Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure Among Working-Class Immigrants in the United States 9780814759929

Citation preview

Dance Hall Days

DANCE HALL DAYS Intimacy and Leisure among Working-Class Immigrants in the United States

Randy D. McBee

a New York University Press New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London © 2000 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McBee, Randy D. Dance hall days : intimacy and leisure among working-class immigrants in the United States / Randy D. McBee. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8147-5620-4 (acid-free paper) 1. Sex role—United States—History. 2. Man-woman relationships—United States—History. 3. Leisure—United States—History. 4. Working class—United States—History. 5. Immigrants—United States—History. I. Title. HQ1075.5.U6 M38 2000 305.3'0973—dc21 00-010742 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Julie and Dylan It all finally makes sense

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

1

ONE

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”: Marriages upon Short Acquaintance, and Immigrant, Working-Class Life 13 TWO

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands: The Rise of Commercial Leisure and the Making of a Peer Culture 51 THREE

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”: Working-Class Women’s Heterosocial Leisure and Homosocial Fun 82 FOUR

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”: Working-Class Male Culture and the Struggle over Gender, Identity, and Dance 115 FIVE

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”: Working-Class Male Culture, Social Clubs, and Heterosocial Leisure 157 SIX

“When It Comes to My Marrying, Boy, There Will Be a Lot of Strings Pulled by My Parents”: Familial Conflict, Commercial Leisure, and Weddings 198 | vii |

Contents

Conclusion Notes

239

Bibliography Index

234

279

289

About the Author

293

All illustrations appear as a group following p. 102.

| viii |

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have contributed to this project. Maurice Manring, Mary Neth, Tammy Proctor, Tom Sabatini, Christina Simmons, and Cynthia Willett read and commented on all or part of the manuscript. The staff of the Chicago Historical Society; David Klaasen, of the Social Welfare History Archives; Heather Muir, of the Immigration History Research Center; and Alan Singer spent an enormous amount of time looking through hundreds of potential photographs. My editor at New York University Press, Niko Pfund, not only enthusiastically supported this project from the start but was a joy to work with. Thanks as well to the anonymous readers who reviewed and critiqued the manuscript for NYU Press. I also owe a special thanks to Robert Bonadonna, David Roediger, and Susan Porter Benson. Robert Bonadonna graciously shared his life with me and carefully read and commented on the entire manuscript. Dave Roediger always made it easy to understand why history matters, and he continues to influence every aspect of my research and teaching. Sue Benson not only painstakingly edited various drafts of the dissertation and manuscript, but her imagination, insight, and humor have significantly improved this project in countless ways and provided a standard that I’ve tried to emulate. Finally, my wife, Julie Willett, and my son, Dylan McBee, made it all worthwhile.

| ix |

INTRODUCTION

In 1901, Veronica Loncki and her parents immigrated to the United States, landing first in New York and then moving on to Chicago’s north side, where she lived for the next seven decades. Loncki was fourteen when she left eastern Europe for America, and eventually married John Orkee in 1910, when she was twenty-three. Before her marriage, Loncki spent much of her leisure time at dances, regularly attended picnics, and, with a few of her girl friends, “maybe three or four,” went to the Crown Theater on Milwaukee to see a show. As she reached her late teens, the neighborhood boys increasingly became interested in her, and she reveled in the attention. If “you want to live with somebody,” she declared, “you ain’t gonna go [with] the first one you see.” Yet, while many of the neighborhood boys were eager to please and wed, she “just didn’t care for nobody.” “I wasn’t so anxious to be tied up with somebody I don’t know,” she explained. “I just like to be free.” Loncki insisted that she was “nice” to these men. But she would only “go out once or so” and only “be [a] friend” because she did not want to “make him feel serious or something.”1 Loncki was certainly candid about her relationships with men, and she had apparently spent a considerable amount of time thinking about “boys” and how to handle them. She was careful about not making her dates “feel serious or something,” suggesting that the men she dated were unaccustomed to the idea that female companionship did not imply commitment. And she was concerned about ending up “tied up with somebody I don’t know,” as if she knew several women who had gotten married after a brief acquaintance with their future spouses, even though her own courtship lasted only about two months. Loncki explained that there was no single reason why she married on such short notice. She first met her husband, John Orkee, at Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, a clothing manufacturing plant where they both worked, and before long he started showing up unexpectedly at her home for visits. Her parents | 1 |

Introduction

quickly grew fond of Orkee and began pressuring her to marry him. “What you looking for?” Loncki remembered her mother saying. “You can’t get nothing nicer than that.” Her parents were not the only ones insisting on the marriage, however. Loncki recalled that “he [Orkee] just hit the spot [and] he just pushed. He says let’s get married. . . . Got time now.” Hart, Schaffner, and Marx was out on strike when he began “pushing.”2 The strike undoubtedly jeopardized the wherewithal on which they were depending to start their married life. But wage work absorbed so much of their time that they could find time to marry only once they were unemployed. For Loncki, then, her courtship was not just about pleasing a potential spouse. It was about making certain sacrifices and negotiating expectations that reflected the broader social and cultural world in which she lived. In this case, that world was both working class and immigrant. Thus, although Loncki liked to “be free” and had become quite savvy at dissuading any unwanted attention, the autonomy for which she was looking was difficult to find. In other words, although she spent much of her free time with her friends at picnics or at one of the commercial amusements that were becoming increasingly popular by the early twentieth century, her parents were quick to pressure her about getting married, a pressure young women typically faced and one that first-generation parents were particularly notorious for applying, and the workplace posed certain problems. Wage work consumed so much of her time that she felt compelled to marry upon short acquaintance, despite her determination to avoid being “tied up with someone I don’t know.” This book explores the day-to-day lives of men and women like Veronica Loncki and John Orkee, immigrants struggling to negotiate the demands of wage work, to live up to the expectations of family and community, and to establish their own norms of behavior governing intimacy and leisure. In particular, it covers the period from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries (the 1890s through the 1930s), when immigration from southern and eastern Europe reached its peak and when commercial leisure became widely popular. As Loncki’s experience makes clear, commercial leisure was already beginning to affect the manner in which men and women organized their leisure. But like Loncki, immigrants generally found family obligation and the struggle to make ends meet too much to contend with. The collective strate| 2 |

Introduction

gies they adopted to help them cope with and shape their urban-industrial setting guaranteed the close association of their families and their communities, especially their parents, who insisted on supervising their social lives. In some cases, parents, much like Loncki’s, simply tried to influence their daughter’s decision about a particular suitor. In other cases, they demanded a more intrusive role and closely supervised the couple or arranged the marriage. The continued practice of arranging marriages and chaperoning young couples reflects the success these parents had in transplanting certain European traditions. But these traditions, along with their collective survival strategies, also challenged the manner in which young men and women met and chose potential spouses. Over the next few decades, young couples would continue to confront similar problems: Their parents would remain a persistent source of tension, and the workplace would continue to compromise their personal lives. But commercial amusements would become a more prominent part of their leisure routines and relationships. In fact, by the 1910s and 1920s, commercial leisure had become a seemingly permanent fixture on the urban landscape, not only because of the opportunities it provided young men and women to escape their parents’ watchful eyes but because commercial leisure also allowed for the development of a peer culture. Dance halls, in particular, attracted primarily men and women who were in their teens and early twenties. Apart from their parents, couples could dabble in romance and experiment with new types of heterosocial relationships, relationships that contrasted sharply with the idea that parents should arrange marriages or supervise courtships.3 The men and women who spent their free time in dance halls did, of course, confront some obstacles along the way. At some dances, hall owners informally supervised the crowd or hired their own floor men. By the Progressive Era, middle-class reformers, ministers, and various moral-reform agencies began to focus more critically on working-class leisure and began to establish ordinances to divorce dance from drink and to protect the innocence of young womanhood.4 At the same time, the men and women who patronized dance halls were likely to find that their parents opposed the intermingling commercial leisure encouraged. After all, when they spent their evenings out dancing, they were violating not only their parents’ rules and restrictions but the traditions that | 3 |

Introduction

gave meaning to the ways in which their parents organized and understood their day-to-day lives and futures. Yet, while the rise of commercial leisure led both to unprecedented moments of autonomy for young couples and to conflict with parents and middle-class reformers, the dance hall culture that took shape during the early decades of the twentieth century was never defined simply in opposition to middle-class reform efforts or to vigilant parents, nor did the dance hall necessarily offer young couples the refuge for which they were looking. When working-class men and women left their families and communities for one of the academies, palaces, or local halls that featured dancing, they confronted a number of other obstacles and boundaries. Indeed, the dance hall seemed only to accentuate the class and ethnic identifications generally associated with their places of work and communities. They were just as likely to bump into the slumming gentleman who was out to make workingclass dates and dances than a middle-class reformer, and working-class men and women created their own barriers. Local halls regularly featured dances organized around neighborhood, occupational, or ethnic affiliations, and cliques or social clubs, which were often based on ethnicity, frequently dominated the dance hall, influencing the ways in which groups of men and women laid claim to public space while establishing limits on the intermingling of the sexes. Most important of all, historians have paid little attention to the ways in which men and women interacted both on and off the dance floor and to the nature and organization of intimate relations, even though contemporaries admitted that heterosocial relations were one of the most significant factors shaping the dance hall experience.5 When Belle Lindner Israels conducted a survey of working-class women’s leisure for the Committee of Amusements and Vacation Resources of Working Girls in New York in 1909, she claimed that almost all dance halls were “thoroughly disreputable” for two main reasons. First, she associated dance halls with “drink,” which she described as the “chief enemy” of the working girl. Alcohol was dangerous because it helped “becloud the vision” and made the “distinctions between right and wrong a little more puzzling.” Second, and inextricably linked to the first, were the social relations between the sexes, or what Israels called the “pursuit and capture.” According to Israels, “no matter how wary or how wise a girl may | 4 |

Introduction

be—she . . . is not always able to keep up the good fight,” because a night at the dance hall was nothing less than “a matter of pursuit and capture. The man is ever on the hunt, and the girl is ever needing to flee.”6 On the one hand, Israels’s description of the dance hall and gender relations emphasizes women’s vulnerability. Eager for fun once they finished the day’s work and driven by what Israels described as their “natural desire for amusement,” working women eagerly made their way to the neighborhood halls, pavilions, or palaces, where they confronted certain temptations and danger. The sensual dancing in which they indulged, along with the alcohol that might upset the moral sensibilities of these young women and the men who were “ever on the hunt,” could lead innocently enough to some dance hall fun and maybe even romance. But according to Israels, that same combination was just as likely to leave young women vulnerable or at the mercy of the men with whom they had only recently become acquainted. In short, when women went dancing, they left their families and communities, the protections upon which they had always depended to negotiate intimacy and leisure. On the other hand, the “pursuit and capture” Israels described suggests that there was no easily defined dance hall etiquette. Once inside the dance hall and apart from their parents and communities, young men and women could perhaps find the autonomy for which they were looking. But they also found that their parents were not the only potential problems they faced. In the process of trying to find dance partners, escorts home, and the money needed to pay for commercial leisure, men and women often disagreed about how to best use their leisure time and how to organize their intimate relations. Thus, while the struggle against the intrusion and interference of middle-class reformers or an unfamiliar and usually hostile American culture pushed men and women together and accentuated their ethnic, neighborhood, or class identifications, the struggle over what constituted acceptable masculinity and femininity could just as easily pull them apart. Gender relations were so contentious, in part, because men were so unwilling to give up the same-sex relationships with which they had come of age. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, working-class men celebrated the cultural traditions of camaraderie, fraternity, and reciprocity—the most well-known being the practice of treating one another to rounds of drink.7 On their street corners | 5 |

Introduction

and in their saloons and poolrooms, they also participated in a culture in which they fashioned their status and identity primarily around the social relationships they developed with other men and usually in opposition to the “womanly influences” associated with the home. Indeed, part of the thrill of being male was defying the community norms parents and other adults established, which might include hanging out in smoke-filled poolrooms, loitering about the neighborhood streets and sidewalks, or harassing passersby. As these men reached their late teens and early twenties and ventured beyond their poolrooms, saloons, and street corners, they usually found it difficult to separate themselves, both emotionally and physically, from the male culture with which they had come of age. Commercial leisure also offered women unprecedented opportunities to create their own culture of intimacy and leisure. In many ways, the commercial amusements men patronized were different from the domesticity from which they were so desperately trying to escape, and the dance craze that swept across the United States at the turn of the century offered men a unique opportunity to show off their athleticism and skill—not to mention the fact that nearly every woman wanted a man who could “shake a wicked leg.” But despite the similarities between allmale hangouts and heterosocial spaces, commercial leisure remained ambiguous, especially with regard to gender. The rise of dance halls and other commercial entertainment not only offered women the chance to “put on style” and thus experiment with new attitudes and identities but also allowed them to stake a more definite claim to public space, challenge the masculinity many men embraced, and construct a notion of womanhood that contrasted sharply with the version to which most men had grown accustomed.8 In particular, by carefully choosing their dates and refusing others, these women defied the idea that a simple acquaintance would lead inexorably to commitment and proposed instead a new model for choosing a potential spouse that favored companionship and emotional compatibility over simple adherence by men to the genderrole expectations prescribed for them. Some men, of course, welcomed the change of pace and the opportunities dance halls offered them to experiment with new gender roles. In their homes, at work, and on the streets of their neighborhoods, men met women who defied the gender conventions that governed male culture and challenged men’s comfort with the social practices that largely | 6 |

Introduction

defined their masculinity. But working-class men were also ambivalent about the idea of abandoning the saloons, street corners, and poolrooms, and they tried to balance their attachment to male culture with their attraction to mixed-sex leisure and relationships. In some cases, they tried to live dual lives—to separate themselves from their male companions when around their female friends but to reimmerse themselves in all-male hangouts as often as possible. By living a double life, they could live the best of both worlds without making the sacrifices made by men who chose one lifestyle over the other. When living a double life seemed impossible, some men simply tried to incorporate their dates into already existing male rituals or openly contested the social organization of heterosociality and embraced not only the exaggerated displays of manliness with which they were most familiar but also the companionship and the camaraderie they found with other men. Commercial leisure may have encouraged the development of a heterosocial, peer culture where men and women could couple up in dark corners or deserted hallways, but making dates was not always the primary goal of most men and women, nor was a heterosocial identity their only one. For many men and women, commercial leisure was as much an extension of the homosocial cultures from which they came as a means to make new and heterosocial acquaintances. This understanding affected the social organization of commercial leisure and men’s struggles with and against one another to define the meaning of leisure, sexuality, intimacy, and even masculinity. At the same time, the tension surrounding dance halls not only profoundly affected the peer culture that was taking shape during the early twentieth century; it also ensured that these new urban amusements would never monopolize dating and courtship. Some men simply could not afford to hang out in dance halls, amusements parks, or movie houses; they patronized instead parks and picnic groves or established their own hangouts, known as social clubs, in the basements of tenement flats. Other men avoided commercial leisure because they were uncomfortable with the version of womanhood many women embraced. The parks, picnic groves, and social clubs preferred by some men undercut commercial leisure’s impact in two distinct ways. First, the social club made it easier for men to negotiate more successfully the conflict between homosocial and heterosocial space. In their own | 7 |

Introduction

basement hangouts, working men not only provided the amenities that made their hangouts attractive and paid the dues required to put on dances and other club get-togethers but also established their own norms of behavior, club rules that allowed them to regulate the behavior of the women who attended their club socials and to weed out the women who violated them. Second, by making use of parks and picnics groves, which had long been important community gathering places, and by setting up their own social clubs, men ensured that parents would maintain a conspicuous role in dating and courtship. While some men’s social clubs were “side street hideouts” intentionally situated along the back sides of buildings and along alleyways to avoid parents and other community members, most clubs were located on busy avenues or in buildings where parents or other adults lived upstairs. Living around the next corner or in the same building, parents automatically assumed a more conspicuous role than they could take on at dance halls and at other commercial amusements. In fact, men often invited parents to their social clubs to serve as chaperones on social nights. The participation of parents meant that club members had to carefully regulate their own behavior, sexual and otherwise, and hence to sacrifice the autonomy for which they might have been looking. But it also made it more difficult for women to embrace a version of womanhood that many men found problematic and one that was at odds with what their parents expected. After all, some women might have been able to let loose at dance halls and to experiment with their behavior and sexuality, but they had significantly fewer opportunities around their own homes and neighborhoods, where parents were sure to intervene. The prominent role parents continued to play was not simply a function of the location of dating and courtship, however. Many couples also recognized that they had a stake in preserving the traditional practices and rituals with which they had been raised. Often eager to go out but ambivalent about the culture of men they inevitably confronted, women continued to rely upon the networks of kin and community to regulate men’s often boisterous and unruly behavior. And the economy surrounding commercial leisure, not to mention the money needed to start a family, guaranteed that parents would remain prominent in their daughters’ lives. While some couples might have been able to afford the | 8 |

Introduction

dates and nights of dancing, they usually remained dependent upon their parents to establish new households. Parents often helped pay for the wedding ceremony and the reception and usually provided the newlyweds with their first home, for at least a short time if not several years. The role parents continued to play diminished commercial leisure’s impact and compelled most couples to yield at least some autonomy over their personal lives, ensuring that some of the traditional and ethnic customs with which their parents were familiar would endure and that their children would remain a part of their immigrant past. Chapter 1 of this study begins by examining the expectations working-class immigrants brought with them and how their trans-Atlantic voyage affected courtship. When men and women first immigrated to the United States, many of them married “upon short acquaintance.” The dislocation immigration produced and the unbalanced sex ratios that were common in immigrant communities in part account for the marriage patterns that were characteristic throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century. But these issues alone do not fully explain the nature of male-female relationships. The poor wages, miserable living conditions, and cramped tenement flats immigrants confronted compelled the newcomers to adopt a number of collective strategies. While these strategies helped relieve many of the problems immigrants encountered, they also exacerbated the loneliness and frustration many immigrants experienced and contributed to the eagerness with which they rushed into wedlock. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the rise of dance halls and their impact on the social organization of courtship. Chapter 2 looks at the development of commercial dance halls throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and offers an ethnographic look at the pavilions, palaces, and neighborhood halls that made up working-class leisure. In particular, this chapter explores the ways in which men and women shaped the dance hall. While entrepreneurs went to great lengths to produce a conspicuous world of consumption, the men and women who patronized the dance hall did not simply embrace it. Instead, they managed a peer culture that bound together the different pavilions, palaces, and neighborhood halls and that provided the stability for which they were looking as they negotiated issues of intimacy and leisure. Chapter 3 looks more closely at the popularity of dance among | 9 |

Introduction

women. For many women the dance hall was not just about experimenting with alcohol and cigarettes or establishing relationships without their parents’ annoying interference; women could also use their newfound autonomy to challenge men over the use of public space. While dance halls offered men and women unprecedented opportunities to establish their own peer culture, all men found themselves occasionally being passed over for dances; their partners usually refused escorts home, and the women were generally better dancers than the men leading them. The rejections most men faced, as well as the prospect of picking a partner who was better at the task at hand, not only made men think twice about whom they asked to dance but also allowed women to define dance hall manners, defy the way in which their parents were trying to organize their courtships, and shape these environments in ways that both contemporary observers and historians have failed to fully appreciate. Chapters 4 and 5 look at how men responded to commercial amusements and the challenges they faced from the women with whom they spent their leisure time. Although dance halls attracted incredible numbers of men and women and became a part of their leisure routines, many men and women attended them only occasionally. Some simply could not afford more than a weekly outing or found that the workplace consumed too much of their time and energy. At the same time, consumption patterns reflected men’s and women’s relations on and off the dance floor. For some men, the constant challenges from the women with whom they were eager to dance and the humiliation of being passed over for dances were simply too much, and they chose to stay seated along the edge of the dance floor when they decided to attend or to contest the manner in which women tried to define male-female relationships. Chapter 4 examines the way men danced and their dress, how they acted on and off the dance floor, and how their collective efforts shaped the dance hall and reinforced the homosocial ties and relationships with which they had come of age. Chapter 5 examines the other way in which men contested women’s use of commercial leisure: simply abandoning the dance hall and setting up their own hangouts in the basements of tenement flats. These social clubs, also known as cellar, basement, athletic, or pleasure clubs, are crucial to understanding working-class masculinity throughout the | 10 |

Introduction

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and men’s efforts to organize their relationships with women. Most clubs included a dance floor and had weekly social nights to which the neighborhood “girls” were invited. Chapter 5 explores the social organization and origins of working-class social clubs and how these clubs allowed men to negotiate commercial leisure as well as the boundaries separating homosocial and heterosocial spaces. Chapter 6 looks at the role parents continued to play, despite the rise of commercial leisure. Almost all women complained about being supervised or fighting with their parents over cosmetics, curfews, and boys. Some women responded by openly challenging their parents and the rules and restrictions they tried to enforce—but not all. Most women recognized that they were still too dependent upon their parents to ignore them and often made great sacrifices to please their parents, sacrifices they could always use as bargaining chips to negotiate more autonomy over their personal lives. In other words, they carefully balanced their parents’ traditions with their desire to go out unsupervised. In the process, commercial leisure assumed more importance in their dating relationships, but so did many of the courting and ethnic rituals with which their parents were most familiar. The rise of commercial leisure may have profoundly shaped and changed heterosocial relationships. But focusing only on the change in the location of dating and courtship or the impact of middle-class reform efforts overlooks the ways in which issues of intimacy and power were played out in working-class communities.9 In short, the tension surrounding dance halls was not just about divorcing dance from drink and protecting the innocence of young womanhood. It was about a clash of cultures, the ongoing struggle between generations, and the formation of new identities and gender roles. In other words, the residents of America’s cities may have been beginning to share a common commercial culture, but ethnicity, income, gender, and social class still shaped the common culture they shared, ensuring that commercial leisure would never quite replace the courting traditions and practices with which their parents were familiar and that dating and courtship would remain a complicated social process of struggle and compromise. One final note on the sources is in order. This study makes use of the investigative reports left by moral reform societies like the Committee of | 11 |

Introduction

Fourteen in New York and the Juvenile Protective Association in Chicago. But in order to recreate the wide ranging and day-to-day experiences of the men and women who spent their leisure time in dance halls, I rely more extensively on the sociological reports and observations left by qualitative sociologists like Ernest Burgess and his students and, most important of all, on oral histories. These types of firsthand accounts not only help clarify the motives surrounding these investigations and their biases but also help corroborate many of the conclusions drawn by the investigators and provide a richer, more deeply textured look at life and love among working-class and immigrant men and women. They therefore provide crucial insight into the ways in which young couples organized intimate relations and family life, issues moral-reform investigations typically ignored.

| 12 |

ONE

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then” Marriages upon Short Acquaintance, and Immigrant, Working-Class Life

In 1904, a young Polish woman immigrated to the United States, eventually settled in New Britain, Connecticut, and immediately went to work at a lock factory in town. “First I had to put all the parts into the lock, [and] every pin into place,” she recalled, “and then I had to slip it under a machine, press a foot lever, and the lock would be done.” While assembling locks was simple, her days at work rarely went as smoothly as the monotonous process of putting locks together. Since she was on piecework and the only Pole at this factory, she ate her dinner alone at her work bench and did “some extra work.” But her extra efforts did not always pay off because “there were some german [sic] girls working there beside me . . . and when I happened to turn away for a minute they ran over and knocked apart all the work I had done, making a big mess out of the locks.” “This happened a lot of times,” she explained. And “there was nothing I could do. They didn’t like me; they were jealous; they never liked us all their life.”1 To try to forget the problems and bitterness she encountered at the workplace, she looked toward her friends and the busy social life in which she participated. As soon as she got home from work, she and the other young Poles in her neighborhood “ate supper hurriedly, did the dishes even faster,” and then all of them would “gather in one house.” It was “here,” she explained, that “we would talk, gossip, | 13 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

laugh, tell jokes, often quoting American phrases like ‘Go home,’ ‘upstairs,’ ‘where you work etc.’ Always,” she recalled, “there was laughter and merriment.” She and the other Poles also went to church and attended weddings, and every Saturday they “would go to town into Main street” to attend a moving picture show. But “when we went there,” she recalled, there “was hardly anybody there. I thought it was a good waste of a nickel,” which helps explain why gathering in one house with other young Poles in her neighborhood “was the only thing that most of the young people did.”2 For both men and women, then, congregating in the homes of other single Poles to socialize and discuss the trials and tribulations of being a “greenhorn” provided the companionship and the camaraderie they desired to forget unruly coworkers and to survive the other day-to-day problems associated with immigration, suggesting that neither rigid boundaries nor a separate consciousness separated work from leisure; experiences in the workplace profoundly shaped the social organization and meaning of leisure and vice versa. But while their nights were filled with “laughter and merriment” and perhaps helped them cope with the drudgery of wage work and hostile coworkers, hanging out, going to town, and attending weddings did not relieve the loneliness and frustration with which they had to contend. Many immigrants, this same Polish woman claimed, also “married young” and “upon short acquaintance even.” “When you figure that they were in a new country, somewhat lonely, eager to have their own homes, you can’t blame them or think that it was funny.”3 As this woman makes clear, the practice of rushing eagerly into wedlock was common among newly arrived immigrants and not only because of the frustration and anxiety associated with their trans-Atlantic voyage. Newcomers also had to contend with the vagaries of wage work and with unfriendly coworkers, and there was little to do besides congregating in the homes of other young and single Poles. There was a nickel theater in town, but it was “a good waste of a nickel,” suggesting that commercial leisure had not yet gained the popularity that it would later attain and that it had little impact on these immigrants’ leisure routines or relationships. The problems associated with immigration and resettlement, in short, compelled many newcomers to rush eagerly into marriage and “upon short acquaintance,” rather than follow the marriage customs | 14 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

with which they were most familiar in Europe, customs that demanded that parents play a conspicuous role and that courtships be more substantial than those in which these immigrants participated in America.4 This chapter explores immigrant life at the turn of the century and the courtships this young Polish woman described. The crowded living conditions, poor wages, and bitter work experiences immigrants encountered in the United States compelled them to adopt a number of coping strategies, such as creating mutual aid and fraternal societies.5 While their collective efforts made it easier for them to shape their urban-industrial setting and to cope with the separation and loneliness that accompanied their trans-Atlantic migration, these strategies also affected the newcomers’ leisure routines and relationships.6 In particular, the conspicuous presence and interference of parents, community members, and other passersby not only potentially exacerbated the day-to-day anxiety and frustration they faced but also helps explain the marriages “upon short acquaintance” that were common in immigrant communities. Between 1880 and 1919, twenty-three million European men and women immigrated to the United States. Most of these new immigrants were from southern and eastern Europe, and they were primarily male. Over the twelve-year period between 1899 and 1910, men accounted for about 75 percent of southern and eastern European newcomers, and 83 percent of these men were between the ages of fourteen and forty-four, when they were more likely to be bachelors. In fact, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, 40 percent of all men over fifteen years of age were unmarried. Among the foreign-born population as a whole, there were seventy-six women for every one hundred men in 1910, when immigration reached its peak, a drop from eighty-four women per one hundred men in 1900.7 Most of these immigrants traveled in groups, sharing resources, information, and companionship along the way, and they usually arrived at a specific destination, planned out well in advance. These networks, or “migration chains,” often began with a single individual settling in a new city, finding work, and then sending letters to friends and relatives in Europe or elsewhere in America, encouraging them to join the trans-Atlantic migration. Of the immigrants who arrived after 1900 and who were interviewed by the Connecticut Works Progress Administration, 91 | 15 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

percent had relied on the information and the resources of kin and village to manage migration and resettlement.8 Once immigrants settled in the United States, kin and community remained conspicuous. Mary Osochowski immigrated to New Haven at the turn of the century because her aunt lived there. “She lived here, I suppose, because many of our people from the village were here.” Another recent arrival known as Mr. Lubenitz initially immigrated to New York but quickly left for New Haven because some girls in New York, “and one girl’s brother in particular,” were after him. His sweetheart soon followed him to New York, and much to her surprise, found out that he “got some girls in trouble.” He wrote to her to join him in New Haven, and at first she reluctantly agreed to stay: “I thought New Haven was the worst dump I ever saw. But we got married so I stayed here.”9 The number of immigrants who followed kin and community was never an occasional few, however. Judith Smith has found that many of the immigrants who came to Providence, Rhode Island, in the early twentieth century already had relatives living there. Sixty-nine percent of the Italian families in the neighborhood Smith studied and 42 percent of the Jewish families had at least one parent or sibling in Providence. Smith has also shown that brothers and sisters were likely to live with each other at some point and then to live in “close residential proximity”; if an immigrant owned property, he or she was also likely to house relatives. In Providence in 1915, 74 percent of Italian families and 46 percent of Jewish families who owned property had kin listed at the same address. This arrangement allowed families to sustain the relationships upon which they had initially depended to make ends meet.10 Most of these new immigrants settled in urban areas. By the end of the nineteenth century, nonagricultural occupations employed nearly two-thirds of the workforce, and nine-tenths of all manufacturing was located in America’s cities. As the location of America’s manufacturing base shifted to its cities, so did the nation’s people. By 1890, one of every three people lived in urban areas, and eleven cities had at least 250,000 inhabitants. The numbers of immigrants living in cities were even more staggering. Of the Russian Jews who immigrated between 1880 and 1919, five of every six lived in urban communities, as did more than 75 percent of their Italian counterparts.11 The Dillingham Commission of 1907–1911 also found that, by 1920, 78.6 percent of U.S. immigrants | 16 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

who had been born in eastern and southern Europe lived in urban areas. The incredible numbers of immigrants attracted to cities, in part, reflected the jobs available in the cities’ sweatshops, factories, mills, and slaughterhouses but also the fact that most immigrants were too poor to wander far beyond the city’s boundaries.12 City life did, of course, have its problems. The endless smoke, soot, and dust combined with the clogged sewers and garbage-strewn streets and sidewalks tried the patience of men and women and made their living conditions unbearable. Above all, the influx of such incredible numbers of immigrants strained the availability of existing housing and left the city’s inhabitants scrambling to find decent homes. Immigrants packed into multistory tenements, converted single-family row houses, double deckers, triple deckers, wooden shacks, shanties, basements of tenement flats, or some other “dark, dreary, ‘cave-like’ dwelling” where they were likely to be crowded with several families in a dwelling built for one or several persons in a single room.13 According to Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, of the National Federation of Settlements, it occurred that several persons might share “the same sleeping-room, and, very commonly, that three or more persons [might] occupy the same bed.” Under these sleeping arrangements, they protested, “hardly a married couple in any crowded neighborhood have a room to themselves, and children sleep with their parents up to the approach of youth,” which they claimed encouraged young boys and girls to “participate in gross immoralities.”14 Besides the overcrowded conditions, these living arrangements also denied their inhabitants the basic amenities that made life bearable. Most rooms, for example, had no windows whatsoever; only four of the fourteen rooms of a typical New York tenement—two in front and two in back—had windows, exacerbating the often unbearable heat and facilitating the spread of tuberculosis and other diseases.15 In many tenements, the water closet was also in the hall or out back, where it was used by everyone connected to the building and then some. A turn-of-the-century study of Chicago found that only 43 percent of families had a toilet in their own flat; 30 percent used the water closet in the yard; 10 percent had a toilet in the basement; and the remaining 17 percent shared the hall toilet with the other tenants on the same floor.16 | 17 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

The wages these men and women earned only made their uncomfortable living situations worse. Throughout the early twentieth century, the earnings of an immigrant household head were rarely enough to cover all the expenses of raising a family. Two studies of the budgets of families in New York City between 1903 and 1909 found that a typical working-class family of four to six members earned an average of eight hundred dollars a year, or fifteen dollars a week.17 For packinghouse workers in Chicago, the common laborer rate earned by at least twothirds of the men who worked in the yards fluctuated between fifteen and twenty cents an hour from the turn of the century to 1917; even this amount was usually undercut by the irregularity of employment resulting from seasonal fluctuations and from the potential for prolonged illness or injury, problems common among workers in meat packing.18 In both the New York and the Chicago studies, the annual earnings of the household head were about half of what families needed to survive. The New York study showed that in fewer than half of the families studied, the father was the sole means of support; in Chicago the earnings of the household head constituted 54.4 percent of the family’s income. For example, a study done in 1911 by investigators for the University of Chicago Settlement House found that the average rate for husband laborers was $9.67, while the weekly expenditures needed to support a family of five was $15.40.19 To make up for the low wages and the poor conditions in which they lived, immigrants relied upon the extensive networks of kin and community they had developed before coming to the United States. For some men and women, the practice of “shared occupancy” provided much of the help they needed to make ends meet. Judith Smith discovered one Italian daughter whose family lived in a tenement owned by her mother’s parents, which meant that they paid a reduced rent.20 This same woman recalled that as a young child she spent more time with her grandparents than with her mother and father because both parents worked in the family bakery. Smith also found three sisters who lived in a tenement house with their husbands and whose day-to-day routine revolved around their “shared occupancy.” The three women shared not only housework but also “motherly duties.” According to one of their daughters, “there was so much closeness among the growing family that whenever a small baby began to cry, | 18 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

whatever mother happened to be around would pick up the child and breastfeed it, whether it was hers or not.”21 The networks these women established and the attendant benefits they offered were never limited to the practice of shared occupancy, however. Rena Morandin, for example, explained that in her Chicago neighborhood “if somebody was sick, we us[ed] to go and see them all the time.” Caring for the elderly and the sick, she explained, was an important tradition by which mothers passed on to their daughters the accumulated knowledge of previous generations and one upon which all women would eventually depend. “My mother too,” Morandin recalled, “I used to go and help her.”22 At Martha Leszczyk’s home in Chicago, Leszczyk distinctly remembered having “lots of company.” “They used to come from [the] old country, and they always stopped at our house, because we always had a big flat, and my mother . . . just liked to help everybody.” Whenever they had company, her father went to the local saloon and brought back a pail of beer, and her mother prepared a special dinner for the guests. Sauerkraut and sausage were staples at such gatherings and sometimes roast, chicken, and “once in a while a turkey.”23 In Ben Czekaj’s Chicago neighborhood, the entire community shared childcare duties without charge. Czekaj explained that in his neighborhood “there was [sic] no babysitters that . . . would be getting paid. If the parents were going out they would take their children over to their neighbor. Maybe the neighbor was next door or maybe a block or two away.” Either way, he claimed, parents could “leave them there for a while while they would go ahead and take care of different things.”24 Children also pitched in to make up for the poor wages most household heads earned. As David Nasaw has shown, working-class children “were expert and experienced junkers, salvagers, rag pickers, and scavengers” who “scoured the back lots, dumps, railroad tracks, construction sites, and urban wastelands.” The items they recovered, including paper, rags, and scraps of iron and copper, earned them salvage fees that ranged from as low as a penny for ten pounds of paper to ten cents a pound for copper.25 As children reached their teens, they were likely to end up in the surrounding factories. In Chicago’s Packingtown before World War I, most women who worked in the yards were the young, single daughters of butcher workmen. Most boys under sixteen worked as messenger or errand boys or became machine tenders. Girls, according to James | 19 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

Barrett, “were even more apt to become machine tenders or wrappers, working at piece rates in soap, candy, and cracker factories.” Other girls entered the needle trades, and a few took the streetcar downtown to work in offices or department stores.26 Boarding was another popular strategy upon which immigrants relied to make ends meet. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the numbers of men and women who boarded varied from neighborhood to neighborhood, but they were, indeed, significant. According to John Modell and Tamara Hareven, for at least a half a century and probably more, “the proportion of urban households which at any particular point in time had boarders or lodgers was between 15 and 20 per cent.” Cities as diverse as Chicago, Wilkes-Barre, Passaic, and Rochester had figures at roughly this level in 1920.27 In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the 1900 census recorded that more than half of all east central European households kept boarders.28 A survey conducted in 1901 by the United States Commissioner of Labor found that of the 25,400 families included, 24 percent took in boarders, while a University of Chicago housing study, done in 1909, found that a third of Packingtown’s population was boarders.29 In some cases, families took in boarders because it allowed mothers to contribute to the family economy and still complete the domestic tasks expected of them. Virginia Yans McLaughlin found that 12 percent of Italian wives who lived in Buffalo, New York, contributed to the family income by caring for roomers and boarders. The extra money generated through boarding provided the needed income to pay for family living expenses or to make a down payment on a home. A significant number of the boarders in Buffalo, she argues, had lived in the United States for more than eight years, and the money they made from boarders was not always used as “emergency funds.”30 For other women, boarding represented the margin between economic survival and catastrophe.31 Elizabeth Ewen argues that the death of a husband or a prolonged illness “served as a catalyst to taking in boarders.” Ewen draws on the case of Maria Ganz’s mother, who lost a husband to the workingman’s disease—tuberculosis. Maria’s mother immediately found her neighbors eager to help out, but she knew their efforts were only temporary and limited, so she was forced to confront | 20 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

the “possibility of eviction or worse starvation.” But like “a vision,” a potential boarder appeared who agreed to pay one-third of the rent, enough money to stave off her debtors.32 Boarding was also popular because it allowed single and potentially lonely men to live with a family. Sophinista Breckenridge, who lived on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the century, argued that “almost without exception” immigrant men “preferred living with a family group if possible.” Single men, she explained, favored boarding because it meant their having to do fewer domestic chores and women’s work.33 The woman who ran the boarding house generally cleaned, washed, and cooked for the bachelors and the married men they housed, and even women boarders were expected to pitch in. Sam Chinicci’s mother, who lived on the Hill in St. Louis during the early twentieth century, not only looked after six children but cared for “maybe ten bordanti [boarders].” “My poor mother,” Chinicci recalled, “I can still remember her at five in the morning making the fire and boiling the clothes . . . the men would live there until they had a place of their own or got married.”34 At the turn of the century, then, immigrant life was nothing less than demanding. The poor wages, miserable living conditions, and cramped tenement flats strained the patience and meager resources of the newcomers. The practice of sharing childcare duties, tenement flats, and the other physical and emotional resources upon which they relied to complete their trans-Atlantic passage and resettlement allowed immigrants to negotiate more readily the circumstances in which they found themselves. In fact, despite the enormous numbers of men and women immigrating to the United States, the housing shortages and the cramped conditions seemed only to reinforce immigrants’ networks of interdependency, as well as their common bond that was strengthened daily in the course of making ends meet. The manner in which immigrants responded to the problems they faced did not, of course, solve all their problems; the makeshift solutions could just as easily exacerbate the overcrowding and other problems that were common in most homes. Dependent upon their communities’ help and resources, men and women had to contend with not only their immediate families but also with relatives, neighbors, and passersby who | 21 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

made up these different networks of interdependency. Boarding, for example, was crucial to the family’s economy and survival but exacerbated the overcrowding that was typical in immigrant homes. Judith Weissman, who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, lived “in a fifth floor railroad flat with windows only in the kitchen and living room.” The two men who worked at the same factory as her father and who boarded with her family shared a bedroom, while she slept on the couch with her brother—until her father thought she was too old for this. “Her brother then moved into the kitchen, where his bed consisted of two chairs placed close together.”35 In Chicago, Barrett found that the blocks with the highest rates of tuberculosis and infant mortality were those closest to the stockyards and with the most crowded conditions. A settlement house investigator, for example, found one two-room apartment occupied by a family of seven who shared the two rooms with six male lodgers and another family of the same size with seven boarders.36 The presence of boarders and the congested tenement flats to which they contributed also profoundly shaped the social organization and location of immigrants’ leisure. For some families, the crowded homes in which they lived served their leisure needs. Rena Domke immigrated with her family to the United States in 1915, at the age of six, and she vividly recalled the boarders with whom she shared a four-room house and the fun they had. “The kids,” she explained, “all slept . . . where the living room was supposed to be” and “the other bedrooms [were rented] to these men that came from Italy.” These boarders were all musicians, Domke recalled, and “we would always have music.” After “we were through eating,” “we’d play some Italian songs and we’d do the pontella and we’d dance and . . . sing and have a lot of fun.”37 At the same time, however, the crowded conditions in which immigrants lived were sometimes simply too much for them to contend with, and most men and women spent the greater part of their leisure time outdoors. In New York City, Kathy Peiss has found a thriving industry of street entrepreneurs, including organ grinders, itinerant acrobats, bakedpotato vendors, hot-corn stands, and soda vendors, who provided entertainment to anyone strolling about the town.38 Young men, in particular, were notorious for hanging around street corners or milling about the fronts of saloons to harass passersby and other outsiders.39 But young | 22 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

women also assumed a conspicuous place on the streets. In 1911, Belle Lindner Israels noted that The distinction between the working woman and her more carefully guarded sister of the less driven class is one of standards, opportunities, and a chaperon. Three rooms in a tenement, overcrowded with the younger children, make the street a private apartment.40

The cramped and congested tenements in which they lived also meant that many husbands and wives first became acquainted with each other on the streets surrounding their homes and neighborhoods. In some cases, couples simply met while visiting neighbors or friends. Rose Ulman, who married in 1916, met her husband, Albert, when he was visiting a neighbor of hers who had lived in the same village in Europe as Albert. “He was a nice looking fella,” Ulman recalled. “Afterwhile,” she met Albert again at a wedding; they were both standing up for the bride and groom. The two began talking and soon discovered that they had a lot in common, “so . . . we got married.”41 If couples managed to miss each other while visiting family and friends, they were bound to notice each other around their own crowded homes and tenement flats. Stanley Cygan, who arrived in the United States in 1896 and married in 1915, lived next door to his soon-to-be wife. “We got acquainted, you know, just like neighbors.”42 Other men met their future wives while walking along the streets or hanging about the street corners. Stanley Ragan first noticed his future wife “when she was playing jacks on the street.” Ragan recalled that he liked the “way she played.” Shortly thereafter, he met her at a wedding; “one of her relations was getting married, fellow by the name of Joe.” Ragan explained that “she stood up to the wedding and some guy stood up with her,” a “guy” who Ragan was convinced “want[ed] her to go out with him, but I wouldn’t let him,” he boasted. “I beat him to it.”43 Even Italians, who watched more closely over their daughters than Poles and most other immigrants, found that a busy street life figured considerably into the ways in which many couples first became acquainted. Joseph Fastuca’s initial encounter with his future wife was almost identical to Stanley Ragan’s. According to his wife, Josephine, “my husband knew my family. Sometimes we would go to the movies, and I would see him and would say hello.” After they married, she found out | 23 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

that he first noticed her when she was playing jacks on his doorstep; he had a shop near her house. Fastuca eventually told his brother about wanting to marry Josephine, and the brother went to Josephine’s uncle to discuss a potential proposal. “And then my father’s brother came to my father and told him that my husband [Fastuca] would like to ask for my hand in marriage.” Fastuca, along with his brother, came to visit her parents. Once they left, Josephine’s parents asked her: “Well, what do you think?” “Well, I don’t know. He looks all right. I don’t know. I don’t know.” Fastuca then “started to come down and we’d go out. Of course, we were accompanied by my parents . . . If we went to the movies, we would take them to the movies. If we went to visit friends, they’d come along. If we went for a walk, they would walk ten paces behind.”44 Besides offering men and women the chance to couple up as they wandered around their own homes, the streets also led to more formal gatherings at neighborhood parks and picnic groves. One Slovak, known only as Mr. Dugas and born in 1889 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, recalled that the local parks were the center of his social life and the social lives of the Slovaks on the east side, whom he claimed were as “thick as flies.” According to Dugas, every Sunday “all of the Slovaks and people of other nationalities used to go out to the parks.” His favorite hangout— Washington Park—was “kind of wild,” because most Slovaks “didn’t want to go far away from home so . . . all of the people in the section would be found there on Sundays and holidays.” While at the park, the parents would usually buy the “kids all kinds of candy, peanuts, and popcorn,” and then their parents “would gather in bunches; the women with the women and the men with the men. They would talk about anything that you could think of.” Most of the men, Dugas recalled, discussed “their jobs, the church, and what they did when not working.” The women would always “talk about how they were getting along, [and] most of them took their sewing bags with them to the park and they would get together and show the kind of work that they had been doing.” While their parents were busy socializing and sharing stories about the week’s work, the children “used to play together and raise hell to beat—the band [sic].” At times, Dugas exclaimed, “when some of us would get into a scrap the whole park would echo with our hollering.”45 More than twenty years later, parks were still a favorite hangout for immigrants. Rena Domke, who learned to dance with the boarders in her | 24 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

home, recalled that she went to a picnic “every single Sunday” along with “about twenty [or] thirty people” who lived with her on Henderson Street in Chicago. Like most Italian celebrations, their picnics revolved around food—and plenty of it. “We would bring a stove,” she explained, “or we’d make a fire and we’d bring our big pot” and have “big platters of spaghetti.” The picnics Domke attended often took place at Zurich Lake or some other lake at Irving Park. Rena recalled that there were a number of “dilapidated” cottages at the park that she and her family and friends would rent and then take old mattresses and “lay them all on the floor” for makeshift sleeping arrangements. Domke “didn’t mind suffering,” because she and her family and friends had so much fun together, “rolling down those sandy hills” and sunbathing. During the fall, hunting trips replaced the beach and the sunbathing. According to Domke, all the men would go hunting and “whatever they would hunt for,” including “rabbit or squirrels or even black bird, the women would clean them all up and we’d all get together and have a feast.”46 As these experiences suggest, a visit to a local park or favorite picnic grove was a communitywide celebration that attracted immigrants, young and old alike. For younger men and women like Mr. Dugas and Rena Domke, a visit to the park was a cherished event where they could let loose all the energy pent up since the previous week’s visit and “raise hell.” For their parents, a day at the park provided the opportunity to catch up with neighbors, to reminisce about family, friends, and the Old World, and to repair themselves physically and emotionally from a week of exhausting wage work. At the same time, however, a day at the park was not just for family gatherings and neighborhood celebrations. Parks and picnic groves also encouraged a certain amount of intermingling between the sexes. Veronica Loncki recalled that, while she was growing up in Chicago during the first decade of the century, picnics were one of the most popular activities during the summer. There were several different picnic groves from which to choose, Loncki explained, and several picnics organized by different lodges. There were Lithuanian lodges, Bohemian lodges, Slovak lodges, and Polish lodges “running special picnics in different groves.” Loncki claimed that you could go to any picnic you wanted, but she preferred the Lithuanian picnics. “The Lithuanian men,” she insisted, were “so friendly”; “they wouldn’t insult a girl . . . especially if they see [a] nice | 25 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

girl.” Her comment implies that she must have attended more than one lodge picnic and suggests that public areas like parks and picnic groves offered young women the chance for which they may have been looking to meet men other than the ones with whom they were already acquainted in their own neighborhoods or the ones to whom their parents introduced them.47 The streets also gave life to more formal religious and ethnic celebrations. Clara Grillo, who grew up in Cleveland’s Little Italy in the 1910s, recalled that the festivals of the Assumption, which began on August 15 and formally opened with a special Mass, were some of the most celebrated of the year’s social activities. The church, she exclaimed, was “so crowded that the parishioners and guests spill[ed] over into the lobby and steps.” Church bells also “clang[ed] joyfully as the delicate featured statue [was] carried from her niche into the open.” As the bells stopped ringing, which was a sign that the procession had begun, “street bands dramatically [struck] up marching music.” “How they do strut!” she fondly recalled. Grillo also explained that the “strident clashing of cymbals and beat of the drum” would always “excite the crowd and make youngsters run bawling to their mothers—especially if they [got] lost in the jostling crowds,” which meant that at street festivals even children were allowed to wander about unsupervised.48 Even more somber events like death became communitywide events in immigrant communities. Martha Leszczyk recalled that when she was growing up in Chicago during the 1910s, “everybody was laid out at home.” The family usually picked a corner of the room for the coffin and placed palms and ferns underneath it. For three days, “all the people came in,” and “people used to come whether they knew you or not, because whoever died had a long flower [or wreath] hanging on the house.” “If you lived in the back flat,” she explained, “then they hung it on the side of the house by the sidewalk. And if you lived on the second floor . . . then you hung it on the door. Then you knew that the person is dead on the second floor.” Leszczyk admitted that most visitors were there to pay their respects, but “many people just wanted to see how you have the house, and what neighbors you knew.”49 The funerals or wakes Martha Leszczyk described were an important feature of immigrant life because they provided the entire community the opportunity to collectively mourn the death of a fellow countryman | 26 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

or woman as well as their own mortality, reaffirming their common experience as immigrants and their shared ethnicity. At the same time, these rituals afforded immigrants the same types of companionship and sociability often associated with picnics and other more obvious leisure activities. Liberato Dattolo, an Italian who immigrated to the United States in 1914 and who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was both fascinated and disturbed by the funerals he attended in his own neighborhood because they resembled a “party.” When the “Polock” died, he claimed, “the people in the family and all the friends have whiskey and beer, and they have a good time just like a party.” The Americans and the Slovaks, he continued, “do the same thing.” Dattolo attended a Slovak funeral once, and “the people there they talk about everything, and they talk like no dead person was in the house. All the women get in one room and all the men get in the other room. The women talk and the men drink.”50 Church-related events, such as baptisms, communions, confirmations, and weddings, where men and women danced together were also popular events that encouraged new acquaintances.51 Stan Dabkowski, who conducted extensive interviews with first-generation Poles in Connecticut for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression, argued that, according to “the old folks,” “a wedding in those days [1887 to 1907] was perhaps their greatest form of social contact, of entertainment, of the expression of lonely but lively spirits.” But weddings were not simply about entertainment. According to Dabkowski, the wedding was often “the harvesting ground for the striking up of new acquaintances which subsequently terminated at the altar.”52 John Staszak, a first-generation Pole who immigrated to the United States in 1913 and who lived on Chicago’s south side, met his wife at a wedding. “I dance[d] with her,” he recalled, “and she was very happy to have met me and I was very happy to have met her. So in almost seven months we got married.”53 Mary Miroka Laver, who emigrated from a small town in Austria-Hungary in the 1910s and who married in 1916, also met her husband at a wedding. Laver often attended dances at the only hall in her part of town in Homestead, Pennsylvania, and she “met a lot of older girls from Europe there.” A “lot of times,” she explained, “there was a free wedding in the hall. After supper they’d open the doors and anybody could come,” no doubt to reduce the cost of the reception. She and several of her girlfriends from the neighborhood would all go. “I met my | 27 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

first husband at a wedding,” she recalled. “A couple of months later we were getting married.”54 Weddings were so popular, Dabkowski argued, because “other forms of amusement were scarce in those days.” Movies “were in their infancy, not to mention the fact that the Poles did not attend them frequently, due to the fact that they could not understand them.”55 And dances had yet to gain the popularity for which they would later be known. According to Kathy Peiss, the “traditional working class dance” during the late nineteenth century was the “affair” held in neighborhood halls. Fraternal lodges, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and unions generally organized these “affairs” on an annual or occasional basis, often in conjunction with either a wedding or a fund-raising effort for charity.56 In other words, the dancing was organized as much for the parents and other adults who attended as they were for young men and women looking for a potential spouse. At the turn of the century, then, immigrant men and women had few opportunities for leisure outside community, religious, or ethnic celebrations; hence the practice of opening up the neighborhood hall during the wedding reception for any passersby even though they might not have attended the ceremony. Yet, the saint’s day festivals, the Sunday visits to the park, and the weddings and other public celebrations still offered men and women, children and parents, and neighbors and less familiar acquaintances the chance to renew old friendships and to share in the celebration of community and ethnic traditions. In fact, for men and women the streets offered a degree of autonomy couples generally could not find in their own homes. Apart from their parents’ watchful eyes, they could strike up a friendship or perhaps even a relationship that might lead to marriage, without having to deal with the typical problems they faced with tenement life. There were, of course, limits to the mixing of men and women at community events. At the funerals Liberato Dattolo attended, the men and women occupied different rooms, and at the picnics with which Dugas was familiar “some of the people . . . would gather in bunches; the women with the women and the men with the men.” Dugas explained that the young women, in particular, kept their distance from the boys at such gatherings. “The girls were trained different then and they were bashful of the boys.” As far as Dugas could remember, “the only time | 28 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

that they would play with boys was either when the parents would tell them to or if the kids were kind of young, in that case there was no feeling of being bashful,” suggesting that as these girls got older or when the boys became more interested in them, their “play” became more segregated.57 At the same time, parents did not always wait for their daughters to voluntarily separate themselves from their male friends and instead closely chaperoned young couples. As Rena Domke reached her late teens and started “keeping company” with her soon-to-be husband, he was simply incorporated into the summer days at the lake and the winter hunting trips, but her father was always present. Fortunately for Rena and her boyfriend, her father had “a sense of humor” and was “a happy go lucky type of a person” who “was always laughing and singing.”58 Even Italian men had to be careful about whom they danced with at weddings and other ethnic celebrations. An Italian man named Carmon, who grew up in the South Bronx, recalled that his parents watched over him so closely that he refused to bring a girlfriend home to meet his mother, and he resisted the urge to entertain any of the neighborhood girls. Instead, he dated girls from outside his own neighborhood and tried to avoid public events whenever he thought he might meet up with his parents. At times, he was not always successful and on one occasion “happened to take a girl from some other neighborhood to a wedding party—thinking perhaps since his father was not going to attend that his mother would not attend.” But while he was dancing with his girlfriend, “he spied his mother, she spied him at the same time.” Before she could approach the pair, he “danced with the girlfriend toward the checkroom, stopped, told her to get her wrap, and the two left” before his mother reached them and without incident.59 Many parents also insisted on arranging their daughters’ marriages. Michelena Gaetano Profeta, for example, married in July 1905, only about three weeks after immigrating to the United States. Profeta explained that her aunt, who lived in New York, visited her family in Italy and took her sister back to the United States with her. “My sister asked me to come,” she recalled, “and I wanted to go.” Profeta sewed and wanted to stay with her sister in New York and become a dressmaker. Profeta, along with her father, eventually joined her sister in America, but the family had to borrow money for the voyage from a friend of the family. Profeta remembered her father telling her that a | 29 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

“man sent the money for tickets for me and you.” “I’ll pay him back,” he explained, “and you marry him.” “I didn’t want to marry,” she protested. “I didn’t know who he was. He said he knew me. He remembered me because my hair was wavy . . . and he came to my grandmother’s house all the time. He knew me; I didn’t know him. I was nine years and he was eighteen.”60 Once Italian immigrants arrived in the United States, their parents continued to arrange their marriages. Letitia Serpe, who arrived in New York when she was seventeen, recalled that when she was working in her mother’s hat store, one of her mother’s friends came into the store, saw her, and decided that she should marry her son. After that, Serpe explained, the “two mothers got together and agreed I should be married to the woman’s son,” who showed up the following Saturday “with flowers for my mother but he asked me for my hand. I told him, don’t ask me, ask Mama. She will tell you.” Her mother then agreed to a threeyear courtship. During that time, Serpe never went anywhere alone with him. “I never wanted to,” she insisted. “My aunt would go with us or he would come over and play cards with my family.”61 Of course, Italians were not the only immigrants who arranged marriages. Pauline Golembiewska, who was Polish and who immigrated to the United States in 1912, met her husband through her brother. Her future husband, Johnny, had just gotten back from the army and was visiting her brother at his saloon in Chicago when she met him. Later that evening, Johnny showed up at her brother’s home with a bottle of wine to discuss marriage plans. “I brought you a boy,” Golembiewska remembered her brother saying. “I don’t want the boy,” she replied. “He’s going to take you to a show,” her brother insisted. “I’m not going to [the] show,” she protested. “But later on,” she explained, “he started coming back to talk to me, and then . . . I don’t know what happened, and I got married with him.”62 Teodozia Malinowski’s family also arranged her marriage. Malinowski met her husband through her brother-in-law, who knew her future husband and his family from Europe. Malinowski eventually received a letter from the potential spouse in which he asked for her permission to visit. At the very least, she was apprehensive: He was thirtytwo years old, and she was only nineteen, not to mention “afraid” to write back to him because she had met several “Lithuanian boys” at | 30 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

work who were fond of her. But she had little choice in the matter. According to Malinowski, her brother-in-law strongly believed that if you were Polish “you got to, you know marry Polish, and if you are Lithuanian you got [to] marry Lithuanian.” She reluctantly answered the letter and his proposal, telling him that “the door is open” and that “he can come [in].” “Then he come,” Malinowski recalled. “But he go talk to my brother in law not to me.”63 The practice of arranging marriages was an obvious holdover from Europe. In Europe, both Polish and Italian parents arranged their offspring’s marriages to ensure the marriages’ stability, and the family’s.64 Once Poles and Italians arrived in America, arranged marriages not only prevailed but, as Michelena Profeta’s case suggests, were often tied to a woman’s trans-Atlantic journey. As a result, young couples found that their courtships and intimacy revolved almost exclusively around family and friends. The parks, picnic groves, and weddings that figured so prominently in the lives of immigrants may have allowed them to snatch moments of autonomy away from the watchful eyes of their parents— not to mention their cramped tenement flats. And some immigrant men even managed to take advantage of the streets to search out their brides and then with the help of relatives or friends, to become acquainted with the girls’ parents and thus perhaps influence the marriage “arrangements.” Yet, even though some men successfully married the bride of their choosing, the public events, ethnic celebrations, and streets surrounding immigrant communities were as much a part of their parents’ leisure routines as their children’s, ensuring that parents would remain a conspicuous part of their daughters’ social lives and courtships. At the same time, most couples found that their courtships usually consisted of staying home with the woman’s parents or did not last long enough for them to take advantage of the little autonomy the streets had to offer. Letitia Serpe, for example, not only “never” went anywhere alone with her fiancé but spent most of her courtship sitting at home watching him play cards with the rest of her family, a typical get-together for immigrant men and women. Eva Rubenstein Dizenfeld, who married at sixteen in 1900, explained that she and her husband-to-be “didn’t have dates.” “He would come to the house. We used to sit with the family.” Dizenfeld explained that he had been in the country only three years, “so he didn’t know very much either,” suggesting that, until | 31 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

immigrants became more accustomed to their surroundings, they rarely wandered far from home.65 Julia Marchewka, who married in 1911, was also barely acquainted with her husband before their marriage. Like Michelena Profeta, she immigrated to the United States after her husband-to-be sent her the money for a ticket. Once she arrived, they never went out much. “He didn’t have much money and there was nothing [to do] like now,” further suggesting the scarcity of commercial leisure.66 During Teodozia Malinowski’s two-month courtship, she explained that she also never went out with her fiancé. She did not even talk with him much before the marriage. She simply got her brother-in-law’s and her sister’s permission to marry, and they took their vows together shortly after that.67 Pauline Golembiewska, whose brother brought home a “boy” for her, also had a two-month courtship before her marriage, which consisted of staying home except for a trip to Whiting, Indiana, to visit her sister on Sunday “when he didn’t work.”68 The unbalanced sex ratios at the turn of the century in part account for these immigrants’ experiences and the eagerness with which they married. As noted at the start of this chapter, 75 to 80 percent of southern and eastern European immigrants were male, and among the foreign population as a whole, men outnumbered women, a fact that undoubtedly contributed to the urgency with which many men pursued potential spouses. For example, James Osochowsky, who immigrated to the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century, recalled that there were only two “Ukrainian girls in New Haven, and every man was after them. At a dance,” he claimed, “they couldn’t sit still for a minute.” The shortage of Ukrainian women was so acute that not only did Ukrainian men have to settle for different dance partners but there were also many intermarriages between Ukrainians and members of other immigrant groups, particularly Poles and Russians, in New Haven, who, like their Ukrainian counterparts, were eager to wed.69 Not to be outdone by other immigrant men, Italian men were also eager to find brides. In 1905, Buffalo, New York, had 3,140 Italian-born men and 2,040 Italian-born women. Some of these men were married with wives overseas, but the number of single men outnumbered the number of single women, a situation that some women claimed influenced their decision to marry. Virginia Yans McLaughlin, for example, cites the experience of a Sicilian-born woman who explained why she got | 32 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

married at thirteen: “I married young. When Italian men came, they grabbed the girls right away. . . . Everyone wanted to marry me because there were not many Italian girls. I married at thirteen . . . I was fifteen when I had my first child.”70 The eagerness with which immigrants rushed into wedlock, not to mention the “child brides” and the intermarriages, suggests that unbalanced sex ratios profoundly shaped marriage patterns at the turn of the century. The shortage of women meant that all men had to make a proposal and quickly if they intended to wed, and most women, like the young Sicilian, were so overwhelmed by the incredible number of men pursuing them that they eventually consented to marry, which for some immigrants may have contrasted sharply with the way they had managed courtships in Europe. In America, “child brides” were as common as they had been in Europe. Among Italians, for example, in 1910, 29 percent of women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were married. The figure for Polish women was significantly lower, at 15 percent, and still lower for Russians at 7 percent, and for Germans, at 10 percent.71 The numbers of married women in the same age cohort in Europe were strikingly similar. For Italians, Rudolph M. Bell found that in four rural villages (Albareto, Castel San Giorgio, Nissoria, and Roglia), in 1910, the percentages of women who married between the ages of twelve and nineteen were 27 percent, 12 percent, 56 percent, and 24 percent, respectively.72 At the same time, however, “marriages upon short acquaintance” may have been more common in America. Pasquali Gruci, who was born in Italy in 1857 and who immigrated to the United States in 1882, had many problems with the younger generation. According to Gruci, “the boys and girls in this country” were not only “foolish” but also “too excited about themselves.” “They see a girl one day and the next day,” he protested, “they’re married; in Italy the couple to be married must know each other for at least three years” and “the engagement should at least be a year and a half.” This “gives the couple a chance to know if they’re suited for each other,” as if in Italy the young couple had a more significant courtship than their American counterparts and had probably known each other for some time before becoming engaged, a practice immigration potentially upset.73 The changes in courtship patterns about which Pasquali Gruci complained illuminate immigration’s impact and how the unbalanced sex | 33 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

ratios immigration produced led many young couples to “marry upon short acquaintance.” Yet while the unbalanced sex ratios in America may have compelled many people to rush eagerly into marriage, like YansMcLaughlin’s Sicilian-born woman, who was inundated with marriage proposals and perhaps “couldn’t sit still for a minute,” sex ratios may not have been the only reason young men and women, as Gruci put it, were so “excited about themselves.” Indeed, unbalanced sex ratios explain only the persistence and eagerness with which many men pursued their female companions. But the shortage of available brides fails to elucidate why a woman would agree to be a “child bride” or to marry after only a two- or three-month courtship and ignores the other reasons immigrant men may have so eagerly embraced marriage. For some immigrants, the loneliness and frustration that accompanied their trans-Atlantic journey help explain the marriage patterns that were common in their communities. A Polish woman who settled in New Britain, Connecticut, during the first decade of the twentieth century explained that “marriages were a little different then”; “I mean various other conditions and circumstances had their influence on them.” “Today [1930s], you can court and take your time if you wish to, or wait until you are ready. But not then. We were all young, all lonely, and it was necessary for us to be among our own people.” Being “among our own people,” she explained, “made you feel better, and closer to home,” because immigration had disrupted the family life to which people had grown accustomed in Europe. But for this young woman, and apparently for many other Poles and other immigrants, being “among our own people” did not lead only to strong family and community ties. “Getting married was also necessary after a fashion,” she explained. “It had some semblance of security about it in this new land and life. A lot of them (like me) married upon not-toolong acquaintance and with borrowed money.” In short, many immigrants were separated from their families, friends, and even parents when they left for America and found that marriage was the easiest way to reestablish the family ties they had lost.74 In particular, the conditions under which many men and women immigrated to the United States help explain courtship and marriage patterns. According to Dabkowski, when “the early Poles flocked to this country in numerous droves, mostly men at first, all young and single,” | 34 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

traditional “forms of expression were cut off almost abruptly.” Men, he continued, “labored through long days” in the city’s factories, and once the day’s work ended, “they boarded in crowded homes,” which “pitifully limited” their “social horizons.” As “letters and stories of this new land drew in the young Polish women,” who also boarded in crowded Polish homes and frequently slept in “separate rooms on the floors,” “old acquaintaces [sic] were renewed . . . [and] many new ones were given birth.” Many of these acquaintances, Dabkowski continued, were formed at weddings themselves, where large crowds gathered. Sometimes, when young men and women boarded in the same house, the boys and girls would introduce each other and in that simple fashion strike up a friendship that would find its destiny in wedlock. Other times the young people met at their place of work, which was mostly in the factory; in some cases it was after church.75

