We have fed you all 1000 years: nineteenth-century radical song and the rise of North American labor

ABSTRACT

Political song, especially that which fits new words to existing melodies’ semiotic associations, has been used by Americans as an oppositional tool throughout the history of the United States. Activists employed tunes’ “virality” to disseminate political stances and these practices played a key role in the rise of the modern labor movement. This article traces that history, through a succession of contextualized examples linking nineteenth-century political song to contemporary activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• song
• activism
• contrafact

Until the movement is marked by the joyous, defiant, singing of revolutionary songs, it lacks one of the most distinctive marks of a popular revolutionary movement, it is the dogma of a few, and not the faith of the multitude. –James Connolly¹

Introduction

Song has been used by Americans as an oppositional tool throughout the colonial and industrial history of the United States. Politically- or economically marginalized audiences employed songs, particularly those setting new words to a familiar melody, as a means for disseminating radical or underclass political stances.² And, these practices played a key role in the rise of the modern labor movement in the United States. This article traces that history, linking nineteenth-century political song to contemporary activism.

In the United States, the half-century between 1848 and 1898 has historically been perceived as a period of political, social, technological, and musical change. While various scholars have demonstrated that the franchise was extended in various parts of the United States in several stages prior to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, in the antebellum period political stakeholders perceived change as imminent, expanding, and either empowering or threatening.³ The upheaval ushered in during the 1820s by the further extension of the franchise, and a new visibility for frontier activism, and resultant shifts in rights and economic opportunities, led to an explosion of political art-making.

Especially ubiquitous, economical, and thus “viral” was the art of the political song: the authoring of new melodies and of contrafacta – that is, new texts to existing melodies. Contrafact technique had been a common practice in North American political song at least since “Brother Ephraim” (in the 1750s), a set of yokel-mocking verses applied to a sixteenth-century Dutch tune, whose import had been the topic of repeated poetical contestations between pro-British and pro-Continental songwriters. Its ownership was only confirmed as “Yankee Doodle” by the Continental victory at Saratoga in 1777, while the tune itself continued to see service in political contexts for the next 100 years.⁴

The contrafact text to an existing melody was a portable, adaptable, and resilient political tool, uniquely suited to print culture – in, for example, the medium of the broadside ballad – and also to the heard-remembered-repeated media of oral/aural processes. Particularly, in the case of subaltern and subversive communities, a song – or even the mere playing of its tune – itself becomes a tactic, covert or overt, for the assertion of political identity. In such a process, a melody like “Yankee Doodle” or “Natchez Under the Hill” a/k/a “Turkey in the Straw” acquires layer upon layer of communicative associations when each new set of words is inscribed, as in a wax tablet or palimpsest, upon the recollected connotations of the tune’s prior usages. Yet unlike the palimpsest, melodies in an aural culture become more resonant, more multi-valent as they acquire new layers of semantic association.⁵

Politics, and political song, changed during the Jacksonian Era. Following the War of 1812’s second and conclusive victory against the British Empire, capped by General Andrew Jackson’s belated victory at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, the nation reconceived what it meant to be a citizen. During the western expansion that followed the 1803 Louisiana Purchase (and imposed a horrific toll upon Indigenous peoples), ferocious debates regarding the legality of enslavement in those new territories and new state constitutions roiled public discourse and the songs that animated it.

Frontier populism in the Jacksonian era

Among other, more ephemeral social and symbolic shifts, between 1815 and 1828 and particularly in the West, land, money, and voting power were at stake, and radicals of all stripes and all constituencies saw song as a useful and economical tool for promulgating political stances.

Jackson, an iconic hero of the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans, won the election of 1828 in a campaign that was notable for its mudslinging, slander, and what might legitimately be termed “fake news.”⁶ His extensive appointment of political allies and newcomers upended traditional East Coast power structures and brought populism’s suspicion of eastern financial elites into the White House.⁷ At the same time, working-class and frontier identities proved a valuable tool for carving out semiotic space, and its cultural expressions became mapped as oppositional, just as frontier hymnody violated the “rational” and “scientific” improved methods of singing promulgated in the East. There had been recurrent tension between establishment proponents of “Regular” singing – that is, sight-reading from composed harmonizations, with consistent tone and intonation – versus sectarian, rural, or frontier congregations who preferred their own improvisations, regional dialects, performance practices, and favorite repertoires.⁸ Jackson thus joined a roster of post-Revolutionary archetypal westerner figures, from the frontiersman Daniel Boone (1734–1820) to the archetypal keelboatman Mike Fink (c1770–c. 1823), whose mythic personae defined rebellious frontier populism and often elicited stories and songs.⁹

That irruptive, oppositional culture is captured in the 1815 contrafact “The Hunters of Kentucky,” which suggested that frontiersmen were “half horse and half alligator.” Published in 1821 with an attribution to Samuel Woodworth, it was sung to the tune of the ribald “The Unfortunate Miss Bailey.”¹⁰ The melody of that earlier song is traced to a traditional tune called “Ally Croker,” which had appeared in song sheets from the 1730s and was published in Thompson's Compleat Collection of 200 Favourite Country Dances vol. 1 (London, 1757). The “Ally Croker” melody was borrowed for a number of London ballad operas – popular theatricals that likewise tended to employ the contrafact technique of authoring new texts to known tunes – while the “Miss Bailey” lyrics, which describe a darkly comic story of seduction, suicide, and haunting, were added in 1803. Under various titles, it appeared as a dance tune in collections from the 1750s onwards, and as a song that also emigrated to Quebec and to America, being recorded in a 1771 music manuscript from the Hudson Valley in upstate New York, the area that gave rise to the Pinkster festival, and thereby to blackface minstrelsy. Hence, before it was ever borrowed for “The Hunters of Kentucky,” the melody that began as “Ally Croker” and continued as “The Unfortunate Miss Bailey” had acquired layers of comic, subversive, and violent association.

The musical setting is in a simple 2/4 time, and follows the common parlor-song format of a simply accompanied tune preceding repeated strophic verses, with a short instrumental introduction to set the key and provide the amateur singer a starting note. The percussive, mostly syllabic (one note per syllable) setting of the sung melody, its repetitious construction using mostly chord tones and stepwise motion, and its relatively narrow range (an octave from D-d, with one added 11th on the high e), all likewise favor the amateur or untrained singer; at the same time, all these factors and the very simplicity of the melodic construction likewise aid easy memorization. The tune is catchy and effortlessly memorable, an important attribute in a song whose political contrafact lyrics are intended to be widely sung, heard, remembered, and repeated.

