December 1891: A beautiful young woman admires the scene of the most elegant dance hall in Los Angeles. Flowers and lights and music and beautifully dressed people, tables draped in silk and lined with silver, an open dance floor peopled by colorful swirling couples. Her dancing partner hands her a glass of wine, which she takes despite having signed a temperance pledge a few years earlier.Footnote ¹ As she drinks, she feels lighter, happier. She feels beautiful, and the dancing only makes her feel more so. The feeling of spinning and gliding across the ballroom, chiffon brushing her legs, makes her feel giddy. Her partner compliments her, and as they dance, she feels drawn to him. She likes his attentions. He is a marvelous dancer. And though she will hardly allow the thought into her head, she likes the way his hand feels on her back. She moves closer to him. Little does she know what he is thinking. “Ah, my Greek Goddess,” he says to himself as he smells her hair. “I shall have the ‘belle of the ball’ for my victim tonight.”

She wakes the next morning in a strange room with a cruel headache. Her dancing partner from the night before is now a pile of fleshy stomach and chest and bedclothes, looking at her with the eyes of a conqueror. She shrieks. “My God! Is it possible, or am I dreaming?”

“Nothing will ever be well with me again,” she sobs. Gathering her things, re-dressing in her now-wrinkled ball gown, she leaves her attacker.

Some weeks later, she learns that she is to become a mother. “Oh, that I never entered a ball-room,” she cries out. She returns to the man responsible for her pregnancy, and he scoffs, calls her a fool, and suggests she have an abortion. In despair, this is what she does. Soon afterward, she falls gravely ill.

On her deathbed, she calls for the evangelist T. A. Faulkner, a former dancing master whose conversion to Christianity included a calling to rid America of the dance hall, to come to her bedside. When he arrives, her message to him is clear. “When I entered dancing school,” she says, “I was as innocent as a child and free from sin and sorrow, but under its influence and in its association I lost my purity, my innocence, my all.” She struggles for breath and whispers of her comfort that she will soon be in the presence of her Lord. The evangelist asks what he can do for her. She replies, “Promise me that you will go before the world and speak out a warning against the awful dangers of the dance hall, and try to save young girls from the sin, disgrace and destruction dancing has brought upon me.” He promises her that he will, and she says in a voice barely audible: “I seal your promise with death.” And she is gone.

***

At least this was how T. A. Faulkner recounted her story. He wrote a popular pamphlet, From the Ball-Room to Hell, which, by his estimation, distributed over a million copies. Faulkner was among the first—From the Ball-Room to Hell was published in 1892, and then updated and re-released periodically until 1920 – but during the early twentieth century, his was but one example of a widespread conviction that dancing would ruin America. Apocryphal stories like this one dramatized the ways young women would come to their downfall, and the ways dancing was but a vehicle for lust, violence, drunkenness, and rebellion.Footnote ²

Around the turn of the twentieth century, jazz dancing emerged as a novel cultural form in American cities. Young people with cash in their pockets found their way to nightclubs in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. They drank cocktails. They pressed their bodies close. Though the “Jazz Age” is typically understood to have taken place in the 1920s, the “Jazz Craze” emerged during the two decades prior. Dancers welcomed the arrival of American mass culture beneath electric lights, and beneath the censorious gaze of those who disapproved.Footnote ³

Not a few Americans grew alarmed at what to them seemed like the sudden arrival of ragtime and jazz, syncopated in rhythm and Black in culture. New technologies of music reproduction – the phonograph and, later, the radio – coincided with a nascent urban nightlife to make jazz seem ubiquitous. The only thing worse than the ever-present music was the dance it conjured from the youth, or perhaps even from hell itself. “We walked up Broadway,” one observer reported, “encompassed with a fierce jazz of light, barbaric in color, savage in gyrating motion, stupefying the optic nerves and conveying to the brain confused messages of underwear, chewing gum, and automobile parts. It seemed an appropriate vestibule to the temple of modern dance.”Footnote ⁴ (Figure 1)

Figure 1.

Drawing in two colors. Print made by Winold Reiss (1886–1953) showing two African American dancers done in an abstract style. Circa 1915. Also published under the title, “Interpretation of Harlem Jazz I.” Gift of Tjark Reiss, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Winold Reiss Collection, LC-USZC4-5687.

Jazz dancing was decidedly not the first moral issue in American politics – concern about slavery, prostitution, alcohol, gambling, and obscenity had dominated the nineteenth century – but there seemed to be something new happening in the ways young people were moving their bodies.Footnote ⁵ The ballroom dancing of the debutante class remained. The vernacular dancing of such groups as Polish immigrants, Appalachian whites, and southern African Americans remained. But elements of these forms combined and evolved into something novel and, it seemed to some at the time, very dangerous. As new types of dancing developed around the turn of the century but especially during the 1910s, pastors, social critics, parents, teachers, and journalists, among others, responded with alarm, even panic. Dancing, it seemed – and especially new dances like the turkey trot, the bunny hug, the tango, and the black bottom – would destroy the nation. It would destroy American youth, American cities, and American culture; it would destroy the purity of young women, the self-control of young men, and the sanctity of the family; it would fill to overflowing America’s brothels, saloons, alleyways, and prisons. “The evil itself has grown so rapidly,” said one evangelist in 1916, “as to cause thoughtful men and women the gravest apprehension as to the downfall of our civilization, if not the extinction of the race itself.”Footnote ⁶

The historical and cultural significance of this moral outrage was many-layered. By focusing on young women as the group most at risk, this discourse served to reinforce and sustain patriarchal values; by associating jazz dancing with African customs and Black music, it served to bolster white supremacy; by correlating dancing with other social evils like drinking, gambling, and prostitution, it aligned with the interests of urban reform during the Progressive Era; and in its exasperated focus on the erotic aspects of dance, the discourse of moral outrage articulated heteronormative sexual values.

