that subordinates oral accounts and alternative histories. Those silenced in death and those alive and able to speak via wired statements bring attention to this power differential along the Border.

Silence is not a void or an absence; silence exists. During the Great Depression, silence existed more ubiquitously in terms of quantity and dispersal over the landscape than in the

Roaring Twenties or in the years of world war bookending the economic crisis. Paredes makes it a point in his story to document these silences on par with other auditory events in order to prove its existence and to emphasize its importance. Paredes accomplishes this by both paying attention 142

to silence as a material object and silence as a mode of operation or of being. To “walk in silence” is a mode, one different from simply “walking.” If one walks, the adverbial mode in which that ambulatory motion takes place is undefined and constantly changing as the walker encounters new terrains, obstacles, and reactionary triggers. If one “walks in silence,” the sonic perception of any sounds either created or encountered by the ambulant become peremptorily and synchronously silenced in favor of that mode. In other words, “walking in silence” involves rejecting the existence of vibrations, environmental shifts, and other perceptible changes to the landscape and the soundscape in favor of an imaginary state of recognition.

Before turning to a history of sound during the Depression, it is useful to introduce three key terms Paredes used in his scholarship and in his writing that I will appropriately be adopting.

First, he uses “Lower Rio Grande Border” (often shortened to “Lower Border” or “Border”) “for the area along both banks of the Rio Grande from the two Laredos to the Gulf.” Second, “Greater

Mexico” refers to “all the areas inhabited by people of Mexican culture – not only within the present limits of the Republic of Mexico but in the United States as well – in a cultural rather than a political sense.” Third, “Texas-Mexican” (also written as “Mexicotexan”) is the nomenclature given to the people that are from this Lower Rio Grande Border area who challenge the political borders established over natural boundaries like the Rio Grande River and its surrounding areas.8 The narrator explains in the second part of the novel that it “was the lot of the Mexicotexan that the Anglosaxon should use him as a tool for the Mexican’s undoing.”9 This important distinction between those individuals that held both political and cultural allegiance and affinity for Mexico and those subsumed into the “Mexicotexan” category highlights one of the primary tensions found in the novel. 143

Richard Bauman, a former colleague of Paredes, calls Brownsville and the Lower Border of the 1930s a “contact zone, a place shaped by the confluence – and conflict – of cultures and the struggle of identities.” Bauman notes how Paredes forever had his “ear open” to all of the

“multiplicity of voices and ideologies striving for expression in Border folklore.” This repertoire of conflict, which Bauman identifies in the “slurs and insults, the proverbs, the songs, the stories” captured in Paredes’ scholarship, shares the “dialogic resonances of Border genres, both insofar as they incorporate multiple voices within themselves and as they interact with each other in use and through time to constitute larger expressive systems.”10 All of these things – the words, the sounds, the songs, and the silences – that permeate the Border soundscape are present in Paredes’ novel. For the sake of contextualization, I turn now to a brief history of the Great

Depression, its musics, and its silences.

The Great Depression, Its Musics, and Its Silences The Jazz Age, or the Roaring Twenties, was a time of relative economic prosperity for the United States of America. Howard Zinn notes that unemployment “was down, from

4,270,000 in 1921 to a little over 2 million in 1927.”11 However, a slump in “the auto, steel, and construction industries coincided with a sharp increase in the number of homeless men seeking overnight shelter in municipal lodging houses.”12 John Galbraith debunks the common assumption that the stock market crash of October 1929 was the primary catalyst for the

Depression, noting that the homelessness that preceded it displayed how “fundamentally unsound” the economy was. Five weaknesses, including a “bad distribution” of income, corporate structure, banking structure, foreign debt, and general economic intelligence ultimately caused the Depression.13 While not only working-class men but “women, families, African-

Americans, and middle-class persons [also] became vulnerable to mass homelessness,”14 the “5 percent of the population with the highest incomes in [1929] received approximately one third of 144

all income.”15 This income disparity led to great tensions throughout the American population, and one way the government decided to quell these problems was with the power of music.

On March 3, 1931, President Herbert Hoover signed into law H.R. 14, an Act which declared that “the composition consisting of the words and music known as The Star-Spangled

Banner is designated the national anthem of the United States of America.”16 Representative

John Linthicum of Maryland introduced the bill to the House in 1929 and secured a hearing with the Judiciary Committee to discuss it in 1930. Linthicum asserted at this meeting that the nation

“needs a national song to give expression to its patriotism.”17 William H. Young and Nancy K.

Young note that the adoption of the anthem in 1931, written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key to the tune of “To Anacreon in Heaven,” “reflected a desire for national unity in troubled times.”18 This desire for unity as a remedy for troubles appears simultaneously with the spreading of

“Hooverville” shantytowns across the nation as millions of Americans were faced with unemployment. These Hoovervilles sometimes created unity among disparate populations – referred to contemporaneously as “an ethnic rainbow” – under this common struggle for sustenance. For example, in 1934 Seattle’s largest Hooverville, the melting pot of 632 men and 7 women intermingling “in shabby comraderie” consisted of a majority foreign-born

Scandinavians and a 29% nonwhite population, including 120 Filipinos, 29 African Americans,

25 Mexicans, 4 Native Americans, 4 South Americans, and 2 Japanese.19 The adoption of “The

Star-Spangled Banner” was supposed to function much like David Quixano’s symphony from

Chapter 2, bringing people from all backgrounds together under a patriotic anthem. However, many of these people brought together in shabby comraderie were experiencing close quarters and similar living conditions for the first time, making for a very quiet if not absent chorus for the anthem’s refrain. 145

From 1935 through 1940, roughly one half-million migrants from states such as

Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma ventured away from home in search of stability in urban areas in the Southwest, particularly in the vast agricultural landscape of California’s

Central Valley. Disdainfully referred to as “Okies,” these men, women, and children of all ages tried escaping from the drought, eviction, farm foreclosure, and agricultural unemployment that made life seemingly unbearable at home. These overwhelmingly white migrant workers did at times find work as itinerant laborers, but in doing so, they shared for the first time the same horrendous living and working conditions as Filipino, Japanese, and Mexican sharecroppers and workers. Ultimately, public attention to these conditions suffered by white American citizens brought on by successful literary and artistic works such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of

Wrath (1939) and Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus (1940) helped realize alleviation efforts. William Conlogue unveils this quandary by noting that Steinbeck’s portraying “whites being treated as if they were nonwhite” played a major part in its popularization.20 Steered by California Congressman John Tolan, a Congressional investigative committee worked toward assimilating these white migrants into the defense industries on the

West Coast, an area of production growing in preparation for the United States’ entry into World

War II.21 These narratives are well-documented; it is the stories that were not discussed in popular literary and artistic venues that reveal much about how the narrative of those suffering during the Great Depression fed into a nationalistic story of enduring hard times together.

Those who struggled in silence, or were silenced in their struggles, found no media coverage or artistic interpretations to offer a voice. Although Paredes wrote George Washington

Gómez between 1936 and 1940, it was not published until 1990. The much more well-known account of the Depression, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, includes some of these ethnic 146

American stories of suffering. However, these comparisons only serve as narrative asides to the ballad of its principle character, Tom Joad. For example, Steinbeck’s narrator explains:

Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did

not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves:

Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business

men said. They don’t need much. They wouldn’t know what to do with good

wages. Why, look how they live. Why, look what they eat. And if they get funny

– deport them.22

Robert DeMott asserts that Steinbeck “elides – but was not ignorant of – the problems of nonwhite migrant workers […] who made up a significant percentage of California’s agricultural labor force.” In further defense of Steinbeck, DeMott claims that “in any event, his book still speaks to the experience of human disenfranchisement, still holds out for an ecology of dignified human advancement.”23 However, as a comparison with Paredes’ narrativization of the

Depression Era for Mexicotexans will show, the very classification of human is the question in terms of liberty and opportunity.

Regardless of where people were moving to throughout the nation, technological advances such as public radio helped sounds travel alongside migrants through the airwaves. It is not that music was not performed or unheard during the Depression. Undoubtedly, the economic crash and subsequent drop in record sales smashed dreams of financial viability for many bands, particularly those who took to recording instead of live performing. In spite of this, many important artists and artistic movements began during or due to the Depression. In 1932, Duke

Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing) ostensibly created the “swing” genre by showcasing the term in a popular song title. Jay Gorney and E.Y. Harburg’s song 147

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?,” part of the Broadway revue Americana, is remembered today as one of the most iconic songs associated with the effects of the Depression. In 1933,

Western Union introduces the singing telegram service, delivering the first tune – “Happy

Birthday” – to entertainer Rudy Vallee. Muzak, a form of music transmitted into homes and businesses via telephone lines, begins in Cleveland in 1934. George Gershwin’s folk opera

Porgy and Bess opens in 1935, producing some of the most enduring popular standards for piano and vocal performance. And throughout the entirety of the Depression, network radio stations such as NBC, with its famed Symphony Orchestra conductor Arturo Toscanini, debuted shows such as The National Barn Dance and performances by American composers such as Aaron

Copland and William Grant Still. Producing these shows and financing these composers helped to build the sense of national music identity that the adoption of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”24

In terms of the bands that did succeed during the Depression, performance bands and their leaders dominated the first half of the 1930s while lead vocalists began taking the center stage toward the end of the decade. The Depression Era financially filtered out so many struggling bands and, in the process, produced many of the icons of country, jazz, and big band music that live on today. These bands both solidified and challenged the amorphous definition of

American music in their engagements with foreign audiences and genres. Louis Armstrong’s distinguished career in the 1920s led to his fronting many bands both in the United States and briefly from 1933-1935 in Europe. Armstrong continued these “cultural diplomacy” tours in

Europe into the Cold War, helping to disseminate the African American sound that European audiences so adored and came to associate with the United States.25 Immigrants to the United

States continued to have a strong impact on defining American music as well. Cuban immigrant

Desi Arnaz and his La Conga Orchestra brought the Conga dance to clubs in Florida in the late 148

1930s. The Conga, a highly contested form of Afro-Cuban carnival dance that Desi’s own father and mayor of Santiago, Desiderio Arnaz, claimed promoted “a lack of respect to society, offend[ed] morality, discredit[ed Cuban] customs, [and] lower[ed Cubans] in the eyes of people from other countries,” provided an enjoyable dance craze that could easily be defined as a foreign import.26 In this limiting exercise, Americans further defined American music.27 As for lead vocalists, the most successful who saw their careers skyrocket during the Depression were

Fred Astaire, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Billie “Lady Day” Holiday, Paul Robeson, Frank

Sinatra, Bessie Smith, and Lawrence Tibbett.28

Before October 1929, record sales for these bands were high, reaching almost seventy million discs sold with annual sales of roughly seventy-five million dollars. However, the stock market crash and the proliferation of sound in public spaces like homes and movie theaters were a two-pronged fork that popped the record sale balloon. Sales dropped by almost fifty percent between 1929 and 1930 and by another two-thirds by 1931, down to only fifteen million discs annually. And while radio sales tripled in 1932, record sales continued to decline through 1934, hitting a bottom of only five million discs. With Prohibition ending in 1933 and the production cost of records dropping in 1934, the industry began to recover beginning in 1935. 149

90 The Recording Industry during the 1930s 80

70

60

50

40

30 Number (in (in Number millions) 20

10

0 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 Year Sales in US Dollars (Estimated) Number of Records Sold (Estimated) Source: William H Young and Nancy K Young, Music of the Great Depression, American History through Music (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 20–21; Joseph Csida and June Bundy Csida, American Entertainment: A Unique History of Popular Show Business (New York: Watson-Guptil, 1978), 216–323.

The emergence of the swing music genre, combined with the jukebox’s ubiquity growing in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs throughout the country, helped pull the record industry out of the Depression.29 Many of these sounds, such as Walter Donaldson and Gus Kahn’s “Yes Sir,

That’s My Baby” (1925), Benny Goodman’s orchestra, and Bing Crosby’s crooning tunes, are mentioned throughout Steinbeck’s novel. However, rarely any specific songs make it into

Paredes’ novel. This is by no inadvertent omission on the part of the author; Paredes was a skilled musician and a highly knowledgeable scholar of musical folklore, both American and

Mexican. Rather, Paredes’ goal throughout the novel is to highlight instead silence and its ubiquity during the Great Depression. What follows is an extended close reading of George

Washington Gómez which pays particular attention to how silence factors into discussions of revolution, nationalism, and Borderland issues. Many of these discussions begin well before the

Great Depression, but the oncoming economic crisis intensifies the need for reevaluation of the 150

Mexicotexan’s liminal position in both United States and Mexican society. By immersing us in these textualized silences that allow for both reflection and expression, Paredes invites his readership to take part in these nationalistic debates over settler colonialism, belonging, inheritance, and progress.

The Polyphonic Silences of George Washington Gómez George Washington Gómez is a bildungsroman story told in the third-person that focuses on a young boy born in 1914 with two names: George, after “the great North American, he who was a general and fought the soldiers of the king,” and Guálinto, an “Indian” name that George’s grandmother creates upon trying to pronounce “Washington.” Guálinto’s father, Gumersindo, gives him this name because Guálinto is destined to “be a great man among the Gringos.”30 This split identity causes Guálinto or George great trouble at times during his life, however. The novel, similarly, is split into five sections that define both parts of Guálinto’s life and the changing landscape and soundscape of the Border. The first section, “Los Sediciosos [The

Seditionists],” introduces the main characters and the main source of their collective fears – the

Texas Rangers, or rinches. The reader learns early on that Gumersindo becomes an innocent victim of a deadly xenophobic and nationalistic attack against Mexicotexans whom the rinches believed to be part of a South Texas seditionist movement. This movement is led by Anacleto de la Peña, the novel’s fictionalized name for Aniceto Pizaña, one of the founders of the

Floresmagonista movement of 1904 that sought “to redress the injustices done to Mexicans on both sides of the Rio Grande” and which held a higher goal of creating an independent republic of the American Southwest.31

The novel opens with Lupe García, “a sallow, skinny runt” of a rifleman, and his more impressive carriage driver “with Negroid features” called El Negro coming upon four Texas

Rangers, engaging with one middle-aged Texas Ranger named MacDougal. With rifles cocked 151

and hands held out of plain sight, the intense interrogation begins with MacDougal rifling through Lupe’s cart of belongings. Here, Paredes begin accenting and punctuating intensity with silence. After MacDougal finds “several boxes of soap” and asks Lupe if he aspires to “take a bath every day,” the narrator documents how “Lupe laughed shortly and after his laugh was a silence.” Lupe’s vibrating of air molecules using the power of his lungs results in an audible sound recognized as a laugh. This sound, which shares the common sonic properties of an attack, delay, sustain, and release, carries through the air for a terminable period before dispersing and becoming inaudible. The sensory result of this auditory event is the recognition of silence’s presence, signified by the verb “was,” or the past tense form of “is,” meaning “to exist.”