Also consistent with popular song construction in many eras is the placement, and often times the repetition, of the title phrase at key points in the song; in this case, the keywords “Oh Miss Bailey” / “Oh Kentucky” appear as atypical quarter notes within the 8th-note dominated setting at the opening of the refrain, and recur in the syncopated 3rd measure of that refrain (“un-FOR-tunate Miss Bailey” / “the HUNT-ers of Kentucky”). In the latter song, they are repeated once more for good measure in the closing cadential melodic figure to form the refrain’s last two bars (Figure 1).¹¹

Figure 1. “The Unfortunate Miss Bailey” / “The Hunters of Kentucky”. Author’s transcription.

Table

Ye gentlemen and ladies fair Who grace this famous city, Just listen, if you’ve time to spare, While I rehearse a ditty;	The British found, ‘twas vain to fight, Where lead was all their booty, And so they wisely took to flight, And left us all the beauty.
And for the opportunity Conceive yourselves quite lucky, For ‘tis not often that you see A hunter from Kentucky.	And now, if danger e’er annoys, Remember what our trade is; Just send for us Kentucky boys, And we’ll protect ye, ladies.^12
Refrain: Oh Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky! Oh Kentucky, the hunters of Kentucky!
We are a hardy, free-born race, Each man to fear a stranger; Whate’er the game, we join in chase, Despising toil and danger.
And if a daring foe annoys, Whate’er his strength and forces, We’ll show him that Kentucky boys Are alligator horses.
[10 verses recounting the battle …]

Activists among both Jackson’s supporters and his opponents appropriated other songs to serve as melodic vehicles for political statements; it bears repeating that the extensive use of the contrafact technique suggests perceptions of its political potency, even in the case of anonymous authorship For example, “Jackson and the Nullifiers” (1832–1833), sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle,” marked the President’s unilateral decision to deny states’ capacity to “nullify” federal laws, and the decision’s enforcement by his threat to send US troops into South Carolina.¹³

Table

Why Yankee land is at a stand, And all in consternation; For in the South they make a rout, And all about Nullification.	Sing Yankee doodle doodle doo, Yankee doodle dandy, If their cotton bags don’t find a sale, Their cash wont be so handy.
Sing Yankee doodle doodle doo, Yankee doodle dandy, Our foes are few, our hearts are true, And Jackson is quite handy.	When we our glorious Constitution form’d, These Southern men declined it, But soon they found they were unarmed, And petitioned to sign it.
Nat Turner’s plan, the daring man, May soon reach South Carolina, Then would the black, their bodies hack, Cæsar, Cato, Pomp, and Dinah,	Sing Yankee doodle doodle doo, Yankee doodle dandy, Now like the snake torpid in a brake, They think Nullification it is handy.
Sing Yankee doodle doodle doo, Yankee doodle dandy. These Southern folks, may crack their jokes, If northerners are so handy.	Our country’s cause, our country’s laws, We ever will defend, Sir, And if they do not gain applause, My song was never penned, Sir.
Their cotton bags, may turn to rags, If Eastern men don’t buy them, For all their gold, they may be sold, Or their slaves may yet destroy them.	So, sound the trumpet, beat the drum, Play Yankee doodle dandy, We Jackson boys will quickly come, And be with our rifles handy.^14

Those familiar with the “Yankee Doodle” tune, which itself had been the vehicle for contesting British and Colonial contrafact texts since before the American Revolution, will recognize constructions that exploit the earlier song’s melodic structure; for example, lines 1 and 2, which balance the single-syllable words “why … land is at a stand” with the polysyllabic “ … consternation.” These also set up a cadence to the V or dominant chord, whose open and unresolved nature demands a concluding response with, again, line 3’s monosyllabic words “For in the South they make a rout” answered by line 4’s polysyllabic “Nullification” on the closing cadence to the I or tonic chord.

It bears repeating – so to speak – that the refrain or chorus of a strophic song is the place in which it is most essential to place the most crucial political messaging because it is the section of the form that will receive the most repetition and is most likely to be sung and thus remembered by listeners. Verses can carry content or framing, but the refrain is the most essential element. In this case, “Jackson and the Nullifiers” carries a line 1 catchphrase “[Sing] Yankee doodle doodle doo” which is repeated in line 2 – really just to fill out the requisite number of syllables – while line 3’s single-syllable defiance (“Our foes are few, our hearts are true”) sets up line 4’s political messaging, on the resolving cadence again: “And Jackson is quite handy.”

The influence of antebellum popular song

The impact of blackface minstrelsy upon oppositional song, as both performance idiom and commerce, can hardly be exaggerated. Troupes such as the Virginia Minstrels and Christy’s Minstrels collaborated with and exploited songwriters, and thereby drove sales, while blackface melodies formed a major resource for authors of contrafacts. By the 1850s, especially through the work of Stephen Foster, popular song had also become a commercial powerhouse and a ubiquitous, shared part of the North American musical ear. The expanding market for new compositions, further accelerated by the development of lithographic techniques that brought down the cost of printing music and opulent multi-colored illustrated covers, simultaneously served the at-home musical consumer. New compositional approaches, adaptations, and bowdlerizations of blackface song were additionally mutated by the expanding cult of domestic gentility that had been one middle-class response to turbulent Jacksonian enfranchisement.

Working-class women also resisted capital’s exploitation of labor, and their experiences were captured as early as the 1830s, in broadsheets like “The Factory Girl’s Song,” which has been tentatively sourced to Canadian mill workers employed in Massachusetts textile mills. It is possibly built upon a tune used for the English song “Jack Munro,” whose earliest printing dates to Newcastle before 1825, about a woman who dresses “in man’s array” to follow her lover to the wars.¹⁵ The cross-dressed defiance of “Jack Munro” is mirrored in “The Factory Girl’s” sardonic defiance, directed to the factory or supervisor, which alternates “Come all ye” callouts to her fellow workers with a tolling, detailed list of all the dehumanizing factory-specific tasks at which she’ll “no more” toil. The narrow range of the melody (within an octave), its wave-like rise and fall, and most especially its A Dorian minor mode, with a refrain probably borrowed from a macaronic Anglo-Irish song, mirrors the sadness and also the anger of the text (Figure 2).

Figure 2. “The Factory Girl,” to the tune “Jack Munro.” Author’s transcription.