But the archive of reaction to jazz dancing reveals two specific historical patterns that are the focus of this essay. The first is what I call “downfall voyeurism,” which was a cultural process by which a group of people could become intimately invested in a moral concern; it was and remains a watchful, prurient attention to the ways a moral threat portends the downfall of America. Within the evidence of moral alarm, there is a wide strand of rich description, of claims-makers not only calling attention to deviance, but inviting listeners to share in it, to see it, to vicariously enjoy it by condemning its particulars and its details. There is an undeniable artistry in this process. It involves not just naming but creating a feeling; one must interiorize deviance for one’s listener. Downfall voyeurism, as it were, became not just a call to action, but a spectacle to be consumed. This spectacle, and the energy it cultivated, became the emotional core of the anti-jazz crusade.

The second pattern was an unintended and ironic outcome of this spectacle: the articulation of downfall voyeurism became a kind of entertainment in and of itself. Increasingly in the first decades of the twentieth century, traditionalist activists found that they not only had to contain the tide of a liberalizing and secularizing culture, but they also had to attract the attention of an increasingly distracted populace. It was the era of “cheap amusements” – moving pictures, circuses, dance palaces, saloons, amusement parks – and the making of moral concern took its place as a form of amusement within a culture of amusement. Stories sprinkled with titillating details of jazz depravity, tawdry and obscene though they were, became an acceptable entertainment when enmeshed in a narrative of downfall. In an age obsessed with fun, music, and scandal, moral entrepreneurs drew attention to these things as they competed in the marketplace of attention. The making of moral concern became participatory, prurient, and voyeuristic.Footnote ⁷

Some jazz alarmists reacted to this dancing as guardians of high culture, others as dance experts, and yet others as urban reformers. But the vast majority reacted to the jazz problem as Christians, concerned about the morality of the young and the purity of the nation. As such, the reaction to jazz dancing has something to teach us about the pre-history of the culture wars, the making of moral consensus amongst conservative Christians, and the place of traditionalist appeals in a modernizing America.

It has become commonplace in the twenty-first century for savvy moral entrepreneurs to employ complex marketing strategies, cutting-edge technology, and organizational branding to broadcast conservative, traditionalist messages. Though oft criticized by pastors at the time, the Christian marketing researcher and pollster George Barna led the way in the 1980s when he argued that churches needed to think strategically and explicitly about marketing their message, similar to the ways that businesses marketed their products.Footnote ⁸ By the early twenty-first century, many religious leaders were unabashed in their embrace of “supply-side” Christianity. For example, in his best-selling book, First Impressions: Creating Wow Experiences in Your Church, pastor Mark Waltz explained to other pastors that “because we live in a consumer environment, there is competition. There are winners and losers. If your church is going to be effective, then you must beat the competition, pure and simple. You must find out who the competition is, what it is doing, and how to win its consumers to your church. You must figure out how to convince potential guests why they should be at your church on Sunday morning.”Footnote ⁹

Historians have written a great deal about the ways Gilded Age and Progressive Era pastors and innovators participated in the beginnings of this phenomenon by adopting modern forms to spread their message. Billy Sunday used his status as a former pro baseball player to create advertisements for his revivals in the 1890s and 1900s. Aimee Semple McPherson stood on the trunk of a Buick and preached through a megaphone in the 1910s, and then drew inspiration from the Hollywood movie industry as she built her megachurch in the 1920s. John Roach Straton, one historian pointed out, “knew that bold measures were required to call attention to the gospel in the endlessly varied urban parade of sound and image,” and reimagined automobiles, radios, and skyscrapers as pulpits after World War I.Footnote ¹⁰

Historians have been convincing in their arguments that American moralists did not construct “a sacred canopy against modernity,” but in fact participated in it, shaped it, and benefited from it.Footnote ¹¹ But we need to know more about this moral message itself, and why it has proven so durable. We need to understand the power of language and performance to create and sustain a culture of reaction that has not only persisted but has shaped American politics down to the present day. The furor over jazz dancing came and went, but downfall voyeurism remains central to the making of moral concern among conservative Americans. It is as relevant to understanding contemporary moral concern over critical race theory or transgender rights as it is to understanding jazz dancing. Moral concerns do not merely appear; they must be made.

The concern over jazz coincided with three relevant and related historical shifts during the Progressive Era. First was the emergence of a new institutional style typified by the Anti-Saloon League – that of the pressure politics values lobby. The catholicity of such groups as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, whose demands ranged from temperance to the eight-hour workday to child labor laws to the elimination of tobacco, gave way to single-issue political advocacy groups. Traditionalist appeals for political solutions became more focused, organized, and efficient, emphasizing clarity of message over intersecting interests. The use of such groups to direct the attention of voters to particular moral issues would come to play a decisive role in twentieth-century American politics.Footnote ¹²

Second was the emergence of Pentecostalism and Christian fundamentalism. Though significant differences existed between and among people who called themselves Pentecostals or fundamentalists, they shared an exasperation with the decadence of modern American culture, and a determination to do something about it. For some, this determination meant converting as many as possible to Christianity before the return of Christ. For others, this meant leveraging the coercive power of the state to address sin within American society. Whether it was drinking, the teaching of evolution, or the dance hall, segments of American Christians possessed new vocabularies and theological rationales to apply to American society. They also increasingly looked to politics as a means of purifying the nation.Footnote ¹³