Therefore, “there was a silence” identifies a second auditory event, although that event is one heard which makes no noise. Lupe’s laugh serves as a dismissive response to the ranger’s snide remark, but the silence that follows the laugh decays is a new sonic event. It is not enough for the narrator to suggest that Lupe and MacDougal were silent in an adjectival form. Instead, by remarking that there “was a silence,” the narrator grammatically makes silence into an object that the interlocutors must engage with and work through. As the one being interrogated, Lupe utilizes the power of silence to force MacDougal into making further moves; talking too much and not letting silence form can lead to self-incrimination. Instead, Lupe’s ambiguous laugh, neither a confirmation or rejection of MacDougal’s assertion, vocally serves as a catalyst for the formation of silence. Unwilling without substantial need to further heighten tensions with Lupe, a man described as being “cuddly as a coral snake,” MacDougal and the rangers end their interrogation of Lupe and El Negro. The silence proved too thick, murky, and uncertain for the rangers in this meeting.32 152

At other times in the novel, silence is less of an object and more of a mode or a way of being. After MacDougal and the rangers leave Lupe, they cross paths with a Model T Ford carrying Doc Berry, an obstetrician, and a “red-haired man” named Gumersindo Gómez. When the rangers ask the red-haired man for his name, Doc Berry interjects and explains that he

“doesn’t speak much English.” MacDougal, who initially thought Gumersindo “was a white man,” begins leading an interrogation with the clarification “Mexican, eh?” This pointed question filled with xenophobic and potentially deadly implications leads Gumersindo to “show signs of nervousness.” Luckily, Doc Berry “vouches” for Gumersindo as a “good Mexican,” which only leads MacDougal to retort how “it’s getting kinda hard these days to tell the good ones from the bad ones.” MacDougal terrifyingly further asserts that he “[c]an’t take any chances these days,” but qualifies the doctor’s vouching as worthwhile. The trepidation which fills

Gumersindo upon meeting MacDougal – not to mention what he was already feeling as an expecting father riding in a car with his wife’s obstetrician – leads to an organic growth of silence inside the car as they part ways with the rangers. The narrator makes mention of how they “rode in silence until the shacks on the outskirts of San Pedrito appeared in the distance.”

As the men park outside the “one-room shack made of mud, sticks, and pieces of lumber,” this silence that marks Gumersindo’s encounter with rinches and gringos is abrasively shattered by a barrage of sounds: a baby’s wail, a woman’s moaning, and an older woman “screaming angrily at the doctor, ‘Viejo cabrón! Pendejo! Ándale!’” After Doc Berry performs an episiotomy on

María García, Gumersindo’s wife, and is forced to sew up her perineum and posterior vaginal wall, the moans of childbirth switch to a “piercing scream.” At this point, Feliciano,

Gumersindo’s brother-in-law, admonishes him for bringing a “Gringo doctor,” asserting that he

“should have got the midwife, like [he] did with the other two.” In this scene, Gumersindo 153

contributes very little else than silence to his proximate soundscape. Instead, the sounds of the gringo world and of San Pedrito metaphorically mark for Gumersindo stark difference and a crossing of cultural borders. By bringing a “Gringo doctor” into San Pedrito and forcing María to endure a possibly avoidable episiotomy, Gumersindo brings the sounds of the gringo world into

San Pedrito.33

The following chapter jumps seven months into the future. Gumersindo and María’s family, which includes their newborn son as well as their two daughters, Maruca and Carmen,

María’s brother Feliciano, and María and Feliciano’s mother, huddle together around a wood stove contemplating what to name the baby. The grandmother proclaims that they “must baptize

[the baby] soon,” to which Gumersindo “snorts” in reply. When the grandmother calls him a

“son of a demon” for the nasal retort, Gumersindo laughs and asserts that he “didn’t say a thing,” calling attention to the sonic and referential difference between enunciating a word and making a sound. While the baby breastfeeds, the narrator contextualizes the child’s birth, explaining that he was “[b]orn a foreigner in his native land, […] fated to a life controlled by others.” And after

María wonders aloud what to name the baby boy, the family becomes entrenched in a “brief, surcharged silence.” Here, the narrator highlights the weight, the intensity, and the excess of the silence, foregrounding silence’s materiality and formidability. Gumersindo “grandiosely” breaks this silence and begins the naming bonanza that ultimately concludes with the decision of George

Washington “Guálinto” Gómez.34

Silence, with its dual potential for revolution and for self-destruction, punctuates the tension of nationalistic and revolutionary talks throughout the novel. In the third chapter of “Los

Sediciosos,” Feliciano verbally battles Gumersindo over his continued affiliation with white 154

religious figures of power. The rapidity of their exchange is best displayed through direct quotation:

“Why do you listen to that queer bird?”

“Who? Oh, the preacher. He’s all right.”

“He’s not. He’s a Gringo.”

“Not all Gringos are alike.”

“Mierda! The preacher told you that.” Gumersindo was silent. “Religion,” said

Feliciano, “is the opium of the people. Remember that.”

They walked in silence for a while, then Gumersindo said, “After all, it’s their

country.”35

Feliciano’s interrogation of Gumersindo begins by asserting that Gumersindo “listens” to the white preacher. Comparing the power figure to a bird, an animal known for its displays of vocal technique and its audibility, Feliciano accentuates and recognizes the preacher’s range of potential attraction and influence. However, by calling him a “queer bird,” Feliciano metaphorically suggests more the awkward song of a crow or a flamingo than that of a canary.

Paredes would have also understood the sexual definition of “queer” at the time of the novel’s composition.36 In this animalistic metaphor, the singing preacher might become a male bird displaying his plumage and calling out for a mate. In this way, Feliciano asserts that Gumersindo is playing the female role of a seduced bird actively listening to his call. Conversely, Feliciano could be using “bird” here for the preacher in a feminizing rhetorical move. If so, then Feliciano is questioning why Gumersindo, a man, is taking orders from a power figure shown to be emasculated and feminized. Gumersindo, in any sense, is actively listening to and being persuaded by an influential figure that Feliciano finds deviant and dangerous. In response to 155

Feliciano’s question, Gumersindo offers a tripartite reply that restores identity, dignity, and legibility to the “queer bird.” By asking the question “who?” and then self-responding with “oh, the preacher,” Gumersindo forces Feliciano to recognize a human form (not a “what” like a bird) and to give that human form a relative identity. After respectfully referring to him as “the preacher,” Gumersindo qualifies not just his actions or his manners with an adjectival modifier

(as in “he does good things”), but goes so far as to say that his whole person “is all right.” This statement simultaneously restores an implicit masculine identity to the preacher through association with a male-dominated profession. In a pithy mimicking, Feliciano cuts down

Gumersindo’s reply by asserting that “he is not [all right],” and that, instead, he is “a Gringo.”

The juxtaposition of these two brief statements serves as an enthymeme, or a rhetorical move that denies “a Gringo” the possibility of being “all right.” Gumersindo notices this rhetorical tactic and attempts to falsify the claim by de-essentializing white Texans and refusing

Feliciano’s Mexican nationalism. Feliciano’s Spanish reply of “mierda [shit]” reinforces his nationalistic attack, and he supplements this with another accusation that Gumersindo has been aurally influenced by the preacher. Here, Paredes takes narrative space and time to note that

“Gumersindo was silent.”

After making a scathing remark against religion’s opiate effects on the masses, the aggressor Feliciano and the wounded Gumersindo “[walk] in silence for a while” until

Gumersindo mutters “after all, it’s their country.” The silence that presages Gumersindo’s concession both stops the rapid narrative exchange between the interlocutors and it invites the reader to anticipate Gumersindo’s reply. With Gumersindo’s concession comes a great revolutionary disappointment and a foreshadowing of his progeny’s assimilative mode of survival. This schism between the marital brothers is marked by Feliciano’s voice when he “half- 156

shouts,” breaking the silence with an echo of Gumersindo’s own words, “their country.” Since perception of an echo requires a certain physical distance, Feliciano’s echoing Gumersindo’s own words metaphorically distances them, forcing Gumersindo to relive his statement. Feliciano continues to inflect his nationalistic statement with purposeful vocal inflections throughout his tirade. Feliciano asserts: “I was born here. My father was born here and so was my grandfather and his father before him. And then they come, they come and take it, steal it and call it theirs.”

Then, the “drop[ping of] his voice” signals Feliciano’s shift from seething hatred to plans of revolutionary retaliation. Feliciano promises that “it won’t be theirs much longer,” and that the

Mexicans will “get it back, all of it.”37 This tension between acquiescing to the expansion of the

United States empire and formulating an effective counterattack permeates the rest of the novel, particularly in scenes involving Guálinto as he grows up.

At the beginning of Part II, “Jonesville-on-the-Grande,” Feliciano takes a job at a bar called El Danubio Azul as a waiter in order to support María, Guálinto, Carmen, and Maruca.

Located close to an Army base called Fort Jones, many of the bar’s patrons are soldiers with

“sweaty red faces” who come “pouring in, laughing and talking among themselves with a lot of back-slapping and friendly goddams.”38 Feliciano serves beer to the soldiers “in silence,” an indicator of his attempting to swallow the “hate and pride” welling up inside of him as he takes a subservient role to active members of the United States armed forces. Whereas Gumersindo’s silence while riding in the car with Doc Berry was consequential, Feliciano’s here is preventative. While the soldiers bade him into a confrontation by “trying to talk and joke with him,” Feliciano resists the risky opportunity to engage with the Unites States’ soldiers by cloaking himself in silence. Feliciano’s turn to silence is in self-preservation and is masked in an inability to speak English. Don Faustino, Feliciano’s employer who explains to the soldiers why 157

the server remains silent, tries explaining that these soldiers differ from Texas Rangers in that the

“only shooting they’ve done was at armed men who were shooting at them.” Because of this difference, Feliciano semi-voluntarily begins to break his silence and interact with the soldiers whom give their patronage to the bar even after “Taps” calls them back to the barracks.39

As Guálinto grows up, silence becomes his preferred mode while engaged in deep thought, signaling reflection, curiosity, and his natural intelligence that marks him as a key figure in his community throughout the text. Guálinto, like a “lone Indian tracking the wounded deer,” would often explore the “vast jungle of banana trees choking the backyard” in the “drowsy silent afternoons when everybody else who was not at work slept the siesta.” The early depictions of

Guálinto connecting with nature work to signify a close connection with his Mexican heritage, especially when contrasted later in the novel with his growing affinity for urban spaces and white identities. However, as an innocent child, Guálinto is first “startled by the beauty in the brilliant red of a cardinal bird against the wet-green leaves and saddened by the cool, gentle whisperings of the evening breeze.”40 His eyes and ears are clean and attuned to the world around him, and he is exploring the world while others sleep. After the exploring is done for the day, María puts

Guálinto to bed. However, before he drifts off to sleep, Guálinto posits questions to his mother about the nature of memory, ephemerality, and life. María does as well as any mother can in offering open-ended yet satisfying answers, but the narrator emphasizes how Guálinto “was silent, thinking. Thinking, thinking.”41 Guálinto’s immersing himself in silence and in thought presages his development and ultimate tragic success later in the novel.

The witnessing of a murder shatters Guálinto’s innocence, and his mother publicly embarrasses him in terms of being scared of the sound of the gunshot. Against his mother’s wishes, Guálinto plays with Chicho and Poncho Vera, two older boys living on a questionable 158

street in his neighborhood. Part of the street’s uneasy atmosphere is the Vera boys’ neighbor,

Filomeno Menchaca. Described as a man who had killed many men and “knew too much about a lot of things,”42 Filomeno strikes up a conversation with Guálinto and the Vera boys as they play outside. Suddenly, two men whom Filomeno describes as friends walk into his yard, pull guns out from under their coats, and shoot Filomeno three times in the chest and one final time in the face. Guálinto “had stood watching it all, his hands tightly clenched around the pickets of the fence, his face pressed against them.” Witnessing the gruesome murder, hearing the “two short grunts” Filomeno gave out “as the bullets thudded into him,” the “choking piglike noises” after the chest shots, and the “splattering sound” made by the head shot leaves Guálinto debilitated, unable to flee from the scene.43 Guálinto is forced to listen on as a crowd gathers, “creating with their combined voices a deep, buzzing sound.” Eventually, the voice of “an old man, dry and shallow like the twang of a cheap guitar,” warns everyone that “the law” will be arriving soon and that no one should interfere with the crime scene.44 Realizing that he is a potential

“[w]itness, informer, pariah,” Guálinto fears for the first time in his life white authority figures and their ability to “curse him” or “beat him to make him tell all he knew.”45 Only after witnessing one of the law men “[stir] the body with the toe of his boot” and seemingly dismiss the murder is Guálinto able to regain his physical ability and run home.46 Guálinto arrives home shaking and with pale lips. Not knowing that he witnessed the murder, María assumes that

Guálinto was frightened by “the sound of a few shots.” In turn, she admonishes him in front of a neighbor woman, Doña Domitila, calling him a “coward,” and tells him to go inside. Out of both embarrassment and the need for self-preservation, Guálinto “[remains] silent” and bears his trauma alone.47 159

One of the many polyphonic ways in which I want to approach Guálinto’s silence is as a reaction to sacred noise. The term “sacred noise” is an understanding of the vibratory effects of high-intensity, low-frequency noise that has the power to “touch” listeners. Sacred noise can be and historically has been experienced through thunder, in the church where organs and bells make pews reverberate, and later in the cacophonies of eighteenth-century factories. For

Guálinto, the sounds of the gunshots and of their impact in the human body are one type of sacred noise. In another way, sound studies pioneer R. Murray Schafer posits the following:

“Wherever Noise is granted immunity from human intervention, there will be found a seat of power.”48 In many cases throughout history, silence signals weakness as the inability to speak. In

Paredes’ text, young Guálinto often stands silent as he is intrigued and intimidated by figures of power. Some of these power figures teach him to be proud of his Mexican heritage while others force him into an American assimilative process. His silence in these moments is not necessarily a sign of weakness. In fact, the textualized silence provides a time-stopping view into the simultaneous, hybrid, conflicting ideas racing through the character’s head. When presented with

Sacred Noises, Guálinto reconsiders his identity, his life plan, his dreams, and his fate.

When Guálinto was young, he went to church every Sunday with his mother and sisters.

On these days, his mother would dress him in “a sailor suit, a striped sissy-looking outfit with a big white collar, stiffly starched so that it chafed his neck.”49 While he hated his clothes, he loved the way she combed his hair because she “rubbed it with brilliantine.” Not only did it smell good, but his “plastered-down hair looked darker brown than usual and that pleased him. He disliked being called gringo because his hair was not as dark as that of other people.” Going to church gave Guálinto a chance to don not only class but also ethnicity. However, on one occasion, his mother was running low on brilliantine and “mixed some shortening with it to 160

make it do.” This sensual connection with the kitchen, with lack of supplies, with hastiness and with unpreparedness separates Guálinto from his ideal Mexican image he hopes to showcase.

This frustration over his identity, brought on by the loss of his ideal hairstyle and his connection with a lower-class kitchen smell of shortening, presages his sonic encounter with his priest at the church. The moment proceeds as follows:

The priest leaned out of the pulpit over the boys like a thunder cloud over a

cornfield. His looks were dark and threatening, and he rumbled and flashed as he

worked up to the full fury of his verbal storm. He pounded on the pulpit, he

stretched out his fist over their heads. He screamed out a phrase of holy anger.

Then he stopped abruptly while the echo went screaming on. He let all the awful

meaning of his words sink in during the silence. Then he spoke again and his

speech was soft, his speech was sweet. His words were a lazy little stream that

wandered through cool green reeds. Like stalks before a storm, so were the

children before the priest. They flinched at his out-thrust fist, they cowered at his

shout. They rustled and sighed when he softened. Their faces mimicked his face.

