Conference Agenda

In a 1921 issue of The Music News, composer and prominent Chicago clubwoman Eleanor Everest Freer decried the apparent foreign domination of opera in the United States. “Americans are beginning to realize their hospitality to foreigners . . . has fatally impaired the racial integrity of their nation,” she proclaimed amid a call for opera’s “Americanization,” adding that “foreign-born citizens must be assimilated . . . through the universal employment of our language.” The topic was nothing new to Freer, who had officially taken up the cause of promoting English-language operas with the establishment of the American Opera Society of Chicago (formerly the Opera in Our Language Foundation). Incorporated by Freer and fellow Chicago clubwomen, the Society sought “the Americanization of our national musical art” through the proliferation of translated libretti and propagation of new, domestically composed operas. Throughout the decade, the Society’s boosterism actively brought the issue of language in operatic production to public consideration, promoting the use of English as a nationalistic imperative and reflecting period xenophobic rhetorics of compulsory Americanism (Bennet 1988, Goldberg 1999, Church 2015, and Lee 2019).

Using press clippings as well as the organization’s extant scrapbooks and records, this paper explores the assimilationist underpinnings of the American Opera Society in the 1920s, placing the organization’s nationalistic aims in dialogue with the wider anti-foreign impulses and anti-immigration policies that remained potent forces in the wake of the First World War. As Katherine Preston and Kristen Turner have shown, by the early-twentieth century, English-language operas already carried connotations of nationalism and a discourse of democratization. By the 1920s, however, they adopted chauvinistic implications. This paper contextualizes Freer’s prolific writings within the decade’s anxieties over immigration and chronicles her organization’s participation in state-sponsored assimilationist activities. It first covers the Society’s origins and operatic boosterism, and it then details a Chicago-wide campaign to promote English-language operas among the city’s ethnic enclaves in 1929, which garnered praise from Hoover’s ultra-reactionary administration. Ultimately, it presents a case in which translation, fervent nationalism, and operatic promotion coalesced into direct political action against foreign-born citizens, reflecting the period’s harmful—and acutely relevant—(inter-)national insecurities.