Table

Come all you weary Factory girls, I’ll have you understand, I’m going to leave the Factory And return to my native land	Come all you little doffers That work in the spinning room Go wash your face and comb your hair Prepare to leave the room.
No more I’ll have these tolling bells, To call me from my bed: No more I’ll hear those passing drums As they roll o’er my head. No more I’ll put my bonnet on And hasten to the mill, While all the girls are working hard, Here I’ll be lying still. [3 verses beginning No more I’ll …]	[3 verses mirroring the incipit “No more I’ll … ”] Then since they have cut my wages To nine shillings a week; If I can’t better wages make Some other place I’ll seek. It’s soon you will see me married To a nice little man; It’s then I will say to you factory girls “Come and see me when you can.”^16

Political songwriters continued to employ the contrafact technique into the Civil War years, both within and beyond the labor tradition, and found it especially useful in the production of pocket-sized “songsters” carried by – and sometimes sourced from–soldiers on both sides of the conflict. From sublime examples of melodic and rhetorical combination like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” to the percussive, syllabic tune of “John Brown’s Body,” to the incongruity of “Maryland, My Maryland” sung to the tune of the Rainer Family-imported O Tannenbaum, political song worked when each subsequent appropriation and re-texting of a tune consistently troped and added resonance to the tune’s previous textual associations.¹⁷ Similarly, the Confederacy’s “Bonnie Blue Flag” could be traced back to the 1848 Irish republican song “The Harp without the Crown,” and before that in turn to the bawdy sea chanty “The Girls of Dublin Town.” In each case, the tune’s prior textual associations would link “Bonnie Blue Flag” effectively with those earlier expressions.¹⁸ Contrafact intertextuality typically failed when – as in the case of “Maryland, My Maryland” – the tune was borrowed exclusively for its memorable singability, absent pertinent textual echoes.

Blackface song’s links to labor and class

W.T. Lhamon Jr, Eric Lott, William Mahar, and Dale Cockrell, among others, have argued that the Jacksonian phenomenon of blackface minstrelsy, in which young, typically working-class, white performers darkened their faces with burnt cork and performed exaggerated racist caricatures of black folkways, reflected both elements of a polyglot, Afro-Caribbean-based street performance culture, and an implicit – and sometimes overt – mockery of the expanding middle class.¹⁹ Many blackface performers claimed inspiration from the folkways of southern Black culture, but their racist and classist mockery could hardly be considered abolitionist. At the same time, their often scatological, cross-dressing, or otherwise eruptive theatrical performance behaviors also opposed them to the genteel domesticity of hymnody, amateur-oriented piano pieces, and sentimental song. Daniel Decatur Emmett’s 1840s Virginia Minstrels, the first to offer a full evening’s entertainment, catered to an immigrant and/or working-class demographic. The minstrels did not care about temperance, abolition, or women’s rights except as topics for parody, any more than did the mechanics and laborers who made up their theatrical audiences. But their techniques of contrafact, caricature, and topical allusion informed both their working-class listeners’ reception of blackface, and of post-bellum labor’s exploitation of minstrelsy’s own tropes and tunes.

Thus, against the working-class performances, repertoires, and prints of the Virginia Minstrels, and the rowdy frontier actors, singers, dancers, and dockworkers who were their source and audience, might be juxtaposed the appeal to aspiration of the Hutchinson Family Singers, founded in Milford, New Hampshire in 1839, who took their musical cues from imported folkloric groups like the Rainer Family’s “Tyrolese Minstrels,” who toured the United States from the 1820s onward. The Hutchinsons’ appeal was calibrated toward gentility; notably sentiment, patriotism, the celebration of rural (especially New England) life, and gentility’s particular approach to socially progressive issues including abolition, women’s rights, and temperance. “The sound of the Hutchinsons,” as Scott Gac puts it, “was an antiminstrelsy that hushed critics who feared the immorality of entertainment, challenged the European bias of their listeners, and attracted throngs of fans with uplifting reform messages built around familiar tunes.”²⁰

The Hutchinsons’ poetics did not much admit to the challenges to industrial workers, and their idyllic world view barely acknowledged the reality of nineteenth-century immigrant life. Nevertheless, despite their appeal to gentility, the Hutchinsons’ songs on abolition would find them banned at intervals below the Mason-Dixon Line, particularly when they sang Brother Jesse’s notorious contrafact “Get Off the Track” (1844), based on the infectious minstrel tune “Old Dan Tucker.”²¹

The subtlety and sophistication of the contrafact technique can be recognized here in both textual and musical terms. Leaving aside the immense popularity of “Old Dan Tucker” itself on the minstrel stage, its insistent and percussive repeated title phrase, and its resultant melodic familiarity for a target audience, the original text’s rambunctious, tall tales-derived metaphor echoes underneath the kinetic energy of Jesse Hutchinson’s new lyrics. Tucker’s tall-tale exploits, his noisy and interruptive billy goat and hound dog, his drunken mishaps and rowdy dancing with “the gal that he loved best,” are quite a distance from Hutchinson’s “majestic Car Emancipation,” “waving of Free Banners,” and shouted “hosannas,” but there is no mistaking the militance of each character’s assault upon an opposing status, whether gentility (for Tucker) or slavery (for the Hutchinsons). The intertextuality continues: the new setting meticulously retains the most distinctive and hooky melodic moment: one can imagine an abolitionist audience roaring out Roll it along! with only a little less fervor than the Bowery Theater “mechanics” audience might shout Get out the way! in chorus (Figure 3).

Figure 3. “Old Dan Tucker” / “Get Off the Track.” Author’s transcription.

In the context of this essay, it is thus most useful to think of the Hutchinsons’ appeal, like that of the Swedish Nightingale Jenny Lind (1820–1887), a soprano whose explosive 1850s media fame was orchestrated by P.T. Barnum, as reflecting a pastorally-infused middle-class gentility that valued progressive justice in the abstract and on the concert stage but was unprepared for the rough-and-tumble of labor songs in the street.²² We will see this dichotomy recurring in the post-bellum tension between rural populism and urban progressivism, and between working-class union and labor organizing songs versus middle-class evangelism.

Post-bellum labor song

Union and labor advocacy in the post-Civil War period took many forms, with organizers seeking to limit hazards, restrict the use of child workers, and create some modicum of a safety social net. Philadelphia carpenters had struck as early as 1791 for a work day no longer than ten hours, and in 1864 Chicago organizers promulgated an eight-hour work day. An anonymous 1865 contrafact to the tune of “God Save the Queen” / “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” began:

Ye noble sons of toil,

Who ne’er from work recoil.