And they shuddered, wide-eyed and silent, while he painted the agonies of Hell.50

This demonstration through simile displays the priest’s power and the effect of sacred noise on

Guálinto. We hear thunder claps, impactful sounds, haunting and traumatizing echoes, and anxiety-ridden silences that force the listener to wait for the next onslaught. Sacred noise relies on a powerful attack, a seemingly never-ending sustain, and a decay and release timed so that the next powerful attack seems inevitable. Whether that attack comes or not is up to the source of the noise, and in this anticipation lies the power. 161

After the priest’s sermon ends, some nearby boys the pews begin taunting Guálinto about the shortening in his hair, telling him that he smells like a frying pan. Guálinto threatens to beat them up after church, although no fight ensues after the boys learn that he comes from the Dos

Veintidós, a part of town near the river filled with “bad people, rowdies, tough characters.”

Guálinto eventually returns to his family, but not before hearing another Sacred Noise – that of the church bells. Unlike the priest’s straightforward language with definite referents, the church bells were interpretable. For Guálinto, they jubilantly signaled that the church service was over.

He knew that they could say other things though – he calls the bells “very wise” and knows that

“they [speak] a language all their own. When a funeral procession came in, with its black coffin and its red-eyed attendants, the beat of the bells was slow and heavy like the tread of the mourners’ feet.” Ultimately, Guálinto acknowledges that the bells “lent illusion. They soothed, they compelled. They sang and wept.”51

However, through all of this sacred noise, Guálinto is able to silently consider how the boys taunted him for having shortening in his hair, how his mother was too eager to make him look a certain way, and how that look did not equate to the Mexican ideal he had set for himself or what society had set for him. On this day, Guálinto has “no ears for the bells.”52 This brooding leads to a temporary hate for his family, for his mother, for his surroundings and his people that were poor and trying to be something that they weren’t. In turn, he brashly daydreams about becoming a Texas Ranger so that he could ride back into his hometown and kill all of them, potentially even his own mother. Only the thought of having to kill his uncle Feliciano, who hated rinches, stops this daydream. Instead, Guálinto imagines martyring himself by fighting against and imaginably dying at the hands of the Texas Rangers. He dreams that “everybody would be sad and they would cry. And his mother would be sorry she had put shortening in his 162

hair.” When Guálinto’s mother asks him “what’s wrong?”, noticing his distant appearance and silent brooding, Guálinto tactically answers “Nothing.”53

Guálinto transfers his outrage against Anglo-American domination and decimation of the

Lower Border and its people onto the landscape itself. Guálinto imagines interrogating a ranger at knifepoint about the disappearance of yet another “Mexican who never hurt you.” The ranger, played by a banana tree trunk, stands silent while Guálinto presses on, only seeming to “cringe with the passing of a gust of wind.” Guálinto calls the tree trunk a coward, “like all your kind,” and the “object of his hate took the insult meekly, offering no resistance.” Here, silence is equated to meekness and to passivity. As Guálinto uses the tree trunk’s silence as an indicator for its kind’s relative weakness, the defamation and accusation clearly becomes a racialized and nationalized attack against civil and social injustice. When the tree trunk responds with “cynical silence” to Guálinto’s charge that the ranger murdered the imaginary Apolonio

González/Rodríguez, Guálinto engages in physical violence and “[slashes] out face high” with a knotted pine wood dagger. Guálinto draws “a thin trickle of clear fluid” tree-blood from the trunk after furrowing the “lustrous, paper-like skin” of the tree. In the end, Guálinto excuses his own act of violence and morally elevates himself above his oppressors by commanding the wounded ranger to “go back to [his] camp and [to] tell old man Keene that Guálinto Gómez,” unlike abusive rangers, “doesn’t kill men who won’t fight.”54

Silence and song, in many instances, help connect Guálinto to his Mexican heritage.

After María notices that Guálinto suffered from night terrors, she summons Doña Simonita, a woman who, through The Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and a mystic application of ash and tea to Guálinto’s body, is able to cure him of his nightmares. As the healer enters into a “meditative silence,” Guálinto becomes aware of “the sputtering crackle of firewood in the kitchen stove and 163

the steady murmur of boiling water,” both white noise sounds that can provide soothing relief from tension and anxiety. As they pray together, Guálinto feels as if they are “singing in harmony” with “anxiety no longer gnawing at his breastbone.”55 Moments like these are memories Guálinto will reflect back on often as he begins to battle with his bifurcating self – one side enamored by his Mexican heritage and culture, the other yearning for progress and an avenue into acceptance in Anglotexan society.

At six years old and just before entering first grade, Guálinto enters into a discussion about the death of his father, Gumersindo, with his Uncle Feliciano. Guálinto tells his uncle of rumor from Maruca that his father was “killed in a gunfight with the rinches,” but Feliciano attempts to hide this truth from him by beautifully correcting the story. Feliciano asserts that

Gumersindo “died of his heart” which was “too big and it killed him.” This version causes

Guálinto to go “silent” as he contemplates his father’s personage. Guálinto learns from his uncle that Gumersindo was “educated and had fine manners,” and that he was “gentry, at least his family was.” When Guálinto asks why their family isn’t rich, Feliciano replies with a “household word, but [one] half-understood by Guálinto” – “the Revolution.”56 Guálinto pushes further, asking if his uncle was ever rich, to which Feliciano bitterly answers: “No, […] but I should have been. Damn these Gringos!” Feliciano, much to Guálinto’s surprise, explains how, through sheer numbers and “Gringo law,” the land that belonged to him and María – “thousands of acres” – was taken from him. Guálinto imagines that Feliciano could have shot the trespassers, recreating the sound of six gunshots going “ping!”57 Feliciano soberly separates fiction from fact for

Guálinto while stoking the fires of nationalism between them. Feliciano explains:

They tell you, these Gringos, ‘If you don’t like it here, don’t want to be American,

get out. Go back to your own country.’ Get out? Why? Let them get out, they 164

came here last. And go where? This is our country. This is our home. They made

it Gringo land by force, we cannot change that. But no force of theirs can make

us, the land’s rightful people, Gringo people.58

This manifesto does not inspire silence; it causes Guálinto to “blurt out” that he will reclaim his family’s land by shooting “all the Gringos and the rinches too […] like Gregorio Cortez and

Cheno Cortinas” and other corrido ballad heroes. Revisionist dreams of history, revolution, and nationalism demand sound to come forth from Guálinto’s body, but Feliciano has learned through tribulation and abuse to stifle and swallow sounds that “only get you in bad.”59

In an effort to continue the conversation about ethnic difference and his family history,

Guálinto starts discussing upcoming holidays like Christmas and if his father was given many gifts as a child from Santa Claus. Feliciano assures Guálinto that Gumersindo received “[t]oys, candy, nuts, fruit you’ve never heard of.” However, Feliciano is quick to explain that, because

Gumersindo “lived in Mexico when he was a boy,” he received his gifts from “The Three Wise

Kings […] the ones who brought gifts to the Child Jesus.” This is because the “Gringo saint” named “Santo Kloss doesn’t go to Mexico. He gives away toys just in the United States.”60 This statement leads Guálinto to go silent in reflection about the possibility of Santa being both

“good” and a “Gringo.” In the final moments of Part II of the novel, Guálinto stumps his uncle by positing: “[I]f Santa Claus is so good, how can he be a Gringo too?” Feliciano is forced to admit that Santa might be “a different kind of Gringo,” an assertion that allows for heterogeneity and works against sweeping nationalistic rhetoric.61

Part III of the novel, “Dear Old Gringo School Days,” begins with Feliciano taking

Guálinto to get registered for first grade. The narrator asserts that what “impressed Guálinto most

[in the hall of the grammar school] were the silence and the smells.”62 This school in Jonesville- 165

on-the-Grande was exceptional for being “fully integrated from first grade up through high school” whereas, in other places in 1920s Texas, “racial segregation was the rule in the educational system.”63 As Guálinto and his uncle wander through the halls “in silence,” they come upon a picture of General George Washington hanging on the wall, marking Guálinto’s first time viewing the legendary figure for whom he was named. Guálinto had expected to see “a fierce-looking warrior in a medal-covered uniform,” but instead he finds a “face like an angry old woman” with “long white hair” and a ridiculous coat. The disappointment leads him to shout out to his uncle, and Feliciano shushes him, leaving them both standing “in embarrassed silence for a moment.” This moment marks a pivotal time of “disillusionment” and “contempt” for

Guálinto in terms of his family lineage, his nationality, and his identity.64

In school, Guálinto meets some of the friends that end up changing his life and his outlook on society forever. Orestes Sierra, another boy from the Dos Veintidós, tells Guálinto that his father is a mechanic who makes decent enough money to care for his family. Orestes dreams of being a musician, but his father tells him that “musicians are always poor.”65 Instead,

Orestes makes an economically sound plan to become a druggist (which he eventually does in his adult years). This conversation marks one of the few instances where characters directly discuss the unviability of working and living as a musician in the early 1920s.

At school, under the care of his teacher Miss Cornelia, a “middle-aged maiden [lady] of

Mexican descent” with a “grammar school education” who “spoke English with an accent” and whose “family had political connections,” Guálinto first became acquainted with institutional racism.66 The narrator pieces out the way Anglotexans treated Mexican students by focusing on the pronunciation of officials: 166

Latin American (or simply Latin) was a polite term Anglotexans used when they

meant Greaser. Or Mexican, for that matter. The word Mexican had for so long

been a symbol of hatred and loathing that to most Anglotexans it had become a

hateful and loathsome word. A kindly Anglo hesitated to call a friendly Mexican a

Mexican for fear of offending him. Even the Mexicotexan stumbled on the word

when he said it in English. In Spanish mexicano has a full and prideful sound. The

mouth opens on the full vowels and the voice acquires a certain dignity in saying

mexicano. But in English it is much different. The lower lip pushes up and the

upper lip curls contemptuously. The pursed lips go ‘m-m-m.’ Then they part with

a smacking, barking sound, ‘M-m-mex-sican!’ Who doesn’t understand will think

he’s being cursed at. It is also a word that can be pronounced without opening

your mouth at all, through clenched teeth. So the kindly Angloamerican uses

Latin American to avoid giving offense.”67

George Washington Gómez often takes pronunciation and the sounds of words as an entry point into complex analyses of connotatively racist and xenophobic sentiments. This deconstruction of the pronunciation of his people’s pronoun will reappear later in George’s life as he becomes more closely connected to white society through his job and his marriage.

The treatment Guálinto receives from authority figures like Miss Cornelia dramatically affect the way he feels about himself and the split identity found in the history and syllables of his name. After Guálinto gives a public speech on George Washington’s childhood, Miss

Cornelia learns from María that Guálinto was in fact named after the first President. The constant taunting Guálinto receives from Miss Cornelia, which includes the sonic torture of “emphasizing every syllable” of the name when calling roll, leads Guálinto to “hate his name, as well as the 167

real George Washington who was supposed to be the father of his country.” This escalates to

Guálinto admitting that “he even hated his dead father for having given him that Gringo name.”68

Guálinto struggles with persecution by a fellow Mexican who condescends upon her on people out of bitterness, spite, and childishness. Instead of driving him away from his Mexican identity, it pushes him further toward it, making George Washington into the symbol for all that is disappointment and condemnable about white settler colonialism.

Remaining silent is a speech act, and the narrator describes silence at times as cynical or embarrassed. As nouns forms then, silence is synonymous with the negatively charged abstract concepts of cynicism and embarrassment. Whereas silence is a sonic environment measurable with the use of decibel or electromagnetic frequency meters, cynicism and embarrassment are immeasurable subjective reactions to or perceptions of social environments. In Chapter 7 of

“Dear Old Gringo School Days,” “silence” comprises an entire narrative sentence that depicts an environment of embarrassment. Miss Cornelia discovers a love letter that Guálinto has written to another student named María Elena Osuna, “known to everyone as La Nena Osuna.” After whipping him with a thin rope, Miss Cornelia drags him into La Nena’s classroom so that she might read his letter aloud for everyone (including La Nena) to hear. Miss Cornelia proceeds to

“read Guálinto’s letter again.” And then, “Silence.” This silence presages the raising of

Guálinto’s head to see that “everybody, including the teacher, was staring at Miss Cornelia.” The pain and embarrassment Guálinto feels cohabitates as a palpable emotion in this silent sonic environment. Silence is the medium through which invisible and immeasurable emotion can travel and occasionally linger.

The welts Guálinto receives from the whipping are so severe that María is forced to treat his bare skin with oils. When his uncle hears about the abuse his nephew endured, he makes 168

arrangements through his connections in the city to get the “Gringo law” on their side in the form of a Spanish-speaking white lawyer. Feliciano and his legal team visit the school, confront the administration about Miss Cornelia’s actions, and suggest that they “might bring suit against the school because of the way they treated little Mexican children.” Feliciano’s story of collaborating with the Gringo law brings to the supper table “silence for a while except for the clink of knife and fork as Feliciano ate.” An immediate result is that Guálinto is promised not to continue his education in second grade with Miss Cornelia and will instead study under Miss

Huff, a white teacher who instructs the more advanced section of second-graders.

It is at this moment that the narrator reveals how Guálinto “began to acquire an

Angloamerican self, and as the years passed, under Miss Huff and other teachers like her, he developed simultaneously in two widely divergent paths. In the schoolroom he was an American; at home and on the playground he was a Mexican.” It would take Guálinto many years to realize that there were “many Guálinto Gómezes, each of them double like the images reflected on two glass surfaces of a show window.” For “Guálinto Gómez,” the Spanish language, the Mexican flag, Mexican music, and the “Himno Nacional Mexicano” “brought tears to his eyes.” And while “George Washington Gómez” indulged in English-language novels and “felt a pleasant warmth” upon hearing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” his “Mexican side” never would completely let him Americanize. As a Mexicotexan, Guálinto is aware that “he was not an immigrant come to a foreign land,” but rather that he was “himself part of the land on which his ancestors had lived before the Anglotexans had come.” Ultimately, Guálinto/George becomes metaphorically bifurcated, hating “the Gringo one moment with an unreasoning hatred, admiring his literature, his music, his material goods the next. Loving the Mexican with a blind fierceness, then almost despising him for his slow progress in the world.” 169

The Depression is first directly introduced in section thirteen of “Dear Old Gringo School

Days.” The narrator explains how “the Delta economy was feeling the impact of the stock market crash” and that the school board would need to eliminate iconic parts of his high school life such as the yearbook and the senior beach picnic. Once the Depression hits the Delta, music begins to appear in the novel. One of George’s classmates, Antonio Prieto, begins “bringing his small guitar to school” after learning that others would enjoy hearing his performances. Others would ask him to play “this rumba and that bolero and that foxtrot, but Antonio gave no indication that he heard them.” Instead, he plays “soft, lonely little songs” that go unclassified and unnamed.

When the high school principal, Mr. Darwin, asks Antonio to play “La Zandunga,” a song he learned about from a Mexican friend, Antonio obliges him and plays “softly and gravely, and a great sadness seem[s] to pour out of him with the sadness of the song.” After the song ends, the narrator makes it a point to document that “there was a silence.” The principal and the guitar player part ways with the sadness of the song drifting out into the surrounding economic slump hanging over the high school.