Lastly, the jazz panic marked a new era in which morally oriented cultural battles routinely ended in defeat for traditionalists. Despite their determined efforts, American culture over the next century evolved to become more tolerant toward sex outside of marriage, homosexuality, birth control, pornography, and a mass consumer culture that traded richly in images of sex and violence. During this time, conservatives responded to their mounting loss with a consistent refrain of Jeremiad. America is on a path of moral and cultural decline, they said, and it must be redeemed. That rhetoric has formed the central tenet of American conservatism, providing its primary touchstone and its sense of mission. The reality of loss serves as a wellspring for the energy of downfall voyeurism, which I argue is the essential dynamo of the traditionalist Right.Footnote ¹⁴

Together, these developments signaled a new era in American conservatism that would ebb and flow over the century and find its most potent manifestation in the New Right of the 1970s to the present. This recent “rightward turn” is a development that has been much studied, but my intention here is to draw attention to the longer history of values politics and particularly to the ways traditionalists tried to gain support for their efforts.Footnote ¹⁵ I argue that jazz dancing was a bridge between the moral reform style of the nineteenth century and the values politics of the twentieth century, and though it owed much to the former it was the first of a new kind of fixation that laid the foundation, provided the vocabulary, and modeled a political style that would come to play a central role in American politics down to the present day.Footnote ¹⁶ From dancing to transgender rights, traditionalist claims-makers have consistently drawn upon tropes of child endangerment, sexual recklessness, nostalgia, and the purity of the Christian nation. These are the central elements of downfall voyeurism, which both call attention to a moral problem and – more significantly – generate perpetually new emotional energy to fight losing battles in a culture filled with distraction.

***

In America during the nineteenth century, popular musical entertainment and dancing were not particularly controversial. Musicians who played in public followed a script and held a certain decorum, played songs the “right” way, whether in a marching band, a symphony, or a church. People who could afford it went to the opera, ballet, and concert hall, formal amusements that were also markers of class status. For most Americans, though, music was something they made in private, or in public but local, non-commercial spaces, to entertain themselves. They played the fiddle on the porch, the banjo at the square dance, the piano in the parlor. They danced, they drank, they sang, and they did so in ways specific to their race and their class. Slaves in Mississippi played certain kinds of music for one another; poor whites in the mountains of Arkansas played certain kinds of music for one another; Irish workers, California merchants, Boston Brahmins – they all encountered music in a way that pleased them, that made sense to them, that did not threaten them. Music had its place; it fit within the social hierarchy. It was not a source of social conflict.Footnote ¹⁷

Even music that was outside the mainstream, morally speaking, did not necessarily raise alarm. In Arkansas, fiddlers played tunes like “Grease My Pecker Sally Ann” and “Poontang on the Levee” and “Fucking in the Goober Patch,” and listeners would dance and drink and hoot and holler. One square dance call included the lyrics, “Lead the ace and trump the king, / Let me feel that pretty little thing … Ladies do the shimmy, down goes her britches, / In goes a thing about six inches.” These ribald nights of music and dancing, though, were not a topic of special concern amongst moralists. They were private, they were local, and small communities had ways of accommodating excess.Footnote ¹⁸

This mentality changed in the twentieth century as music and dancing became part of a highly visible American mass culture. As more men and women moved to cities and worked for cash wages, many of them chose to spend some of this money on public amusements. It was not always music and dancing – they also went to Coney Island, to the movies, to the circus and the fair, and vaudeville shows – but sometimes it was. The hoped-for tidiness of American culture became impossibly untidy: nice women showed up at dark nightclubs; white people went to hear Black musicians; teenagers heard music that made them want to dance in public. The social hierarchies that kept people in their place weakened in the face of the city and the music and the allures of the night. In many ways, this new reality was to become the problem of the twentieth century for American traditionalists: what people had long done in private, they now did in public.Footnote ¹⁹

This visibility was fuel for the fiery fantasies and prophecies laid out by people like T. A. Faulkner and others: beautiful young women lured into night clubs by tango dancers and nightlife lurkers; these dancers seduced them with liquor; premarital sex, cigarette smoking, and gambling ensued; young girls spurned the authority of their families. At best, girls became saved and left dance behind. At worst, dance led to the brothel, the prison cell, or the grave: “19 of every 20 fallen women coming to the confessional attribute their fall to the dance,” said one priest in New Jersey. “There are more girls ruined around the dance hall and turned into public prostitutes than you can count,” said another in Texas. “The inevitable end is death,” said another. “Did you ever know a lady who danced to excess,” asked another, “who lived to be over twenty-five years of age?” Edward F. Hannigan, a Catholic priest in New York City, concluded: “If I were the presiding judge in any court I would sentence any woman who danced the turkey trot to a year in the penitentiary.” The seemingly sudden appearance of public dancing demanded swift action: stamp it out, punish transgressors, make it disappear.Footnote ²⁰