Take up the lay;

Loud let the anthem’s roar.

Resume from shore to shore,

Till time shall be no more,

Eight hours a day.²³

Once again, a melody is selected not only for its memorable tune, but more specifically as a means of evoking particular connotations – in this case, of nobility, patriotism, and sacrifice – in support of the new cause and words; a particularly resonant textual reference is to the King James Bible’s Revelations 10:6 (“And sware by him that liveth for ever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer”).

Productions of radical song, and particularly the use of contrafacts on populist and working-class topics, accelerated in the era between the 1866 Reconstruction Acts, which established military governorships in the former Confederacy, and the withdrawal of federal troops from southern states after 1877. At the same time, an ugly strain of protectionist, racist, and nativist thinking appears in agrarian unions like the Farmers’ Alliance. The Knights of Labor, for example, founded in the 1870s as a secretive alliance of miners, steelworkers, and railroad personnel, and influenced – as had been the first Ku Klux Klan – by the immigrant traditions of rural rebels such as the Rebecca Rioters and Molly Maguires, excluded foreigners from their ranks, along with bankers, lawyers, and land speculators. Similarly, when the completion of the first transcontinental railway lines meant that cheap labor from Chinese workers was no longer an economic necessity, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first major law restricting immigration to the United States, followed, and was enthusiastically supported by the protectionist Knights of Labor.²⁴

Even so, despite the nativism, racism, and rural skepticism of the Knights, song remained a crucial and artful political weapon for them. Alfred Green’s 1877 “Workman’s Hymn” (a/k/a “Hold the Fort”) was set to the gospel tune “Rock of Ages,” whose original text by the Reverend August Toplady had appeared in The Gospel Magazine in 1775, and which may have been inspired by a sermon quoted in a hymnal collated by Charles Wesley in the 1740s. “Rock of Ages” was thus the recipient of several generations’ worth of gospel connotation. The original melody, which is attributed to Thomas Hastings (1784–1872) and was borrowed by the American Lowell Mason (1792–1872), emphasizes the march-like short phrases of each line, using a simple four-note rhythmic motif whose appearance at various transpositions (on “Ho, my Comrades,” “see the signal,” “waving in the [sky]”) makes it easy to learn and to remember. The refrain, whose chant-like opening of “Hold the fort” begins on the tonic scale degree and is thus readily located by amateur singers, outlines the tonic (D) and subdominant (G) chords, to an unresolved open cadence on “ … Jesus signals still.” This in turn sets up the resumption of the march forward on “Wave the answer / Back to heaven,” and a uniquely modified retrograde version of the rhythmic motive, which rises, on “by Thy grace, we will,” to the closing cadence.

Toplady’s melody would be borrowed again, specifically because of its evangelical associations, for “Storm the Fort, Ye Knights of Labor” (1884) by Philip P. Bliss, which was published in Labor Songs Dedicated to the Knights of Labor (Figure 4).²⁵

Figure 4. “Hold the Fort” / “Storm the Fort.” Author’s transcription.

Toplady’s “Ho, my comrades” becomes “Toiling millions,” and those millions are not just “seeing a signal waving” but are now waking and marching. His sympathetic and optimistic “reinforcements” are countered by “all the tyrants,” and the response to those tyrants’ tottering power is not to “hold” the fort but to storm it. For the gospel reformers, evangelical belief would bring relief in the next world (“Jesus signals still; / Wave the answer back to heaven”); for the populists of the Knights of Labor, it was a this-world battle for a specific political goal: e.g., “down with tyrant laws.”

Table

Ho, my comrades, see the signal, Waving in the sky! Reinforcements now appearing, Victory is nigh.	Toiling millions now are waking, See them marching on; All the tyrants now are shaking, Ere their power is gone.
Hold the fort, for I am coming, Jesus signals still; Wave the answer back to heaven, By Thy grace we will.	Storm the fort, Ye Knights of Labor, Battle for your cause; Equal rights for every neighbor, Down with tyrant laws!

This counterpoint – between working-class, often immigrant labor organizers and authors on one side, and sentimental song and pious hymnody, often native-born, on the other – was further exacerbated by the frequency with which evangelicals group like the Salvation Army supported capital, and solicited ongoing charitable donations, in capital’s ongoing opposition to labor organizing. By the late 1870s, middle-class gentility was so deeply invested in the status quo that labor songsters mined gospel hymnody, particularly the “Sankey” tunes associated with the 1875 Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs, precisely in order to parody and attack that evangelical impulse.

An additional factor shaping and accelerating the use of contrafact song in post-Civil War labor was the strong influence of immigrant organizers, particularly from Scandinavia and southeastern Europe. Activists had been part of many waves of immigration that followed the 1848 revolutions, many finding it safer to depart Europe altogether in favor of America, and this continued in the social upheavals that followed German unification (c1866–1871), the annexation of Polish-speaking lands, and the pogroms against Jewish shtetls in Ukraine and Russia. Immigrant refugees brought both political skills and radical singing traditions, and these shaped labor discourse.

Minoritized women and immigrant activists continued their wars-through-song even later, into the new twentieth century. In 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in which 146 garment workers barricaded in a New York piecework factory died from fire or falling, would prove a watershed moment in the history of labor disasters brought about by corporate greed, and in the horrible specifics – burning, still living bodies leaping from tenth-floor windows – that lent themselves to muckraking investigations, editorial excoriation, and the pursuit of labor reform. A song-based judgement came in “Dos lid fun nokh dem fayer” by Charles Simon, who specified that his Yiddish contrafact should be sung to the tune of William B. Gray’s hit “pathetic” song “She is More to be Pitied than Censured” (1898). Though the collision of saccharine tune and original text with the stark horror of the Fire may seem incongruous, there is sophisticated intertextuality here: by emphasizing the youth and innocence of those killed, Simon draws the preventable sadness of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory tragedy in bold relief, and taps into the savage critique of male abusers implicit in Gray’s original closing line “That a man was the cause of it all” (Figure 5):²⁶

Figure 5. “She is More to be Pitied than Censured.” Author’s transcription.