The fourth section of the novel, “La Chilla [The Squeal],” most heatedly foregrounds the suffering of Mexicotexan during the Great Depression. “La Chilla” is a phrase the narrator uses as setup and punchline, or as a bookending device of repetition, to punctuate ironic and sarcastic descriptions of how the Great Depression affected areas and populations of the United States differently. The narrator proposes: “La Chilla. Sugar is two cents a pound and men are two cents a dozen, Mexicans half-price. Flour costs a quarter a sack, and a quarter costs all of a man’s efforts and the little pride he has left. La Chilla.”69 What follows in the third chapter is a comparison between the economic strife of the Mexican and that of the Okies depicted in

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. The narrator explains that the Mexican laborer “heard about the 170

people of Oklahoma, who were leaving their land, getting on their trucks and going west.” He counters this by asserting that, “[t]o the Mexicotexan laborer, anybody who owned a truck was rich.” Similarly, the Mexican laborer, “who had subsisted on tortillas for most of his life, wondered how people who could afford [nothing but] biscuits and bacon could be poor.” As a final jab, the narrator relates how the Mexicotexan laborer “heard how people in the big cities were lining up to receive free soup and bread because of the Depression, and he would joke with his friends, ‘I wish what they call the Depression would come down here so we could get some of that.’” What these comparisons do is to reveal the hidden nature of suffering outside of white communities during the Depression. It is the systematic suffering under settler colonialism that presages the Depression for the Mexicotexan, leading to a level of suffering, poverty, and disenfranchisement that goes beyond what is perceivable as a shock relatable to the economic crash.

Later in the same section, the narrator does admit that the Mexican “is not the only racial group that often finds the going hard.” However, the narrator asserts that “while there are rich

Negroes and poor Negroes, rich Jews and poor Jews, rich Italians and Poles and poor Italians and

Poles, there are in Texas only poor Mexicans.” This homogeneity is due to the fact that

“Spanish-speaking people in the Southwest are divided into two categories: poor Mexicans and rich Spaniards.” The result of this classification system is that “while rich Negroes often help poor Negroes and rich Jews help poor Jews, the Texas-Mexican has to shift for himself.”

Classifications of family lineage, instigated by sociopolitical forces on both sides of the Border, lead to a phenotypical and genotypical separation of peoples based on skin color. Gumersindo,

Guálinto’s father, was considered gentry and even passed for white on occasion due to his red- tinted hair and fair skin. Similarly, Guálinto shares some of their fairer features and is apparently 171

able to move up and out of Jonesville at least in part due to them. However, the narrator here is bringing attention to the separations brought on by the Depression to a community already struggling under settler colonialism that separated families, towns, and cultures across political boundaries that were not always so.

Because of the Depression’s effect on his family’s ability to pay for him to attend school,

Guálinto takes up a part-time job at a local market in the stockroom. One day, his coworker,

Paco, explains that he only was able to finish the seventh grade and that he secretly dreams of becoming a working musician. Again, music enters the narrative as a primary discussion during the time of the Depression as Mexicotexans begin searching for alternatives to their existences under the settler colonialism that is Texas in the 1920s. Paco dreams of composing “a really new song, a song like none of the other songs that have been composed before.” After George informs him of a friend trying to sell a guitar, Paco’s dreams become one step closer and both men revel in the possibility of art leading to financial success.

However, for all of the music that does appear in the Depression Era section, silence still looms over Jonesville with often grim implications. Due to a misunderstanding where George thought a boy named Chucho was hiding and waiting to attack him, George accidentally kills a man by hurling a brick at his head. The man, George later discovers, is his uncle, Lupe García, brother to María and member of Los Sediciosos. Feliciano discusses Lupe’s story with George, revealing in the process the nature of Gumersindo’s death – shot down by the Texas Ranger named MacDougal – and that Feliciano was in Monterrey at the time of his murder. The silence that grows between Feliciano and George allows for what seems like hours of narrative time to pass in the silent brooding of George’s thoughts. George curses his uncle for not saving his father and wishes that he could have been closer with his uncle Lupe who actively fought against 172

the rinches. Frustrated, George renounces his call to be “a great man” and resigns himself to

“just be another Mexican with the seat of his pants torn and patched up.” By the end of the “La

Chilla” section, George does learn that Lupe was less than kind to many people and that his uncle Feliciano is actually highly admired by others for his courage and sacrifice for his family.

Nevertheless, that silence that hung over them during their confrontation had a dramatic impact on his self-fashioning in an assimilative American mode.

The final section of the novel, “Leader of His People,” begins with George dreaming of war and restitution. In this dream, Sam Houston is “easily captured” by a wave of rancheros and

Mexican soldiers, securing Texas and the Southwest for Mexicans. George fantasizes about organizing the rancheros “into a fighting militia and train[ing] them by using them to exterminate the Comanches.” Then, in a Hank Morgan, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s

Court-manner, George anticipates discovering “the revolver before Samuel Colt, as well as the hand grenade and a modern style of portable mortar.” George swears he would have enlisted a

“well-trained army that included Irishmen and escaped American Negro slaves.” The result of this elite and powerful band of technologically advanced, downtrodden peoples coming together to fight would be the reconquering of “all the territory west of the Mississippi River and [the] recover[y of] Florida as well.” Indeed, George dreamed of alternative histories and of nations and borders redefined. However, George perpetually awakes from this recurring dream “with a feeling of emptiness, of futility.” The narrator explains that, for George, “something [was] missing that made any kind of ending fail to satisfy.” Therefore, it is the unfulfilled, the unspoken, and the unknown that haunts and limits dreams of revolution, even when those dreams seem to have reached their pinnacle. 173

George awakens from his revolutionary-turned-abysmal dream at the side of Ellen, a woman who the narrator introduces as George’s wife. George first met Ellen Dell when she “was an out-of-state student from Colorado getting a Master’s degree in sociology.” The narrator describes her blond hair as “naturally straight and lank” and her face as “long” and “Anglo-

Saxon.” George’s mother, on one of George’s “infrequent visits home,” disparagingly dubbed it a “horse’s face.” Ellen was born in San Pedrito, moved to Boulder at the age of ten, and then returned to Texas “on a graduate scholarship to study Mexican migrant labor in central Texas.”

The narrator explains that, with this enunciation, George knew “they were meant for each other.”

However, Ellen makes a later enunciation regarding her family that she worries will crush

George – Ellen’s father, Frank, was a Texas Ranger, “just for a short while,” who “never killed any – anybody.” George dismisses this admission, reassuring her that her father’s occupational history was “not a very serious sin to confess.”

Ellen’s father, upon scrutinizing George’s appearance and ethnic makeup, finds the sound of his name unfortunate. After asserting that George’s parents really “screwed [him] up,” Frank

Dell explains: “You look white but you’re a goddamn Meskin. And what does your mother do but give you a nigger name. George Washington Go-maize.” Frank runs down a hierarchical ladder of phenotypic and genotypic possibilities, scorning his Mexican ethnicity before landing on the racial epithet that lumps together and insults many African Americans such as George

Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington whose names refer back to that general who

“fought the soldiers of the king.” Even though Ellen corrects Frank, explaining that it was

“George’s father who gave it to him, because he admired the father of our country,” Frank concludes that “it don’t sound right.” George is present for this derogatory qualification of the sonic properties of his name. Consequently, he decides “to legally change his name to George G. 174

Gómez, the middle G for Garcia, his mother’s maiden name.” George erases the Washington from his name that connotatively conjures images of African Americans in Frank Dell’s mind. If

Washington was meant to stand for Gumersindo’s dream of his son’s actually becoming a leader of his people, and if marrying into a racist Texas Ranger family was the first familial offense, then this erasure is the complete obliteration of his family’s dreams.

As this chapter has shown, the evaluation of language and pronunciation throughout this novel functions as a nationalistic marker of belonging and loyalty. A childhood friend/nemesis named Elodia, who has always questioned George’s dual allegiances, calls him a “vendido sanavabiche” – or, a sell-out sonuvabitch – in their last meeting as adults.70 Elodia believed that

Guálinto would actually serve his people, using his education and success as a uniting political force that might incorporate the Mexicotexan community. However, as an adult at the outset of

World War II, he becomes a “first-lieutenant in counter-intelligence.” George lies to Elodia and his other friends about his job title, suggesting that he is doing land surveys, looking to repurpose a local military base after the war ends. The lie leaves Elodia and the other members of the meeting without voices. It is only when Georges reaches the door “that Elodia found her voice.”

After finding it, Elodia employs “an exaggerated Gringo accent” in calling after him. Instead of calling him Guálinto, Elodia calls for “Ge-or-ge,” and reluctant tears streak her face as she calls him a “vendido sanavabiche.” This over-enunciation marks George’s overstepping boundaries between friends, between Mexicotexans, between members of a lower class, and between members of a collective memory community.

In the final section of “Leader of His People,” George meets with his uncle Feliciano on his farm and discloses his military assignment as a border surveillance agent. George knew that

Feliciano was supposed to have been in Monterrey but was hiding out in Texas. When asked to 175

elaborate on his job title, George explains that he works for “border security,” watching for

“sabotage” and “infiltration by German or Japanese agents.”71 When Feliciano asks if George’s future children will learn Spanish, George explains that they will not need to because “[t]hey will grow up far away from [Texas].”72 This assertion causes Feliciano, a character who is very often outspoken in the text, to turn silent. Guálinto, whose father was killed by a Texas Ranger, comes to ironically and tragically stand for much of the denigration and pain involved in assimilating successfully. In this way, the shared silence between Feliciano and George is truly polyphonic in its multi-layered and conflicting nuances. Feliciano’s disappointment and frustration in seeing how Guálinto sees himself operating as an agent in the white settler colonialist project. George’s resign in terms of Jonesville and the Mexicotexans trying to organize in vain. Their shared, continued dream that they could escape from the racism and prejudice that plagues brown- skinned people along the Border and beyond. And their mutual uncertainty and trepidation in terms of what the United States’ involvement in World War II would bring to not only the

Border but the nation and its neighbors. All of these sentiments and more are palpable in the silence of the Great Depression.

Conclusions Américo Paredes wrote George Washington Gómez between 1936 and 1940; it took him four years to do so because he would set aside the manuscript “from time to time while he practiced eight to ten hours on the piano. The guitar study continued too, as did his singing.”73

For a text that is so entrenched in music culture on the outside, the narrative inside explicitly expresses anxiety over not having access to music and over being filled with silence. I first came to this project through Américo Paredes’ corrido ballad studies and of course through the canonical study of Gregorio Cortez titled With His Pistol in His Hand. These songs have so much to say about the injustices committed by the Texas Rangers against Mexicans, and I was 176

shocked to find so many moments of silence in George Washington Gómez and so little singing of ballads. I initially thought these silences signaled weakness in the text, but after thinking though how remaining silent is a choice, how silence is in itself a response, I began to reconsider

Paredes’ motive in textualizing it so frequently.

A popular way of describing silence in music is by highlighting that it does not just function as the canvas upon which a painter paints but rather as one of the colors at her or his disposal. Music does not fill a void of silence; it relies on silence’s presence in order to make sound distinguishable.74 In this way, it is only through silences that we can differentiate and understand music. While it is important to notice how and when music functions in literary texts, it is equally worthy to examine moments of silence, periods and situations where music does not and perhaps cannot exist, and to explicate the reasons for this silence.

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Epilogue: The Rocket Experience: Antonín Dvořák and American Music in Space

“It took us four days riding on a rocket To set foot for the very first time I’m gonna tell you ‘bout the meaning of it all We came in peace for all mankind.” – DR. BUZZ ALDRIN, AKA DOC RENDEZVOUS, “ROCKET EXPERIENCE” (2009) PROD. SNOOP DOGG AND TALIB KWELI

Throughout “Literary Soundscapes,” I have introduced and analyzed ways in which sounds and silences intersect with nationalistic projects at moments of crisis. In this Epilogue, I summarize and make connections between the early Twentieth century debates over “American music” and the ongoing economic and political tensions of the Cold War. This involves a look at

Antonín Dvořák’s 1893 symphony “From the New World,” President John F. Kennedy’s Cold

War rhetoric of freedom, the Apollo 11 mission of 1969, and the Buzz Aldrin’s 2009 song

“Rocket Experience.”

In 1922, Henry Charles Lahee wrote on the shape of American classical music and the struggle of American composers to find their national idiom. He did so by discussing how

Europe continued to influence American music heavily and suggesting how composers might break free from these. Lahee explains:

Italian opera was now being pushed hard by German opera, while French opera

was very little heard. The table of performances published in New York at the end

of the season 1900-1901 shows that [Wilhelm Richard] Wagner had thirty-four

performances out of a total of eighty-six. […] American composers were seeking

new themes indigenous to the soil. Many had already written something under the

title of “Rip van Winkle,” and Walter Damrosch had brought out an opera based

on Hawthorne’s novel “The Scarlet Letter.” [Antonín] Dvořák composed his 178

“New World Symphony” making use of negro melodies for his themes. The

resources of the Indians, the prairies and the mountains have been tapped more or

less successfully. The oil fields still offer a thrilling subject for the composer.1

Some of the compositions Lahee catalogues that resulted from these “tapped resources” include:

Edward MacDowell’s 1896 “Indian Suite,” Victor Herbert’s 1911 opera “Natoma,” Carl Venth’s

1914 “Prologue to an Indian Drama,” Charles Sanford Skilton’s 1916 “Deer Dance” and “War

Dance,” Charles Wakefield Cadman’s 1920 “The Sunset Trail,” and Henry Franklin Gilbert’s

1921 “Indian Sketches.” This material metaphor of Indian culture being a depletable resource, placed in parallel to oil wells, asserts a racial and cultural hierarchy. White history and culture functions here as an agent that utilizes American Indian history and culture as ore to be fashioned and made to function in particular ways.

One of the most prominent composers to mine Indian and African American cultures for material was the Bohemian superstar Antonín Leopold Dvořák. Born September 8, 1841 in the

Austrian Empire (now the Czech Republic), Dvořák was a prodigious violinist and composer for whom Johannes Brahms advocated early on in his career. In 1892 at the age of 41, Dvořák moved from a professorship at the Prague Conservatory to becoming director of the National

Conservatory of Music of America, located at 126 and 128 East 17th St. in New York City.

Established in 1885 by Jeannette Meyers Thurber with the financial support of Andrew Carnegie,

William K. Vanderbilt, Joseph W. Drexel, and August Belmont, the National Conservatory was a degree-granting institution that aimed to foster a “national musical spirit” much like the

Conservatoire de Paris did for France.2 Lahee mentions Dvořák’s use of “negro melodies for his themes,” but Dvořák’s approach to “native melodies” actually involved a comparison and synthesis of both African American and American Indian themes. These themes did not actually 179

incorporate many sounds “native” to those populations, however. Dvořák was a fan of minstrel show tunes, a simulacrum form of entertainment that, according to Eric Lott, “seems a manifestation of the particular desire to try on the accents of ‘blackness’ and demonstrates the permeability of the color line.”3

Dvořák had the goals of discovering “American music” and training African American musicians at the National Conservatory, a practice that Jim Crow laws forbid. Surprisingly,

Dvořák not only desegregated the Conservatory, but he also completely subsidized tuition for

African American students, declaring that “talent is the only necessary qualification” for matriculation. While training then-students and later famous composers Will Marion Cook and

Harry Burleigh in 1893, Dvořák spoke to the New York Herald and explained his belief that

African Americans were the only ones who could produce “real American music.” Dvořák asserted:

Many of the negro melodies – most of them, I believe – are the creations of

negroes born and reared in America. That is the particular aspect of the problem.

The negro does not produce music of this kind elsewhere. I have heard the black

singers in Hayti for hours at the bamboat dances, and, as a rule, their songs are not

unlike the monotonous and crude chantings of the Sioux tribes. It is so also in

Africa. But the negro in America [reveals] a new note full of sweetness, and as

characteristic as any music of any country.4

In the space of this excerpt, Dvořák does many things: he acknowledges African American ownership of the melodies in discussion, he differentiates African American music from other musics of the African diaspora, he equates in skill and form the music of the African diaspora with that of the Sioux people, and he locates both African diaspora and Sioux music below that 180

of African Americans in terms of quality. In addition, it is implied that, since African American music is “as characteristic as any music of any country” and since this musical form is better in skill and form than that of Native Americans, that the music of Native Americans is not characteristic of a country and therefore does not represent “real American music.”