The 1910s and 1920s witnessed an outburst of such promises and demands: promises of certain demise, demands for new laws, and a return to old ways. But jazz and jazz dancing proved irresistible. The emergence of the record player in the late nineteenth century and the radio in the 1920s made experimental music cheap and easy to obtain on the sly. The Great Migration of African Americans to the North remade American cities economically and politically but also remade American music and nightlife. Clubs in Harlem like the Cotton Club and the Cavoy, and clubs in the South Side of Chicago like Dreamland and Royal Gardens, attracted both white and Black audiences. At first, this mixing seemed dangerous to white people – “slumming,” they called it – but they learned to appropriate, copy, steal, reproduce, and sell Black musical and dancing styles, and often took credit for it. Black culture became American culture.Footnote ²¹

This all happened in the era of the Ku Klux Klan, institutionalized segregation, immigration restriction, and lynching. This kind of change, at this kind of pace, was disconcerting to say the least. But it was also strangely alluring. This is the heart of downfall voyeurism: the cultural pull of tradition, morality, and Christian social norms increasingly took place in the context of a mass culture animated by sexuality, youth, and notions of independence. It was no longer possible, for urban dwellers particularly, to ignore. And they did not.

Traditionalists reacted to this situation with foot-stomping and table-pounding indignation, but this indignation contained an unmistakable element of fascination. As onlookers witnessed the jazz scene – a scene that brought not only new sounds but also corsetless women, new drugs, Black musicians who played with raw sexuality, a rewriting of musical rules, a demanding youth culture, and a robust nightlife – many of them involved themselves deeply in this process of witnessing, of watching, of observing. Vice committees studied life in Harlem nightclubs; inspectors took in every detail they could in San Francisco’s Barbary Coast; women’s club members chaperoned dance halls; pastors visited jazz clubs to see sin for themselves to develop their sermons. Their voyeurism prepared them to paint pictures for others, to invite readers and parishioners to see what they had seen. T. A. Faulkner, the former dancing master, had seen it all and invited his readers to imagine with him. His pamphlet opened: “You will, my dear reader, find many very plain things between the covers of this little book: things which will, perhaps, shock your modesty … If you find merely the reading of the facts disgusting, think how much more the reality.”Footnote ²²

And think about it his readers did. The anti-dancing literature of the early twentieth century can be read in part as an invitation to imagine deviance. The best exhorters approached their work with an artistry, a creative energy; they were painters of pictures and creators of imaginary worlds. In a new era of commercial entertainment, downfall voyeurism served as a kind of counter-entertainment. Moral entrepreneurs had to compete with moving pictures, urban nightlife, and dance clubs now, and they did so by appropriating some of the appeals of these amusements. The pairing of allure and resistance, desire and restraint, generated a righteous indignation that was also excitable, participatory, and imaginative.

Three examples will suffice. The first is M. F. Ham, an evangelist and the man later responsible for converting Billy Graham to Christianity. “The modern dance is an institution conceived in lust, born of heathen parentage, nurtured and reared in brothels,” he promised. “It is destructive to the spirit, soul and body and is a menace to the integrity of our civilization.” Ham had collected, or perhaps created, a list of evil dances for his readers to consider. “As the years have come and gone,” he said, “the devil has stealthily insinuated more and more evil into this seductive snare till today we have the following very formidable List of Modern Dances: The Waltz, two-step one-step, and all their family known by such names as turkey trot, grizzly bear, bunny hug, honey bug, gaby glide, pollywog wiggle, hippohop, ostrich stretch, kangaroo canter, dizzy drag, hooche cooche, Salome dance, necktie waltz, Bachannalian waltz, hesitation waltz, love dance, shadow dance, wiggle-de-wiggle, pickanniny dandle, fuzzy-wuzzy, terrapan toddle, Texas Tommy, Boston Dip, kitchen sink, cartel waltz, boll weevil wiggle, Arizona anguish, Argentine ardor, lame duck, chicken flip, grizzly glide, maxixe, shiver shake, cabbage clutch, puppy snuggle, fado foxtrot, syncopated canter, lemon squeeze, hug-me-tight, tango, etc. etc.”Footnote ²³

The second example is James F. Minturn, Justice of the Supreme Court of New Jersey. In charging a grand jury to indict those involved in jazz dancing, he ruminated: “Keeping time as it were with the hilarious civic invasion with an intoxicating rhythm that defies and submerges the eternal song of old ocean, comes that verbiform appendix of the musical art known as a jazz band, exuding as it were, that ear-splitting avalanche of monotonous noise which finds its counterpoint only in the depths of Goethe’s ‘Walpurgis Night’ or in the heart-rending emanations from the condemned souls in Dante’s ‘Purgatorio.’ In response to its call there ensues a series of snakelike gyrations and weird contortions of seemingly agonized bodies and limbs, resembling an Asiatic pot-pourri, which for a more definite name is called a dance.” As dancers pursued these snakelike gyrations, they became “magnified in ethereal ecstatic exuberance and intensity.” Judge Minturn recommended that the grand jury see for themselves this spectacle, and they would understand.Footnote ²⁴

The third example is T. A. Faulkner, evangelist. For him to do justice to the sexual nature of the dance, Faulkner needed to draw an accurate picture. Two dancers: “With heart beating against heart, hand clasped in hand, and eyes looking burning words which lips dare not speak, the waltz becomes one long, sweet and purely sensual pleasure.” By two o’clock in the morning, “her bare arm is almost around his neck, her partly nude swelling breast heaves tumultuously against his, face to face they whirl on, his limbs interwoven with hers, his strong right arm around her yielding form, he presses her to him until every curve in the contour of her body thrills with the amorous contact.”Footnote ²⁵

Ham’s list of modern dances took on the syncopated rhythm of ragtime music itself; Minturn’s reference to the exotic noises that led to “snakelike gyrations” called to mind the Midway Plaisance of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; and Faulkner’s imagining of a young woman’s “partly nude swelling breast” surely rivaled the best contemporary smut. This is not to say these people were hypocrites. It is not to say they were insincere, unaware, or trying to trick their listeners. It is rather to point out that they were not merely reacting to modern American culture – they were participating in it, shaping it, and experiencing it.