Table

Tsi gedenkt ir dem umglik vos hot getrofn In monat Merts vos iz geven Fun kleyn biz groys zenen gefloygn gelofn Tsu dem fayer vos es iz geshen	Do you remember the calamity That took place last March? From small to big, they flew And ran to the fire that was taking place
Di fayer layt zenen ongekumen Mit vaser payps mit pikes in di hent Tsu der arbet hobn zey zikh shnel genumen Un retn hobn zey nit gekent	The firemen came With water pipes and picks in their hands They swiftly got to work But they couldn’t save anyone
Refreyn Oy a trer darf yeder mentsh fargisn Af dem groysn khurbn vos es iz geven Vi der fayer hot kinder fun eltern avekgerisn Aza umglik zol mer nisht geshen	Refrain Oh, one should shed a tear for every lost person The great destruction that took place How the fire tore children from their parents Let such a disaster not take place again
Fun der tsentn flor zenen zey geshprungen Zikh tsu retn fun der biterer noyt Dokh iz zey nebekh nit gelungen Un af dem sayd-vok gefinen zey dem toyt	They jumped from the tenth floor To save themselves from the bitter emergency But of course they weren’t successful, Poor things, And on the sidewalk they found death.^27

Capitalists, when unable to entirely shut out organizers, often sought to thwart consolidated action by drawing divisions between workers’ groups: they feared union consolidation across trades and ranks above all else. Recognizing this, some labor song collections themselves explicitly pursued this kind of common cause: the 1887 Anti-Poverty Land and Labor Songs, published by George-McGlinn, is subtitled:

A Choice Collection of One Hundred and Thirty Popular, New and Original Compositions, with Radical Words … all designed for Land and Labor Lectures, Anti-Poverty Societies, George-McGlynn New Cross Crusade Meetings, Knights of Labor Assemblies, Trade Union Associations, and all Orders or Lodes intended to improve the Physical, Moral, Social and Spiritual Condition of Mankind.²⁸

Labor and imperialism in the gilded age

Between Reconstruction and the turn of the century, the vast expanse of industrial wealth on one side and the significant increase in immigration on the other brought both new class tensions and new labor stances into the songwriting mix. In this Gilded Age, the lines between middle-class “reformers,” who were largely supporters of the status quo and often sought to “uplift” the urban poor via education and evangelism, and labor activists, many of them experienced in or inspired by European socialist and anarchist traditions, were drawn more fiercely, and song deployed more savagely. The post-bellum era saw the rise of mass religious revivals as public and spectacular events, whose sung soundtrack was supplied by gospel songwriters such as Ira D. Sankey (1840–1908), the Civil War songwriter George F. Root (1820–1895), and Fanny Crosby (1820–1915). These songs’ associations with evangelical Christianity and sentimental gentility, their wide distribution, and their singability made them both memorable and popular.

Sabine Baring-Gould’s text “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” published in 1871 to music composed by Arthur Sullivan (of operetta fame), is an exemplar of the type. Its ubiquity and its associations made it a prime target for labor songwriters’ parodic skills. For example, the Journal of the Knights of Labor, reorganized from the earlier Journal of United Labor (1880–1889, Marblehead Massachusetts), published “Modern Missionary Zeal” in 1893 (Figure 6):

Figure 6. “Onward Christian Soldiers” / “Modern Missionary Zeal” / “Onward Christian Soldier.” Author’s transcription.

Sullivan’s tune sets Baring-Gould’s four-square hymn-style melody in syllabic fashion. Its melodic shape and formal structure are slightly more sophisticated – indeed, to use period locution, “scientific” – in keeping with Sullivan’s more expansive and ambitious compositional skills. The title line is sung at the opening of both verse and refrain, rendering it that much more memorable, but the melody also employs an internal secondary dominant, with the rising A-natural on “going on be-fore” pivoting us momentarily to the dominant key of Bb major, which is tonicized by the F-F-Bb-F (on “Christ, the Royal Master”) in the next measure. And there is further “scientific” sophistication – and text-painting – in the extension of the recurring c-Bb-A-Bb motif on “forward into / battle / See his banners go,” which in turn sets up the chantlike “Onward Christian Soldiers,” this time on the amateur-friendly tonic Eb.

Onward, Christian soldiers! On to heathen lands

Prayer book In your pockets, Rifles in your hands.

Take the happy tidings Where trade can be done;

Spread the peaceful Gospel With a Gatling gun.

Tell the wretched natives Sinful are their hearts.

Turn their heathen temples Into spirit marts.

And If to your preaching They will not succumb,

Substitute for sermons Adulterated rum.

 … 

If, spite all your teaching. Trouble still they give;

If, spite rum and measles. Some of them still live;

Then with purpose moral, Spread false tales about,

Instigate a quarrel And let them fight it out.²⁹

Though both “Modern Missionary Zeal,” from 1893, and “Onward Christian Soldier,” whose text is undated but which references the Philippine/American war of conquest in 1899, are more concerned with anti-imperial and anti-evangelical sentiment than with labor’s cause itself, their appearance in The Journal of the Knights of Labor reminds us that worker-activists were conscious of imperialism and evangelicalism, no less than the corporate “Combines,” as equivalently foes. These two contrafacts therefore exploit and parody the original text’s unctuousness: “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war” becomes (in the 1899 version) “Anglo-Saxon Christians, with Gatling gun and sword,” while the original “With the cross of Jesus, Going on before” becomes “Prayer book in your pocket, rifles in your hands.”

1891s Alliance and Labor Songster illustrates the awareness on the part of activists that there was vast, if untapped and not yet organized, power in cross-trade and rural-urban alliances.³⁰ Farmers might have different priorities than industrial workers and skilled craftspeople might wish to separate their goals from those of unskilled laborers, but the wisest organizers recognized that more concerted action, crossing boundaries and finding common cause, represented the greatest aggregate power – and it was for precisely this reason that capital sought to stifle the chance for the “One Big Union” (of “all workers”) about which the Industrial Workers of the World would preach in the next decade. For example, Number One in the Songster’s first section is an “Opening Song,” to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne.” Its chorus reads:

For Justice is our cornerstone,

And Truth our sword and shield:

Fraternity our battle-cry

The world our battlefield.

The compilers’ fierce embrace of a particular patriotic activism is evinced in Number Two, “The Future America,” which uses the tune of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and deploys no less than four alternate texts, whose opening lines are, respectively:

One more we meet to clasp / In friendships hallowed grasp / The hands of men! … 

Our country, great and grand, / Is known in every land / As Freedom’s home … 

Our cause, it is of Thee! / Sweet Cause of Liberty / Of Thee we sing … 

Most radical of all is Thomas Nicol’s contrafact, whose ferocity deserves more extensive replication:

My country, ‘tis of thee, / Once land of liberty, / Of thee I sing

Land of the Millionaire; / Farmers with pockets bare; / Caused by the cursed snare– / The Money Ring

My native country, thee, / Thou wert so pure and free, / Long, long ago.