While in the United States, Dvořák composed perhaps his most important and ubiquitous work that significantly helped define “American music.” “From the New World,” also known as

“Symphony No. 9 in E minor” and “New World Symphony,” is a four-movement symphony in E minor. It begins with a thirty-bar introduction before transitioning to the first movement in allegro, a move that Dvořák explains functions in this symphony “to preserve, to translate into music, the spirit of a race as distinct in its national melodies or folk songs.”5 The second movement is an adagio, or a calmer section than the allegro, which serves here for Dvořák as “a study, a sketch for a longer work, either a cantata or opera which […] will be based upon

Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha.’” The scherzo, or the third part of a four-movement symphony, Dvořák explains was “suggested by the scene at the feast in ‘Hiawatha’ where the Indians dance […] which [Dvořák] made in the direction of imparting the local color of Indian character to music.”

The last furious movement, or an allegro con fuoco, is where “[a]ll the previous themes reappear and are treated in a variety of ways.” However, instead of using any actual sounds of American

Indian music, Dvořák implements “only those of what we call the ‘Beethoven orchestra,’ consisting of strings, four horns, three trombones, two trumpets, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons and tympani.” Dvořák expounds: “There is no harp, and I did not find it necessary to add any novel instrument in order to get the effect I wanted.”

While Dvořák had disparaging remarks to make about Sioux music early in May 1893, he later in the year lauds “Indian” music in positive albeit generalizing ways. In an interview with 181

The New York Herald on the December 15, 1893 premier night of “From the New World,”

Dvořák explains: “Since I have been in this country I have been deeply interested in the national music of the negroes and the Indians. The character, the very nature of a race is contained in its national music. For that reason my attention was at once turned in the direction of these native melodies.”6 Dvořák asserts how he found “that the music of the negroes and of the Indians was practically identical.” Explaining how he composed “From the New World,” Dvořák admits to carefully studying “a certain number of Indian melodies which a friend gave [him],” and this led to his becoming “thoroughly imbued with their characteristics – with their spirit, in fact.” Dvořák continues: “It is this spirit which I have tried to reproduce in my new symphony. I have not actually used any of the melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, harmony, counterpoint and orchestral color.”7

In his own lifetime and continuing after the end of his career and life, Dvořák and his music – “From the New World” in particular – have been and remained to be influential and canonical in the world of classical music. Even though the symphony was composed by a

Bohemian who only spent two years of his career in the United States, “From the New World” is indicative of and contributed to the American classical music scene at the turn of the century. Its belonging in an American catalog of compositions was further confirmed in the 1960s as the

United States’ role in the Cold War intensified. From the 1940s through the 1980s, the United

States sponsored high-profile musical tours of countries emerging out of colonialism and imperialism, hoping to spread a positive image of democratic power. Headlined by primarily

African American bandleaders and musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and

Duke Ellington, these tours aimed to “promote a vision of color-blind American democracy […] 182

with blackness and race operating culturally to project an image of American nationhood that was more inclusive than the reality.”8 By working under the identity of the U.S. State

Department, these jazz ambassadors officially and culturally served as representatives of the nation and performed with the goal of promoting America’s greatness. It was through the Cold

War that the rhetoric surrounding jazz’ identity shifted from being simply “American music” to something “international” and even “global.” If jazz went global during the Cold War, then

Dvořák’s “From the New World” symphony went interplanetary. It did so as part of Neil

Armstrong’s music collection on the Apollo 11 mission of 1969, under the manifesto of

President John F. Kennedy.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech to Congress on “urgent national needs.” He calls the era of the Cold War “extraordinary times” and the task of spreading democracy “an extraordinary challenge.” Kennedy asserts that the United States is “not against any man – or any nation – or any system – except as it is hostile to freedom.” The President, concerned about “which political or economic route” the “rising peoples” of Asia, Latin

America, Africa, and the Middle East might choose to take, puts forward what he calls “the

Freedom Doctrine.” The Freedom Doctrine includes the following “necessary measures”: economic and social progress at home and abroad, increased means of communication, partnerships for self-defense, an increase in military spending and civil defense, and an eventual call for disarmament. The ninth formal section of the Freedom Doctrine, however, takes concerns over the spread of Communism to the atmospheric level. President Kennedy explains:

“Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men 183

everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.”9

Kennedy was greatly embarrassed by Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin’s April 12, 1961 historic suborbital flight into space, and the President knew he must redeem the United States’ international image of superiority.10 His ultimate plan for influencing the minds of men around the world involved, “before the decade is out, […] landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” Kennedy was confident that this would impress upon mankind the power of democracy. He asserted that “in a very real sense, it [would] not be one man going to the moon

[…] it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.”11 Kennedy links the

United States’ interest in impressing emerging populations and the spread of democracy to a national work project in which the success of individual astronauts depends on the vigor and dedication of the body politic. The “United States,” in all sense of the people, the state, and the nation, would be landing on the moon, and the nation would be making the perilous journey for those “rising peoples” who must decide between the freedom America represents and the tyranny of Communism.

In terms of space exploration, the practical results of Kennedy’s speech were the Projects

Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. On July 20, 1969, as part of the Apollo 11 mission, astronauts

Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin achieved Kennedy’s goal by becoming the first humans to set foot on the Moon.12 The Lunar Module “Eagle” which landed on the surface featured a plague on the descent stage that read: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.” As Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface, he proclaimed it was “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”13 In these verbal and written statements, the United States represents the human race, simply using its advanced technology and economic capability to make the journey as ambassadors. However, 184

roughly twenty minutes after Armstrong stepped onto the surface, Aldrin joined him, calling the lunar surface “magnificent desolation,” and the pair proceeded to “put up an American flag and

[talk] to President Nixon by radiotelephone.”14 While the United States ostensibly “came in peace for all mankind,” the Stars and Stripes symbolically marked the claiming of a new frontier for a particular nation; no new “mankind” flag was created for this new frontier. These rhetorical moves, both openly promoting the United States’ national interests and advocating for a humanistic approach to the future, echoes many of the unifying, nationalistic tones Kennedy uttered eight years earlier.

Symbolically, the cultural artifacts the astronauts brought with them to the Moon, from the Stars and Stripes to a selection of music recordings, mark the journey and the claiming of the frontier as an American experience. Dvořák’s “From the New World” was one of Neil

Armstrong’s two music selections to bring on the 1969 mission, the other being a cassette-tape recording of the 1947 theramin record Music Out of the Moon.15 The choice of the theramin record makes sense considering the otherworldly sound of the principal instrument as well as the appropriateness of the album title. Armstrong might have chosen Dvořák’s symphony in order to call Earth associatively “the New World” from which the astronauts came. Conversely, perhaps the Moon as a potential frontier of virgin land ready for colonization was the “New World” to which Armstrong aimed to link the music. In either case, Dvořák’s symphony served as a cultural apparatus through which the Cold War binary rhetorics of inclusion/exclusion and freedom/tyranny were symbolized. A piece of music composed of Indian and African American themes yet one that does not incorporate any actual sounds of those indigenous groups, Dvořák’s symphony is an ode to indigeneity but not something in itself indigenous. Likewise, the Apollo

11 mission was undertaken “for all mankind” but under the auspices of the United States, the 185

Stars and Stripes, and the spread of democracy. Dvořák’s symphony and the chords of nationalism euphonically echo through American history, rising up from the soil of Georgia and into the exosphere and beyond.

In 2009, the United States and the rest of the world to varying extents celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the moon landing. The popular science magazine Scientific American published various articles that revisited crucial issues and moments of the journey and the landing. Andrew Chaikin, one of the few biographers actually close to Neil Armstrong, emphasized how important and difficult the landing of the lunar module was for Armstrong, not the stepping off the ladder and onto the surface that was so memorialized.16 Another article – an interview with Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei – focused on “what it was like from the losing side of the Space Race.” In this interview, Sergei Khrushchev reminds everyone that “[back then], when Americans spoke of the first man in space, they were always talking of ‘the first

American in space,’” and not Yuri Gagarin, throwing the rhetoric of the Cold War back into public debate.17 Dr. Buzz Aldrin, his ShareSpace Foundation, and Will Ferrell’s Funny or Die website decided to celebrate the anniversary in a special way – by recording and releasing a hip- hop music video in the style of Spinal Tap titled “Rocket Experience.”

Posted on June 22, 2009, the video for “Rocket Experience” faux-documents Buzz Aldrin in front of a sound studio mic and producers Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli in front of the mixing board. The song begins with an audio sample courtesy of NASA from the Apollo 11 mission in which Houston tells Buzz that he has “about ten minutes left now.” Aldrin is joined on the track and in the video by harmony vocalists Lisa Cannon, Christina Rasch, and Lamont Van Hook.

Credited as “Doc Rendezvous” in the video’s song tag textual overlay, Aldrin raps with precision and timing about how “Moon walking is a trip, it’s so fine / When you’re walking in the lunar 186

dust.” The Doc continues: “It took us four days riding on a rocket / To set foot for the very first time / I’m gonna tell you ‘bout the meaning of it all / We came in peace for all mankind.” Forty years after the moon landing and in a “post-Cold War” era (after the 1991 dissolution of the

USSR), Aldrin reiterates the origin myth of the Freedom Doctrine and its message of exclusive inclusivity to a beat produced by two of the biggest names in both mainstream and underground hip-hop.18

On the same day “Rocket Experience” was published, so was its behind-the-scenes video

“Making of Buzz Aldrin’s Rocket Experience.” This Spinal Tap-esque vignette begins at the end of Aldrin’s recording session with Snoop and Talib celebrating the impending success of the single. Snoop compliments Buzz’ “bars,” and The Doc confirms in an interview shot that he has

“only two passions: space exploration and hip-hop.” Next, Talib Kweli, one-half of the legendary hip-hop group Black Star (along with Yasiin Bey aka Mos Def), explains in a similar interview cut how the duo actually got their name. Talib corrects the popular assumption that they were inspired by Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line and the Back-to-Africa movement, and instead asserts that Buzz Aldrin was their true idol. Talib’s interview is followed by confessionals by

Soulja Boy and Quincy Jones, both professing their admiration and awe of Buzz and his legacy, suggesting that his moonwalk had an impact on music history. Talib returns with further corrections, arguing that Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 track “Whitey on the Moon” was not actually about Presidents Nixon or Johnson but was instead about Buzz. Buzz addresses the critically ironic lyrics of the track, such as “I can’t pay no doctor bills / But Whitey’s on the moon,” and explains that he and Gil are “cool now” because Buzz assured him that they went “in peace for all mankind.” The scene then returns to the sound studio where Buzz bashes the use of auto-tune 187

and Snoop gives Buzz some lessons on vocalizing attitude. The video finishes with Snoop offering an acapella “G-mix style” remix of the track and images of the Apollo 11 mission.19

As amazingly funny as these videos are, just as the Freedom Doctrine had both overt and underlying stories and motives, so does “Rocket Experience.” On the surface, the video shows

Snoop and Talib producing the track, adding a level of authenticity and racial equality through collaboration to the project. However, it was actually Lisa Cannon, one of the white, female harmony vocalists, who not only co-produced the track but also wrote its music and lyrics. In the

“Making of” video, Talib claims a particular role in the track’s engineering, saying that Buzz tweeted him about the project and wanted Talib’s to “do his thing” to get that “underground feel.”20 Actually, Eric “ET” Thorngren, a highly acclaimed Caucasian technician who worked with Talking Heads, Cher, Cyndi Lauper, Chuck Berry, and many other musicians, engineered the track. In fact, at 0:45 into the “Rocket Experience” video, we are given a quick glimpse at a white left hand using index and middle fingers to slide volume faders up – possibly Thorngren’s hand, but definitely not Snoop or Talib’s. Snoop tells the origin story of the song in the “Making of” video, explaining that Buzz was at Snoop’s house playing video games when he asked him to be part of the commemorative project. Truthfully, white American comedian Seth Morris wrote the entire skit as Funny or Die viral material and for iTunes song sales.

A portion of the song’s sale proceeds went to Aldrin’s ShareSpace Foundation, a non- profit “focused on the benefits of the STEAM disciplines – science, technology, engineering, arts, and math – for both the individual young person and society as a whole.”21 These proceeds also benefitted the National Space Society in Washington D.C., The Planetary Society in

Pasadena, California, and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. While Aldrin’s ShareSpace

Foundation and The Planetary Society actively perform outreach opportunities to aspiring space 188

explorers around the world, other organizations are very clear about their nationalistic missions.

The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation’s stated goal is to “aid the United States in retaining its world leadership in science and technology by providing college scholarships for the very best and brightest students pursing science, technology, engineering or math degrees.”22 What is clear is that while scientific achievement and space exploration are for “society as a whole” and for

“all mankind,” these achievements still belong to a particular nation and its body politic. While

Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli join in the “Rocket Experience” as actors, the writing and directing of the song, video, and skit as a concept for commemorating the moon landing was largely carried out by white agents. The cultural power and draw of hip-hop and its stars is used here to further the memorialization of the United States’ in the same way that jazz ambassadors toured the world during the Cold War in the U.S. State Department’s name. Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” brings attention to the personal and systemic strife faced by many African

Americans in direct conflict with a national narrative of progress. While Neil Armstrong and

Buzz Aldrin could have brought a recording from any African American musical genre to the

Moon as part of a cultural ambassador visit to space, they opted for Dvořák’s symphony, a

Beethovian symphony draped in indigenous bric-a-brac.

In conclusion, what this focus on nationalism through sound reveals is perhaps muddier than a visual analysis might provide. The textualization of sound requires compressing the wide- ranging audible frequencies into a limited system of signifiers that in turn must replay and in some cases recreate sounds for a reader. Naturally, this compression results in occasional low fidelity and distortion. Through the stories, lyrics, and visual texts I have examined throughout this project, I have tried to show how expanding our examination of the frequencies of nationalism might reveal previously unheard utterances, both verbal and non-verbal. From the 189

age of imperialism and Jim Crow through years of exclusionary immigration laws and up through the Cold War spread of democracy, sound has been an important part of a nation- building project. Instead of privileging the gift of hearing over that of sight, I believe that a syncretic approach to understanding and analyzing the rhetoric employed in nationalistic endeavors might highlight and amplify artifacts and archives.