“Loneliness and the desire for homes [also] played their part,” he argued, “as well as the ties of their former motherland.” Yet, wherever young people met and for whatever reason, Dabkowski noted, The early courtships were outstanding because of their many limitations. Unlike today [1930s], people met with a certain eagerness, even a need. . . . Of circumstantial necessity these engagements were likely to be brief. Many a married, first-generation family recalls that when the call to wedlock was strong and the purse empty, money was borrowed for this occasion.76

There were, of course, marriages where the courtship was more substantial, but even then the marriage was as much about reestablishing family ties as it was about finding a spouse who fulfilled certain genderprescribed requirements, especially for parents who were just as lonely and anxious about immigration as their children. In the case of Marietta Interlandi, an Italian who immigrated to the United States in 1906, it was her father who was searching for “some semblance of security,” and he managed to find it through his daughter’s marriage. In 1912, Interlandi’s father received a letter from a friend in Italy informing him that he was sending his two sons to the United States and asking Interlandi’s father, to meet them at the station. When they arrived, her father not only took them to a close friend’s home, where they boarded, but also | 35 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

found them jobs. After they settled in, Interlandi continued to see one of the boys. Interlandi’s father owned a barber shop, and “he [the young man, John] used to come over to the barbershop . . . to . . . talk.” During this time, Interlandi got several marriage proposals from other men, “and naturally they’d ask my dad not me.” If her father “didn’t like them, he’d say, ‘oh I ain’t got no daughters to marry off’” because Interlandi was convinced that “he liked my husband,” and “he knew the family from Europe.” Over the next couple of years, their friendship continued to grow, and John even proposed. But “he didn’t ask my father. . . . I couldn’t marry him unless he asked my father,” she explained. “So I told him off” and assured him that there were “others” she “could marry.” But she “didn’t like any other ones,” and “my dad didn’t either.” John eventually proposed by way of the old Italian custom and first asked her father. A couple of months later, they had an engagement party, and, about a year later, they married.77 As a young woman, Interlandi’s father refused to accept other marriage proposals for his daughter. He may have been respecting Interlandi’s wishes, since she liked only John, or he might have grown attached to John once he assumed the responsibility of helping him and his brother become adjusted to their new lives in America. Most important of all, he knew John’s family from Europe. By helping her future husband find lodging and a livelihood, he reestablished the link with Europe that immigration had disrupted and confirmed his commitment to community and kin even though they had been separated. By welcoming John into his family through the marriage with his daughter, he established a trans-Atlantic Italian family and the “semblance of security” he appeared to have lost when he left for America. Marriage was thus a way for immigrants to deal with the frustration and anxiety associated with their immigration. Often apart from family and friends, young men and women embraced marriage because it made them “feel better” and “closer to home.” Many couples married after only a two- or three-month courtship and even on borrowed money, suggesting that their parents may have approved of the marriage. In fact, as Marietta Interlandi’s experience makes clear, parents were just as anxious as their children about immigration and the separation it entailed and looked to their children and their potential spouses to recapture the family life they had lost. | 36 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

The survival strategies immigrants adopted once they settled down in the United States further encouraged them to marry on short acquaintance. Anna Kuthan, who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side in the early twentieth century, explained that the experience of boarding exacerbated men’s desire to marry. According to Kuthan, “Everybody wants to get married, [because] they want to get their own homes.” Kuthan explained that when a young man boarded, the homes often had young children and “he can’t stay there during the day so he has to walk the streets.” For many men, wandering the streets may have offered a desired escape from the crowded tenements and from the young children with whom they shared their home. But as Kuthan recalled, walking the streets also made these men want to get married because it only made them “homesick.”78 Boarding also contributed to the disparity in ages that characterized many marriages and the prevalence of “child brides.” As noted earlier, relationships in which the man was older than the woman were common because of the unbalanced sex ratios and men’s practice of singling out their brides while the girls were still children playing games on the front stoop. Boarding offered men even greater opportunities to become acquainted with single and young women. Liberato Dattolo, who worked on a repair crew for the New Haven Railroad throughout the 1930s, recalled that when he first arrived in the United States in 1914, he boarded with an Italian family for about five years. When Liberato first met his wife-to-be, whom he referred to as the “little girl,” he was only fifteen years old; she was just “a little bit younger” than he. Liberato got to know her because he was eager to avoid the pejorative term “greenhorn,” and his padrone’s daughter knew the “English language good.” Some of the other boarders “used to look at me and they used to think I was doing this so I know the girl better.” But, he protested, “I never had ideas like that. I really wanted to learn how to read and write.” “After a while, she said that she liked me a little bit and she told her mother and her father and they said that I would make a good son-in-law.”79 Andrew Devich, who was born in 1896 in the town of Krasna in Croatia and who immigrated to the United States in 1913, also met his wife while boarding. Working in coal mines and lumber camps from Virginia to Minnesota, Devich spent part of his time boarding, or he “bached” | 37 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

up with other miners and timber workers. Devich eventually ended up boarding at Mrs. Pocrnich’s home in Buhl, Minnesota. “From the time I lived at Mrs. Pocrnich’s,” he explained, “I had my eye on her second oldest daughter, Lucy, but felt she was too young for me.” Lucy was “but fifteen years old” when Devich first saw her; he was twenty-seven. “Many of the other bachelors who lived or visited at the Pocrnich’s [sic] had their eye on her too,” he insisted, “some even older than I was.” But, he thought that perhaps he could “win her hand.” Devich only stayed at the Pocrniches’ home for only a short time but “would think of excuses to come back” so that he could see more of Lucy. When that failed, he and his friend Nick would take walks around town and inevitably “go by the school in hopes of getting a glimpse of her as she was still a student in high school.” Devich finally resorted to writing Lucy a love letter. He had a book that “showed just how to write such a letter. I copied it and sent it to my sweetheart Lucy.” Unfortunately for Devich, Lucy failed to answer him, and he was on the verge of leaving Buhl for California when he received a Valentine card signed by his “sweetheart.” Years later Devich discovered that Lucy’s sister Matilda had sent and signed the card. But the valentine was enough to convince him to ask her parents about marriage. “I was terribly bashful,” he explained, “and didn’t really know how to go about it.” But he figured that some wine would perhaps “unloosen” his tongue. Before arriving at the Pocrniches’ home, he bought a liter of wine and drank it, and when he arrived he bought another bottle from Mrs. Pocrnich, who conveniently made wine and sold it to the bachelors living with her. Devich and Mr. Pocrnich shared the wine and, as it became “easier to talk,” he asked for their permission to “take their daughter as his wife.” Mrs. Pocrnich immediately told Devich that she had been waiting for his proposal and quickly “called Lucy to come to us.” Devich fondly recalled that he could still hear Mrs. Pocrnich asking Lucy: “Do you know what this man is asking? He wants to marry you. Will you take him for your husband? He’d like to know what your feelings are.” For a while, Lucy and her mother talked over his proposal, and then her mother said that “she would have me and it would now be up to us to make plans for the wedding.”80 As Dattolo’s and Devich’s experiences suggest, the practice of boarding served as an important matchmaker in immigrant communities. Often apart from their families or working jobs that required a consider| 38 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

able amount of traveling, young, single men like Dattolo and Devich either “bached up” with their male coworkers or chose a more domestic setting and boarded. Boarding provided men homes despite the housing shortages they faced and made it easier for them to save up the wages they planned to take back to Europe with them or to use to settle down in the United States.81 Above all, boarding granted men one of the few opportunities they had to find a wife. With so few women in immigrant communities and parents who either closely supervised their daughters’ personal lives or intended to arrange their marriages, boarding not only promoted a certain amount of intermingling between the sexes but also allowed young single men to become better acquainted with the parents who might make it easier to find a bride. The types of families that took in boarders further explains the prevalence of “child brides.” As Dattolo’s and Devich’s experiences suggest, many families took in boarders to increase their income at a time when their children were too young to contribute significantly to the family economy. Tamara K. Hareven and John Modell have argued that it was older families who began taking in boarders to make up for the loss of income experienced when an older child left the parents’ home to set up his or her own household. Such a strategy not only compensated for the loss of revenue from the absent child but also helped the family adjust to the decline in earnings that accompanied the advanced age of the household head.82 James Barrett, however, has argued that the “relationship between [the] family cycle and boarding seems to have run in the opposite direction: the younger the family, the greater the reliance on boarding.” Bohemian families, Barrett argues, were “precisely the sort of older, larger, more stable families that might be expected to have taken in boarders”; yet the practice was “universally shunned” among Bohemians, who relied more heavily on the income of older children to make ends meet. Instead, families with younger children often took in boarders until those same children were old enough to contribute to the family economy.83 Under this arrangement, families with younger children had a much greater chance of having boarders than families with children who were old enough to be counted among the laboring population. In other words, the families that took in boarders were likely to include men like Dattolo and Devich, bachelors who were eager to find a bride, and younger children and potential spouses. For example, | 39 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

among the Polish in Packingtown whom Barrett studied, the homes that included boarders had a mean number of 3.12 boarders, with 67 percent of the children in the families in the study under ten years of age.84 Besides boarding, immigrant women blamed the conditions in which they lived for their marriages. Mary Miroka Laver, who was born in rural Austria-Hungary at the turn of the century and whose immigration reunited her with a father she had not seen for several years, explained that her marriage grew out of the miserable conditions with which she had to contend. Laver’s husband-to-be lived across the street, next to his uncle, who introduced the pair. Laver recalled that “I didn’t even think whether I like him or not.” “At that time,” she explained, “you didn’t have the feeling if you liked him or not. You just met him and times were bad and you’re looking for something better to live. You figure if you get married, you had a better life.” These considerations convinced her to marry him after only a two-month courtship.85 Julia Marchewka’s home life also contributed to her decision to get married quickly. As noted earlier, she immigrated to the United States in 1909 and found a husband after he sent her money to immigrate to America. After she arrived, her courtship was brief. But, Marchewka was happy to get married and to have her own place “because when you got family how does that look everybody in the same four rooms.”86 Other women explained that their marriages were simply an issue of the family’s survival. Mary Massato, another “child bride,” married Oresto Baldi in 1913, when she was fifteen. She did not wish to marry. But her mother had trouble supporting all the children alone, so Massato “thought [she] would help her,” which meant either leaving her mother’s home or adding another breadwinner to the family through marriage.87 In Martha Leszczyk’s case, her mother insisted that she marry to guarantee her position in another family economy. Leszczyk met her husband at a dance to which she had gone with her parents when she was ten years old; he was twenty. She recalled that her mother “liked him because he was very polite.” He eventually started coming around the house for visits, undoubtedly encouraged by her mother, who at the time was “very sick.” Worried about her health, her mother began planning for her daughter’s future and began asking her “if I would die what would happen to you?” and then suggesting marriage, insisting that if Leszczyk married “it will be easier for me to die.” Leszczyk could not re| 40 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

call what was wrong with her mother. But “because doctors said that she might go real soon . . . I go[t] married.”88 Immigrants also married after short courtships because their leisure and work experiences failed to relieve the angst and frustration they faced in America. As noted at the start of this chapter, the young Polish woman who settled in New Britain, Connecticut, recalled numerous marriages in which the couples had only recently become acquainted. These marriages not only reflected the loneliness that accompanied immigration and separation from family and friends but also the long and bitter days of wage labor and a social life that failed to resolve all the problems immigrants faced. Immigrant men also recalled bitter work experiences. Joseph Rusilavicius, who was Lithuanian, explained that when he came to America he “liked riding on the train because it was so comfortable and went so fast.” But Rusilavicius’s first three months in the United States were the “worst” in his life. “The thing that made me feel bad was that I couldn’t understand or speak the language. I couldn’t find out things that I didn’t understand and I didn’t learn much about my new country until I was here for over a year.” To make matters worse, Rusilavicius had been trained as a tailor and intended to pursue his trade in the United States. But there was no demand for experienced tailors who “couldn’t speak English.” To make ends meet, he found work in the coal mines. Rusilavicius admitted that in one month he made as much in the coal mines as he made in a year in Lithuania. But the “food in the boarding house and [the] work were not as good as I had in the old country.” Rusilavicius explained that “I didn’t like the way I had to live, working underground like a mouse when I could have a much easier and better life in the old country.”89 Other immigrants claimed that their coworkers and their bosses were as much to blame for their unhappiness as the conditions in which they worked. Mr. A. T., an industrial worker at the General Electric plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who emigrated from Italy in the early 1920s, also found the workplace particularly inhospitable when he first arrived. “I didn’t speak very good English,” A. T. recalled, “and I had many fights with the fellows that I worked with. They used to call me a greenhorn and I would get mad at them and the boss would come along and give them hell for picking on me.” Mr. A. T. eventually told his brother about his troubles and how his coworkers “always called [him] | 41 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

a greenhorn.” His brother told him “to never mind them” and admonished him to save his money so that one day he could tell them to “go to hell.”90 James Osochowski recalled that he and his coworkers understood one another; it was the boss in the shop who caused all the problems. After Osochowski immigrated to the United States, he claimed that “America seemed to us as far away as Africa and just as foreign.” Osochowski, along with many of the other Ukrainians in his community, learned to read and write Ukrainian in this country, and almost all of his coworkers were immigrants. The only Americans with whom he was familiar were the ones with whom he worked, and they were notoriously easy to pick out because they were the ones always giving orders. At work, Osochowski explained, “The Russians understood us; the Jews understood us; the Polish understood us. And who was American? The boss in the shop. And what did he say? Make this box. Put this box there. Put that box here. We understood that, and that was enough.”91 In response to the problems they encountered at the workplace, immigrants openly challenged their coworkers and bosses or, like Mr. A. T., simply ignored them with the hope that one day they could tell them to “go to hell.” But like the young Polish woman who gathered together with the other single Poles to forget their bitter work days, single men often congregated over a drink to face their frustration and loneliness— although usually without the company of women. After “they labored through long days,” the Polish men Dabkowski interviewed would often “gather together after work, purchase a keg of beer, drink and reminisce.” For Poles, such gatherings were eagerly anticipated events because they provided them the camaraderie and the chance to commiserate over their shared and sometimes hostile circumstances.92 Joseph Szewezyk, a Pole living in New Britain who had immigrated to the United States in 1903, explained that he “worked in the local factories, long and hard hours for little pay, about a dollar a day.” After finishing the day’s work, he explained, “we were pretty tired, as you can imagine,” and “there wasn’t much we could do [for recreation] under those circumstances.” A “favorite thing among Poles,” he recalled “was to buy a keg of beer over the weekend, get together, and talk and drink. That was our relaxation. There wasn’t much else we could do.”93 For immigrants like John Szewezyk buying a keg of beer for a weekend get-together was a typical way to relax. Many others, however, got | 42 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

their fill of both drink and companionship at the local saloon. As historians have noted, the saloon played a particularly important role in the lives of immigrant men.94 According to a writer for the Connecticut Ethnic Survey, John Skritulsky’s saloon in New Britain was especially important “in the lives of the earlier immigrants from Russia and the Baltic States.” John Skritulsky was one of the earliest Lithuanian settlers in New Britain, and, “with his great knowledge of the language and customs of the country, [he] was able to act as interpreter, banker, letter-writer, and general leader for the group in their dealings with the natives of the country.” In addition, his saloon was a “community gathering place at night for these men who spent the day working in local factories among strangers whose language they could not understand nor their animosity which took the form of petty tricks and abusive language.”95 The saloon thus provided men the companionship and the camaraderie that was typically missing in other areas of their life, especially the workplace where they often worked long hours for poor wages and where they were despised and mistreated as “greenhorns.”96 An equally popular hangout was the barber shop, which also provided immigrant men close association, relaxation, and conversation. Joseph Szewezyk, who was a barber in New Britain, Connecticut, throughout most of the early twentieth century, claimed that his barbershop “was always pretty full,” and the barbers were “constantly busy.” “There were no definite hours as there are today [1930s],” he explained. On weekdays, Szewezyk usually “kept the help going until eight o’clock at night or so” and sometimes until midnight, “but that was mostly on Saturday nights.”97 Szewezyk claimed that his shop was open so many hours because of the barbers he kept in his shop, who were of different nationalities. “I had an Italian, a Greek, and an Armenian, and three Poles working for me” but “no Irish.” “I wanted those because they might bring in trade of their own nationality.” “In business,” he explained “you have to do those things.” Szewezyk’s attempts to appeal to his customers’ ethnic loyalties may have attracted more customers. But his shop’s popularity grew more because of the autonomy it offered individual groups of immigrants than because it provided barbers of various ethnic backgrounds. “At times when there were a lot of Poles in the shop at the same time, talking in their own tongue, an Irishman would not come in. No, he just wouldn’t. He never came. But when there were not any [Polish] | 43 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

there, or a lot of them [Irish] at one time, then they would; and in cases like that they too, would come in in crowds.” While the animosity between the Irish and the Polish may have produced some anxious moments as men waited for a shave, their bitterness toward each other also produced autonomous spaces where newly arrived Polish “greenhorns” could commiserate over their shared problems, exchange advice, establish personal and business networks, and help one another become better acquainted with their new homes in America.98 Barbershops were also popular hangouts because they were the site of coming-of-age rituals between fathers and sons. According to Salvatore Cosentino, who owned and worked in Chicago barbershops throughout the early twentieth century and who became a barber because his father always wanted someone around the house to shave him after he got home from work, “almost every customer in the shop had his own mug with their own name on it.” At one of the shops in which Cosentino worked, there were about fifty mugs “with their own brush and everything.” The mug used to go from generation to generation, Cosentino recalled, or, if the father died, the “son . . . used to pick up his father[’s] mug and we used to use his father’s mug to shave him.”99 Passing the shaving mug from father to son and from generation to generation was a rite of passage that bound the generations together and provided some stability to the problems associated with immigration and working-class life. Moreover, it guaranteed the life of an all-male ritual and an all-male space that, as Joseph Szewezyk claimed, was also ethnically defined. When young men accepted their fathers’ shaving mugs, they accepted not only their new status as men but also the privileges that accompanied adulthood. For men, those privileges included the company of other immigrants, which made it easier for them to cope with their separation from family and home and the bitterness and hostility they faced in the workplace. Thus, like the gatherings of young Polish men and women in the homes of other single Poles for “laughter and merriment,” the saloon and barbershop provided men with a sense of belonging. After the day’s work was done, immigrant men either retired to the crowded homes in which they boarded or spent their leisure time with other single men at the corner saloon or barbershop. These all-male hangouts not only offered men the company that might make the loneli| 44 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

ness and frustration they faced tolerable, but also provided important networks of exchange, coming-of-age rituals, and a safe and comfortable atmosphere in which to forget the problems they faced about the town and in the workplace. But men’s leisure did not just fail to meet all these men’s needs; gathering together over a keg of beer or at a saloon could possibly even exacerbate the loneliness and frustration they felt because of their obsession with women, domesticity, and married life. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, saloons were generally sex segregated. Many saloons had a “ladies’ entrance” that led to the back room where women could consume the “free lunch” or accompany their male companions to the parties and vaudeville acts that were occasionally held there. Other women used this entrance to “rush the growler” or to buy carry-out beer by the pail for home consumption.100 But women rarely ventured beyond the back room. Victor Harackiewicz, who was living in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s, distinctly recalled the door through which the “ladies” entered. “I remember when they [women] come for beer there was the doors you know, some lady came with a bucket and she stayed behind that door so nobody would see her.” The bartender, he recalled, would “fill the bucket and give it to her and she [would] pay [for] it.”101 At the same time, the sexualized images of women and the prostitutes who were generally associated with saloons stood in sharp contrast to the women who used the ladies entrance. According to Rose Telleroni, who grew up in Chicago during the 1910s, “no women were allowed to go in [the saloon]. Not unless you were a prostitute.” Rose explained that she “didn’t know too much about that line [of work].” But she did know that prostitution was “open,” and “they couldn’t walk the streets like they do now.” “They would be above the tavern,” just in case “any of those men in the tavern wanted to.”102 Women—or various representations of them—also figured prominently in barroom culture. Paintings of female nudes like Andromache Tied to the Rock, Venus at the Bath, and The Sleeping Courtesan, argues Leonard Ellis, “constituted the standard decorative art of the American saloon.” The Police Gazette was also widely read in saloons across America, which Ellis describes as “the male magazine of the era” and which regularly featured pictures of scantily clad women alongside the latest sporting news.103 | 45 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

How men dealt with the exclusion of women on the one hand and the sexualized images of them on the other varied considerably. But many men spent much of their time in saloons obsessed with the women who reminded them of their homes in Europe and the domestic life for which they yearned in America. According to George Ade, a journalist and connoisseur of early-twentieth-century barroom culture, “it was right in front of the bar that the fond husband announced to the wide world that his wife was the best damned housekeeper in town and her kitchen floor was so clean that you could eat off of it.” Other topics of conversation, which immediately called for another round of drinks, included the birth of another child, the graduation of an older daughter from high school, or “the junior getting a grade of 100 in geography.” Many men may have “left their families to loiter in saloons,” Ade argued, but “this did not mean that they ceased to love their families.”104 Single men, too, sentimentalized and idealized in song the women they loved and lost. According to Ade, “In all my dreams your fair face beams” was almost a “perfect specimen of the love-laden verse which was so popular in the saloons through the eighties and nineties and well into the present century,” when unbalanced sex ratios were common in immigrant communities. Indeed, the most popular of the “‘slush-ma-gush’ ballads of the 90s” were “the ‘mother’ songs and the recitals of insulted girlhood and betrayed womanhood,” such as Joseph P. Skelly’s “A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Mother” or the favorite “Her Eyes Don’t Shine Like Diamonds” by David Marion, which included the refrain: With a smile she always greets me, from her I’ll never part; For, lads, I love my mother and she’s my sweetheart.105

Madelon Powers argues that the popularity of “mother” songs reflected working-class child-rearing practices in which fathers were generally absent during the day and out with their peers at night, leaving mothers alone to care for their children. “Boys raised in this manner,” Powers argues “might naturally identify most strongly with songs glorifying nurturing mothers.”106 Child-rearing practices and absent fathers undoubtedly influenced the ways in which men sentimentalized dear “mother,” but they were just as likely to idealize her because of the domestic amenities they had grown accustomed to at home, amenities that were often unavailable to single men boarding about the town. Anna | 46 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

Kuthan explained that “it was always the men who wanted to get married more than the girls,” because, she claimed, “they missed their mother’s cooking.”107 The pictures of scantily clad women that adorned the walls of many saloons did, indeed, keep “alive the salty humor of Rabelais.” Saloon culture allowed men to collectively sexualize the women in their lives and to express their contempt with “skirts” or anything remotely associated with domestic life. If that did not make them feel more comfortable, they could simply drown out their misery over a salty lunch and a five-cent beer and immerse themselves in the male camaraderie endemic to bar culture. Either way, saloons provided men the distraction they needed to cope with the problems they faced and the companionship to try and forget them. Yet, the representations of women were not simply the spice of barroom life that allowed a male culture to flourish. While some men embraced the saloon, others were more ambivalent and searched out other ways to cope with the problems they faced. Andrew Parylo, a Ukrainian who initially settled in Jersey City in 1911, recalled that his introduction to the United States included an extensive tour of the city’s saloons. On his second day in the United States, he ran across a fellow from Galicia who agreed to “show him the town.” According to Parylo, “we left the house at eight o’clock in the morning and came home at eight o’clock at night.” In that twelve hours, he exclaimed, “we visited thirty-six saloons.”108 Parylo’s experience was quite common. When newly arrived immigrant men were not sharing a keg of beer at the boarding house, they usually spent their evenings treating one another to rounds of drink at the neighborhood saloon, which for Parylo was part of his initiation into his new life and surroundings. But they did not always remain there. After Parylo spent his second day in the United States on a twelve-hour tour of the city’s saloons, he politely declined his Galician companion’s offer to show him the rest of the city the following day: “Thank you, I don’t want to go.” Instead, he joined a church organization and a dramatic club and sang in the choir or spent his leisure time reading books and newspapers such as Svoboda and a Polish paper entitled Echo.109 Parylo was likely to continue to patronize saloons despite his other interests. But his experience also suggests a relationship between homo| 47 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

social and heterosocial leisure. While saloons provided him his initial introduction to life in America and became the standard by which he judged his experiences in the workplace, and as he wandered the city’s streets, the saloon apparently failed to meet all his needs despite the domestic qualities attributed to it.110 Instead, he joined a church organization and sang in a choir, two pastimes that were not only heterosocial but that had a reputation for leading young couples to the altar. Indeed, among some immigrant women, the church was the only source of leisure their parents accepted. Emma Reale, who immigrated to the United States during the first decade of the twentieth century, recalled that, growing up, “we weren’t allowed to go to dances except those connected with the church and when either or both parents chaperoned us. In fact our social activities were centered around the church dances, suppers, family reunions, etc.” It was only after her father died that her leisure activities began to expand beyond the church; she was allowed to attend dances at a friend’s home across the street.111 The all-male companionship men found in saloons, along with the alcohol they drank, certainly made it easier for them to come to terms with the loneliness and frustration that accompanied immigration and urbanindustrial life, both of which threatened to disrupt their family lives. Moreover, the inherent tension between the men’s contempt for domesticity and their attraction to it, along with the pictures of scantily clad women and the ballads of lost love and dear mother, undoubtedly reminded men, especially newly arrived immigrants, about the women in their lives, loves lost, and Old-World sweethearts. The saloon may have even bound men together regardless of their marital status because of their longing for “dear mother” and her domestic qualities, qualities that might have compelled some men to abandon the saloon—at least temporarily—for other types of associations, including marriage. Andrew Parylo may not have left the saloon because it only made the frustration and angst he suffered worse. But after visiting thirty-six saloons in a single day, it is unlikely that he could have overlooked the pictures of scantily clad women, the prostitutes, and the love-laden verses that were popular when he visited the city’s saloons and that contrasted sharply with his experience at home, where men generally outnumbered the women who also lived there. For immigrant men, then, the saloon might bring out the worst of their bawdy humor and coarse language, enabling them | 48 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

to mark out the saloon as a distinctly male space. But at the same time, it could just as easily exacerbate the isolation and loneliness that accompanied their trans-Atlantic voyage to America, contributing to the eagerness with which they rushed into wedlock. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, courtship was inextricably linked to family and community. Whether young men and women attended picnics or saint’s day celebrations or visited the park on Sundays, their families and their communities not only established the norms of behavior that governed courtship but were also conspicuously present in young people’s social lives, so much so that in many cases marriages were simply arranged. Some men and women successfully eluded their parents’ watchful eyes and established some autonomy over their personal lives. But these individuals then found the struggle to negotiate the different circumstances in which they found themselves more complicated. The cramped tenement flats, the low wages, and the endless and exhausting hours of wage labor, along with the mental and physical separation from family and friends, affected the social organization of courtship as much as the ethnic and religious celebrations that prominently influenced the collective memory of southern and eastern European immigrants. Once they arrived in the United States, almost all immigrants adopted a number of strategies to help them adapt to their urban-industrial setting. Most men embraced the rituals of a male culture—the camaraderie, the companionship, and, of course, the alcohol—to help them cope with or at least forget temporarily the circumstances in which they found themselves. While these strategies may have made their day-to-day lives easier, they did not eliminate the frustration with which most immigrants had to contend. Caught between the loneliness, the isolation, and the delayed stages of immigration that produced unbalanced sex ratios on the one hand and unruly coworkers, miserable living conditions, and, for men, a male culture that never quite replaced the home life to which they had grown accustomed on the other, immigrant men and women eagerly rushed into wedlock to relieve the central tensions in their lives. Immigrants and their children did, of course, continue to have to deal with the poor wages and the crowded living conditions. Increasingly, | 49 |

“Marriages Were a Little Different Then”

however, the circumstances around which they organized their courtships began to change with the rise of commercial leisure. As noted throughout this chapter, young men and women often met at dances. But these dances were almost always connected to weddings and other community celebrations, and parents usually accompanied their offspring to them. The rise of commercial leisure offered young couples not only the chance to escape their parents’s watchful eyes but also the opportunity to establish their own peer culture and norms of behavior. The rise of commercial leisure and men’s and women’s role in shaping it are the subjects of the following three chapters.

| 50 |

TWO

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands The Rise of Commercial Leisure and the Making of a Peer Culture

In 1913, Angela Mischke immigrated with her family to the United States and settled in Chicago. As a young women, Mischke had a busy social life. She and her brother Karol used to “read a lot, played cards, and roller skated.” With her girl friends, she “went swimming, played jacks, skipped rope . . . took long walks,” and she “always looked forward to [the] 4th of July, [for] the fireworks and the shooting from . . . real revolvers.” During her summer vacations, her “recreation consisted of going to nearby parks—Eckhardt and Pulaski.” “The parks were small,” Mischke recalled, “but each had a playground, swimming pool, and gym.” She and her parents also went to picnics sponsored by various lodges or church societies, or “traveled by street car to some grove located on the outskirts of Chicago.”1 When Mischke was not playing cards and roller skating with her friends, she and the other neighborhood girls entertained themselves by attending the other “spectacles”—funerals—which she recalled offered a “good show.” With two large parishes in the vicinity—Holy Trinity and St. Stanislaus Kostka—Angela explained that “seldom a week went by that some person was not being laid in his grave with pomp and circumstance . . . especially if he was a politician or a wealthy businessman.” According to Mischke, when the cortege left the church, it was “preceded by a large band playing the funeral march” followed by “a horse-driven | 51 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

hearse” and wagons filled with “flowers and wreaths and a long procession of mourners, friends, and representatives of societies to which the deceased belonged.” “These processions,” she recalled, “always passed our house on Division Street, and we children thought it a good show.”2 Thus, like that of most immigrants, Mischke’s social life revolved primarily around her family and friends and the streets and parks surrounding her home. But commercial leisure was beginning to make more of an impact. Besides visits to the park, she recalled that there was a nickel theater she occasionally visited. “Those were the days [1910s and 1920s] of the great silent movies,” and “some of the children in the neighborhood attended nickel shows.” Mischke noted that her family “seldom had the necessary five cents, but I was luckier than my brothers. Aunt Hania loved the movies and frequently took me with her.” Saturday matinees, in particular, “were the big thrillers, [and] serials such as ‘The Peril’s [sic] of Pauline’ kept us in suspense until the next week’s episode.” As she grew older, the nickel theater lost some of its charm, but she maintained a busy social life. After about the age of sixteen, she spent much of her leisure time at concerts and amateur plays that the Literary Circle of the Holy Trinity parish sponsored; she also sang in the church choir and in a Polish singing group called Chor Warszawiakow. In the winter, her brother’s friends organized house parties and in the summer, they arranged picnics or other outings. “And of course there were the dances given by many Polish clubs and societies. This also was the era of large ballrooms and famous bands.”3 As Mischke’s experience makes clear, the world around which immigrant men and women organized their social lives and relationships was changing with the rise of commercial leisure. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century and expanding dramatically over the next several decades, movie houses, dance halls, and amusement parks assumed an increasingly conspicuous role in cities across the country.4 These new commercial amusements, especially the dance halls, not only expanded opportunities for leisure but also offered men and women the chance to escape from their parents and to join a heterosocial peer culture. While movie houses and amusement parks were part of many young men’s and women’s dating repertoire and were incredibly popular, they appealed to men and women of all ages. Dance halls not only attracted men and women who were generally in their teens and early twenties but | 52 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

also encouraged the coupling up of men and women on the dance floor and in the adjoining halls and barrooms. The Sunday picnics and park visits that immigrants fondly recalled continued to figure prominently in their leisure routines. But their social lives were no longer limited or confined to these neighborhood and familial gatherings. As young couples stepped outside their own neighborhoods and communities, they found a burgeoning world of commercial leisure that promoted the intermingling of the sexes and offered the privacy for which many of them were looking. These men and women did, of course, find that their time in dance halls did not go unchallenged. The dance hall’s popularity and the opportunities it offered couples to experiment sexually, play with flirtation, and “put on style” quickly attracted the attention of middle-class reformers who were concerned about unregulated social intercourse. By the Progressive era, cities across the country were enacting rules and regulations that challenged many of the amenities that had initially attracted so many men and women, such as the alcohol, the intimacy, and the dance, and much of the autonomy for which the young patrons yearned was undermined. But dance hall patrons not only found ways to evade and undermine the rules they faced. They also shaped a dance hall culture that, while fractured along class, ethnic, and gender lines (as chapters 3 and 4 argue) still bound the different palaces, neighborhood halls, academies, and taxi-dance halls together and gave them a better sense of what to expect from their partners on and off the dance floor or wherever they decided to dance. By the 1890s, the traditional ball linked to mutual aid, educational, and political organizations was no longer the most popular place for working-class and immigrant youth to dance. Instead, young people began to set up what were typically called social and pleasure clubs and organized their own dances, or rackets, as they were sometimes called. Social clubs, with names like the Round Back Rangers, the East Side Crashers, and the Limburger Roarers, included anywhere from ten to fifty members who were in their mid- to late teens or early twenties. Members usually met once a week in saloons, settlement houses, rented halls, cigar stores, or cafes or in their own hangouts set up in the basements of tenement flats to smoke, play cards, gamble, and entertain their dates with dances, skits, | 53 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

and other games. Most social clubs also held a semiannual or annual affair in a neighborhood hall or an uptown hotel, using money raised through the sale of tickets and hat-check fees to pay for club activities, buy uniforms, and outfit and decorate their hangouts.5 The size of social club dances or “affairs” varied considerably. In Chicago, on December 8, 1917, the Progress A. C “gave their annual dance . . . to provide for more money for their treasury to carry on their athletic activities for the next season.” The crowd “consisted of all very young people, about 12 men to 8 girls.” The dances “were chiefly fox trot, one-step, waltz, and two-step, and the couples danced extremely close together.”6 That same night, in Chicago, the Blue Jay B. & S. Club, “an organization of men and young men mostly Irish,” held a dance to raise money for the “purpose of plenty of ‘good times.’” According to the ticket man, there were about four hundred people in attendance, which was “a very large number for the size of the hall.”7 By 1900, dancing academies had joined these new club dances as hall owners began to disassociate themselves from club sponsorship and opened their doors to anyone willing to pay admission. The “typical dancing academy,” according to the sociologist Henry Richard Edwards, gave “lessons during the day and on certain evenings, perhaps three in each week.” Teachers with a “recognized professional” or dancing master generally operated these schools and often devoted a good deal of their time to teaching ballet and “aesthetic dancing.”8 The remaining evenings and Sunday afternoons were either “reception nights” in which “pupils, their friends, and outsiders may come (for a price) to take part in general dancing; or the hall was leased to organizations to ‘run off’ affairs.” Dancing academies also usually held regular public dance nights each week with at least one but not more than two or three nights of instruction for beginners or for special classes.9 The emergence of the dancing academy directly reflected the growing craze for dance and the eagerness with which men and women sought out instruction, which may have helped legitimize dancing as a profession. But, through at least the first decade of the twentieth century, most dance halls remained attached to saloons. A survey, done in 1901, of New York’s Lower East Side found that 80 percent of dance halls were adjacent to saloons, with the sell of liquor serving as the main source of their profits.10 Nearly a decade later, Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Asso| 54 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

ciation asserted that the “public dance halls of Chicago were largely controlled by the saloon and vice interests, many of the halls being owned by the brewery companies.”11 In most cases, saloon dance halls were “merely an adjunct to a saloon and open to the promiscuous throng or let to any individual or group which desires to ‘runoff’ a dance.” Often adjoining the barroom on one side, and hidden partially by a screen, was a large room with tables where couples socialized and “from time to time, rise and whirl to the music of an unpleasant piano.”12 On the other side of the barroom was the toilet. Of the 278 dances Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Association investigated in 1915, in 139 of them the men’s bathroom was “reached only by going through the bar, and there is an unwritten code that the man who avails himself of this privilege must spend money for a drink.”13 In many of these halls, seating accommodations were scarce, and the boisterous and coarse nature of the men, who often “shouted at each other across the room,” accentuated by the “frequent screams” of women and the acrid smell of the men’s smoking and chewing tobacco, made the hall’s crowded conditions more apparent.14 When not attached to saloons, dance halls could be found almost anywhere. Investigators noted that some dance halls were in large lofts that accommodated “many hundreds of couples and [were] run solely as a money-making affair”; others were in outdoor pavilions on old athletic grounds.15 Second and third floors were “particularly popular” for dance halls, unlike cabarets, which were often located in basements. Other dances were held on the “upper floors of cheap tenements where the partition walls between the rooms had been cleared away to give the necessary space,” and sometimes more than one dance hall could be found in the same building.16 Dances were also held on building rooftops, in public schools, in rooms connected to movie houses (undoubtedly to capitalize on the massive crowds attracted to moving pictures), and in Raines Law Hotels, saloons that their owners had converted to hotels by attaching a number of small rooms that patrons could rent.17 By the second decade of the twentieth century, dance palaces had joined the dancing academies, the neighborhood or saloon halls, and the converted back rooms, as entrepreneurs became more ambitious and strove to meet the growing demand to dance. New York’s Grand Central Palace, which was the first dance palace, opened its doors in 1911. | 55 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

Within ten years, entrepreneurs had built five more in New York, the most famous being the Roseland and the Savoy. The Trianon and the Aragon led the pack in Chicago, as did the Raymor in Boston and the Hollywood Palladium and the Palomar in Los Angeles, while many smaller towns had their “Avalon, Dreamland, or Paradise.”18 Most palaces were brilliantly lighted and “electrically advertised” structures that occupied some of the best real estate locations in America’s largest cities; others were located near focal transportation points in the vicinity of good residential property.19 In New York, for example, they were usually located in the commercial amusement zones of the city along 42nd Street and Broadway, 14th Street, and 125th Street. Dance palaces often paid “tremendous rents” and generally accommodated from five hundred to three thousand patrons.20 Dance palaces were also a more elaborate and conspicuous commercialized attraction than earlier dance halls. The Vermont Garden, for example, had a saloon on the first floor and a pool hall, two wine rooms, and a men’s toilet on the second floor, while the dance hall occupied all of the third floor, with a balcony at the south end and a cloak room and a smoking room. Smoking rooms were, in fact, quite common in many of the larger halls, whereas smoking on the dance floor proper was usually prohibited.21 The palaces were ornately decorated with gilt drapes, columns, mirrors, and ornate chandeliers, as well as rococo murals and carved railings, and there were often two orchestras.22 The Aragon in Chicago, for example, was built to represent the patio of a Spanish building. The ceiling was blue, and there was “a manipulation of lighting effects to give the impression of changing cloud formations,” while the Trianon “was modeled after the Grand Trianon, one of the prides of France, famous throughout the world as an architectural masterpiece.”23 Dance hall entrepreneurs did not stop with the dance palace, however. By the 1920s, taxi-dance halls or closed halls (which were also called dancing academies because they offered some instruction) began to appear in increasing numbers in cities throughout the country.24 Observers often described taxi-dance halls as “more frankly commercial, primitive, and sordid” than either the club dance or the palace, and, according to one observer, the taxi-dance hall was a “direct descendant of the mining camp joint.”25 In addition, most taxi-dance halls were establishments “to which only the masculine ‘public’ is admitted.”26 They operated “under | 56 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

the pretense of teaching dancing though there may actually be little real instruction.”27 Instead, the dancing academy or taxi-dance hall hired women, known as hostesses or dime-a-dance girls, to dance with the male customers or clients who paid by the dance. Many of the men attracted to taxi-dance halls, noted Paul Cressey, who conducted an extensive study of Chicago’s taxi-dance halls in the 1920s, “enjoy dancing for its own sake [or] . . . crave youthful feminine society of a sort which can be enjoyed without the formality of introduction.” Other men took the dancing academy advertisement seriously and showed up for instruction. But according to Cressey, the dance hostesses made “no attempt to teach these men” and simply walked them about the hall in an “uncertain manner.” Thus, for most men, the taxi-dance hall was “a place of amusement, [and] not of instruction.”28 According to Cressey, the taxi-dance hall had its origins in the “Far West,” in what were called “49 dance halls” or in dance halls along the “Barbary Coast,” a red-light district in a tourist section of San Francisco. In these particular establishments, dancing was incidental to drinking, and the hostesses “secured their income not from dancing, but upon the amount of liquor which they could persuade the patrons to buy at the adjoining bar.” At the time of the Barbary Coast’s “abolition” in 1913, the so-called closed hall arose in the adjoining districts. In these establishments, the hostesses were employed to dance with male patrons on a “commission basis and salary,” earning ten cents per dance, and each dance lasted less than two minutes. By the 1920s, taxi-dance halls had spread to other cities, including Chicago and New York, and the number of such halls grew steadily throughout the decade. Chicago’s first taxi-dance hall opened in 1921 and was a “private dancing club,” called the Apolon Dancing Club, that was open only to Greeks. By 1925, a survey in New York reported that eight thousand women worked as taxi dancers and earned about thirty dollars a week, a wage significantly higher than that of the average office worker, who made between eighteen and twenty dollars a week. By July 1931, there were “reported to be nearly one hundred taxi-dance halls operating nightly in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone” and it was estimated that from “35,000 to 50,000 boys and men attended these halls each week.”29 Most taxi-dance halls did not simply replace the hangouts associated with the Barbary Coast, however. According to Cressey, the taxi-dance | 57 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

hall developed out of the struggle between the public ballroom and the older, less favorably located and equipped dance halls, which had to turn to the “taxi-dance hall plan as a means of forestalling business failure.” After 1910, the large and ornately equipped public ball rooms became increasingly popular, making it more difficult for the smaller and less embellished halls to survive. “With the rapid expansion of the city at the center and the pushing outward still farther of the adjoining areas of deterioration,” Cressey argues, “those older halls” were “forced frequently to adopt themselves to an entirely new clientele if they are to survive.” These changes took the “form either of lowered standards of supervision and conduct in the establishment” or of “a change in the institutional organization to attract a different patronage”; hence the rise of the taxidance hall.30 Taxi-dance halls were also generally less conspicuous than other dance halls and were removed from the “brightlight centers of the city,” such as the Loop in Chicago, where the dance palaces or “wonder ballrooms” prospered. Cressey noted that the taxi-dance hall flourished “exclusively in the zone of furnished rooms and in the central business district,” near the residences of a majority of its regular patrons, and they were generally harder to find.31 According to one observer, “every where they are found in some half-secluded region of the building.” If the building was tall, the hall was likely to be found on one of the upper floors; if located “on one of the lower floors, the dance hall is set well back from the street.”32 The Palace De Arts Dancing Academy, a Chicago taxi-dance hall of the 1920s, was “located on a sixth floor attic, in one of the most respectable-looking buildings on lower North Clark Street, outside of the Loop.” There were no lights glaring “from the place down on [to] the street, [and] no advertising signs shine out to direct the uninformed visitor.” “Its reputation is probably its only means of advertisement.”33 The Athenian, also in Chicago, was located in “a small, plain, three-story brick building,” with the first story being “occupied by a dog, cat, and bird store.” “The barking of dogs and singing of birds being very much in evidence as you enter the side door, which is the opening to the rickety stairway.”34 Taxi-dance halls were also somewhat smaller than the conspicuous dance palaces. According to Bert Perkins, who conducted a study of taxidance halls for a sociology class at the University of Chicago, when men | 58 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

entered a taxi-dance hall, they were usually greeted by a “group of men standing around the ticket office waiting to usher in any hesitant individuals and to see that no unwanted customers are let in.” After purchasing his tickets, the patron was “allowed to go into the dance hall proper which is well curtained and screened from view from the lobby.” The halls were usually “as large as a fair-sized gymnasium.”35 The Madison and Ashland Dancing Academy had a floor that was about one hundred feet wide and fifty feet long, and there was a six-piece orchestra located at the southwest corner of the hall and about thirty hostesses.36 The Colonial Dance Hall in New York was also “very spacious [and] . . . plainly decorated in modernistic style.” The “dance floor was railed off on three sides. On the fourth, alongside the windows, was a rostrum upon which sat a seven-piece negro jazz band.” Along the wall, there were seats for hostesses and patrons, and not far from the entrance there were several tables where refreshments were served.37 The arrival of the dance palace, the taxi-dance hall, and especially the end of the legitimate liquor trade, which reformers generally claimed was responsible for the conditions at most dances, did not significantly affect the dance hall’s decor and location. According to Collis Stocking, who conducted a survey of dance halls for the Pittsburgh Girls’ Conference in 1925, the “spacious, clean, well-kept places, while they do exist, are rare enough to be in no way typical.” Instead, he explained, “little effort” had been made to make the dance halls “aesthetically attractive.” Few were “totally barren of decorations, but [had] grotesque mural designs with tawdry ceiling hangings.” In some of the smaller halls where smoking was prohibited in the dance-room proper, it was “rare that suitable smoking rooms are furnished.” Instead, Stocking noted that “there is nothing more than a toilet room [for smoking], crowded with rubbish, ill-ventilated, with a stifling repugnant odor” and “grossly inadequate in size for the number of people it is supposed to accommodate.”38 To be more specific, he claimed that “any vacant enclosed space is a potential dance hall,” just as in previous decades. Many dance halls, Stocking explained, were nothing more than “converted store buildings where little has been done other than to clear [off] the soft wood floor and to place a few chairs or benches along the wall”; others were little more than a “refurbished auditorium” made suitable by “removing the seats.”39 | 59 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

While Stocking may have exaggerated the extent to which the typical dance hall was a dingy, ill-ventilated back room or converted auditorium, the dance hall’s generally shabby decor did not diminish the enthusiasm with which men and women patronized these amusements. In his study of commercial leisure, done in 1915, Edwards found that a significant number of men and women attended dances. Cleveland, for example, had a population of 560,663 in 1910 and had 130 “dance halls where pay dances were given.” On one evening in Cleveland, he found five thousand girls and 6,500 young men at the seventy-nine public dances he visited. In Kansas City, between April 1911 and April 1912, when the population was around 250,000, the weekly attendance at “all types of dancing places” was 16,566. Louisville, a city of 223,928, had thirtythree dance halls, while New York had more than five hundred public dance halls registered, which contemporaries claimed constituted a veritable “craze.” The number of people who patronized dance palaces was no less astonishing. By 1924, the fancier dance palaces, gardens, parks, and ballrooms were attracting six million patrons in New York City alone and nearly that many in Chicago.40 Dance halls, however, were never limited to large cities like New York and Chicago. When cities across the country began establishing legislation to regulate dance halls before World War I, the first laws enacted were in cities like Bayonne, New Jersey; Plymouth, Pennsylvania; and Beaumont, Texas. By the 1920s, dance halls could be found anywhere. When the Children’s Bureau in 1924, sent inquiries in regard to the municipal regulation of public dances to 492 cities, 416 replied. Of those, 240 cities had specific ordinances, and seventy-four of the cities that had no ordinances were located in states in which state laws were in effect. In short, dance halls had not only spread across the country but had also attracted enough attention to spur the enactment of legislation to regulate them in large and small cities alike.41 Public dance halls were also likely to attract an immigrant and working-class clientele. In many cases, dance halls were located in or around immigrant and working-class neighborhoods. Chicago’s Gaelic Park, for example, was located south and west of the stockyards in a “large Polish district” and drew its clientele largely from men and women of Polish, Irish, and Slavic ancestry who lived in the surrounding areas. The girls, in particular, came from stockyard “families of Polish, Lithuanian, Bo| 60 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

hemian, or Irish antecedents.”42 At the same time, working-class and immigrant couples could be found at the fancier dance halls. Almost all the larger public dance halls had a more heterogenous crowd on Saturday nights than on other nights, which according to one observer attracted “girls” whose “ages ranged from twelve to forty” and who were “of all classes and degrees,” including “the sleek and semi-civilized type of business man with his wife or stenographer.” But contemporaries were quick to note that “their habitues” were usually “lower in social rank than the patrons of good cabarets and restaurants,” and many of the dance hall’s patrons were immigrants or their children.43 Constance Weinberg and Saul Alinsky, who were sociology students at the University of Chicago, noted that Chicago’s Dreamland was “patronized extensively by Italians, by Poles and Bohemians, and by Jews.”44 Valentino Lazzaretti, for example spent much of his leisure time dancing at some of Chicago’s fancier dance halls. After immigrating to the United States in 1912, Lazzaretti initially lived with his family on a farm in Iowa. His family went back to Italy when he was sixteen, but he convinced his father to let him return to the United States, where he settled in Chicago with his cousins. At first, Lazzaretti’s recreation was limited to his neighborhood, which in his case meant “the neighborhood there at the boarding house.” “The old custom from the coal mines,” he explained, “was kept up for a few years.” But as Lazzaretti grew older, his leisure was restricted only by his knowledge of the city. Lazzaretti recalled that once he “learned the city,” he “started dancing at different ballrooms, Merry Gardens . . . Dance Paradise, the Trianon, [and] the Aragon,” where he “learned to dance the modern dances.”45 The growing popularity of the dance hall, Kathy Peiss argues, reflected changes in women’s work and a shrinking work week. As the United States’s economy began to expand during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Euro-American women found greater opportunities to escape domestic and personal service for wage work in factories and in white-collar employment. In 1900, 11 percent of women were in clerical and sales work. By 1930, that figure had increased to 35 percent. The majority of clerical workers in the United States—50 percent—were native-born women with native-born parents. But 41 percent were the daughters of the foreign-born, and about 7 percent were born in Europe. In cities with large populations of immigrants, Sharon | 61 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

Strom argues, “the tendency of immigrant families to place daughters in clerical jobs was even more dramatic.” In Chicago, for example, nearly 60 percent of all women clerical workers were the daughters of immigrants, and 10 percent were foreign born.46 The number of hours women worked was also changing during this same period. Although irregular hours and seasonal employment characterized much of women’s work, between 1880 and 1920 the hours for women wage earners in factories and stores decreased. In 1885, for example, the work day ranged from ten to seventeen hours. By 1910, the long days were much less common. Millinery workers, for example, often worked fourteen hours a day in 1885, but, by 1914, they typically put in a nine- to ten-hour day. A study of female wage earners in lower Manhattan confirmed the shrinking work week and found that nearly two-thirds of women worked fewer than ten hours a day. Indeed, by 1914 twenty-seven states had established some type of regulation regarding women’s working hours. Three years later, only nine states had no laws limiting the number of hours women spent at the workplace.47 The decreasing number of hours spent at work, Peiss argues, contributed to the rise of commercial leisure and to the idea that rigid boundaries separate work from play. Work in factories or performing clerical work contrasted sharply with personal and domestic service where women sandwiched moments of play in between the endless and monotonous hours of household chores they performed; in addition, women in personal service might be on call twenty-four hours a day, making it nearly impossible for them to find time for leisure. Either way, such women had very few moments to relax and even less time to leave their places of work or homes for an evening out at a dance hall. The rise of white-collar work and the decreasing hours spent at labor not only provided more opportunities for leisure but also effectively separated the worlds of work and leisure. Women no longer had to mix moments of pleasure with their work day. They now recognized distinct boundaries separating the two and increasingly expected that when it was time to play, they required more than a moment of leisure snatched away from a seemingly endless and exhausting day of work. At the same time, the incredible popularity of dances partly grew out of the opportunities and social space dance halls offered their patrons to experiment with new types of relationships and identities. By the late | 62 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social dance was undergoing many significant changes. The waltz, which appeared in the nineteenth century, was initially greeted with some alarm among high society because it was the first dance not confined to a group formation and because it permitted closer contact between the partners. But as Peiss argues, “the dance form [of the waltz] countered that intimacy with injunctions towards stiff control and agile skill.” The waltz, for example, demanded “self control and training to achieve the proper form.” The partners did, indeed, place their hands on each other, but their shoulders were expected to be three to four inches apart, and the distance between their bodies, when performed properly, “should increase downward.”48 The new social dances that dominated the dance scene around the turn of the century stood in diametric opposition to the waltz and its penchant for control. According to the choreographer and dance scholar Agnes De Mille, in the new social dances “the entire body posture of both partners, the spread of step, the speed and zip, the grace and seemliness, belonged to the new century. Everything was more natural, more vigorous, and less artificial than any dancing done in the previous four hundred years.”49 In the late 1890s and early 1900s, pivoting, spieling, and tough dancing began to replace the traditional waltz and two-step. While the waltz required “stiff control and agile skill” to reach the speed of the expected performance, contemporaries described spieling as a “dance out of control” that demanded “much twirling and twisting.”50 The tough dances were even more reckless. Tough dances, also known as rag and animal dances and including the turkey trot, the bunny hug, and the grizzly bear, were rooted in the black vernacular tradition and had their origins on the Barbary Coast. Unlike the principally European dances, with their practice of holding the body erect, these dances are performed from a crouched position, with the knees flexed and the body bent at the waist. Many of these dances imitate animal gestures and movements while celebrating improvisation and individual expression and are performed to a propulsive rhythm, giving them a swinging motion and a more sensual and sexually expressive look and feel.51 Many men and women—especially moral reformers or investigators—also identified dancing with sex. Throughout the early twentieth century, when working-class couples danced, they were often described as being vicious, pernicious, rude, or vulgar or as “not dancing at all but | 63 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

[practicing] a series of indecent antics to the accompaniment of music.” When the Committee of Fourteen, a moral reform agency in New York committed to ending vice, sent Natalie D. Sonichsen to the Harlem Casino in 1912, she reported that the place was packed with people so that the dances were all the “nigger” and “shivers.” The floor, in fact, gave her “the impression of one wild orgy because of the perfectly unrestrained actions of those dancing.”52 At about the same time, in Kansas City, Missouri, all the dances that required some “dipping”—the Boston Dip being the most common, along with the “hammerlock hold,” which consisted of the man placing his arms under the girl’s and holding her shoulder with his wrists—appalled the Board of Public Welfare. The Board found the Castle Walk particularly disturbing because in the dance “the couple takes a series of stiff-legged steps with knees and thighs in contact practically all the time.”53 At taxi-dance halls, the dancing was also denounced as indecent, with the “hostesses rubbing their bodies against men and wriggling,”54 a sight that convinced one observer that a “whore wouldn’t do [dance like] that.”55 When the girls were more “chummy” with their partners, explained one investigator, they allowed “them to take them around the dance floor with the man dancing with the girl’s back facing him and his hand on her breasts, the man rubbing his body against the girl’s.”56 In this kind of dancing, women almost always captured more attention than their male partners because of the obsession middle-class reformers had with instilling the virtues of “true womanhood.” But after watching the dancing at a taxi-dance hall, one investigator noted that the dancing was not simply obscene, nor did he single out the women for being unladylike. Instead, he described what he saw as “mutual masturbation rather than dancing,” suggesting that both partners offered an overtly sensual and explicitly sexual performance.57 There was, of course, some rhyme and reason to the social organization of working-class dance. While historians have noted that dancing was popular throughout the United States and at every kind of dance hall, the manner in which men and women danced varied considerably, and certain tastes and regional distinctions prevailed.58 In the 1920s, Gregory Mason found that the “Far West” was “more partial to the Waltz than the East.” In Seattle, in 1923, he continued, “one prominent dance-palace was offering as many waltzes as fox-trots,” a “taste” that he | 64 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

concluded would not be “tolerated by connoisseurs along the Atlantic Coast.” “Another safe generalization,” he noted, was that “the tango is rarely danced in the small town hall, whereas in the big cities it is done much more frequently and more skillfully than half a decade ago.”59 Other observers argued that certain dances held sway in different dance halls throughout the same district or neighborhood. Many taxidance halls, for example, posted lists of the types of dancing in which they specialized on the front door, no doubt a perfunctory gesture to appease the wrath of reformers who had targeted the taxi-dance hall as illegitimate but also one that might discourage the dancing novice seeking lessons.60 The public dance halls and dance palaces also specialized in certain types of dancing. Weinberg and Alinsky claimed that “not all dance halls are of the same type and rating.” Instead, there was a “system of social graduation” from one dance hall to another, which they argued was “comparable to our school system of graduation from one institution to another.” The “grammar schools,” they argued, were Dreamland, White City, and the small public neighborhood dance halls. At these halls, they continued, “one finds youngsters who are just starting out,” which meant “girls of twelve and boys of fifteen.” “Next in line,” after a person had outgrown “the associates of [their] earlier stomping ground,” were the “high schools,” such as Midway Garden, Arcadia, and Merry Garden. Once dancers had joined the “elite of the dance hall world,” they went to the “colleges”—the Trianon, the Aragon, and the Paradise.61 The system of classification and social graduation was so complete that dance halls that were adjacent to one another or in the same neighborhood belonged to different “schools.” At White City Ballrooms in the 1920s, a Chicago dance hall run in connection with the amusement park White City, the two dance halls, the Casino and the Ballroom, catered to different dancers. The Casino was “slightly smaller” and more “gaily decorated” than the Ballroom and attracted a “younger crowd.” The music was “more peppy,” and there were “no restrictions in the way of trick steps.” Weinberg and Alinsky, in fact, claimed that “one is astonished at the intricacy of the dancing and the amount of physical labor so expended,” which provided patrons a way to measure the dancers’ prestige. The intricacy of the dancing resulted in more of a “closed crowd” at the Casino than at the Ballroom “because one must have danced with | 65 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

the same person a long time to be able successfully to negotiate the syncopated hopping” that was “in vogue.” As might be expected, there were “a certain number of outsiders who [had] drifted in from the Ballroom” who were “easily recognized by their comparatively conservative dancing.”62 The Ballroom had “a larger, older, and more heterogenous crowd” than the Casino. The lights were “dimmer” and “the music was more seductive than peppy,” while the dancing was “fairly decent, due to the efficiency of the bouncers.” Ages of the dancers at the Ballroom ranged from fifteen to fifty, unlike the Casino, “where girls’ ages varied from 12 to 18.” Weinberg and Alinsky even claimed that in the Ballroom the crowd was “far too heterogeneous for any type of accurate classification,” with “girls” varying “from naive youngsters in their early teens to vicious middle-aged looking women who make no attempt to conceal their purpose.” But they dared to guess that the largest group was somewhere in between and was made up of “the shop girl and telephone operator type,” girls who “earn fifteen to eighteen dollars a week and manage to subsist on that amount,” while the majority of men “appear to be steel workers, clerks, and skilled laborers of various types.”63 The system of social graduation as described by Weinberg and Alinsky was more rigid than the reality. For example, they favored the dance palaces like the Trianon and the Aragon as the “elite of the dance hall world,” which were generally more heterogenous than the neighborhood hall and were more likely to attract dancers with wide-ranging skills and talent, including middle-class patrons. But a system of social graduation undoubtedly prevailed. The different types of dances combined with the skills required for the performance allowed for certain styles and levels of expertise to dominate, which gave men and women a better sense of what to expect from each other on and off the dance floor and undoubtedly soothed the anxiety they may have felt about finding a dance partner of similar ability and style. While men and women could attend any dance hall they pleased, they often avoided certain ones if they were unfamiliar with the intricacy of the steps that were popular in certain halls, suggesting that some dance halls were likely to be organized primarily around various skill levels and only secondarily by class. This arrangement differentiates the dance halls from the amusement parks, where, as Kathy Peiss argues, class distinctions generally prevailed.64 | 66 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

Weinberg and Alinsky also suggest that a dance culture that was age segregated was starting to replace the traditional social club affair, which included young and old alike. Men and women got their start at the “grammar schools” when they were twelve to fifteen years old and then moved on to the high schools and colleges of the dance world when their level of expertise and age increased. And even when they attended the larger ballrooms, which generally attracted a more heterogenous crowd, the “vicious middle-aged women” they observed were prostitutes while the majority of those in attendance consisted of shopgirls and laborers of “various sorts.” To be sure, the traditional “affair” remained popular throughout the 1910s and 1920s, as did the participation of adults and parents. At a Jewish benevolent group dance, in 1917, for example, one investigator described the dance as a “family affair,” and “many parents and little children were present.” Several small boys were even admitted into the barroom, while “coffee, cakes, apples, and other fruit were sold on the floor.”65 On New York’s East Side, about a decade later, Gregory Mason found “many a solidly Jewish organization a-shimmying, while elsewhere one may stumble on to the soirees of Italian spaghetti vendors, Pullman porters, and Bohemian buttonhole makers.” But despite the continued importance of the traditional affair, opportunities for young men and women to hang out with their peers were much more prevalent than they had been during preceding decades, and, even at the traditional affairs and fraternal dances, certain changes were evident. According to Mason, while a certain “foreign color remains,” and while the dance “showed a great deal of local flavor,” in nearly every case the men and women in attendance had “abandoned their tribal steps for the rhythmic walking and wiggling which have become the national dance of the United States.”66 Dance halls were also popular because they made introductions easier for young men and women who felt restricted by their parents when they were around their own homes and neighborhoods. As one young man explained his attraction to dance halls: “When you see a cute looking girl on the street you can’t go up and talk to her but at a dance hall you can.”67 Some men even boasted that they went to dance halls every Saturday and Sunday “to get a piece of tail” and claimed that “they get what they come for always.”68 Indeed, throughout the period and at every type of dance, couples had numerous chances to begin what one | 67 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

investigator called “a career of promiscuous social intercourse.”69 At most dance halls, many men and women were seen “standing at one side of the hall squeezing and embracing each other continually,” or women could “be seen sitting in the laps of men and submitting themselves to the most careless sort of handling.”70 If such facilities were available, couples simply used the row of tables surrounding the dance hall for close embraces or retired to an adjoining room used for drinking. At the Progress Athletic Association’s annual dance at Chicago’s Dania Hall, in 1917, the basement in the back of the barroom, which housed rows of tables where the couples sat and had their drinks, also served as the site of what reformers undoubtedly labeled a “brazen petting party.” At about 11:30 P.M., twenty couples occupied the room, and, after “having their quota of liquor,” they “became very affectionate, and practically without exception hugging and kissing prevailed.”71 Of course, the dance hall did not simply promote a career of “promiscuous social intercourse,” as some investigators insisted. Among many contemporaries, dance halls also had the reputation of being the “parlor of certain classes,” affording men and women opportunities otherwise denied them on the streets of their neighborhoods where parents were nearby. Ted Webber, a publicity agent for Chicago’s White City in the 1920s, often told the story of a boy who met a girl at a dance hall, courted her there, and some months later married her, “never during this time having seen her home or, in fact, having seen the girl outside of the dance hall.”72 Angeline Tonietto, whose parents emigrated from Italy, also recalled that many of her friends started their courtships at dance halls. According to Tonietto, who grew up in Chicago in the 1920s, some of her friends met at high school “and through dancing. . . . Several of my friends have met fellas in dance halls. They became acquainted, Became good friends. Got married [and] they’re still married to this day.”73 More than a decade later, Robert Bonadonna, who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1920s and 1930s, met his first wife at a Knights of Columbus dance. “Part of the bond that we formed together,” explained Bonadonna, “was as we’re dancing around the dance floor.” As Bonadonna and his future wife were dancing and “exchanging opinions,” they were “surprised to find” that they were both atheists, which they agreed was “a nice marvelous thing to have in common.”74 For many men and women, then, dance halls could be a great deal of | 68 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

fun. The often sexually explicit dancing, along with the drink that flowed freely and the large numbers of single and eager men and women who were free from their parents’ watchful eyes was a combination that might lead to romance and intimacy. But rather than stepping out in between every dance, couples participated in a collective sexual culture that took shape in the adjoining galleries and hallways, a culture that separated them from their middle-class counterparts. Clara Row, a sociology student at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, admitted that the public expressions of affection she witnessed at dance halls shocked and amazed her. According to Row, The men stood around between dances with their arms around the girls in a much more open fashion than they do at the dances to which I am accustomed, and the girls accepted it in a calm, matter of fact way that showed that they were quite used to it. Of course, ordinarily with “our” kind of people, people of “good taste,” that sort of thing isn’t done for the benefit of an audience, therefore if indulged in at all at a dance, it must be outside where it is not observed of all beholders. Perhaps the fact that neither the girls nor men seemed to have inhibitions of that sort accounted for the fact that there was less sitting in the automobiles that were parked close to the pavilion at Gaelic Park, and on the benches that surrounded Polonia, than I would have expected.75