Yet still I love they rills, / But hate thy usury mills, / That fill the bankers’ tills / Till they overflow.

So when my country, thee, / Which should be noble, free, / I’ll love thee still;

I’ll love thy Greenback men / Who strive with tongue and pen, / For liberty again, / With right good will.

And then my country, thee, / Thou wilt again be free; / And Freedom’s tower.

Stand by your fireside then, / And show that you are men, / Who they can’t fool again, / And crush their power.

In the same era, the close association of evangelical organizations – most notoriously, the Salvation Army – with the moneyed interests who were often significant donors led to labor suspicion around gospel hymnody. So, the Songster contains five new texts, for example, to the tune of the hymn “Hold the Fort.” There is another set of contrafact texts to the tune of the S. Fillmore Bennet and Joseph P. Webster’s gospel song “In the Sweet By-and-By,” published in 1868. In the original, the narrow range, mostly step-wise or chord-outlining shape, and syllabic setting of the refrain encourage unison singing by amateurs. But the original’s real musical genius appears in the scored call-and-response between the vocal soloist and accompanying singers in the chorus, alternating “In the Sweet” (soloist) and “In the Sweet by and by” (accompanying singers) in an infectiously participatory fashion. Within the chorus, the soloist lays out the details of that happy day (“We shall meet in that beautiful shore”), while the chorus chants their assent. The celerity of the verses’ syllabic text is counterbalanced by the chorus’s almost hypnotically repetitious title phrase (“In the Sweet”). Most notably, lyricist Bennet’s original evangelical suggestion that the true reward for life’s suffering could and should be postponed to the afterlife drew the ire of successive waves of radical contrafacteurs (Figure 7).

Figure 7. “Sweet By-and-By” / “The Right will Prevail” / “Pie in the Sky When You Die.” Author’s transcription.

Gilded Age labor songs’ more radically confrontational imagery and language echo the radical, even extra-legal rhetoric of the period. For example, the role of the hated “company gun thugs,” most notoriously Allan Pinkerton’s detectives who quelled the 1892 Homestead Strike, is commemorated in “Father Was Killed by the Pinkerton Men,” which was published in Chicago by William W. Delaney, to a tune called “Weep Some More My Lady” by Sigmund Spaeth (Figure 8).³¹

Figure 8. “Father was Killed by a Pinkerton Man.” Author’s transcription.

Delaney’s song represents a particularly striking juxtaposition of the appropriation of the text language associated with a sentimental song, contrasted to the starkness of the event delineated, and is included here partly because of this notable atypicality. Though the melody is unidentified, its form is striking for two reasons; first, because its shape, range, and internal organization suggest a more skillful singer and exploit the implied “scientific” secondary document (on “They fought for home and right to live”) that we have previously seen from Arthur Sullivan, and second, because of the unusual shift from 4/4 time in the verse to 3/4 in the refrain. This sort of metric shift was not uncommon in some more “elevated” types of commercial parlor song, but it is rare to find in a song borrowed for or addressing labor topics, as it does not lend itself so readily to unison singing or learning by ear. That refrain may reflect the vast expansion of Tin Pan Alley songs composed in 3/4 time in this decade, whose popularity and secular topics, and the physical intimacy of the dance associated with it, led to references to “the lascivious waltz.”³²

Table

‘Twas in Pennsylvania town not very long ago Men struck against reduction of their pay Their millionaire employer with philanthropic show Had closed the work till starved they would obey	Ye prating politicians, who boast protection creed, Go to Homestead and stop the orphans’ cry. Protection for the rich man ye pander to his greed, His workmen they are cattle and may die.
They fought for home and right to live where they had toiled so long But ere the sun had set some were laid low There’re hearts now sadly grieving by that sad and bitter wrong God help them for it was a cruel blow.	The freedom of the city in Scotland far away ‘Tis presented to the millionaire suave, But here in Free America with protection in full sway His workmen get the freedom of the grave.
CHORUS God help them tonight in their hour of affliction Praying for him whom they’ll ne’er see again Hear the orphans tell their sad story “Father was killed by the Pinkerton men.”

Populism reached a kind of apotheosis with the 1892 convention of the People’s Party, more commonly known as the Populists, which was held in Omaha in July; there, central planks of the platform were a guaranteed federal loans system, a national program for crop storage, and the elimination of private banks, three core tenets which reveal the Party’s agrarian bias. See, for example, “The Workingman’s Hymn,” to the tune of “Sweet Bye-and-Bye,” above, and “Looking Backward,” to the tune of “Shall We Gather at the River?”³³

Looking backward o’er the record the Republicans have made,

Can we still support their party with these before us laid?

First, they ‘except’ on greenbacks, causing gold to take a rise;

But T. Stevens saw the danger – tears went streaming in his eyes.

Chorus:

We will vote for the labor party,

A good and reliable party.

Vote to support the laboring party,

That gives justice to all.

Then they passed the national bank act, giving wealthy men the chance

To loan you money congress should do, and charge you high interest in advance.

Next, they contracted our money, and passed on act in ‘66,

Which burned up the national greenbacks on which the people paid no tax … 

The 1893 economic panic, whose repercussions echoed for several years, was rooted in crop failures and bad harvests, the receivership of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and a subsequent succession of bank runs and a credit crunch. The stock market fell, banks failed, and unemployment in some states reached as high as 35–45%. In 1894, led by Ohio businessman and politician Jacob Coxey, “Coxey’s Army” of unemployed workers marched on Washington to demand that it inaugurate job-creation programs – a premise that only really took root with FDR’s New Deal almost forty years later:

The Battle Hymn of Labor

[to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”]

Ye have offered bribes and share of spoils to rulers of our land;

Ye have subsidized our teachers and sown lies on every hand.

But the suf’ring people rising now, come forth at God’s command,

For God still marches on.³⁴

In the same year, the American Railway Union launched a series of strikes against the Pullman manufacturing plant in Chicago. When they were shut out of the plant, the membership under the leadership of Eugene Debs voted for a massive boycott of all trains that used the Pullman restaurant and sleeper cars. Though the ARU was supported by Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld, Grover Cleveland’s presidential administration moved quickly to squelch the boycott and ordered federal troops to clear strikers from the obstructed lines, which predictably led to violence. Debs was arrested, tried, and convicted on charges of conspiring to obstruct the mail; he served six months in jail. Cleveland and Congress designated September 1st as a new “Labor Day,” seeking to draw attention away from the traditional international workers’ day of May 1; Samuel Gompers’s American Federatio of Labor supported these actions.