190

Notes

Introduction

1 Ann Ostendorf, Sounds American: National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800-1860 (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2011), 2. 2 Executive Office of the President, African-American Music Appreciation Month, 2015, 80 FR 31819, 2015, https://federalregister.gov/a/2015-13745. 3 Executive Office of the President, African-American Music Appreciation Month, 2014, 79 FR 32421, 2014, https://federalregister.gov/a/2014-13154. 4 Jimmy Carter, “Black Music Association - Remarks at a White House Dinner Honoring the Association - June 7, 1979,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, vol. 1979 - Book 1 (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1980), 1015, http://www.heinonline.org.ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/HOL/Page?handle=hein.presidents/ppp079001 &id=1036. 5 Gilbert Chase, America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 522. 6 Vivian Perlis, Copland, vol. 1 (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1984), 158. 7 Carol Kimball, Song: A Guide to Art Song Style and Literature, Revised Edition (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2005), 252–280. 8 Raymond Williams, Keywords : A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 22. 9 Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 6. 10 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 137. 11 Andrew F Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, eds., Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, The Afro- Asian Century, 11 (2003): 3. 12 Kara Keeling and Josh Kun, “Introduction: Listening to American Studies,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2011): 453. 13 Richard E. Berg and David G. Stork, The Physics of Sound, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1982), 144. 14 Ibid., 147. 15 Ibid., 163. 16 “Strong Protan,” EnChroma, 2016, http://enchroma.com/test/result/strong- protan/?completed=1&summary=strong+protan&axis=4.28&exta=124.88&extb=8.66&lcs=3.59. 17 A. Rest et al., “Light Echoes Reveal an Unexpectedly Cool ηCarinae during Its Nineteenth- Century Great Eruption,” Nature 482, no. 7385 (February 16, 2012): 375–78, doi:10.1038/nature10775; Nadia Drake, “In Light Echoes, a Glimpse of the Cosmic Past,” National Geographic, May 3, 2014, http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/05/03/light- echoes-cosmic-time-capsule/. 18 Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2003), 2. 19 Josh Kun, Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (Berkeley: U of California P, 2005), 2–3. 20 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny, 1993), 8. 21 Ostendorf, Sounds American, 2. 191

22 Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010), 8–9. 23 Bonnie C. Wade, Thinking Musically: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), 162. 24 Yoshihara does not cite Marx directly, but rather summarizes a popular conception of his classic model via other scholars such as Erik Wright. Yoshihara uses the phrase “unproductive labor,” although I cannot find an instance of Marx labeling that category. Admittedly, musicians at the turn of the century did not fit easily into Wright’s “basic class typology” of capitalists, petty bourgeoisie, expert managers, experts, nonskilled managers, and workers (21). 25 Mari Yoshihara, Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 135. 26 C.J. Arthur, Marx’s Capital: A Student Edition (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1992), 7, https://muse.jhu.edu/. 27 Yoshihara, Musicians from a Different Shore, 157. 28 Pierre Bourdieu and Randal Johnson, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 18. 29 Ibid., 115. 30 Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York and London: New York UP, 2014), 20. 31 John M. Coski, The Confederate Battle Flag: America’s Most Embattled Emblem (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005), 105. 32 Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 2. 33 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999), 6. 34 Wade, Thinking Musically, 191.

Chapter One

1 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989), 64. 2 Donald Gibson, “Introduction,” in The Souls of Black Folk, by W.E.B. Du Bois (New York: Penguin, 1989), viii. 3 Du Bois, Souls, 1. 4 Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993), 459–460. 5 “Folk, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, March 2015), http://www.oed.com.ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/view/Entry/72542?redirectedFrom=folk&. 6 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, Project Gutenberg Etext (Champaign, Ill: Project Gutenberg, 1880), http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n lebk&AN=1085342&site=ehost-live&scope=site. 7 Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (Boston and New York: Riverside Press, 1900), http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/chesnutthouse/cheshouse.html. 8 Du Bois, Souls, 179. 9 Ibid., 105. 10 Ibid., 88. 192

11 Ibid., 2. 12 Ken Burns, “Gumbo (Beginnings to 1917),” Jazz (PBS, 2001), http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002P3GM5C/ref=dv_dp_ep1. 13 Todd Decker, Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 6. 14 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 2011), 184. 15 Michele Wallace, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Before and after the Jim Crow Era,” The Drama Review 44, no. 1 (April 1, 2000): 144, doi:10.2307/1146824. 16 Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty. 17 Gibson, “Introduction,” xiv. 18 Schafer, The Soundscape, Introduction. 19 Michel Chion, “The Three Listening Modes,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 52. 20 Du Bois, Souls, 12. 21 Ibid., 112. 22 Ibid., 113. 23 Ibid., 181. 24 Ibid., 99. 25 Ibid., 3. 26 Ibid., 208. 27 A variation in tune and verse first published in 1872. While Du Bois’ transcription of the tune is in “common time” (4/4), the Fisk Singers’ arrangement was in 2/4. The similarity between the two songs is in the chorus and the ultimate tone and theme. See J. B. T. Marsh, The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers: With Their Songs. With Supplement Containing an Account of the Six Years’ Tour Around the World, and Many New Songs, by F. J. Loudin (Cleveland: Cleveland Printing & Publishing Co., 1892), 125. 28 Ibid., 93. 29 Richard E. Berg and David G. Stork, The Physics of Sound, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995), 37. Emphasis mine. 30 Du Bois, Souls, 17. 31 In the Bible, the Book of Numbers 20:17 and 21:22 serve as the reference for this. 32 Du Bois, Souls, 35. 33 Ibid., 25. 34 Ibid., 25–26. 35 Ibid., 14. 36 Ibid., 63–64. 37 Atlanta University (founded in 1865) is now Clark Atlanta University after it merged in 1988 with Clark University (founded in 1869). See “About CAU: History,” Clark Atlanta University, accessed July 22, 2015, http://www.cau.edu/about/cau-history.html. 38 Du Bois, Souls, 68. 39 Ibid., 69. 40 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Creative Conflict in African American Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. 41 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York and London: Norton, 1999), 50. 193

42 Du Bois, Souls, 125. 43 Ibid., 117. 44 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 110. 45 Du Bois, Souls, 22. 46 Ibid., 20. 47 Ibid., 94. 48 Ibid., 97. 49 Ibid., 99. 50 Ibid., 109. 51 Ibid., 109–110. 52 Ibid., 110. 53 Ibid., 3. 54 Ibid., 4. 55 Ibid., 3. 56 Louis Székely, better known by his stand-up comic moniker Louis C.K., is the source from whom I adapted this concept. See Louis. C. K., Chewed Up (Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2008). 57 Du Bois, Souls, 3–4. 58 Ibid., 36. 59 Ibid., 37. 60 Ibid., 42. 61 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Seattle: Amazon Kindle, 2010), 37. 62 Du Bois, Souls, 37. 63 Ibid., 49. 64 Ibid., 38. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 39. 67 Ibid., 40. 68 Ibid., 43. 69 The American form of imperialism that Du Bois addresses has never been a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Rather, as Edward Said explains about modern Western imperialism, it is one “supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperial culture is plentiful with words and concepts like ‘inferior’ or ‘subject races,’ ‘subordinate peoples,’ ‘dependency,’ ‘expansion,’ and ‘authority.’” Du Bois describes the imperialistic period between the 1819 Missouri Compromise and the 1899 annexation of the Philippines as "stirring times for living, times dark to look back upon, darker to look forward to.” See: Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 10.; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 135. 70 Du Bois, Souls, 43. 71 Ibid., 45. 72 Ibid., 44–5. 73 Ibid., 45. 74 Ibid., 47. 194

75 Ibid., 87. 76 Du Bois suggests that white music ways influenced by these African American styles might be considered a fifth type. See Ibid., 209. 77 Ibid., 205. 78 See Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 457–539. 79 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 10–11. 80 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Transcendentalist (Raleigh, N.C.: Alex Catalogue, 1997), 9, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n lebk&AN=1086102&site=ehost-live&scope=site. 81 Ibid., 1. 82 Ibid., 3. 83 Ibid., 9. 84 Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 142. 85 Emerson, The Transcendentalist, 8. 86 Du Bois, Souls, 116. 87 Ibid., 10. 88 Ibid., 10–11. 89 Ibid., 11. 90 Emphasis mine. 91 Du Bois, Souls, 11–12. 92 See: Ostendorf, Sounds American. 93 Henry Fothergill Chorley, The National Music of the World, 3rd ed. (London: William Reeves, 1911), 234–235. 94 Ostendorf, Sounds American, 176. 95 Wade, Thinking Musically, 191. 96 This is a tripartite analytical framework that I am borrowing from Karl Hagstrom’s work. See Miller, Segregating Sound. 97 Jackson accepted this gift against the wills of senators like John C. Calhoun who questioned the Constitutionality of this executive power over states’ wishes and the acceptance of foreign funds. See “Smithson Legacy,” National Intelligencer, May 2, 1836, Smithsonian Legacies, http://www.sil.si.edu/Exhibitions/Smithson-to-Smithsonian/natinte3.html. 98 Investment of Proceeds of Sale of Land or Scrip, 7 U.S.C. 304, 1862, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title7/pdf/USCODE-2011-title7-chap13- subchapI-sec304.pdf. 99 Franz Boas, “Poetry and Music of Some North American Tribes,” Science 9, no. 220 (1887): 383, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1764411. 100 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (Hill and Wang, 2000), 149. 101 “Front Matter,” The Journal of American Folklore 1, no. 1 (June 1888): 5, http://www.jstor.org/stable/532880. 102 Du Bois, Souls, 132. 103 “On the Field and Work of a Journal of American Folk-Lore,” The Journal of American Folklore 1, no. 1 (1888): 5. 104 Ibid., 6. 105 Ibid. 195

106 Marsh, The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, 124. 107 I invoke this phrase from Paul Gilroy’s crucial study of modernity and double consciousness and argue that the Fisk Jubilee Singers challenged the concept of double consciousness and the tyranny of slavery in a transnational sense that precludes notions of national belonging and national identity. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992). 108 Marsh, The Story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, 96. 109 Ibid., 152–153. 110 Du Bois, Souls, 13. 111 Ibid., 82. 112 Ibid., 93. 113 Ibid., 94. 114 Ibid., 101. 115 Ibid., 11–12. 116 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 154–155. 117 Ibid., 155. 118 Emphasis mine. 119 Approximately worth $3.3 million in 2010. Net value calculated considering purchasing power on the Measuring Worth website. See: “Relative Values - US$,” Measuring Worth, 2015, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/. 120 Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 156 n.3. 121 Ibid., 156. 122 Ibid., 157. 123 Ibid., 156. 124 Ibid., 157. 125 Du Bois later notes the “eloquent omissions and silences” of these lyrics, however. He explains: “Mother and child are sung, but seldom father; fugitive and weary wanderer call for pity and affection, but there is little wooing and wedding; the rocks and mountains are well known, but home is unknown.” Ibid., 160. 126 Ibid., 159. 127 Ibid., 161. 128 Ibid., 162. 129 Burns, “Gumbo (Beginnings to 1917).” 130 W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues (New York: Collier, 1970), 195. 131 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis 32, no. 1 (1926): 291. 132 Du Bois, Souls, 209. 133 James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (Seattle: Amazon Kindle, 2012), 82. 134 Scott Herring, “Du Bois and the Minstrels,” MELUS 22, no. 2 (June 1, 1997): 4, doi:10.2307/468131.

Chapter Two

1 Israel Zangwill, “The Melting Pot” (Promptbook, London, 1909), 0, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 196

2 Israel Zangwill, The Melting-Pot (New York: Macmillan, 1916), ix, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t3rv0fq77. 3 Pacific Theatre Co., “The Melting Pot” (Program, Oakland, CA, October 4, 1910), Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 4 See: Rita Steblin, A History of Key Characteristics in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983); Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music., trans. Alexander John Ellis (New York: Dover, 1954). 5 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 2. 6 Louis Lipsy, “Zangwill in the Melting Pot,” n.d., Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 7 Nicholas Tawa, The Great American Symphony: Music, The Depression, and War (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 26. 8 Joe Kraus, “How The Melting Pot Stirred America: The Reception of Zangwill’s Play and Theater’s Role in the American Assimilation Experience,” MELUS 24, no. 3 (1999): 12, doi:10.2307/468036. 9 “President Sees New Play,” New York Times (1857-1922), October 6, 1908, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96812913?accountid =14518. 10 “A New Zangwill Play,” The Tribune Bureau, October 6, 1908, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 11 Elsie Bonita Adams, Israel Zangwill (New York: Twayne, 1971), 24. 12 Guy Szuberla, “Zangwill’s The Melting Pot Plays Chicago,” MELUS 20, no. 3 (1995): 6, doi:10.2307/467739. 13 Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917, 204–205. 14 Cathy Schlund-Vials, Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 60. 15 Emphasis mine. Ibid., 52. 16 Ibid., 53. 17 “How the Deed Was Done,” New York Times (1857-1922), September 7, 1901, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96165954?accountid =14518. 18 “Gov. Roosevelt to Jewish Chautauqua,” New York Times (1857-1922), July 24, 1900, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1016152046?account id=14518. 19 “The Case of American Jews Entering Russia,” New York Times (1857-1922), July 3, 1902, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1013637468?account id=14518. 20 Benjamin Harrison, “Third Annual Message,” The American Presidency Project, December 9, 1891, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29532; “The Policy of Humanity,” New York Times (1857-1922), November 2, 1902, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, 197

http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96241000?accountid =14518. 21 Emil Flohri, Stop Your Cruel Oppression of the Jews, Chromolithograph, 1904, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ppmsca.05438. 22 This powerful statement of unification comes from the same man who in 1902 published Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, in which Gompers asserts that “it is a most serious mistake for the citizens of the Eastern States to believe that the anti-Asiatic sentiment is limited to any particular class or faction, creed or nationality.” See: “Mr. Roosevelt Unable to Aid Russian Jews,” New York Times (1857-1922), November 7, 1905, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96585299?accountid =14518; Samuel Gompers, Herman Gutstadt, and Asiatic Exclusion League, Meat vs. Rice : American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism : Who Shall Survive? (San Francisco: Reprinted with introd. and appendices by Asiatic Exclusion League, 1908), 11, https://books.google.com/books/about/Meat_Vs_Rice.html?id=qmMLAQAAIAAJ. 23 “Dedicates ‘Melting Pot’ to Roosevelt,” New Jersey Telegraph, October 25, 1908, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 24 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 215–216. 25 “‘The Melting Pot’ by Mr. Zangwill,” New York Times (1857-1922), September 25, 1909, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96964378?accountid =14518. 26 “Successfully, Too,” Toledo Blade, October 31, 1908, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 27 Emphasis mine. Noelle Morrissette, James Weldon Johnson’s Modern Soundscapes (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013), 25. 28 Bourdieu and Johnson, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, 84. 29 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 82. 30 “Relative Values - US$.” 31 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 85. 32 Ibid., 86. 33 Walter Benn Michaels, Our America : Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 60. 34 Du Bois, Souls, 8. 35 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 1–2. 36 Ibid., 11. 37 Ibid., 12. 38 Ibid., 13. 39 Ibid., 14. 40 Ibid., 19. 41 See: “2 Chronicles, Chapter 29: 25-36,” in The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007). 42 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 23. 43 Ibid., 26. 44 Ibid., 27. 198