As Row’s comments make clear, not only did the sexual behavior she witnessed offend her, but middle-class men and women, her “kind of people, people of ‘good taste,’” may have preferred to organize intimate relations in a fashion somewhat different from that practiced at Gaelic Park or at Polonia. That is, while middle-class men and women often confronted obstacles that limited their contact when they went dancing (e.g., the placement of tables and the stage at cabarets), they may have simply preferred more private sexual encounters. At the least, they favored a sort of intimacy that separated them from their working-class and immigrant counterparts, who embraced a public sexual culture that allowed them to express openly their disdain not only for middle-class ideas about refinement and grace but also for their parents’ desire to arrange relationships or supervise their sexual behavior.76 These working-class couples did, of course, confront some obstacles along the way. By the early twentieth century the Progressive movement | 69 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

was well under way as Americans from all walks of life became increasingly concerned about the problems associated with a rapidly developing urban-industrial economy. These “progressive” reformers began to challenge boss politics, power-hungry corporations, the abuses of factory life, and the interests of vice, including commercial amusements.77 As early as 1893 in Bayonne, New Jersey, an ordinance was passed “prohibiting any girl under 16 years of age from attending a dance hall unless accompanied by one of her parents or her legal guardian.” In 1902, Plymouth, Pennsylvania, passed an ordinance “requiring a license issued by the burgess for all public halls and dances to which an admission fee is charged.” The ordinance also stipulated that “halls or rooms in which a dance is held must be closed no later than 1 A.M. [and] prohibit[ed] the attendance of any person under 16 years of age unless accompanied by parents.”78 Between 1910 and 1913, the pace of legislation quickened, as reformers across the country became obsessed with dance halls. Cities including Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Newark, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Portland (Oregon), Kansas City, Oakland, and Duluth established ordinances regulating the operation of dance halls. Among other things, these ordinances compelled hall owners to pay for licensing fees, to comply with city codes regarding sanitation and the location of amusement halls, to regulate dancing styles, to prohibit the attendance of underage patrons, especially girls, and to establish limits on the hours of operation. The push for laws to regulate dance halls stalled during World War I but resumed wholeheartedly with the end of the conflict.79 In 1929, Ellen Gardner, who conducted a national study of dance halls for the Department of Labor, reported that about 75 percent of the more far-reaching ordinances had been enacted after 1918 and that, by 1929, twenty-eight states had laws “that specifically regulated the operation of public dances and public dance halls.” The ordinances passed after 1918 were very similar to their World War I predecessors. In general, state and municipal laws related to licensing, suitability of the grounds on which the dance was to be held, character of applicants, minimum age of patrons, hours when minors could attend, Sunday closing, conduct of dancers, types of dances, and supervision by police officers or qualified matrons. The rules and regulations enacted before and after World War I had some effect on the day-to-day operation of dance halls. But the most | 70 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

troublesome problem for the men and women in attendance was having to deal with some sort of supervision, and not just from moral reformers or vice investigators. In almost every type of hall throughout the early twentieth century, policemen often made a point of showing up unexpectedly, and when “subdued lights were used and the hall became almost totally dark,” they moved to the center of the floor to prohibit “certain styles of dancing.”80 Some halls even used police matrons or policewomen. Policewomen were “public officers [usually with a background in social work] vested with police powers” to enable them to “deal with all cases which come to the attention of the police in which women and children are involved.” Their duties included the “supervision and enforcement of the laws concerning dance halls, skating rinks, moving picture shows, and similar places of public entertainment; the suppression of objectionable bill-board displays; [and] the search for missing persons.”81 In addition to policewomen or matrons, moral reform agencies such as the Chicago Juvenile Protective Association provided supervisors to oversee the halls. In 1917, for example, the Juvenile Protective Association reported that on three separate occasions it “furnished social workers, to supervise Italian dance halls.”82 In the larger palaces, owners or managers hired their own dance supervisors, or floor men, as they were sometimes called. At New York’s White City Casino and Dance Hall, in 1911, a “supervisor of dancing dressed in a white palm beach suit” was often seen standing in the middle of the dance floor. “He seemed almost a mechanical toy,” insisted one man. First “he looked to the right for a few minutes and then to the left.”83 More than a decade later, supervisors remained a conspicuous feature of the dance hall and floor. At Chicago’s White City, in the 1920s, the management instructed floor men to watch for the use of intoxicating liquors, women smoking, immodest dancing, patrons sitting on each other’s laps, and any “unruly” person. They were also expected to supervise the crowd as it was “checking out,” watching to make sure that the “crowd will stay in line” and to “keep them from pushing and jamming, and adjust any trouble that may come up.”84 Of course, the presence of vice investigators or hall supervisors did not always mean that dancers were closely observed, despite the prevalence of dance hall ordinances and the zeal with which some reformers condemned the dance hall.85 When Chicago’s Juvenile Protective | 71 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

Association began investigating dance halls in 1910, many observers reported that most policemen failed in their duties. Of the 278 dances the Juvenile Protective Association attended in 1911, a total of 202 police officers were present at 158 dances. Of those, the Juvenile Protective Association claimed that “only seventeen were attempting in any other way to enforce the law than by interfering when a fight was in progress.”86 The rest of the time, investigators complained, they were drinking freely and on at least two occasions officers “were endeavoring to lead young girl patrons astray.”87 While the Juvenile Protective Association may have been overly critical of the police, about ten years later Ellen Gardner also found that some investigators failed in their duties. Gardner noted that most inspectors were “conscientious, interested, and anxious to do creditable work.” The majority of inspectors, she reported, “spent at least 20 minutes to half an hour at a well-attended dance, scrutinized the crowd fairly carefully to see if any very young-looking persons were present unchaperoned, glanced in the dressing rooms, and possibly spoke with the manager or hostess.” Yet, she still found that some investigators only made “the most perfunctory visits and ignored or failed to see questionable conditions in the halls” or felt no responsibility for “searching out one night dances and club affairs and did not go to them unless . . . they ‘just happened to.’”88 Police officers and vice investigators were not the only ones to ignore “questionable conduct.” Hall owners eager to make big profits also failed to regulate their patrons’ behavior and instead encouraged the drinking and dancing. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some hall owners employed spielers lest there be an unattached woman, or wall flower, as she was called. The spieler did not excel in a particular “style of dancing” but was a “young man whose strongest recommendation is that he is a skilled and untiring dancer,” a “youth” who had no “other livelihood than assisting the dance master with his pupils.” The “business of the spieler is to attract and interest young girls,” “look after the wall flowers,” and seek out “the girl who sits alone against the wall.” He “dances with her and brings other partners to her.” Some investigators even lamented that the spieler made “it his duty to point out those seeking . . . the girls whose ‘good time’ can be prolonged beyond the dancing floor.” Either way, he was the dance hall’s jack-of| 72 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

all-trades who made it his business to “keep everybody happy and everybody busy,” especially young and lonely women.89 By the 1920s, the spieler had become much less common, as entrepreneurs shifted some of their attention to men and began providing hostesses to dance with the unattached ones, no doubt because of the disproportionate number of men who attended dance halls and the greater resources they commanded.90 “In some cities,” remarked one observer, the dance palaces had “made provision for the man who cannot easily secure dance partners on the ballroom floor by having ‘hostesses’ on hand for him to employ.” The professional hostesses some dance palaces provided served the same function as the taxi-dance hall for many men and cost nearly as much. During the fiscal year 1922– 1923, the twenty-two instructors at a typical Manhattan palace “trotted with 57,221 men at the rate of thirty-five cents for each three dances, the hall netting $20,027.35 from this source alone.”91 But these hostesses were not “the only women in the establishment,” separating the palace hostess from the taxi dancer, “where to dance at all a man must dance with them [taxi dancers].” At California’s Rose Ball Room in 1920s, the girls who were hired “by the ballroom to dance with patrons stand on one side of the room, while the girls who have merely come up to dance stand on the other side.”92 Most dance halls also featured special dance nights or integrated them into the regular night’s activities to further stimulate patronage and to encourage the good times for which many patrons were searching. Some dance nights were designed to attract or expand the hall’s clientele; for example, some dancing academies offered a beginner’s night or a married couple’s night.93 But dance nights also pandered to the sensual. A New York taxi-dance hall, in the 1930s, designated Thursday nights as “kiddy night,” when all hostesses were required to be clad in “kiddy costumes.” Most women wore “only flimsy rompers or thin silk ‘shorts’ and brassieres” and other “scanty attire,” which “contributed to the lasciviousness” that “seemed to reach its height on Thursday night.”94 Masque balls were another popular attraction, which served to “heighten the boisterous conduct.”95 At masque balls, guests rented costumes and masks and, according to one observer, “appear in very gala fashion indeed.” At a masquerade ball held at Chicago’s Vandorf’s Hall, in 1917, | 73 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

for example, one observer noted that women were dressed up like troubadours, girls, or clowns, and some sported Egyptian costumes. The ball included a grand march, and “confetti and serpentine” were handed out at 9 P.M., which one observer noted led to the “men sticking a handful of confetti down the front of the womens’ [sic] gowns.”96 The most popular dance was the shadow dance, in which “the rays of all kinds of colored lights are thrown upon [the dancers] from the upper galleries.” Investigators claimed that this dance was possible only in the large dance halls because it cost the proprietor some money.97 At a shadow dance, in 1911, at New York’s Terrace Gardens, which could accommodate crowds as large as fifteen hundred, “the ceiling lights are turned out and the spotlight search light or magic lantern apparatus plays colored lights on the dancers.” According to one investigator the dancing that followed was the “acme of objectionable amusement,” because couples took advantage of the “semi darkness to indulge in lewd embraces and sensuous dancing.”98 At New York’s Silver Casino, the shadow dance was even more elaborate. “During part of the waltz,” the “dancers are bathed in rose-colored lights, which change suddenly to purple, a blue, or a green. Some very weird effects are made, the lights being so manipulated that the dancers’ shadows are thrown, greatly magnified, on walls and floor.” At intervals, “a rain of bright-colored confetti” poured “down from above,” and the scene was a “bacchanalia” with “color, light, music, confetti, [and] the dance,” all of which combined to produce “an intense and voluptuous intoxication which the revelers deepen with drink.”99 Off the dance floor, hall owners also encouraged patrons to indulge themselves. In most dance halls, the dancing lasted from three to five minutes, while the intermission lasted much longer, generally anywhere from fifteen to forty-five minutes, a period one observer described as “listless pauses before ‘doing it all over again.’”100 During the time between dances, patrons helped themselves to what one investigator called “happy fluid.” “At the refreshment counter,” which was either located at one end of the dance hall, in an adjoining room, or on another floor, “they come in droves between dances.”101 In many cases, “the girls stand up at the bar along with the boys, and buy their own refreshments,”102 and some of the larger halls had what they called the “wine room,” “where liquor was served to the ladies.”103 Usually, however, most | 74 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

women “would stand around . . . while their escorts brought drinks to them.” Getting men to “buy things to drink,” argued Belle Lindner Israels was “the acme of achievement in retailing experiences with the other sex.”104 The length of the intermission undoubtedly reflected the intensity of the “fast and furious” dancing in which many patrons engaged and their need to rest. But long intermissions also meant larger profits for hall owners. Bowen insisted that the saloon keeper “lives and thrives by the sale of liquor,” which meant that “the dances are short, four to five minutes, [and] the intermission is long fifteen to forty five minutes thus giving ample opportunity for drinking.” In halls where liquor was unavailable, she argued that the “intermissions are short and dances long,” which she insisted was “an argument for divorcing the sale of liquor from the dance hall.”105 Julia Schoenfeld, a Committee of Fourteen investigator in New York, even claimed that the “character of a place may often be rated according to the time allowed for drinking [which] stands in ratio to the dancing periods.” In a well-mannered dancing academy,” she explained, “there may probably be a ten-minute period for dancing, with five minutes intermission for rest and refreshments.”106 At the same time, assorted bartenders, waiters, and managers openly ignored dance hall rules and clandestinely slipped beer to their patrons after the bar had closed. At a Chicago dance, in 1917, one investigator overheard some one he took to be a host tell a patron to “not worry and go on with the dance and he would see that the beer got around to the girls.”107 At other halls, patrons could purchase tickets for wine and beer before the bar closed and then redeem them any time before the hall closed; waiters also sold alcohol after the bar was closed. At Chicago’s Schoenhofer’s Hall, in 1917, one observer reported that “the waiters carried in about eight cases of beer and placed them under a table at the end of the hall” about twenty minutes before twelve. Within ten minutes after the bar closed, the “waiter sold a case of beer to a group of young people at one end of the tables.”108 Special prizes or contests during intermission further encouraged the unrestrained behavior for which dance halls were known. At one Chicago dance hall, for example, the dancing was regularly interrupted to allow the manager to make his “customary” megaphone announcements: “There will be a novelty party next Friday evening, at which each | 75 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

lady who attends will be given a Japanese parasol.” The manager also assured the crowd that a “dozen silk and crepe kimonos will be given away as prizes to the ladies holding lucky numbers,” which was followed by “short applause” on the part of the men and “murmurs of interest by the girls.” Other halls held lucky number contests and prizes in connection with masquerade and fancy dress balls, while some dance halls featured beauty contests. Beauty contests consisted “of an exhibit of portrait photographs of girls who attend the dance hall more or less regularly. . . . Each photo has a number on it for the voter to use in marking his ballot for the lady of his choice,” which in some cases might include as many as two hundred women.109 Other halls held contests on special occasions. At Chicago’s Dreamland, in the 1920s, Weinberg and Alinsky found “a pumpkin on display in the lobby” and a prize to be given to the person who could “come closest to guessing the number of seeds in the pumpkin.”110 Prizes for the different contests were often as innocent as cheap jewelry, perfume, or cigars and other goods donated “by the neighboring tradesman.”111 At some dances, hall owners conducted raffles “with the idea that they will add to the popularity of the dance.” The articles raffled “embrace almost everything from chocolates to a goat.”112 Prizes for dance contests often consisted of cash, whereas candy was usually “the reward for the fortunate ones” when it came to lucky number contests. Before Prohibition, some investigators insisted that alcohol was regularly handed out as prizes. At a Chicago dance hall, in 1911, prizes for the best costume consisted of a “barrel of beer” for the “best group of men” and “a dozen bottles of wine to the best group of girls.” Investigators for Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Association claimed, in 1917, that prizes were awarded to a woman who “would drink the greatest number of glasses of liquor during the evening,” and some places went “so far as to offer prizes of $100 to the girls who at the end of the month had the largest number of drinks placed to their credit.”113 The extent to which hall owners encouraged drinking or openly ignored the rules and regulations they were expected to enforce is difficulty to say, but some evidence suggests that the behavior of the dance hall patrons varied depending upon the type of hall. One observer noted that the larger and centrally located halls were “ordinarily owned by a company and operated by a company manager” who was “held entirely | 76 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

responsible for the place.” Dreamland, in Chicago, for example, was one of four dance halls owned by the same company.114 In order to handle the large groups of people that were attracted to this type of hall, the “management must require uniformly dignified conduct and must efficiently enforce local regulations.”115 The owner of the privately owned or lodge hall, “even in cities where he, as the licensee is responsible for the conduct,” was likely to “feel that the person to whom he rents his hall should be held responsible.” As a result, “the conduct on different nights may vary greatly, depending entirely on the character of the group which rents the hall.”116 Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, middle-class reformers and vice investigators successfully established laws regulating dance-hall behavior. But while many hall owners closely supervised the conduct in their halls, many more of them suffered from an “amusing two-mindedness.”117 On the one hand, they were “ever alert for furtive investigators” and “seek to impress the stranger with the propriety of their background.” On the other hand, the dance hall was about making money, and “their prey is not attracted by prudery.” Consequently, the “clever” businessmen, noted Gregory Mason, remembered that although “their patrons relish an appearance of purity they do not enjoy the actual state” and, like one Chicago proprietor, admonished his “subordinates to ‘keep this place clean, but not too clean.’”118 Of course, while hall owners and managers may have been eager to make big profits and therefore encouraged their patrons to indulge themselves, they also found it extremely difficult to regulate the conduct of their patrons, who routinely defied dance hall rules. When it came to alcohol, for example, many men and women simply purchased cases of wine and beer “before midnight and placed [them] under the table for late consumption.”119 “Stray couples” also avoided the “refreshment counter” and took advantage of the dark corners to drink or headed for the gallery where young boys about “10 and 11 years [could be seen] collecting empty beer bottles [and] returning them to the bar.”120 Other men and women were much more confrontational and drank while dancing. An investigator from Pittsburgh, in the 1920s, “noticed a chap who did not feel it necessary to . . . retire to the smoking room to drink, simply standing nonchalantly on the dance floor while gulping what appeared to be whiskey.”121 Even more bold were the men who brought in | 77 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

their own beer and then tried to check it in with their coats apparently on the assumption that they could retrieve it whenever they pleased.122 When dark corners or galleries were unavailable or when patrons refused to pay the often exorbitant prices for beer and other drinks, dancers simply left the hall during intermission to satiate their thirst.123 A survey, done in 1915, of dance halls in Madison, Wisconsin, found that “a great many men and a few girls leave the hall on pass-out checks,” or return checks, as they were called. These allowed patrons to leave any time during the night and to return at their leisure. Couples who took pass-out checks went “to the lunch wagon, . . . loaf[ed] in doorways or [went] up the alleys.” The “men who pass[ed] out with other men [went] to the saloons almost without exception,” and the practice of women “drinking beer while up the alleys” was “found to be extensive.”124 Other men simply carried bottles of liquor to the dance hall; women slipped it in in their handbags. Once inside the hall, “they usually retired to the toilet with one or two friends and there passed the bottle around,” a practice inspectors argued was evident by the number of “whiskey flasks in the toilet.” At one dance hall in Kansas City, Missouri, inspectors even found a door that opened from the dance hall into an adjoining hall that was well lighted. At the end of the hall was a rarely used toilet in which they found “a number of bottles of beer submerged in ice water.”125 During Prohibition, the use of alcohol undoubtedly decreased, but it was never eliminated altogether. At Goodman’s Dance Hall, in New York, in 1931, one observer noted that there was “considerable drinking from flasks bearing whiskey labels all over the place in plain view of the patrons.”126 Many of these men had left the dance hall and brought the liquor back in with them and then openly flaunted their disdain for Prohibition. But even with Prohibition one could still purchase alcohol in many dance halls. James Neri remembered that, during Prohibition, at Chicago’s Murray Garden and Riverview Park Ballroom, “guys would come in there with their little suitcase and sell the fellows their half pints” for fifty cents.127 Couples relied upon similar strategies for more intimate matters. On the dance floor, dance partners often attempted to elude inspectors or “cops” by hiding among the other dancers or by dancing in the adjoining halls. In some taxi-dance halls, dancers eager to participate in more | 78 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

sensual styles of dance moved to the center of the group with whom they were dancing “where they could not be clearly observed by the patrons who were on the sidelines.” If a “cop” did arrive unannounced, which often happened on Saturday nights, the “orchestra started playing the waltz Margie,” which signaled dancers “as soon as the cop comes in.”128 Other couples simply abandoned the dance floor for the adjoining halls or back rooms. At a New York public school dance, in 1919, one investigator reported that many patrons were performing “unlawful dances” while in the rear of the school building away from the dance floor and their attendants’ watchful eyes.129 For “loving up,” young couples also found ways to elude intrusive inspectors and their rules and restrictions. Throughout the period and at every type of dance hall, especially if they were located in high-rent sections, every possible foot of space was “utilized for dancing itself; lounging or resting quarters are entirely lacking.” At other halls, “more than half of the patrons are unable to be seated at one time”; in some, there were only a “few chairs or benches along the wall.”130 With so little space for “embracing,” couples simply left the hall. In 1909, Belle Lindner Israels noted that both boys and girls “frequently leave the warm hall where they have been dancing together and drinking, none too clear in their minds as to their relations towards each other.” Most of these “girls,” she explained, “rarely go very far on the downward path, but they are only too apt to lose the bloom of their youth in the course of these promiscuous amusements.”131 Of course, not all men and women chose to abandon their favorite dance hall. Instead,”stray couples” preferred to take advantage of the “dark corners” and participate in a more collective sexual culture. At the same New York school dance in 1919 where couples were performing “unlawful” dances in the rear of the school building, the attendants reported having caught men and women having sexual intercourse in a room used for kindergarten, in dark hallways, behind property closets, in girls’ toilets, on stairways leading to the upper floors, and even in the janitor’s room. Miss Harper and Miss Morrell, the two attendants who supervised the dance, knew about it, but they admitted that they were “powerless to stop it.”132 In the larger dance halls, couples usually headed for the balcony, which was such a popular hangout that it was commonly referred to as the “great lover’s lane of the dance hall.”133 The | 79 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

balcony at Chicago’s Aragon during the 1920s was “not so well lighted.” In fact, “most of the time [it] was extremely dim making the task of the hostess difficult unless she got close to the people sitting in the seats on the side.” “It is here,” remarked another curious onlooker, that “you see many vulgar actions, necking, and embracing in an indecent manner.”134 About a decade later, the dark corners were still a popular getaway for many couples. At Chicago’s Shadowland Dancing, in 1930, a taxi-dance hall, there was “a dark nook behind a railing to the west of the dance floor for ‘necking.’” There usually were “three or four couples . . . who sat here, hugging and kissing.”135 As the experiences of these men and women suggest, middle-class efforts to regulate the dance hall were never as successful as many reformers had hoped. While dance hall owners had a vested interest in breaking the very rules they were expected to enforce and had grown accustomed to making their profits off alcohol despite Prohibition and the other rules designed to divorce dance from drink, working-class men and women had their own ideas about their leisure time. The practice of taking passout checks or hiding out in dark corners allowed couples to elude the watchful eyes of police matrons or other inspectors while still taking advantage of the freedom dance halls had to offer. Indeed, the men and women who attended dance halls often worked together to conceal the sensual dancing they favored or to lay claim to a certain section of the dance hall for more intimate matters. Their efforts not only foiled middle-class attempts to regulate morality but also helped strengthen a collective identity and a peer culture. The palaces, neighborhood halls, and pavilions that dotted the urban landscape by the 1920s dramatically expanded the potential ways in which young couples could manage their leisure and intimacy. While fraternal and lodge dances remained popular throughout the 1910s and 1920s, young couples increasingly sought out their own leisure space and usually found dance hall entrepreneurs eager to meet their needs. The combination of the dancing and the drinking with which most reformers were obsessed and that helped define the dance hall not only encouraged greater levels of intimacy but also allowed men and women to participate in a peer culture. Young couples could experiment with alcohol or cigarettes, engage in sexually expressive dances, or even dabble in | 80 |

The Era of Large Ballrooms and Famous Bands

romance, all the while ignoring the manner in which their parents were trying to supervise intimacy and arrange marriages. Along the way, dance hall patrons confronted many obstacles, usually in the form of restrictive rules and regulations. But reformers’ efforts did little to stop the revelry for which dance halls were famous. The men and women who spent their leisure time at dance halls simply defied the rules and regulations they confronted and established a sexual culture more public and collective than that with which reformers were comfortable. The system of social graduation that organized dance halls around different skill levels and age and the practices of taking pass-out checks, hiding out in dark corners, and dancing wherever floor space was available not only challenged middle-class efforts to regulate the dance hall but also gave men and women a much better idea about what to expect from their partners on and off the dance floor. Of course, the popularity of the dance hall was not simply about creating more autonomous spaces; many men and women may have eagerly embraced the dance hall because it allowed them to explore their sexuality, develop personal and intimate relationships, and play with different cultural styles. But while the identities and the cultures men and women created made their social interaction on and off the dance floor more predictable, they still disagreed about what constituted acceptable behavior. In other words, dance offered women opportunities not only to establish some autonomy apart from their parents but to challenge men over the use of public space. What dance halls meant to these women and how they used them to contest male-defined ideas about intimacy and leisure and their parents’ are the subjects of chapter 3.

| 81 |

THREE

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy” Working-Class Women’s Heterosocial Leisure and Homosocial Fun

In November 1913, an investigator for the Committee of Fourteen interviewed Rose Kaiser, a twenty-two-year-old who worked at a department store in New York and lived with her parents on 98th Street between Second and Third Avenues. Kaiser, the investigator concluded, was a “dance hall habitué.” She had attended dances at “the New Star Casino, the Majestic, Empire Dancing Academy, Harlem River Casino . . . Westminster” and even belonged to the recreation center near her home until “she insisted on spieling,” a popular dance of the time, and was “turned out for good.” The Empire, Rose claimed, was “the limit,” and Tighes on Third Avenue was “tough.” “That’s a hang out for the Car Barn Gang,” she declared, and “I dont [sic] care to go there.” Kaiser explained that “altho the fellows all know me [at Tighes], and they would not touch me,” she preferred a dancing academy on her own street, a “small hall behind a saloon” to which “nice Jewish girls and boys go.” It was “not tough,” she insisted, and “a great deal of fun.”1 Describing her as a “dance hall habitué,” investigators were suggesting that she was perhaps more caught up with this new dance “madness” than were other men and women. But her experience with dance halls was, in fact, quite common. Not only were dance halls particularly popular among younger men and women and “a great deal of fun”; they were also part of a larger peer culture. Apart from their parents, work| 82 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

ing-class men and women took advantage of the unprecedented moments of autonomy the dance hall offered them to establish their own norms of behavior governing intimacy and leisure. Yet, while men and women may have created a culture that provided the soil in which new patterns of personal and intimate relationships could take root, the identities and gender roles that made up that culture were never identical. For women, in particular, dance meant the chance to define what were acceptable heterosocial relations and to challenge the conventional gender norms they confronted in their day-to-day lives.2 Like Kaiser, who drifted from hall to hall, avoiding Tighes on Third Avenue because it was “tough” and eventually settling for a “small hall behind a saloon to which nice Jewish girls and boys go,” women across the country did not simply attend dance halls. They either challenged men over the use of dance hall space or investigated and explored the different dance halls in their neighborhood until they found one that was compatible with their understanding of heterosocial relations. After all, Kaiser might have preferred a “small hall behind a saloon,” but she was also familiar with Tighes on Third Avenue and with the members of the Car Barn Gang, who were tough but knew better than to “touch” her, as if they were familiar with certain boundaries she had established and were reluctant to cross them. In other words, dance halls were not just crucial to the development of new types of relationships; they also afforded women new ways to manage intimacy and to define what it meant. At dance halls, the simple pleasures of passing over certain men for dances, attending unescorted, and refusing invitations to step out during intermission or for escorts home allowed women to defy the idea that companionship led inexorably to commitment and to reject their parents’ attempts to supervise relationships and arrange marriages. How women explored the embodied pleasures of dance and how they used dance to convey messages of resistance, equality, and power often made their male companions uncomfortable (as I show in Chapter 4). But, young women, eagerly awaiting some dance hall fun and anxious about male-defined ideas about heterosocial relations, felt the angst and frustration that often accompanied “shaking a wicked leg” well worth it. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ministers, vice investigators, and other moral reformers who were concerned | 83 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

that the dance hall was on the verge of building up a “patronage comparable to that of the old-time saloon” claimed that women’s attraction to dance reflected more than the opportunity to experiment with intimacy, alcohol, and men.3 Weinberg and Alinsky argued that one of the reasons so many women attended dance halls was that they had “meager lives” that were “empty of any emotional or intellectual stimulation.” Their homes, they argued, were “shabby and ugly” and “crowded constantly with other members of the family” who were “unable to provide anything in the way of companionship or diversion.” Weinberg and Alinsky were particularly hard on the mother who worked all day instead of staying home and caring for her family. “Consider,” they explained, “a girl whose mother goes out working by the day, [and] whose family has neither the desire nor the facilities of introducing her to a circle of friends.”4 Belle Lindner Israels also argued that the “home conditions of most of the young working girls in New York are such that they cannot undertake to carry on the social life which they crave within the limits that are prescribed for the young women of other environments.” The dance hall, she insisted, was “naturally [a woman’s] club” where “she meets boys and men who are interesting and attractive to her and to whom she in turn can be attractive,” men “whom she does not reach in her every-day life.”5 Jane Addams also argued that working women’s “love of pleasure,” or dance halls, reflected the scarcity of other alternatives. But rather than simply use their “love of pleasure” as an excuse to denigrate workingclass families and their home life, she castigated the “modern city” for failing to provide satisfactory recreation. According to Addams, at the very moment that “modern industry gathered together multitudes of eager young creatures from all quarters of the earth as a labor supply for the countless factories and workshops,” the modern city had failed to provide “adequate provision for play.” Addams admitted that the city had made “haste” to provide the “restless boy” an athletic field “where he may safely demonstrate that he is braver at jumping and climbing than any other boy on the street.” But the city was “much less successful in making . . . provisions for the girl’s needs” and had simply “turned over to commercialism practically all the provisions for public recreation.” As a result, “so-called ‘places’” arose in every city “in which alcohol is dispensed, not to allay thirst but . . . to stimulate gaiety.” The most obvious | 84 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

and egregious examples, she insisted, were the “huge dance halls . . . to which hundreds of young people are attracted,” dance halls that thrived on “coarse and illicit merry makings . . . [and confused] joy with lust, and gaiety with debauchery.”6 Of course, the dance hall was not simply the only alternative to their tenement homes. At the same time that contemporaries were critical of dance halls, they also agreed that women’s attraction to dance reflected more than their desire to meet strange men or to escape their crowded and dreary homes. In 1913, members of Cincinnati’s Juvenile Protective Association argued that “the adolescent girl . . . [finds that] the rhythm of the dance seems to afford an opportunity for self expression which no other means provides.”7 Similarly, Jane Addams argued that “within [dance halls] five cents will procure for five minutes the sense of allurement and intoxication which is sold in lieu of innocent pleasure.”8 Even Weinberg and Alinsky claimed that “this institution [the dance hall] is a place of escape,” where “for these few hours she [the working-class girl] is Cinderella, and she constructs for herself a new world—a world of make believe.” A young “girl,” they insisted, found similar excitement and the “thrill of vicarious pleasure from the contemplation of her favorite movie star, but in the dance hall,” they insisted, “she can act for herself.”9 Like Cinderella, women who went dancing could dress up and forget the problems they faced at home. But when they threw off the dress and demeanor of their workaday selves and assumed the appearance of the dance hall habitué, they could also challenge the image of femininity Cinderella projected and the gender norms upon which she based her image. As Kathy Peiss argues, “it was in leisure that women played with identity, trying on new images and roles, appropriating the cultural forms around them—clothing, music, language—to push at the boundaries of immigrant, working-class life.” Dress, in particular, she argues, was a “potent way to display and play with notions of respectability, allure, independence, and status and to assert a distinctive identity and presence.”10 The usual appearance, dress, and style of women who spent their free time dancing, although soundly criticized by investigators, not only bespoke an air of self-assurance and affirmation that intimated the dance hall’s liberating potential but also reflected a style often associated with the prostitute, potentially shattering Cinderella’s conventional | 85 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

image. A common look for the “devotée” of the dance hall in the 1920s featured the “loud clothes” or abbreviated skirts, in what one observer characterized as “barbaric shades of yellow, purple, red, and black,” that in some instances failed to reach the knees and were set off by “brilliantly colored garters just below the knee cap.”11 Other contemporaries characterized working women as being “dressed in the extreme: hair bobbed in the latest style—straight and greased down; [with] tightly draped form-fitting dresses, and the green and red slippers of late popularity [1920s]” while “dolled up with liberal applications of paint, powder, and grease.”12 A woman who attended Chicago’s Gaelic Park in the 1920s, for example, wore “a brown silk dress . . . without waistline and reaching the floor, which is supplemented by many ruffles and a long and prominent slit down the side,” a slit that offered the curious onlooker a peep at what were “presumed to be flesh-colored stockings turned down at the knee.” “Over the roll she places a brilliant red garter which plays peek-a-boo with the slit in her skirt as she dances across the floor.”13 Besides the dress and the image associated with it, dance halls also offered young women a considerable amount of freedom from supervision—and not just from that of their parents. Unlike the cabaret, where patrons were expected to dance with their dates for the evening or with someone to whom the management had introduced them, dance halls generally allowed women to arrive unescorted.14 In the 1910s, Rheta Childe Dorr argued that it was “an unusual thing for a girl to be escorted to a dance in any kind of a dance hall.” The “exceptional girl” who is “attended by a man, must dance with him, or if she accepts another partner, she must ask his permission.” Escorts, then, were “deemed a somewhat doubtful advantage.”15 In fact, most women patronized their favorite dance hall in groups, some rather large, but usually they “stream[ed] in by twos and threes,” as did the majority of men who usually “saunter[ed] in” in pairs or in larger groups, which were almost always suspected of being gangs.16 The system of treating described by Kathy Peiss, in which women traded sexual favors for various nights of dancing, drinking, and gifts, allowed young women to negotiate the cost of commercial leisure and the poor wages they received for long hours of monotonous wage labor.17 But for the system of treating to work, they first had to find a way into the dance hall, since they almost always arrived unescorted. Because of the dress and the image associated with it, dance halls were | 86 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

also associated with danger and the breaking of rules. While Collis Stocking claimed that “nothing ‘heinous’ took” place in the Pittsburgh dance halls he investigated in the 1920s, “there was a great deal of behavior that would fall outside the pale of ‘good manners.’”18 Many reformers, for example, were absolutely convinced that at dance halls “young girls” were sold liquor and “taste it for the first time in those places.”19 The effect of the spiel, a popular dance of the time, was even considered by some to be “a species of drunkenness which creates an instant demand for liquor, and a temporary recklessness.”20 Others claimed that the danger lay with prostitution. In 1909, Henry Moskowitz of New York’s Down Town Ethical Society argued that dancing academies were “a source of danger to the community and a moral menace to the young girls frequenting them.” It was at dance halls, he protested, that girls began “a career of promiscuous social intercourse which has not seldom ended in the Tenderloin.”21 Belle Lindner Israels strongly concurred and claimed that dance halls “had been the origin and chief recruiting station for [the] traffic in women.” Of the one thousand girls who had come under the supervision of the Bedford Home for Women in New York in 1910, every one of them, she argued, “had got the downward start from a dance hall somewhere.”22 A decade later, Mrs. E. M. Whitmore, founder of New York’s The Door of Hope, announced “gravely that 70 per cent of the fallen girls in the Metropolis were ruined by jazz,” while One Faulkner, “a favorite moral snouter” of Los Angeles, was even more specific and claimed that “81 1/2 percent” or 163 out of the two hundred “bad girls” with whom he was familiar had slipped “From the Ballroom to Hell.”23 While reformers may have exaggerated the dance hall’s link to prostitution, parents were convinced that these halls unnecessarily promoted the intermingling of the sexes and allowed their daughters to push at the boundaries that separated “good girls” from “bad.” Joseph Lazzar, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and a father of ten children, eight of whom were girls, feared that dance halls could potentially undermine the “Old World idea of chaperonage.” At dance halls in the United States, he declared, girls “meet all kinds of bums.” By the time an American girl gets married, he insisted, “she knows one hundred men.” In Italy “only one man goes with one girl” because “the only place a girl goes to dance is at the Fiesta with her people.”24 | 87 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

Joseph Lazzar’s fear about his daughters meeting “all kinds of bums” was a concern most parents shared. But immigrant parents were not simply troubled about the issue of preserving ethnic customs; they were also worried about the dance halls’s potential to attenuate the distinctions that separated men from women. An Italian woman whose husband was an industrial worker at a General Electric Plant in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was determined to keep her daughter away from dance halls. “The trouble with many of the girls of today [1930s],” she claimed, was “all that they know how to do is to dress up and go to dances.” “When they get married,” she complained, “they dont know how to boil water.”25 W. S., an immigrant from Galicia, was even more explicit about the dance hall’s potential to confuse gender norms. “The dances here seem different,” he remarked. “The people are not so friendly,” and he “didn’t like the way the girls . . . sit on the side and the boys when they want to dance with them just call them.” In the “old country,” he explained, “the boys would walk up to the girl and ask her politely to dance with them. If she is sitting with another boy he asks both the boy and the girl for permission to dance.” In short, he was convinced that in the United States “the girls seem more fresh,” and “they act like boys.” “A girl in the old country,” he insisted, “never drinks whiskey in public, but here a boy drinks soda and a girl drinks whiskey and beer.”26 Even Joseph Lazzar admitted that “American” customs eroded the boundaries that separated men from women. According to Lazzar: The girls in this country are just like Gypsies, they paint like Indians and smoke like the men, that’s a shame. If I knew that my daughter touched a cigarette I would have her out of the house forever. The girls here are like crazy, they do everything that a man does, and the bad thing is that the men like this. In Italy you never hear of this, they always stay home and always go to places where the respectable people go.27

W. S. and Joseph Lazzar were certainly concerned about preserving the customs to which they had grown accustomed in Europe. But preserving those customs was not simply a matter of making sure their daughters behaved or that intimacy remained community and familial defined. The social relations to which they had grown accustomed in the “old country,” or at least the ones with which they were most familiar and upon which they relied to understand their own masculinity, were | 88 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

gender specific. At dance halls, young immigrant “girls” potentially upset the social organization and meaning of gender by adopting the persona of the “bad girl” who not only smoked cigarettes and drank whiskey like the men with whom she danced but also challenged the customs and the conventional gender norms upon which they were based. In short, many parents felt that dance halls were too intimately associated with public space; while they might have considered smoking cigarettes and drinking whiskey appropriate pastimes for men, such behavior defied the manner in which they defined femininity and the manner in which they expected their daughters to behave. For many women, then, their attraction to dance was not simply about fun. Dance halls allowed them not only to escape their dreary tenements but also to appropriate new identities. Whether it was the dresses they donned, the “barbaric shades” of color they favored, the dance hall’s association with prostitution, or the alcohol they drank, women used the dance hall to forget, at least temporarily, the problems they faced at home and the rules and restrictions the “good girl” was supposed to follow. Dance halls afforded young women the opportunity to experiment with sexual allure or to play with flirtation and hence to call into question the version of womanhood idealized by middle-class reformers and the “old country” values their immigrant parents were desperately trying to defend. Dance also offered women opportunities to claim ownership of public spaces. While historians have emphasized the emergence of new dance steps and even the ways in which dance allowed for more individual expression and experimentation, they have ignored the gender dynamics of the dance hall and floor.28 Yet, as Leslie Gotfrit argues, dance offered women a powerful way to challenge what she calls “patriarchal imperatives.” According to Gotfrit, “On the surface going out dancing may be viewed as a set of practices that subordinate women in a male-defined and controlled arena, where oppressive stereotypes of femininity and masculinity are enacted and where sexist practices that demean women are tolerated and even expected.” But the politics of pleasure, which she contends are key in “structuring the relationship of the individual to a cultural form,” were also contradictory and invested with multiple meanings. Thus, as much as the dance floor reinforced “patriarchal imperatives,” it also provided the public space where women could embrace the | 89 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

physical, sensual, and embodied pleasure of dance and confront and challenge men’s expectations about their behavior.29 The practice of initially dancing alone or in same-sex pairs afforded women the chance to define dance and themselves. In 1912, Belle Lindner Israels explained that it was customary for a night of dancing to begin with a congregation of men waiting for the arrival of their female companions, who had sequestered themselves in the dressing room. According to Israels, when “girls” arrived at a dance hall, there were usually “men hanging about the door who ask them to come in.” While they were in the dressing room, “the men, most of them not over 22, make a circle sometimes three deep around the ballroom at the beginning of the evening.” At no particular moment, the girls “come dancing out of the dressing room together” and begin dancing as couples on the floor as their male companions anxiously look on. Then, rather than individually choosing partners, the men, acting in pairs, would pick their favorite couple and “go out and ‘break it up,’” which Israels concluded was “the regular form of procedure.”30 To the dismay of reformers, many of the dances women performed in same-sex pairs or by themselves before the men “broke it up” ensured an image of expressive sexuality and strength. At a social club dance sponsored by the “Put Away Trouble Club” in Chicago, in 1916, Louise De Koven Bowen witnessed what she called “very disgusting muscle dances” preformed by a few women.31 At taxi-dance halls, hostesses preferred a dance called the South Side, which consisted of a “violent twisting of the hips when two girls dance together”; other women enticed their male companions onto the floor by “pull[ing] up their dresses, [and] exposing the upper parts of their limbs.”32 The practice of women initially dancing in same-sex pairs, Gotfrit argues, defies the “heterosexual couple imperative endemic to dance”; being the “object of the look,” she insists, provided women with an audience to “note the creativity” of their dance and the “breaking of rules,” both of which enhanced the pleasure and the thrill of their performance.33 At the same time, the ritual of “breaking it up” allowed the women to showcase their talent in the hope of attracting a male partner of similar ability and prowess and to define the dance and to invest it with certain meanings. The “very disgusting muscle dances” Bowen described emphasized the physicality of the new social dances and the fe| 90 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

male body’s potential strength and endurance. Observers frequently commented on the physical labor expended to “shake a wicked leg” or expressed disbelief in the ability of taxi dancers to dance almost every one of the several hundred dances an evening “without getting the least bit tired.”34 The sexually explicit nature of their performance also defied conventional gender norms by further blurring the line dividing “good” girls from “bad.” Not all women performed “very disgusting muscle dances,” nor did all taxi dancers embrace the South Side. But dancing provided women the luxury of the performance where they could act out different identities, attitudes, behaviors, and reproduce and redefine them if necessary at the start of each dance. In the 1920s, dances still began with the men anxiously awaiting the arrival of their dates; in the absence of women, “several of the fellows” were often found “dancing about the floor.”35 But the practice of “breaking it up” had lost some of its charm among investigators who had become obsessed with the ways in which men and women informally coupled up before each dance. What investigators referred to as the “most repellant” [sic] feature of the dance hall was the ease with which “a fellow may walk up to any girl and ask her for a dance”; and neither he nor she was “under any restrictions of making known their respective status.”36 In other words, “the accepted dance-hall etiquette” did not “demand previous acquaintanceships nor introductions.” It was, in fact, quite common for men “to make a dance date by a nod of the head or simply by pointing a finger and it is frequently done in just this way.”37 With this arrangement, the “girl tries to pick the most eligible young man, but if the dance is on, she will lower her standards so as not to be left unattached on the side lines.”38 Of course, asking for a dance was never as simple as an innocent nod of the head, nor were women as receptive as some investigators insisted. A “blind man,” reported one observer in the 1920s, “could not miss the universal boredom of the patrons of the dance emporia in the urban centres.” When a man asked for a dance, a woman did “not risk losing mandible motion by uttering a word.” Instead, “she rises negligently; if unwilling, she vouchsafes no sign save a slow wagging of the head, carmine lips and pale muzzle still devoted to her munch.” The unhabitual male visitor was advised “to not be offended by this unresponsiveness”; it was “ordinary dance hall manners.”39 But many men seemed to | 91 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

ignore such advice and became “piqued” when their offers for a dance were “repeatedly refused.”40 Finding someone willing to dance was so difficult that some men claimed that one had to be friends with a woman who frequented the place before she might accept an offer to dance. According to a young man who attended dances in Chicago in the 1920s, competition for a dance was “very hard.” After graduating from high school, he made dancing “a regular part of [his] weekly program.” On weekends he either attended a dance “under the auspices of one of the numerous basement clubs in our neighborhood” or went “to one of the big dance halls in the city,” and “at least once during the mid-week [he] attended a special affair given by one of the dance halls.” The “competition in all of these halls,” he explained, “was very heavy.” “It takes a long time before a comparative stranger may be sure of even getting a dance. One must either become a member of a clique or ‘get in solid’ with a girl who frequents the place before he can be assured a dance.”41 Other men claimed that one did not necessarily have to know a girl to get a dance but that competition for a dance was nonetheless “very hard.” “On Saturday night,” explained a man who attended taxi-dance halls in the 1920s, “there are at least ten fellows after every girl on the floor of most halls.” “So many [men] are after them all the time that they get tough in spite of everything,” or worse, “hard boiled,” and were more likely to “turn men down” and be choosy, “unless you are willing to throw your whole bank-roll away.” “It was better” under these circumstances, explained another man, either to come back on Tuesday or Thursday nights when there were significantly fewer men or “to pick out a girl that was sitting alone.”42 Robert Bonadonna confirmed these findings: Men usually asked women to dance either on the basis of watching their skills on the floor, or looking for a lonely, shy girl in the corner. Alone was more vulnerable and more likely to accept. A girl standing with a friend, was not as good a prospect. They hesitated to say yes to a man that their friend might not approve of.43

When a man finally found a dance partner, he might find that his partner nonetheless revealed a certain “unresponsiveness.” Bonadonna noted, “Relations between men and women were about 90% harmo| 92 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

nious in the public area of the dance floor.” “Misbehaving,” Bonadonna argued, “could cause loss of image and mark a person as unacceptable by others.” And, since some men claimed that they could get a dance only with a girl they knew or that they had to meet the approval of a girl’s close female friend before being accepted, relations on the dance floor were generally agreeable. Yet, Bonadonna also explained that he spent a good part of his time dancing at the fancier dance palaces such as the Roseland, where floor supervisors were conspicuous, and at churchsponsored confraternities, and religion, he noted “has always had a muting effect on passions.”44 In fact, other observers noted that the crowd at a dance hall was not always “a wholesome looking crowd” or a “laughing crowd.”45 Contemporaries often described the dancers’ faces as “blank and expressionless,” as if they were “burdened with problems which they themselves do not understand and perhaps are not conscious of.”46 “They begin dancing without a word, and in all probability will complete the whole dance without exchanging a single word of conversation,” doing everything possible “to resist any development of ‘social interpenetration.’” If the men asked direct questions, “the answers were very brief and very indefinite”; sometimes the men received no answers at all, convincing them that their partners were “damned dumb.” The “impersonal relationship” was carried so far that it was “not uncommon for people to dance together at different evenings many times without either party being able to give even the first name of the other party.” The “boys and girls” also did not “dance as closely together,” especially among the “younger people, who for some reason kept a very respectable distance between partners most of the time.”47 Once the dance was over, “the partners [broke] up at the middle of the floor,” parting wherever the music left them and with “none of the chivalrous escorting of the lady back to her seat.” Instead, the girls usually wandered back to “their meeting place,” while the “boys stroll[ed]” toward the opposite side of the hall, what one contemporary characterized as “the men’s side of the arena.” Once back with their own gangs, men and women talked over the dance separately, and then the men returned “to hunt partners for the next dance,” as if couples, and women in particular, were more interested in the dance than in the potential companionship to which it might lead.48 The unresponsiveness men feared was in fact common enough to make its way into Vera Bloom’s and Jacob Gade’s 1925 song | 93 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

“Jalousie” (Jealousy), which tells the story of a young man who is jealous because his girl loves to dance more than she loves him. I fear that the music will end And shatter the spell it may lend, To make me believe, When your eyes just deceive, And it’s only the tango you love.49

At some dances, the “unresponsiveness” men encountered simply reflected the problem of language barriers. For example, at Gaelic Park in the 1920s, many of the girls in attendance were Polish and apparently “enjoyed using Polish profanity and vulgarity to mystify their Irish boy friends.”50 But language problems account for only certain cases. Instead, the often impersonal nature of dance not only defies the harmonious and carefree image historians have generally accepted of the dance floor; it also allowed women to more readily engage in the wiggling, shimmying, and shaking that was characteristic of the new social dances while squashing the expectations—sexual or otherwise—of their male partners.51 Indeed, women could assume the prerogative of declining offers to dance and remain “unresponsive” as long as their male companions outnumbered them—and they did throughout the early twentieth century. As noted earlier, there were always more men than dime-adance girls at taxi-dance halls, which, according to one disgruntled taxidance hall patron, explained why so many women were “hardboiled,” or choosy. At the New American No. 1, a taxi-dance hall in Chicago during the 1920s, one officer “counted 600 men and 68 girls at the hall.”52 But this was not the case only at taxi-dance halls. Throughout the early twentieth century, men almost always outnumbered women at dance halls of all types. In 1911, Bowen noted, “the men outnumber the women at all dances.”53 More than a decade later, one observer reported that “there are usually many more men than women in a dance pavilion of this kind [Gaelic Park]. Usually an excess of men of from thirty-five to fifty percent is to be expected.”54 In a survey of New York, done in 1920, men even admitted being drawn to dance halls in greater numbers than their female contemporaries. According to Gregory Mason, moral reformers, whom he claimed had “risked their senses of smell, hearing and decency in the cause,” found that “fourteen percent of the males be| 94 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

tween the ages of seventeen and forty and ten percent of the females of the same ages attend public dance halls at least once a week.”55 With such a disproportionate number of men to women in dance halls, women could afford to be choosy or “unresponsive,” since another offer was sure to follow even if the woman had offended her first potential partner. At the same time, dance halls allowed women to challenge conventional gender norms and practices. The social organization of dance, which might call for different partners and granted women the prerogative to pass certain men over for dances, defied the idea that marriage was a simple arrangement for which parents were responsible and that their daughters should accept the first young man to whom they were introduced. Indeed, the time women spent in dance halls was as much about reaffirming homosocial ties as it was about establishing heterosocial relations. Women usually arrived in groups of two or more; they almost always danced together, at least at the start of each dance; and they often spent the time in between dances with each other, almost as if men were there only to satisfy their urge to dance. In the process, women helped create a culture that, with the homosocial ties upon which it was based, challenged conventional gender roles and allowed them a type of social interaction against which they might measure the other relationships in their lives, especially when they returned home and faced parents whose ideas about intimacy and leisure contrasted sharply with their own. Women’s experiences in dance halls did, of course, change over time. While a disproportionate number of men attended dance halls, women made up a rising proportion of immigrant communities. In 1910, the number of foreign-born women was the lowest since the turn of the century, with seventy-six women for every one hundred men. By 1920, the number of immigrant women had increased to eighty-one women for every one hundred immigrant men, and by 1930, there were eight-six foreign-born women for every one hundred foreign-born men.56 In specific immigrant communities, the change was even more dramatic. Among Italians in San Francisco, for example, one survey showed that, in 1892, 83 percent of the Italian population was male and 17 percent female. By 1920, there were 164 men for every one hundred women; by 1930, there were 133 males for every one hundred females.57 | 95 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

The balancing out of sex ratios, in part, reflected the strain and cost of World War I, which slowed down immigration. An additional factor was the fact that America closed its doors to immigrants with the immigration restriction laws of 1921 and 1924. In 1921, Congress cut the number of immigrants to about 350,000. Three years later, Congress enacted the National Origins Act of 1924, which limited immigration from any one country to 2 percent of the total number of persons of that “national origin” already living in the United States in 1890. Since most southern and eastern Europeans arrived after 1890, these restrictions sharply reduced the number of southern and eastern European immigrants and reduced immigration to about 300,000 persons a year for the rest of the 1920s. By the Depression, the numbers of men and women immigrating to the United States had dropped so low that when one compares the number of men and women who left the United States during the 1930s with the number of immigrants, one finds that, between 1932 and 1935, the United States experienced net emigration.58 As sex ratios began to balance out, women undoubtedly found that they were no longer as exceptional as they had been at the turn of the century, when there were so few women in immigrant communities. In other words, men simply had more women to choose from, which meant that women were likely to have fewer unexpected callers or proposals. Yet, because men continued to outnumber women in dance halls throughout the period, women still found overwhelming numbers of men asking for dances or offering to escort them home. As a result, the dance hall emerged as one of the few places where women were likely to attract the attention of more than an occasional man and could pick and choose until they found the most compatible dancer or companion. By the 1920s, women were also convinced that going out was necessary if they ever wished to “hook their fish.” A young Jewish woman who worked as a department store saleslady in the 1920s explained to Weinberg that in her “version of life in society,” she had no “exact future,” and the department store in which she worked was a “drudge.” But she did “want to get married.” “Every girl does,” she insisted, “though they all don’t admit it.” Most men, she added, were bound to “nag” at you, although most of them “don’t mean bad,” and, moreover, she explained, “they tickle my most delicate feelings.” The problem she faced was finding a prospective spouse. “When I get home from work, I’m all in. | 96 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

Sometimes I go to bed right away to be fresh for tomorrow. But I ain’t a hermit,” she insisted. “I want to live . . . Well!” In fact, at parties or dances, she exclaimed, “I forget myself. I love good times. Every girl does. And it’s the only way I’ll meet a prospect. You know they don’t dish husbands out to you on a gold platter. You got to keep plodding along until you hook your fish.” She explained that she had “a few on a string,” and there was one in particular that she was fond of. “I hope we’ll hook up permanently,” she said. But until she “hooked” her “fish,” she would continue to “go over to girls’ houses; we play bridge, invite fellows over. Sometimes, I invite fellows over [to] my house. We go to picnics and sometimes when things are slack, we crash a wedding. It’s all in the fun and it’ll give me a better chance to get a better pick.”59 For young women, then, the unexpected visits by eager, anxious, and sometimes strange men as well as the immediate proposal that was sure to follow were as old-fashioned as the women’s parents’ ideas about intimacy and leisure. Instead, the department store saleslady found herself anxiously “plodding along” with the hope that one day she might “hook her fish.” In short, she had to go out and crash weddings, visit friends, go to picnics, or attend dances and parties because increasing numbers of women were finding it harder to choose a “prospect” than women from preceding decades, and that men were not as eager for marriage as their counterparts from earlier in the century. The growing need to go out and find a “prospect” in part reflected changes in the day-to-day circumstances in which these women found themselves. As noted earlier, the sex ratios that in previous decades had contributed to the eagerness with which men rushed into wedlock were beginning to balance out. At the same time, boarding, which served as such an important matchmaker among immigrants around the turn of the century, was on the decline. Gary Ross Mormino has found that the overall number of boarders in St. Louis had decreased by the 1920s because of the increase in available housing. A construction boom between 1900 and 1920 produced 999 new homes and relieved the housing shortage that had contributed to the practice of boarding; the 999 new homes built during the period made up 70 percent of the houses built on the Hill between 1900 and 1940. By the 1920s, Mormino argues, boarding had “outlived its usefulness,” and by the 1930s, “the national census recorded virtually no boarders on the Hill.”60 James Barrett has | 97 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

found that boarding suffered a similar fate in Chicago’s Packingtown. “Hostilities in Europe and the draft at home,” he explains, “cut off the flow of young, unattached immigrants” who made up the bulk of the boarding population. The population of a Lithuanian community just north of the stockyards dropped by 1,400 between 1914 and 1924; yet the number of families remained the same. There had been 1,555 boarders in the neighborhood before the war; by 1924, there were only 323, with only seventy-six families keeping boarders.61 Of course, even if there had been lots of boarders from whom to choose and a disproportionate number of men anxiously offering proposals, many women no longer expected to and no longer wanted to meet potential spouses around their homes or in the same manner their parents had met. Instead, they were eager to save their wages for the “fancy styles” that accompanied a night out on the town and the opportunity dance halls afforded them to “forget” themselves and go for the “good times.” For some women, going for the “good times” may have simply meant immersing themselves in the revelry for which dance halls were known. But “forgetting themselves” also might have meant appropriating an identity that set them apart from their parents and their “oldfashioned” ideas about intimacy and leisure as well as the chance to define their own norms of behavior governing dating, dancing, and courtship. They may not have “dished husbands out on a gold platter” anymore. But, increasingly, these women were demanding more control over their choice of a potential spouse and were making the decisions about whom they might one day marry. And they seemed to be enjoying the time required to look for a spouse, or at least the time they spent in the company of their female friends, who provided them the comfort and support they needed to carefully choose the husband for whom they were looking.62 Men, of course, still laid claim to the prerogative of leading their partners in dance. Or did they? The dance historians Sylvia G. L. Dannett and Frank R. Rachel argue that, by the World War I era, dancing was no longer standardized. “Each teacher would have his own methods of instruction as well as his own interpretation of the steps . . . If husband and wife chose different teachers of if a gal had a date with a man who had graduated from a different studio, there was endless confusion.” The woman might “start hopping in one direction at the moment he [the | 98 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

man] had been told, perhaps, that a glide was in order or a dip or a stretch.”63 Many contemporaries insisted that the new social dances were simple. At a conference in New York sponsored by the Committee on Amusement and Vacation Resources for Working Girls, in 1912, Al Jolson “in high jollity . . . with feet a twinkle in patent leathers with brown cloth uppers” and Florence Gable “with her hat on, young and gay, and spirited in her dancing” demonstrated the new social dances that were all the rage throughout the second decade of the twentieth century. Jolson explained that he had “picked up the art as he saw it on the Barbary Coast [in San Francisco],” where he used to sell papers as a boy. “It’s all the same dance,” he explained. “Call it ‘Turkey Trot’ or ‘Bunny Hug’ as you will. Stripped of the variations, despoiled of the precautions, all the new variations drop insensibly into the one thing.”64 Despite Jolson’s best effort to downplay the complexity of these new dances, he alluded to the turkey trot, the bunny hug, and the endless variations that had the potential to lead to confusion on the dance floor. At the same time, in Kansas City, Missouri, “dance masters” claimed that there were “as many variations [in the new dances] as there are persons dancing them,” which, they argued, generated most of the opposition to the new steps. Many dance teachers were even considering “the adoption of a standard set of steps which will be easy to learn and suitable for the ballroom,” arguing that the “acrobatic feats and the more difficult steps can then be confined to the stage and the padded-cell type of tangoer.”65 By the 1930s, this trend had only gained strength. According to Robert Bonadonna, the lindy was “a generic heading that covered an awful lot of various types of dances.” There was the “cool” lindy, the “smooth” lindy, the “gliding” lindy, and the most popular and well-known lindy, which was “tremendously gymnastic where people would throw people up in the air and slide them between their legs.” The lindy, Bonadonna explained, came after the big apple, which was the shag and a “few other composite dances that were put together.” But the lindy was more “versatile and more varied . . . and diverse,” a dance that required a tremendous amount of skill and practice.66 The variation, improvisation, and potential for mixed signals also profoundly shaped the manner in which men and women practiced dancing in the early decades of the twentieth century. The waltz and other earlier dances did, indeed, require precision footwork and timing. | 99 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

But the performers were simply practicing the same steps. With the endless variations of the new social dances, dancing also required extensive preparation and communication between partners. At some dance halls, couples tried to avoid any confusion by practicing their steps along the side of the dance floor. Other dancers practiced their steps in front of the factory gates during lunch break or tried out new steps while waiting for streetcars.67 In 1913, Speedy Vaughn, of Kansas City, Missouri, was actually arrested for dancing on the sidewalk at Fifth and Main Streets at eight o’clock in the morning. The police officer “did not think it was right” and claimed that he did not “know that nowadays people always practice dancing as they wait for street cars.”68 Many dance partners simply worked out the choreography on the floor.69 According to Bonadonna, he often talked to his partner to set up the next move: “you’d say o’kay we’re gonna do the double-go-around this time . . . or I’m gonna go under your arm this time and if they had danced with [you] before they knew what we meant.” Bonadonna “tried not to get [caught] talking” because “that somehow took away the mystique,” although everyone knew that most dancers talked out their moves ahead of time. When talking out the next step failed, some men might push their partners into the next position. “A lot of it [dancing],” Bonadonna explained “was leading just by the male strength. You would lead the woman by sort of pushing her into the position you wanted and she would catch on.” Of course, dancing in this fashion ultimately led to mixed signals and even to accidents on the floor.70 On one occasion, Bonadonna was dancing with a “ninety-eighty pound cute, little Irish girl.” Bonadonna threw “her out,” and there was some confusion as to whether he would catch her hand or switch, “and I think I threw her out too hard and she wound up spread on the dance floor.”71 As Bonadonna points out, the idea of men leading their female partners remained the basis for organizing social dancing throughout the early twentieth century. But the so-called modern dances had made a significant move towards the improvisation, spontaneity, and individual expression that potentially upset the traditional and gendered understanding of dance that required precise footwork and that rigidly defined the male and the female parts. Throughout the World War I era, the method of instruction was also experiencing significant change. While dancing remained an occupation | 100 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

controlled, in part, by the dancing professor, who rigorously put his pupils through their paces, dance instruction throughout the first few decades of the twentieth century was democratized with a decidedly feminine touch. By the second decade of the twentieth century, dance instruction was generally cheap and accessible. Instruction books were easily obtained, and one could buy printed dance lessons through the mail. Magazines also featured articles on the newest dance fashions and used photographs to showcase “the ‘New Dances for the Winter.’”72 As early as 1913, in Kansas City, Missouri, Elsie Janis was offering detailed descriptions of the latest new steps through her articles in the Kansas City Star. Besides offering instructions that admonished men to handle a partner as if “she were the steering wheel of an automobile” (further suggesting that most men were having some problems leading their partners), her articles featured diagrams on the proper position in starting a particular dance and the position of the feet on the first variation.73 By the 1920s, contemporaries agreed that women, in particular, had just “picked it up.” In the 1880s, Minnie Markie, a first-generation Irish immigrant, spoke fondly in her letters to her family about the dances she attended at her cousin’s home and the dance lessons she was taking.74 By the early twentieth century, “a few fortunate ones,” according to one reformer, had “received dancing instruction from intelligent dancing masters who love dancing as an art and teach it as such.” But a “great number have just ‘picked it up,’” usually from “friends who are good dancers.”75 For example, Louise Tetlin, who lived in Chicago during the 1920s and who worked as a taxi dancer, never had any formal instruction when she became a taxi dancer. Before moving to Chicago in the 1920s, Tetlin had danced the “old square dances among French people in Westville,” Illinois. But even after taking a job as a taxi dancer, she “had never danced the American dances.” Tetlin was afraid that she “didn’t know h[o]w to dance well enough to be in a dancing school,” but she “got along all right . . . from the start” after her sister Mary and her friend Sarah taught her enough basic steps to get by.76 Tetlin’s experience was unique because she learned to dance at such an advanced age—sixteen. Most women, in fact, “just picked it up” at a much younger age. In a survey done in 1910, of one thousand New York public school children ages eleven to fourteen, nearly nine out of ten girls reported knowing how to dance.77 The figures for boys were | 101 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

significantly lower, only three out of ten boys from the same age cohort had “picked up” any dance steps. As these boys reached their late teens and many of them began patronizing dance halls, the number of men who knew how to dance undoubtedly increased. Some men continued to learn from the astute dance master or from other men in their social clubs.78 But most men just “picked it up” from sweethearts, sisters, or some other female friend. According to an editorial in the New York Times, dancing required “a certain amount of nimbleness and a sense of rhythm if not an ear for music.” Yet, most men possessed “only a single qualification of the dancer”—“the sense of time.” The “waltzing step” that monopolized the dance repertoire of most men, the editorial continued, “was a crude adaptation of their own” derived in part from “a few scarcely heeded lessons” and from “some well-intentioned advice from sisters and sweethearts,” while young women danced “so nearly well that the observer who knows something of the art feels that they might learn to dance perfectly if they tried.”79 Working-class men and women also admitted that women were not only better dancers but usually instructed the men with whom they would later dance. Veronica Loncki recalled that when she went dancing at the neighborhood halls throughout the first decade of the century, “the girls could go free because they [the dance instructors in the local hall] had to have a partner to show a man how to dance,” as if the women in attendance had already picked up the new steps and then played an important role in teaching them to their male counterparts. More than two decades later, women were still teaching men how to dance. According to Bonadonna, “women were usually more terpsichorean than the men were [at] that age [their mid- to late teens].” In 1936, “on a whim,” Bonadonna, along with five friends from the neighborhood, organized the Power House Athletic Club in their friend Johnny’s basement to “provide a group of sports minded friends a title and a bond.” Johnny’s basement was “better finished” than Bonadonna’s, and Johnny had “the fortunate built in three sisters” who were about the same age. In fact, “the three sisters were . . . the dance instructors of the group.” “Girls,” Bonadonna insisted, “knew more about dancing cause they danced together those days and practiced together.” “Once they had mastered their craft they passed it on to the male partners of necessity . . . cause they got tired of dancing with each other.”80 | 102 |

“A Visit Discovered A Two-Story Wooden Tenement Filled to Suffocation with Broad-Shouldered, Kindly Faced Men.” Bulgarian men on the steps of a two-story tenement in Chicago, ca. 1909. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, Prints & Photographs Department. ICHi-29421.

