In their shared goal of communicating left-wing principles to children through music,
Marc Blitzstein’s Worker’s Kids of the World (1935), Aaron Copland’s The Second Hurricane
(1937), and Alex North’s The Hither and Thither of Danny Dither (1941) exhibit a fundamental
unity of purpose that binds them both to each other and to the extensive leftist pedagogical
efforts of their time. By observing the parallel relationship among these three children’s works
and contemporary youth organizations, summer camps, and children’s literature, their cultural
objectives and stylistic idiosyncrasies emerge as expressions of a continuously evolving
educational tradition. Whereas Worker’s Kids comes out of the revolutionary Communist
aesthetics of the Composers’ Collective and the militant activism of The Young Pioneers, The
Second Hurricane and Danny Dither reflect the increasingly accommodating educational efforts
of the American Popular Front.