***

This voyeurism served its intended purpose, which was to call attention to jazz dancing. It also served an unintended purpose, which was to invite participation. It demanded consideration of amorous contact; it invited imagination of arms and necks and breasts. The downfall of the nation would be devastating, but it would also be fascinating. The making of moral concern was an intimate process. This intimacy lent emotional urgency to a process that may otherwise have devolved into pedantic detail. In order to care about sin, Americans needed to feel it. As such, the culture wars beginning with jazz and amusement in the early twentieth century ought to be understood not merely as culture wars, but as battles for attention and crusades to capture emotion.

To garner attention and generate feelings, claims-makers linked their claims to the fragility of proper hierarchies in society. They pointed out the ways jazz dancing could alter these hierarchies, particularly those related to race, gender, sexuality, and recent immigrants. In other words, dancing was bad because it blurred the distinction between white and Black people, men and women, healthy sexuality and deviant sexuality, and Americans and non-Americans. The downfall of the nation would begin with the reordering of social hierarchy.

About jazz rhythms having African roots, and about jazz dancing having Black origins, jazz alarmists were correct. The syncopated rhythms of ragtime and jazz music had their roots in African and Afro-American folk traditions, and the expressive movements of early twentieth-century “animal dances” like the grizzly bear and the bunny hug had origins in Black neighborhoods of New York, Chicago, and New Orleans. Historians of dance have taught us that very few innovations in American dance since 1850 have not chiefly involved African-derived influence. Critics were right to notice there was cultural exchange going on.Footnote ²⁶

Their noticing of it, though, was not an observation but a warning. “Jazz, with its barbarous sound,” promised the Rev. William Crafts of Philadelphia, “serves to arouse the primitive passions as the tom-toms and shouting of the aborigines … It is undermining the health of our people.” “Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer,” Anne Shaw Faulkner wrote in the Ladies Home Journal, “stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm of the voodoo invokers, has also been employed by other barbaric people to stimulate brutality and sensuality. That it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists.” The editor of the Literary Digest concurred: “Far from being ‘new,’ these dances are a reversion to the grossest practices of savage man … based on the primitive motive of orgies enjoyed by the aboriginal inhabitants of every uncivilized land.” In the idiom of downfall voyeurism, words like “barbarous,” “primitive,” and “savage” stood alongside words like “arouse,” “sensuality,” and “orgies.” The warning was that the former led to the latter; the power of the warning, though, was in the pairing.Footnote ²⁷

Likewise, with gender, tales of dancing reinforced patriarchal values and also warned of their demise. They instructed women that they were powerless to overcome the temptations of the dance hall, powerless to resist the advances of dancing men, powerless to decide for themselves how to move their bodies. Sermons, speeches, and pamphlets on the subject linked shifts in femininity with social destruction. One editorialist wrote of a friend with a wayward daughter: “She has a really dreadful young woman on her hands – a flapper daughter who drinks whiskey, smokes cigarettes, wears diaphanous, clinging frocks, parks her corsets at dances and rolls her stockings below the knees … Just a 1921 type. A jazz type. A type that has substituted the brazenness of the harlot for the dignity and sweetness and naturalness that were our old-fashioned ideas of good manners.” Billy Sunday painted a similar picture: “Girls who preserve some semblance of decency at home, oh, they seem to abandon it when they enter the ballroom. Why, we are told that innocent girls, enticed into the dance halls by damnable, vile, unprincipled designing companions, when they left home they were free from sin and guile or thought of iniquity, but when morning’s dawn came it found those poor girls possessed of secrets that no girl should know outside of legal sanction at the marriage altar.” These images of women expressing so much independence, having so much fun, acting so like men in their habits of drink and sex, were effective in creating indignation. They portrayed something as unjust as it was exciting.Footnote ²⁸

Upon thinking of middle-aged women out dancing, the writer Owen Johnson said he “could not help conjuring up a vision of the husbands and sons slaving away in downtown offices that ‘mother’ might enjoy her youth again.” To him, this fascination with dancing was a symptom of modern woman’s flight from religion, which for centuries had offered her “protection from herself.” Now, though, her impulses had free rein. “Much has been said about the loss of influence of the church upon the man of to-day; but to my mind the aspect that is far more dangerous is the weakening of its influence over women, whose very instincts, from their impulsiveness and energy, need that discipline.” The fight for the obedience of modern woman was one he and others would lose, but the fight itself proved significant in modeling a cultural mode that has proven transferable across multiple fronts.Footnote ²⁹