Learning the “manly art” typically began at an early age for working men: boys boxing in front of the Chicago Hebrew Institute gymnasium, ca. 1915. Photographer: Taylor & Lytle. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, Prints & Photographs Department. ICHi-17310.

The Aragon Ballroom, on the northeast corner of Lawrence and Broadway, in Chicago, 1952. Photographer: Carol Rice. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, Prints & Photographs Department. ICHi-27320.

The interior of the Aragon Ballroom, undated. Photographer: Raymond Trowbridge. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, Prints & Photographs Department. ICHi-27263.

A wedding on roller skates in Riverview Park, Chicago, ca. 1920s. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, Prints & Photographs Department. ICHi-23202.

A Polish wedding party in an automobile, in Chicago, 1919. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, Prints & Photographs Department. ICHi-22846.

Whether at a beach, dance hall, or picnic grove, working women were almost accompanied by a close female friend or two. From the Albert Mindlin album. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, Prints & Photographs Department. ICHi-24021.

Picnics were a favorite form of leisure among young and old alike. From the Albert Mindlin album. Courtesy of the Chicago Historical Society, Prints & Photographs Department. ICHi-24026.

While moral reformers did, at times, successfully enforce “proper dancing,” dance halls generally offered young couples the unsupervised interaction for which they were looking. Margaret Bourke-White/Life Magazine© Time Inc.

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

When men sought instruction outside their immediate group, women, usually played the role of instructor. For immigrant men, the taxi-dance hall was an especially important source of instruction. Gaetano DeFilippis, who studied the social life of an Italian immigrant community in Chicago, noted that, before young, Italian immigrant men attended dance halls like Dreamland, “their prepatory course is spent in the various taxi-dance halls.” Here, he argued, “they learn to dance and ‘break in’ by getting over bashfulness,” suggesting that immigrants may have actually used the taxi-dance hall for instruction.81 Taxi dancers also commented on the number of men who “come up just to dance.” Some men regularly patronized dance halls on a weekly basis. But “most of the fellows come up only a few times and don’t come back.”82 Many of these men were undoubtedly searching for a hall that fit well with their understanding of leisure and dance and when a particular hall failed to meet those needs, they moved on. But other men, like the immigrants DeFilippis studied, were perhaps stopping in for their “prepatory course” before building up the courage and skills to go dancing at the bigger, public halls and palaces. Dance instruction was also available at some dance halls, and, again, the instructors were usually young women. At Dreamland, in Chicago, in the 1920s, where the proprietor embraced the principle “to have dancers you must make dancers,” the hall regularly employed about five hundred “girl” instructors who offered “instruction in dancing with the price of admission on Tuesday nights.” A dance professor, who demanded “absolute quiet” from his charges and who expected the “girls” to pay “strict attention to his instruction,” was also usually in attendance, but the “girls” provided the one-on-one instruction. “If a fellow likes an instructor, and gets along with her especially well,” he could even “rent her services for an hour for the sum of one dollar,” which was paid to the “girl” instructor. Instructors kept track of the number of dances via a card that was punched every time the couple made an entire “circuit of the floor,” which by the end of the evening reached anywhere from twenty-five to forty circuits. Instructors were never paid actual wages, however. “In return for her services,” a girl received a pass “entitling her to free admission to Dreamland for an entire week.” In fact, instructors were never regularly scheduled. They simply had to register before eight o’clock Tuesday night to guarantee employment for that evening. Rather | 103 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

than employ “professional” instructors, Mr. Harmon drew from the pool of women who regularly danced at Dreamland, which meant that male patrons were likely to find the women they danced with on Saturday nights putting them through their paces on Tuesdays.83 Under this arrangement, working women readily combined wage work with commercial leisure, earning them a week’s worth of free dance passes, which helps explain the ease with which Dreamland recruited as many as five hundred instructors for Tuesday nights. Women might have received treats from their male companions, but they almost always paid their own admissions, since they usually arrived at dance halls unescorted. In the process, the practice of exchanging a night of instruction for a week’s worth of free passes not only made commercial leisure possible for women who were expected to pay their own admission but also saved them the wages they would have spent on admission and now could use instead to buy the cosmetics and clothes they needed to go dancing, perhaps helping them avoid the exchange relationships upon which treating was based. At the same time, the practice of having women work as dance instructors offers insight into the popularity of dance among women. As dance instructors, women were afforded the opportunity to show off their expertise and skills, skills working-class men coveted because of the prestige they brought and their value in dating and courtship. Men, of course, retained the traditional prerogative of asking for dances and had the money that might tip the balance of power in their favor. But the money and the “traditional” prerogatives did not protect them from the potential humiliation they faced with a dance partner who possessed greater skill and agility. Dancing, then, not only helped women negotiate the cost of commercial leisure but provided the opportunity to validate their skills and expertise at a time when they had few other opportunities to do so, while making it easier for them to stake a more definite claim to commercial leisure—if only temporarily—that potentially undercut and challenged men’s claim to public space.84 Working-class men were also ambivalent about the new social dances because they contrasted sharply with the organization of male culture. The copious drinking, the sensual dancing, and the other revelry in which men and women indulged at dance halls was vaguely redolent of the demonstrative behavior for which working-class men were known. | 104 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

As Roy Rosenzweig has shown, working-class picnics, Fourth of July celebrations, and other gatherings were marked by drunkenness, fights, and other mischief, to the dismay of middle-class reformers.85 Yet, men’s public behavior was not just about offending middle-class reformers. The social practices endemic to saloons, street-corner gangs, and sporting events also allowed men to publicly fashion and demonstrate their masculinity and hence fostered a sense of belonging and a collective public culture that was conducive to boisterous behavior. The dance floor, then, did not simply cut men off from the collective safety of the group but also eliminated the context upon which men generally relied to construct a public masculinity. At most dances, the dance floor effectively upset men’s numerical dominance in the dance hall proper, which inevitably affected their behavior. Except in the women’s dressing rooms, which were a feature of many of the larger halls, men almost always outnumbered their female counterparts in the dance halls’ galleries, barrooms, and hallways, except on the dance floor where they were equally matched. In fact, because of the ubiquitous practice of women’s dancing together, at times women outnumbered their male counterparts there. Rosabeth Kanter has argued that the numerical composition of a workforce can profoundly affect the behavior of men and women in the workplace. Around token women, Kanter argues, men sometimes offer “exaggerated displays of aggression and potency,” including “instances of sexual innuendos, aggressive sexual teasing and prowess oriented ‘war stories.’” Other men’s behavior included “‘showing off’ [or] telling stories in which ‘masculine prowess’ accounted for personal, sexual, or business success.” As the number of women increased to what Kanter calls a tilted group, with ratios of 65:35, so-called minorities (women in this case) “have potential allies among each other, can form coalitions, and can affect the culture of the group.”86 In fact, as the number of women increased, men were much more likely to refrain from the sexist remarks and innuendos rampant in male culture; at the very least, they found that women were more likely to object to and challenge their behavior. In addition, it suggests that a certain emotional intensity was missing. As Bonadonna explained: “You had to have some bit of extrovert in your personality [to dance],” as if most men did not.87 Yet, the extrovert in men was readily visible on the streets of working-class neighborhoods, in saloons, or at sporting events, which | 105 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

was bolstered by the same-sex camaraderie endemic to these hangouts. On the dance floor, men were not simply outnumbered but were also cut off from the reciprocal and mutual relationships or the collective safety of the group that almost always accompanied the unrestrained revelry for which they were known. Consequently, men found it difficult to replicate the sense of invulnerability they identified with a collective male culture when faced with a single female partner, someone who was probably more adept in the activity at hand than they were and whom most men were unaccustomed to including in the various rituals of reciprocity around which they organized male culture and their masculinity. Off the dance floor, men were equally unprepared for the challenges they confronted because they usually could not pay for all the treats their dates demanded. Belle Lindner Israels claimed that “the man who wished to spread himself dissuades the girls from drinking 5-cent drinks, such as beer or soft drinks because he wants to show his ability to buy more expensive ones—whiskey at 13 cents,” a practice Israels suggested was widespread. But treating could also extend well beyond the favor of picking up the tab. Men who socialized with taxi dancers, in particular, complained about being asked to pay for dresses, coats, slippers, meals, and even more expensive items, such as rent, and their dates were sure to remind them of birthdays, Valentine’s Day, and other holidays that might entail gift giving.88 What men expected in return for their treats varied considerably. But “the general feeling” among many men was that after “showing [a girl] a good time,” it was a “perfectly normal and ‘right’ demand” to expect some sort of intimacy. In fact, according to one dance hall patron, men “went to [dance halls to] ‘get away’ with things they couldn’t get away with back home,” and they boasted that at dance halls they could do whatever they “damn please.”89 The problem about which most men complained was trying to get their dates to “come across.” Some men claimed that patience was the only worthwhile virtue when it came to dating. “If you expect to ‘make’ any of these girls,” claimed one man who attended taxi-dance halls in the 1920s, “you’ve got to work slow and give them plenty of time.” You “have to court them,” “give them a good time [and] give them presents.” “They didn’t have to be expensive presents,” he insisted. “Just a lot of little things that . . . [they] would treasure just as much.”90 But most men found that negotiating sexual fa| 106 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

vors was never that simple, or as easy as providing lots of “little” gifts. Some men insisted that taxi dancers, especially those who stayed at their job “very long,” “know their stuff and are pretty hard to make.” “It is much easier to pick ‘it’ up at the big halls,” insisted one man. “The girls don’t know so much for one thing. Sometimes a few dirty jokes are all that are necessary to make them hot.”91 These dancers were in fact so “hard to make” that treating did nothing less than convince the men with whom they were acquainted that they were not prostitutes. “The trouble with taking out these girls,” stated one taxi-dance hall patron from the 1920s, “is that you never know whether you are going to get anything. Most of them are not regular prostitutes you know.” But he concluded, “if you strike them just right you can get something, . . . if you don’t you just lose your time and your money.”92 The problem men had with getting taxi dancers to “come across” further encouraged them to accuse them of being “gold diggers.” “Practically all of the girls [in taxi-dance halls],” claimed one man, were “golddiggers, out to exploit the men as much as possible.” Alma Nelson Zeitler had been working as a dancer for only a month when she exclaimed that she had already become a “successful gold digger.” She credited her success at “gold digging” to her ability “to choose the right man.” “He can be any age, but they got to be the ones who don’t know too much.” The “old ones [men who came regularly to the taxi-dance hall]” were “alright,” “but usually the new man at the halls are the best.” Zeitler explained that a girl had to give the impression that she was a “good girl [but] under hard circumstances.” “Then when a fellow asks for a date she tells him how hard up she is and [how] she would like to go out but . . . she needs the money and has to come to the hall and work every night.” After that, she would “get the idea across to him that I’ll go with him, if he’ll pay me what I’d make if I stayed in the hall that night.” To further take advantage of the situation, she would inflate the amount by “a few dollars.”93 Zeitler, however, did not simply fail to “come across” with her dates; she slipped away unannounced and unexpectedly. Zeitler often had her “pick ups” take her to a cafe, where, after getting “a good meal off of him,” she would “invent some way of getting away.” The easiest method was to “ask to be excused having meant then to [go] to [a] telephone or go to a restroom and then I go out another door and ditch him.” When | 107 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

that failed, she relied upon the help of a friend with whom she would split her earnings. If, for example, there was “only one door and the fellow can see me leaving,” she would “call up an older girl . . . to come . . . down . . . and to claim me as her niece” and then threaten “to make a scene.” Zeitler always paid her friend’s cab fare and “split” the “rake off” on a “fifty-fifty basis.” This particular scheme could work only “a few times,” she explained. But “there’s one born every minute and a lot of these [men] come up to these halls.”94 Of course, taxi dancers were not the only women notorious for outwitting their male companions. Rose Kaiser, who preferred a small hall behind a saloon “to which nice Jewish boys and girls go,” was equally clever. But rather than play the role of the beleaguered “woman adrift” barely eking out a subsistence, Kaiser liked to give the impression she was “fast,” for she “dressed flashy and had nice dresses.” Her ruse apparently worked, for she “used to pick up men ‘at dances in the street, [or] anywhere they happened to be.’” Although her initial approach differed sharply from Zeitler’s, there were many similarities. Kaiser, for example, was careful about whom she chose for treats. “I’d never make a working man supporting any one spend on me,” she insisted. “I picked out the fellows with money.” Like Zeitler, Kaiser also recognized the danger and expectations involved with treating and took great care to avoid any mishap. “I’ve gone out with lots of fellows,” she explained, “but I’d never let any one of them get the best of me. Everybody thought I was fast, but I wasn’t, because I knew when to stop.” Kaiser, for example, refused certain gifts like silk stockings “because they’d want to put them on [me].” And, like Zeitler, she often ended her dates abruptly. Although she admitted that her “pick ups” generally showed her a “good time,” at the right “psychological moment” she would “clear out” and “take good care not to meet them a second time.” Kaiser eventually stopped playing the “fast girl” after a man she had been dating during this time found out about her “good times” and “told her what he thought of it all.” This, combined with the fear that one day some man would “get her,” “stopped all this.”95 The extent to which women resorted to these kinds of tactics is, of course, impossible to know. But Rose Kaiser’s policy of not meeting her dates a second time was a strategy common among taxi dancers, further contributing to the link between working-class women and taxi dancers. | 108 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

One investigator found that taxi dancers belonged to “the same type of migratory group in which we class the hobo, shifting from one city to another wherever fortune takes them, stopping wherever they can make the best subsistence.” It was even more common, he insisted, “where girls shift from one dance hall to another.” This investigator claimed that taxi dancers moved from job to job to “make the most money.”96 Some taxi dancers explained that they changed jobs to avoid certain men. A hostess named Jackie, who had worked as a dancer for two years and who described herself as overworked and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, had just started dancing at New York’s Goodman’s Dance Hall, in the 1930s, when a Committee of Fourteen investigator questioned her. According to Jackie, she had worked as a hostess at the Rose Danceland but left that job because she had “promised many guys and they were after [her],” which she insisted was the reason “[she] had to quit.”97 At the same time, working-class men, and not just men who patronized taxi-dance halls, recalled that, after treating their dates to an evening of dancing and drinking, they usually left the dance hall as they came— either alone or with other men—because most women, and not just taxi dancers or Rose Kaiser, found ways to “clear out” at the right “psychological moment.” As the dance came to an end, usually anywhere from midnight to as late as three in the morning, single men inundated their female companions with offers to escort them home. Some men even accosted women while on the dance floor to see if they “had anyone to go home with.”98 Once the dancers were outside, it was common to see great numbers of “men and women loiter[ing] about” where “a great deal of date making continued.”99 Along the streets surrounding the dance hall, men often lined up their automobiles and anxiously awaited their “pick ups.” As each group of women left the hall, they were “interviewed by different groups of boys” who up to this point had not successfully made a date. Despite the men’s persistence, most girls succeeded in “breaking away from their many seducers” and managed “to get a chance to go home on the street car,” where many of the “boys” continued to “crowd around them and insist on familiarities while on the car.”100 In some cases, a group of girls might accept the invitation to see them home and “four or five couples pack in to a car intended only for five [people] and off they go with much noise and laughter.” But only in a few cases were men lucky enough to take their dates home. More likely, | 109 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

the girls were seen “going home with their ‘girls chums’ and the boys with their boy friends. They go as they come.”101 Angeline Tonietto, for example, used to go to the Aragon and out to the Trianon. Tonietto always went with a “bunch” of girls and came home “in a bunch.” Going “dancing to the big name bands . . . [and staying] out [till] three or four o’clock in the morning” was “our fun,” she insisted, and “nobody would bother you.” “Once in a while you’d meet some fella, you know, who’d give you a lift home.” But “we’d rarely come home with fellas.”102 The problems men faced in getting “pick ups” or dealing with stubborn and unruly women were themes common in popular songs from the period. Songs like “Coquette” (1928), which asked the girl to “Tell me why you keep fooling, little coquette,” and “There’s Yes! Yes! in Your Eyes” (1924), which included the line “I’ll stop my scheming and dreaming, ’Cause I realize, Your lips tell me no, no! But there’s Yes! Yes! in your eyes,” highlighted not only the frustration men faced but also the heartache.103 Other songs, like “Don’t Bring Lulu” (1925), claimed that women were disruptive and impossible to control. You can bring Pearl, she’s a darn nice girl, but Don’t Bring Lulu. You can bring Rose with her turned-up nose, but Don’t Bring Lulu. Lulu always wants to do, What we boys don’t want her to.104

Even more ruthless was “Hard-Hearted Hannah (The Vamp of Savannah),” who seemed to take pleasure in men’s pain: Hard-hearted Hannah, the vamp of Savannah, The meanest gal in town; Leather is tough, but Hannah’s heart is tougher. She’s a gal who loves to see men suffer. To tease ’em and thrill ’em, To torture and kill ’em Is her delight, they say.105

Of course, the social relations of the dance hall did not affect only popular songs from the period; working-class men were no less bitter. The men who failed to get “pick ups”—and most of them did—usually denounced the women who rejected them as “lemons” because they always “went home without boys” and hence failed to “come across.”106 | 110 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

But even if a woman consented to an escort home, men still remained bitter. In his study of Chicago Italians, Gaetano DeFilippis noted that some Italian men referred to their dates as “winsome wench[es]” because they had to work a whole week to pay for a night out at Riverview Park or the Dreamland dance hall, a finding that suggests that many men simply resented having to pay for their dates.107 Another man who attended taxi-dance halls in Chicago complained that he “went out with one of these [gold-diggers] once and . . . before we’d gotten home I’d spent over fifteen dollars and all I got out of it was a good night kiss. These girls are on to their stuff. You can’t fool them.”108 In both cases, their dates did not necessarily clear out at the right “psychological moment,” nor did they necessarily call on a friend to arrange a quick get away. They simply failed to “come across” and in the minds of their male companions failed to reciprocate for the fifteen-dollar date or the week’s worth of wages they felt they had wasted. Stepping out at the right “psychological moment” and taking care to avoid meeting up with the same man twice were not the only strategies women adopted to negotiate the system of treating and the demands their male companions invariably made. Belle Lindner Israels claimed that “when the girl is both lucky and clever, she frees herself from her self-selected escort before home-going time and finds a feminine companion in his place for the midnight ride on the trolley.”109 Young women freed themselves from their “self-selected escort” by making up other dates. One taxi dancer named Sally, who worked at New York’s Goodman’s Dance Hall in the 1930s, agreed to meet an investigator of the Committee of Fourteen after the dance was over. But she could not say whether the plans were “definite or not.” She had already made “arrangements to step out with one of the musicians.”110 Another taxi dancer claimed, there was always a “fellow who comes along that is too drunk or too dirty or I can’t stand for some reason.” But she claimed that she could “usually get rid of him in one dance.” Sometimes, she explained, “I tell him I have the next dance, and sometimes I ask him to excuse me, and I go in the rest room.” One night, she recalled, one man kept insisting on dancing with her. “I finally went up and asked one of my regular friends to dance with me,” which successfully discouraged the first man’s unwanted advances.111 Other women, and not just taxi dancers, adopted similar tactics to | 111 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

avoid certain men. One tactic was to feign illness. A woman who worked in a New York department store in the 1910s recalled that once an outof-town buyer she met in the store asked her to join him for a drink after work. She accepted his offer and had a “very gay time.” They had dinner and went to a show, and then the out-of-town buyer took her home and “made the inevitable proposal.” “Was’nt [sic] it a shame,” she explained, “I was sick,” which quickly ended the date and foiled the efforts of her out-of-town companion. This same woman also found ways to avoid any unwanted attention by hiding from the men who were pursuing her. On another occasion, she and a friend went to Coney Island and had an “awful time” when “they were in bathing.” Apparently, they had attracted the attention of two men who “persisted in wanting to talk to them” and who left only after they lost track of the two girls, who had buried “themselves in the sand to escape their notice.”112 Many women also took care to remain sober. One of the outstanding features of the dance hall that morally outraged reformers was the rampant use of alcohol, especially among women. At a Blue Jay Social Club dance, in 1917, for example, an investigator for the Chicago Juvenile Protective Association claimed that “there were so many cases of downright drunkenness that it was impossible to keep count of it,” and many of the drinkers were “women and young girls [who] were drinking very freely.” But this same investigator also admitted, “up to the time that we left the hall (2:00 A.M.) we did not see an[y] female so completely intoxicated that she could not take care of herself,” suggesting that some women simply watched the amount of alcohol they consumed.113 Others literally took matters into their own hands. A woman who worked behind the lingerie waist counter at a New York department store in the 1910s was “familiar with gin fizzes, Jack Rose cocktails, whiskey, and ginger ale highballs, etc.,” and often drank heavily when she went out dancing. On one occasion she and one other woman and their two dates “drank five quarts of champagne . . . in about an hour or so.” The woman recalled that “she and the other girl were both pretty drunk.” They quickly excused themselves, went to the ladies’ room, and, “by sticking their fingers in their throat, got rid of the wine and much to the men’s surprise appeared again in about half an hour perfectly sober.”114 As these experiences suggest, women had a number of different strategies for avoiding having to “come across” or even to accept rides | 112 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

home. In fact, while taxi-dancers may have been dancing to earn their dimes, they shared these experiences with other working-class women who were also anxious about having to negotiate their dates’ expectations. All women looked for that right “psychological moment” to end a date or depended upon one of their many friends to break one. As Bonadonna pointed out, even the practice of accepting or rejecting dances was a collective practice; a woman would accept a dance only if her friend first approved of the potential partner. Many women even planned their strategies in advance and took particular care to avoid alcohol, as if they not only expected their dates or other acquaintances to make unwanted advances but also were familiar with the problems other women faced when they went out alone. The extensive measures women took seemed to encourage men to stigmatize them as “lemons” or as “winsome wenches.” But the practices of refusing escorts home, watching the amount of alcohol they drank, and even hiding themselves in the sand allowed young women to protect themselves, avoid any mishap, and ensure that some men would have to accept the manner in which they tried to organize intimacy and leisure. As much as the dance hall was about romance and fun, it was also a place where women could challenge conventional gender norms and lay claim to public space. The way women danced, their dress, and their behavior on and off the dance floor conveyed an image of expressive sexuality, independence, and, at times, power that not only defied the image of the “good girl” but allowed women to contest the manner in which their parents governed dating and courtship. There were some risks involved. Women’s accepting of male treats seemed to contribute to men’s expectation that they would receive sexual favors in return. Yet, women were still able to create a culture that combined the somewhat contradictory impulses needed to experiment with new identities, attitudes, manners of speech, and behavior on the one hand while remaining resilient enough to counter their male companions’ persistent overtures on the other. In other words, working-class women were able to balance the often intoxicating world of commercial amusements with their own concerns for personal safety and family obligation. At the same time, the culture of leisure women helped create was not just about dealing with the demands made by their male companions. | 113 |

“The Girls Here Are Like Crazy”

For women, the dance hall was a world of make-believe that thrived on spontaneity, embraced flirtation, and had the potential to upset certain gender norms. In short, when women appropriated different identities, experimented with alcohol and cigarettes, and passed certain men over for dances or refused escorts home, they not only helped define the norms of behavior that governed dating and courtship and challenged the version of womanhood their parents favored but also called into question the attributes and social practices that collectively made up working-class masculinity. Throughout the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, men may have retained the prerogative of asking women for dances, but few other guarantees prevailed as women increasingly assumed some of the privileges men had initially claimed as their own. In addition, these women came to know the dance hall through the homosocial relations upon which they relied to understand it. Women not only danced together and hung out with one another between dances but also drew upon the same-sex culture of which they were a part to negotiate the system of dating that governed male-female relationships. Whether men were asking them for dances, insisting that they join them in a deserted back room or dark gallery, or offering to escort them home after the dance was over, when women went dancing, they almost always had a close friend nearby to help them get out of a sticky situation. In the process, the collective organization of their dance hall fun allowed women to promote more readily their own ideas about intimacy and leisure and to provide the comfort and safety they required to pick and choose until they found the dance partner or spouse for whom they were looking.

| 114 |

FOUR

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here” Working-Class Male Culture and the Struggle over Gender, Identity, and Dance

On a rainy Chicago night in 1925, Julia Podraza met her future husband, George Matiasek. George was a friend of Julia’s oldest brother, Frank, who played baseball with George on the neighborhood corner lot. On that night, Frank brought George home with him to “get protected from the rain” after a storm interrupted their game. When the pair arrived, they unexpectedly ran into Julia. Her brother introduced the two, and from that night on, Julia recalled fondly, “we became friendly.”1 During their courtship, the pair often visited the zoo at Lincoln Park or took Sunday afternoon rides to Starved Rock, a park outside Chicago. Sunday evenings were set aside for dinner at George’s parents house and usually consisted of roast pork, duck, or goose and Bohemian dumplings and sauerkraut. And Julia loved to dance. “I’d rather dance than eat,” she declared. Julia and George went to all “the big places in the 20s,” including the Aragon, the Trianon, and the Merry Gardens, which featured the big-name bands and conductors such as Wayne King and Lawrence Welk. When not attending the larger ballrooms, they went to the neighborhood “Polish Hall,” which also doubled as a union hall, for dances. Julia recalled that “they have big doings there” and “all these dances,” like the Chocolate Dance, the Donut Dance, and the Rose Dance. Yet, while Julia loved to dance, she and her friends “would all get together and have ballroom stepping” “maybe every two weeks,” and | 115 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

the only time George ever danced with her was on their wedding night, to the song “Home Sweet Home.” On the other nights they went dancing, Julia recalled that “he’d sit and wait for me till I got through dancing and then he’d take me home.” Julia explained that she used to dance “with all the fellows [she] knew there. ’Cause we used to have like a gang.”2 Dancing, then, figured prominently in Julia’s and George’s courtship. But their dancing, or her dancing and his watching from the sidelines, also sheds light on the meaning of dance for men and women and on commercial leisure’s impact. While dancing was all the rage throughout the early twentieth century, the couple’s experience suggests that most men were not as enthusiastic about dancing as the women they so eagerly pursued and that commercial leisure—and dance halls in particular—did not play as significant a role in working-class dating and courtship as some historians have assumed. After all, Julia may have loved to dance, but she and George went ballroom stepping “maybe every two weeks.” The reasons men and women only occasionally visited dance halls varied as much as the different steps they performed on the dance floor. In some cases, their infrequent attendance reflected a lack of spare cash to pay for more than an occasional outing. In others, the workplace either consumed too much time and energy, or the wages they made were too meager to afford more than a weekly outing. In addition, men’s consumption of commercial leisure revolved around their relationships with women on and off the dance floor. While many men boasted that, at dance halls, they did whatever they “damn please,” their female partners were never quite willing to accommodate them. All men found themselves being passed over for dances; dates usually refused to “come across” or accept escorts home; and women were usually more adept dancers—all of these factors contested male-defined ideas about intimacy and leisure and challenged the manner in which men had grown accustomed to constructing a gender identity.3 The new social dances that gained popularity at the turn of the century not only were organized around couples instead of danced in a group formation but also favored spontaneity and individual expression over a more predictable routine, potentially undercutting the collective safety of the group and the collective process that gave meaning to the manner in which men understood their masculinity and heterosocial relations. | 116 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

For working-class men, the anxiety and humiliation that generally accompanied finding a dance partner or “making dates,” as well as the manner in which women challenged their use of public space, were simply too much to contend with, and they either avoided patronizing dance halls altogether or refused to dance (much like George Matiasek). Yet, they still tried to lay claim to the dance hall by adopting a number of collective strategies that allowed them to both remain committed to the male culture with which they were most familiar and negotiate the norms of behavior that governed the dance hall and floor. Men’s behavior, their dress, their language, and the manner in which they danced reflected their attempts to redefine dance as a collective practice. Contemporaries may have feared that dance halls promoted the promiscuous intermingling of the sexes, and historians have emphasized the heterosocial coupling dance halls promoted. But dance halls were as much extensions of the homosocial cultures from which both men and women came as sites for finding romance and intimacy. Making dates was never the primary goal of many men and women, nor was heterosexuality their only identity. As they left their families and communities, working-class men found that the identities and identifications with which they were most familiar followed them into the local halls, palaces, academies, and taxidance halls that made up their leisure routines.4 At times, the mixing of men and women and dance and drink led to uninhibited moments of pleasure, but the social relations of the dance floor just as often led these men and women back to the same-sex groups from which they had come and that played an important role in the dance hall throughout the early twentieth century. Of course, the manner in which men responded to their situation did not solve all their problems. By organizing a collective male dance hall culture, these men may have found ways to negotiate the demands and expectations of their female companions. But they also successfully reproduced the culture with which they were most familiar in saloons and poolrooms and on street corners. All dance halls were characterized by unruly and boisterous behavior, organized around cliques or social and athletic clubs, and, at times, disrupted by violent conflict. Such behavior allowed groups of young men to stake out their own territory, to intimidate outsiders, and to establish “exclusive rights” to certain women. But the culture they created did not discriminate, at least not too thoroughly, | 117 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

for all men outside the immediate group were suspect, including other working-class men, who found themselves having to carefully negotiate several boundaries. As a result, dance halls may have encouraged a certain amount of intermingling between the sexes and perhaps some romance. But they were also vehicles through which men came to terms with the broader inequalities and problems they confronted in their dayto-day lives, affecting both the social organization of commercial leisure and their consumption of it. In the 1910s, Louise De Koven Bowen insisted that it was “not difficult to know when one is in the neighborhood of a dance hall.” The “doorways, alleys, and dark passages in the vicinity,” she claimed, were almost always “filled with young men and girls in couples, and outside the halls there are always girls waiting to ask men who are leaving for their return checks.”5 But the energy and the time dance hall owners expended to try and cultivate and then maintain a clientele suggests that dance halls were not automatically magnets for hordes of working-class people. In addition to sponsoring contests, intermission prizes, and special dance nights in order to attract crowds and then to convince them to indulge themselves as much as possible, dance hall owners also organized extensive advertising campaigns. All dance halls, especially the small clubs both “pseudo and bonafide,” made use of throwaways, pluggers, circulars, or dodgers, as well as window placards, billboards, newspapers, and posters that were nailed to telegraph poles. The most popular method of advertising, the plugger, was generally in the “form of a small card bearing an announcement of the dance. On the reverse side of the card were the words of some piece of music,” “occasionally . . . the advertisement of some business concern”6 or “the printed choruses of popular songs and other matter that would bring the blush of shame to the most hardened cheek.”7 In some cases, these printed cards were “scattered broadcast [in dance halls] over chairs and benches, on the floors, and even on the bar itself.”8 Pluggers, throwaways, handbills, and dodgers were also tossed into the windows of parked cars and handed out “in practically every hall in the city,” often as early as a month in advance.9 In a Chicago district, in 1911, Bowen even claimed that “pluggers announcing Sunday dances are given to people leaving churches.”10 Mailing lists were another form of advertisement used by entrepre| 118 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

neurs to attract young men and women and to keep them apprised of the halls’ latest activities. In the 1920s, Chicago’s White City had a mailing list of twenty thousand patrons and sent out four thousand cards every week, announcing special features “so that the entire list is gone through every month or five weeks.” The list was in the form of a card catalogue, and each card included the person’s name, address, post office district, and “special dances or contests attended with the date of each,” as well as “prizes won, and mail returned.” Names were “left voluntarily with the inducement that every week a certain number of free passes are sent out.”11 Mailing lists were particularly popular among the larger dance halls because the clientele was “hardly ever local.” Instead, dance hall patrons “drift from hall-to-hall, and in the larger places [such as dance palaces] nearly everyone is a stranger to everyone else.” During the 1920s, for example, the patrons of Chicago’s Dreamland were never “confined to any particular district or districts of the city.” The southwest side and the northwest side furnished a large proportion of the dance hall patrons, as did the west. Dance hall patrons also came from some of the wealthier residential districts, such as Hyde Park, the South Shore District, North Edgewater, and Rogers Park. The addresses from these districts were “for the most part . . . along car line streets”; when the addresses were on residential streets, the names were those of girls who “in all probability” were domestics.12 Working-class youth drifted from hall to hall via “street car and elevated,” which contemporaries concluded was obvious by the few cars outside the dance hall “in proportion to the multitude of dancers within.”13 Many of the larger halls were situated at busy transportation intersections. Chicago’s Dreamland was located at Paulina and Van Buren and could be reached by three public transit lines—the Van Buren Street car line, the Ashland Avenue car line, and the Elevated— making it one of the best-located dance halls in the city.14 Dating patterns also suggest that the popularity of dancing was restricted to an occasional visit for many working-class couples, much as it was for Julia Podroza, who went “ballroom stepping” “maybe every two weeks.” Veronica Siwek knew her husband about a year before their marriage in 1912. But “there wasn’t dates . . . like they are dating now,” which might mean going out several times a week. She and her husbandto-be would go to a “dance every week . . . and sometime[s] [he would] | 119 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

take you back home.” There was also “a movie at 35th close to Archer,” which they went to a “couple times” on Sunday.15 Joseph Sowa knew his wife only about six months before they got married, in 1916. Yet, despite the short courtship, Sowa recalled that “we didn’t do much together.” “We used to go [to] picnics and dances . . . stuff like that.” Sowa explained that there were two picnic groves in the neighborhood that were busy all summer, and “we went to a couple of dances.” There was a dance hall on North Avenue and Palmer called “Humble Hall.”16 By the 1920s, when commercial leisure had assumed a more conspicuous place in urban life than it had occupied during the preceding decades, many couples still went out only occasionally. Stella Montwicki, who married in 1925, explained that, when her future husband was courting her, he would “come to the house once in a while,” but they “didn’t sit around the house,” which seemed a typical get-together for many couples before the 1920s; instead, they went out once a week, “sometimes twice a week.” “We went to a movie,” she recalled, and “we used to go for a ride” in her husband-to-be’s car.17 Working-class men and women went out only occasionally because many dance halls were open only a few nights a week. McNamara and McIntosh, the “enterprising businessmen” who subleased Gaelic Park in the 1920s, held dances on Saturdays and Sundays. On Wednesdays and Thursdays they rented the dance pavilion “to other organizations who conduct dances on their own responsibility,” such as the Hamburgs, the Novelty Trio, and the Gaelic Park Steppers. The Hamburgs was a “well organized athletic club,” whose club room was located in a former Presbyterian church building; the Novelty Trio consisted of three men who held dances as a “means of earning a living”; and the Gaelic Park Steppers was a “partnership of two young men said to belong to the Wallace Athletic Club.”18 During the rest of the week—or for three days—Gaelic Park was left vacant, while the men and women who regularly patronized the park spent their leisure time elsewhere. The incredible numbers of men and women who attended dances also reflected the fact that dances were held during what contemporaries called the “dance season,” usually from November to May, or about thirty-two weeks a year, according to investigators in Kansas City, Missouri.19 In November 1911, when the Milwaukee Recreation Survey estimated that twelve thousand or thirteen thousand people on average at| 120 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

tended both academies and dance halls each Saturday evening, they also noted that “this was before the height of the [dance] season,” suggesting that the season had just began.20 In March 1916, Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Association investigated a dance sponsored by the “Put Away Trouble Club.” Investigators contended that the dancing they had viewed was the “worst they had ever seen in a public dance hall,” and they felt compelled to hand-deliver their report to the chief of police. When the chief of police failed to respond, the JPA began suit against the club’s four officers. The case was continued twice, and a hearing was then scheduled for May 1916. “But by that time,” investigators lamented, “the hall where the dance was held will have had several other dances and by the middle of May the dance hall season was over,” which they felt would make it more difficult to prosecute the offenders.21 Victor Harackiewicz, who immigrated to the United States in 1913, also reported dancing by the season. As a young man growing up in Chicago during the 1910s and 1920s, Harackiewicz often used his leisure time for Sunday picnics or to go dancing. These activities had definite seasons: The summer was set aside for picnics, while the dance season ran from the beginning of fall until late in the spring.22 The development of a dance season was undoubtedly an effort to avoid dancing during the hot summer months. Even during the winter months, dance hall patrons had a difficult time managing the often unbearable heat that was common in most halls. “Usually a low ceiling and a thick atmosphere,” reformers argued, meant “low, murky standards.”23 But low ceilings also contributed to an almost suffocating heat, a problem that was much less severe in the larger dance palaces. The fly-bynight dance halls in converted auditoriums, tenement flats, and the back rooms of congested saloons rarely had any type of ventilation, including windows. At the Athenian, a Chicago taxi-dance hall during the 1920s, the third floor was the dance hall proper, a “rather small rectangular room with a low ceiling” that was ventilated by “raising two windows at the bottom,” which was considered “very poor.24” In other cases, the windows were simply “boarded up” or opened only after the room had become “uncomfortably warm,” apparently on the “theory that the hotter it was the more thirst would be superinduced.”25 When hall owners managed to open the windows, the heat was still too much to contend with. According to Bowen, “Even in halls where | 121 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

the windows were open, the odor of the overheated people, mingled with the tobacco smoke and the fumes from the liquor spilled on the floor, tables and chairs, made the air unmovable.” In some clubs, “especially the rented halls,” owners “neglect even the floor reserved for dancing, allowing it to become blanketed in dirt to which are added cigarette remains, ashes, and other debris.” The “dust arising from the floor by the moving feet and swirling skirts of the dancers is so thick that it makes breathing both difficult and dangerous.”26 At the Progress AC’s annual dance, in 1917, for example, the hall, which measured twenty five feet by fifty feet, was “very clean and brilliantly lighted but the ventilation was poor. The six high windows on each side had been made for ventilation purposes.” But on “account of the cold “the management decided not to open them, so the crowd had to be content with inhaling the dust and smoke, all of which caused several girls to become groggy, and the “fainting of one of them,” a problem Bowen claimed was common.27 Bowen undoubtedly exaggerated the extent to which young women fainted, but other observers were quick to note that the unbearable heat did have a profound impact on the dance hall. Men were often seen without their coats, “dancing in shirt sleeves” with “the water pouring from their faces.”28 The heat and the fear of sweating prevented some women from dancing altogether. A woman who frequented Chicago’s White City in the 1920s was overheard in the washroom complaining to a girlfriend: “I can’t dance. When I dance I sweat, and when I sweat I smell, and when I smell the fellows won’t dance with me. I can’t dance.”29 Other women avoided the problem of sweating, or at least tried to cover it up, by wearing black gowns, which one observer claimed “might be called the mark of the dance hall habitué.” “The girl who is dance mad and who spends all her evenings going from one resort to another . . . wears black because light evening gowns soil too rapidly for a meager purse to renew.”30 The development of a dance season also reflected the popularity of the other summer fun that was available to both men and women. In 1909, Belle Lindner Israels noted that during the winter months, or the “indoor season,” the town was dance mad. “If you walk along Grand street on any night in the week during the winter months,” she explained, “the glare of lights and the blare of music strike you on every side.” By the summer, “the range” of summer amusements around New York City had | 122 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

expanded dramatically and covered “first, beach resorts; second, amusement parks; third, the picnic park utilized for the outing, the chowder and the summer night’s festival; fourth, the excursion boat; fifth, the vacation home or camp provided by settlements, churches, and girls’ clubs.” The problem for the “ordinary average working girl earning five or six dollars a week,” she insisted, was that the summer months found “thousands of working girls . . . in the position of compulsory idleness through slack seasons in the trades with which they are familiar,” making it difficult for them to afford the summer fun that was available.31 Men also favored athletics over dancing during the hot summer months. During the winter months, social clubs held their dances in neighborhood halls or in uptown hotels. By the end of May or early June, club activities centered around outings and excursions. Some of these outings included weekend trips to Coney Island, and some social clubs even rented lockers at Coney Island for the summer months. But most of the time men spent their summers amusing themselves with athletics, which Israels claimed was the “natural outlet for the boy.”32 Many social clubs developed out of athletic teams or were simply athletic clubs that put on dances to pay for equipment and uniforms. Once enough money had been raised or when the weather permitted, they abandoned dancing and resumed the athletic events for which they had initially come together. Men may have been attracted to dance halls to get “pick ups” and the other heterosocial fun associated with dancing. But the urge for athletics, as well as the homosocial ties around that baseball, football, and other sports revolved, was strong enough to compel some men to abandon the dance halls during the hotter summer months. Working-class men simply had more than one identity with which to contend, and dating and heterosocial leisure were not always their most important priorities. Besides dancing by the season or on certain days of the week, men and women also had to contend with the long and monotonous hours they spent on the job and the poor wages on which they had to live. As one man in the 1920s explained his use of leisure time: “When you worked for twenty-two dollars and all week you just work and eat and sleep, on Saturday you feel like doing something.”33 In his case, doing something meant going dancing at Chicago’s Dreamland. A young woman who lived in the “Polish colony of Waterside,” Connecticut, during the 1920s | 123 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

recalled that she and her boyfriend, Bill, “didn’t go out to dance much because Bill’s allowance wasn’t big enough for that and the others’ pockets were [e]ither always empty or full of fish-hooks.” She did, however, explain that between the house parties and “wild rides in Bill’s car we managed to spread joy and plenty of it.”34 Another man who often attended Chicago’s taxi-dance halls in the 1920s explained that he also never had enough money for more than a weekly outing. When a “fellow” “gets his pay check on Saturday, he goes out for a big time on Saturday night, and takes his roll along with him.” “By Sunday night,” he continued, “he’s spent most of his week’s pay and so has to go light for the rest of the week. Then he rests up and is all fired up ready for another big spree on the following Saturday.”35 There were, of course, some men and women who went out more than occasionally. But they had to carefully watch over their meager resources and restrict the types of leisure activities in which they participated. In Chicago during the 1920s, a clerk at a cleaning and dyeing store explained that he “went out four times” last week and was “dated up heavy” the “next week too.” The young clerk was twenty-three and “old enough” to get married, but, he declared, “I want to sow my wild oats and make a good pick while I’m sowing those oats.” He hoped to find a “good looking, understanding wife” one day and claimed that once he did, he would be “content.” “Until then,” he declared, “life’s gonna be one sweet parade of dates.” At the same time, however, he insisted that he “don’t spend all [his] money on the girls.” “Some I [take] down [to] the club (basement club), some I visit at their homes, others I take riding,” and still others, those he described as “the best,” “I take out.”36 He failed to explain where he went with his “best” dates. But since he spent most of his time at the basement club or around his own home and neighborhood, he probably attended one of Chicago’s many dance halls, especially if his date liked to dance, and he wanted to spend some money. Robert Bonadonna also “took out” only his “special dates.” Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s, Bonadonna and a few of his buddies, who collectively made up the Power House Social and Athletic Club, used to go dancing all over Brooklyn. From time to time, Bonadonna would go to “other places” in New Jersey or on Long Island. But “he didn’t go in groups [to] these places.” When he was with a “special date,” it would | 124 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

usually be a “one-on-one arrangement,” and he would go to these “other places” to dance, “you know to spend a whole ten dollar bill on a girl and take her out to a place that would cost ten dollars for the evening.” In Bonadonna’s case, he did not just “go out” but took his date dancing at one of the more expensive halls that cost more, and without the other members of the Power House. This pattern suggests that the nights out with his male friends cost considerably less than his evenings with his “special” dates and that he could not afford to go out with a “special date” too often.37 Dance halls, then, may have attracted enormous numbers of men and women, but only during certain days of the week and months of the year. The development of a dance season, which may have made going to the dance hall a special event, combined with the problems working-class men and women had in paying for commercial leisure and the strategies they adopted to stretch their meager resources, helps explain the popularity of Saturday nights and the social organization of commercial leisure. Some men and women simply could not tolerate the unbearable summer heat or were eager for other amusements. For other men and women, going dancing was either their reward for a week of wage labor that monopolized all their time and energy or an outing that was expensive enough to require them to save up for a week to pay for a Saturday night out. In short, many hard-pressed working people simply could not splurge either all their money or all their energy on the big dance halls more than once a week and usually had to content themselves with more modest entertainments or become more discriminating consumers and patronize different types of dance halls, depending upon the company they planned to keep and the amount of money they intended to spend. By organizing their consumption of commercial leisure in this fashion, they could more easily remain committed to both their homosocial and heterosocial lives and find ways to pay for their dates without spending all their money in one night or in one place. At the same time, the dance hall’s popularity and men’s and women’s consumption of commercial leisure revolved around people’s relationships on and off the dance floor. Throughout the early twentieth century, many men responded enthusiastically to dancing and dance halls attracted a disproportionate number of men. But the frustration and anxiety they faced when trying to make dates or when trying to find | 125 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

a willing dance partner also took its toll, and many men became “piqued”38and exhibited a considerable amount of resentment toward the women with whom they were so eager to become acquainted. At most dance halls, for example, men and women cussed irreverently. But one observer at Gaelic Park noted, “little vulgarity was heard among the boys until after the girls arrived,” as if the men were consciously trying to offend their female companions and redefine the dance hall as male space.39 On other occasions, men were much more explicit about their disdain for the women with whom they shared the dance hall. An investigator in Pittsburgh found that “when the dance was over a ‘stag line’ formed at the foot of the stairs, the men rather indiscriminately accosting nearly every unescorted girl that departed.”40 Many of these men had probably been passed over for dances and remained what one man called the “great unmatched” who expressed their resentment by harassing unescorted women.41 Working-class men were equally offensive on the dance floor. Bowen claimed that, at the dances with which she was familiar in Chicago, cigarettes were “everywhere in evidence,” and cuspidors were often furnished in the dance room, since chewing tobacco was also “valued at a premium” and men “expectorate freely.”42 More than a decade later, chewing tobacco was still popular. In the 1920s, Collis Stocking noted that men chewed tobacco at Pittsburgh’s dance halls, and they were “not always careful and the floor, for several feet around, bears evidence of their lack of accuracy.”43 At Chicago’s Gaelic Park, at about the same time, the outer edges of the dance floor provided “acceptable substitutes for cuspidors.”44 With floors that were dirty, and “slopped with liquor,” cigarette butts, and chewing tobacco, the dance hall was vaguely redolent of the working-class saloon. As George Ade explained, every town had its “exceptional places [saloons]” such as “Tony Faust’s in St. Louis or the splendiferous Righeimer’s in Chicago,” where the “socially select could become pickled under polite auspices.” But the “‘Forty-Second Street Country Club’ was not related to the small-town dump where the hard nuts from the farming districts assembled to get themselves liquored ‘to the key-hole’ and then pull off rough-and-tumble fights, rolling around in the saw dust.”45 The debris-covered and alcoholdrenched dance hall floor could never replace the saloon or take on its | 126 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

importance to working-class male culture. But the familiar smells that cigarettes, alcohol, and chewing tobacco produced still helped men lay claim to the emerging sphere of heterosocial leisure and perhaps accounts for the disproportionate numbers of men who continued to attend dance halls, despite the fact that many of them—like George Matiasek—avoided dancing. To be sure, not all men smoked cigarettes and chewed tobacco. Nor were all dance halls as unappealing as some investigators insisted. Dance palaces, in particular, were known for their lavish decor, and they were more likely to make use of floor supervisors than were the club dances or rented halls. But most dance halls were not dance palaces. In particular, and especially before Prohibition, dance halls were typically connected to saloons, which long had a reputation for boisterous behavior. As Madelon Powers has shown, not only did saloons have a reputation for violence, bawdy language, and pictures of scantily clad women, but brass cuspidors also stood within “convenient spitting distance, with sawdust scattered about to accommodate lapses of marksmanship.”46 The saloon thus profoundly shaped working-class masculinity and same-sex relations, and there is no reason to believe that men simply abandoned the ways in which they typically behaved at saloons once they had left, especially if the dance hall was in a back room connected to the bar, thereby making it even easier to transplant to the dance hall the rituals and behavior men commonly identified with the saloon. At the same time, men found subtle ways to lay claim to the dance hall and floor. One such way was to refuse to take off one’s hat. Besides being bothered by the drinking and the smoking, Bowen complained that “at many dances men wear their hats.”47 Almost a decade later, middle-class observers were still obsessed with men’s hats. Clara G. Row, who was bothered by the public and collective sexual culture working-class and immigrant men and women created at dance halls, noted that the “most obvious surface difference” between the dances and the dancers with whom she was familiar and the ones at Gaelic Park and Polonia “was that the men kept their hats on.” Row wondered “if this is merely a surface difference, a case of it not being the custom with that particular crowd, or in that particular neighborhood.” But she guessed that it also may have reflected “the attitude of the men toward the girls who went there.” | 127 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

“If they had picked up at school and on the streets the knowledge of both dress and customs,” she queried, would they not have acquired the knowledge that a man does not dance with a lady with his hat on? The movies must have instructed them, if nothing else had. It seems to me that the girls would have demanded this mark of respect from the men, if they had felt that as a group they were in a position to do so, and that the men must have known that with some girls and women at least they would have had to remove their hats.48

Taking their hats off before each dance was not simply a middle-class convention, however. Lilian Stockley Wilson, a Chicago taxi dancer from the 1920s, noted that her “mother’s people never liked [her] father.” “They said he was stubborn and queer, and things like that.” Wilson noted that her father “had a lot of strict ideas,” which perhaps accounted for what she called his “stubborn and queer” behavior. But she also explained, he “wouldn’t dress up much and didn’t take his hat off to anybody,” as if his behavior was as much of an insult to working-class folk as it was to middle-class reformers.49 Moreover, working-class men seemed to understand what was “proper” or when to remove their hats. While men usually refused to take off their hats when they danced, they often obliged their female companions when holding dances in their own clubs. Unlike the dance hall, which Row noted was generally “built with no provision for anything in the way of a place where hats could be checked,” the social-club dances men sponsored usually required all the men in attendance to remove their hats.50 Most clubs were undoubtedly dependent upon the revenue hat-check fees generated. But club members were also out to attract the “neighborhood girls” and to appease their parents, so, along with hat-check fees, they also established numerous rules that explicitly forbade alcohol, gambling, and swearing, but usually only during their social nights when “ladies” were present.51 Many men also consciously isolated themselves from their female companions. While the dance hall encouraged the intermingling of the sexes and is generally identified as heterosocial space, the spatial configuration of the dance hall also defied such generalizations.52 Observers, for example, often noted that, as the dance came to an end, the women had their meeting place separate from the “men’s side of the arena”; and “the couples sat right off the dancing space,” while “the unescorted men | 128 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

sat at the farthest distance from the dancing space.”53 Other men simply left the dance hall during intermission. Surveys of dance halls across the country found that “a great many men and a few girls leave the hall on pass-out checks” or return checks, as they were called. These checks allowed patrons to leave any time during the night and to return at their leisure. Some men and their female companions loitered about the alleyways or around the lunch wagons that were drawn to the dance hall’s entrance. But men also “passed out” with other men who, according to one observer, went “to the saloons without exception.”54 Whether men left the dance hall or congregated in certain sections of the room, apart from their female companions they reveled in the collective social practices crucial to the ongoing performance of their manhood. Investigators, in 1911, noted that the “wide door into the barroom” was generally crowded by a “steady stream” of men “going in and coming out,” and many young men spent the entire time “between dances in the barroom,” generally without the companionship of their female counterparts or their objection.55 An investigator for the Juvenile Protective Association, in 1917, for example, “saw four young boys sitting at a table with forty-eight bottles of beer between them; they were racing to see which one could drink the largest amount,” perhaps the end result of a night of treating one another to rounds of drinks, a practice common in working-class saloons.56 In many ways, men’s behavior or their habit of separating themselves from their female counterparts reflected changes in public space. By the 1910s and the 1920s, many of the exclusively all-male institutions that figured so prominently in the day-to-day lives of working-class and immigrant men were either feeling the influence of women’s growing public presence or were no longer in existence. Julie Willett, for example, argues that the beauty shop grew out of the struggle between men and women over the use of public spaces. As growing numbers of women began to have their hair bobbed, they found that there were rarely enough beauty shops to meet the growing demand, so they began to patronize the local barbershop. Some barbers welcomed their female clients along with their increased profits. But most barbers and their male customers adamantly opposed the intrusion.57 In the meantime, Prohibition eliminated the most exclusive and important all-male hangout—the saloon. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth | 129 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

centuries, the saloon was a seemingly permanent fixture. Chicago, for example, had 3,500 saloons in 1884, which translated into one saloon for every 203 people.58 The ratification, in 1919, of the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution made it illegal to “manufacture, sell, barter, transport, import, export, deliver, furnish or possess any intoxicating liquor,” and during Prohibition, the consumption of alcohol dropped by about half.59 Prohibition also changed the ways in which money and alcohol were made. The huge profits that could be made from bootleg liquor quickly promoted the growth of criminal gangs, not to mention loan-sharking, prostitution, political corruption, and labor racketeering.60 At the same time, Prohibition encouraged the movement of the production, consumption, and distribution of alcohol into working-class homes. As Roy Rosenzweig has shown, kitchen barrooms had long been an important part of working-class life.61 Prohibition only encouraged that tradition. Elmer Shorb Wood, a social worker on the Hill in St. Louis, claimed that he knew several hundred families engaged in some stage of bootlegging, as did Herbert Asbury in New York. “In many foreign families,” Asbury claimed, “the children were taught to mind the still, while Mama bought the ingredients and prepared the mash, and Papa sold the product, after liberal samplings by all members of the family.” The production and consumption of alcohol also moved into decidedly heterosocial venues outside the home. Mrs. Viola Angelin, chief probation officer for New York City assigned to the family court in Manhattan, claimed that the number of families operating stills was staggering. But the stills she found were not just in homes; they were also located in cigar stores, delicatessen stores, and all sorts of places, including candy stores and soda-drink parlors.62 On the Hill in St. Louis, a predominantly Italian community, there were only a “handful” of soda-drink parlors before Prohibition. By 1931, there were seventeen soft-drink parlors and eighteen confectioneries, which meant that men could still find the alcohol for which they were looking—albeit in the company of women and children.63 The growth of speakeasies also did little to preserve the drinking customs with which most men were familiar and, as George Chauncey argues, may have even lent an “atmosphere of apparent respectability to prostitution.” Around the turn of the century, the few women who were visible in saloons were prostitutes, clearly demarcating the saloon as a | 130 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

male and disreputable space. Prohibition and the development of illegal speakeasies broke down those boundaries. According to Chauncey, speakeasies not only allowed for the intermingling of middle-class Anglo Americans and Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants but also attracted men and women who previously might not have patronized such establishments, such as middle-class women. Thus, when men attended the hangout that replaced the saloon—the speakeasy—they not only found these sites just as heterosocial as the delicatessen stores or soda-drink parlors but noticed that the women who patronized them stood in sharp contrast to the prostitutes with whom they had previously shared company and who were such an integral part of male culture.64 Prohibition, then, may not have eliminated the production or consumption of alcohol in working-class and immigrant communities. But the typical way in which men had traditionally treated one another to rounds of drinks did change dramatically. Most men found not only that drinking bootleg liquor usually took place at home with their families but that the public places on which they could still depend to get their fill of liquor were decidedly heterosocial. Above all, men lost out on the rituals of male culture that accompanied the saloon decor and the drinking, rituals that were crucial to the ways in which men ordered and understood their public selves and their gender identity. The disappearance of all-male spaces affected men in two ways. First, men vigorously defended existing institutions. Many barbers, for example, refused to admit female clients, despite the potential additional profits. Or, if barbers did admit women, both they and their male customers treated the newcomers with contempt to discourage their attendance.65 Second, working men attempted to redefine already heterosocial spaces, such as the dance hall. After the dance was over, men and women may have retired to their own sides of the arena where alone men could embrace the unmitigated expressions of manliness for which they were known. But these men also tried to lay claim to the entire dance hall and consciously accentuated the behaviors that uniquely defined other allmale get togethers. Using the dance floor like a saloon and refusing to take off their hats when they danced let women know that they had no influence on men’s behavior, while the men’s unruly habits recreated the ambiance—the smells, the taste, the feel—of an all-male hangout and its usual aversion toward womanly influences. | 131 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

In addition, the energy men invested in trying to recreate homosocial spaces and the intensity of their disdain toward their female companions suggest that their behavior reflected the nature of heterosocial relations in dance halls. Intimidated by the ways in which women danced, their “unresponsiveness” on and off the dance floor, and their skill and ability at dancing, men desperately tried to find ways to compensate for these challenges to their masculinity. The stag lines, the drinking contests, and the practice of not taking off their hats or of using the dance floor as an “acceptable substitute for a cuspidor” allowed them to express their contempt for the women who challenged their understanding of gender relations, their use of heterosocial space, and, most important of all, their masculinity. In particular, by spending their time between dances in the barroom or by taking passout checks and isolating themselves from their female companions, men not only refused to accept the ways in which women tried to define intimacy but also reinforced women’s invisibility and negated their influence on dance hall culture, further highlighting the contradiction between the manner in which men defined their masculinity and how women understood it.66 These men ran the risk of offending the women with whom they danced. But offending their female friends was apparently worth the risk for men uncertain about their own masculinity and the competing notions of manhood surrounding the dance hall. In other words, the dance hall could lead to plenty of fun and maybe even to romance. But the women who spent their leisure time at dance halls were just as likely to run into anxious and unruly men as into potential spouses, a theme made clear in the 1930 song “Ten Cents a Dance”: Ten cents a dance; That’s what they pay me. Gosh, how they weigh me down! Ten cents a dance, pansies and rough guys, Tough guys who tear my gown.67

Working-class men also had to deal with questions of masculinity on the dance floor. In his work on representations of masculinity in twentieth-century dance, Ramsay Burt notes that male dancers often expressed a sense of powerlessness or even objectification when on stage. To counter the spectator’s gaze, male dancers looked for ways to ac| 132 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

centuate their masculinity. One of the most prominent ways was to appear active. Drawing upon the work of Richard Dyer, who looks at the male body as pin-up, Burt notes that, even if a model, or dancer in his case, assumes an “apparently supine pose,” he “tightens and taughtens his body so that the muscles are emphasized, hence drawing attention to the body’s potential for action.” In addition, “the appearance of strength and the ability to control women are other important signs” of masculinity. Part of this posturing meant that men tried to display their female partners in helpless or passive positions, thereby emphasizing the male’s control. But male dancers also had to avoid the appearance of doing any hard work or expending any physical effort that might call into question their strength.68 In dance halls throughout the early twentieth century, men were preoccupied with many of the same concerns as Burt’s dancers and went to great lengths to try to redefine dance as a mark of masculinity. The “intricacy of the dancing and the amount of physical labor so expended,” for example, astonished Weinberg and Alinsky, who observed what they called “freak performances by many of those who seem to be most zealous regarding the physical side of the dance.” At Gaelic Park, some men even delighted “in swinging girls about so fast that their feet leave the floor entirely for an indeterminate period.” One young man, in particular, could “whirl his partner about” in “such a way that he can bring her back over his shoulder head first.” For an instance, claimed one observer, “she hangs by her knees from his shoulder. Then he clasped his arms about her and supported her while she makes a jack-knife dive for the floor fortunately arriving feet first.” Many men even consciously chose partners who danced as “seriously as possible” or who were not “too large.” “If [she is] too heavy or clumsy,” the “boys cannot handle her very well,” detracting from the overall performance of the couple and the manner in which men not only tried to publicly express their physical and perhaps sexual prowess but also the sense of control over their female partners that they felt was crucial to the overall presentation of their gender identity. Indeed, some men claimed that they often pushed their partners into the next position if they were unfamiliar with the partner or a new variation, reflecting both the problems working-class men had in finding a compatible partner and the ways in which issues of power were played out on the dance floor.69 | 133 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