45 Public Law 57-162 / Chapter 1012, 57 Congress, Session 2, An Act: To Regulate the Immigration of Aliens into the United States, 1903, 1218, http://heinonline.org.ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/HOL/Page?handle=hein.statute/sal032&size=2&id= 1283. 46 Ibid., 1216. 47 Public Law 59-96 / Chapter 1134, 59 Congress, Session 2, An Act: To Regulate the Immigration of Aliens into the United States, 1907, 898–899, http://heinonline.org.ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/HOL/Page?handle=hein.statute/sal034&size=2&id= 930. 48 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 28. 49 Ibid., 29. 50 Public Law 59-96, 898–899. 51 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 32. 52 Ibid., 33. 53 Ibid., 184. 54 Thilo Rehren, “Crucibles as Reaction Vessels in Ancient Metallurgy,” in Mining and Metal Production Through the Ages, ed. P.T. Craddock and Janet Lang (London: British Museum, 2002), 207–215. 55 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 146. 56 “Israel Zangwill in The Melting Pot,” Life, September 30, 1909, Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 57 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 34. 58 Ibid., 38. 59 Ibid., 75. 60 Ibid., 77. 61 Ibid., 81. 62 Ibid., 141. 63 Sondra Kathryn Wilson, ed., The Selected Writings of James Weldon Johnson, vol. 1: The New York Age Editorials (1914–23) (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 289. 64 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 141. 65 Ibid., 178. 66 Ibid., 179. 67 Ibid., 184–185. 68 Deborah Wong, “Sound, Silence, Music: Power,” Ethnomusicology 58, no. 2 (2014): 352, doi:10.5406/ethnomusicology.58.2.0347. 69 “Zangwill on His New Play,” New York Times (1857-1922), September 25, 1908, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96801613?accountid =14518. 70 After dismissing discussions of the play, Zangwill speaks at length about the Zionist movement and “The Territorial Society” of which he was the founder and head. Beginning in 1897, Theodor Herzl, founder of Die Welt newspaper and leader of the Zionist movement that sought land in Palestine, began discussing massive Jewish immigration at Zionist Congress meetings. Initially, the aim of Zionism was “to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” However, due to “diplomatic failures on the one hand, and the 199

persecution of the Jews on the other,” members at the congresses began considering alternative spaces for the establishment of Israel such as El Arish on the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt and East Africa (modern-day Kenya). These potential locations were discussed throughout the years with British officials such as colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain who might allocate sections of the empire for Jewish use. However, the “sense of urgency” to find legally secured land for the Jewish people “intensified” in April 1903 when news broke of the Kishinev pogrom on the 19th and 20th. An April 25 report from Saint Petersburg appearing in The New York Times on April 28, “[t]aken across the border for transmission in order to escape the censor,” reports the “dead number 120 and the injured about 500” with “scenes of horror […] beyond description” including “babes […] literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and blood-thirsty mob” that cried “[k]ill the Jews.” A few months later at the August 1903 Sixth Zionist Congress, members voted on a proposal drafted between the Jewish Colonial Trust (the Zionist fund for purchasing land in Palestine) and His Majesty’s Government “for the establishment of a Jewish settlement in East Africa.” Dubbed “the Uganda Plan” by contemporaneous discussants, the terms of the proposal allowed conditions to “enable the [Jewish people] to observe their National customs” with “Local Autonomy” under a “Jewish Official as chief of the local administration.” It also granted permission “to have a free hand in regard to municipal legislation and as to the management of religious and purely domestic matters […] being conditional upon the right of His Majesty’s Government to exercise a general control.” 295 members voted for the Uganda Plan while 178 voted against it and 99 abstained. Ultimately, due to numerous factors, including Herzl’s sudden death in 1905, the World Zionist Organization rejected the Uganda Plan and focused efforts on a settlement in Palestine. Created in 1903 with the British-Jewish journalist Lucien Wolf as a result of the April pogrom in Kishinev, the Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO) took on a mission of finding a Land of Israel outside Palestine. Zangwill, who was less invested in Palestine specifically and more interested in securing any place “where the Jew lives as a Jew,” began distancing himself from Herzl and the World Zionist Organization. After the Kishinev pogrom in 1903, Zangwill along with the British-Jewish journalist Lucien Wolf founded the Jewish Territorialist Organization (ITO) to take on this task of finding alternative spaces for relocation. This controversial stance caused Zangwill to fall out of favor with many Jewish Zionist critics in Europe and in the United States. See: Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism, 1600-1918. (New York: KTAV, 1969), 268; Yitzhak Conforti, “Ethnicity and Boundaries in Jewish Nationalism,” in Nationalism, Ethnicity and Boundaries, ed. Jennifer Jackson and Lina Molokotos-Liederman (Routledge, 2014), 144, http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315746999; “Jewish Massacre Denounced,” New York Times (1857-1922), April 28, 1903, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96331607?accountid =14518; “Eine Erklärung Der Englischen Regierung,” Die Welt, August 29, 1903, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/images/uganda.jpg; Stenographische Protokoll Der Verhadlungen Des VI, Zionisten Kongresses in Basel (Vienna: Buchdruckerei Industrie, 1903), 223–277; Joseph Leftwich, Israel Zangwill (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1957), 181–215. 71 “Roosevelt Criticises Play,” New York Times (1857-1922), October 10, 1908, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96836792?accountid =14518. 72 Ibid., 9. 200

73 Eric Homberger, “Ward McAllister,” in Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 150–152. 74 Emphasis mine. See: “Israel Zangwill’s Serious Purpose,” New York Times (1857-1922), October 24, 1908, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96847445?accountid =14518. 75 Rachel Rubin and Jeffrey Melnick, Immigration and American Popular Culture: An Introduction (New York and London: New York University Press, 2007), 99. 76 Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke UP, 1996), 64. 77 “Display Ad 25 -- No Title,” New York Times (1857-1922), October 9, 1909, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96909711?accountid =14518. 78 “Rabbi Sees Peril in Intermarriage,” New York Times (1857-1922), May 10, 1909, 4, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/96908568?accountid =14518. 79 Zangwill, The Melting-Pot, 203. 80 Ibid., 205. 81 Ibid., 210. 82 Ibid., 197–198. 83 Horace M. Kallen, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” Nation 100, no. 2591 (1915): 220. 84 Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 97. 85 “Assail Zangwill Theory,” New York Times (1857-1922), April 8, 1918, 10, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/99989713?accountid =14518. 86 Neil Baldwin, “The Melting-Pot,” in American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), 159. 87 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “When Ethnic Studies Are Un-American,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 1990, Eastern edition, The Wall Street Journal, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/398124134?accounti d=14518; Ronald Takaki, From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, 2nd ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 295. 88 Takaki, From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, 298. 89 Gilbert H. Muller, New Strangers in Paradise: The Immigrant Experience and Contemporary American Fiction (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 25. 90 Schlund-Vials, Modeling Citizenship, 55. 91 Martin Denton, “Reviews - The Melting Pot,” Metropolitan Playhouse, March 12, 2006, http://metropolitanplayhouse.org/MeltingPotReview.htm. 92 The director’s middle name was bestowed upon him at birth (1933) by his uncle, William Schulman, a playwright, scenic director, and writer of radio dramas. See: Jerry Tallmer, “The Still Simmering ‘Melting Pot,’” The Villager 75, no. 43 (March 15, 2006), http://thevillager.com/villager_150/thestillsimmeringmelting.html. 201

93 Ibid. 94 Thomas L Friedman, “War of the Worlds,” New York Times, February 24, 2006, Late Edition (East Coast) edition, New York Times, http://ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/433273320?accounti d=14518. 95 Tallmer, “The Still Simmering ‘Melting Pot.’”

Chapter Three

1 “How the New Casino Is Progressing,” New York Times (1857-1922), December 18, 1881, 7. 2 “Forty Years of the Casino,” New York Times (1923 - Current File), January 7, 1923, 15. 3 “‘Funabashi’ to Open at the Casino on Jan. 5,” New York Times (1857-1922), December 26, 1907, 7. 4 Gerald M. Bordman, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle, 4th ed (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), 282. A review in the Salt Lake Tribune called the plot “spineless,” while the New-York Tribune explained to its readers that “there is no need to dwell on the plot, for none can be found.” See: “In the Playhouses of New York,” The Salt Lake Tribune, January 12, 1908, 15; “‘Funabashi’ Is All the Title Indicates,” New-York Tribune, January 7, 1908, 7. 5 Theatrical Notes, 1908, 7. 6 “Ted Snyder,” Songwriters Hall of Fame, 2015, http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/exhibits/C244. 7 “In the Playhouses of New York,” 20. 8 Ian Bradley, The Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), 555. 9 Josephine Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Mikado” (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010), 40. 10 Mina Yang, “East Meets West in the Concert Hall: Asians and Classical Music in the Century of Imperialism, Post-Colonialism, and Multiculturalism,” Asian Music 38, no. 1 (2007): 2–11. 11 I list these specific years in conjunction with the Songwriters Hall of Fame’s periodization. See: “Tin Pan Alley: 1880-1953,” Songwriters Hall of Fame, 2015, http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/exhibits/eras/C1002. 12 Philip Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists, 2nd ed (New York: Oxford UP, 1992), 19. 13 As with any musical genre or movement, the exact beginning and end of Tin Pan Alley is vague. In one often-cited delineation, Philip Furia suggests that the poets of Tin Pan Alley “wrote songs in the years between World War I and World War II, when a close relationship between the popular music industry […] and the musical comedies of Broadway and Hollywood gave the songs of that era […] their distinctive character.” While I agree with this focused synchronization of narrative style and cultural industry time, I also feel that recognizing and emphasizing Tin Pan Alley’s beginnings in minstrel “coon songs” and the vaudeville stages of 1880s is important. See: Ibid., 1–25. 14 Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1998), 75. 15 Only the representatives from Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Missouri, Rhode Island, and Wyoming unanimously voted against the resolution. 202

16 This equals the relative value of approximately $145 according to the Consumer Price Index of 2013. See: Samuel H. Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1774 to Present,” Measuring Worth, 2015, http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/. 17 The Philippines was an American colony and its people were not barred by this Act. Japan had already voluntarily limited its emigrants in the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement, so this Act did not further restrict its people. Chinese subjects were already completely excluded per the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and this Act did not “repeal, alter, or amend existing laws relating to the immigration or exclusion of Chinese persons or persons of Chinese descent.” This 1917 Act primarily stopped potential immigration from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and most of the Middle East. See: United States Cong, “An Act to Regulate the Immigration of Aliens To, and the Residence of Aliens In, the United States,” in The Statutes at Large of the United States of America, vol. XXXIX (Washington D.C.: GPO, 1917), 897. 18 Ibid., 876. 19 Ibid., 876–877. 20 Ibid., 877. 21 Ibid. 22 Lowe, Immigrant Acts, ix. 23 Ibid., 26. 24 Ibid., 71. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 See: Jennifer Gordon, “Transnational Labor Citizenship,” Southern California Law Review 80 (2007): 514. 27 See: Bruce Calder, The Impact of Intervention in the Dominican Republic, 1916-1924 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1984), 8. 28 The Guano Islands Act of August 18, 1856 (11 Stat. 119) allowed the United States to take control of and create “insular areas” out of any terra nullius, or uninhabited island, in order to harvest guano. This Act was used in claims of more than one hundred islands, and most of them have been returned to their non-territorial status. However, islands like those which make up the United States Outlying Islands (Baker Island, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Palmyra Atoll, and Wake Island) were all claimed under the Guano Island Acts with Palmyra Atoll being the latest of them (1912). As of September 25, 2014 (79 FR 58643), the United States still maintains an Exclusive Economic Zone of “up to 200 nautical miles from the baseline from which the breadth of the territorial sea of these seven Pacific Remote Islands is measured” via the establishment of a national monument over the area (authorized by section 2 of the “Antiquities” Act of June 8, 1906 [34 Stat. 225, 16 U.S.C. 431]). See: United States Executive Office of the President, “Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument Expansion,” Federal Register 79, no. 188 (November 26, 2014): 58645–58653, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/25/presidential-proclamation-pacific- remote-islands-marine-national-monumen. 29 See: Schafer, The Soundscape, 8. 30 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006), 100. 203

31 Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982), 296. This questioning of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” as ragtime music is commonplace. Wilfrid Sheed suggests that the song “is called a rag because the title says it is, but it is in fact a hybrid with a syncopated verse and a marching chorus.” Charles Hamm makes a point of highlighting how many songs of Berlin’s included the word “rag” in their titles, such as “Yiddle on Your Fiddle, Play Some Ragtime” (1909), “Stop That Rag” (1910), and “Oh, That Beautiful Rag” (1910). Titles served the purpose of connecting these songs, which had nothing to do with African American culture or history, to the lineage of syncopated music found in minstrel tunes and later in ragtime. See: Wilfrid Sheed, “Irving Berlin: The Little Pianist Who Couldn’t,” in The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty (New York: Random House, 2007), 13–37; Charles Hamm, Music in the New World (New York and London: Norton, 1983), 365. 32 Miller, Segregating Sound, 140–141. 33 See the introduction titled “Meditations on The Mikado” to Josephine Lee’s work for an excellent overview of how countries and peoples are invented through performance, commodities, and popular culture. 34 Wade, Thinking Musically, 118–119. 35 R. Murray Schafer coined the term “soundmark” and explains that it is “derived from landmark and refers to a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed by the people in that community. Once a soundmark has been identified, it deserves to be protected, for soundmarks make the acoustic life of the community unique.” I find that this term is both useful and troubling in that it seems to advocate for the memorialization of “Dixie” as a soundmark of the Confederate South. In this same way, the Orientalist soundscape has been reified through its reproduction and repetition in popular art and entertainment. While “Dixie” and other soundmarks should not be ignored or forgotten, I cannot agree that it should be “protected.” See: Schafer, The Soundscape, 10. 36 Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, 17. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 12. 39 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), 33. 40 This is not the same song as minstrel performer Luke Schoolcraft’s “The Heathen Chinee” which Robert Lee analyzes in his chapter “The ‘Heathen Chinee’ on God’s Free Soil” (15-50). 41 Bret Harte, Plain Language from Truthful James, 1870, 287. As many scholars have noted, Harte’s satire was lost on many readers and they instead interpret this poem as a harangue against Chinese immigrants. For articles that deal directly with the satire of this poem, see: Daniel A. Métraux, “How Bret Harte’s ‘The Heathen Chinee’ Helped Inflame Racism in 1870s America,” Southeast Review of Asian Studies 33 (2011): 173–178; Tara Penry, “The Chinese in Bret Harte’s ‘Overland,’” American Literary Realism 43, no. 1 (2010): 74–82; Jacqueline Romeo, “Irony Lost: Bret Harte’s Chinese and the Popularization of the Coolie as Trickster in Frontier Melodrama,” Theatre History Studies 26, no. 1 (2006): 5–14. 42 Harte, Plain Language from Truthful James, 278. 43 Coleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005), 51. 204

44 Gary Y. Okihiro, The Columbia Guide to Asian American History (New York: Columbia UP, 2001), 17. 45 John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), xvi. 46 Lye, America’s Asia, 3. 47 Tchen, New York before Chinatown, 99. 48 Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909), 99. 49 See: Tchen, New York before Chinatown, 99–106. 50 This list includes Camille Saint-Saens’ La Princesse Jaune (1872), Emil Jonas’ Die Japaneserin (1874), W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s The Mikado (1885), Reginald De Koven and Harry B. Smith’s The Begum (1887), J. Cheever Goodwin and Woolson Morse’s Wang (1891), André Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème (1893), Sidney Jones’ The Geisha (1896), Pietro Mascagni’s Iris (1898), J. Sherrie Matthews and Harry Bulger’s By the Sad Sea Waves (1898), and Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (1904). See: Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention, xiv. 51 Ibid., xiii–xiv. 52 Unfortunately, this film, directed by Robert P. Kerr and based on the 1891 Charles H. Hoyt Broadway musical of the same name, is presumed to be lost. Hoyt’s musical held the record for being the longest-running musical in United States history (657 performances) until 1919. 53 Wade, Thinking Musically, 17. 54 Miller, Segregating Sound, 140. 55 Harvey G. Cohen, Duke Ellington’s America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2011), 130. 56 Some scholars like Tim Brooks view the performance of Tin Pan Alley songs by black artists as participation in a white, commercial popular culture. While I do not necessarily agree that black performers cannot and should not perform Tin Pan Alley songs out of fear of conformity and criticism for “going commercial,” I do think they helped to perpetuate the Orientalist soundscape in their performing of these tunes. See Josephine Lee, particularly chapters 4 and 5, for a similar nuanced critique of how black jazz performers in the 1930s both embraced and challenged yellowface performances of The Mikado. For analyses of individual black artists who performed “white” Tin Pan Alley songs, see: Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2004). 57 Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the West: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford UP, 2003), 37. 58 This equals the relative value of approximately $9.46 according to the Consumer Price Index of 2013. See: Williamson, “Seven Ways to Compute.” 59 See: Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, 44–71. 60 Other famous Southern pastorals like Harry Ruby’s 1914 “Oh, Tennessee, I Hear You Calling Me,” Milton Ager’s 1918 “Everything Is Peaches Down in Georgia,” and George Gershwin’s 1919 “Swanee” were also written by Jewish songwriters who had not visited or spent much time in the South. See: Miller, Segregating Sound, 140. 61 Irving Berlin, I’ll Take You Back to Italy, Charles H. Templeton, Sr. Sheet Music Collection. Special Collections, Mississippi State University Libraries (New York: Waterson, Berlin & Snyder, 1917), 2. 62 Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, 105. 205