The language of downfall voyeurism applied not just to the plight of womanhood, but also to the decline of distinctions between men and women. Dancing presumed a dangerous equality between the sexes, as many saw it. Wholesome society at its best, one evangelist wrote in the Baptist Quarterly, should afford “an opportunity for mutually ennobling companionship between man and woman, inspired with a chaste and sweet interfused remembrance of their contrasted relationship to each other.” But dancing, he said, erases this contrast: “The ‘noble shame,’ which guards the purity of man and woman alone together, is absent.” Just in case his readers could not imagine this scenario, he described it in detail. “It is evening,” he wrote. “The hour is late; there is delicious and unconscious intoxication of music and motion in the blood; there is the strange, confusing sense of being individually observed … Hour after hour, it whirls its giddy kaleidoscope around, bringing hearts so near that they almost beat against each other, mixing the warm mutual breaths, darting the fine personal electricity across between the meeting fingers, flushing the face and lighting the eyes with a quick language, subject often to gross interpretations.” “Passion,” he said, “PASSION and nothing else is the true basis of the popularity of the dance.” This passion, displayed openly and in public, had the dangerous potential to suggest to children that both men and women enjoyed and desired sex. This suggestion was dangerous because sexual desire was thought to be a kind of power, and these Americans preferred that power to remain in the bodies of men.Footnote ³⁰

This is what J. C. Hardy of the Baylor College of Women worried about when he spoke of the “modern dance” undermining “the highest ideals of true manhood and consecrated womanhood.” This is what M. F. Ham meant when he said, “The expression of an innocent young girl has been likened to the surface of a piece of new velvet: After it has once been stroked the wrong way, it can never again be restored to its original delicacy of beauty. It has also been said that to awaken the sexual desire of such a girl is like wiping the bloom from the unplucked plum – it can never be restored to its pristine beauty and loveliness.” And this underlay the concern of Cardinal O’Donnell of Boston, who said, “something is passing in the heart and the mind of the women to-day which is leaving them hard and un-womanly, and that year by year this transformation goes on until, if it continues, there will be neither home nor family, nor normal womanly nature left. If this is the new woman, then God spare us from any further developments of an abnormal creature.” Man and woman were distinct, opposite sexes, and to blur the distinctions between them was to blur the gender order that sustained a wholesome society.Footnote ³¹

Dance crusaders were particularly worried about sexual difference at a historical moment when homosexuality was increasingly visible in American culture. Whereas human beings had long expressed their sexual desires in various ways other than monogamous, reproductive sex, including but not limited to homosexuality, by the early twentieth century, homosexuality was becoming an identity, a subculture, and, according to some, a pathology. Doctors invented terms like “invert,” “psychical hermaphrodism,” “homosexual,” and “heterosexual.” Queer people invented terms like “mollies,” “fairies,” “wolves,” and “Uranians.” In big cities and small towns, in bars and church choirs, in Massachusetts and Mississippi, Americans knew what a queer was and where they could find one. For some, this was great news; for others, it felt like the sexpocalypse. In reading the literature of dance worry, one can see a heightened attention to “normal” manly and womanly desires. There was comparatively little direct talk of homosexuality, but coded language about “degeneracy,” “deviance,” and “abnormality” served to alert listeners to its dangerous presence.Footnote ³²

“The dance has its basis in the passion of human nature,” explained one pastor. “Every man who will face the question fairly and squarely knows that they like the contact, the physical contact in the ball-room. Every man knows this is true. Who believes you if you say it is not so? I do not, unless you are an abnormal man, or unless you are made out of wood or marble, but if you are a normal man, I would not believe it.” Another Methodist minister described a “voluptuous” dance he witnessed, and concluded that “anyone who knows the real nature of men understands exactly why they were lost in the revels of such a social and physical swim. That every passion of their manhood was under the glow of excitement, no one doubts who saw the performance.” For women, too, according to this logic, normal sexuality heightened the appeal as well as the danger of the dance. If one were not titillated by it, this might be due to faulty sexuality. “I do not believe that any woman can or does waltz without being improperly aroused,” wrote T. A. Faulkner. “Any woman with a nature so cold as not to be aroused by the perfect execution of the waltz, is entirely unfit to make any man happy as his wife.” This policing of “normal” sexuality would also fall short of its goals, but it became a mainstay of reactionary speech. The spectacle of abnormality has proven a wellspring for the conservative imagination from the dance scare to the lavender scare to the transgender scare.Footnote ³³

Alongside all this talk of race, gender, and sexuality, moral watchmen always reminded listeners and readers of the broader stakes: the nation itself. America, to them, was the object most in need of protecting and purifying. For a moral campaign to generate concern and consensus, the threat could not merely be to the body, or the family, or even the white race; it must also be to an ordered, patriotic, Christian America. Reference to the foreignness, the un-American aspects of dancing, served this purpose. Just as Americans of this era so often portrayed drinking as particularly Irish or German or Black or Eastern European, they did likewise with dancing.

“The worldliness of the modern dance is also apparent in that it come to us from pleasure loving, vain and Godless France,” one preacher said to his Kentucky congregation, “or from Germany long given over to the delight of worldly amusements and attacks on the inerrance of the Word of God. That our modern dance emanates from the centers of vanity, pride, sensuality and Godlessness, at once stigmatizes it as a worldly amusement.” “Two hundred years ago in Germany,” one former dancer testified, “there was much dancing. They danced and danced and danced, and by and by their brains began to go round and round as their bodies did, and many dancers went mad … Believe me, the nations that are your enemies, secret or open, would wish you to go on dancing.” That this seemingly obvious danger went unheeded by America’s youth was exasperating. “In the name of all that is good and holy,” one evangelist fumed, “what has our country come to? Have your sons and daughters in this boasted civilization become so corrupt that they have to be put down on the level with outlaws, thieves, murderers, and the scum of creation?” In the decade surrounding World War I – the tail end of the era of mass immigration – this message was salient and actionable.Footnote ³⁴