“It should be noted,” however, “that most of these eccentricities in dance . . . were practiced by only a comparatively small percentage of those attending.”70 According to Bonadonna, most other men “did a fox trot and they’d waltz around holding the girl and they’d sway from side to side.”71 By accentuating the physicality and the athleticism of their dance, men set themselves apart from other men and established dance as a sign of prestige; the manner in which they danced also allowed them to distance themselves and their dancing from their female partners. Weinberg and Alinsky, for example, explained that men were “proud of their trick steps and measure prestige in this way.”72 “Our guys were macho guys,” insisted Bonadonna. Dancing for Bonadonna and the other members of the Powerhouse was as much a measure of their masculinity as the other sports in which they participated, including baseball, football, stick ball, and softball. “In my day,” Bonadonna emphasized, “tennis was kind of sissified,” but not dancing.73 Some social clubs even had potential members “do an exhibition dance with one of the best girls in the group.”74 Apparently, dancing ability was an important consideration in determining the promise of a potential club member, as if the dancing prowess of a single person affected the reputation of the entire group. Working-class men also collectively organized their attendance at dance halls. Investigators reported that it was common at dance halls to see men in small, tightly drawn and sometimes hostile groups. Many of these men either belonged to social and athletic clubs or “made connections with the regular crowd patronizing [a] particular dance hall” and became members of a clique, which most contemporaries recognized as another “definite social group.”75 At Chicago’s Gaelic Park, the Wallace and Hamburg Athletic Clubs constituted what one observer called the “inner circle” of the dance hall. Members of the Wallace Club set themselves apart from other men by dressing alike. At first, they “took to wearing blue shirts” of the “common work-shirt variety,” until “the more dressy members bought blue shirts, with detachable starched blue collars, to which they attached small black jazz-bow ties.” “Not to be out done” by the men, the women who hung out with the Wallace Club soon “came out in blue silk blouses and blue collars and black jazz-bow ties, with plain blue serge skirt of short length.”76 The practice of dressing alike allowed men to publicly pronounce | 134 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

their commitment to fraternity and gave them the chance to demonstrate their masculinity to the other men and women in the dance hall. Indeed, the distinctive dress of club members made it easier for them to recapture the collective safety of the group, and the uniformity of their appearance publicly expressed the group’s cohesiveness and strength. Some men may have even found that dressing alike made it easier for them to establish “exclusive rights” to certain women, especially when their female friends donned the same colors and style, as did the women who hung out with the Wallace Club. Ethnicity also stimulated the development of many cliques. While immigrants or their children could be found at all types of dance halls, they often organized their time collectively. At dances located in boarding house districts, for example, one observer noted that, although the general pubic was admitted, the dances often became “real family parties where few distinct outsiders” were present.77 At some of these more exclusive dances, the dancing even reflected the ethnicity of the dancers. In 1917, an investigator for the Juvenile Protective Association attended the 30th Ward Woodrow Wilson Club dance, an Irish club with an attendance that was “largely Irish.” The investigator witnessed a considerable amount of drinking; the “influence of beer seemed to be small in the Irish.” There was also “kissing and hugging and sitting on men’s laps in the parlor, but nothing unseemly in the dance hall.” The dancing, he reported, was even “inoffensive”; the “style was modern,” a fox trot, but with a “clog effect,” suggesting that although Irish immigrants readily practiced “modern” dances, in this case they combined them with already existing cultural styles to produce a distinctly ethnic version.78 At the more embellished and larger dance halls, pavilions, and academies, cliques also frequently revolved around ethnicity. For example, at Chicago’s Dreamland, where Italians, Poles, Bohemians, and Jews were in attendance, members of the different groups did not always mix. Instead, different groups “were located in different sections of the dance hall,” and “the place in the dance hall where a person stands determines the group to which he is attached.” “Near the door is the Italian group. At the extreme other end is the Polish and Bohemian group, and at a point in between these two is found the Jewish group.”79 Mary Janka, a Polish immigrant who lived in Chicago in the 1920s, also recalled that her leisure time revolved around ethnicity. Janka, who considered herself | 135 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

a very “outgoing” person, insisted that “we’d go dancing elsewhere [outside the neighborhood],” as if to make new acquaintances and meet new friends, “but we’d always end up meeting Polish.”80 Valentino Lazzaretti, who learned to dance the modern dances in Chicago’s dance palaces, also recalled that immigrants stuck together as they wandered about the town. Lazzaretti explained that “when the boys came here from Italy they . . . didn’t know the language. Naturally they didn’t go to dances like [he] did.” In fact, he insisted that he “was a little more or less unique . . . among the fellows that came from Italy . . . cause I used to run . . . with the fellows that were born here.” In other words, when immigrants ventured beyond the neighborhood halls and boundaries, most of them remained in tightly knit and ethnically defined groups.81 Working-class men also tried to shape the dance hall by dancing the same steps or performing mass and ensemble dances. Members of the Wallace and Hamburg Athletic Clubs, for example, distinguished themselves from other men not only through their dress and style but also through the dances they performed. “The aerial ride, the sack of flour stunt, and the Texan were practiced almost exclusively” by the group, and “outsiders seemed to make no effort to copy the antics of this group.” From time to time, club members deviated from the aerial ride and other signature dances, but any “new stunt” performed by a member of the group “was sure to cause others . . . to attempt such feats.”82 Ensemble and mass dances also remained popular, even though the new social dances usually required partners. During the 1910s and the 1920s, many of the academies in Pittsburgh included a “‘Paul Jones,’ or two” on beginner’s night, and even the Roseland, a dance palace in New York, set “aside one evening each week for the ‘Paul Jones’ and other forms of ensemble dancing and stunts.”83 The Paul Jones was an ensemble dance in which the dancers “joined hands and whirled about until a whistle signaled them to stop. Those opposite each other then paired off and continued until the next whistle, when they once again changed partners.”84 The practice of performing the same dances or participating in mass or ensemble dances were particularly useful in helping men feel more comfortable with dance. Mass and ensemble dances, argues one dance scholar, start “everyone on an equal footing” and make “it possible for the shy, reluctant, skeptical, and self conscious members to lose their identity and become part of the group.”85 In fact, regardless of their | 136 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

skill level and expertise, when men performed the same steps or mass and ensemble dances, they subsumed themselves in the collective safety and comfort of the group, both publicly reaffirming their commitments to one another and eliminating dance as a potential source of conflict and competitiveness. In other words, men did not have to worry about their masculinity being trampled on—or, in this case, danced on—since dancing together made the men indistinguishable from one another and undoubtedly relieved the tension and anxiety some men may have felt in trying to find a single partner. Many men may have learned to dance from women who generally were better dancers. But by performing ensemble dances or just by dancing the same dances, they found ways to attenuate the differences in skill levels, challenge women’s claim to the dance hall and floor, and reproduce the collective culture that meant as much to their masculinity as their saloons, pool rooms, and street corners.86 Dancing as a group also may have helped immigrants adjust to this new culture of commercial leisure. Clara Grillo, who grew up in Cleveland in the 1910s and 1920s, recalled that her father’s boarders preferred the ensemble and mass dances. After the day’s work was finished, the boarders often found time to socialize among themselves. “They [the boarders] played cards or morra, a guessing game of how many fingers two players totalled as they spread out and showed fingers.” On other occasions “they played leap frog in the back yard, and got quite boisterous riding each other. Or they fought each other and rough-housed.” Other men had brought their mandolins, accordions, and guitars from Italy, and after drinking “freshly squeezed grape juice, which each autumn season amounted to at least fifty barrels housed in fifty-gallon whiskey kegs,” the boarders became “operatic stars or lovelorn singers,” singing their favorite songs—“Ciribiribin,” “Santa Lucia,” and “La Donn’e Mobile.” They also listened to records by Italian-American artists. “Next to eating, drinking, and playing cards,” these men also liked to dance. The men, she recalled, “clomped about in mazurkas, polkas, fast dances” but did very few waltzes. “They talked, laughed, and sweated profusely and seemed to enjoy the longer dances as endurance challenges”; again, they seemed to wish to emphasize their physical prowess and strength, stopping only when the musicians quit or when Grillo’s father “chased them all to bed.”87 | 137 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

By the 1930s and 1940s, many immigrants were still unfamiliar with the new social dances and the practice of dancing with a single, female partner. In the 1930s, Paul Cressey interviewed an Italian man known as Nick who claimed that Italian men never danced with women alone before immigrating to the United States. “Most of the dances [in Italy],” he explained, “are group dances,” and most men “never heard of dances where a woman danced with a man alone.”88 Michael Lamont, who was born in 1904 and who had been working as a dance instructor since the 1930s in Cleveland, Ohio, also noted that “outside of the Tarantella and the Italian Quadrille the Italian community had little to offer.” Lamont recalled that while he was working as an instructor at the Alta House settlement in Cleveland, the head of the settlement informed him that two exchange students from Italy would be attending his class. “I thought this is it they will be able to teach me some of the dances of Italy I had never heard of.” But then, he recalled, “we heard the astounding news, they did not know any traditional Italian dances, and they came to our class to learn from us.” Both women, Lamont explained, were from Rome, where they were doing dances such as the rumba, the cha cha, and the tango. The only “people doing the Tarantellas and Quadrilles were the folks in the countryside.”89 As Lamont’s experience suggests, many Italians were already dancing the new social dances that were all the rage by the second decade of the twentieth century before they immigrated to the United States. But, as a rule, only men and women from large urban areas were this up to date. Italians from the countryside were not so familiar with the new dances, which helps explain the popularity of both taxi-dance halls, where many immigrants first learned the new steps, and the continued popularity of the ensemble and mass dances, which more closely resembled the quadrilles and other figure dances to which many immigrants were accustomed. The ensemble and mass dances, then, not only allowed the “shy, reluctant, skeptical, and self conscious” men to “lose their identity and become part of the group” but also helped newly arrived immigrants become more comfortable on the dance floor. The collective organization of the dance hall also helped men deal with the cost of a night of dancing and drinks. In 1909, Israels noted that “all the hunting, masculine and feminine, is done in couples,” because, she explained, “you are always sure of company then should you fail to | 138 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

so dire an extent as not to ‘catch on’ and consequently not be ‘treated,’” making it clear that when women ran in pairs they both expected treats, even if only one of them had successfully made a date.90 Hunting in pairs did not lead to any treats for men, but it did make it easier to pay for them. As a group, men often took turns buying rounds of drinks and food or shared the responsibility of providing transportation and the attendant expenses. In the 1930s, Bonadonna and four of his buddies each pitched in ten dollars for a car. Bonadonna kept the car at his home because he had a back yard and a garage in which to house it and thus became the de facto owner of the car, which undoubtedly guaranteed certain privileges—not the least of which was greater access to it. But when they used the car for nights out, Bonadonna and his buddies would “chip in for gas and go places in the car together.”91 The practice of “chipping in” or sharing expenses undoubtedly intensified men’s commitments to one another, especially in Bonadonna’s case where he and his friends bought a car together and had an interest in protecting their investment. But chipping in was not just about commitment. Sharing gas money and the other attendant expenses helped men to manage more easily an unpredictable labor market and the bouts of unemployment that generally characterized working-class life. Moreover, chipping in helped these men manipulate the economy of dating in which they participated. While women had an especially difficult time paying for commercial leisure, they were not the only ones who constantly faced financial squeezes; commercial leisure almost always cost more than hard-pressed working men were able to pay, especially alone. Chipping in allowed them not only to reciprocate more readily for the companionship they craved but also to afford the amenities some men claimed were essential to successful dating, such as a car. The prominence of social clubs and the collective organization of the dance hall also suggests that commercial leisure did not erode the broader social divisions based on ethnicity, class, or neighborhood affiliation, as some historians have argued. David Nasaw, for example, contends that: In going dancing, well-to-do and poor, the smart set and working folk entered a third sphere of everyday life, separated intentionally and irrevocably from the worlds of home and family, work and workplace. On | 139 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here” returning home or leaving for work the next morning, the dancers would rejoin a world defined and divided by categories of class, income, neighborhood, and ethnicity. But, for the moment, for that evening, those identifications—and those social worlds—were left behind, as the dancers, in close embrace, whirled across the floor to a ragtime beat.92

The social clubs and cliques that often dominated the dance hall not only grew out of the ethnic, class, and club affiliations that Nasaw argues were left behind at their homes or workplaces but also allowed men to “establish certain limitation in choice of dance partners” and collectively to lay claim to certain women. The Wallace Club’s exclusivity with regard to dress and dance, for example, extended to more intimate matters. Within the group “‘kissing’ and ‘loving’ was [sic] entirely haphazard and promiscuous,” and during the period between dances “the more active girls would be petted and kissed [by] at least a half-dozen boys of the group.” The group’s attitude toward “outsiders” was also “exceedingly frigid”; group members danced together exclusively, paid “no attention to others,” and would “not permit their girls to dance with others until they meet with acceptance from the men [of the club].”93 If other men violated these rules, the ensuing conflict might lead to violence. The Vernon Athletic Club, whose members attended Chicago’s Dreamland “en masse every Saturday and Sunday night,” also had “its own girls who come especially to meet these particular fellows.” The “girls must not dance with any one outside of the clique,” and any “outsider who presumes to transgress this rule is waylaid outside and convinced physically of the error of his ways.”94 Fear of being “waylaid outside” affected the practice of cutting in. Beth Bailey argues that dating and courtship in the 1930s and 1940s were inextricably linked to the “rating and dating system” in which popularity for men revolved around signs of material prosperity and for women depended on building and maintaining a reputation. Dates, and lots of them, were the keys to women’s popularity. The rating and dating system began on campuses in the 1920s; by the 1930s, Bailey argues, it had “passed from college youth into the culture at large.” By the 1930s and 1940s, the practice of building a reputation was “enacted most visibly on the dance floor” through the practice of “cutting in.” In this case, popularity was earned not by the number of | 140 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

dates but by the number of dance partners. According to the “strict protocol of the dance hall,” a man was expected to request a dance and was “responsible for the woman until she was taken over by another partner” or “cut in.” Getting stuck, then, was “a highly visible catastrophe” and “a sign of social failure.” Cutting in, Bailey continues, was a “convention” based on a “sociological reality.” “In a society where men outnumbered women it had provided an ordered and civilized way to share access to women.”95 Working-class men, in Bailey’s terms, were perhaps less “civilized” than other dance hall patrons because they were less inclined to live up to their sociological expectations and “share access to women” through the practice of cutting in. In the 1920s, cutting in at Gaelic Park or at Dreamland invited the wrath of various social and athletic clubs who were prepared to “waylay any outsider” who attempted to dance with “their girls.” While cutting in may have been practiced, it was usually isolated to community or neighborhood celebrations. Martha Leszczyk, a Polish immigrant who settled in Chicago during the 1920s, recalled attending numerous dances. Her sister played the saxophone in a band, and Martha “always had to go everywhere with her because it wouldn’t be nice if a girl went alone.” “I remember once,” she explained, “I was at St. Boniface Church,” which was hosting a German dance. “I always sat on the side and was with lots of other people. But I’ll tell you that day I wasn’t sitting a minute. My God, I don’t know, did I look like a German person or what. I’m telling you I was so darn tired, but boy, I was so happy.” Martha’s apparent shock at being asked to dance by Germans suggests that as a rule she would not have been included in the merriment if the party goers had known that she was Polish and that her ethnicity would have perhaps kept men from “cutting in” at more public venues.96 By the 1930s and 1940s, the practice of cutting in had gained little favor. According to Robert Bonadonna, cutting in only occurred under one circumstance: “if we were among a group of people that we all knew well and we knew it was safe to cut in and nobody would be offended.” But usually, he explained, “the two people dancing together wanted to be dancing together.” At “the bars they never would [cut in],” he insisted. And at the “night club they never would because that would cause a fuss.” Cutting in, he continued, was | 141 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here” considered to be a slightly hostile act . . . because the guy that cuts in is saying either I can do better than you or I’m going to try and take this girl away from you or I can dance better than you. It was considered to be a slightly hostile act so you wouldn’t do it in a threatening atmosphere unless you were six foot five and the guy you were cutting in was five foot five. Then you’re making a statement.97

The persistence of class and ethnic loyalties and men’s efforts to lay claim to certain women also made life particularly difficult for middleclass men. Weinberg and Alinsky argued that the only men who attended dance halls were those who had no other “opportunity for finding companionship or diversion” (except for “college boys who do all manner of queer and incomprehensible things”). Yet, observers also noted that middle-class men often had a hard time trying to find a working-class date. At a Chicago dance in the 1920s, one investigator explained that “the girls here are looking the men over with an eye to possible matrimonial intentions.” They had “no time to waste on college boys, except perhaps a few of them who may believe in Santa Claus and stories about rich men’s sons.”98 Middle-class men also found that it was difficult for a college man to get a dance. At a Pittsburgh hall in the 1920s, one investigator for the Recreation Division of the Pittsburgh Girl’s Conference observed “well acquainted groups, effervescent with conviviality . . . in spite of the restraining influence that is generally exerted by the interspersion of strangers of different nationality and class.” Yet, a “free intermingling did not seem to be very prominent,” according to the investigator who “was unable to get a single dance.”99 At Chicago’s Gaelic Park, middle-class investigators observed similar problems and rejection. Upon entering Gaelic Park, two investigators noticed that most of the men in attendance remained “in tightly drawn groups.” As the investigators approached, the men’s conversations died down, and “inquisitive and sometimes hostile eyes” were “turned upon [them] in a way to give [them] the feeling that [they were] called upon to explain [their] intrusion.” One of the investigators ingratiated himself enough to be invited as the Wallace Club’s special guest at a Tuesday evening dance in their club room. He was “forced to do an exhibition dance with one of the best girls in the group.” Shortly after that, he insisted that he was being framed for trying to “seduce a woman” and that | 142 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

he was “fired upon many times” by the other men, leaving him convinced that there was “a very definite feeling of group antagonism toward strangers.” The Wallace Club promptly expelled its guest from its hangout, and only later did the investigator notice that he had lost “several dollars and some jewelry in pickpocketing.” Thus, despite his best efforts to fit in, he was unable to escape the “restraining influences” of class and perhaps even ethnicity.100 To be sure, not all middle-class men became the targets of workingclass pranks and hostility. Yet, class, ethnicity, and neighborhood affiliation still rigidly divided this new world of commercial leisure, so much so that middle-class men were often singled out. In fact, rather than attenuate these different identifications, the dance hall’s collective culture brought them into sharper relief. When men danced in groups and dressed alike or organized their time at dances around cliques or athletic clubs, they offered a show of force and a collective demonstration of their masculinity that allowed them to challenge more readily the social divisions and inequalities they confronted in their homes, communities, and workplaces, even as they exploited the chance to express their working-class and ethnic culture and identity. The dance hall may have offered men and women a world of make-believe where they could perhaps forget their day-to-day problems, at least temporarily. But the dance hall was also about consumption, and the fantasy it offered often demanded a level of consumption that working-class men struggled to meet, which effectively limited their number of nights out and potentially exacerbated the problems these men had hoped to forget by dancing the night away. As Weinberg and Alinsky explained the problem, most men tried to share in this world of “make-believe.” But for men, they argued, it was “more difficult to do than in the case of girls.” “For a boy to sustain the pretense of being what he is not, he must have money.” Some of “these girls may accept the fiction of his being a rich man’s son in spite of his dirty finger nails and grammatical lapses, [but] they know that a rich man’s son does not have empty pockets. The boy, then, has to get money, [and] a good deal of it, and in a hurry.”101 Of course, middle-class men were not the only targets of workingclass men’s frustration. At dance halls throughout the early twentieth century, fights were as common as the drinking and other revelry that characterized intermission. “Sometimes,” declared one taxi-dance hall | 143 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

patron, “you can have a pretty good time at these places, but most of the time there are so many fights and so many riff raff to mingle with that you don’t have much [of a] good time.”102 Public dance halls were no different. Richard Henry Edwards claimed that dances in general “were found to be unprotected from disturbances” and that “fights precipitated by intoxicated individuals or by gangs of toughs and rowdies” were common.103 In 1917, for example, Bowen explained that police officers attended dances to “see to the proper ventilation of halls” and to prohibit all manner of “obscene dancing,” “vulgar and profane language,” and drinking. But the police usually confined “their attention to interfering when fights are in progress.”104 At a church-sponsored dance on Chicago’s north side a decade later, one observer described the parties and dances he attended as “brawls.” Throughout the dances, he claimed, “there was much drinking and then numerous fights would breakout. Friends of each participant in a fight would pitch in [to] help their friend. The police would come to the park for one load after another during a party.”105 The extent to which fighting was as common as these observers suggest is hard to say. But various efforts were organized to stop them. Some cities and states enacted ordinances that allowed them to specifically target loiterers and other men who loafed around the dance hall, with the intent of eliminating the disproportionate number of men in dance halls. Other regulations targeted pass-out checks, which men used more extensively than women in order to visit neighboring saloons, and these regulations frequently empowered dance hall proprietors to prohibit the admittance of any individuals suspected of dealing drugs or guilty of unruly behavior.106 More typically, dance hall owners or managers organized activities during intermission to distract their patrons’ attention. Mr. Harmon, the proprietor of Chicago’s Dreamland, “conceived the idea of having music of some type during the intermission,” when the number of fights always seemed to escalate. Dreamland usually featured a couple of musicians and someone singing popular songs on one side of the room. The entertainers encouraged the crowd to join the chorus, and “for this purpose folders with words are distributed.”107 Children were another favorite distraction. In dance halls, including taxi-dance halls, young children offered musical performances during intermission. At the New American No. 1, a Chicago taxi-dance hall, “there was a spe| 144 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

cial exhibition dance put on by a little girl who appeared to be not over seven years of age.” She was “clothed in the typical light aesthetic dancer’s costume and sang a popular song and danced to the considerable entertainment of her audience.”108 At Chicago’s White City Casino and Dance Hall, a similar performance was put on by a young girl and two “little boys.” At a “quarter of ten a table was placed in the center of the hall [with] a chair on top if it.” A little girl about six years of age, dressed as a Red Cross nurse, was placed on the chair, between two little boys who were between seven and nine years of age and who were dressed as “Jackies,” (sailors). They sang “‘Tennessee’ and many other modern rag time pieces,” and the young girl performed solo. Between each dance they bowed, and, after their performance, “the children went to their parents who sat at a table in the Casino.” Patrons from all over the Casino “flocked around these children,” and between each dance “the men handed them money.”109 Singalongs and musical performances during intermission undoubtedly attracted or distracted the attention of many patrons, although men still found the time to fight. In many cases, the drunken stupor into which many men fell influenced the fighting. But fights also erupted over competition for dates and dances. According to Bonadonna, “If you were a good dancer, you were somewhat resented by the competition.” “If you were very good [at dancing], you had to be very careful not to ask some girl to dance if you thought she was with some guy who looked big and strong . . . because then you’d be encroaching on his domain in an area where he couldn’t compete.”110 Fighting also erupted over competition for dances and dates in taxidance halls. On January 2, 1926, there was a “gang fight” at the Plaza Dancing School, which had what one observer called a “bundle of nationalities,” including “Polish, Italian, Greek, Lithuanian, German, Swede, Filipino, Chinese, all dancing together.”111 This gang fight, and many of the others at taxi-dance halls, usually involved disgruntled “white” men who objected to Filipino men dancing with the female hostesses, who were generally Euro-American.112 One disgruntled taxidance hall patron, for example, claimed that the “Damn chinks” were “taking all the best girls at these dancing schools. It used to be that you could come here and get a pretty good ‘broad’ but not any more. The Chinks take all the best ones.”113 Other men felt cheated and claimed | 145 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

that Filipino men were somehow violating some unspoken dance hall etiquette. According to one man, “these girls go out with their Filipinos because they spend all their money on the girls,” and “sometimes the Chinks don’t even ask the girls for anything,” which shows, he concluded, “what damned fools they are.”114 Another taxi-dance hall patron noted that the “Filipinos take out [their dates] in taxis and take them all over town. Even buy them fur coats” and “don’t even make them come across.” “No American guy is going to spend his money on them unless they come across,” he insisted. “They’re spoiling the game for the American fellows that want these girls and that’s why we’re after them.” This same man boasted that he and his “buddies” had already “shanghaied three Chinks that were mixing up things at the Madison,” and he claimed that they were going to continue to “scare these fellows away from these halls even if we have to go in the coop to do it.”115 The use of violence or intimidation often produced the results for which these men may have been looking. A week after the gang fight at the Plaza Dancing School, no Filipino men were present, while the controversy attracted an unusually large number of “American” men either fascinated by the prospect of seeing Filipino men dance with “white” women or eager to take part in the possible melee and help defend white “American” manhood. The violence, then, not only potentially reinforced the idea among “American” men that Filipinos were “a yellow bunch anyway” but also may have countered the belief, according to one taxi-dance hall patron, that “no really white guy” would be “willing to go in and dance with these Chinks or Japs,” unless, of course, he had “a little nigger in him.”116 In other words, the violence allowed men to scare off the competition and to compensate for the challenges they faced from Filipino men, who were apparently more successful at making dates than they were. Insecure about their own racial and gender identity and fearful of the repercussions involved in associating with Filipinos, who were often referred to as “niggers,” these so-called white men used violence to prove their masculinity even as it was being called into question when they were passed over for dances and when they realized that they lacked the money to live up to women’s expectations about dating and treating. In public dance halls, gender relations followed a similar pattern. As one young man explained to an investigator after being refused repeat| 146 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

edly for dances, “that’s alright I have my gang here,” suggesting that despite the potentially humiliating experience of being passed over for dances, men always had the companionship and the camaraderie they found with their all-male gangs as they ventured beyond the venues that made up traditional working-class male culture.117 In short, the constant fighting, combined with the endless drinking, cussing, spitting, chewing, smoking, and other male habits, offered men ways to challenge women, or at least intimidate them, over the use of dance hall space and their leisure time. In addition, their behavior apparently made men feel more comfortable with their surroundings. Familiar with the street corners, poolrooms, and saloons that revolved around all-male rituals, most men were loath to abandon their boisterous behavior once they entered this new world of heterosocial leisure. On the dance floor and in the adjoining halls, galleries, and barrooms, many men eagerly tried to get “pick ups,” but making dates or finding dance partners was never that simple or easy, leaving them with the choice of patiently awaiting the start of the next dance, leaving the hall altogether, or gathering together with the other single men who were just as anxious about the public presentation of their masculinity. Whatever these men decided to do, their behavior suggests that they had more than one identity with which to contend and that their homosocial ties were as strong as their heterosocial desires. Of course, picking a fight and other displays of aggression did not always make the time men spent in dance halls any easier; many were still too afraid of the potential humiliation they faced from the women they so eagerly pursued to even try dancing. In his study of Chicago gangs in the 1920s, Frederic Thrasher noted that, when men wanted to obtain a reputation for being tough, they avoided being too closely associated with “girls” and any man who danced, as if dancing would be equated with women and hence a threat to the public presentation of their masculinity.118 Sam Goldberg, who often attended taxi-dance halls in Chicago during the 1920s, often found himself in the company of “a bunch of people who were dancers.” “They often wanted to dance,” he explained. But since he “couldn’t” and would rather “sit out these dances with the different girls [he] was paired off to at the time,” he had “to depend upon the other fellows to give [his] girl an opportunity to dance.” Goldberg eventually decided to learn how to dance, perhaps because he was tired of sitting out each dance while someone else danced | 147 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

with his date. For whatever reason, he admitted that “all it takes was a little self-confidence,” suggesting that many men were intimidated by their female companions, who were much better at “shaking a wicked leg.”119 Gus Sandy also had plenty of opportunity to dance but avoided it because he was afraid he might be “awkward.” During the 1920s, Sandy often attended dances at his high school in Connecticut. But at that time, he claimed he “wasn’t much interested in girls” and usually stayed “on the sidelines at social affairs.” Sandy explained that he “had plenty of opportunity to mix in” and insisted that staying on the sideline “wasn’t a feeling of inferiority,” as if some men and women might have suspected as much. “Girls like Ruth Haggerty and even some of the teachers,” he explained, “tried to get me out on the dance floor.” “But I didn’t try it [dancing] as I thought I might be awkward” and because “[I] “wasn’t a ladies man . . . like some of the other fellows,” he said, firmly establishing a link between dancing and dating.120 Another man known only as Erickson also took his dates dancing but sat out each dance while his date danced “with other fellows.” He insisted, however, as if an explanation were in order, that “I don’t dance, not because I cant [sic], but because I never took the time to learn, and never cared about it enough to learn.” His remark suggests dancing required a certain amount of skill and that dancing could do more to undermine a man’s public masculinity than letting some other man dance with his dates.121 At the same time, many men avoided dancing, not because they were afraid of the possible humiliation or fearful of being passed over for dances but because they had to be careful about when and where they danced. Working-class men may have had their gang along just in case they were repeatedly passed over for dances, but the gang on which they relied, or the collective organization of the time they spent in dance halls, also established boundaries that these men crossed only reluctantly. After the “gang” fight at the Plaza Dancing Academy in Chicago, not a single Filipino man was in attendance at the next dance, while an unusually large number of “American” men were on hand, implying that their attendance at dance halls was not only erratic but limited by the fear of violence. Even Bonadonna, who spent much of his time dancing at confraternities or other church-sponsored dances, “tried to avoid getting into fracases with the local Romeos.”122 In other words, race, class, ethnicity, and even skill levels, as Bonadonna suggests, sharply divided men | 148 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

at dance halls. The fights that erupted over these identifications may have allowed men to overcompensate for any challenges to their masculinity, as well as for the frustration they faced in trying to find a willing dance partner. But the organization of dance halls around social and athletic clubs or other cliques also uncovered other equally potent divisions that profoundly shaped men’s experiences in dance halls and further explains the reason so many men attended only occasionally. The fighting and other boisterous revelry did little to solve men’s problems, because they also ran the risk of offending the women with whom they were eager to dance. Many women who worked as “dime-adance girls,” for example, admitted that Filipino men had a reputation for spending a lot of money on their dates. But these same women also described distinct differences in the way Filipino and “American men” treated them. One woman, for example, explained that she knew “why the girls like the Filipinos.” For one thing, she explained, “they are always clean,” and there were “no bad smells about them.” And they were “always polite to a girl.” “I never heard of a Filipino insulting a girl,” she insisted. “The girls always feel safer going out in a taxicab with a Filipino than with an American,” and they do not “quarrel with you if you don’t do exactly what they want you to do and will do just about what you want to do.”123 Another woman agreed that most Filipino men were “perfect gentlemen.” This woman claimed that you always felt “safe if a Flip takes you out.” But she insisted, “you don’t know what’s likely to happen if you go out with most of the white fellows, especially the Italians,” whom she claimed “don’t seem to care what they say in front of a girl.” This same woman agreed that Filipino men were “after all they can get when they . . . go out with the girls, but so are the white fellows and out after it a darned sight harder.”124 Dime-a-dance girls were not the only women who objected to men’s behavior. In the 1930s, a nineteen-year-old woman named Helen explained that she was dating a Slovene. Her mother, who was Hungarian, “was not so crazy about the idea, but since she is beginning to know him better, she likes him and sez [sic] that she is sure he will make me happy.” “With the Hungarian boys,” Helen insisted, “I just can’t get along. For one thing, I think they are too bossy.”125 Helen V., a twenty-year-old Greek woman, also argued that it was the Italian men who were “too rough,” which she insisted was one of the | 149 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

reasons she did not want to be identified with them. Italians were lighter than Greeks, she explained, but “still dark enough” to be associated with her and any other Greeks.126 The men to whom women were attracted only reaffirmed their concerns about meeting up with the unruly types. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, some women explained that “looks” initially attracted them to their husbands. Rose Ulman noted that her husband was a “nice looking fellow”;127 Martha Leszczyk described her husband as “handsome”;128 and Leona Hojnacka’s husband “was always neat” and had “nice clean shoes.”129 Yet, while some women liked handsome men and distinctly recalled handsome husbands, many other women were concerned about the ways their boyfriends treated them. Veronica Loncki was particularly fond of the Lithuanians with whom she was acquainted because they were so friendly. But she ended up marrying a Polish boy who was also nice. “He was [a] . . . sharp man,” who “ma[d]e friends all over” because he knew “how to respect people,” she remarked.130 Mary Stojak explained that her boyfriend’s personality was “polished.” “He didn’t act like the boys from Europe, from [the] village. He acted like he was always American . . . by talking and acting and he was very nice. Was kind of mature for his age, I would say.”131 Mary P., who immigrated to the United States during the early twentieth century, insisted that her boyfriend looked just like Rudolph Valentino, and “all the gals liked him.” He was, in fact, so handsome that Mary “was ’fraid, some other gal take im’ way from me.” But she claimed that she did not marry him only because he was handsome or because he reminded her of Valentino. “My boyfriend was nice, too,” she insisted, “and that’s why I fall in love wit[h] him.”132 For some women, “nice” simply meant polite. But throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nice boys women favored contrasted sharply with the men who were the epitome of working-class male culture. Julia Madro recalled that when she and her husband-to-be first met, we “were friends from the beginning and after a while we fell in love.” He was a “real gentleman,” she explained, because he was a “man of the world”; he had been fighting with the Polish army during World War I and had recently returned from Poland and France. But Madro also “liked him very much because he . . . didn’t drink, [and] he was a real gentleman.”133 Leona Hojnacka, who met her husband | 150 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

walking to and from work, recalled that she was attracted to him because she “liked his ways . . . gentle.” He was never like “some of the other boys [who] were rough.” He was “always gentle, [and] never said no [to] whatever I wanted.”134 Tillie Wojewodka could not tolerate a “drunk.” Growing up in Chicago in the early twentieth century, she “would run if [she] saw a drunkard on the sidewalk,” a fear instilled by her grandmother. As she got older, whether or not a man drank became the characteristic by which she judged him. On one occasion, she was dating a “very nice clean fella” from the neighborhood, and she was “not afraid to go out [with him].” “I could go through the darkest alleys,” she insisted, and “he would never hurt me . . . in no way,” implying that she was concerned some men might. The relationship did not last long, however, because her brother warned her that his family was “very much involved in drinking.” “That hit me,” she recalled, “drinking. That word drink.” “I never saw him drunk or anything,” but she figured that “when he doesn’t go out with me, maybe he drinks.”135 As these women’s experiences make clear, the male culture that was embraced by men often clashed with the version of masculinity many women favored. According to these women, men were gentlemen because they were “polished” or well mannered, unlike many of the men who hung out in dance halls and who refused to remove their hats, aggressively accosted unescorted women as they stepped off the dance floor, and used the dance hall floor as a cuspidor. In addition, they were also gentle and not too demanding or domineering. “He never said no [to] whatever I wanted,” recalled Leona Hojnacka, as if these women cherished the opportunity to get out of the house and away from their parents’ rules and restrictions and were also attracted to the men who allowed them to take advantage of the autonomy dating had to offer. The problem most women faced was trying to figure out some way to avoid certain men. In many cases, they simply relied upon their female friends to find out about a potential spouse. Joseph Blazowski, for example, recalled that he met his wife through his sister, who worked in a laundry with six other women. After work, his sister and her six friends spent much of their time together at his sister’s house. “I was living about the fourth house away,” Blazowski explained. One day, while his sister’s friends were visiting, she invited Blazowski to join them: “Joe . . . come over . . . there is lots of girls for [you].” Blazowski rushed over | 151 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

to her house and met his future wife, Anna. The pair “got acquainted” and married soon after, all with the help of his sister, who not only introduced the two but probably also had assured Anna about Blazowski’s potential before the introductions ever began.136 Many women also continued to depend on their parents or other adults who were also familiar with the way men behaved on and off the dance floor and who were concerned about the types of boys their daughters might meet. Both Tillie Wojewodka and Anna Midlowski eventually married men who boarded in the same building as one of their relatives. Tillie Wojewodka, who did not like that word “drink,” was leaving the house to visit a girlfriend when her future husband approached her and said hello. Wojewodka had first noticed him leaning against the iron fence that surrounded the yard and talking to her Uncle Ben. She thought to herself: “Wow, I wonder if that’s him”; her grandmother had been talking up a nice fellow from the neighborhood who “don’t drink.” He asked her if she was taking a walk. “I says, yes, I’m going by my girlfriend. He said, can I walk with you? Well, I says, you can walk with me, but . . . I’m still going . . . over to my girlfriends [sic].” Wojewodka’s grandmother never admitted to her involvement. But Wojewodka suspected that she must have gone home that evening and told John, who boarded in her building, “that I’m going out [and that] maybe, if he goes around the block he might meet me.”137 Anna Midlowski, on the other hand, was at home one day when the door bell rang unexpectedly; it was one of the boarders who lived upstairs, above her aunt’s apartment. “He started to talk to me,” she recalled. But before Midlowski could respond, her landlord unexpectedly showed up and suggested that they go for a walk together. “He’s alright [sic],” the landlord assured her. “So I did go out with him. And we went to Wicker Park.” The two stayed out until ten o’clock, when the groundskeeper closed the gates and ran them out. Her new companion asked her to join him for a picnic the next day. Midlowski had never been on one, but she agreed and soon found herself about to be married.138 Family influences were, in fact, so strong that even when daughters were separated from parents they still heeded their advice to avoid certain men or looked toward the other adults in their lives. Mary Pieprznik, for example, received advice from family and friends on both sides of the | 152 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

Atlantic, some of which she solicited. Before she immigrated to America, her father admonished her not to go to dances “because they . . . cost money . . . [and] you won’t have nothing.” He was also particularly concerned about the types of “boys” she might encounter in the United States—especially the ones he referred to as the “nice horses.” “Don’t look at the nice horse,” he told her. “Because when you ride [a] nice horse, you can’t go too far with it because he’s too delicate.” “That’s how he talked,” Pieprznik explained, but what he meant to say was that “I shouldn’t look for the . . . good-looking boys . . . they are stuck up and they don’t want to work.” “Look for somebody that’s nice, domestic type or something like that.”139 After Pieprznik immigrated to the United States in 1923 and settled in Chicago, she remained leery of the “nice horses” and consulted the couple with whom she was living about dating and marriage. Pieprznik immediately got a job clearing and cleaning tables at a restaurant at the corner of Lake and State Streets. While she was working there, the forelady from the restaurant invited her to a dance, where she met Joseph, a young Polish man who had also recently immigrated to the United States. But while Joseph was eager to continue seeing her, he lived too far away to visit her more than once a week, on Sundays. So, instead of breaking off the relationship or settling for their weekly visits, he proposed. “I don’t want to get married,” Pieprznik replied. But Joseph persisted and reminded her that he was “not gonna be coming.” After that, Pieprznik explained, “he was nothing.”140 For the next five months, Pieprznik never saw or even heard a word from Joseph. Then, in July, when she and two of her friends went to a picnic on Chicago’s north side near St. Albert’s cemetery, she unexpectedly met Joseph’s aunt, who was there with the rest of the family, including Joseph, who was with another girl. Joseph saw her, Pieprznik recalled, and “he left that girl” and proceeded to ask her for a dance. “I says No, you can dance with my girlfriend. I’m not gonna dance.” By the end of the evening, she had accepted his offer to dance and even his offer of a ride home, which gave him another chance to remind her that he was “not gonna be coming.” “I want to get married in September,” he continued. “I didn’t say no,” Pieprznik explained. She began to realize that they actually had a lot in common because of their shared experience | 153 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

as immigrants, and she recognized that by getting married she would “have [her] own place to stay,” and she did not like to be “baby sitting and all that.” During the time that Joseph refused to visit, she had also been dating other men. One of these fellows, she claimed, had saved $7,000, another $5,000, and she was sure that her father “looked better than [Joseph],” which also bothered her. “So I didn’t want to get married.” But Pieprznik began to have second thoughts about Joseph’s proposal once she talked with Mr. and Mrs. Kick, the couple with whom she lived. Mr. Kick, she fondly recalled, was “like my father,” and he liked Joseph. The other “fella,” he feared, was “not gonna be good” and was “gonna be mean,” which was enough to convince her to accept Joseph’s proposal and marry him two months later.141 Despite the rise of commercial leisure, then, parents and other adults still played a particularly important role in helping a young woman pick a prospective spouse. By first asking about a potential date, young women gave their parents the opportunity to pry into their personal lives. But it was a sacrifice many women were willing to make. Familiar with the male culture that flourished throughout working-class communities and reproduced in public dance halls, many women were careful to avoid men who were too rough or drank too much. In some cases, these women simply relied upon their female friends to negotiate dating. But parents still helped with introductions, because their daughters were still asking for their advice. As a result, commercial leisure did not necessarily lead women astray or separate them from their parents’ values and traditions. In fact, the cliques and social clubs that flourished in the dance hall and to which men and women belonged were so identified with ethnicity, class, and neighborhood affiliation that the children of immigrants effectively preserved boundaries between themselves and other dance hall patrons and in the process continued to learn what it meant to be Polish, Italian, and Jewish from their parents. The constant spitting, cussing, fighting, and other unruly behavior in which men indulged may have made it easier for them to deal with the frustration they faced in dance halls. But the women with whom they were eager to dance were uncomfortable with the gender-role performance men were attempting to stage, leading these women to take the necessary steps to find someone who willingly fit the role of husband and friend. They continued to rely upon their parents to avoid the “nice horses” or the “mean ones,” | 154 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

effectively undermining men’s best efforts to get “pick ups” whether they went dancing or not.142 Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dance halls were indeed a popular pastime for men and women. But the dance halls’ popularity was also embedded in people’s daily lives. A problem most men and women faced was finding ways to participate in these new commercial amusements. The long hours and low wages that consumed working people’s time and energy, along with the cost of commercial leisure and their parents’ demands, made it difficult for men and women to participate extensively. In response, they saved up for their Saturday nights out and attended the fancier dance halls only when trying to impress a special date. While such strategies allowed young men and women to participate more fully in these new commercial amusements, they also limited the extent to which commercial leisure affected malefemale relationships, since many men and women could manage to go out only occasionally. The drama surrounding dance halls was not only about whether one could afford more than an occasional visit. In the adjoining galleries, hallways, and dark corners, working-class men and women created a collective sexual culture that allowed them to couple up without their parents’ interference. But going dancing also offered men and women the chance to challenge each other over the social organization of the dance hall. For men, this meant having to struggle with female friends and acquaintances over the use of public space and their masculinity. Men responded by reproducing the male culture to which they had grown accustomed in their saloons and poolrooms or by collectively organizing their time in dance halls. The manner in which they danced, along with their behavior on and off the dance floor, made it easier for them to deal with the frustration they may have felt and suggests that a heterosocial identity was not the unique goal of either men or women in the process of dating and courtship. While the dance hall was central to heterosocial leisure, it was still deeply entangled in homosocial ties. Not only did both men and women arrive in separate groups and “leave as they come,” but the social organization of the dance hall was, at times, decidedly homosocial, with men and women occupying different sides of the dance hall. In fact, the manner in which some men behaved suggests that they | 155 |

“That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”

celebrated their identity as men vis-à-vis other men and that the audience for whom they staged the ongoing performance of their manhood was as much the other men as it was the women with whom they shared the dance hall. Organizing dance halls along homosocial lines did not solve all their problems, however. When men accosted women as they left the dance hall, refused to take off their hats, or ignored them in between dances, they may have laid an obvious claim to dance hall space. But they also embraced the values many women openly despised, making matters worse for themselves and leaving them likely to find themselves hopelessly at odds with other men. The collective organization of the dance hall around cliques or other social and athletic clubs meant that the identifications of class, ethnicity, and or neighborhood affiliation continued to figure prominently in the hall’s social organization. The fights that invariably erupted not only made it difficult for men and women to couple up at dances but also account for men’s ambivalence about dancing and for their continuing attachment to basement clubs and other hangouts, which I focus on in chapter 5.

| 156 |

FIVE

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt” Working-Class Male Culture, Social Clubs, and Heterosocial Leisure

In 1926, William Krueger, who was a carpenter by trade, declared, “I don’t trust these Chicago girls.” “As soon as they find a man is through spending money on them they are through.” A taxi dancer named Ann Novak, for example, dated Krueger twice and then abruptly asked for a pair of six-dollar slippers, a dress costing thirty-five or forty dollars, and money for an apartment. Krueger angrily denied her request, stating that “if she wanted clothes that cost that much she’d have to find some man who had a bigger income.”1 In many ways, Krueger’s dating experiences were atypical: He was a twice-widowed, fifty-four-year-old man who spent most of his leisure time in taxi-dance halls. But his complaints about the intersection of consumption, dating, and urban amusements were frequently echoed in the words and actions of other working-class men. Indeed, his experience was so common that men like Krueger spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to find ways to negotiate the problems they faced in paying for their dates and in laying claim to the urban amusements that had become a regular feature of workingclass life. Despite their best efforts, many men failed to get “pick ups” and even offended the women with whom they were so eager to become acquainted, leaving them with little choice but to spend their time on the | 157 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

edge of the dance floor waiting anxiously for the next dance or to gather with the other men who had been passed over for dances or dates. At the same time, working-class men did not just settle for hanging out with their “gang.” Some men, like Krueger, simply “quit” their dates, hoping to find a more compatible companion at the next dance. Other men went a step further and abandoned the palaces, academies, pavilions, and neighborhood halls, at least temporarily, for their own social clubs. Social clubs, also known as pleasure, athletic, and cellar clubs, were “independent organization[s] of young men or women, maintaining private quarters for the social activities of the members and their friends.”2 In other words, they were hangouts “where boys and girls hobnob after school hours in poorly lighted basement rooms”3 or “avenue[s] of escape from crowded homes and inconvenient quarters . . . [where] the young men and women may go to dance and otherwise while away their leisure time.”4 As early as the 1890s, social clubs began attracting the attention of reformers and other contemporaries concerned about the unsupervised social interaction among working-class youth, and, at least through the 1930s, social clubs remained popular.5 But social clubs were not just about heterosocial leisure. Most clubs formed out of athletic teams, gangs, school clubs, and political organizations, or members became acquainted as pinochle or billiard players and at their parents’ lodges or philanthropic organizations.6 With roots in athletic teams, gangs, and other all-male get-togethers, social clubs remained an integral part of a larger homosocial world where men sustained and even celebrated their relationships with other men. As George Chauncey argues, manhood “was not simply a quality that resulted naturally and inevitably from one’s sex.” “Manhood could be achieved, but it could also be lost.”7 Social clubs provided men the space and the audience to witness and even share in the ongoing performance of one another’s manhood through the contests of strength and skill that largely defined male culture and that are crucial to understanding working-class masculinity at the turn of the century. In short, social clubs resemble what the anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal” spaces, spaces “betwixt and between” the “formerly familiar and stable and the not-yet familiar and stable” that provide a | 158 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

“release from normal constraints” and make possible the “deconstructing of the ‘uninteresting’ construction of commons sense.”8 Social clubs routinely defied the normal order of things by blurring the boundaries between heterosociality and homosociality, between masculinity and femininity, and even between public and private, since most clubs were community-based yet consumed with sexual experimentation and intimacy. As such, they offered men the opportunity to enjoy the best of both their homosocial and heterosocial lives, but only if they could find some way to manage them simultaneously. This chapter explores the origins and development of working-class social clubs. It examines the different activities in which club members participated and explains how social clubs allowed men to negotiate both homosocial and heterosocial leisure. Social clubs, in part, grew out of the tension surrounding mixed-sex, commercial amusements. The cost of commercial leisure, combined with their dates’ demands and behavior, compelled many men to find other ways to organize heterosocial interaction. Social clubs literally afforded men the collective opportunity to create their own leisure space. They not only provided the supplies and labor that made their hangouts attractive. The clubs also afforded them the opportunity to establish their own rules of “common decency,” rules that allowed them to regulate more thoroughly the behavior of the female guests who attended their club social nights. Setting up their own basement hangouts or “dancing and dating cooperatives” did not, of course, solve all the problems men faced. Because most clubs were such an integral part of a larger male culture, many men found coming to terms with heterosocial leisure a complicated matter. Social clubs may have granted men unique opportunities to create their own leisure space, but club members still found themselves struggling both with and against the women who attended club social nights as they worked to define the meaning of leisure, sexuality, intimacy, and even masculinity. Like the dance hall entrepreneur, who often went to great lengths to try and attract and then maintain a clientele, club members had to make their social clubs attractive and acceptable to an audience of anxiously awaiting parents and potential dates and to regulate their own behavior if they ever expected to win their parents’ approval and to attract the neighborhood girls. This | 159 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

reality created a dilemma that challenged the commitment they made to male culture and heterosocial leisure. According to Herbert Asbury, social clubs had been a “feature of life in the congested tenement districts” for “many years” before the 1890s. But it was during the early 1890s that clubs began to appear “in greater numbers than ever before.” On the one hand, social clubs grew increasingly popular because politicians found that they could use them to support their own political rise; hence, many clubs were “patterned after” and supported by the “political associations which had been formed in large numbers by the Tammany district leaders.”9 Mary McDowell, head resident of the University of Chicago Social Settlement, noticed a similar development at about the same time in Chicago. McDowell explained that, before World War I, social and athletic clubs “were always under obligation to some politician for renting a store and paying the initial expenses of their clubs. That’s what started them, and it has come to be quite the fashion to get an empty store with big panes of glass on which they like to put their names.” In return for providing financial assistance, the politician generally attached his name to the club; he often made speeches at club dances and picnics; and he used the club as a “tool in building up his own personal or local political machine.”10 On the other hand, social clubs grew increasingly popular because saloonkeepers were out to increase their profits. According to Raymond Calkins, who conducted a study of saloons at the turn of the century, some men were initially attracted to social clubs because they offered a “more comfortable way to drink” than did saloons, and beer was not always available from saloons on Sundays. In the clubs, alcohol could be “bought in advance and freely dispensed to all comers,” and some clubs obtained licenses and “have bars of their own.” As a result, the social club was a potential rival, and the money that used to “find its way into the tills of the saloon” was now “paid directly to the brewer.” To ensure their profits, some saloonkeepers opened up their rooms to social clubs for dances and other entertainment and provided music free of charge; others organized their own social clubs and had members meet at different nights in their saloons.11 When young men failed to find a politician or a saloonkeeper willing to support their pleasure, they simply paid their own way and expenses. | 160 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

In his study of leisure in New York, done in 1910, Michael Davis found a group of twenty-five men, ages twenty-one to twenty-five, who paid dues of ten cents a week for a room above a saloon.12 Indeed, with Prohibition and attempts to clean up boss politics, many men lost the political patronage upon which they had initially relied and had no choice but to pay for their own clubs. By the 1920s and 1930s, the rent for their clubs’ quarters ranged from the “cheerless” twelve-dollar-a-month basement cellar to the more luxurious forty-five dollar three-room spread, both of which required members to pay dues from twenty-five to fifty cents a week, although about any place would do “just so the rent is cheap.”13 Many youth used vacant houses, lofts, garages, store fronts, shacks, barns, attics, the “empty front basement rooms intended for janitors,” and even their parents’ basements.14 In Harlem, in the 1930s, it was believed that social clubs were out of view entirely because the “topfloor-back apartments are cheapest.” In Brownsville, “furnace rooms of two-family houses serve as club quarters,” and once Prohibition ended and removed the premium from Greenwich Village cellars, many men found old speakeasy sites ideal. The most popular club, and the type from which its name was derived, were the social clubs located in the basement flats of high-stoop tenements called cellar clubs, where “all one can see of clubs from the street are windows peeping over the sidewalk and a home-made sign.”15 At the same time, these men were careful about their club’s location. According to Isadore Zeligs, who conducted a study of social clubs for his sociology class at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, many clubs, known as “side street hide outs,” were tucked away along alleyways or on the back sides of buildings. One of the “side street” clubs he investigated was located in the basement of a private home and was “completely hidden from view” because there was “no sign at its entrance,” which was “thru a side door about half way to the rear of the house.” Some men undoubtedly ended up with “side street” clubs because rooms facing a busy avenue, or main street clubs, were harder to find and to afford. Renting a main street club meant more passersby, especially girls, and the increased chance of making new acquaintances, the goal of many men. But the hangout’s location was also a matter of choice and was related to its purpose. Zeligs insisted that “public opinion” was “very intensely averse to their existence [side street clubs]” because they were organized | 161 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

primarily for “sensations and stimulations of the simplest and most impulsive kind,” distinguishing the side street club from clubs set up along the busiest streets and avenues, which were a much more obvious part of the community’s life and culture.16 The reasons men set up a club varied as much as the buildings in which they gathered. Besides using their clubs to elude their annoying parents and to take part in certain “sensations and stimulations,” Weinberg found that Jewish men set up social clubs to avoid the potential discrimination they faced. In particular, Weinberg explained that, while these hangouts allowed for the expression of the “dominant urge of solidarity,” they also represented a compromise for young Jewish men too “extroverted” to “sit and brood” and not “sufficiently extroverted to break away from [the] community” because of the “bristle of anti-semitism.” This observation helps explain the increased visibility of social clubs throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as immigration from southern and eastern Europe reached its peak; social clubs were one of the few autonomous spaces available to Jewish youth desperate to escape from the anti-Semitism that typically reared its ugly head at more public gatherings.17 Using a club house to escape the discrimination some men faced was never a peculiarly Jewish practice, however. In Chicago, throughout the early twentieth century, social clubs maintained a conspicuous presence in many immigrant and working-class neighborhoods, including Little Sicily, Cicero, Back of the Yards, and Chicago’s South Side, where Italian, Czech, Polish, and Irish youth spent much of their time socializing. In New York during the early 1920s, John Mariano, while strolling along New York’s Mulberry Street, the main thoroughfare of the Italian Lower East Side, noticed “placards proclaiming the existence of at least thirty such clubs all within the short space of four blocks” and even Harlem boasted its share.18 The Eastside Dudes was a social club organized in central Harlem in 1933 out of a gang whose members hung out at a candy store or huddled together in hallways to escape the bitter winter cold until the mother of one of the members died and left him a life insurance policy worth five hundred dollars.19 Other men established social clubs because they, too, were searching for an escape, but from the neighborhood cop on their own block, who ran them off the street corner to which they had laid claim. In cities | 162 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

across the country, nearly every boy had his “club of intimate friends”— usually called “the gang” or “the push.” Members usually met on the corner, at the wharf, or on the streets in the summer, while “a lumber pile, a shed, or some deserted building” served a similar purpose in the winter.20 Kathy Peiss argues that, by the 1890s, police and reformers had begun cracking down on gang activity throughout the working-class neighborhoods of Manhattan, transforming the gangs into social and pleasure clubs, as did Raymond Calkins, whose study of saloons covered several major cities. As one young man explained his club to Calkins, “The policeman wouldn’t let us stand on the corner, so we thought we’d get together and form a club.”21 Of course, neither gangs nor social clubs were limited to large cities such as New York and Chicago. Recreation surveys from the early twentieth century routinely reported social-club activity in such diverse cities as Kansas City, Missouri; Cincinnati; Philadelphia; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and Madison, Wisconsin, where, according to a police manual, most of thieves with whom the city had to contend were recruited “from young men who spend their time in and around places known as hangouts, such as candy stores, cigar stores, two-and-half-cents-a-cue pool parlors [and] fake social clubs.”22 In smaller cities, investigators usually failed to report the number of clubs, noting only the number of dances or parties social clubs sponsored. In Kansas City, Missouri, “it was found [that] during the month January 1912, twenty [social] clubs gave fortythree card parties and socials . . . reaching between one and two thousand people.”23 In larger cities, the number of clubs varied from five hundred to one thousand through the 1920s. In 1898, there were an estimated seven hundred clubs in Philadelphia and one thousand in Cincinnati, while New York claimed more than five hundred in the 1920s, a figure that equaled the number of commercial dance halls.24 By the Depression, there were five thousand social clubs in the greater New York area, with a total of approximately 150,000 members, numbers that contributed to the belief that they were “Depression born.”25 Yet, while the Depression may have provoked an increase in the number of clubs, they seemed to have remained a working-class pursuit. College students at the University of Chicago noted that, before the Depression, formal dinner dances in which a crowd would “go downtown” for dinner at a hotel and then spend the rest of the “evening and part of | 163 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

the morning ‘gadding about’ to the night clubs” were weekly or biweekly occurrences. During the Depression, a crowd might gather at someone’s “home, [play] bridge or [dance] . . . and [call] it an enjoyable evening.” But instead of turning toward the social club as a way to manage more easily the hard times they faced and their desire for mixed-sex leisure, college students turned toward the hotel room or apartment to replace the night club. R. L. Masters, another student at the University of Chicago, explained that “gay parties in hotel rooms or apartments were a substitute for night clubs. Here cheap liquor and radio took the place of expensive drinks and [a] fine orchestra.”26 The large number of social clubs also reflected the popularity of sports. In the 1890s, many clubs adorned their walls with pictures of sporting celebrities, sports trophies, or pennants, and they organized athletic competitions with other clubs or used their hangouts to hone their craft. Calkins found that sometimes a club might include “a ring and boxing-gloves,” which, he noted, seemed to “betray the character of the club.”27 More than forty years later, sports remained the reason working-class men set up basement hangouts. According to Robert Bonadonna, he and his buddies set up their club, the Powerhouse Athletic Club, “on a whim, just to provide a group of sports minded friends a title [and] a bond.” Bonadonna and the other club members kept their boxing gloves in the basement and “used to spar with each other and a few other things like that,” things like “box ball, stoop ball, ringaleveo, kick the can, buck-buck, softball,” and weight lifting.28 Other men may have been interested in sports, but they set up their clubs to meet “girls.” The first to go when they organized what investigators called a “dancing and dating cooperative” was the usual tenement-house “cockroach” green paint. In the 1930s, one working man named Arti stated he had “lived with that color all his life,” and he would just be “darned” if he was going to let the social-club walls stay that way even if he had to “paint it with my hair and use spit for mixing.”29 Members also would generally “sand and wax the floor to danceability and screw colored bulbs into the lighting fixtures to give the place some atmosphere.” The group also collected furniture from a second-hand man such as “a table and a few hard chairs for the back room pinochle ring and a couple of couches and overstuffed chairs to go down the side of the dance floor.” And to add the romantic touch that was conspicuously | 164 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

absent from tenement flats, many clubs put in an artificial fireplace. “They streamline it; they make its opening in the shape of a heart” and use “real wood with bark” and “make it ‘work’ with colored electric bulbs.” Artificial fireplaces were so popular that one study of social clubs along New York’s Lower East Side in the 1930s found that twenty-one of twenty-eight clubs had installed one.30 Members’ stage in the life cycle also affected the social clubs’ purpose. Many men initially organized their social clubs because they found that spending nights at home meant “adding another body to that already too numerous family gathering in the narrow flat” or sitting around reading the sports page while “your old man talked about how hard he had worked to raise you and feed you, and ‘now look at you sitting around doing nothing.’”31 The Depression only made matters worse for many young men. John Rotoli, who worked as a baster at a clothing manufacturing plant in New York during the Depression, explained that there was always a good deal of friction between him and his stepfather, but much more during periods of unemployment, “because I’m round home more—more chance for it.”32 To get out of the house, young men first took to the streets or went “shouting and shoving on the subways.” Others gathered up “a dime for a show, a dime for subway fare, and a nickel for root beer and knishes on Delancey street.” But “there were plenty of Saturdays when no one had a quarter—or even a dime for subway fare.”33 Social clubs provided young men the escape they needed from bustling city streets, cramped tenement flats, and what one man in the 1920s called the “yoke of their parents who try to impose a patriarchal kind of obedience upon them.”34 One young man summed it up best by describing his club as “the one place where I can get up without having somebody grab my seat.”35 As men became interested in the neighborhood “girls,” privacy was no longer about escaping from an overbearing father or a cramped tenement flat but about intimacy with women. One man, in the 1930s, complained about how his parents teased him for having placed his sweetheart’s picture on his bureau. “Most fellows between the ages of fifteen and nineteen and even older men,” he insisted, “have sweethearts.” It was common for the “loving birds” to “exchange pictures [and] naturally a fellow of seventeen would like to . . . put it [the girl’s picture] on his desk in his home . . . or wherever he is at home.” Yet, every time “an | 165 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

argument would arise on a certain topic,” his parents, who “don’t expect you to have a sweetheart until you’re seriously thinking of being married,” would “go back to that picture and to the girl.” Other men, he protested, were “mocked when they are seen cleaning themselves too often, when they try to learn to dance, [and] when they refuse food that will make them too fat or too thin.” The social club he envisioned “wouldn’t be just a hangout to loaf one’s time away” but a place to which one could “invite people to come to talk to us on different subjects. We’d make it a point to have distinguished visitors every week or two to give us ideas . . . to ask us questions on neighborhood problems and how to get ahead and many other things,” things that up until he was seventeen—like dating, dancing, and girls—never preoccupied so much of his attention or time.36 To make matters worse, working-class men often complained that finding a place to date in crowded tenements or on the streets of their neighborhoods was especially difficult. Couples went for walks in parks or made and met dates on street corners or around neighborhood stores. One young man, in the 1930s, recalled how “Almost every night at 10:30 when Benny Goodman [was] broadcast, a couple of dozen boys and girls from the tenements nearby crowded into the candy store’s ‘two by nothing’ back room and ‘went to town’—foot stomping, hands clapping, swaying and shouting.” But in most cases, their entertainment was short lived, lasting only as long as the store owner remained patient. In this case, he lost his patience and “expelled the ‘bunch’ from his candy store after they had upset the pot-bellied coal stove around which they were holding a ‘jam session.’” Without a hangout, these men found themselves back on the streets, where in the winter time it was especially difficult to “take a girl out and park her on a bench.” The few options left away from family and community, according to one young man, were “the halls or that dark place under the stairs.”37 In many different ways, social clubs offered young men the opportunities they desired to meet and entertain their dates. Almost all clubs, including “side street” clubs, regularly held social nights in their own rooms, sometimes once a week if not every Saturday and Sunday night. Social nights featured skits, singing, tap dancing, amateur programs, stunt nights, bingo, and drawings much like those run by commercial dance halls, which used prizes to attract female patrons. But | 166 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

dancing with “thrice amplified swing music” from a victrola or a radio with a “loudspeaker hookup” was the biggest attraction. Nearly every social club included a dance floor. Some clubs even remodeled tenement flats, using removable wall partitions that could be set aside at a moment’s notice to uncover a dance floor big enough to accommodate fifteen couples.38 A typical social night at Club Regal in the 1930s saw the dance floor comfortably occupied by fifteen couples or so, members, their guests and girl friends. Around the walls in the several sofas and easy chairs are others, talking and smoking. The lights are low, but ample for one to see the photographs of the club’s champion basketball team of last year and scenes from their outings which decorate the walls. Phonograph music is amplified too loud for comfortable conversation. Other couples gather in the back room around the ping pong table that now serves as a refreshment stand. If it is a special party beer will be served to all those who have “ante’d” their 25 [cents].39

In some clubs, the social night was an informal affair “at which the members and their ‘steadies’ are the only attendants.” But in many cases, girls, “whether known or not may come in at will.” In fact, “doing the clubs” was “a popular weekend activity [in which] couples often drop down on half a dozen clubs in an evening.”40 During the Depression, when there were so many different clubs from which to choose, club members complained of men they referred to as “roamies”—“boys who find it more satisfactory to pay ten cents for an evening in someone else’s club when they feel like it than join one themselves.”41 The more ambitious clubs—or most clubs except the “side street” clubs whose members were careful about attracting too much attention—also organized picnics and other outings, and they usually held semiannual or annual affairs, elaborately staged and organized dances held in rented halls in the neighborhood or in uptown hotels. Club members would “sink” the club savings, as much as fifty to one hundred dollars during the late 1930s, to hire a big name orchestra and to advertise the “affair” with posters that were “plastered over the neighborhood.”42 Club members raised money for the big event by selling “splendiferous, silver-covered and silk-betassled booklets” called “souvenir journals that were presented to each ticket purchaser.” Their “sixteen to | 167 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

two dozen pages” included a list of club members, while the rest of the space was reserved for advertisements from “cafes, candy stores, barber shops, doctors, [and] dress suit renters from the neighborhood” who were “coerced into subscribing for space.”43 Social clubs also encouraged more intimate moments. In some clubs, sexual encounters of varying degrees were a common part of club life and not just for members of “side street” hangouts. At a Chicago club, in the 1920s, one observer reported that on social nights “petting and other intimate relations between the sexes is prevalent in free fashion.” “During the early evening there is quite a good deal of chattering and much dancing. . . . Towards midnight most of the participants are coupled off, dancing has ceased practically, and the corners, every chair and couch occupied.”44 In fact, some social clubs had no “hard and fast rules” about so-called immoral conduct. According to the vice president of Club Colossal, a New York club in the 1930s, “it [sexual intercourse] is up to the fella. If he gets hold of something in the club room he can lock the door and go ahead. We don’t have any lining up or anything like that, but if a guy wants, we don’t bother about stopping him.”45 Members of a Chicago club during the 1920s, for example, boasted about what they referred to as “lays of their own”—women known as “mistresses” who were invited into their clubs specifically “when no one was around” so they could “give ’em the works.”46 Some men, of course, vigorously argued that they would never use their clubs for anything more than a simple get-together. According to one member, his social club was “the last place they would come to for anything like that [sexual intercourse].” “If they got caught here,” he insisted, “every relative in New York and Jersey would know about it in a week.”47 At a Club Regal social night in the 1930s, for example, “three of the fellows and their girl friends stayed around after the social night was over and the rest of the gang had gone home.” Later that night, a neighbor who recognized one of the girls saw them leaving after three o’clock in the morning. The girl’s mother was promptly told of the assignation, and in “less than a wink” through the “air shaft telegraph system” word spread to the rest of the neighborhood. Parents throughout the community rigorously questioned their sons about the incident, and at the next club meeting, the other members summarily expelled the three boys after they admitted to being in the | 168 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

club late. Two of the men had recently joined the club, so it “didn’t matter much.” But “what the bunch did hate was having to kick out Shapiro,” the “humorist” of the club and a founding member, even though “they knew it would not do to keep him.” In short, club members recognized that they had no choice but to accept the community’s role in club affairs and the right of parents to intervene if club members violated the community’s sexual norms and standards.48 The extent to which men regulated their own behavior also may have reflected the age of some club members. According to one man in the 1930s, “sexual intercourse” in his club was “‘impossible’ since an older member is in charge all the time rooms are open and only a few of these have keys.”49 Before the 1930s, social clubs rarely included “older members”—men who were in their thirties. During the Depression, as men began to postpone marriage, many of them remained attached to their hangouts into their late twenties and even their early thirties, which helps explain the tenfold increase in the number of clubs during the Depression. As a result, the disparity in age of club members was likely to increase as unprecedented numbers of them faced worsening economic times, affecting not only the make up of individual clubs but also the types of activities in which they participated.50 Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then, the social club played a number of different roles for young men. On the one hand, these hangouts provided men the escape for which many of them were looking. Whether men were seeking refuge from the neighborhood cop, nosey and intrusive parents, or the discrimination and racism they faced about the town, the social club offered them a place to commiserate over their shared problems and the companionship and camaraderie to perhaps forget them, at least temporarily. On the other hand, social clubs expanded men’s opportunities for intimacy. Most men had neither the spare time nor the spare cash to attend dance halls more than occasionally or once a week at best. Social clubs were one of the more modest entertainments with which they had to content themselves during the rest of the week or until they had saved up some money, but one that still afforded considerable opportunities. Social clubs not only made it easier for men to negotiate long hours of wage labor and create their own leisure space. | 169 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