63 See: Brooks, Lost Sounds, 87. 64 Miller, Segregating Sound, 141. 65 Furia, The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, 20. 66 For example, Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte painted some forty pieces for sheet music covers in the 1920s. Some of them, like for Willy Stones’ 1925 “Nuits D’Asie [Asian nights]”, an “Oriental fox-trot,” render an Asian female form in paint with accompanying cherry blossoms painted in the background. 67 Irving Berlin, From Here to Shanghai (New York: Waterson, Berlin & Snyder, 1917). 68 From the 1880s through the 1930s, New Orleans boasted the largest concentration of Chinese and Chinese Americans in the South, many of whom worked on sugar and cotton plantations. This Chinatown was located in the Faubourg Saint Marie section of the city, but the New Orleans Central Business District has since replaced and erased it. For more on Chinese in the South, see: Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without a History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984). 69 Berlin, From Here to Shanghai, 2–3. 70 Edward Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary ed (New York: Vintage, 1994), 32. 71 The word “dreamy” was in much higher usage in the 1910s than it is today in the 2010s, and its usage was mainly limited to this magical, unreal, nostalgic connotation. For example, American writer Wallace Irwin published the poem “A Word About the Dreamy South” in Life in 1911 which in part reads: “And the taste of Creole creamy / Chicken mocks my yearning mouth; / Vagrant memories of the dreamy -- / Say! where is the ‘Dreamy South’?” Similarly, American poet Fred Myron Colby’s 1919 poem “In Dreamy, Sunny Mexico” in part reads: “A land of lutes and dulcet tones, / Of silver, gold and onyx stones. / The Aztec land of long ago, / The place of Maximillian’s woe, / This dreamy, sunny Mexico.” See: Wallace Irwin, “A Word About the Dreamy South,” Life 59, no. 1523 (January 4, 1912): 337; Fred Myron Colby, “In Dreamy, Sunny Mexico,” The Granite Monthly 51, no. 1 (January 1919): 126, https://books.google.com/books?id=NRoXAAAAYAAJ&lpg=PA126&ots=S846TtRbjw&dq=co lby%20dreamy%20sunny%20mexico&pg=PA126#v=onepage&q=colby%20dreamy%20sunny %20mexico&f=false. 72 Max Hoffman’s 1901 tune “Ching-a-ling-a-loo” uses the term as a euphonious pet name between Asian lovers. Singers since the 1970s have often employed “chingaling” as an onomatopoeia for the sound of a tambourine as well (such as in songs by David Bowie and Missy Elliott). In hip-hop lyrics, the term “chingaling” often refers to wealth (such as in the rapper Chingy’s name). 73 Berlin, From Here to Shanghai, 2–3. 74 See: Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the New York Underworld (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 234–269. 75 Ibid., 251. 76 See: “Shanghai,” Encyclopædia Britannica (Edinburgh: A & C Black, 1886), https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica,_Ninth_Edition/Shanghai. 77 Berlin, From Here to Shanghai, 4. 78 Ibid. 79 Wade, Thinking Musically, 16. 80 Berlin, From Here to Shanghai, 4–5. 81 See: W. W. Durbin, “Ching Ling Foo,” The Linking Ring IX, no. 3 (1929): 222–223. 82 Berlin, From Here to Shanghai, 5. 206

83 Ibid., 2–3. 84 Ibid., 3. 85 See: Huping Ling, “Chinese Immigrants,” Immigration to the United States, accessed September 30, 2015, http://immigrationtounitedstates.org/425-chinese-immigrants.html. 86 Erika Lee and Judy Yung’s research provides excellent first-person narratives describing these sentiments. Specifically, Chapter 2, “‘One Hundred Kinds of Oppressive Laws’: Chinese Immigrants in the Shadow of Exclusion” and Chapter 4, “‘Obstacles This Way, Blockades That Way’: South Asian Immigrants, U.S. Exclusion, and the Gadar Movement” focus on the 1917 Act and its particular implications. See: Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford UP, 2010). 87 See: Okihiro, The Columbia Guide to Asian American History, 17. 88 Ibid., 16. 89 Russell Sanjek, From Print to Plastic: Publishing and Promoting America’s Popular Music (1900-1980) (Brooklyn: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1983), 12. 90 Raymond Egan and Richard Whiting, The Japanese Sandman (New York and Detroit: Jerome H. Remick & Co., 1920). 91 Ibid., 2. 92 Ibid. 93 See: Roland Barthes, The Empire of Signs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 3; Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention, viii. 94 Egan and Whiting, The Japanese Sandman, 2–3. 95 Ibid., 3. 96 Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, known in Japan as Koizumi Yakumo, offers in his 1902 Kottō: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs a more likely Japanese folktale that equates to a type of “Sandman” called baku, or the “eater of dreams.” Hearn explains that an ancient book in his possession “states that the male Baku has the body of a horse, the face of a lion, the trunk and tusks of an elephant, the forelock of a rhinoceros, the tail of a cow, and the feet of a tiger.” Hearn recalls a common parlance that “when you awake from a nightmare, or from any unlucky dream, you should quickly repeat [baku kurae] three times; -- then the Baku will eat the dream, and will change the misfortune or the fear into good fortune and gladness.” See: Lafcadio Hearn, Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, with Sundry Cobwebs (Norwood, MA: Norwood, 1902), 243–251. 97 Hans Andersen, Fairy Tales (New York: James Miller, 1868), 16. 98 Ibid., 17. 99 Egan and Whiting, The Japanese Sandman, 4. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 See: Mark Metzler, Lever of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: U of California P, 2006), 15. 103 See: John W. Dower, “Yokohama Boomtown: Foreigners in Treaty-Port Japan (1859-1872),” Visualizing Cultures, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (2008), http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/yokohama/yb_essay01.html. 104 Egan and Whiting, The Japanese Sandman, 2. 105 Andersen, Fairy Tales, 16. 106 See: Ostendorf, Sounds American. 207

107 Ibid.; William Gibbons, “The Musical Audubon: Ornithology and Nationalism in the Symphonies of Anthony Philip Heinrich,” Journal of the Society for American Music 3, no. 4 (2009): 465–91. 108 Gibbons, “The Musical Audubon,” 468. 109 For an excellent work on amnesia as a nation-building tool, see: Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (Durham: Duke UP, 2005). 110 See: Ostendorf, Sounds American, 16–41. 111 See: “Digital Collections: Historic American Sheet Music. Subject: Legacies of Racism and Discrimination - Asian,” Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, (2014), http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/sheetmusic/browse- subjects.html.

Chapter Four

1 John Cage, “Experimental Music,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1961), 8. 2 Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel (Houston: Arte Público, 1990), 45. 3 Ibid., 35. 4 Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 221– 223. 5 Brian Delay, “Independent Indians and the U.S.-Mexican War,” The American Historical Review 112, no. 1 (2007): 35–36, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4136006. 6 José R. López Morín, The Legacy of Américo Paredes (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 14. 7 Paredes, George Washington Gómez, 24. 8 See: Américo Paredes, “Preface,” in A Texas-Mexican Cancionero (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976), xiii – xv. 9 Paredes, George Washington Gómez, 42. 10 Richard Bauman, “Introduction,” in Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, by Américo Paredes (Austin: University of Texas at Austin Press, 1993), xv–xvi. 11 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 382. 12 Todd DePastino, “Great Depression,” ed. David Levinson, Encyclopedia of Homelessness (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 184, http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412952569.n55. 13 See: John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 177–186, http://site.ebrary.com/lib/uconn/docDetail.action?docID=10465660. 14 DePastino, “Great Depression,” 184. 15 Galbraith, The Great Crash, 1929, 177. 16 An Act To Make The Star-Spangled Banner the National Anthem of the United States of America, H.R. 14, 1931, http://www.loc.gov/law/help/statutes-at-large/71st-congress/c71.pdf. 17 “The Designation of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’” History, Art & Archives: United States House of Representatives, accessed November 12, 2015, http://history.house.gov/Historical- Highlights/1901-1950/The-designation-of-the-%E2%80%9CStar-Spangled- Banner%E2%80%9D/. 208

18 William H Young and Nancy K Young, Music of the Great Depression, American History through Music (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 48. 19 Donald Francis Roy, “Hooverville: A Study of a Community of Homeless Men in Seattle” (M.A. Thesis, University of Washington, 1935), 42–45; James Gregory, “Hoovervilles and Homelessness,” The Great Depression in Washington State: Pacific Northwest Labor & Civil Rights Projects (University of Washington), 2009, http://depts.washington.edu/depress/hooverville.shtml. 20 William Conlogue, Working the Garden: American Writers and the Industrialization of Agriculture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 124. 21 See: Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down & Out, On the Road : The Homeless in American History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 201–220. 22 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 2006), 273. 23 Robert DeMott, “Introduction,” in The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck (New York: Penguin, 2006), 2. Emphasis mine. 24 Young and Young, Music of the Great Depression, 239–242. 25 See: Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2004). 26 Pérez I 1988: 337 27 See: Ostendorf, Sounds American. 28 Young and Young, Music of the Great Depression, 199–222. 29 Ibid., 20–21; Joseph Csida and June Bundy Csida, American Entertainment: A Unique History of Popular Show Business (New York: Watson-Guptil, 1978), 216–323. 30 Paredes, George Washington Gómez, 16. 31 James Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904- 1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 117; Roumiana Velikova, “Américo Paredes’ George Washington Gómez and U.S. Patriotic Mythology,” in Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, ed. Kenya Dworkin y Méndez and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, vol. V (Houston: Arte Público, 2006), 52. 32 Paredes, George Washington Gómez, 10. 33 Ibid., 11–13. 34 Ibid., 15. 35 Ibid., 19–20. 36 The Oxford English Dictionary cites a November 19, 1914 Los Angeles Times article using the term “queer” as a reference for homosexuals and homosexuality. Specifically, the article discusses a nightclub where “the ‘queer’ people” sometimes “spent hundreds of dollars on silk gowns” for “drag shows.” See Oxford English Dictionary, “‘Queer, adj.1’.,” accessed November 13, 2015, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/156236. 37 Paredes, George Washington Gómez, 20. 38 Ibid., 42. 39 Ibid., 44. 40 Ibid., 50. 41 Ibid., 51. 42 Ibid., 53. 43 Ibid., 56. 44 Ibid., 56–57. 45 Ibid., 57. 209

46 Ibid., 58. 47 Ibid., 54. 48 Schafer, The Soundscape, 76. 49 Paredes, George Washington Gómez, 58. 50 Ibid., 59. 51 Ibid., 61. 52 Ibid., 62. 53 Ibid., 63. 54 Ibid., 68. 55 Ibid., 97. 56 Ibid., 101. 57 Ibid., 102. 58 Ibid., 102–103. 59 Ibid., 103. 60 Ibid., 104. 61 Ibid., 105. 62 Ibid., 108. 63 Ibid., 116. 64 Ibid., 109. 65 Ibid., 115. 66 Ibid., 117. 67 Ibid., 118. 68 Ibid., 137. 69 Ibid., 195. 70 Ibid., 294. 71 Ibid., 299. 72 Ibid., 301. 73 Rolando Hinojosa, “Introduction,” in George Washington Gómez: A Mexicotexan Novel, by Américo Paredes (Houston: Arte Público, 1990), 5. 74 See Schafer, The Soundscape; Wade, Thinking Musically.

Epilogue

1 Henry Charles Lahee, Annals of Music in America (Norwood, MA: Plimpton, 1922), 6, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29634. 2 Emanuel Rubin, “Jeannette Meyers Thurber and the National Conservatory of Music,” American Music 8, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 295. 3 Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, 20th- Anniversary ed. (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 6, http://www.myilibrary.com.libproxy.temple.edu/?ID=504968. 4 “Real Value of Negro Melodies. Dr. Dvorak Finds In Them the Basis for an American School of Music,” New York Herald, May 21, 1893, America’s Historical Newspapers, http://docs.newsbank.com.ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88- 2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:EANX&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_d at=129EBDAEBA052258&svc_dat=HistArchive:ahnpdoc&req_dat=0F4DBBBDD0D99E09. 210

5 “Dvorak on His New Work, an Interesting Talk about ‘from the New World’ Symphony, to Be Produced for the First Time to-Day,” New York Herald, December 15, 1893, America’s Historical Newspapers, http://docs.newsbank.com.ezproxy.lib.uconn.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88- 2004&rft_id=info:sid/iw.newsbank.com:EANX&rft_val_format=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&rft_d at=12BD1D0993BFEC68&svc_dat=HistArchive:ahnpdoc&req_dat=0F4DBBBDD0D99E09. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World, 3–4. 9 “John F. Kennedy: Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” The American Presidency Project, May 25, 1961, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=8151. 10 “The Decision to Go to the Moon: President John F. Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 Speech before Congress,” NASA, October 29, 2013, http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html. 11 “John F. Kennedy.” 12 “The Decision to Go to the Moon.” 13 NASA, “Apollo 11 Highlights: Day 5,” July 21, 1969, 5, https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/Apollo-11_Day-05-Highlights.pdf. 14 “Apollo 11 Lunar Module / EASEP,” NASA Space Science Data Coordinated Archive, 2016, http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1969-059C. 15 Vanessa Barford, “Who Is Neil Armstrong?,” BBC Magazine, July 6, 2009, BBC, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8133835.stm>. 16 Andrew Chaikin, “For Neil Armstrong, the First Moon Walker, It Was All about Landing the Eagle,” Scientific American, July 17, 2009, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neil- armstrong-apollo-11/. 17 Saswato R. Das, “The Moon Landing through Soviet Eyes: A Q&A with Sergei Khrushchev, Son of Former Premier Nikita Khrushchev,” Scientific American, July 16, 2009, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apollo-moon-khrushchev/. 18 Funny Or Die, Buzz Aldrin’s Rocket Experience, Web clip, accessed March 30, 2016, http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/0be5c681fc/buzz-aldrin-s-rocket-experience. 19 Funny Or Die, Making of Buzz Aldrin’s Rocket Experience W/ Snoop Dogg and Talib Kweli, accessed March 30, 2016, http://www.funnyordie.com/videos/f7a26d7505/making-of-buzz- aldrin-s-rocket-experience-w-snoop-dogg-and-talib-kweli. 20 Ibid. 21 “Buzz Aldrin’s ShareSpace Foundation,” accessed March 9, 2016, http://web.sharespace.org/. 22 “Our Mission,” Astronaut Scholarship Foundation | Created By The Mercury 7 Astronauts, 2013, http://astronautscholarship.org/. 211

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