The foreign nature of dance was not merely dangerous because it was foreign, but because foreignness implied deviance and sexual carelessness. “‘Jazz is a signboard on the road that was travelled by Greece and Rome,’” claimed one pastor, citing a historian. “‘Orgies of lewd dancing preceded the downfall of those nations.’” He concluded, in his own words, “It is this state of moral indifference on the part of both sexes that seems most appalling. It is European, it is Oriental, it is what historians report of Greece and Rome in their decadent period.” And another minister relied on his own investigations, his own trips into the darkness to express how interconnected immigration, sexual deviance, and dancing really were: “It all began with the grizzly bear and the grizzly bear came from the underworld of San Francisco. Those who have visited the Golden Gate and who have been curious have visited the Barbary Coast. It is the amusement section of the red light district, where the worst types of all nations gather in the dance halls that crowd the coast. Here, every form of vice can be found openly displayed. It is a section reserved for the fallen classes of both sexes, and the warning, ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ is above the entrance gates.”Footnote ³⁵

Taken together, these warnings of downfall captured the most pressing concerns of white traditionalists in the first decades of the twentieth century: changing gender norms and sexual mores, mass immigration, urban disorder, racial equality, and a youth culture seeking independence and autonomy. Packaging these concerns into lurid narratives of decline, traditionalist exhorters generated moral indignation while at the same time providing the forbidden images of mass culture: heaving breasts, the swell of manhood, the electricity of physical touch. By 1920, concern was widespread, and it seemed to many that it was time for action, time to make jazz disappear. They would lose this battle, in part because the work of legislating, policing, and enforcing required a different sort of emotional energy than narrating, imagining, and watching.

***

Upon hearing and being compelled by the message of social ruination, some Americans organized themselves for action in the early 1920s. They built upon the momentum of prohibition, women’s suffrage, and the post-World War I desire to purify America and make it a model democracy. The attempted regulation of dancing took many forms – municipal laws, church mandates, music association resolutions, censorship of jazz music – all of which were direct and indirect efforts to control what people did with their bodies. The traditionalist political establishment, which at this point was a pastiche of loosely connected pastors, legislators, and parents (unlike later in the century, when these people grouped as so-called values voters), tried its best to convince lawmakers and law enforcers to prohibit dancing, to silence jazz, and to do their part in protecting Americans from themselves.

The first and most widely used tactic was to call upon and to organize experts. Music, dancing, and teaching organizations met and devised efforts to combat jazz and jazz dancing. In 1919, the National Association of Dancing Masters passed a resolution at their annual meeting that members would not “permit vulgar dancing and cheap jazz music to be played.” They distributed pamphlets to churches, schools, and dance halls with charts that illustrated approved dance steps. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which boasted over two million members, vowed to “annihilate” jazz in 1921, and to bring back wholesome, uplifting American music: “Let us carry out this motto in every home in America firmly, steadfastly, until all the music in our land becomes an influence for good.” Other organizations followed suit, including the Federal Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board, the American Recreational Congress, the Public Welfare Departments of several states, and the Bureaus of Community Services in towns from Philadelphia to Memphis. Women’s club members signed up to chaperone dance halls, and even Henry Ford pitched in by sponsoring a series of traditional European folk dances to model proper steps.Footnote ³⁶

But even these efforts, while substantial, did not have the backing of the ultimate symbolic and coercive power: the law. “This nation has been fighting booze for a long time,” the superintendent of schools in Kansas City told an audience of a thousand parents in 1922. “I am just wondering whether jazz isn’t going to have to be legislated against as well.” “Jazz music was invented by demons for the torture of imbeciles,” a literature professor at Princeton explained. “The state has the same right to protect its citizens from deadly art as it has to prohibit the carrying of deadly weapons.” Within a few years, over sixty cities and towns had laws on the books prohibiting jazz music and jazz dancing. Chicago’s vice watch group, the “Committee of Fifteen” – in concert with the U.S. Interdepartmental Social Hygiene Board – had advocated for such laws, and they won their first conviction under the law in January 1922, when a woman was fined $200 for “improper ‘wiggling.’” The judge explained: “The abdominal muscle dancer and the shimmyite must go,” he said. “This case smacks of the barbarism of the jungle … That these things happen in the fourth largest city in the world, in a so-called civilized community, where decency and religion are presumed to be supreme, must cause the average Chicagoan to hang his head in shame.” The head of the Committee of Fifteen applauded the decision and proclaimed it a “great victory for decency.” He promised to build on this momentum to secure more convictions.Footnote ³⁷

Likewise, in New Jersey and New York, state senators passed laws regulating “‘cheek’ dancing, ‘shimmying’ and any motions reminiscent in the slightest of the jungle.” In Savannah, Georgia, the city council passed a law outlawing any type of jazz or jazz dancing. Though the ordinance was quite long, a writer for the Atlanta Constitution approvingly quoted the salient parts for readers:

Thou shalt not permit:

1. (1) jerky or languorous jazz music

2. (2) partners to hold each other tightly

3. (3) partners to make love in public by touching cheeks

4. (4) neck holds

5. (5) shimmying or toddling

6. (6) any steps that are very long followed by holds, or very short and jerky

7. (7) dancing from the waist up

8. (8) suggestive movements of any kind

9. (9) “stage stuff”

10. (10) offenders on the dance floor—fire them

Savannah hired a former dancing master to be the “official jazz inspector,” and paid him fifty dollars per month to supervise all public dance halls, pavilions, theatres, and even streets. Any person caught violating the law would be subject to a $100 fine and up to thirty days in jail.Footnote ³⁸

These jazz laws, however, did not eradicate jazz dancing. They secured a few convictions here and there, they implied the symbolic power of the law, but they were too little, too late, and too unclear in their objective. They were attempts to capture a minority cultural mood within legislation. The efforts to specify what was illegal, for example, in the Savannah law, suggest the difficulty in pinpointing what exactly was to be regulated. How was one to measure how “tightly” dance partners held one another? Who was responsible for judging dance steps that were “too long”? Vagueness worked for exhorting, but it created trouble for policing.

