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This timely oral history-based study examines memories of people who narrate competing national visions as they converged on the dance floor of the Hollywood Canteen, a celebrated nightclub where members of the guilds and unions of the motion picture industry entertained military personnel in Los Angeles during WWII. Based on archival research and interviews with approximately sixty Canteen-goers, this book builds on my previous work on swing, race, gender, and nation to explore historic and continuing struggles over social and political meanings of American democracy on one potent site of swing-culture-as-national-memory. In listening to the ways that war-time swing memory propels seductive narrations of nation as simultaneously populist and affluent; innocent and powerful; multicultural and white; this book also yields modes of hearing contradictions, negotiations, and critiques in the interplay of narratives from the less memorialized corners of the dance floor.