They were cheaper than a Saturday night out at a commercial dance hall, especially if these men were expected to pay for their dates. The location of their hangouts and its membership did, of course, pose certain problems. While members of a “side street” club could perhaps elude their parents and other community members and thus take advantage of the privacy their hangouts had to offer, other men had to either avoid using their clubs for more intimate matters or, like the men from Chicago, who used their clubs to entertain their “mistresses,” make sure “no one was around.” As a result, club members generally found more privacy in their social clubs than the neighborhood streets, or, as one man put it, “that dark place under the stairs.”51 But they had to either cautiously abide by the community’s sexual norms or discreetly circumvent them, lest they attract their parents’ unwanted attention, as well as the interference of older members, who often held the keys to the club room and watched over the behavior of their younger counterparts. At the same time, dating and dancing did not consume all of men’s leisure time, nor were social clubs built primarily for heterosocial relationships and activities. Throughout the first few decades of the early twentieth century, when upwards of 40 percent of men over fifteen years of age were single, working-class male culture revolved primarily around what historians have called a bachelor subculture. The ethic of male solidarity and manliness associated with the bachelor subculture was forged through the social practices endemic to saloons, street corner gangs, blood sports, games of chance, and demonstrations of sexual prowess with women and other men.52 In many ways, social clubs were simply an extension of a larger male culture and the ethic of male solidarity and manliness upon which it was based. By joining a social club, young men learned how to drink, smoke, play cards, and gamble, skills that often served them in cultivating and sustaining same-sex relationships.53 Frederick J. Santoianni, a WPA cost clerk from Bridgeport, Connecticut, often went to the neighborhood club, or “dive,” as some people called it, to avoid arguing with his mother. Many of the men in his club, he explained, had a “bad name” or had served some time in the “goose house.” But “if you are smart enough, [and] just listen to them and don’t talk,” he insisted, “some of those boys can teach you more ‘stuff’ in one hour than what you can learn in college in a whole year.”54 William A. Carroll, a Democratic member of the Council from Brooklyn | 170 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

in the 1930s, enthusiastically agreed and “recalled with what sounded like nostalgia that when he was a boy [he] learned to play ‘crap, pinochle, and rummy’ in just such a place [a cellar club].”55 Social clubs also offered men new and unique ways to demonstrate their masculinity to the group. The Ukelele Aces, a New York club in the 1930s, not only tiled, painted, and completely installed an extra washroom for “girls,” constructed five tables, several chairs, two reading lamps, and built a dance floor with an “inlaid center” out of scraps they “picked up on the job” but assumed the titles associated with these trades as a sign of prestige. Members, for example, often identified themselves as the club’s electrician, butcher, tile setter, shoemaker, plumber, concrete layer, painter, candy cook, brick layer, or contract worker. In the process, they not only found a way to distinguish themselves through the collective work of building a club house but implicitly embraced the values generally identified with adult men, who regularly latched on to skill and physical prowess as a way of proving their manhood.56 Once their clubs were complete, members continued to use them to demonstrate their skills and masculinity to the group. In the 1930s, the “Y Boys,” so-called camera enthusiasts from New York, “turned the darkest of their three basement rooms into a developing laboratory.” Despite their meager twelve- to twenty-dollar-a-week salaries, they were able to enjoy an expensive hobby through the cooperative buying of equipment and supplies. Another club from the 1930s called the “Versatile Craftsmen” (located on New York’s East Third Street) used only “a tiny back room in their basement flat for social affairs.” They converted the rest of the club into a workshop where members assembled several radios, a boat, a glider, and rebuilt a couple of outboard motors.57 By using their clubs as workshops, the Y Boys and the Versatile Craftsmen insisted that the skills that were perpetually being routinized and rationalized in the workplace remained the basis for a shared masculinity that explicitly recognized and celebrated their identity as workers. In other words, the Versatile Craftsmen, the Y Boys, and the Ukelele Aces were not simply building a clubhouse or using it as a workshop; they were constructing a realm of unalienated labor in which they controlled every step of the production process, suggesting that the boundaries that separated work from leisure were virtually indistinct at times. The work men performed in their hangouts helped them establish a standard by | 171 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

which they measured the impact and experience of wage labor and that affected the ways in which they understood their roles as producers and as consumers. In the meantime, they not only constructed goods that enriched the club experience and more fully established club ties and a greater sense of interdependence and mutuality among the members; their workshops also provided the social spaces needed to repair the damage done to their working selves by the endless and monotonous hours of wage labor. The practice of paying dues was another club ritual that reaffirmed the group’s solidarity. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, club members were responsible for raising their own dues and the money needed to finance club outings and parties. When they lacked the wherewithal to pay their fair share, they ran the risk of being expelled. But most clubs established specific rules to help members deal with hard times. For example, during the Depression, unemployed members were not required to pay dues in many clubs. Sometimes, dues were set aside; sometimes some of the “fellas” helped “them out with their personal finances if they are in need.” In other clubs, unemployed members performed different jobs, such as cleaning the club, in lieu of paying dues, or dues were suspended until they had the wherewithal to pay. The GoGuys in New York, for example, suspended the dues of a furrier who was out on strike.58 Special consideration for out-of-work members implicitly recognized working-class men’s erratic employment and suggests that club members rejected the idea that an impersonal marketplace should dictate the exchange relationships that they customarily negotiated through face-to-face practices based on reciprocity. In the process, their handling of dues served to strengthen the ties between club members by making membership not an individual privilege but a collective practice that valued the potential contributions of all men regardless of their economic well-being, as well as characteristics like good fellowship and group commitment. Expulsion for not paying dues was also deemed exceedingly harsh, since many men viewed their clubs as a second home. Social clubs provided not only a place to hang out but many of the amenities that were often absent from tenement flats. New York’s Acme Social Club included showers and hot water, a washroom with a metal sink, a small clothes wringer, and a clothesline. “See how it is,” explained Milton Jessel, | 172 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

Acme’s vice president, “most of the guys live in places where they haven’t got showers or hot water,” and we “are down [at the clubhouse] from 6:30 on every night and either at the gym or the ball park or here every Saturday and Sunday afternoon.” As a consequence, Jessel insisted, “we take baths [and] we wash our clothes” in the “club room.”59 Another man complained that at home he was allowed to wear a clean shirt only on Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays, and Mondays. But “sometimes,” he insisted “a shirt becomes a little soiled on Tuesday night and the fellow has to go to a party,” which, he suggested, explained the need for having laundry facilities in his social club.60 With access to many of the comforts that were noticeably missing from their homes and the privacy to enjoy them, some men literally adopted their social clubs as a second home, spending as many as six or seven nights a week and thirty-six hours a week “down club.” At a Chicago club in the 1920s, members usually arrived after seven and stayed “til about twelve.”61 During the Depression, the average amount of time spent “down club” remained about the same, except for unemployed members, who often spent their entire afternoons at the club playing cards or “stretched out on a sofa with a magazine.” In time of crisis, some men temporarily moved into club quarters. The Wa-Del Social Club, for instance, allowed a member who had had a nasty quarrel with his father “to sleep in their rooms and for several weeks [they] brought him food and assisted him financially.”62 Belonging to a social club also provided men the chance to manage a quasi-domestic space. In almost every club, senior members initiated new members and held the keys to the club’s hangout; they thus enjoyed more say in organizing club events and had greater responsibility for overseeing both the actions and behavior of other men and the club’s reputation. At the Acme Social Club in New York, for example, the vice president supervised “a rotating committee of five,” who gave “the room a thorough cleaning every two weeks: windows are washed, bath and showers scoured, floors scrubbed etc.”63 Thanks to seniority, some men had the privilege as well as the distinction of not having to perform domestic chores, which perhaps exacerbated some other members’ already hostile feelings about having to take on such tasks. But the day-to-day experience of keeping their hangouts clean as well as the practice of having some men supervise the operation helped | 173 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

reaffirm the club’s collective culture and gave men the chance to practice the skills they would eventually use once they assumed the responsibilities of adulthood.64 Club membership may have even made it easier for young men to cope with their prolonged bachelorhood during the Depression. Increasing numbers of men remained attached to their clubs until their early thirties because they lacked the resources needed to marry, and their clubs along with the gambling and other all-male fun offered them the companionship they craved to help them deal with hard times. Of course, “older members,” who preferred to spend their evenings around the back-room pinochle ring, often complained about the “noisy youngsters” with whom they shared their clubs and who eagerly anticipated the weekly social nights. The difference of opinion was often sharp enough to break up a club and threatened the “dominant urge of solidarity” that brought these men together. But older members were also careful to negotiate the use of club space and time because they depended upon their younger counterparts’ weekly dues. Older club members may not have had the financial resources to marry and set up their own households, but through their clubs they could supervise the younger men as they carried out their quasi-domestic responsibilities, thereby laying claim to a masculine identity at a time when neither their age nor their income afforded similar privileges.65 For many working-class men, then, their social clubs were never entirely heterosocial, despite the popularity of club social nights and affairs. Nor were they simply domestic or irrepressively masculine. The social club was a space where the boundaries that separated the different identities and experiences with which young men had to contend often blurred. They were spaces where the demarcation between heterosociality and homosociality broke down, where work and leisure seemed indistinguishable, and where the worlds of boyhood and adulthood collided. Of course, the social club’s in-between or liminal status should not suggest that it was completely distinct or separate from the “familiar” or “stable.” “Liminality,” Turner also argues, “must bear some trace of its antecedent and subsequent stages.”66 On the one hand, this meant that working-class men’s behavior did not change as much as the context in which it took place. As children, these men took part in much of the same rowdy behavior that would eventually define the social-club expe| 174 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

rience; gathering at their favorite social club to forget their parents and the mundane affairs of the home or to just enjoy the simple pleasures of good conversation, close association, and male camaraderie was not altogether different from hanging about a street corner or on the front stoop of somebody’s home. These rituals simply took on new meaning once those men reached their late teens and early twenties and as their families and potential spouses expected them to assume certain responsibilities and hence quit postponing their role in reproducing those more accepted measures of manhood such as the breadwinner ethic. On the other hand, the clubs offered men opportunities generally reserved for adults. Working-class men did not simply hang out in their basement clubs; they converted them into second homes or quasi-domestic spaces and took great care to manage and maintain them, both of which prepared them to assume the responsibilities associated with married life. As a result, their clubs gave men the opportunity to lay claim to a masculinity that could bridge the gap between the bachelor subculture and the breadwinner ethic, an option that undoubtedly enhanced the social club’s appeal and popularity while allowing men to negotiate more easily the difficult economic circumstances in which they often found themselves.67 At the same time, the collective manner around which men organized their masculinity was never confined to the work of building a club house or managing club space; while social clubs blurred many boundaries, they often made the boundaries surrounding race and ethnicity more rigid. During the 1920s, members of the Cornell Athletic Club in Chicago noted that the desire to escape family supervision and the annoying interference of their neighbors initially engendered a feeling of solidarity. But they greatly augmented their commitment to one another through “clashes” with other groups of men. “Clashes” usually took the form of football games or other sporting events, which often ended in free-for-all fights.68 These fights sometimes escalated into raids on other groups of men and their clubs, which served as a crucible in which definitions of race and ethnicity were formed. In the summer of 1921, along the “Jewish-Polish frontier” in Chicago, “it was rumored that a few Jewish boys” had been “assaulted when passing through the Polish community.” News of the melee quickly spread throughout the Jewish neighborhood, sending “men like ‘Nails’ and ‘Nigger’” into the fight for | 175 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

revenge. Their slogan—“Wallop the Polock!” Many men joined the fight after hearing the news in their poolroom hangouts. But “the social and ‘basement’ clubs of Lawndale [also] found a good opportunity for sport in the ‘Polock Hunt.’” Club members generally set out after their “enemies” on what contemporaries called an “expedition,” picking up other gangs along the way and forming “the nucleus for a mob before [they] finished.”69 Athletic and social clubs also played a significant role in the Chicago race riots of 1919. According to the Chicago Commission on Race Relations, “it was no new thing for youthful white and Negro groups to come to violence.” The Commission concluded, however, that, if it had not been for all-white gangs or athletic clubs, “it is doubtful if the riot would have gone beyond the first clash.” According to the grand jury, “many of the crimes committed in the ‘Black Belt’ by whites and the fires that were started back of the Yards . . . were more than likely the work of the gangs operating on the Southwest Side under the guise of these clubs.” The grand jury’s report further stated that the “authorities employed to enforce the law should thoroughly investigate clubs and other organizations posing as athletic and social clubs,” which the foreman of the grand jury insisted were “athletic only with their fists and brass knuckles and guns.” It was even suggested to the coroner’s jury, which conducted inquests into the thirty-eight riot deaths, “that race hatred and tendency to race rioting had its [sic] birth and were fostered in the numerous social and athletic clubs made up of young men and scattered through out the city.” The coroner’s jury found the suggestion a bit farfetched but advised that if it was even partially true, athletic and social clubs should be investigated and controlled. In the wake of the jury’s finding, the police were compelled to shut down some of the more infamous clubs “for a period of several months.”70 Club members further strengthened an ethic of solidarity through the sexualization and objectification of women. Almost all clubs featured pinups of bathing beauties, movie stars, or some other “half clad woman.” Many clubs also sponsored stag parties and posted gossip sheets or produced newspapers in which the members listed their dates and the activities in which they participated. At the Go-Guys social club in New York, “information about the love affairs . . . of members is furnished by a weekly bulletin board newspaper” entitled the “Hoity| 176 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

Toity.”71 Other clubs took the idea of sharing in the sexualization of women considerably further. Members of a club located in Chicago’s Lawndale community in the 1920s sometimes shared prostitutes. “One time,” a member recalled, “a whore came down and she took us eight guys in a row.” These visits, according to the same fellow, took place “about once a month or once in two months until we got tired of her and told her not to come down anymore.”72 With few exceptions, the violent “clashes” with men of different racial and ethnic backgrounds and the collective objectification of women intensified an already acute sense of commitment among club members. In his study of Chicago gangs, including athletic and social clubs, during the 1920s, Frederic Thrasher found that some men became “utterly enthralled” with other men, leading to “a devotion hardly to be excelled even in the cases of the most ardent lovers of the opposite sex.”73 The men’s devotion to one another often translated into their forming fictive kin relationships or wearing matching uniforms and sweaters. In the 1930s, members of New York’s Dreamalong Social Club wore pearl grey hats and yellow shoes, which not only rekindled and publicly proclaimed the collective spirit of the group but allowed club members to boldly distinguish themselves from other men wherever they roamed.74 Of course, not all men took part in race riots or invited prostitutes into their club rooms. As the experiences of some of these men suggest, the day-to-day ways in which they publicly demonstrated their masculinity could be as innocent as competing in a football game between rival clubs or other forms of physical prowess and skill. Members of the Powerhouse Social and Athletic Club, for example, preferred dangerous gymnastic stunts and bodybuilding to street fights and race riots. Growing up during the Depression, the members of the Powerhouse could not afford to buy any athletic equipment, so they “borrowed two bus stop signs that were on heavy iron bases and taped them together to make a weight of about a hundred pounds, which they used for bodybuilding exercises, together with pull ups, pushups, sit ups, etc.” With muscles in tow, the Powerhouse A.C. “toured the playgrounds of Brooklyn and put on [its] performance for the admiration of the local population.” The show included several different gymnastic stunts, such as the dangerous “giant swing on the high bar and a fly-away (air somersault)” without “belts, nets or any protection.”75 | 177 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

Yet, while some clubs may have been able to avoid street fights or other violent confrontations, the manner in which they fashioned a gender identity often took unexpected turns. On the one hand, some clubs were just better at avoiding the community’s watchful eyes, and their members spent most of their time involved in seemingly innocuous pursuits such as sports and neighborhood dances but when “no one was looking” stepped boldly across the line separating rough from respectable. The Chicago club whose members had a “whore come down” once every month or so also organized weekly social nights to which the neighborhood girls were invited, and it often sponsored large dances at a hall downtown, both of which attracted attention to the club and its members.76 On the other hand, clubs that adhered to the community’s social and sexual norms often found that the potential for violence was always present despite their best efforts to avoid it. For example, when members of the Powerhouse went to a local dance hall, they were careful to look out for what Bonadonna called the “local Romeos.” In particular, Bonadonna explained that one had to be careful about one’s dancing and about whom one asked to dance because if one asked a girl to dance who was with some other guy, he would be “encroaching on [the other man’s] domain in an area where he couldn’t compete,” which could lead to violence.77 Some men, like the “local Romeos” Bonadonna faced, were simply out to establish exclusive rights to certain women and feared the potential competition they faced from other men who were just as anxious about making dates. But as George Chauncey has shown, working-class men’s unruly behavior also reflected concerns about the rise of an increasingly visible gay subculture. According to Chauncey, the “highest compliment in this world [the bachelor subculture]” was to be called a “man” or a “regular guy,” implying that these same men were “in danger of being called something else: unmanly, a mollycoddle, a sissy, even a pansy.” Such names associated them with the behavior of the “fairy,” or effeminate male, who had “assumed the sexual and other cultural roles ascribed to women” and who, Chauncey argues, “influenced the culture and self-understanding of all sexually active men.”78 As a result, working-class men could, in part, shape a gender identity. Yet they still faced a perplexing dilemma. On the one hand, they opened themselves up to charges of homosexuality, or, at the least of questionable mas| 178 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

culinity, if they did not cautiously watch over their gender-role performance or if they embraced too thoroughly the homosocial relations upon which their clubs were based. On the other hand, the street fights and stag parties that strengthened the bond between club members also stigmatized all nonmembers, including women, as outsiders and hence were not always easily reconciled with club social nights and other heterosocial fun. The range of men’s response to this dilemma varied considerably. Some men simply abandoned their hangouts, at least temporarily. Most men cited moving, marriage, and full-time employment as their main reasons for leaving their hangouts, claiming that the social club simply belonged to a stage of the life cycle that they had outgrown. Robert Bonadonna recalled that it was marriage that led to the end of the relationships formed at his social club. World War II temporarily interrupted the friendships as each member went off to war. Two of the group would never return—Bill O’Shaunessy “died in a tank battle with Rommel in Africa,” and Jesse DePee “died in the Pacific.” But once the others returned, they quickly renewed their friendships, beer drinking, and dancing, until, as Bonadonna explained, “Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine,” a reference to Irving Kahal’s and Willie Raskin’s 1929 hit, “Wedding Bells (Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine),” about marriage and the loss of bachelorhood. The song tells the story of a young man lamenting not only the demise of the old gang once those wedding bells start ringing but also the demise of the all-male institutions around which male culture revolved, alluding specifically to the street corner gang and “Sweet Adeline,” or the barbershop. Not a soul down on the corner, that’s a pretty certain sign That wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine. All the boys are singing love songs, they forgot “Sweet Adeline”; Those wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.79

At the same time, most men did not have to get married to end their ties to their clubs; their clubs became unusually quiet when “the guys have steady girls.” One man, known as Ellman, a member in the 1920s of a Chicago club called the Dirty Dozen, “was one of the meanest fellows” when he was with his gang. But when he went out with his “girl,” “on the sly,” he was “very courteous, quitting his loud talk and dropping | 179 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

his braggadocian air.” In other words, Ellman could adopt a more congenial manner and try and live up to his date’s expectations about intimacy and leisure but only after separating himself from the “Dirty Dozen,” men who ostracized “the man who danced, who went out with girls, or who was well-mannered.”80 Other men, ambivalent about giving up their hangouts, tried to manage their heterosocial and homosocial lives simultaneously, although the type of club to which they belonged determined the different kinds of strategies they embraced. At “side street” clubs, members tried to negotiate their dilemma by making their clubs appear as heterosocial and respectable as possible to the women who were invited in as guests. For some men, this meant regulating their own behavior. At the “side street” club Isadore Zeligs visited, the owner of the private home in which the club was located was convinced that the men who were renting a room in his house did not “behave properly.” But, he exclaimed, “I’m not responsible for what they do”—as long as they paid the rent on time and “don’t cause any trouble,” suggesting that some men may have been able to circumvent the community’s sexual norms and that their clubs actually offered the refuge for which they were looking. Yet, even though the club’s chief aim was gambling, Zeligs was surprised to find that the men’s behavior quickly changed once their female friends arrived. According to Zeligs, What surprised me was the great success this little club had in procuring guests of the other sex. When the latter were present, which was the case many nights during the week as well as the week-ends, gambling ceased entirely. (This was not the case in a number of other clubs.) Everyone concentrated on the ‘social,’ and put forth great effort to entertain and make their guests feel quite comfortable.81

Thus while the “side street” clubs may have gained a notorious reputation because of its location and the conscious attempt on the part of club members to separate themselves from their communities, they were still able to attract the neighborhood “girls” and, in the process, manipulate the line dividing rough from respectable—as well as the reputation that distinguished the “side street” club from clubs located along busy avenues in plain sight of the rest of the community. Indeed, by “concentrating on the social” and by prohibiting gam| 180 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

bling and other manly practices such as “coarse” language and drinking, working-class men could effectively set their clubs apart from other male hangouts. From street corner gangs to poolrooms, saloons, and even dance halls, working men reveled in the use of hard language and liquor as an accepted part of male sociability. The use of “vulgar” language and other male social practices allowed them to openly proclaim their independence from feminine constraints and to delineate male space; according to Ray Oldenburg, when men slip “into a distinctly masculine style of talking . . . a common heritage surfaces . . . [and] an almost immediate intimacy is engendered.”82 By prohibiting or at least regulating certain male vices, working men attempted not only to clean up the image of their clubs but also to redefine them as heterosocial space. On the other hand, members of a “side street” club relied on decorations to enhance their club’s heterosocial appeal. At the same “side street” club Zeligs visited, the rooms included the typical accessories like cheap couches, card tables, a few cushions, lamps, books, and magazines, while the walls were covered with pennants, banners, and pictures taken from magazines and newspapers. Yet, the old, wornout couches about which Zeligs complained were also covered with “attractive linen,” the windows were curtained, and flowers adorned some of the card tables. Clean windows, curtains, flowers, and other decorations resembling those found in members’ tenement homes often clashed with many of the other decorations found in “side street” clubs, such as sports banners and trophies. But the ambiguous feel produced by these two different styles, especially with regard to gender, allowed members to distinguish themselves and their clubs from those who frequented other male hangouts.83 The main street clubs followed a similar routine. Besides carefully decorating their hangouts, club members insisted that members’ conduct remain “gentlemanly.”84 In both Chicago and New York clubs during the 1920s and 1930s, respectively, card playing and gambling were generally allowed but only if the stakes were small, while on social nights the gamblers were “removed to the rear room” or gambling was eliminated altogether.85 Other clubs forbade swearing, and, although alcohol was often present during club social nights, in many clubs it was permitted only during monthly beer parties.86 For example, the Chicago club that | 181 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

welcomed a prostitute into its hangout every month or two also restricted gambling at different times throughout the club’s history, set up rules to eliminate swearing, organized a “cleanup committee” each week, and fined members when they violated club rules.87 In fact, many clubs went so far as to establish patrols on social nights to police behavior. Offending guests were “tossed out,” and members who violated club rules could be brought up on charges “by an executive committee” that met weekly to mete out punishment, including fines, suspension, or, if the offense was egregious enough, expulsion.88 The Soliath Club in New York, for example, expelled a couple of members after they admitted to having relations with prostitutes.89 Yet while members of “side street” clubs shared many of the same strategies as the men whose clubs were located along busy avenues, members of these main street clubs also went to great lengths to show off their clubs. In some cases, this meant having parents “drop down for five minutes or so”; sometimes members invited parents in on social nights to act as chaperones.90 Other clubs offered a “parents’ night” two evenings a season in which the members had a party and put on plays for the parents, and some clubs held street dances. At a neighborhood dance in New York in 1927, the “block was closed with police posts and ropes,” “the jazz band seated themselves in a large Mack truck right by the curb,” and “people from almost all over the local district danced in the streets.” Most of the men and women who attended were “fellows and girls between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one,” but street dances attracted the attention of the entire community and gave parents a better look at the club’s day-to-day activities.91 Members of main street clubs also called attention to their hangouts by donating the money they raised on social nights to local charities and political causes. In the 1930s, the Square Club was affiliated with the American League for Peace and Democracy and helped all movements on New York’s East Side that were “anti-Fascist and pro-China.” Occasionally, they even gave small dances with a hat-check fee of fifteen to twenty-five cents to raise money for Spain, Chinese relief, or”neighborhood charities.” Other clubs participated in housing campaigns or donated money to needy members and other families. A Jewish club in Chicago during the 1920s often contributed money to families “not limited to the neighborhood,” and, for the Jewish holiday of Passover, the | 182 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

club provided funds to a local charity for the “additional expense of the holiday-food as tradition required.”92 Of course, not all clubs joined political movements or donated funds to local charities. Clubs with older members were more likely to take part in charity work or political protest movements than were those whose members were younger men, who spent their free time obsessed with their own “affairs” and dances or who deliberately isolated themselves to escape crowded homes and intrusive parents. Thus while the dancing and other boisterous behavior in which all club members participated could distract or mute any overt political expression among some men, it could just as easily nurture dissent, especially among older men whose bachelorhood stood in sharp contrast to the younger men surrounding them and whose bachelorhood reflected the problems they faced accumulating the resources needed to marry and to start their own families. In other words, club life compelled certain men to confront more directly the problems and contradictions of working-class life or more specifically their exclusion from the burgeoning consumer culture that steadily gained strength throughout the early twentieth century. The political movements and charity campaigns in which they participated not only allowed these men to confront more directly the problems they faced. Participating in charity events also enabled them to duplicate many of the functions associated with the mutual aid societies with which their parents were already familiar, and, as Lizabeth Cohen argues, these efforts helped create a second-generation ethnic, working-class culture that valued parents and many of their customs.93 Members of main street clubs also tried to establish a more conspicuous presence by occupying the sidewalk immediately in front of their hangouts. On weekends (or just about any day of the week during the Depression, when greater numbers of men had an abundant amount of free time), club members could be found camped out around the front stoop, or terrace as they called it, in the easy chairs and overstuffed couches they dragged out of their hangouts.94 In many ways, the obstruction of sidewalks by groups of young men represented a challenge to the use of public space and leisure time. But hanging out on the terrace also allowed the entire community to observe the day-to-day activities of club members and to interact with and to establish more personal, face-to-face relationships. The Go-Guys, for example, often hung out on | 183 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

the front stoop of their East Broadway club. They quickly attracted the attention of their neighbors and before long found themselves babysitting children whose parents had sent them over to be “watched by the fellows when they are sitting out front.”95 The Go-Guys may have occupied their front terrace to hang out and to intimidate outsiders, but they ended up making themselves more accessible and familiar to both their families and the larger community. As the experience of the Go-Guys suggests, many parents not only tolerated social clubs but often embraced the boys they found hanging about the streets and sidewalks. Many parents accepted social clubs because their own sons belonged to some of the neighborhood clubs. But club efforts also may have contributed to some clubs’ popularity and success. The Go-Guys, for example, had at first organized their hangout on a different block but eventually moved because their neighbors, who suspected “immoral purposes,” disliked them. Once the boys set up on East Broadway, they immediately began to regulate more closely the drinking, gambling, and promiscuous behavior for which their other club was infamous and soon found themselves gaining community acceptance and babysitting children from the neighborhood.96 Clubs like the Go-Guys may not have been able to transgress the community’s sexual norms as easily as the “side street” clubs. But they still found ways to successfully negotiate the line dividing rough from respectable and to use their clubs as a “dating and dancing cooperative.” The Go-Guys not only made themselves a more conspicuous part of the community’s life but also effectively incorporated their parents into the club’s day-to-day routine. In short, while historians have emphasized the development of peer cultures, they have failed to acknowledge the degree to which the young men who made up those peer cultures remained embedded in families and neighborhoods and were still dependent upon their parents’ approval and good will.97 Besides demanding “gentlemanly conduct” and donating their time and money to improve their club’s image, club members also targeted their female guests’ behavior to enforce certain gender conventions. Some clubs reproduced gender roles by simply appropriating the labor of the women they admitted into their clubs. For example, if a girl’s “steady date” regularly attended club events, she could expect to “be called to help make curtains . . . slip covers for the second-hand furni| 184 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

ture” or to help serve refreshments at club parties.98 Curtains, which were a conspicuous decoration in most hangouts, including “side street” clubs, were especially important because they were part of the public performance members were attempting to stage. Whether that performance was for the larger community or just for the neighborhood girls who attended club social dances, the addition of curtains not only added the feminine touch that was noticeably absent from the usual male hangouts but also helped define women’s role in club life and the behavior expected of women who were planning to participate in future club events. Club members also tried to exclude “those of reputation.” In the 1930s, the Square Club in New York forbade “rough talking or acting,” stating that “members and guests must be clean and orderly.”99 Many other clubs established similar rules to control women who violated rules of “common decency” on the dance floor. At one of its social nights, the Rutgers St. Boys had to “put out” one girl when she “got very hot and started cutting up [on the dance floor].” Her conduct, they argued, was not in accordance with “common decency.”100 Many clubs, especially main street clubs, excluded “those of reputation” because they feared the potential interference of parents. According to one man, if parents of the “nicer girls” found out they admitted so-called bad girls, they “would . . . forbid their daughters to attend the dances held two or three times a week.”101 By regulating or trying to eliminate rough talking, acting, and dancing, working-class men were suggesting that their clubs were as much a breeding ground for marriage as a space to couple up unsupervised, which perhaps explains the zeal with which they tried to eliminate certain women. In the process, they defined what they considered an appropriate night of heterosocial fun and, above all, linked more effectively the reputation of their hangouts to the “decent girls” they admitted into their clubs. They accomplished this by instituting rules that established a limited range of acceptable behaviors and by stigmatizing the women who flaunted club rules and engaged in indecent behavior as promiscuous and potentially dangerous. In short, they projected all that was negative on to the women who defied their understanding of conventional femininity. By having the “indecent” ones “put out,” they not only removed the potential threat but shifted the blame for the unseemly image of the social club away from themselves and male culture’s more notorious side. | 185 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

At the same time, however, all men, including members of “side street” clubs, generally recognized that rough talking, acting, and dancing were not simply the actions only of indecent or promiscuous women. Women’s behavior not only challenged the manner in which men defined and organized dating and courtship but also served as a metaphor for the larger problems men confronted with the rise of commercial leisure. Dance hall culture not only offered women the opportunity to experiment with new identities and to “put on style” but also granted them a considerable amount of influence in their relations with men. William Krueger, mentioned earlier, was upset about the expensive dress and slippers Ann Novak demanded, not only because they undoubtedly were accouterments of the dance hall girl’s identity and style but because these purchases were usually tied to various sexual favors, which in Krueger’s case were always withheld. With other women, he suffered similar indignities. In the case of one Jewish woman whom he “liked very much,” he could not tolerate her affinity for hard liquor. At her home one evening, Krueger was surprised to find “whiskey bottles all around her bedroom.” “A little beer now and then is alright” he exclaimed, “but I didn’t want a whiskey drinking wife so I quit her.”102 When Krueger was last seen in the dance hall, he was engaged to a German woman named Grace who had promised to marry him once he agreed to pay for her tonsillectomy. In all of Krueger’s dating experiences, the women involved somehow violated his understanding of femininity. They either drank too much, claimed autonomy with their sexuality, or made too explicit a connection between consumption and heterosocial relations. In social clubs, working-class women also adopted a particular identity and “style” through rough talking, acting, and dancing, behavior that often unnerved their male hosts not only because it violated some abstract idea about “true womanhood” but because it encroached upon certain male privileges that helped define the often rigid gender distinctions that separated men from women. But unlike the dance hall, where men like Krueger had fewer options to regulate women’s behavior and chose simply to “quit” their dates, social clubs offered men the opportunity to weed out the “indecent ones.” In other words, the public world of commercial leisure was a much more fiercely contested realm than Beth Bailey suggests. During the nineteenth century, according to Bailey, courtship “took place within | 186 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

the girl’s home—in women’s sphere . . . or at entertainments largely devised and presided over by women.” Dating, she explains, moved courtship out of the home and into the public sphere, “commonly defined as belonging to men.” Outside the home, “Female controls and conventions lost much of their power,” which shifted the balance of power in men’s favor. Men undoubtedly had certain advantages by entertaining their dates without the potential intrusion of family. But the shift in the balance of power was never as profound as Bailey argues, compelling men to look elsewhere—in this case to their social clubs— for more control over their dating relationships.103 In fact, because of the practice of inviting parents in on social nights or having them attend as chaperones, working-class men were not simply using their clubs to weed out certain women. They were also making use of their parents to help regulate the behavior of the women who attended their club social nights. When rough talking, acting, and dancing failed to challenge male control of social clubs, women adopted a number of other strategies. The Go-Guys, for example, felt the need to establish rules to prevent women from sitting around the club with their coats on. According to one of the Go-Guys, club members insisted that when a woman attended one of their events, she had to “act like she was in her own home,” and hence they did not “like or allow girls to sit around with their coats on.” “They wouldn’t do that at home,” he insisted.104 Keeping their coats on allowed some women to perhaps cover up shabby or workaday clothes or to save their “special” clothes for “special” occasions. But the practice also seemed to suggest that these women were a bit uncomfortable. To be sure, many women were as enthusiastic about participating in social club events as their male counterparts, and the women who sat around with their coats on were just as eager to elude their parents’ watchful eyes as the women who more fully embraced club life. Indeed, because of the conspicuous role parents played in social clubs, men had to regulate the rough and unruly behavior about which women complained, thereby separating the social club from the dance hall and other public venues. But the women who attended these events were still ambivalent about hanging out like “one of the guys” who considered their social clubs a second home. By keeping their coats on, they constantly reminded their male hosts that they were displeased with male-defined leisure and that | 187 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

they were prepared to leave at a moment’s notice for more aesthetically pleasing and personally fulfilling entertainment and dates.105 Other women challenged men over the use of their clubs by appropriating certain space. After the members of the Melody Moon Club, in New York, gave some very subtle hints—such as “O.K., if you don’t want to sit on my lap buy yourself a chair”—the women chipped in and bought another second-hand sofa.106 The sofa, no doubt, stood as an endless source of irritation to the men and a constant reminder of how certain women rejected their sexual advances. But it also contested maledefined intimacy and singlehandedly allowed the women to stake a claim to club space. These women may not have initially organized the club and were not permitted to become members, but they nonetheless owned some club property and therefore enjoyed the advantages ownership implied. In a few other cases, women actually organized their own clubs. The Silver Stars was one of two “all-girl” social clubs on New York’s Lower East Side in the late 1930s. The club consisted of five Italian, two Irish, and two Jewish women, all between eighteen and twenty years of age and six of whom worked as clerks in “five and dimes.” Club members had known one another in the neighborhood and often met at social club dances. At one point, they tried to meet in their homes but found it unsatisfactory: “We wanted a place where we could invite our friends and have it our way for a while.” They organized their club just before Christmas 1937 in a parlor-floor apartment on East Broadway. Members painted the walls a deep blue “dappled with the clubs insignia”—silver stars—and club members had an inside wall removed, transforming the apartment into a small dance hall. Together, members paid twenty-five dollars for rent; with other expenses, they needed to raise a total of thirty-five dollars a month. Short of funds for the first month’s rent, they borrowed money from brothers, cousins, and boyfriends.107 To pay back the money they borrowed and to raise enough money to cover future expenses, the Silver Stars paid dues from fifteen to twentyfive cents a week and put on three dances each week, at which they charged a ten cent hat-check fee. Club members were expected to attend two of the three dances a week “to see that the boys have a good time,” and they prided themselves in knowing the latest steps. But some women found dancing two nights a week too much: “After I stand on my feet all | 188 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

day,” one woman complained, “I can’t dance down here all night.” As a result, the Silver Stars reluctantly admitted women who were not members so that the men who attended would have enough dance partners. Leery of their club’s reputation, they made it clear that they were particular about the types of girls they admitted. “You know how it is,” stated the vice president; “one bad apple spoils the bunch. The boys would find it out and try to say all of us were like that.” Unfortunately, they “couldn’t be too particular about the boys.” “If we are they’ll start calling us ‘high hat’ and won’t come in.”108 Like that of other clubs, the Silver Star’s future was dependent upon the funds generated on social nights, forcing members to make certain compromises. But their social club still allowed them to make their own decisions and rules. And, since they controlled some of the resources in their dating relationships, they perhaps had greater opportunities to influence the system of treating and thereby to challenge the manner in which men organized their leisure time and relationships. For the Silver Stars, this provoked a disturbing reaction. On one occasion, a couple of boys tried to force their way into the club, resulting in a fight. Three weeks later a neighbor found that someone had “stretched a rubber contraceptive device on the doorknob,” apparently, according to same neighbor, to “break up the club.” Thus, it appears that the neighborhood “boys” not only were upset about an “all-girls club” but were willing to use violence to try to reestablish more acceptable dating arrangements.109 Men also blamed women for disrupting the same-sex relationships by which they had initially organized their hangouts. “It was petty jealousies,” stated one club member in the 1920s. “If one girl would prefer one guy to another then he’d be jealous of that guy and try to tease him,” which often caused the “two fellows to have a scrap.”110 Going steady only made the problem worse. Club members often became resentful when members became “tied to a skirt,” because often the men involved lost all interest in their clubs or their dates simply refused to attend club events, despite the clubs’ best efforts to “concentrate on the social.”111 In the 1930s, for example, the Madison Street Boys of New York welcomed their “sweet hearts” into the club anytime but admitted that few of them “come in except on dance nights.”112 Club members eager to “keep company” on other nights were forced to abandon their | 189 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

hangouts, along with the social practices endemic to club life. As a result, most men found that their commitment to male culture was something less than a masculine privilege. It was more of a mutually agreed-upon arrangement they begrudgingly reached with their “steadies,” but an agreement equally beneficial to women ambivalent about being incorporated into male culture because it implicitly recognized female-defined ideas about intimacy and leisure. The struggles over women’s behavior also convinced some men that social nights and the women whom they admitted into their clubs were the source of most of their problems. As one club member in the 1930s stated: “That’s the reason so many clubs get into trouble, letting girls run in and out all the time until you’d think they was members. And you know the old story about familiarity breeding contempt.”113 Many men genuinely tried to improve their club’s images and to redefine their clubs as heterosocial, but they remained ambivalent about being “down club” with their female guests, leading them to either restrict women’s participation or to adopt the more familiar and comfortable male practice of excluding women altogether. Many clubs were “closed clubs”: Men were members; women were invited guests, generally at the discretion of their escorts.114 On social nights, some clubs did, indeed, welcome “any and all girls,” but other clubs required a guest card or they kept “a regular list” of the “girls” they invited to their socials, because they either demanded some familiarity or at least the opportunity to look over the potential visitor before admitting her.115 Several other clubs had an open front room for social nights but often reserved a back room for members, while nearly all clubs held their social nights during what they called their “season,” usually in the winter. In the 1930s, at New York’s Club Majestic, social nights raised much of the revenue needed to keep the club afloat, but members offered social nights only “during the cooler weather while athletics take the stage during the warmer season.” Such practices effectively allowed men to manage their heterosocial and homosocial identities without giving up either their social clubs or the male culture to which they had grown accustomed.116 The extent to which the “familiarity” about which this club member complained affected heterosocial relationships outside the social clubs varied considerably. But children of immigrants were much less eager to rush into marriage than their parents. For example, while 74 percent of | 190 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

Italian women in 1910 were married by the age of twenty-four (29 percent were married by their nineteenth birthday), almost 75 percent of Italian women remained unmarried up to the age of twenty-four among the second generation. Figures for second-generation Polish immigrants were no less astonishing, with 71.8 percent of Polish women also remaining unmarried up to the age of twenty-four, in contrast to the 65 percent who were married before reaching the age of nineteen a generation earlier.117 The practice of postponing marriage undoubtedly reflected women’s changing expectations about marriage. Many women may have preferred “plodding along” instead of rushing into marriage because they enjoyed they time they spent in dance halls and the freedom to make their own dates. Moreover, finding the right “prospect” was no easy task. It not only required a considerable amount of patience but also plenty of nights out. Remember the department store saleslady who liked to “forget herself” and go for the “good times” when she went to dances, crashed weddings, or attended parties because it was the only way she felt she would ever “hook her fish.” Women, then, not only enjoyed the autonomy commercial leisure had to offer but also faced the problems finding the right prospect.118 Yet, while marriage patterns reflected women’s changing attitudes about intimacy and leisure, the urgency surrounding going out and the problem of having to “plod along” also suggests that men were no longer as eager to marry as they had been during the preceding decades. For example, Marie Arendt, who lived and married in Chicago in the 1920s, found herself “plodding along” for six years because her boyfriend refused to propose. Arendt immigrated to the United States in 1909, at the age of six, with her parents. By the 1920s, her parents had returned to Europe, which Arendt explained allowed her to “live a little.” About a year later, she met her future husband, Joseph, at a house party: “I think it was 1920 or 1921.” Arendt had already known some of his family from the coal mines in which her father used to work in Illinois. But instead of rushing into wedlock, like many couples in the preceding decades, Arendt and Joseph dated “on and off” for six years. “I guess he was afraid . . . to propose to me,” she recalled, even though it was “love at first sight” for him. In fact, Joseph insisted that Arendt was the one who made the marriage proposal. “We were going to Calumet | 191 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

show [nickel theater] once,” Arendt recalled, “and I slipped on the track just a little bit on one knee and he’s always saying that [I] proposed to [him].”119 Sylvia P., another woman from Chicago, did not date her husband “on and off” for six years, but her marriage was also postponed, in her case because her future husband was dating someone else. Sylvia was nineteen when she first met Johnny at Hart, Schaffner, and Marx, where she was a timekeeper; Johnny was head of the silk detail in all the shops. Johnny was “very funny” and “well liked” by everyone, but he had a reputation for not dating the timekeepers, a practice that changed the moment he met Sylvia. But rather than rush into wedlock, they continued to date and were “going together quite a while” because “he never mentioned marriage or anything,” and Sylvia found out that he was dating a friend’s niece. Johnny had told Sylvia that the niece “didn’t mean anything.” But Sylvia was not about to take any chances. “I’m not breaking anybody up,” she recalled saying. “I’ve got enough boyfriends without you.” Shortly thereafter, Sylvia left Chicago for McKeesport to visit her mother, who was ill. Johnny came to the train station all “down in the dumps.” But Sylvia ignored him, and, after her sister asked her what to “do with him,” Sylvia replied, “what [do] I care let him go to hell. I don’t care.” Sylvia exclaimed that she had “never two-timed anybody and I don’t want to two-time her either, let him go marry Ann.” Johnny and Sylvia eventually reconciled once he agreed to stop seeing Ann. But he still never made any proposal. Johnny came to visit Sylvia at her parents’ home in McKeesport and wanted to take her back to Chicago with him. Sylvia was convinced that her parents would say no, but at dinner she asked them, and to her surprise her mother agreed to let her leave with Johnny, but only as “man and wife.” “That was my husband’s proposal,” explained Sylvia; “how do you like that?”120 As Sylvia’s experience suggests, men often avoided marriage because of the other potential dates they could make. In this particular case, Johnny was too distracted to “mention marriage or anything” because of another woman. Indeed, it was only after Sylvia told him to “go to hell” and left him alone at the train station that he began to make any sort of commitment. Even then her mother ended up making the proposal, perhaps because Johnny was experiencing last-minute jitters or because marriage meant the end of the dating he seemed to enjoy. For whatever rea| 192 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

son, he was much more ambivalent about marriage than men a few decades older, men who rarely had the opportunity to consider more than one potential spouse. Not all men were too distracted to commit themselves to marriage; their experiences in social clubs suggest that changes in male culture also may have contributed to the ambivalence many men felt. Throughout the late nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, one of the biggest problems men faced, other than making ends meet, was finding a prospective spouse. Sex ratios clearly put men at a disadvantage, and the anxiety and frustration they faced was unavoidable. In fact, most men looked toward a weekend drunk in the company of other single men to help them cope with their frustration and loneliness. Both the barbershop and the saloon played important parts in this drama, always providing men with a friendly face to share their misery and the alcohol that made everything go down much more easily. But the saloon was also obsessed with the loneliness these men faced and their separation from mother and family. The pictures of scantily clad women, the presence of magazines like the Police Gazette, and the songs and conversations about dear mother and Old World sweethearts seemed only to exacerbate the loneliness and frustration many men experienced. By the 1920s and especially by the 1930s, the ratio of men to women had leveled out considerably, so much so that some men were complaining about “familiarity.” Women’s employment opportunities had expanded dramatically, the proprietors of amusement parks, dance halls, and movie houses were going out of their way to attract female customers, and two of the cornerstones of male culture—the barbershop and the saloon—were feeling the influence of women’s growing public presence. Thus, unlike men from the preceding decades, who had had to meticulously plan out their marriage proposals in advance and even sometimes to take “child brides” working-class men by the 1920s and 1930s seemed more focused on trying to recapture the homosocial spaces they had lost. George Ade, for example, noted that, while the songs men sang in saloons during the 1880s and 1890s and “well into the next century” focused on dear mother and contained love-laden verses, these songs eventually lost their charm and were replaced with songs about “Mammy” and the “flapper.” Songs about “Mammy,” Ade argued, were so popular because “Mammy” knew how to “cook spoon-bread and always took care of the children while | 193 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

mother was attending whist parties.” But above all, her popularity represented the feeling among men that they had lost something, both in terms of race—the faithful servant—and in terms of gender—the conventional housekeeper or mother—especially in comparison with the “flapper” whom men immortalized in song as being promiscuous, “or else the songs [about her] are libels.” Ade’s book was published in 1931.121 The changes men alluded to in the songs they sang led them to try to preserve homosocial spaces or to create new ones. In the dance hall, they either established a men’s side of the arena or attempted to lay claim to public space by trying to intimidate the women with whom they shared the dance hall. Of course, there were limits to what they could accomplish. Men who patronized dance halls found themselves competing with dance hall rules and regulations and hall owners who were just as interested in the money women were willing to spend as in men’s money. Moreover, commercial leisure cost more than many men were able or willing to pay, except perhaps for an occasional visit; men were compelled to search out other social venues, including the social club, which involved significantly fewer restrictions and offered greater opportunities to negotiate heterosocial leisure. But club members did not establish rules and restrictions only to eliminate “unladylike” behavior. They also used their clubs to preserve the male culture with which they were most familiar and that they feared was slipping away. While their hangouts promoted the intermingling of the sexes and provided the space for more intimate moments, heterosocial revelry had its time and its place. Many club members not only closely scrutinized the behavior of the women who attended their social nights and only admitted those women who appeared on their guest list but also reserved a significant part of the week for men to pursue their homosocial lives and relationships. The men who belonged to these clubs were as anxious and frustrated as the men of earlier generations. But the frustration and angst they experienced was not about the loneliness and isolation that accompanied immigration; the male culture upon which these men relied to define their identity had been overrun by the development of a public and heterosocial culture of intimacy and leisure. In other words, the development of a heterosocial peer culture gave men and women the space and the freedom to get acquainted without their parents’ interference—unlike men | 194 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

and women from preceding decades whose privacy was generally limited to the escape the streets had to offer. But this new heterosocial peer culture did not always live up to participants’ expectations, and men and women usually found themselves battling with and against each other over the use of their leisure time, the nature of public space, and how they were supposed to behave in social settings. Many men responded not only by trying to live a double life but also by postponing marriage or at least not rushing into it like many of the men who preceded them. For working-class men, then, the social club or the bachelor subculture upon which it was based may have encouraged unmitigated expressions of manliness. But while these men could intentionally separate themselves from family and community and collectively fashion a masculinity through their relations with other men, most men, especially as they matured, found themselves eager for more heterosocial associations and generally recognized the potential problems they faced in trying to both maintain their membership in this male culture and simultaneously meet and please potential spouses, an issue historians have generally overlooked. Some men responded to their dilemma by separating themselves from their hangouts once they found a steady date; others tried to ignore the conflict and set up “side street” clubs, hoping to avoid nosey neighbors and the potential problems associated with them. Yet, these men still found that they had to try and make their clubs more heterosocial. On the one hand, they were eager to attract the neighborhood girls, and they feared the potential intrusion of their parents, who maintained a conspicuous role in club life. On the other hand, men had to either give up heterosocial leisure or change the manner in which they organized male culture. Many men had already abandoned the dance hall because of the behavior of the women they met there. Their social clubs offered the possibility of establishing their own leisure routines. But even in their own social clubs, men found that their female guests consistently struggled with and against them over the use of club space and the nature of heterosocial relations. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, workingclass men used their social clubs to help them deal with the rise of commercial amusements and the problems they faced when trying to balance homosocial and heterosocial leisure. On some nights, their basement | 195 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

hangouts afforded them the freedom they desired to set up their own “dating and dancing cooperatives,” where they could more easily experiment with sexual behavior and develop personal and intimate relationships. At other times, social clubs were the central location of a male culture in which identity and status revolved around an ethic of solidarity and manliness produced, in part, at the expense of women. The men who belonged to social clubs took several measures to mitigate the obvious contradiction. While the men who set up “side street” clubs focused primarily on regulating their own behavior and changing the club’s decor to demonstrate their willingness to meet community standards, the men who belonged to main street clubs went to great lengths to include their communities via block parties, parents’ nights, and even donations to charity, all of which allowed them to publicize more effectively the heterosociability of club life and to negotiate the expectations of family and community along with their own desire for mixed-sex leisure. Indeed, the rules of “common decency” they established, along with the stigmatization of women who defied club rules, may have compelled club members to closely scrutinize their own behavior, but they could also enforce certain gender conventions. In the process, they not only challenged the behavior associated with the “devotee” of the dance hall and deflected the blame for the infamous reputation of their hangouts away from the different social practices and rituals that made up their masculinity but also effectively incorporated their parents into their leisure and courtship routines, further ensuring that the women who attended their club get-togethers would behave properly. Men’s collective efforts to regulate women’s behavior did not, of course, solve all their problems. While social clubs made certain boundaries more rigid, the use of their clubs as quasi-domestic establishments, the ambivalence toward community sexual mores, the regulation of certain male vices, and the fact that women paid and labored to outfit and decorate many clubs only seemed to contribute to the ambiguity of club space and belied the idea that social clubs were inherently masculine. In other words, men inadvertently produced social spaces that blurred the boundaries surrounding conventional gender norms, making it easier for women to challenge male-defined leisure, dating, and courtship. Contesting the use of club space was no easy task for women, because they were generally excluded from membership and the other privileges | 196 |

“And You Know the Old Saying about Familiarity Breeding Contempt”

granted men. But they were surprisingly effective in convincing their dates to abandon their clubs, as well as the collective social practices men considered fundamental to their understanding of masculinity. The extent to which men successfully distanced themselves from the homosocial world in which they came of age varied considerably. These men would eventually abandon their clubs along with their adolescence, would marry and assume the responsibilities of adulthood. But the transition would likely prove difficult for them. Once they emotionally and physically separated themselves from their social clubs, they were bound to participate in other rituals—in saloons, in fraternal lodges, and at sporting events—that, in part, also fashioned a masculinity at women’s expense. As a result, social clubs not only provided many men their first intimate heterosocial and sexual experiences but served as the basis for developing a gender identity that would continue to affect the ways in which they organized other heterosocial relationships, including marriage. The popularity of social clubs does not, of course, bring the drama surrounding male-female relations to an end. It merely suggests that commercial leisure did not precipitate a major shift in the location of intimacy. At the same time, however, the social club was not the only factor that kept commercial leisure at bay. Most people, and especially women, not only had to contend with their parents and with the rules and the restrictions that parents tried to place on their adult children’s social lives but also recognized that their parents still controlled the financial resources upon which they would eventually depend as they married and set up independent households. This conflict is the subject of chapter 6.

| 197 |

SIX

“When It Comes to My Marrying, Boy, There Will Be a Lot of Strings Pulled by My Parents” Familial Conflict, Commercial Leisure, and Weddings

In the 1930s, a young Italian woman named Clara P., who was a shirt factory worker and who lived with her parents, admitted that “some times you got to lie.” According to Clara, she usually had an “enjoyable time at home,” but she felt her parents had “green ideas” and were “old fashioned” when it came to “going out with fellows or staying out late.” Clara admitted that her parents allowed boyfriends into the house. But “the first guy you take in,” she protested, “you gotta marry,” and they did not approve of her going to dances. Clara “love[d] to dance” and often attended her parents’ lodge dances, where, she boasted, she could get the “dagoes tired out dancing” the polka and the mazurka, or she went to christenings and weddings to meet up with friends. But dancing with the Italian men she met at lodge functions or hanging out with her friends did not always satisfy her urge to dance. “I like to go dancing but they [her parents] won’t let you go,” she insisted. “I can go to movies anytime but . . . I can go [to dances] only once a week, sometimes only once a month, so I lie and say I am going to shows and stuff like that.” Clara explained that “they [her parents] think you go wrong [at | 198 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

dances],” and she claimed she knew why. “We lived across the street from a roller rink and she [her mother] saw how the boys took out the other girls and what they did and so she is afraid I will get in wrong too.”1 Many young women shared Clara’s enthusiasm for dancing. And, like Clara, most men and women only occasionally attended their favorite dance hall. But in Clara’s case, she did not dance as often as she would have liked, perhaps because dance halls cost too much, perhaps because wage work monopolized all her time and energy, or perhaps because men preferred to hang out in their own social clubs. All of these factors profoundly shaped men’s and women’s consumption of commercial leisure and affected its impact on their dating routines. Clara simply could not escape her parents, who were afraid that she might “get in wrong too” and hence challenge the manner in which they supervised her social life. Indeed, Clara complained that she could go dancing only “once a week” and “sometimes only once a month” compelling her to lie to her parents so that she could sneak out for an evening at her favorite dance hall. In homes throughout the country, other young women also found themselves eager to go dancing but bickering with their parents about dating, dancing, and boys. At times, the fighting was so severe that it disrupted the family’s life, and some daughters found themselves “pushed out of the house” for openly defying their parents and their rules and restrictions. At the same time, however, most daughters found less contentious ways to negotiate their personal lives. Many of these women were simply eager to go out alone and to take advantage of the different freedoms commercial leisure offered, not to mention eager to meet up with men of their own choosing. But most of them either had a stake in preserving the traditions and customs with which they had been raised or were too dependent upon their families and communities to establish new households and marriages, a step that working women and men were unaccustomed to undertaking alone. Either way, they were clever enough to understand the capricious nature of parental veto and lacked both the financial means and the autonomy to set out on their own. Finding some way to compromise did not, of course, mean that young women simply acquiesced to their parents’ demands. Like Clara, working-class women often attended the ethnic functions their parents favored or found other ways to appease them and then slipped away for a night out at their favorite dance halls. In Clara’s case, attending the | 199 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

traditional celebrations only seemed to exacerbate her disdain for her parents’ lodge functions and her desire to have more control over her personal life. But when she agreed to attend lodge functions and to dance with the men she referred to as “dagoes,” she nonetheless accepted the boundaries her parents set for her social life, at least temporarily. In the process, she may have ensured that part of her parents’ past would survive and that she, although reluctantly, would remain a part of it. Yet, she still managed to take advantage of the commercial dance halls in her neighborhood, and probably more often than her parents ever imagined. Thus, while the conflict between children and parents could strain their relationships, these struggles also had the potential to sustain them, keeping the younger generation’s new ideas about dating and leisure in tension with the traditions and rituals that were part of their parents’ immigrant past. In the 1930s, a young woman named Elisabeth confessed that “Yes, I suppose, I’m going to marry a Hungarian boy.” Elisabeth knew several families “when the boy or girl marries another nationality,” and she had many “friends of other nationalities.” But she had also seen “plenty of troubles” in those same families and knew that “when it comes to my marrying, boy—there will be a lot of strings pulled by my parents.”2 The strings upon which parents invariably pulled typically took the form of restrictive rules that effectively circumscribed a young woman’s social life, especially her involvement in commercial leisure. Irene, who was eighteen in 1939, explained that she had no problems in her neighborhood: “In that neck of the woods almost everybody is Hungarian and they’re pretty well pleased with each other”. At home, however, she “continually” found herself “bumping against a lot of don’ts.” Irene’s parents, for instance, “don’t believe girls should go out alone.” They “don’t believe in makeup, short dresses, fancy styles, curled hair, etc.,” amenities often associated with the “devotee of the dance hall.” And she continued, “I mustn’t let any boy give me anything (gifts) or pay my way into anything, show or dance, etc.,” as if her parents were well aware of the system of treating that governed such exchanges and staunchly opposed it.3 Irene recalled that both of her parents objected to “fancy styles.” “My mother,” she protested, “tells me that at my age she was the mother of | 200 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

two children,” thereby implying that Irene should start thinking about marriage and quit going out all the time. But of the two, her father was particularly hard to please. “How,” she queried, “can I make my father see that he is not always right and that I am not always wrong?” Irene explained that he “always tells us kids how hard he had it in the old country and how lucky we are,” and he repeatedly lectured her brother about how he “had to take a job when he was twelve years old.” “You can’t go to clubs, you can’t have your own opinions—for crying out loud,” she complained, “what does he want us to do, pack up and go to his village in Hungary to live?” Irene did admit that her parents felt that it was “all right” for her to go out with a boy friend, but she “must be home by ten o’clock,” the boyfriend “must be Hungarian,” and she must “keep steady company with only one boy and then marry,” as if her parents feared intermarriage as much as the fancy styles she was eager to wear. Whatever their concerns, Irene insisted that she would never marry a man of her own nationality just because of her parents’ pressure.4 Many parents were also much more likely to restrict their daughters’ social activities than their sons’. In the case of Elisabeth—the Hungarian whose parents were prepared to pull “lots of strings” when it came to her marriage—her father thought that she should be more “ladylike.” Her parents were particularly concerned about her love of sports, especially baseball, basketball, and bicycle riding, sports her brother regularly enjoyed. “It burns me up,” Elisabeth protested, “to think that my kid brother does all these things and has more freedom than I have, just because he is a boy.” Elisabeth did not know why her father was “harder on the girls than the boys.” But she did know that “he thinks girls should not be out as much as boys” and that girls “should stay home, learn to cook, sew and clean the house.” In short, her father wanted her to live up to the gender conventions to which he had grown accustomed and to be like his mother and her own mother, which Elisabeth insisted was the problem. “But honestly,” she exclaimed, “I wish my mother would get out a little more than she does. But then none of her friends do. All they do is go to each other’s houses and gossip, when they . . . don’t have a chance to do it at . . . church socials.”5 Rose Clementi’s parents were even more demanding. According to Clementi, she had never even kissed her husband till their wedding night in 1924. Clementi recalled that when she was fourteen, a young man | 201 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

who was “just three years here from Italy” came to her house, accompanied by two of his brothers and by her brother-in-law, in order to propose. Clementi “did not want to get married”; she wanted to go to high school. But her mother was persistent and reminded her that “he’s such a nice man. And he comes from a very good family.” Clementi’s mother, in fact, begged her to accept the proposal. “Please, she says, you know I’m not well. I want to see you settled and taken care of before I die.” “You’re not going to die,” Clementi replied. “And so I says . . . No, no, no.” Disappointed, her mother relayed the news to the group of brothers and to her brother-in-law, who were anxiously awaiting an answer. As usual, her eager suitor returned within a month, along with his entire entourage, and asked again. This time Clementi agreed. “If that’s what you want,” she told her mother, “I’ll marry him.” Clementi admitted that she “had no . . . feelings for the man” but was doing it for her mother, who claimed she was ill. Clementi’s courtship lasted about a year, but her parents never allowed her out with her fiancé alone. “My sister had a grocery store on the corner of Princeton and Twenty-Fourth Street in Chicago [and] that . . . was the only place we were allowed to go.”6 While Clementi’s parents restricted her social life to an occasional visit to the corner grocery store, her brother would “leave home and go travelling.” Clementi explained that his whereabouts concerned her mother, and on one occasion she asked Clementi to “follow him and see where he goes, see what he’s doing.” Clementi remembered that to keep up with him she had to hide “in between the doors” of the different buildings he passed. “He only went to the park,” she recalled, and “that was the first and only time that I did that,” perhaps because her mother did not worry about his visits to the park or perhaps because she was uncomfortable prying into his personal life. The point, of course, is that Clementi’s brother was put under a one-time surveillance and had no interference with his comings and goings, whereas Clementi was carefully scrutinized and allowed out only to visit her sister’s grocery store.7 Making daughters surrender their pay envelopes unopened was another string upon which parents pulled to regulate their daughters’ social lives. In the 1910s, Ruth True noted that “the precarious state of family wellbeing has instituted a rigid system of household economics.” Under this system, the mother “is the ‘spender.’” “All wages come to her untouched; the broken envelope violates the social standard; [and] hus| 202 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

band, sons, and daughters alike are supposed to come under this rule.” No exceptions to the rule were tolerated, according to True, until “the children reach the age of eighteen or nineteen,” at which time the “mother doles out spending money according to the needs and earnings of each.”8 The “rigid system of household economics” rarely followed the pattern True described, however. Through the 1920s, women’s wages averaged only 57 percent of men’s, which meant they had significantly less money with which to start. And, working women found that their parents were more likely to claim ownership of their pay envelopes than their brothers’. In 1888, for example, 72 percent of female factory workers in one study gave all their earnings to their families. In the 1910s, that figure remained almost the same: Three-quarters to four-fifths of women handed their entire pay envelopes over to their parents unopened, while most men gave their parents on average half of their pay for room and board and kept the rest for themselves.9 In most families, parents laid claim to their daughters’ pay envelopes as soon as they brought them home. In 1898, Francesco Bruno immigrated to the United States with his wife and settled in New York’s “Little Italy of the lower [sic] West Side.” When Francesco first arrived in the United States, he worked as a laborer for fifty cents a day but “felt he could not tolerate the social abuse and the people with whom he had to work.” He then bought a pushcart and sold vegetables, later, he rented a small store. During this time, his wife bore ten girls and then two boys “to round out an even dozen.” As soon as his daughters reached the age of eleven or twelve, they began working in dress factories to help support the family. Francesco always prepared their lunches for the next day’s work, and each daughter received a meager money allowance. But on payday, he expected the girls to hand over their pay envelopes to their mother, which “obviate[d] the necessity of paternal toil” and enabled Francesco to retire only a few years after his daughters began working, when he was just forty-five years old.10 In other families, parents watched so closely over their daughters’ pay envelopes that some women never got to examine the contents themselves. A young Polish woman who grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, in the 1920s recalled that her father “used to stand right outside the door next to the pay window and pounce upon my $4.40 pay envelope | 203 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

the moment I got it on Saturdays.” At first, she “couldn’t imagine” where all the money went. Her father, she claimed, was “too fond of money to spend it on liquor, although he liked it well enought [sic] when somebody else paid for getting him drunk.” It was only after the truant officer caught up with her father and when she learned enough English to know that she was too young to be working at “twelve going on thirteen” that she found out that he “was salting almost every cent away in the savings bank.”11 The Depression only exacerbated the tension surrounding this system of household economics, as parents became increasingly dependent upon their children’s unopened pay envelopes. Jolan, who was twenty years old in 1939 and who worked at a small paper manufacturing plant, also found herself constantly “bumping against a lot of don’ts.” Her father strongly believed “that girls should not stay out later than 8:30 pm”; he “scolded” Jolan and her sister for “using cosmetics”; and, she complained, “he dislikes us to wear slacks or shorts.” He was even stricter about boys and forbade Jolan and her sister to speak to “other ‘fellas’” if they were not Hungarian.12 To make matters worse, Jolan’s father was unemployed, and she was supporting the family, which, she argued, entitled her to certain privileges. He “does not seem to realize that in America, if a girl has a job in the daytime, she is not expected to tend the furnace in the winter time and clean the yard in the summer time.” Jolan had quit school after grade 10A to go to work to help supplement relief. Yet, while her father was unemployed, he refused to make any concessions, even though she was twenty and paid most of the family’s living expenses. He “doesn’t think that I should have my own spending money, even though I support the family. As a matter of truth, I have to give him my pay envelope each week and he gives me just enough for what I need, that is, lunches and car fare.” Jolan explained that her “Mother sometimes tells him that girls need a few extra things, besides necessities but she doesn’t get very far with him, because, he says, he is the boss.”13 Handing over the pay envelope unopened was also the source of most of the friction between a twenty-four-year-old woman named Rose and her Italian parents during the Depression. Rose confessed that she did not know if Italian parents were any more demanding than most. “I don’t know,” she said, “but I know one thing . . . my parents want me to give them all the money I make.” Rose explained that she gave them | 204 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