Censorship, though, found better success.

The jazz problem was bad enough when confined to dance halls and nightclubs, but the radio and the record player multiplied the problem a millionfold. In 1921 alone, there were over a hundred million records manufactured in the United States, many of them jazz records. Radio shows were broadcast into millions of homes by the mid-1920s. “‘Listen in’ on the radio any night,” an editorialist wrote in Etude magazine in 1924. “Tap America anywhere in the air and nine times out of ten Jazz will burst forth.” The result of all this was that jazz music became ubiquitous. It was cheap to purchase and easy to find on the radio. One could dance to it in one’s bedroom – or college dorm room – as well as in more public places. Demand increased. As more people heard jazz on the radio, more people wanted to see it endure.Footnote ³⁹

In response, jazz critics broadened their ambitions to include censorship. At first, they lobbied professional organizations like the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Association of Music Merchants, and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). They called radio stations when they played indecent music, and they urged companies not to advertise on jazz stations. By mid-decade, censorship advocacy reached the U.S. Congress; the Radio Act of 1927 included a section that stated, “no person within the jurisdiction of the United States shall utter any obscene, indecent or profane language by means of radio communication.” This act, expanded and renewed by the Federal Communications Act of 1934, created license commissions that granted licenses only to stations that steered clear of “indecency.” This vagueness led radio stations to be very careful about their material from 1927 through the 1930s. Record companies, though, were still able to sell jazz and blues music with less fear of recrimination.Footnote ⁴⁰

The net result was that experimental jazz, which had been an innovation of the 1910s and early 1920s, was less likely to be heard on the radio after 1927 but could still be experienced live and on records. Whereas censorship was mostly successful at limiting certain kinds of lyrics on the radio, efforts to prevent jazz dancing were not. The dance craze overpowered the protestations of traditionalists. And although coercive efforts to stamp out jazz dancing failed, many regulations had the unintended consequence of making dance halls appear more respectable. Under the direction of state and city licensing commissions, dance halls monitored dancing behavior, closed at decent hours, set age restrictions, forbade Sunday dancing, and even regulated lighting. There was money to be made in the dancing business, so managers did their best to stay open. By 1933, the Baptist minister Robert Campbell felt alone in his fight against the “moral and religious ruin” of dancing. “The dance has become so prevalent,” he said, “that seemingly most churches, preachers, teachers, and parents have folded their hands and accepted defeat.”Footnote ⁴¹

He was right. In the 1930s, jazz became more firmly segregated, commercial, and mainstream. The decade also ushered in Fred Astaire, who danced beautifully on film for millions to see. Big band jazz and swing music, typified by the clean-cut Benny Goodman and his all-white band, put a more reputable face on the genre. Record companies figured out how to market blues and jazz “race” records directly to Black markets. Popular jazz had become whiter and lost its association with Black neighborhoods, nightclubs, and youth rebellion. By 1937, there were over 16,000 dance studios in the United States, many of which had waitlists of students wanting to learn the jitterbug and the Lindy-hop. By this time, several states had even mandated dance instruction in public schools. Jazz dancing intermixed and merged with mainstream dancing, and concern about it dwindled.

The archive of dance protest from the 1930s is nearly silent, and it remained so in the 1940s. One might be forgiven for thinking the dance panic had come and gone, ushered out of style by economic depression and war and well-behaved young white people. But one would be wrong. The gyrating hips, screaming mouths, and sweating faces of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley would animate the warnings of the next chapter to this story.Footnote ⁴² Moral indignation about jazz dancing gave way to moral indignation about rock and roll. Then followed hippies, abortion, feminists, gays, pedophiles, satanists, Harry Potter, groomers, critical race theorists, and trans people, among others. Though the objects of moral fixation change, the basic process of downfall voyeurism does not: traditionalist activists issue warnings about the downfall of America. They tell stories that illustrate the ways gender norms, traditional sexual values, the nuclear family, parental authority, and the American way of life are threatened by a new phenomenon. These stories carry the excitement of the illicit and an opportunity to peek into the forbidden; they are an entertainment as well as a reaction. They contain historically significant emotional and cultural language that is effective in generating concern and sustaining interest amidst rival claims for people’s attention. When the work turns to regulating behavior, though, interest fades.

Examining Americans’ response to jazz dancing in the first decades of the twentieth century helps us understand the origins of this cultural process. The controversy over jazz played a significant role in the making of the patterns of moral concern in America that have animated conservative politics down to the present day. It was during the jazz craze that the basic framework of downfall voyeurism first established its effectiveness in shaping the moral concerns of Americans. It established itself alongside and within the growing power of Christian fundamentalism, pressure-politics values lobbies, and a religious right wing that increasingly looked to politics to address moral issues. This process unfolded concomitantly with the emergence of mass culture and entertainment, which provided competition for attention but also methodologies for success. The end goal – a return to a pure America, Christian in norms and values – has not been attained, but traditionalist innovators continue to capture the imaginations and allegiances of many who hope for it.