By the end of the decade, civil and labor rights were in full retreat in the face of capital’s muscle and the federal government’s complicity. The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, in which African-American Homer Plessy intentionally violated Louisiana’s segregation laws by boarding and refusing to leave a whites-only train car, was the basis for the Supreme Court’s ruling that “separate but equal” facilities for whites and Blacks did not violate the U.S. Constitution – and it paved the way for sixty years of discrimination in the workplace, in social life, and especially in public education. In the same year, Filipino nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo embarked on a revolutionary uprising against Spanish rule in those islands, which brought Aguinaldo’s nationalists into an alliance with the U.S. government after the (probably staged) sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor in April 1898.

The “muscular Christianity” of “Onward Christian Soldiers” would return in a December 1899 publication from the American Anti-Imperialist League in response to the American annexation of the Philippines.³⁵ Authored by William Lloyd Garrison Jr, the son of the famed abolitionist, its text references both the Filipino resistance and analogous British culpability in their treatment of Boer detainees in South Africa in the same year.

“Onward Christian Soldier”

--William Lloyd Garrison Junior

The Anglo-Saxon Christians, with gatling gun and sword,

In serried ranks are pushing on the gospel of the Lord;

On Afric’s shore they pressed the foe in war’s terrific scenes,

And merrily the hunt goes on throughout the Philippines.

What though the Boers are Christians: the Filipinos, too!

It is a Christian act to shoot a fellow creature through;

The bombs with dynamite surcharged their deadly missiles fling,

And gaily on their fatal work the dum-dum bullets saying.

The dead and mangled bodies, the wounded and the sick,

Are multiplied on every hand, on every field are thick

“Oh gracious Lord,” the prayer goes up, “to us give victory swift!

The chaplains on opposing sides the same petition lift … ”³⁶

The US Army’s occupation of the Philippines likewise brought its own cohort of revolutionary – and anti-revolutionary – songs. From a typescript pamphlet of contrafacts issued in the 1920s for the delectation of veterans of the conflicts (the “Military Order of the Carabao”) comes “The Soldier’s Song,” to be sung to the tune of George F. Root’s Civil War song “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Prisoner’s Hope)”; the layers of association between an 1864 original dedicated to Union prisoners of war and soldiers serving in an early war of western hemisphere imperialism are complex, and the brutality explicitly acknowledged (e.g., the “Krag” referenced is the Krag–Jørgensen bolt-action rifle issued to US forces) (Figure 9).

Figure 9. “The Soldier’s Song,” to the tune of “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” Author’s transcription.

In that land of dopey dreams, happy, peaceful Philippines,

Where you work and height and sweat the whole day long,

You get into camp deadbeat, not a blooming thing to eat,

And the Soldier sings his little evening song.

Chorus:

Damn, damn, damn the Insurrectos, pock-marked kakiac ladron’s,

Underneath the starry flag, civilize ‘em with a Krag,

And return us to our own beloved homes.

 … 

Underneath the nipa thatch, where the lousy lepers scratch

Only refuge after hiking all day long;

When I lay me down to sleep, slimy lizards o’er me creep,

Then you hear the soldiers sing this evening song.

By 1905, gaveling into session the National Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, William D. “Big Bill” Haywood would declare:

Fellow workers. … This is the Continental Congress of the working-class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working-class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working-class from the slave bondage of capitalism. … The aims and objects of this organization shall be to put the working-class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of the machinery of production and distribution, without regard to the capitalist masters.³⁷

The “Wobblies” would fall victim to strikebreakers, gun thugs, imprisonment, torture, exile, and lynching, and their death knell seemed to have sounded in the anti-progressive Palmer Raids of the 1919 Red Summer. Haywood himself had been tried and convicted in 1918 of “conspiring to hinder the draft … and intimidate others in connection with labor disputes,” and after the failure of his appeal in 1921 fled to Russia, following Emma Goldman, Carlo Tresca, and others into exile. But the song remained a weapon of massed resistance; in 1912 Stannard Baker reminisced that:

It is the first strike I ever saw that sang. I shall not forget the curious lift, the strange sudden fire of the mingled nationalities at the strike meetings when they broke into the universal language of song. And not only at the meetings did they sing, but in the soup houses and in the streets … They have a whole book of songs [the legendary “Little Red Songbook,” or more formally Songs to Fan the Flames of Revolution, a collection of contrafact texts which went through many editions] fitted to familiar tunes – ’The Eight Hour Song,’ ‘The Banner of Labor,’ ‘Workers, Shall the Masters Rule Us?’ But the favorite of all was the ‘Internationale.’³⁸

Many Wobblies were exiled, and others were tortured and killed. But the dream remained in the Dust Bowl and anti-Fascist songs of Woody Guthrie, in the service of the IWWs in the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, and in street actions that echoed their activism as well as in the March on Washington in 1963, the No Nukes movement of the 1970s, and the wave of union awareness and organizing kicked off by 1999s World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, at which both Wobblies and anarchists were again a presence.

Song was and is power, especially for those to whom power is otherwise denied because it is portable, mutable, memorable, economical, accessible, and difficult to contain. That power rings again, as recently as the wave of union formation and organizing that followed the “Great Resignation” of the COVID-19 crisis.³⁹ At a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York for example, on October 12^th, 2022, English folk/punk singer Billy Bragg sang his own version of “There is Power in a Union,” a title authored by immigrant Wobbly Joe Hill the tune of George F. Root’s “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” prior to Hill’s execution by firing squad, on falsified charges of murder, in November 1915. In the classic contrafact tradition, Bragg’s new twenty-first-century lyrics update the tune’s 175-year history of layered radical connotation (Figure 10):⁴⁰

There's power in a factory, power in the land

Power in the hand of the worker

But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand

There is power in a union

Now the lessons of the past were all learned with workers’ blood

Mistakes of the bosses we must pay for

From the cities and the farmlands to trenches full of mud

War has always been the bosses’ way, sir

[Chorus]

The union forever defending our rights

Down with the blackleg, the workers unite

With our brothers and our sisters from many far-off lands

There is power in a union

Figure 10. “The Battle Cry of Freedom” / “Power in a Union.” Author’s transcription.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher J. Smith

Christopher J. Smith is Professor and Chair of Musicology, and director of the Vernacular Music Center (www.vernacularmusiccenter.org) at the Texas Tech University School of Music. In addition to an active career as performer, conductor, and arranger, he has also authored The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Illinois, 2013) and Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (Illinois, 2019); his next monograph is Situational Genius: The Practice of the American Bandleaders (Illinois, forthcoming).