“something each week out of the $10.00 I get,” but her father “just hands me bill after bill to pay and I’ll be darned if I’ll pay for his automobile.” Rose admitted that her parents had “it hard with seven [children] and him on the W.P.A.” But “after all,” she added, “I’ve got to look out for myself too.” “I don’t know how they figure a girl can get married that has to support the family.” And, like other women with brothers, Rose complained that “they are not so hard on my brother Joe, who is 22 and has never worked. They have all kinds of excuses for him because he is a boy.”14 For women, then, the struggles over pay envelopes, cosmetics, curfews, and boys did more than simply produce a considerable amount of tension at home. Some women were absolutely convinced that, without such items or the opportunity to go out unsupervised, they might never find a husband. Rose summed up the problem best when she declared, “I don’t know how they figure a girl can get married that has to support the family.” In other words, the strings upon which most parents pulled—taking daughter’s wages, enforcing curfews, prohibiting daughters from attending dances—not only made their home life particularly contentious, but also made it almost impossible for the young women to afford the clothes, cosmetics, and other amenities that they felt were essential to enter into a courtship. And, increasingly, many women felt that such items were a necessity because going out to dances or other entertainment was the only way they might “hook their fish.” Indeed, some women were so worried about finding a “prospect” that they openly defied their parents and married without parental permission or approval. At the Bruno household, for example, Francesco did not simply watch over his daughters’ pay envelopes; he closely supervised his daughters’ every move. At the dinner table, he sat at the head of the table, to the left of his wife, while the children sat around quietly and waited to be served; “no one made a grab for the food,” noted one observer, and each child was served individually and according to age. Francesco also forbade his children to speak English at the table, and conversation had to be “sparing and confined to the limits of necessity.” For a short time, his reign at the head of the table went without serious challenge. But as the children grew older, relations at home became more contentious. Francesco found it increasingly difficult to “stop the use of English at the table,” and “the children became more voluble and | 205 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

Yiddish, which was learned in the factories by the girls, developed into a useful tool to avoid the parents’ knowledge of their social plans and activities.”15 Francesco eventually moved from the Lower West Side to 149th Street and Brooks Avenue in the Bronx because he felt that the Lower West Side “could never be conducive to any normal character development of the children of his family.” Despite the move, the “rebelliousness” seemed to increase, “both in quantity and kind.” “Disobedience to customary behavior and aggressions against the home, parents and traditions became more frequent and more disconcerting to the parents.” The girls, for example, “insisted on wearing stylish clothes and on going with boy friends.” In response, Francesco closely scrutinized his daughters, followed them when they left the house, and strenuously punished them, often “with violent physical measures.” “A heavy strap, a broom stick or a fist was applied with great vigor.” Because the girls were “always in fear of getting caught and of being subjected to humiliation in the presence of others, the natural tendency was for them to get married as soon as a proposal was made.” In fact, only two of his ten daughters received a dowry and married while still living at home. Of the other eight, one daughter, Anna, remained a spinster, and the other seven eloped and “went to live at a married sister’s house, from which place the marriage ceremony was arranged.”16 The Bruno sisters were not the only women who relied upon a sibling in time of crisis. Mary P., an Italian who lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in the 1920s, moved in with her sister after becoming pregnant. “I come over here in 1920,” she recalled, when “I was full of hell.” She immediately went to her mother’s home in Providence, Rhode Island, and soon met “a nice fellow” by the name of Valentino. The pair quickly fell in love, and before long Mary “got in trouble” with her boy friend, that is, became pregnant. “But I never told my mother because I was ’fraid she holler on me, and . . . push me out the house.” Once her mother found out, Mary told her boyfriend about the impending problems at home. “Then I said that we ought to go to my sister [sic] in Bridgeport, and he said O.K. and we come over here.”17 As the stories of the Bruno daughters and of Mary P. make clear, a sympathetic sister with a home offered some women the escape for which they were looking. In Mary’s case, having a sister made it easier to | 206 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

deal with her unexpected pregnancy and to avoid her mother, who might “holler” at her and “push” her out of the house, while the Bruno daughters were able to avoid the public humiliation and potential violence they saw befall other siblings. In both cases, seeking refuge at a sister’s home made it easier for women to negotiate the rules and restrictions they invariably faced at home. This arrangement allowed these young women to remain within their families while still achieving some autonomy in their personal lives. Of course, when young couples so openly defied their parents and married without permission or approval, their families and friends often ostracized them. Mary, a young Greek woman who grew up during the 1930s, recalled that her parents and brother were particularly difficult when it came to boys. Like most parents, Mary’s closely watched over her social life, but they were concerned not only about setting a curfew or restricting the types of activities in which she participated; they also feared intermarriage and insisted that she and her sister marry only Greek boys. If they refused, her father claimed that their mother would “never step over their doorstep.” Mary’s sister Rose, for example, “liked a red haired Irish boy and he used to carry her books home from school.” “My mother and brother made her stop it,” she explained, “even tho [sic] they came straight home and didn’t fool around.” Even her brother, who would “raise heck” if she or her sister “dared look at another boy,” had “gone around with German girls and really liked one of them.” But he “wouldn’t think of marrying anyone but a Greek. The community is solidly opposed to intermarriage and those who are brave enough to go thru with it are completely ostracized by the older people.”18 When a young Hungarian Jewish woman’s community ostracized her, for example, she suffered what one observer called “mental conflict and misery.” She was fourteen when she “became acquainted in school with a gentile boy of German parents.” Their friendship, which was “unknown” to her parents, continued for “a period of several years,” until the couple married and “without her parent’s [sic] consent.” Once her parents learned of her “secret doings,” they were “full of scorn” and chased her out of the house. “I am now being spurned by my friend, my lover, my everything—my husband.” Her husband, she explained, became a “different man” after they married; “he drank and gambled and called me the vilest names . . . [and] asked why he married a ‘dammed | 207 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

[sic] Jewess’ as if it were my fault alone.” Her husband’s parents were particularly hard to please and “hated” her even more than her husband did; and “just as I was turned out of the house for marrying a gentile,” she lamented, “so he was shown the door by his parents for marrying a Jewess.”19 Other women undoubtedly shared the emotional and psychological burden this woman faced. Yet, while other women may have experienced the same “mental conflict and misery,” they usually avoided being pushed out of the house. In many cases, parents simply refused to disown their daughters, even when they openly challenged their authority. Mary P., who unexpectedly got pregnant, recalled that her sister wrote a letter to her mother explaining the pregnancy. Mary’s mother “was mad,” and “she said she goin [sic] [to] kill me,” but she eventually welcomed her back home.20 Angeline Tonietto, who grew up in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s, claimed that when young “Girls got in trouble those years [or got pregnant] . . . they hushed—hushed everything up.” According to Tonietto, “They either went to visit their aunt for three or four months or something. Then they’d come back. Or something was done.”—perhaps an allusion to abortion. Either way, she explained, “It was all in the family [and] nobody knew about nothing,” a statement that seems to suggest that an unplanned pregnancy could just as easily bring the family together as tear it apart.21 The Bruno family also found “peace” after several years of bitter conflict. By the 1930s, the children were all living in different parts of New York, but they saw one another quite often, and also their parents “if they are not ‘on the outs,’” suggesting that fights and then forgiveness were part of the usual routine. In fact, sometimes Francesco would go out of his way to visit his children, “but only on important occasions.”22 Some women’s parents actually accepted the cosmetics, clothes, and “fancy styles” and thereby reduced the possible conflict evoked by a busy social life. Leona Hojnacka, who lived and married in Chicago in the 1910s, recalled a busy social life free from her parents’ interference. Hojnacka danced at the neighborhood social clubs, “like ZP on Ashland Avenue.” Many clubs, she recalled, held dances on different days of the week and invited members of other clubs in the neighborhood to their functions by sending out a written invitation. “They send a letter [to] invite this club,” she explained, “and then when we had something, we | 208 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

sent letters to the other clubs that were invited.”23 Albina Deptuch, who married her husband in 1916, met her husband at a dance hall. When Deptuch first immigrated to Chicago at the age of seventeen, she took a job as a seamstress. The woman for whom she worked knew Deptuch’s future husband and introduced the couple at a dance one night after getting Deptuch’s mother’s permission to take her daughter out dancing.24 Sylvia K., who married in 1920, spent her courting days going to shows, to the ice cream parlor, and to the dance hall. “We went to the show,” she recalled. “We used to have a Paulina theater right near by, and we used to have the Atlanta ice cream parlor.” Sylvia also recalled a dance hall, which, she exclaimed, “was beautiful,” and “they used to have . . . movie houses all around here.”25 Even some Italian women went out unsupervised, although Italian parents were more likely to insist upon a chaperone than were other immigrants. Jean Carasello, who grew up in Chicago in the 1920s and who married in 1924, knew her husband from the neighborhood. “His father used to come over to our house in the old neighborhood and he worked for my dad so we always saw each other.” But the time she spent with her future husband was never restricted to an occasional home visit. Carasello explained that her parents permitted her to go out unchaperoned with her boyfriend. In fact, there were many nights that she came home by herself on the street car. “I wouldn’t have anybody take me home that I didn’t know,” she recalled. “I’d come home by my self [and] my dad would be waiting on Irving Park.”26 Angeline Tonietto also recalled the late nights out alone with her friends. When Tonietto was a child, she was allowed out to play hopscotch, skip the rope, cops and robbers, and, of course, “balls and a jack.” But she had to be in at a certain time. “Nine o’clock came, my father whistled. That was it. In the house. We weren’t allowed to stay out late . . . or go anywhere by ourselves. We were always supervised.” Tonietto remembered that she usually played “right around the house,” and when she visited a friend’s house, “your mother would have to know about it [and] know where you were.” “You know,” she concluded “Italian people are very strict with their children.”27 Tonietto’s supervision continued through her early teens. “I never went anywhere by myself,” she explained. “I was always chaperoned . . . either by my mother or my dad or my cousin that lived with us.” The | 209 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

only places of amusement outside the neighborhood games were the two theaters on Chicago Avenue, the Hub and the Alvin, which she described as her “big treat.” When she “became older, 15 or 16,” her cousin even took her downtown to the Loop, where she saw “the big shows.” But by the time she was “seventeen or eighteen years old,” she no longer required a chaperone and was going to dances at the Aragon and the Trianon, which were located at “opposite sides of the city.” Going “dancing to the big name bands . . . [and staying] out [till] three or four o’clock in the morning” was “our fun,” she explained, and “nobody would bother you,” including her parents.28 Throughout the early twentieth century, many young women constantly found themselves fighting with their parents over dating, dancing, and boys. Yet, these same women recalled staying out until the early hours of the morning without their parents’ supervision. And even when parents objected to the nights out and to the boys with whom their daughters kept company, they generally accepted the choices their daughters made, although grudgingly in some cases. Both Mary P. and the Bruno sisters, for example, dated and married men without their parents’ permission or approval, yet their parents refused to allow unplanned pregnancies and other problems to permanently disrupt family life. In other words, not all parents insisted that their children submit completely to their authority. Parents may have bitterly resented and opposed their children when they challenged them. But they were able to survive the generational differences that separated them and to find ways to accept their daughters’ individual “needs and emotions.”29 At the same time, women themselves avoided any serious problems by keeping their personal lives hidden from their parents. Collis Stocking explained that many of the women he encountered in Pittsburgh’s dance halls were there on “the sneak.” According to Stocking, parents disapproved of their daughters attending dances because parents were attempting to “preserve the old world idea of chaperonage in an alien American environment,” which often “results in the daughter having to remain home evening after evening.” But usually, he explained, “the girl through some subterfuge” made her escape from “paternal surveillance” and found her way to the dance hall, “where she sometimes enters into clandestine courtship.”30 For example, Mary B., an Italian who grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, recalled that she used to go out with her | 210 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

younger sister, and her parents “didn’t mind so much.” But “I never could go out with boys,” she protested. “My mother alway[s] tells me that when she was a girl women stayed home in the old country, and they couldn’t even go out to work. She says at least you go out to work and have friends.” Mary agreed with her mother that a “woman should [not] stay out too much at night.” But she still used to sneak out of the house and “meet them [boys] on the street corners.” Mary admitted that she was “scared . . . of coming home late at night,” although she “never sneaked in through no windows. I always came in through the door,” perhaps hoping that her parents might catch her and give her the excuse she needed to challenge more openly their rules and restrictions.31 Rose Kaiser also would sneak out of the house. But instead of leaving unannounced and without her mother’s permission, she spent the night with a cousin whose mother was “broad minded and did not mind that the girls would come home after midnight.” By staying overnight at her cousin’s, Kaiser claimed that she “was able to explain everything in a satisfactory way to her mother,” who was “very strict.”32 Other women “entered into clandestine courtship” by sneaking out of the house in disguise. Veronica Loncki used to go to dances in Chicago during the 1910s but “on [the] sneak.” Although she described these dances as “nice Polish gathering[s]” in the neighborhood hall, her mother warned her that she would go “to hell” if she insisted on dancing. But Loncki ignored her mother’s warnings, and on Saturday she would “sneak out for a dance” by telling her mother that she was going to church. Since she attended dances only during the winter, she first put on a “good dress” and then a coat so that her mother “didn’t see” the dress.33 According to an investigator from New York’s Committee of Fourteen, dressing in disguise was also an especially popular ruse among young girls. At a public school dance in 1919, this same investigator noted that before the dance, girls who were twelve or thirteen years old would “generally stop in [a] nearby hallway, comb their hair up, paint and powder their faces, then pull their would be short skirts down and proceed to dance as girls 18 or 19 years old.” On the way home after the dance, they would stop again, “comb their hair down, remove paint and powder from their faces, pull up their would be long skirts and appear home as ‘good girls.’”34 Some women would even take clothes from their mother’s closets and then sneak out before they came home from | 211 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

work. A young Polish woman who immigrated to the United States in the early twentieth century recalled that much of her leisure time revolved around house parties. Since she “didn’t have the clothes,” she would “sneak in the back way” up to her friend Ruth Favour’s room where “she’d doll me up in something of hers all the way from silk stockings and undies up to rouge and powder. She was awful good that way.” Sometimes they would even “raid her mother’s boudoir and got away with it usually,” because her mother never got home from work “till after six.”35 Working women also covertly challenged the “rigid system of household economics” upon which many family economies were based by taking money out of their pay envelopes before turning them over to their parents.36 According to True, with the working girl’s “first humble job and her first meager wage, there comes to the young girl her first taste of power.” “Her position at home is altered. She has more prestige,” and her family may actually be “dependent for comfort on what she brings in.” Some women during their “headstrong years,” True argued, “will press [their] advantage to the full” and contest the ways in which their mothers dole out spending money.37 Mary, the oldest Bruno daughter, for example, “followed the traditional pay-envelope routine” of dutifully handing over her sealed pay envelope—until one day when she came home overwrought but “shedding bitter crocodile tears.” Mary claimed that she had lost her pay on the train; only later did she reveal that “she wanted the money for herself” and “played her tragic role so well that she succeeded in her plan.”38 Other women chose a less ambitious strategy and “knocked down” when they needed some of their own money. According to a woman True interviewed, “whatever you make is written outside in pencil,” which was “easy to fix”—“you have only to rub it out, put on whatever it usually is, and pocket the change.”39 More than twenty years later, many of the Bruno daughters also “knocked down” the amount of money they received in their pay envelopes. The “typical scheme” was to tell their parents that they had to open the envelope to examine its contents, which “invariably ended with a skillful balancing of the accounts in their own favor.”40 The practice of sneaking out and of “knocking down” their pay undoubtedly made it easier for women to live with their parents. In fact, sneaking out was almost synonymous with women’s appropriation of dif| 212 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

ferent identities. These women did not simply step out of the house when they were eager to meet up with different men or go dancing; they often changed their appearance and adopted their own unique style and fashion by donning fancy dresses and experimenting with makeup. Their appropriation of different identities did not, of course, always protect them from their parents. Every time they went out of the house “on the sneak,” they violated the manner in which their parents governed courtship and ran the risk that their parents would publicly humiliate or physically punish them. In addition, sneaking out restricted the amount of time they spent in dance halls, which helps explain the disproportionate number of men to women. While young women eagerly attended dance halls, they not only had to patiently bide their time while they saved up the money necessary to pay for commercial leisure but also had to wait for the auspicious moment to sneak out of the house, lest they draw unwanted attention to their nights of dating, dancing, and drinking. Sneaking out, then, may have posed certain problems. But it was apparently worth the risk because it not only offered women one of the easiest ways to balance their own desire for mixed-sex amusements with their parents’ expectations about their leisure time but also allowed them to avoid bickering with their parents because they could keep their personal selves separate from their family life. Above all, the practice of sneaking out of the house may have even helped change the ways in which parents governed dating and courtship.41 Parents, one Italian man explained, would “admit” that the Old World practice of making couples “sit a mile apart from each other” when they “kept company” was “stupid.” And most parents “would no doubt exercise the same practice with their offspring.” But these same parents also would admit that “they can’t adhere to this practice too stringently because girls go out to business [to work] in America and would therefore have ample opportunities to go out ‘on the sneak.’” In short, sneaking out was not only a particularly popular strategy among women but one that successfully convinced some parents to ease up on the rules and restrictions they tried to enforce as well as the “old country” traditions they favored.42 At the same time that women kept their personal lives hidden, they combined sneaking out and the knocking down that generally accompanied it with a conscious effort at compromise. Instead of “knocking | 213 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

down,” for example, many women voluntarily offered up their pay envelopes in exchange for more independence. According to Rose P., an Italian who lived with her mother during the Depression, her mother allowed her to participate in a busy social life, including baseball and roller skating, in which she indulged as often as possible. Her mother even permitted her to “go out alone with the boys but not too often.” “Of course,” she explained, “I did not tell my mother every little thing,” perhaps because sneaking out was also part of her plan to manage her mother. But Rose never reported any problems with her mother; neither did she complain about her trying to lay claim to her paycheck; Rose used her wages to pay for her own clothes and to “buy things for the home, such as drapes, breakfast sets, curtains etc.” Rose explained that she “enjoyed bringing this new decoration into the home.” Apparently her mother also appreciated it, so much so that she allowed Rose to go out with the boys, “but not too often.”43 Other women found that a certain exchange had been made, but it never came out of their own pay envelopes; instead, a single sister might face her parents alone, ultimately paving the way for her siblings but sacrificing her own social life in exchange. In the 1930s, Helen C. explained that she “could not go roller skating or play baseball. I had to stay home and crochet.” She eventually persuaded her parents to “grow into American ways.” Her sister “went to camp, she roller skated, played baseball and did everything.” Helen figured that “just because I had it difficult is no reason other people have to.” Helen, in fact, found herself smoothing the way for parents and children throughout the neighborhood as they came into “conflict over their opinions.” “Even in my own neighborhood,” she explained, “some women tell me about their younger daughters because they have an awful time getting them to stay home. They won’t let them take part in any outside activities at school but they usually believe me when I tell them about it because I have been to school.”44 Helen C. recalled that she had “considerable difficulties” coming to terms with her parent’s customs until she visited her mother’s hometown in Europe. I realized that it was not they, my parents, that were different but that they represented a system. I was really quite surprised that my mother was as | 214 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .” understanding as she was when I saw the little town where she was born and the customs of her people and I realized that the only protection which she had here in a new country with a new language was to hang on to her old strict family ideas. After I understood my parents better I was tolerant of this.45

The Bruno sisters also benefitted when one of them confronted Francesco alone. Besides insisting on using Italian at the dinner table, Francesco was particularly demanding in the “matter of personal appearance,” and he “objected to the bobbing of hair.” His ten daughters pleaded with him to allow them to wear their hair like the other girls, but he adamantly refused, leading one of them, Dora, who was eighth in line of birth, to “resort to rebellion.” One day after work, Dora came home with a freshly cropped do. Dora’s bold move undoubtedly outraged her parents, especially Francesco, but she insisted that it was not her fault and explained that a “crazy man in the crowded train must have cut off her hair” without her realizing what had happened. Dora was most certainly the target of her parents’ anger and frustration, but the “die was cast,” and before long the “others bobbed their hair,” no doubt over their parents’ objection but without some of the misery Dora had endured.46 In other families, even if older sisters did not pave the way for their younger siblings or provide some sort of excuse to help out a younger sister, they did serve as an example of how to handle their parents.47 Florence B., who worked as a stenographer in a factory during the 1930s, explained that when her two sisters became engaged, their fiancés did not ask Florence’s mother for permission first. “Her mother has never forgotten this,” claimed one investigator, “and insists to this day that the marriages will not be happy because they just came and announced that they were engaged.” When Florence became engaged, her fiancé followed the traditional custom and first asked her mother. Her mother, Florence was glad to report, was “very happy about it and feels he is a fine boy because of this.” By first asking Florence’s mother, her boyfriend undoubtedly subjected himself to some difficult questions. But the simple gesture of consulting the parents about an impending engagement made the difference between an obstinate mother-in-law who claimed the marriage was doomed to failure and one who graciously supported the engagement.48 | 215 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

Couples also tried to live up to their parents’ expectations by appealing to their immigrant past. As Elizabeth Ewen has shown, once young children started speaking English, they quickly passed the language on to the rest of the family, including older siblings who spent most of their day at work and even to their parents or potential in-laws.49 Yet, many children, and especially their soon-to-be-spouses, also voluntarily avoided using English around their future in-laws. Gloria Bocci, who grew up in Chicago in the 1910s, knew her husband from school. As she got older, her mother was constantly reminding her that “he was a nice boy [and] he spoke Italian.” In fact, he spoke Italian so often that Bocci “used to call him the Little Dago because every time he saw my mother he would go into Italian.” His attempts to impress her mother apparently paid off. When World War I broke out, he asked Bocci if she “would take his engagement ring and wait for him.” Since Bocci and her mother liked him “so much,” she eagerly accepted his ring and his proposal and anxiously waited for over two years until his return in 1920— the same year they married.50 Julia Podraza’s fiancé also avoided speaking English at certain times. According to Podraza, her fiancé “loved” her family. At Christmas, for example, he had “a little present for every one of them,” including her parents. “My mother,” she recalled, “used to love coffee,” and “He’d have a can of coffee wrapped up for her. And my father smoked Old Dorham [sic], and he had a great big package of Old Dorham [sic] sack that was wrapped for a Christmas present.” But gift giving was only one of his many strengths. After he proposed to Podraza, he asked for her parents’ permission—“the old fashioned way”—in Bohemian. Julia Podraza’s sister Lelia, whom Podraza described as “such a devil,” was “peaking [sic] through the key-hole at the time when my husband asked my mother and dad for my hand.” “They thought an awful lot of my husband to be,” she declared.51 Despite the fighting over curfews, cosmetics, and boys, immigrant daughters, including Italians, adopted a number of different methods to convince their parents to permit them to go out unsupervised. Some women followed the lead of an older sibling to figure out what boundaries their parents might be willing to cross, while others tried to live dual lives and to separate their private and personal lives from their lives with their parents. The practices of sneaking out of the house or the knocking | 216 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

down upon which it was based allowed single women to pay for the nights out and for the cosmetics and clothes that were part of the different identity they assumed. When parents found out about the dating, dancing, and boys—and many did—some women collectively challenged their parents or offered their wages in an attempt to find some compromise. The conflict aroused by efforts to manage their parents and to win access to commercial leisure could, at times, turn bitter. But these struggles could just as easily lead parents to accept more readily the manner in which their daughters defined intimacy and leisure. Some parents were simply tired of all the bickering and refused to allow the fighting to disrupt their family life; others feared that if they were too strict, their daughters would openly ignore them and sneak out of the house without their permission or approval; or they were too dependent upon their daughters’ wages to risk losing them. Commercial leisure may have offered women the chance to establish their own norms of behavior. But they first had to find some way to deal with their parents before they could take advantage of the opportunities commercial leisure had to offer—and they usually did, without having to abandon the home in which they had been raised. Indeed, even if parents, and mothers in particular, were eager to share in this new culture of consumption, as some historians have argued, problems invariably arose.52 Mothers and daughters still disagreed about the amount of money daughters set aside for leisure, with whom they shared their free time, where they spent their leisure, and what time they returned home—issues that had little to do with whether their parents were fascinated with this new culture of consumption. These problems profoundly shaped the day-to-day relations between the generations and the manner in which young women organized commercial leisure and their consumption of it; hence the practice of sneaking out. They also compelled many young men and women to try to live up to their parents’ expectations about their personal lives. Gloria Bocci’s boyfriend, for example, gained a reputation as the “little dago,” suggesting that the younger generation was not altogether comfortable with its Italian heritage or their parents’ immigrant past. But his reputation also reflected a simple measure of respect that made it easier for the couple to go out unsupervised and his concern about accepting their parents’ past and traditions. In short, by the 1920s and 1930s, commercial leisure had become | 217 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

a part of the these men’s and women’s leisure routines, and many women were convinced that the only way to meet a “prospect” was to go for the “good times” at dances, picnics, and parties. But the rise of commercial leisure did not make it any easier for young men and women to ignore their parents or their courtship rituals. After all, Clara P. lied to her parents about going to dances. But her usual routine of going out “on the sneak” was generally followed by an evening out at her parents’ lodge, as if the two lives she desperately tried to keep separate were so inextricably intertwined that neither one could exist without the other.53 Of course, the urge to go out unsupervised was not the only reason some women anxiously tried to win their parents’ approval. Some women were also used to the collective lifestyle in which they had come of age and feared the isolation and loneliness that generally accompanied being disowned. Before their marriages, women were almost always surrounded by other female friends. The time women spent in dance halls was as much about their homosocial ties as it was about heterosocial leisure. Women often danced together, relied on each other to negotiate the demands their male companions made, and left the dance hall the way they had arrived—with other female friends. Around their own homes and families, young women also wandered freely with other single women. Julia Matiasek, who grew up in Chicago in the 1920s, fondly recalled a bench her grandfather had built “between the sidewalk and street.” “When grandpa wasn’t there with his cronies,” she explained “then my girlfriends and I would sit there. That was our entertainment.”54 Rena Domke recalled that as a young woman she spent all her leisure time with her three friends, Olga, Lena, and Jean. She and her three companions went to picnics at area lakes, attended block parties, and sunbathed during the summer. “We stuck together,” she remembered, “even when we were going out with the fellas.”55 Once these women married, they often lost contact with their female friends. After Domke got married, she said, “everybody was separated.” “We were married then and we all went our own way.”56 A Polish woman from Stamford, Connecticut, recalled that, after her marriage, she missed her family. In 1917, she married a man who was “a good bit older” and who was “lame in one leg.” He was “very quiet” and “didn’t have much to say,” but her father insisted that she marry him. “When I was first married,” she explained, “it was lonesome for me, after so much noise at [her | 218 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

parents’] home.”57 Another Polish woman, from New Britain, Connecticut, agreed that “married life was hard.” But in her case the loneliness derived from her husband’s constant absence. “I don’t like to talk too much about it,” she explained, “but a lot of young men in those days worked good and hard.” At the end of the day’s work, they usually “congregated in the different saloons, where they drank and no doubt become intoxicated.” “When you think about it rationally,” she claimed, “you couldn’t blame them too much . . . They merely wished to be together, to talk, to plan, to recall their mother country and far away homes, [and] to mingle with one another in good fellowship.”58 Yet, while some women complained that marriage was a disappointing change because their husbands proved distant or because they found the separation from their parents and siblings difficult, it also meant new family and friends. Leona Hojnacka explained that when she was with her future husband and his family, “I felt I was back in Europe.” Before her marriage, she had been living alone in Chicago with her parents, whom, she explained, “were lost. They never got used to being here.” Once she met Bruno and fell in love, her hopelessness and despair began to fade. The two of them spent most of their time together with his aunts and uncles. “And I like them,” she exclaimed, because “they accepted me just like I belonged in that family.”59 Once married, women also assumed a number of new responsibilities and acquired a prestige denied to single and disowned women. According to Robert Orsi, marriage extended the interdependent relations upon which the life of the community was based. In their immediate families, Orsi argues, mothers usually “dominated the life of the home.” They were the family disciplinarians who either meted out punishment or assigned the duty to their husbands or older sons; they controlled the family’s finances; and they oversaw the rituals of courtship, including the unenviable task of greeting the children’s dates and determining whether a date might make an acceptable spouse. Outside the home, married women were equally influential. Orsi argues that married women were “the guardians of traditional mores in Italian Harlem. If a person wanted to know what the appropriate forms of behavior were in a particular situation, he or she would not go to the old men sitting in front of their regional clubs in East Harlem, but to old women,” who were “revered in the neighborhoods.” Older immigrant women, for example, were | 219 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

known for their “skill in healing with traditional cures,” famous for their work as midwives, and “respected . . . for their knowledge of southern Italian magical rituals,” including “rituals of protection against the evil eye.”60 Many women may have even found that the marriage ceremony served as their initiation into a larger culture of married women. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eastern European immigrants recalled that weddings almost always were performed during morning mass or in the early afternoon. Sylvia P., who married in 1920, had her wedding at eight o’clock in the morning. “Our church was full of school kids,” she exclaimed “and the school kids sang for us, it was beautiful.”61 Some priests even arranged the wedding around the presence of children to make up for the small attendance at morning mass or because the bride and the groom came from small families. Leona Hojnacka wanted to have her wedding at ten o’clock in the morning. But the “Father said why don’t you have it at nine o’clock [when] . . . the church will be full of children. He said ‘you don’t have hardly any family.’”62 Attendance was poor at many weddings also because they were typically held on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays—workdays. Helen Bajkowski, who married in 1909, recalled that “they used to have the wedding on Wednesday or Monday or Tuesday.”63 Bernice Mateja, who married in 1922, had her ceremony on Tuesday. “Nobody,” she explained, had their wedding on a Saturday “just in the weektime, [and] just in the weekday.”64 When Stan Dabkowski interviewed Polish immigrants for the W.P.A., he found that “for a long time marriages took place only on one day, which was Tuesday. If one belonged to a society of the church these weddings could also be performed on Wednesdays.”65 Some immigrants argued that they married on Wednesdays because the priest simply refused to perform wedding ceremonies on Saturdays or Sundays. Others claimed that priests objected to Sunday weddings because the wedding often led to enough drunkenness to keep many of these men from attending church later that day. But Leona Hojnacka explained that she and her husband married on Wednesday because “that was the cheapest [day] and we both didn’t have any money.”66 With weddings taking place on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, the attendance at the morning ceremony was smaller than the crowd that | 220 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

gathered at the reception that evening, and women generally dominated the group at the ceremony. John Staszak, who met his wife at a wedding, “was invited to the wedding in the morning.” But he did not go “because I was working days,” and he showed up after work.67 Veronica Siwek actually attended weddings in the early morning and afternoon, including her own in 1912, which was held at high mass at 10:00 A.M. When the reception started in the afternoon, she noted that “the ladies who had kids come right away to eat,” without the men; the men joined their families after the workday was done, leaving the women alone to celebrate the occasion and to mark the beginning of a new stage in the life cycle for the young bride.68 Of the women who dominated the weekday weddings, most were themselves married. Most married women worked hard and contributed substantially to their family’s economy. But throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, few married women worked outside the home. In New York City in 1890, only one out of twenty Italian wives and one out of fifty Jewish wives worked outside the home; by 1920, the numbers of gainfully employed married European women who left their homes for work was just over 6 percent. At the same time, significant numbers of single European women were gainfully employed: In 1900, 61 percent of single European immigrant women over the age of ten worked outside the home. With so many single women absent from their homes during most of the day and only a few gainfully employed married women, the morning ceremony and afternoon reception were not only primarily female events but events attended disproportionately by married women.69 Daughters tried to avoid confronting their parents about dating and courtship also because they remained dependent upon them to reproduce the homes from which they came, beginning with the expense of the wedding. The elaborate wedding ceremony and reception, with plenty to eat and drink along with dancing and other unrestrained revelry, are some of the most popular images of immigrant life. In The Jungle, for example, Upton Sinclair begins his shocking portrayal of life in Chicago’s stockyards with a description of Ona Lukoszaite’s and Jurgis Rudkus’s wedding reception. As the ceremony concludes, the guests, along with the wedding party eagerly make their way to the neighborhood hall for the veselija, or wedding feast. The room for the wedding, | 221 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

much like halls in immigrant neighborhoods throughout the country, is “about thirty feet square, with white washed walls” and “bare save for a calendar, a picture of a race horse, and a family tree in a gilded frame.” There is also a saloon to the right “and in the corner beyond it a bar, with a presiding genius clad in soiled white, with waxed black mustache and a carefully oiled curl plastered against one side of his forehead.” While the hall is somewhat dreary and uninviting, the food for the reception is spectacular. In the corner opposite the bartender there are two tables, “laden with dishes and cold viands,” that fill about a third of the room. At the head of the table where the bride is to be seated, there is “a snowwhite cake with an Eiffel tower of constructed decoration, with sugar roses and two angels upon it, and a generous sprinkling of pink and green and yellow candies.” Besides the cake and table of viands, there is “a great platter of stewed duck . . . ham . . . a dish of sauerkraut, boiled rice, macaroni, bologna sausages, great piles of penny buns, bowls of milk, and foaming pitchers of beer.” And there is a bar where those in attendance can order all they please “and do not have to pay for it.”70 The kind of wedding reception depicted in Sinclair’s richly detailed description was, in fact, quite common. Veronica Siwek, who married in 1912 in Chicago, had what she called a “very, very big wedding.” The wedding began with a high mass at ten o’clock in the morning. Siwek wore a white dress; the men wore the traditional black suits; the nine brides maids, whom she met at work or at local dances, wore dresses of many different colors. After the wedding, everyone immediately went to the photographer’s and then on to the reception hall, which had a tavern in front and a big hall out back. The reception began in the afternoon and continued until about two o’clock in the morning, with couples eating and drinking the entire time.71 Even during the Depression, many couples staged elaborate weddings and receptions. Rena Domke had about two hundred people at her wedding. For the reception, she and her husband rented a hall, furnished an orchestra, and served Italian beef sandwiches, Italian cookies, Italian liqueurs, and a wedding cake, which Domke described as looking “just like a castle” and costing nearly as much—fifty dollars, which was “a lot of money at that time.”72 Yet, while weddings with hall receptions were still popular during the 1930s, by the 1920s home weddings had come to dominate the wedding scene in many communities.73 Martha Lezczyk claimed that “very sel| 222 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

dom were the weddings at the hall. [They were] mostly at home.”74 Marie Cazrnowski, for example, met her husband through her father, who became acquainted with her husband-to-be while he was on furlough from the navy. “First thing I know,” Lezczyk explained, “he brought him home,” and “we made a date.” Her future husband was on leave for only two or three days. But he returned from World War I in February 1918, and they were married by September. Lezczyk’s wedding “wasn’t too large.” “See, years back, a lot of people used to have home weddings.” Lezczyk’s mother and father had a “regular building” with a basement. “We had it in the basement,” she recalled, along with a couple of caterers who provided the food, while the “six room apartment” upstairs was reserved for “our socializing.” Lezczyk recalled that “you couldn’t put too many people in a six room apartment.”75 Julia Madro also had a “simple home wedding.” “We didn’t plan big things,” she admitted. “We just had a home wedding” with “lot[s] of friends and neighbors.” The actual wedding ceremony was held at the St. John Cantius Church on Carpenter and Chicago Avenue, with two attendants and a flower girl. The reception was at home. Madro’s parents had “the big basement downstairs where the cooks made good dinners.”76 Julia Podraza, who married in 1927, had a church wedding at four o’clock in the afternoon, “with all the trimmings.” She had a “white rug . . . singers and . . . [an] organ playing and a crowd of people.” The bridesmaids and the rest of the wedding party were either her friends from work or family members; her sister Lillian was her maid of honor, and her brother Frank was her husband’s best man. The reception was at home—about fifty people who gathered in her parents’ “finished basement downstairs where we ate and danced.”77 Home weddings were perhaps less spectacular than those held in halls. Instead of having a large hall out back and a tavern up front, couples were more likely to celebrate their union in the “big basement downstairs.” And, instead of including guests who ate and drank until the early hours of the morning and a “castle-like wedding cake,” the reception often consisted of a home-cooked meal eaten at a party that generally lasted only a few hours. But the growing popularity of the home wedding did not reflect a major shift in the social organization of weddings. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there were other traditions besides the large, elaborate ceremony and the | 223 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

festive reception. John Rolek, who married in the early 1940s, claimed that he had an “old-fashioned Polish wedding.” “It was a hall wedding,” he recalled, “with everybody invited. Neighbors, friends, cousins and so forth.” The reception came to an end late in the morning, which Rolek defended by explaining that the wedding that lasted three days or longer was “more or less a Croatian wedding.”78 Joseph Blazowski, who was also Polish and who married in 1937, disagreed and claimed that the three- or four-day wedding was uniquely Polish. The wedding tradition he was referring to was the wesele, or wedding party, which usually lasted at least three days.79 He did, however, explain that weddings in Poland lasted three or four days only if the couple or their families were “richer.” “If the girl was richer, they keep it [the wedding] many times for four days.”80 Their disagreement over which wedding was more Polish suggests that weddings in Poland differed by region and that there was no single tradition within any one community. As Joseph Blazowski pointed out, someone was bound to be “richer” or poorer, and the wedding arrangements usually reflected the family’s wealth, which made it easier for immigrants to live up to the traditions to which they had grown accustomed in Europe and for their children to continue to be a part of those same traditions in America. Another wedding tradition celebrated by Polish immigrants involved a ceremony and a reception marked by a number of cost-cutting measures. A young Polish woman who immigrated to the United States in 1904 explained that weddings were “big things then.” The bride, she declared, had to have “no less than ten pairs of ushers and bridesmaids attending her.” If only four or six, her wedding “was considered a small one and more or less of a failure.” At the same time, however, “there used to be many mass weddings.” “The people were poor then, starting in life, and they often were married together. They would all go to church, kneel before the banister that cuts off the altar from the church, and the priest would first move to one couple, marry them, and then go to another and repeat the ceremony.” “It was a pretty sight,” she exclaimed, “all those young people, with healthy faces, kneeling there and waiting to be married.” At one of the weddings she attended, there “were as many as eighteen couples . . . at one time. Believe me or not.” After the wedding ceremony, everyone “would go to a show,” and then they would retire to the local hall, in this case Skritulski’s saloon, “where | 224 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

we would eat. There was always enough food,” she recalled, and “music was lively of various pieces; violin, piano, accordion, etc. Everyone had a fine time. [and] It was all very exciting.”81 The weddings described by this young Polish woman offer another example of the ways in which immigrants negotiated and then incorporated commercial leisure into already existing ethnic rituals. As the woman reported, after the wedding ceremony, the newlyweds and all the guests first went to a show and then attended the reception. The weddings she described provide insight into the extent to which even weddings were part of a larger network of interdependent relationships. In this case, the mass weddings she attended not only reduced the cost of the celebration but also allowed for a more elaborate party afterward. Men and women from throughout the community if not the entire community, attended the reception she described, especially when there were as many as eighteen couples taking their vows together, ensuring that the young couples would join the interdependent networks and relationships upon which the community was founded and that their transition to married life would be smooth. Polish immigrants were not alone when it came to cutting costs. Despite Rena Domke’s expensive wedding during the Depression and her “castle-like cake,” she explained that “they didn’t have sit-down dinners yet, because it was too expensive, to begin with.”82 Jean Carsello, who married in 1924, described her wedding as “very plain,”83 while Salvatore Cosentino had what he called a “peanuts” wedding, because they had “a lot of peanuts.” Cosentino and his bride had the reception in a hall on Taylor and Ogden Avenue in Chicago, where they served sandwiches, beer, ice cream, and peanuts.84 Many first-generation Italians also had home weddings. Pasquale Russo, who immigrated in 1900 and married in 1918, knew his wife, Inessa Romana E’Elia, from Italy. In 1913, he began “to keep company” with her, and five years later the young couple married at the Holy Rosary church in Bridgeport, Connecticut. At the reception, the guests had a “real fine time” and danced the “‘tarantella’ and the ‘quatriglia’” while “drinking lots of wine and liquors.” “We sing [old Italian songs] too,” Russo recalled, and “lots of people got feeling good for drinking too much.” The reception continued into the early morning, and many friends stayed “up to two and three o’clock, and didn’t want to go home.” But Russo insisted that they | 225 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

had to because the reception was in his father-in-law’s house.85 Liberato Dattolo, who married at about the same time, explained that when Italians get married, “they want their children to have a big wedding and the girl has to have a lot of clothes in the chest.” Like other couples, Dattolo and his bride were married in the church. At the reception afterward, “there was a lot to drink and plenty to eat,” and many of the couples’ family and friends “came to see us [Dattolo and his bride].” But rather than renting a hall, Dattolo explained, that “we went home and our close friends came and we had a good time.”86 Home weddings were also a favorite among first-generation Poles. In 1890, the New Britain Herald reported a disturbance at a house on South Main Street where a newlywed Polish couple was celebrating their wedding on “a grand scale.” “There was a large number of the countrymen of the happy couple present,” the paper reported, “and nearly everyone got drunk.” Plenty of singing and shouting accompanied the drinking, which they “kept up until three O’clock Sunday morning.” Before the wedding was over, “they went out on the sidewalk where they continued their racket,” because “the house wasn’t large enough to hold some of them.” The whole neighborhood “was aroused by the disturbance,” the paper claimed, “and many wondered why it wasn’t stopped by the police.”87 As the experiences of these men and women suggest, most immigrants were not “rich” enough to pay for the more elaborate ceremony and hall reception, yet they still found ways to manage a different and equally important tradition. At both types of weddings, children and parents, men and women, and neighbors and less familiar acquaintances could renew old friendships, reminisce about family and friends, and establish the networks of interdependency upon which newlyweds could rely to make ends meet. Indeed, the sharing in the dance, the drink, and the fellowship that accompanied the reproduction of the community and its values through marriage and the formation of a new family not only helped sustain community and family and bound the generations together but also publicly legitimated the couple’s relationship and ensured their continued role in the community’s life; hence the continued dependence of young couples on their families and the need to get their parents’ permission before accepting any proposal. In addition, both traditions—the elaborate ceremony with a hall re| 226 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

ception and the modest home wedding—usually required friends and family alike to pitch in. Throughout the early twentieth century, the bride and her family generally expected the groom to pay for some, if not all, of the expenses. According to Pauline Golembiewska, who got married just after World War I, “Usually [the] boyfriend . . . give you money for the wedding dress.” Italian brides expected the groom to provide the wedding finery, “consisting of a simple veil, orange blossoms, and a dress.”88 And Andrew Devich, who was Croatian, recalled that “most of the financial expenses were mine.” Devich “shopped for wearing apparel,” along with the food and the flowers, and he made the church arrangements. But on occasion the groom could not afford to pay his share, refused to pay for the wedding dress and veil, or said that the wedding expenses surpassed the financial commitment he was prepared to assume. To raise enough money for the ceremony and reception, the young bride often offered herself up for dances. At Jurgis’s and Ona’s wedding in The Jungle, the reception culminated in the acziavimas, a dancing ceremony in which the guests form a great ring around the bride, who stands in the center. One by one, the men step into the enclosure and dance with her for as long as they wish. As they leave the ring of onlookers, they may deposit a dollar or perhaps five to pay for their entertainment and to help the newlyweds pay for the night’s festivities.89 Among the Polish, each of the men who wanted to dance with the bride threw a silver dollar onto a plate that was placed on the floor. If the plate broke, the dance was free. If not, the money remained on the plate and was used to help the newlyweds pay for the wedding.90 At the same time, it was generally expected that anyone attending the wedding would help pitch in. Rena Domke recalled that her wedding and the hall reception, which included a castle-like cake and cost about one dollar per person, or two hundred dollars, were paid for by her guests, who each gave her two dollars for a wedding present. Home weddings were no exception. Andrew Devich, who held his reception in his mother-in-law’s home and who assumed most of the expenses himself, also “went from house to house, leaving five or ten dollars as was the custom in hopes of their returning that amount or more as a wedding gift,” as if it was common for the newlyweds to expect their neighbors to help out regardless of where they held the | 227 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

reception.91 Pauline Golembiewska, who expected her groom to pay for the wedding dress, also had the reception at home and ended up having her friends and family pay for the modest arrangements she made. Golembiewska recalled that “He [the groom] didn’t give me nothing.” “I bought myself the dress. I bought myself [the] veil.” The rest had to be collected from guests. Golembiewska explained that she did not have much of a ceremony, just a few close friends and family, who raised fifty dollars to pay for the sweet rolls she got from the baker and for dinner at home afterward. “That’s all,” she explained, “no dancing, no nothing.”92 By the 1920s and 1930s, then, the elaborate church wedding and hall reception were much less common than they had been during the preceding decades. Indeed, the home wedding with the big basement downstairs not only had become the fashion among most newlyweds but dominated the wedding scene in immigrant communities. Since the home wedding required enough money to pay for only a dinner and a basement in which to hold the reception, young men and women undoubtedly had more opportunities to organize their own weddings and hence their own relationships. Francesco Bruno may have forced his daughters out of the house, but they had still saved enough money to celebrate each and every one of their weddings at a sister’s home. Yet many men and women still remained dependent upon their parents. The simple dinner afterward and the big basement in which to eat it were simply too expensive for some couples. As a result, they continued to rely on family and friends to pitch in, ensuring that their parents would not only remain a part of the daughters’ courtships but perhaps even have the chance to approve of the marriage before agreeing to help pay for it or to provide the big basement in which to hold the reception. Moreover, even if a young couple could afford their own wedding arrangements, they remained dependent upon their parents once the reception was over. Throughout the first four decades of the twentieth century, working-class couples rarely went on a honeymoon following the wedding and reception, in sharp contrast to middle-class men’s and women’s experiences. Ellen Rothman argues that by the second half of the nineteenth century, middle-class bridal tours, on which the couple visited close friends or relatives or were accompanied by them on their journey, had developed “into an exclusive ritual in which bride and | 228 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

groom alone participated.” According to Rothman, “Friends and relatives now ‘went a piece’ with the bridal couple or saw them off on the train, rather than joining them on the journey.” Indeed, by the 1880s, honeymoon trips to “‘romantic’ locations were expected to follow the weddings.” But the bridal journey was no longer a ritual designed to integrate a new pair into the community; it self-consciously isolated the couple and marked the beginning of their married life and their independence from friends and family.93 While the honeymoon was being transformed into a middle-class convention that reaffirmed the couples’ commitment to each other, working men and women were setting aside the money for more practical purposes or moving in with their parents. After Veronica Loncki married in 1910, she spent her wedding night at her mother’s home. Loncki explained that if she and her new husband wanted some privacy, they went out to a show, or they would “just take a walk.”94 Leona Hojnacka also spent her wedding night at her mother’s home. Hojnacka recalled that they had their own room “but no door.” The next day, she explained, “my husband went to work . . . [and] I did too.”95 Joseph Sowa explained that a honeymoon was simply out of the question. “We didn’t have no money . . . with paying the house up [and] didn’t go no place . . . just went to work.”96 Liberato Dattolo, who married in the 1910s, noted that when he got married “people never had any honeymoon like they got now.” Although wealthier Italians often went on honeymoons during the early twentieth century, Dattolo insisted that the “Italian style is that the people get married, and then they have a good time, and then they go home to sleep. The Italian people are not crazy, they don’t care for this honeymoon business.”97 Throughout the next two decades, it was common for couples to continue to forgo romantic trips to faraway locations. When Pauline Golembiewska got married in 1919, she and her husband “never know what honeymoon meant.”98 Maria Interlandi, who married a year later, explained that a honeymoon “wasn’t the custom them days at all.”99 Bernice Mateja also skipped the honeymoon after she married in 1922 because there was no honeymoon custom—“just right away go home and work.”100 When Julia Podraza got married in 1927, she claimed that “a honeymoon in Niagara Falls . . . was quite a thing in them days.” But instead of taking that trip, they “saved that money for furniture.”101 When | 229 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

working-class newlyweds finally began going on honeymoons by the late 1930s and early 1940s, they often had to go with other friends or relatives to be able to afford the trip. Virginia Martell went on her honeymoon immediately after her wedding in 1940, but accompanied by her brother and his wife, who had married two years earlier but who had postponed the honeymoon because they could not afford to leave town right after the marriage ceremony. “My brother,” she explained, “had an old Ford car,” which they used for the trip to Canada.102 Throughout the first few decades of the twentieth century, many newlyweds did not simply miss out on the honeymoon or postpone it until they had the savings for a romantic getaway. At the time of their marriages, many of them did not even know what a honeymoon was. Marriage for these men and women did not end their life as dependents and mark the beginning of a life of independence, as it did for middle-class newlyweds; marriage simply marked the passing of one stage of dependency for another, since most couples spent their wedding night at the home of one set of parents before going back to work the following day. The poor wages on which these men and women had to live meant that newlyweds would continue to depend on their parents after the ceremony, reception, and wedding night. After they married, some couples were able to afford their own homes. Stella Montwicki, for example, spent “about a week or longer” in a room in which her husband boarded, and then “we found [an] apartment and bought the furniture.” Her apartment had running water and an overhead flush tank with the chain hanging. Her parents “still had an outhouse.” But she did not have an oven, “just a hot plate to cook on top.” “It was a long time before I could have [an] oven . . . to do baking.”103 Virginia Martell and her husband lived with her brother for the first three days after her marriage. “We slept on my brother’s floor for the first three days.” “We didn’t want to go to my mother’s house or to his mother’s house because we both had large families.” Once she got her first paycheck, we went to a woman who had a large house and we rented a bedroom for five dollars a week. We lived there for the first six months and later we managed to save every dime we could and we rented a little apartment, a little cottage which was three rooms. We went and bought a kitchen set, a refrigerator and a stove, and we bought a large studio cou[c]h which served | 230 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .” as a front room piece and a bed. As the weeks and months rolled by we started to buy one piece of furniture at a time. We shopped very carefully and everything was bought for cash. We would look where the best sale was and the best bargain for our money. Even to this day, I never buy anything on credit. If I don’t have the money for it, I will not buy.104

While some hard-pressed working people managed to save enough money to rent a simple cottage or apartment, others found themselves living with their in-laws or some other family member for at least a short time, if not several years. Leona Hojnacka, who married in 1919 and whose bedroom had no doors, stayed with her parents for six months, paying only for food so that she and her husband could save up for their own home.105 Mary Stojak and her husband stayed in her aunt’s parlor while they conducted the difficult search for a place of their own. It “wasn’t so easy to find [a] place,” Stojak recalled. “You can’t afford to . . . get a big place. So we were looking for a smaller place . . . [and] couldn’t find it . . . because you [were] working and all that.”106 Julia Madro spent her first year of marriage living with her husband’s sister. A week after their wedding, “we moved into an apartment with his sister and we split the bill, pay rent . . . and we start furnishing our little apartment.”107 Other couples expected or hoped that their stay was only temporary but usually ended up with their in-laws for several years. Martha Leszczyk got married at her mother’s home and stayed there after she married. Leszczyk explained that her mother was “very sickly,” and the marriage was at a time “when though my brother was the eldest, naturally he wouldn’t help or pitch in.” “What good [would it] do me,” she asked, “if my mother was sickly if I would move out?” “So we lived together.” Leszczyk explained that she had “a very close family,” and “we [all got] along very well,” so much so that she and her husband lived with her mother for seventeen years, a record she boasted “nobody can break.”108 Other couples had no expectation of ever even having a home until they reached their fifties. According to Tillie Rutkowski, “Them days nobody was buying homes like today [1970s]. . . . That was the one thing that nobody looked forward . . . to having.” Newlyweds, she explained, “stayed in after they got married.” Usually “a year or two” or “as long as mother’s got another bedroom. . . . Then, we paid board.” Rutkowski explained that she was close to her fifties when she bought her | 231 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

first home. By about fifty “you look forward to get[ting] your own home . . . because then, maybe, you’d have a little bit put aside that you could put down.” There were, of course, exceptions, she explained; for example, “when the folks died, the kids got the building.”109 Despite the rise of commercial leisure, then, working couples, and especially women, remained dependent upon their parents when it came to intimacy and leisure. And with good reason. Many women successfully eluded their parents and went out on the sneak or knocked down the amount of money in their pay envelopes. But like Clara P., who was determined to go dancing as often as possible, sneaking out of the house did not always satisfy the urge to dance, and these women recognized that the dancing and dating would eventually come to an end—at least long enough for them to get married. Because courtship was never just about the dating and the dancing, most men and women found that they needed to gain their parents’ approval—along with access to the resources they might eventually need to survive married life—rather than elope and set out on their own. As a result, young couples generally found that they could never completely separate themselves from their parents. This reality reaffirmed the interdependency that characterized the courtship practices with which their parents were familiar, while ensuring that the traditions and rituals with which the young couple had been raised would prevail. Throughout the early twentieth century, dating and courtship for many couples negotiated both their parents’ past and their own present desires. In families across the country, women constantly found themselves “bumping up against a lot of don’ts.” Wearing cosmetics, staying out late, and dating boys of other ethnicities became bitter bones of contention as parents and their daughters struggled to define acceptable behavior and heterosocial relations. The constant bickering and the fear of having their parents publicly humiliate them were troublesome enough for many women eager to attend the different amusements that gained popularity throughout the early twentieth century. But women also feared that they might never find a “prospect.” By the 1910s, and especially by the 1920s, many working women not only identified commercial leisure with “good times” but felt that going out was crucial to finding a future husband. This understanding compelled some of them to | 232 |

“When It Comes to My Marrying . . .”

openly challenge their parents and, sometimes, to elope and permanently separate themselves from their families and communities. Yet, while some parents and children were never able to cross the generational divide, other young women were never quite able to completely abandon their families or the different traditions and rituals with which they had been raised. Instead, they assumed a double life and went out on the sneak in response to parents who claimed the right to supervise their social lives. Such strategies not only were part of the larger process of appropriating a different identity and paying for the amenities their transformation required but made it easier for them to negotiate their parents’ rules and restrictions. Many women were eager to “shake a wicked leg,” but they had to patiently bide their time until they had the money to pay for commercial leisure and until they found the appropriate moment to sneak out of the house. Most important of all, they recognized that dating and dancing were not the only issues at stake and consciously tried to compromise. Some women appeased their parents by offering up the wages they made, by sacrificing their own autonomy to ease the path for a younger sibling, or by appealing to certain “old country” traditions. Many women negotiated more easily the double life they had assumed because they remained committed to the values and traditions with which they had been raised. After all, dating and dancing may have been great fun, but women who engaged in them were potentially sacrificing the power and prestige that accompanied married life. Other women were much more reluctant to give up the autonomy for which they so desperately yearned but still recognized that they relied upon a large network of interdependent relations before and after they married. Either way and for whatever reason, by trying to find some way to compromise, they recognized that the economy of dating in which they participated not only posed the problem of how they were to pay for commercial leisure; it also meant that they had to contend with their parents, whose support they would need when they were ready to marry and establish their own homes.

| 233 |

CONCLUSION

Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many southern and eastern European immigrant women became “child brides,” and many couples married “upon not too long acquaintance” because of the living conditions with which they had to contend. Apart from family and community and unaccustomed to their surroundings, which generally included cramped tenement flats, untold numbers of boarders, and miserably poor wages, working-class men and women eagerly rushed into wedlock to find the security for which they had been looking and to help them cope with and manage their new lives in America. The streets offered some relief, as did the picnic groves and parks that surrounded many of their neighborhoods. But their parents were often close behind or quick to accompany them, making it almost impossible for them to establish their own norms of behavior to govern courtship. By the 1920s, many changes were apparent. The expansion of the economy, changes in women’s work, and the rise of commercial amusements expanded immigrants’ leisure opportunities and gave rise to a heterosocial peer culture. Dance halls, in particular, offered young men and women the chance not only to couple up on the dance floor or in a back room or dark hallway but to do so without the added annoyance of intrusive parents or other community. In particular, the physical and sensual feeling of dance, the different use of the body, and the dress and demeanor women and men adopted both on and off the dance floor allowed them to call into question their parents’ ideas about intimacy and leisure, or what they considered to be the antiquated system of chaperonage and the practice of arranging marriages. Yet, while the mores of the dance halls contrasted sharply with the customs their parents favored, dance halls did not necessarily provide young men and women the refuge for which they may have been looking. On the one hand, men and women confronted middle-class reformers and their endless rules and restrictions designed to regulate the intimacy, al| 234 |

Conclusion

cohol, dance, and the slumming gentleman who was eager to make working-class dates. On the other hand, dance halls seemed only to exacerbate the tension surrounding mixed-sex leisure. Some men avoided dancing altogether because of the potential humiliation and frustration they faced. Other men successfully made dance dates but ended up with partners who were better at the task at hand or simply had their own ideas about the next step or variation. Off the dance floor, men and women claimed that their dates were either “unresponsive” or overbearing. While men complained that women demanded too many treats and then failed to “come across,” the demands men consistently made and their rough and unruly behavior appalled the women with whom they were eager to dance. The problems associated with dance halls affected men and women in two ways. First, it compelled them to collectively organize their leisure time. In many cases, they worked together to challenge middle-class reform efforts and to watch more carefully for cops and other potential intruders when they coupled up for intimate moments in the dance hall’s dark hallways, back rooms, and balconies. Other men and women smuggled in alcohol and appropriated certain sections of the dance hall in order to drink it; and they favored ensemble and mass dances or simply danced collectively to provide the cover they needed to engage in sexually expressive moves. At other times, men and women drew upon their homosocial ties and relationships to challenge each other. Men dressed alike, performed the same dances, and imitated the rough and unruly behavior typically associated with other all-male get-togethers such as saloons, poolrooms, and street corners in order to contest women’s claim to public space and to intimidate men of other class, racial, and ethnic backgrounds. Women, on the other hand, often ignored the men with whom they shared the dance hall. They often danced together or used the sensual and physical side of dance to defy the version of womanhood with which many men were comfortable, and they roamed around in groups to ensure their own protection from unsuitable men and to negotiate the system of treating that governed male-female relationships. Second, the problems young men and women faced with commercial leisure led them to search out their own leisure spaces and to establish social clubs. In the privacy of their own basement hangouts, workingclass men and women organized their own dances or affairs, put on plays | 235 |

Conclusion

or contests, planned weekend outings and other excursions, and used their social clubs to take part in a range of sexual encounters in greater privacy than was afforded by a park bench or a dark hallway in someone’s tenement flat. In particular, social clubs allowed men and women to avoid many of the problems they associated with dance halls. At their social clubs, they not only pooled their resources more effectively than at dance halls but also avoided the nosey and often intrusive hall supervisors or floor men who were out to regulate intimacy, alcohol, and dance. To be sure, relations between men and women could be just as contentious in a social club as at a dance hall. Club members often established their own rules of common decency to weed out any women whose rough talking, acting, and dancing violated what they considered appropriate behavior and to recapture the collective safety of the group, or homosocial spaces. By the early part of the century, women not only were visible on the neighborhood streets or at the local picnic groves and parks but were invading traditionally male spaces. Women were demanding to have their hair bobbed at the local barber shop and were already present at the city’s department stores, delicatessens, and candy stores when Prohibition further undermined working-class men’s drinking customs. Social clubs helped men preserve the rituals of manhood with which they were most familiar and provided the room needed to carve out new all-male spaces where they could learn to smoke, gamble, play cards, or take part in the games of strength and skill upon which they based male culture and their identity. Women, in turn, openly violated social club rules, appropriated club space, refused to participate in club social nights, and on occasion set up their own basement hangouts. By challenging men over the nature of club space and the manner in which they tried to organize intimacy and leisure, women profoundly shaped club culture and, above all, disrupted the same-sex relationships upon which most men had organized their social clubs. In response, men desperately tried to balance their heterosocial and homosocial lives but usually ended up abandoning one or the other as well as the manner in which they had grown accustomed to organizing their gender identity. Nevertheless, social clubs did make life easier for most men and women. In particular, social clubs allowed both men and women to make effective use of their parents, who could be called upon to regulate men’s unruly behavior or the rough talking, acting, and dancing for | 236 |

Conclusion

which women were notorious. In fact, club members often invited their parents in as chaperones on social nights; they donated money to local charities and political causes; and they made their clubs and themselves as personable and public as possible. While such efforts forced men to compromise their own autonomy and to avoid the behavior associated with the larger male culture of which they were a part, women had to behave properly on and off the dance floor. At the same time, working-class men and women felt compelled to include their parents because they remained dependent upon them, despite the rise of commercial leisure. Women often complained about their parents enforcing curfews, hoarding their pay envelopes, opposing their use of makeup or American styles of dress and hair, and insisting that they marry men of their own ethnicity or men to whom their parents had introduced them. The conflict that emerged could at times turn bitter, and many women anxiously recalled the pain of being pushed out of the house. But most women somehow either avoided bickering with their parents about dating, dancing, and boys or kept their anger and their parents under control. While increasing numbers of women were convinced that going out was the only way they would find a “prospect,” they also recognized that they were dependent upon their parents to help choose a potential spouse and to establish a new home. Some women simply respected their parents’ ideas about courtship and abided by their rules, hoping one day to assume positions of respect and prestige like their mothers’. Many other women established some sort of compromise by trading their wages for nights out, by sacrificing their own personal lives to pave the way for a younger sibling, by living two separate lives and spending their leisure time out “on the sneak,” or by hanging out in social clubs, thereby ensuring that parents remained a part of the process of picking a spouse and that courtship remained a part of the community’s life. By the 1920s and 1930s, then, the balancing out of sex ratios and the development of a heterosocial and public culture meant that most men and women had more opportunities to find potential spouses without their parents’ interference. Yet, they usually avoided rushing eagerly into wedlock. Working-class men and women still had to contend with crowded living conditions, hostile coworkers, and poor wages, issues that played an important role in convincing many men and women at the | 237 |

Conclusion

turn of the century to marry “upon short acquaintance.” But by the 1920s and 1930s, the security, comfort, and sense of belonging they sought were no longer identified with marriage, as they had been for men and women earlier in the century. Instead, they looked toward the homosocial relationships of which they were a part to understand the heterosocial culture they helped create. To be sure, men and women had always been a part of a larger homosocial culture, but the proximity of their parents had attenuated its impact on courtship and other heterosocial relations. With the rise of commercial amusements, people were freed from many of the restraints their parents had imposed, leading them to search out other ways to organize male-female relationships. While young couples often found the relationships for which they were looking, they also found that their heterosocial relationships were so entangled with their homosocial lives that they often identified more strongly with the latter. As a result, the struggle of trying to negotiate their different identities not only made the time couples spent together contentious but also ensured that men and women would continue to look toward their parents to manage intimacy and leisure, however slight. The tension that invariably surrounded dating and courtship guaranteed that men and women would remain a part of the parents’ past and that they would avoid rushing as eagerly into wedlock as had the men and women who preceded them.

| 238 |

NOTES

Notes to the Introduction 1. ORK-115 (3–4), Box 6, Oral History Archives of Chicago Polonia (hereafter cited as OHACP), Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois, 12, 22–23. 2. Ibid. 3. On the rise of commercial leisure and courtship see Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1968); Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993); on courtship in the West see Dee Garceau, “I Got a Girl Here, Would You Like to Meet Her?”: Courtship, Ethnicity, and Community in Sweetwater County, 1900–1925,” in Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997); see also Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon, 1983). 4. For a discussion of dance hall regulation during the Progressive era see Elisabeth I. Perry, “‘The General Motherhood of the Common Wealth’: Dance Hall Reform in the Progressive Era,” American Quarterly Volume 27, no. 5 (Winter 85): 719–733. For the most complete discussion of regulation efforts before and after Progressivism see Ellen Gardner, Public Dance Halls: Their Regulation and Place in the Recreation of Adolescents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929); see also Andrew Linn Bostwick, “The Regulation of Public Dance Halls, Municipal Legislation,” St. Louis Public Library Monthly Bulletin (July 1914). For a discussion of intimacy in modern societies see Lynn Jamieson, Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies (Cambridge, Eng: Polity Press, 1998). 5. On the importance of an interactionist approach see Robert Prus, Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: Intersubjectivity and the Study of Human Lived Experience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). | 239 |

Notes to the Introduction 6. Belle Lindner Israels, “The Way of the Girl,” Survey 22 (3 July 1909): 495. 7. On saloons see Jon Kingsdale, “The ‘Poor Man’s Club’: Social Functions of the Urban Working-Class Saloon,” in The American Man, ed. Elizabeth Pleck and Joseph Pleck (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 255–283; Perry R. Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 113–125, 178–192; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 35–64; Madelon Mae Powers, “The ‘Poor Man’s Friend’: Saloonkeepers, Workers, and the Code of Reciprocity in U.S. Barrooms, 1870–1920,” in International Labor and Working Class History, no. 45 (Spring 1994), 1–15; on working-class street-corner gangs and pool rooms see Leonard H. Ellis, “Men among Men: An Explanation of All-Male Relationships in Victorian America” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1982), 1–193. 8. On “putting on style” and this new womanhood see Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 57–87; Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). 9. For an example of the shift in location of courtship see Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 14–15.

