Ruth Crawford's experience in the Composers’ Forum in 1938 marked a turning point during a static time in her career, possibly providing just the inspiration the struggling composer needed to reestablish her faltering professional identity. Never a prolific composer, Crawford experienced an unusually unproductive period from 1932 to 1938—her only surviving work the three-part agitprop round “When, Not If” and a group of twenty-two folk song settings. A number of works from the early 1930s were either left unpublished or were lost. She left two orchestral pieces unfinished around 1932, a year that also witnessed the crisis in her psychic equilibrium, marked most dramatically by her burning of the Violin Sonata, which had proved such a success at its premiere in 1926. “When, Not If” (1932–33), the counterpart to her husband Charles Seeger's “Not If, But When,” was published and recorded five years ago. Another round Crawford wrote at that time was lost. Though she worked on a piece for the New Masses competition, along with Seeger, Copland, and a host of other radical modernists, in the end she failed to enter her “Into the Streets May 1st” into the competition, and the composition has never resurfaced. She was slated to contribute a piece to the Eisler Festschrift in 1934, according to the table of contents, but the piece never materialized.

The New York City Composers’ Forum, a series of weekly concerts of contemporary music, was established in 1935 under the auspices of the Federal Music Project (FMP) and Works Progress Administration (WPA). One of the New Deal's most successful endeavors, it showcased countless of Crawford's contemporaries, including Aaron Copland, Amy Beach, Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, and Roger Sessions.

The Forum reflected the lively political atmosphere of the period as well. Inspired by a recent tour of the Soviet Union, Ashley Pettis, director of Social Music Education for the FMP, visualized the Forum as a teaching tool for building a new, educated audience, and presented his idea to FMP director Nikolai Sokoloff in 1935. As a music editor for the Communist weekly New Masses, as well as a pianist and composer, Pettis fervently believed in the use of music as a weapon in the class struggle and sought a closer relationship between composer and audience.