Notes

1 Connolly, Selected Writings, 48.

2 For the purposes of this essay, I take “radical” as a stance regarding group action that disobeys existing laws and statutes. Both “conservative” and “progressive” positions may yield such action; “radical,” in my usage, therefore connotes a rhetoric that expresses willingness to violate existing laws and statutes. So, for example, both the paramilitary “Sons of Liberty” (c. 1765–1784) in the American Revolution, conventionally understood as “progressive” and literally revolutionary, may be described as “radical,” but so also may be the paramilitary First Ku Klux Klan (c. 1865–1871), conventionally mapped as “conservative.” In both cases, each group’s rhetoric expressed willingness to operate outside the rule of law, and thus qualifies as “radical,” under my definition. As regards “underclass,” I take methodological and critical frameworks from the historians E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Linebaugh, and Marcus Rediker.

3 See, for example, Ratcliffe “The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828”; Gronningsater, “Expressly Recognized.” On the perception of imminent change during this period see, among others, Conlin, “The Dangerous Isms. I am indebted to Billy Coleman for these citations.

4 See, for example, Alexander, “Yankee Doodle Rides into Town,” in To Stretch Our Ears; Goodman, “Transatlantic Contrafacta,” 392–419.

5 Disclaimer: Parallel to these usages is the very rich and complex tradition of slavery-era Black song, especially the early spirituals and work songs that sometimes encoded resistance. Though a comprehensive analysis of this latter repertoire is beyond the scope of the current article, it must be acknowledged that the tradition of Black sung resistance, including spirituals, hollers, gospel songs, Civil Rights songs, and so forth, is rich and complex.?

6 Jackson’s parentage, marriage, slaveholder status, harshness as a military commander and governor, and actions in various campaigns against Native Americans were all the targets of pamphlet attacks. See, among others, Basch, “Marriage, Morals, and Politics,” 890–918; Watson, Liberty and Power, chapter 3.

7 Most tangibly, by dissolving the Second Bank of the United States in 1832.

8 Church fathers had long inveighed against this kind of defiant musical apostasy. See Ford (ed.), Diary of Cotton Mather, 2:693.

9 On Jackson as an archetype, the foundational text is Ward, Andrew Jackson.

10 Sung in New Orleans in 1833 by Noah M. Ludlow; “The Unfortunate Miss Bailey.”

11 As Steven Tyler of the American rock band Aersomith once said, “If you want to write a hit single, start by repeating the title.”

12 The hunters of Kentucky. Online Text. https://www.loc.gov/item/amss.sb20165a/. Accessed 1.8.2024.

13 Jackson and the nullifiers. Library of Congress, https://goo.gl/xVTerL Accessed 1.8.2024.

14 “Jackson and the nullifiers” (1833). https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:277529/.

15 “Jack Munro.” Roud 268; Bodleian 9061. http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/roud/268. See also https://studylib.net/doc/8199023/lowell-factory-girl---fund-for-labor-culture-and-history Accessed 2.15.2023.

16 Anonymous broadside tentatively dated 1830s, https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1445159 Stecher & Brislin, “Jack Monroe.”

17 See, for example, Davis, Maryland, My Maryland.

18 On the difficulty of legally parsing the multiple meanings of songs like “Maryland, My Maryland” and “Bonnie Blue Flag” during the American Civil War see Coleman, “Confederate Music,” 95–7.

19 See, for example, Lhamon, Raising Cain; Lott. Love & Theft; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask; Cockrell, Demons of Disorder; Smith, Creolization.

20 Gac, Singing for Freedom. See also Runzo, Theatricals of Day, and Roberts, Blackface Nation.

21 Though beyond the scope of this article, the association of the locomotive with technological advance, modernization, internal immigration, and the industrial/urban north meant that trains continued to be a central metaphor in, particularly, southern Black folklore and song.

22 See, for example, Stroman, “The Etude Magazine,” 21ff.

23 Quoted in Crawford, An Introduction to America's Music, 224.

24 As Yingze Huo has pointed out, working-class and nativist resentment of Chinese guest workers plays out in a significant body of contrafacts based upon borrowed minstrel tunes. See Huo, “Strange Affinities,” 50–2.

25 N.a., Labor Songs.

26 http://www.yiddishpennysongs.com/2015/05/dos-lid-fun-nokh-dem-fayer-fun-di.html Accessed 2.15.2023.

27 Peppler, Yiddish Songs. Thanks to Jane Peppler for her musical detective work in collecting and publishing these songs.

28 Cited and reproduced in Crawford, 450.

29 Quoted in Foner, 152.

30 The Alliance And Labor Songster. https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt%3A31735061820746/viewer#page/6/mode/2up

31 1892 Homestead Strike (https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-events/1892-homestead-strike) Accessed February15, 2023. See Pilon, The Monopolists. I am indebted to Billy Coleman for this citation.

32 See for example: “At the trial the court brought out the fact that Pennell and Burdick's wife found their heaven in the lascivious Waltz at their Buffalo dancing club. The faithless woman on the witness-stand was compelled to make profession of criminal degradation. She admitted that Pennell's love-letter stated the fact, that he found ‘paradise within her arms‘.” Quoted in Everitt and Francis, Immorality of Modern Dances.

33 The Alliance and Labor Songster, 29. https://www.kansasmemory.org/item/209603/page/13 Accessed January 31, 2023.

34 Quoted in Luectefeld, “Petitioning in Boots,” 179.

35 “Muscular Christianity” as a moral aesthetic emerged in Victorian-era England and is particularly associated with the 1857 schoolboy novel Tom Brown’s School Days by Thomas Hughes (1822–96) in the UK and with Theodore Roosevelt in the USA. It was particularly attractive to Anglo-Saxon Protestant activists who were suspicious of foreign creeds and immigrant identities.

36 James, “Cotton, Rum, and Reason,” 44–5.

37 Haywood, Autobiography, 181.

38 Baker, The American Magazine, quoted in Brenner, Day, and Ness, The Encyclopedia of Strikes in American History, 109.

39 Lindsey Jacobson. Robert B. Reich, who served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, likened it to a “general strike.” “The ‘Great Resignation’ is a reaction to ‘brutal’ U.S. capitalism: Robert Reich.”

40 Bragg. “There is a Power in a Union.”