Notes to Chapter 1 1. “Personal Life History of New Britain Poles,” Box 87, Folder 187:7b, WPA Connecticut Ethnic Survey, University of Connecticut, Storrs (hereafter cited as CES), 3–4. Her description of the workplace does not negate the argument of historians like Kathy Peiss, Leslie Tentler, and Susan Glenn, who show that women viewed the workplace as a positive social environment that promoted cooperation rather than competitiveness. Rather, her experience suggests that the workplace may have been more difficult at the outset for newly arrived immigrants, especially if they made up a minority of the workforce. See Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 132–133, 151; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 45–49; Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 67–71. 2. “Personal Life History of New Britain Poles,” Box 87, Folder 187:7b, CES, 4–5. 3. Ibid., 3–4. 4. On marriage customs among Poles and Italians see Dominic A. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922 | 240 |

Notes to Chapter 1 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 119–120; William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, abridged (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 69–70; Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985), 226–229. 5. On fraternal and mutual aid societies see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 53–97; John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 117–143. 6. On different interpretations of the impact of immigration see Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951); for a critique of Handlin see Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted,” Journal of American History 51 (December 1964): 407–417; for a look at the experience of immigrant women see Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982). 7. Irish and Jewish immigrants were the exceptions. See Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 30; Nancy A. Hewitt, Women, Families, and Communities: Readings in American History, Vol. Two: From 1865 (London: Scott, Foresman, 1990) 254–255; George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 76. For an overview of sex ratios in immigrant communities see Donna Gabaccia, “Women of the Mass Migrations: From Minority to Majority 1820–1930,” in European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Moch (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), pp. 90–114. 8. On chain migration, see June G. Alexander, “Staying Together: Chain Migration and Patterns of Slovak Settlement in Pittsburgh prior to World War I,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 1 (Fall 1981): 56–83; Laura Anker Schwartz, “Immigrant Voices from Home, Work, and Community: Woman and Family in the Migration Process, 1890–1938” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1983), 302–310. 9. “Organized Life of New Britain,” Box 92, Folder 202:1, CES, 6. 10. Judith E. Smith, Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900–1940 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 98. | 241 |

Notes to Chapter 1 11. Kessner, The Golden Door, 30; Howard P. Chudacoff and Judith E. Smith, The Evolution of American Urban Society, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988), 101–106. 12. Chudacoff and Smith, The Evolution of American Urban Society, 109–110, 114; Kessner, The Golden Door, 7–8. 13. Quote from David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 10–12; see also Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 150–151; Gary Ross Mormino, Immigrants on the Hill: Italian-Americans in St. Louis, 1882–1982 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 112–119; Yans-MacLaughlin, Family and Community, 117–118; Selma Berrol, East Side/East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York, 1870–1920 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), 23–29; Mario Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures on New York’s Lower East Side (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 69–73; Pacyga, Polish Immigrants, 62–67, 98, 101–105. 14. Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 42. 15. Nasaw, Children of the City, 10–12; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 172. 16. Nasaw, Children of the City, 9–11; see also Pacyga, Polish Immigrants, 101–102. 17. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 12. On the living standard among Polish immigrants see Pacyga, Polish Immigrants, 77–80. 18. James R. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 90–91. 19. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 90–91. 20. Smith, Family Connections, 100–102. 21. Ibid., 102. 22. MOR-96, Italians in Chicago Oral History Project, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois (hereafter cited as ICOHP), 25–26. 23. LES-032, Box 4, OHACP, 28–29. 24. CZE-118 (1–2), Box 2, OHACP, 20. 25. Nasaw, Children of the City, 88–89. 26. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 91–98; Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land, 78. 27. Tamara K. Hareven and John Modell, “Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (August 1973): 469; see also Pacyga, Polish Immigrants, 67. | 242 |

Notes to Chapter 1 28. Ewa Morawska, For Bread with Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 127. 29. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 72, 99. 30. Quote from Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 173–175. 31. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 72. 32. Quote from Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 120. 33. Ibid., 120. 34. Quote from Mormino, Immigrants on the Hill, 113. 35. Quote from Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 120. 36. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 100. 37. DOM-87, ICOHP, 58–59. 38. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 12–13. 39. Madelon Mae Powers, Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36. 40. Israels, “The Way of the Girl,” 486–487. On street life, see also Maffi, Gateway to the Promised Land, 75–77. 41. ULM-051 (1–2), Box 9, OHACP, 11–12. 42. CYG-037 (3–4), Box 2, OHACP, 20–21. 43. RAG-007 (1–2), Box 7, OHACP, 9. 44. Quote from Corinne Azen Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters: Oral Histories of Three Generations of Ethnic American Women (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 27–28. 45. Interview Mr. Dugas, Box 18, Folder 109:5a, CES, 6–7. 46. DOM-87, ICOHP, 59–60. 47. ORK-115 (3–4), Box 6, OHACP, 11–12. 48. Clara Grillo Papers, “Little Italy, Cleveland Ohio,” Box 1, Immigration History Research Center (hereafter cited as IHRC), University of Minnesota, 16–17. For a discussion of religious festivals in Italian communities see Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). For a larger discussion of ritual and celebrations see Ramon A. Gutierrez and Genevieve Fabre, eds., Feasts and Celebrations in North American Ethnic Communities (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 49. LES-O32, Box 4, OHACP, 6–8. 50. Interview Mr. Liberato Dattolo, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 14. 51. Clara Grillo Papers, “Little Italy, Cleveland Ohio,” Box 1, IHRC, 16–17. 52. Stan Dabkowski, “Polish Marriages,” Box 86, Folder 187:7a, CES, 2. 53. STA-029 (1–2), Box 8, OHACP, 2–3. | 243 |

Notes to Chapter 1 54. Quote from Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters, 153–154. 55. Stan Dabkowski, “Polish Marriages,” Box 86, Folder 187:7a, CES, 2. 56. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 90–91. 57. Interview Mr. Liberato Dattolo, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 14; Interview Mr. Dugas, Box 18, Folder 109:11, CES, 7. 58. Dom-87, ICOHP, 58–60. 59. Rose M. Deveto, “An attempt to show the life patterns, customs, and culture that the typical poor southern Italian immigrant brought to this country— how much is kept by his children and later by their children,” Box 65, Folder “The Boy and His Family,” Leonard Covello Papers (hereafter cited as LCP), Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 18–19. 60. Quote from Krause, Grandmother, Mothers, and Daughters, 18–19. 61. Quote from Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 233. 62. GOL-027 (3–4), Box 3, OHACP, 25–26. 63. MAL-098 (1–2), Box 6, OHACP, 6–7. 64. Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, 69–70. 65. Quote from Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters, 115. 66. MAR-028 (1–4), Box 6, OHACP, 51. 67. MAL-098 (1–2), Box 6, OHACP, 8. 68. GOL-027 (3–4), Box 3, OHACP, 26. 69. “Organized Life of New Britain Ukrainians,” Box 92, Folder 202:1, CES, 7. On the impact of sex ratios see Richard M. Bernard, The Melting Pot and the Altar: Marital Assimilation in Early Twentieth-Century Wisconsin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 95–100. John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber also argue that immigrant daughters married as soon as possible to escape from work routines and family burdens. See John Bodnar, Roger Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 100. 70. Quote from Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 95. 71. Tamara K. Hareven and John Modell, “Family Patterns,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 348. 72. Rudolph M. Bell, Fate and Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural Changes in Rural Italy since 1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 232–233. Susan Glenn also notes that early marriage was important in traditional Jewish society because women feared being “old maids.” See Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 157. 73. Interview Pasquali Gruci, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 9; historians have emphasized arranged marriages and even the practice of hiring matchmak| 244 |

Notes to Chapter 1 ers, but they have been relatively silent on the length of courtships. See, for example, Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 36, 44–46; YansMcLaughlin, Family and Community, 93–94. 74. “Personal History of Early New Britain Residents,” Box 87, Folder 187:7b, CES, 5. 75. Dabkowski, “Polish Marriages,” Box 86, Folder 187:7a, CES, 2–3. 76. Ibid., 2–3. 77. INT-15, ICOHP, 42–44. 78. Quote from Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 230. 79. Interview Mr. Liberato Dattolo, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 4–5. 80. Andrew Devich, “My Memoirs,” South Slavic Miscellaneous Manuscripts, “Andrew Devich Autobiography,” IHRC, 9–10. 81. 25 to 60 percent of emigrants from Europe eventually returned to Europe. See for example Bodnar, The Transplanted, 53–54; Kristian Hvidt, Flight to America: The Social Background of 300,000 Danish Emigrants (New York: Academic Press, 1975); Betty Boyd Caroli, Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900–1914 (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1973); Jonathan Sarna, “The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Europe, 1881–1914,” American Jewish History 71 (December 1981): 256–268; Dino Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982). 82. Hareven and Modell, “Urbanization and the Malleable Household,” 474–475. 83. Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 98–99. 84. Ibid., 98–100. 85. Quote from Krause, Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters, 154–155. 86. MAR-028 (1–4), Box 6, OHACP, 51. 87. BAL-192, ICOHP, 5. 88. LES-032, Box 4, OHACP, 2–3. 89. Interview Joseph Rusilavicius, Box 64, Folder 158:1, CES, 5–6. 90. Interview Mr. A. T., Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 1–2. 91. “Organized Life of Ukrainians in New Haven,” Box 92, Folder 202:2, CES, 11–12. 92. Dabkowski, “Polish Marriages,” Box 86, Folder 187:7a, CES, 2. 93. “Personal History of New Britain Poles,” Joseph Szewezk, Box 87, Folder 187:7b, CES, 4. 94. On the importance of the saloon see Richard Stivers, A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 86; Jon Kingsdale, “The ‘Poor Man’s Club,’” 255–283; Duis, The Saloon, 35–64; Powers, “The ‘Poor Man’s Friend,’” 1–15. | 245 |

Notes to Chapter 1 95. “History of Lithuanian Immigrant,” Box 64, Folder 158:1, CES, 4. 96. Mary Manella also claimed that in her neighborhood the shoe repair shop was a favorite hangout for many men. Every time she went in there, she claimed, “there was always three or four men.” Half of the shop, she explained was for “shoe shining purposes.” The rest of the store was occupied by two or three men “sitting in those chairs but not getting their shoes shined.” “So evidently,” she concluded “it was just visiting.” See MAN-50, ICOHP, 14. 97. “Personal History of Early New Britain Poles,” Joseph Szewezyk, Box 87, Folder 187:7b, CES, 5. 98. Ibid., 4–5. 99. COS-2, ICOHP, 15–16. 100. Powers, “The ‘Poor Man’s Friend,’” 3. 101. HAR-042 (1–2), Box 3, OHACP, 30. 102. TEL-26, ICOHP, 13. 103. Ellis, “Men among Men,” 158–169. 104. George Ade, The Old-Time Saloon, Not Wet, Not Dry, Just History (New York: R. Long & R. R. Smith, 1931), 110. 105. Ibid., 118–119, 127. 106. Powers, Faces along the Bar, 202. 107. Quote from Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 230. 108. “Organized Life of Ukrainians in New Haven, Box 92, Folder 202:2, CES, 8. 109. Andrew Parylo, Box 92, Folder 202:2, CES, 7–8. 110. Jon Kingsdale, for example, argues that for working men the saloon served many of the same functions as a home: They slept there, used the saloon as a mailing address, and left and picked up messages there, it also offered them a place to relax after work and to meet friends. He also notes that when married men went to the saloon, they rarely ever thought of women. See Jon Kingsdale, “‘The Poor Man’s Friend,’” 262, 274; on the masculine attractions of the saloon see also Norman H. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition (New York: Norton, 1976), 1. 111. Interview Emma Reale, Box 57, Folder 156: 4, CES, 2, 5.

Notes to Chapter 2 1. “Angela Mischke,” Polish Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, IHRC, 10–11. 2. Ibid, 11. 3. Ibid, 11, 14. | 246 |

Notes to Chapter 2 4. On the rise of commercial leisure see Peiss, Cheap Amusements; Erenberg, Steppin’ Out; Nasaw, Going Out. 5. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 59–60. 6. Investigator’s Report, “Progress Athletic Ass’n,” December 8, 1917, Folder 104, Juvenile Protective Association Records (hereafter cited as JPA), University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago Illinois. 7. Investigator’s Report, “Report on Blue Jay B&S Club Dance,” December 8, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 8. Richard Henry Edwards, Popular Amusements (New York: Associate Press, 1915), 73; Paul Cressey, The Taxi Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 20. 9. Collis A. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh: Made under the Auspices of the Pittsburgh’s Girls’ Conference (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh’s Girls’ Conference, 1925), 9; Edwards, Popular Amusements, 73. 10. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 95. 11. Louise DeKoven Bowen, The Road to Destruction Made Easy in Chicago (Chicago: Juvenile Protective Association, 1916), 9. 12. Edwards, Popular Amusements, 73. 13. Louise DeKoven Bowen, “Dance Halls,” Survey 26 (3 June 1911): 385; Louise DeKoven Bowen, The Public Dance Halls of Chicago (Chicago: Juvenile Protective Association, 1917), 7. 14. Bowen, Road to Destruction Made Easy, 10; “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, Ernest Burgess Collection (hereafter cited as BUR), University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 13; Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 42. 15. Edwards, Popular Amusements, 73. 16. “Want Law to Govern City Dance Halls,” New York Times, 31 January 1909. 17. Israels, “The Way of the Girl,” 490. In 1896, legislators in New York passed the Raines Law, which required saloons to close on Sunday unless attached to hotels. In response, saloonkeepers began attaching rooms to their saloons (the minimum number of rooms was ten) to avoid closing on Sundays. See Chauncey, Gay New York, 160. 18. Russel B. Nye, “Saturday Night at the Paradise Ballroom: Or, Dance Halls in the Twenties,” Journal of Popular Culture 7 (Summer 1973): 18; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 95–96. 19. Cressey, The Taxi Dance Hall, 22–24; Gregory Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” American Mercury (June 1924): 177; Nye, “Saturday Night at the Paradise Ballroom,” 17. | 247 |

Notes to Chapter 2 20. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 177; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 95. 21. Investigator’s Report, “Vermont Garden Dance Hall,” December 8, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 22. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 178–179; Nye, “Saturday Night at the Paradise Ballroom,” 17. 23. Kerson Weinberg and Saul Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 24. For the most complete discussion of taxi-dance halls see Cressey, The Taxi Dance Hall; see also Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Mary V. Meckel, A Sociological Analysis of the California Taxi-Dancer: The Hidden Halls (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1995). 25. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 178. 26. Cressey, The Taxi Dance Hall, 27. 27. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 19. 28. Cressey, The Taxi Dance Hall, 8. 29. Nye, “Saturday Night at the Paradise Ballroom,” 17; Cressey, The Taxi Dance Hall, 222. 30. Cressey, The Taxi Dance Hall, 183, 190. 31. Ibid., 224. 32. Bert Perkins, “The Taxi Dance Hall,” Box 145, Folder 5, BUR. 33. Investigator’s Report, “Palace De Arts,” December 28, 1923, Folder 103, JPA. 34. Investigator’s Report, “Athenian,” December 15, 1923, Folder 103, JPA. 35. Bert Perkins, “The Taxi Dance Hall,” Box 145, Folder 5, BUR. 36. Deposition of “Olof B. Gustafson,” October 11, 1928, Folder 104, JPA. 37. Investigator’s Report, “Colonial Dance Hall,” October 20, 1932, in Bureau of Social Hygiene Project and Research Files, Folder 164, Microfilm Reel 4. 38. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 11–12. 39. Ibid., 30. 40. Edwards, Popular Amusements, 72; Nye, “Saturday Night at the Paradise Ballroom,” 14–15; “Annual Report of the Recreation Department,” in Third Annual Report of the Board of Public Welfare, April 18, 1911–April 15, 1912 (Kansas City, 1912), 193. 41. Madison Board of Commerce, Madison: The Four Lake City, Recreational Survey (Madison, Wis.: Board of Commerce, 1915), 61; Ellen Gardner, Public Dance Halls: Their Regulation and Place in the Recreation of Adolescents (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929), 10. | 248 |

Notes to Chapter 2 42. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 9, 20. On ethnic neighborhoods in Chicago see Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, 4th ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995); Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 43. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 177 44. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 45. LAZ-5, ICOHP, 41. 46. Sharon Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 297. On ethnicity and white-collar work, see also Nasaw, Going Out, 43–45. 47. On the declining hours of women’s work, see Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 41–45. See also Alice Kessler Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 187–188. 48. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 101. 49. Agnes De Mille, America Dances (New York: Macmillan, 1980), 16–17; On the history of dance, see also Peter Buckman, Let’s Dance: Social Ballroom and Folk Dancing (New York: Paddington Press, 1978); Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp, The History of Dance (London: Orbis, 1981); Marshal Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of the American Vernacular Dance (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 50. Edwards, Popular Amusements, 78. 51. Stearns, Jazz Dance, 15. 52. “Welfare Inspector at Society Dance,” New York Times, 4 January 1912. 53. “On with the Tango Now,” Kansas City Star, 2 December 1913. 54. Investigator’s Report, “Dreamland Dancing,” November 6, 7, 1930, Box 35, Committee of Fourteen, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (hereafter cited as COF). 55. Investigator’s Report, “Dreamland Dancing,” November 7, 8, 1930, Box 35, COF. 56. Investigator’s Report, “Dreamland Dancing,” November 6, 7, 1939, Box 35, COF. 57. Investigator’s Report, “Shadowland Dancing,” June 16, 1930, Box 35, COF. 58. David Nasaw in particular emphasizes the uniformity of dancing in different halls. See Nasaw, Going Out, 117. 59. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall, 179. 60. Perkins, “The Taxi Dance Hall,” Box 145, Folder 5, BUR. | 249 |

Notes to Chapter 2 61. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Kathy Peiss emphasizes the emergence of new dance steps and the development of different types of dance halls but does not suggest any relationship between the two. See Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 93–104. 65. Investigator’s Report, “Hall 1224 Milwaukee Ave,” Folder 104, JPA. 66. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 176. 67. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 68. Ibid. 69. “Dance Hall Evils Being Wiped Out,” New York Times, 28 May 1910. 70. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 30; Investigator’s Report, “Schoenhofer’s Hall,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA; Bowen, Road to Destruction, 11. 71. Investigator’s Report, “Progress Athletic Ass’n,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 72. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 73. TON-88, ICOHP, 35. Among second generation Italian American women in Nassau County, Mary Jane Capozzoli found that four out of five met their husbands at school, at a dance, at a skating rink, at a bowling alley, or in other public places such as the A&P. See Mary Jane Capozzoli, Three Generations of Italian-American Women in Nassau County, 1925–1981 (New York: Garland, 1990), 137. 74. Interview Robert Bonadonna, Lawrence, Kansas, August 29, 1995. 75. Clara G. Row, Paper on Dance Halls for Sociology 34, 1924, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR; Polonia or Polish American community. Edward R. Kantowicz notes that “By 1890 five large Polish colonies had been settled in Chicago. Each was in an area of heavy industry: Polish Downtown on the northwest side, just west of the Goose Island industrial complex; the Lower West Side, adjacent to many factories along the Burlington Railroad and the ship canal; Bridgeport and Back of the Yards, circling the Union Stock yards; and South Chicago, hard against the steel mills.” Two of these areas, Polish Downtown, near Division and Ashland Avenues, and the Polish area near the steel mills of South Chicago, were overwhelmingly Polish in population. The area at the intersection of Division Street and Milwaukee and Ashland avenues on the city’s near Northwest Side in the West Town Community area was so identified with the Polish that the city named a small park at the intersection Polonia Trian| 250 |

Notes to Chapter 2 gle. See Holli and Jones, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, 175–176, 604–606. 76. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 135–137. 77. For a look at the different sides of Progressivism see Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1992); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955); Stephen R. Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Boston: Little Brown, 1981); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). 78. Gardner, Public Dance Halls, 10. 79. On the regulation of dance halls before World War I see Perry, “‘The General Motherhood of the Common Wealth,’” 729–739. 80. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 17. 81. A. Louis Brownlow, “How Women Got into Police Work,” Policewoman’s International Bulletin, 4, no. 36 (February 1928), in The Bureau of Social Hygiene Project and Research Files, originals in Bureau of Social Hygiene Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, North Tarrytown, N.Y. (hereafter cited as BSH), Microfilm Reel no. 3, Series IV, Folder 745, 8–10. 82. Bowen, The Road to Destruction, 9. 83. Investigator’s Report, “White Casino and Dance Hall,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 84. “Instructions to Floor Men,” Folder 104, JPA. 85. On reformers see Nasaw, Going Out; Perry, “‘The General Motherhood of the Common Wealth,’” 729–730. 86. Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 384; Bowen, Road to Destruction, 9. 87. Edwards, Popular Amusements, 78. 88. Gardner, Public Dance Halls, 25. 89. Israels, “Way of the Girl,” 495; Rheta Childe Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want (Boston: Small, Maynard, and Company, 1910), 213–214; “East Siders Like Model Dance Hall,” New York Times, 6 February 1910. 90. On historians who have emphasized the dance hall owner’s appeal to women see Nasaw, Going Out, 104; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 97–99. 91. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 178. 92. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 93. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 23. | 251 |

Notes to Chapter 2 94. “Commercialized Prostitution in New York City in 1935,” in BSH, Microfilm Reel no. 4, Series III, Folder 164. 95. Juvenile Protective Association, Recreation Survey of Cincinnati (Cincinnati: Juvenile Protective Association, 1913), 31. 96. Investigator’s Report, “Keystone Lodge, Vandorf’s Hall,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 97. Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want, 220–221. 98. Investigator’s Report, “Terrace Gardens,” September 16, 1911, Box 28, COF. 99. Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want, 221. 100. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 37–38. 101. “‘An Evening in a Dance Palace,’ Adapted from Materials on The Natural History of Vice Areas in Chicago by Walter C. Reckless,” Handout for Sociology 34, Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 20. 102. Ibid. 103. Investigator’s Report, “Report on Blue Jay B & S Club Dance,” December 8, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 104. Investigator’s Report, “Keystone Lodge, Vandorf’s Hall,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA; Israels, “Way of the Girl,” 489. 105. Bowen, The Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 8; Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 385. 106. Edwards, Popular Amusements, 77. 107. Investigator’s Report, “North Side Turner Hall,” December 8, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 108. Investigator’s Report, “Schoenhofer’s Hall,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 109. “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 19. 110. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 111. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR; Bowen, The Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 5–6. 112. Bowen, The Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 5; Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 385. 113. Edwards, Popular Amusements, 78–79; Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 385. 114. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 115. Eleonore L. Hutzel, The Policewoman’s Handbook (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), 44–45. 116. Ibid., 44–45. 117. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 180. | 252 |

Notes to Chapter 3 118. Ibid. 119. Bowen, Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 6. 120. Investigator’s Report, “Keystone Lodge, Vandorf’s Hall,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 121. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 30. 122. Madison: The Four Lake City, 61. 123. At a masque ball at Chicago’s Vandorf’s Hall in 1917, a beer cost thirtyfive cents, soda twenty cents, and wine ten cents when admission was only fifty cents. See Investigator’s Report, “Keystone Lodge, Vandorf’s Hall,” December 1, 1917, folder 104, JPA. 124. Madison: The Four Lake City, 61. 125. Second Annual Report of the Board of Public Welfare, April 19, 1910–April 18, 1911 (Kansas City: N.P., 1911) 186; Fifth Annual Report of the Board of Public Welfare, April 21, 1913–April 20, 1914 (Kansas City: N.P., 1914), 47, 329. 126. Investigator’s Report, “Goodman’s Dance Hall,” January 3, 1931, Box 35, COF. 127. NER-106, ICOHP, 27. 128. Investigator’s Report, “Goodman’s Dance Hall,” January 3, 1931, Box 35, COF. 129. Investigator’s Report, “Public School 63,” September 20, 1919, Box 28, COF. 130. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 11. 131. Israels, “The Way of the Girl, 495. 132. Investigator’s Report, “Public School 63,” September 20, 1919, Box 28, COF. 133. “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 19. 134. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 135. Investigator’s Report, “Shadowland Dancing,” June 16, 1930, Box 35, COF.

Notes to Chapter 3 1. Investigator’s Report, November 2, 1913, Box 39, COF. 2. For a discussion of the problems historians have had in addressing the issue of conflict in heterosocial and heterosexual relations see Karen Dubinsky, Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 113–116. 3. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 175. For religious critiques of dance | 253 |

Notes to Chapter 3 halls see Don Luigi Satori, Modern Dances (Indiana: St. Joseph’s Printing Office, 1910); M. F. Ham, The Modern Dance: A Historical and Analytical Treatment of the Subject, 2nd ed. (1916). 4. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 5. “Want Law to Govern City Dance Halls,” New York Times, 31 January 1909. 6. Jane Addams, “The Failure of the Modern City to Provide Adequate Recreation,” Charities and the Commons 21 (5 December 1908): 365–366. 7. Juvenile Protective Association, Recreation Survey of Cincinnati, 31. 8. Addams, “Failure of the Modern City,” 366. 9. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 10. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 62–63. 11. Gaetano DeFilippis, “Social Life in an Immigrant Community,” Box 30, Folder 2, BUR, 23. 12. “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 19. 13. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 14. 14. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 135–136. 15. Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want, 212–213. 16. “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 18. 17. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 53–55. 18. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 36. 19. “Dancing Academies,” New York Times, 7 April 1909. 20. Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want, 208. 21. “Dancing Academies,” New York Times, 7 April 1909. 22. “Dance Hall Evils Being Wiped Out,” New York Times, 28 May 1910. 23. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 175. 24. Interview Joseph Lazzar, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 9. 25. Interview Industrial Workers, “Mr. A. T.,” Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 5. 26. Interview W. S. November 29, 1939, Box 92, Folder 202:1, CES, 5–6. 27. Interview Joseph Lazzar, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 7. 28. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 100–104; Nasaw, Going Out, 113. 29. Leslie Gotfrit, “Women Dancing Back: Disruption and the Politics of Pleasure,” in Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics ed. Henry A. Giroux (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 174–175; see also Leslie Gotfrit, “Dancing Back in the Jazz Age: Discourse of Danger and Possibilities of Pleasure” (Ph.D. diss. University of Toronto, 1992). | 254 |

Notes to Chapter 3 30. “Making Model Dance Halls a Paying Proposition,” New York Times, 10 November 1912. 31. Bowen, The Road to Destruction Made Easy, 11. 32. Investigator’s Report, “Plaza Dancing School,” May 28, 1917, Folder 103, JPA; Investigator’s Report, “Dreamland Dancing, November 7,8, 1930, Box 35, COF. 33. Gotfrit, “Women Dancing Back,” 174–175. 34. Bert Perkins, “The Taxi-Dance Hall,” Box 145, Folder 5, BUR. 35. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 12. 36. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 37. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 21. 38. “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 19. 39. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 177. 40. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 24. 41. “An Evening in the New American Dance Hall,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 42. Paul Cressey Notes, “Sam Goldberg,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR; Paul Cressey Notes, “Ed Griffis,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 43. Letter from Robert Bonadonna in author’s possession, November 1999. 44. Ibid. 45. “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 19. 46. Ibid. 47. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 25–26. 48. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 178–179. 49. For a copy of all the lyrics to “Jalousie” (Jealousy) see The Most Fantastic Fakebook in the World (Canada: Warners Bros., 1992), 324. 50. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 20. 51. Historian have generally emphasized conflict with middle-class reformers or parents or that surrounding consumption, but they have generally ignored men’s and women’s relationships on the dance floor. See for example Nasaw, Going Out, 104–119; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 67–72, 108–114. See also Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 31–34, 63. Bailey in particular deals with the issue of consumption and the etiquette surrounding the dance floor. 52. Investigator’s Report, “New American No. 1,” 1921, Folder 103, JPA. 53. Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 385. 54. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 10. 55. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 176–177. 56. Hewitt, Women, Families, and Communities, 254. | 255 |

Notes to Chapter 3 57. Cinel, From Italy to San Francisco, 163–165. 58. On immigration restriction and nativism see Higham, Strangers in the Land, 324; see also Dale T. Knobel, America for the Americans: The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1996), 260–261. For an exact count of the numbers of immigrants see Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 287–295. 59. Kerson Weinberg, “Jewish Youth in the Lawndale Community: A Sociological Study,” Paper for Sociology 269, n.d., Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 17–19. 60. Mormino, Immigrants on the Hill, 113. 61. Quote from Barrett, Work and Community in the Jungle, 100–101. 62. Karen Lystra notes that middle-class women were making these decisions about potential spouses much earlier. See Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 63. Sylvia G. L. Dannett and Frank R. Rachel, Down Memory Lane: Arthur Murray’s Picture Story of Social Dancing (New York: Greenberg, 1954). 64. “Social Workers See Real ‘Turkey Trots,’” New York Times, 27 January 1912. 65. “Here’s a Dance ‘System,’” Kansas City Star, 10 December 1913; “Standard Tango the Plan,” Kansas City Star, 9 December 1913. 66. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 67. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR; Lillian W. Betts, “Tenement-House Life and Recreation,” Outlook, 11 February 1899, 365. 68. “Danced His Way to Jail,” Kansas City Star, 25 November 1913. 69. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 70. Historians have emphasized the problem reformers had with so many variations, but they have ignored the potential confusion and problems the dancers faced (especially with regard to gender) and instead have constructed a dance floor in which conflict between the dancers was absent. See for example Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 100–104; Nasaw, Going Out, 118–119. 71. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 72. Gotfrit, “Dancing Back in the Jazz Age,” 45. 73. Elsie Janis, “The Castle Walk: How to Dance the New Steps,” Kansas City Star, 16 November 1913. 74. Carroll Family Letters, December 8, 1889, Private Collection Kerby Miller. 75. “Social Dancing,” Box 30, Folder 3, Young Women’s Christian Associa| 256 |

Notes to Chapter 3 tion Papers (hereafter cited as YWCA Papers), Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 4. Box 31, Folder 5 of the Young Women’s Christian Association contains case studies of immigrant women collected by the YWCA International Institute’s “Commission on the Problems of the Second Generation Girl.” The study was nation wide and included cities like New York, Cleveland, Akron (Ohio), Jersey City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Bridgeport, Connecticut. 76. Paul Cressey Notes, “Louise Tetlin,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 77. Michael M. Davis, Jr., The Exploitation of Pleasure: A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York City (New York: Department of Child Hygiene of the Russell Sage Foundation, 1919), 12–13. 78. “The Boy’s Wishes and Home Conflicts,” in Frederick M. Thrasher, “The Use of the Superior Boy in Research,” Reel 6, Folder 229, BSH (NYU Boys Club Study, 1930), 19–21. 79. “Dancing and the Dancers,” New York Times, 25 November 1912. 80. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 81. DeFilippis, “Social Life in an Immigrant Community,” Box 130, Folder 2, BUR, 8. 82. Paul Cressey Notes, “Lilian Stockley Wilson,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 83. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 84. See Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the ‘Outsider Within’: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33 (1986): 514–532; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1991), 201–220. 85. Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, 65–86; Gorn, The Manly Art, 129–147; on men’s socialization see Elizabeth Lunbeck, The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 231–236. 86. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 209, 223. 87. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 88. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 107–110; see also Paul Cressey Notes, “Annette and Hazeline McCormack,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR; Paul Cressey Notes, “William Krueger,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 89. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 20, 31–32. 90. Paul Cressey Notes, “Sam Goldberg,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 91. Ibid. 92. Paul Cressey Notes, No Author, No Title, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 93. Paul Cressey Notes, “Alma Nelson Zeitler,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 94. Ibid. | 257 |

Notes to Chapter 3 95. Investigator’s Report, November 2, 1913, Box 39, COF, 7–8. 96. Perkins, “The Taxi-Dance Hall,” Box 145, Folder 5, BUR. 97. Investigator’s Report, “Goodman’s Dance Hall,” October 30, 31, 1930, Box 35, COF, 4. 98. Investigator’s Report, “Schoenhofer’s Hall,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 99. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 30, 42. 100. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 19–20. 101. “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 20; “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 19. 102. TON-88, ICOHP, 33–34. 103. For the complete lyrics to “Coquette” and “There’s Yes! Yes! in Your Eyes” see The Most Fantastic Fakebook, 118, 621. 104. For the complete lyrics to “Don’t Bring Lulu” see The Most Fantastic Fakebook, 158. 105. For the complete lyrics to “Hard-Hearted Hannah (The Vamp of Savannah)” see The Most Fantastic Fakebook, 229. 106. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 19–20. 107. DeFilippis, “Social Life in an Immigrant Community,” Box 130, Folder 2, BUR, 2. 108. Paul Cressey Notes, “Charles Leeney,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 109. Israels, “The Way of the Girl,” 487. 110. Investigator’s Report, “Goodman’s Dance Hall,” October 28–29, 1930, Box 35, COF. 111. Paul Cressey Notes, “Lilian Stockley Wilson,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 112. Investigator’s Report, “Report of Miss Sidney Nov. 1–Nov. 8,” 1913, Box 39, COF, 2. 113. Investigator’s Report, “Report on Blue Jay B. & S. Club Dance,” December 8, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 114. Investigator’s Report, “Report of M. Sidney, Nov 19th to 25th,” 1913, Box 39, COF, 10–11.

Notes to Chapter 4 1. MAT-030 (1–4), Box 5, OHACP, 19, 57–58. 2. MAT-030 (5–6), Box 3, OHACP, 18–19. 3. On saloons see Jon Kingsdale, “The Poor Man’s Club,” 255–283; Duis, The Saloon, 113–125, 178–192; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, 35–64; Powers, “The ‘Poor Man’s Friend,’” 1–15. On working-class street corner gangs and poolrooms see Ellis, “Men Among Men,” 1–193. | 258 |

Notes to Chapter 4 4. For a discussion of compulsory heterosexuality see Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 631–660. 5. Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 384. 6. Bowen, The Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 6; Edwards, Popular Amusements, 80; Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 13. For the use of the term “circular,” see Investigator’s Report “Terrace Garden,” September 16, 1911, Box 28, COF. 7. “Making Model Dance Halls a Paying Proposition,” New York Times, 10 November 1912. 8. Dorr, What Eight Million Women Want, 206. 9. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 13. 10. Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 384. 11. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 12. Ibid. 13. “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 18–19; Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 180. 14. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 15. SIW-097 (1–2), Box 8, OHACP, 47. 16. SOW-090 (1–2), Box 8, OHACP, 39–40. 17. MON-024 (3–4), Box 6, OHACP, 2–3. 18. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 7–8. 19. “Survey of Commercial Recreation of Kansas City, Missouri,” in Third Annual Report of the Board of Public Welfare, April 18, 1911 to April 15, 1912 (Kansas City: N.P., 1912), 246. 20. Edwards, Popular Amusement, 71. 21. Bowen, The Road to Destruction, 11. 22. HAR-042 (1–2), Box 3, OHACP, 30. 23. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 180. 24. Investigator’s Report, “Athenian,” December 19, 1923, Folder 103, JPA. 25. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 42; Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 386. 26. Bowen, “Dance Halls,” 386; Bowen, Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 7; Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 12. 27. Investigator’s Report, “Progress Athletic Ass’n,” December 8, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 28. Investigator’s Report, “Report on Palace of Pleasure,” November 24, Folder 104, JPA. | 259 |

Notes to Chapter 4 29. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 30. Dorr, What Eight Million Girls Want, 213. 31. Israels, “The Way of the Girl,” 486–488, 493–494. 32. “A Room of Their Own,” Box 17, Folder 10, Henry Street Settlement Records, Social Welfare History Archives (hereafter cited as HSSR), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 5. 33. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR; on consumption patterns among white-collar workers see Nasaw, Going Out, 40–41. 34. “Life History No. 2,” Box 85, Folder 187:4, CES, 9 35. Paul Cressey Notes, “Ed Griffis, Alias Dale,” Box 126, Folder 6, BUR. 36. Kerson Weinberg, “Jewish Youth in the Lawndale Community,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 21. 37. Interview Bonadonna, 29 August 1995. 38. For another look at men’s frustration see Kevin White, The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 98–105. For a look at conflict between men and women during the nineteenth century see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 39. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 13–14. 40. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 36. 41. For the phrase “great unmatched,” see “An Evening in a Dance Palace,” Box 31, Folder 4, BUR, 19. 42. Bowen, Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 4. 43. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 42. 44. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 13. 45. Ade, The Old-Time Saloon, 27. 46. Powers, Faces along the Bar, 30, 39, 166, 168. 47. Bowen, Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 4. 48. Clara G. Row, Paper on Dance Halls for Sociology 34, 1924, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR; Kathy Peiss also notes that when entrepreneurs began to try and attract a female clientele to various commercial amusements, they made men take off their hats. See Kathy Peiss, “Leisure and the ‘Woman Question,’” in For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, Butsch, Richard ed. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 109. 49. Paul Cressey Notes, “Lilian Stockley Wilson,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 50. Clara G. Row, Paper on Dance Halls, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 51. For a complete discussion of social clubs see chapter 5. | 260 |

Notes to Chapter 4 52. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 6–8, especially 7; Kathy Peiss argues that the “affirmation of heterosociality was pervasive” throughout the early twentieth century in dance halls, amusement parks, movie houses, and other new forms of commercial entertainment. 53. Investigator’s Report, “Fountain Inn,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA; see also Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall.” 54. Board of Commerce, Madison: The Four Lake City, 61. 55. Investigator’s Report, “Terrace Garden,” September 16, 1911, Box 28, COF. 56. Bowen, Public Dance Halls of Chicago, 4. 57. Julie A. Willett, Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 41–42. 58. Duis, The Saloon, 28. 59. James H. Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 182; Clark, Deliver Us from Evil, 146. 60. Clark, Deliver Us from Evil, 144. 61. Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, 40–45. 62. Herbert Asbury, The Great Illusion (New York: Doubleday, 1950), 228; Duis, The Saloon, 222; Mormino, Italians on the Hill, 130. 63. Asbury, The Great Illusion, 228; Mormino, Italians on the Hill, 130. 64. Chauncey, Gay New York, 307. 65. Willett, Permanent Waves, 41–42. 66. Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within,” 517–518. 67. For a complete look at the lyrics of “Ten Cents a Dance” see The Most Fantastic Fakebook, 609. 68. Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1995), 53–56; other recent studies of dance include Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); on the new cultural studies and dance see Jane C. Desmond, ed., Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 69. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 17; Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 70. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 24. 71. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 72. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 73. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 74. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 28. | 261 |

Notes to Chapter 4 75. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 76. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 28. 77. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 13. 78. Investigator’s Report, “30th Ward Woodrow Wilson Club,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA; Kevin White argues that “differences in ethnicity” had little impact on the development of commercial leisure. See White, The First Sexual Revolution, 82. 79. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 80. Jan-116 (3–4), Box 3, OHACP, 10. 81. LAZ-5, ICOHP, 42. 82. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 28–29. 83. Mason, “Satan in the Dance Hall,” 180; Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 23. 84. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out, 136. 85. Olga Kulbitsky, “Dance—A Sport for Men,” in Focus on Dance VI: Ethnic and Recreational Dance, ed. Jane Harris Ericson (Washington, D.C.: American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1972), 63–64. 86. Ensemble dances were in fact so helpful in making men feel more comfortable when starting to dance that they were still being used in beginning dance classes in the 1970s. At Hunter College in the 1970s, “highly skilled athletes with no previous training in dance” were required to take a course on dance as part of their physical education major. The selected no-partner dances, such as the Mechol Ovadya, an Israeli dance based on a drum pattern; the Rumunjsko Kolo, a Yugoslav men’s dance; the Hora, a festive Jewish dance; and the Greek Sytros, a dance with a Rhumba beat, were considered “encouraging starters in a man’s dance program.” For both college undergraduates at Hunter College in the 1970s and immigrants at the turn of the century who were either unfamiliar with dance or used to dancing in a group formation, ensemble and mass dancing reaffirmed the male culture to which most men had grown accustomed while reproducing the same type of social context that allowed men’s boisterous and unruly behavior to thrive. See Kulbitsky, “Dance—A Sport for Men,” 63–64. 87. Clara Grillo, Box 1, “Little Italy, Cleveland Ohio,” IHRC, 13–14. 88. “Seminar—Wednesday March 14, 1934,” Box 65, “The Boy and His Family—Motion Picture Study and Seminar,” LCP, 23. 89. Italian Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection, Box 7, Michael Lamont, IRHC, 4. 90. Israels, “Way of the Girl,” 489. | 262 |

Notes to Chapter 4 91. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 92. David Nasaw, Going Out, 119. 93. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 28–29. 94. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 95. On the Rating and Dating Complex see Willard Waller, “The Rating and Dating Complex,” American Sociological Review 2(1937): 727–734; see also Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 26–29, 31–33. 96. LES-032 Box 4, OHACP, 9. 97. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 98. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 99. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 34. 100. “A Study of Gaelic Park,” Box 129, Folder 7, BUR, 13, 28. 101. “Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 102. Paul Cressey Notes, No Author, No Title, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. Kevin Mumford also discusses the violence in taxi-dance halls. See Mumford, Interzones, esp. chapter 4. 103. Edwards, Popular Amusements, 78. 104. Bowen, Public Dance Halls in Chicago, 5. 105. “A Study of Behavior Problems in the Lower North Community,” Box 135, Folder 4, BUR, 23–24. In some cases reformers feared shootings. See “East Siders Like Model Dance Hall,” New York Times, 6 February 1910. 106. Gardner, Public Dance Halls, 19–20; see also “Plans Model Dance Hall,” New York Times, 1 October 1912. 107. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR; see also Investigator’s Report, “Report on Dreamland,” Folder 104, JPA. 108. Investigator’s Report, “New American No. 1,” May 14, 1927, Folder 103, JPA. 109. Investigator’s Report, “White City Casino and Dance Hall,” December 1, 1917, Folder 104, JPA. 110. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995; letter from Bonadonna, May 19, 1995, in author’s possession. 111. Paul Cressey Notes, No Author, No Title, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR; in Chicago, Paul Cressey found that some taxi-dance halls catered to specific tastes and clienteles. The Oakley Dancing School attracted “the Filipinos who wish nice girls and wish to dance decorously.” The New American No. 1 and the New Majestic specialized “upon those parties who under no circumstances will associate with Orientals and who want sensual dancing. They are mostly either young | 263 |

Notes to Chapter 4 boys of Italian or Polish extraction or older men.” See “Summary of the Trends in the Closed Dance Halls,” Folder 103, JPA. 112. In his study of taxi-dance halls in Chicago, Bert Perkins found that around 60 percent of the hostesses were Polish. See Perkins, “The Taxi Dance Hall,” Box 145, Folder 5, BUR; for a discussion of these men’s relationships see Barbara M. Posadas, “Crossed Boundaries in Interracial Chicago’s Pilipino American Families since 1925,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, 2nd ed., Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, 1994), 316–329. For a larger discussion of the experiences of Asian immigrants see Ronald T. Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little Brown, 1989). 113. Paul Cressey Notes, “Journal of Documents, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 114. Paul Cressey Notes, No Author, No Title, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 115. Paul Cressey Notes, “Journal of Documents,” November 10, 1925, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 116. Paul Cressey Notes, No Author, No Title, February 6, 1926, Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 117. Weinberg and Alinsky, “The Public Dance Hall,” Box 126, Folder 10, BUR. 118. Frederick Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (abridged) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 39, 200. 119. Paul Cressey Notes, “Sam Goldberg,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 120. “Growth of Bridgeport,” Box 21, Folder 109:11, CES, 3. 121. “Sex Attitudes and History,” Box 186, Folder 6, BUR, 2. 122. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 123. Paul Cressey Notes, “Life Story of One Dancing Girl,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 124. Paul Cressey Notes, “Lilian Stockley Wilson,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. Italian men were certainly not the only men with a reputation, but a persistent myth attaches to them. See Jonathan Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn (Boston Harvard University Press, 1985), 27, 35–37, 48, 182–184. Josh Freeman also notes that Jewish men could be just as tough. See Joshua B. Freeman, “Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 Pro-War Demonstrations,” Journal of Social History 26 (Summer 1993): footnote 28. 125. “Interview with Helen,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 126. “Interview with Helen V.,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA papers. On the “in-between” status of Italians see Robert Orsi, “The Religious Boundaries of an In-Between People: Street Feste and the Problem of the Dark-Skinned ‘Other’ in Italian Harlem, 1920–1990,” American Quarterly 44 (September 1992): 313–347. | 264 |

Notes to Chapter 5 127. ULM-051 (1–2), Box 9, OHACP, 12. 128. LES-032, Box 4, OHACP, 2. 129. HOJ-040 (1–3), Box 3, OHACP, 2. 130. ORK-115 (3), Box 6, OHACP, 11–12, 21–24. 131. STO-136 (6–10), Box 8, OHACP, 102–103. 132. Interview with Mary P., Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 2, 5. 133. MAD-046 (1–2), Box 5, OHACP, 22–23. 134. HOJ-040 (4–5), Box 3, OHACP, 51. 135. RUT-033 (5–6), Box 7, OHACP, 29–30. 136. BLA-008 (1–2), Box 1, OHACP, 19. 137. RUT-033 (5–6), Box 7, OHACP, 34. 138. MID-019 (1–2), Box 6, OHACP, 1–2. 139. STO-136 (1–5), Box 8, OHACP, 64–65. 140. STO-136 (1–5), Box 8, OHACP, 93–96. 141. STO-136 (1–5), Box 8, OHACP, 92. The experiences of women like Mary seem to support John Bodnar’s argument about the importance of family. See Bodnar, The Transplanted, 57–66. 142. Some historians have suggested that any association with commercial leisure somehow led the second generation astray. See for example John Bukowczyk, And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish Americans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 75. See also White, First Sexual Revolution. White also emphasizes how commercial leisure hastened the process of Americanization. Lizabeth Cohen notes that it was through commercial leisure that the second generation learned about being ethnic. But these authors have ignored how the second generation’s experience with commercial leisure ensured that their parents remained an important part of dating and courtship. See for example Cohen, Making a New Deal, 187.

Notes to Chapter 5 1. Paul Cressey Notes, “William Krueger,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. On Middle-class men’s clubs see Mark C. Carnes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 2. “How They Begin,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 17. See also Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 59–62; Juvenile Protective Association, Recreation Survey of Cincinnati (1913), 21. 3. “‘Cellar Clubs,’ Hit as Peril to Youth,” World Telegram (New York), 22 November 1938. 4. “Rooms of Their Own,” Evening Public Ledger (Philadelphia), 1 August 1939. | 265 |

Notes to Chapter 5 5. Thrasher, The Gang, 52; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 59; John Mariano, The Second Generation of Italians in New York City (Boston: Christopher, 1921), 141; “Report Defends Cellar Club of East Side Youth,” New York Herald Tribune, 24 July 1939; “‘Cellar Club,’ Not a Crime Peril,” New York Times, 24 July 1939; Juvenile Protective Association, Recreation Survey of Cincinnati, 21. 6. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” 57. 7. Chauncey, Gay New York, 80. 8. Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 160; Victor Turner, Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), 132. 9. Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York: Knopf, 1927), 268–69. 10. Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 55. 11. Raymond Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), 50–52. 12. Davis, The Exploitation of Pleasure, 18–19; for dance hall admission prices see Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 97; on different efforts to clean up machine politics see Chudacoff and Smith, The Evolution of American Urban Society, 170–172, 176–177, 253–254. 13. “Report Defends Cellar Clubs of East Side Youth,” New York Herald Tribune, 24 July 1939; Davis, Exploitation of Pleasure, 18–19. 14. Thrasher, The Gang, 60–61; “‘Cellar Clubs,’ Hit as Peril to Youth,” World Telegram (New York), 22 November 1938; Asbury, Gangs of New York, 269; Frederic M. Thrasher, “Final Report of the Jefferson Park Branch of the Boys’ Club of New York,” Reel No. 7, Series III, Unnumbered Folder, BSH, 212. 15. “A Room of Their Own,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 2–3. 16. Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR; Susan Porter Benson initially came up with the term “main street” clubs. 17. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 60. 18. Mariano, The Second Generation, 141; on ethnicity and social clubs see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal, 145. 19. Ray D. Phelps, “The History of the Eastside Dudes, A Black Social Club in Central Harlem, New York City, 1933–1985: An Exploration of Background Factors Related to Adult Criminality” (Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1987), 65, 165. | 266 |

Notes to Chapter 5 20. Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, 47. 21. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 59; Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, 49. 22. Madison: The Four Lake City, 64. 23. Rowland Haynes, “Recreation Survey of Kansas City, Mo.” in Second Annual Report of the Recreation Department of the Board of Public Welfare, April 18, 1911–April 15, 1912 (Kansas City, 1912), 199–200. 24. Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, 50; Cincinnati’s 1913 directory gives a list of 190 “Pleasure, Social, Outing, and Fishing Clubs,” while a “further list from the Mayor’s office brings the number up to 214.” See Juvenile Protective Association, Recreation Survey of Cincinnati, 21. 25. “Report Defends Cellar Club of East Side Youth,” New York Herald Tribune, 24 July 1939. 26. National Recreation Association, “A Report of a Study of Leisure Time Activities and Desires,” February 1934; see also Jesse F. Steiner, Research Memorandum on Recreation in the Depression (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937), 16–36; Reislia Heller, “Recreation and Depression,” Paper for Sociology 358, n.d., Box 176, Folder 3, BUR; R. L. Masters, “Amusement in the Depression,” Paper for Sociology 358, January 10, 1935, Box 176, Folder 4, BUR. 27. Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon, 49. 28. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995; letter from Bonadonna, May 1995, in author’s possession. 29. “Club Regal Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 26. 30. “A Room of Their Own,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 3–4; see also Isadore Zeligs, “A Study of Basement Social Clubs,” Paper for Sociology 270, 1928, Box 142, Folder 3, BUR, 3. 31. “Club Regal Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 24. 32. Studies of Unemployment, Box 45, Folder 45:6, Unemployment Case Studies of Unemployment Draft, 1930, Helen Hall Papers, Social Welfare History Archives, 14. 33. “Club Regal Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 24. 34. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 51. 35. “How They Begin,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 17. 36. “The Boy’s Wishes and Home Conflicts,” in Frederick M. Thrasher, “The Use of the Superior Boy,” 19–21. 37. “The Melody Moon Club,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 40–41; “Club Regal Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 24. 38. Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR, 5; George C. Stoney, “Club Life in a Cellar,” New York Times Magazine, 10 September 1939, 8; “Fri-Le-Has Social Club Inc. (Lenton),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 1. | 267 |

Notes to Chapter 5 39. “Club Regal Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 30; for another description of club social nights see Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 53. 40. “Circle Social Club (Square Club), Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2; “Social Nights,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 50. 41. “The Melody Moon Club,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 43; Athlitso Social Club (Soliath), Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 1. 42. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 61, 90–93; “‘Cellar Club,’ Held Not a Crime Peril,” New York Times, 24 July 1939; “Finances,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR; Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 54; some clubs even put on parades before the night of the big dance. See “Club Dances,” Chicago Area Project Papers, Box 91, Folder 7, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Illinois, 3. 43. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 61, 90–93; “‘Cellar Club,’ Held Not a Crime Peril,” New York Times, 24 July 1939; “Finances,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR; Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 54. Asbury argues that club members resorted to intimidation to compel local merchants and other businessmen to buy tickets for their affairs. See Asbury, The Gangs of New York, 270. 44. Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR, 6–7; see also Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 51. 45. “Club Colossal,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3. 46. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 70. 47. “Cerise Social Club,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4. 48. “Club Regal Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 29. 49. “Katherine Street Boys, Inc. (Governour Street Boys),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3. 50. On men’s ages in the 1920s see Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR, 4,9, 13, 17; Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 51; on men’s ages in the 1930s see “Index to Tables of Facts about the 28 Clubs,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 4. 51. “Club Regal Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 24. 52. On the bachelor subculture see George Chauncey, Gay New York; Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will, 57–64, 74–81; Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 115–116. 53. Thrasher, “The Boys’ Club of New York,” Reel 7, Series III, Unnumbered folder, BSH, 207. 54. “Interview of Frederick J. Santoianni,” May 4, 1939, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 10. 55. “Social Club Study,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 2. | 268 |

Notes to Chapter 5 56. “Broadway Strutters (Ukelele Aces) Social Club Inc., Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 1–2; on working-class manhood see Robert Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 34–67; Peter Stearns, Be a Man: Males in Modern Society (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), 76; for a look at middle-class masculinity see E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996). 57. Stoney, “Club Life,” 8; see also Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 52–53; on the relationship among work, community, and leisure see Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 45–51; Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Poverty in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 8–28; on alienated work see Barbara Garson, All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 92–105. 58. “Joy-Goys Social Club (Go-Guys),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4; “Perfecto Social Club (Acme),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 5; “Clin-Hes Social Club (Riv-Del),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2. 59. “Perfecto Social Club (Acme),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2–4; “The Boy’s Wishes and Home Conflicts,” in Thrasher, “The Use of the Superior Boy in Research,” Reel 6, Folder 229, BSH, 19. 60. “The Boy’s Wishes and Home Conflicts” in Thrasher, “The Use of the Superior boy in Research,” Reel 6, Folder 229, BSH, 21. 61. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 66. 62. “Wa Del Social Club,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3; Thrasher, “The Boys’ Club of New York,” Reel 7, Series III, Unnumbered Folder, BSH, 211; “Perfecto Social Club (Acme),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 1–2; “Club Colossal,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 1; “Resume of Club Imperial (Club Majestic),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4; “Broadway Strutters (Ukelele Aces) Social Club Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 1. 63. “Perfecto Social Club (Acme),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR; see also Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 67. 64. On hostility towards domesticity see Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 105–107; Chauncey, Gay New York, 76–79; Gorn, The Manly Art, 142. 65. “Popular Street Boys Association (Rutgers St. Boys Assn. Inc.),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2–3. 66. Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, 160. 67. George Chauncey recognizes a gap between the bachelor subculture and the breadwinner ethic. See Chauncey, Gay New York, 79–80. 68. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 68–69. | 269 |

Notes to Chapter 5 69. Thrasher, The Gang, 28, 134–135. 70. Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago, 12–17. The grand jury explicitly cited the Ragen’s Colts, a “mostly Irish American” club that kept a hangout at Fifty-Second and Halstead Streets and “operated with automobiles” from which they managed to “bump off a number of niggers.” Some of Ragen’s Colts were also implicated in the raid on Shield’s Avenue, where black families occupied a row of nine houses that were set upon by as many as two hundred to three hundred young men. The men “started at one corner and worked through the block throwing furniture out of windows and setting fires.” Other athletic and social clubs involved in the riots included members of the Sparkler’s Club, who were seen setting fires to black homes on Wentworth Avenue, and the Aylward Club, whose members attacked and beat blacks with clubs as they left the stockyards. The Ragen’s Colts were apparently organized and supported by politicians in Chicago. But, some evidence suggests that other clubs, which were independent, also may have been involved in the riots. While a third of the reported incidents of violence occurred in the Black Belt, 41 percent took place in a white neighborhood west of the Black Belt and near the stockyards where social clubs also thrived. See Cohen, Making a New Deal, 27–38; for more details about the riot see also William M. Tuttle, Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1970). 71. “Joy-Goys Social Club (Go-Guys),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3. 72. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 23, 70; on stag parties see Thrasher, The Gang, 164–165. 73. Thrasher, The Gang, 224. 74. “Dreamalong Social Club,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3. 75. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995; letter from Bonadonna, May 1995, in author’s possession. 76. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 23, 70. 77. Interview Bonadonna, August 29, 1995. 78. Chauncey, Gay New York, 47–48, 80. 79. Bonadonna quoted a portion of the lyrics from “Wedding Bells (Are Breaking Up That Old Gang Of Mine)”; see letter from Bonadonna, May 1995, in author’s possession. For a look at the complete lyrics see Singalong Funfest (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1990), 77–79. 80. Thrasher, The Gang, 39–40. 81. Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR, 15. 82. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 244. 83. Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR. | 270 |

Notes to Chapter 5 84. “Ohyeah Social Club (Sowatt),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3; “B.R.A. (Benjamin Rothbergh Assn.),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2; “Athlitso Social Club (Soliath),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2. 85. “Resume of Club Imperial (Club Majestic),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3; “Athlitso Social Club (Soliath),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2. 86. “Perfecto Social Club (Acme),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4; “How the Fellows Behave,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 57; “Joy-Goys Social Club (GoGuys),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4; “Resume of Club Imperial (Club Majestic),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3; Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 67. 87. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 67. 88. “Joy-Goys Social Club (Go-Guys),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3; “Perfecto Social Club (Acme),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4; “Seward Street Boys Social Club Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4; “Athlitso Social Club (Soliath),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2. 89. “Athlitso Social Club (Soliath),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2. 90. “Popular Street Boys Association (Rutgers Street Boys Assn. Inc.)” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3; “Broadway Strutters (Ukelele Aces) Social Club Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 5; Stoney, “Club Life,” 8; Thrasher, “Boys Club of New York,” Reel 7, Series III, Unnumbered Folder, BSH, 307; “B.R.A. (Benjamin Rothbergh Assn.),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3. 91. “The Block Dances,” in Frederic M. Thrasher, “The Use of the Superior Boy in Research,” Reel 6, Folder 229, BSH, 8–9. 92. “Circle Social Club (Square Club), Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 1–2; Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR, 19; “Broadway Strutters (Ukelele Aces) Social Club Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4. 93. See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 120–124; Robin Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 75–112; on mutual aid societies see Cohen, Making a New Deal, 64–75, 147; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 60. According to Isadore Zeligs, during the 1920s, the clubs that generally took part in political protest or donated money to charity generally included men in their late twenties, rather than men who were only interested in social nights, who were generally in their late teens and early twenties. See Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR, 17. 94. “Club Neighborhoods,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 15; “Club Life,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 49; “Dreamalong Social Club,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2; Stoney, “Club Life,” 8; Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 13; “Fri-Le-Has Social Club Inc. (Lenton),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 1. On the | 271 |

Notes to Chapter 5 use of public space see George Lipsitz, “We Know What Time It Is: Race, Class and Youth Culture in the Nineties,” in Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 17–28. 95. “Joy-Goys Social Club (Go-Guys),” Box 10, Folder 9, HSSR, 4. 96. Ibid., 3–4. 97. For a discussion of middle-class peer subcultures see Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), especially chapter 3; Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat; 78–79; among the working class see Peiss, Cheap Amusements , 45–51, 97–100; Chauncey, Gay New York , 76–86; Joanne J. Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 107–119. 98. “The Melody Moon Club,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 43; “Club Regal Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 27; Stoney, “Club Life,” 8; Zeligs, “Basement Social Clubs,” Box 142, Folder 3, BUR, 3–4; Thrasher, “Boys Club of New York,” Reel 7, Series III, Unnumbered Folder, BSH, 307; Ray Oldenburg argues that in male spaces, “Windows were curtainless or covered with nothing more attractive than flour sack material”; Oldenburg, The Great Good Place, 241. On the respectability of clean, white curtains see Mary Heaton Vorse, A Footnote to Folly: Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 281–82. 99. “Circle Social Club (Square Club),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2. 100. “Popular Street Boys Association (Rutgers St. Boys Assn. Inc.),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3. 101. “Revers Social Club (Ramblers),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3; “Report Defends Cellar Clubs of East Side Youth,” New York Herald Tribune, 24 July 1939. 102. Paul Cressey Notes, “William Krueger,” Box 129, Folder 6, BUR. 103. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat, 19–21. 104. “Joy-Guys Social Club (Go-Goys),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4. Some women found social clubs friendlier than dance halls. See Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 55. 105. On regulating women’s sexuality see John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 184–185; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 58; Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 115–117. 106. “Melody Moon Club,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 43. | 272 |

Notes to Chapter 6 107. “Golden Slippers Social Club (Silver Stars),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2–3. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 110. Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 70–73. 111. “Broadway Strutters (Ukelele Aces) Social Club Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3. 112. “Grover Street Boys, Inc. (Madison St. Boys),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3. 113. “Broadway Strutters (Ukelele Aces) Social Club Inc.,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 4–5. 114. “Index Tables of Facts about the 28 Clubs,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 6. 115. “Wa-Del Social Club,” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 2–3; “Social Nights,” Box 17, Folder 10, HSSR, 50; Weinberg, “Jewish Youth,” Box 139, Folder 3, BUR, 55. 116. “Resume of Club Imperial (Club Majestic),” Box 17, Folder 9, HSSR, 3–4; Stoney, “Club Life,” 8. 117. On marriage rates for second-generation immigrants see David Heer, “The Marital Status of Second-Generation Americans,” American Sociological Review 26, 2 (1961): 233–241; see also Josef J. Barton, Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians, and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 164. 118. Donna Gabaccia notes that women married later because their parents were dependent upon their wages. See for example Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 67. 119. ARE-055 (1), Box 1, OHACP, 7–8. 120. Anon-089 (3–4), Box 10, OHACP, 12–17. 121. Ade, The Old-Time Saloon, 123.

Notes to Chapter 6 1.”Interview with Clara P.,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers, 1–2. 2. “Interview with Elisabeth,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers, 2. On conflict between immigrant parents and their children see Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 210–216; Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 67–72; Sydney Stahl Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 115–119; on Mexican | 273 |

Notes to Chapter 6 immigrants and their children see Vicki L. Ruiz, “The Flapper and the Chaperone: Historical Memory among Mexican-American Women,” in Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States, ed. Donna Gabaccia (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). 3. “Interview with Irene,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 4. Ibid. 5. “Interview with Elisabeth,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 6. CLE-47, ICOHP, 11–12. 7. Ibid, 12–13. 8. Ruth S. True, The Neglected Girl (New York: The True Press, 1914), 47–49. 9. Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 68. See also Lynn Jamieson, “Limited Resources and Limiting Conventions: Working-Class Mothers and Daughters in Urban Scotland, 1890–1925,” in Labour and Love, ed. Jane Lewis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986): 49–69. 10. “Study of a Family,” Box 93, Folder “Family in America,” 1938–1939, LCP, 7–8. 11. “Life History No. 2,” Box 85, Folder 187:4, CES, 3–4. 12. “Interview with Jolan,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 13. Ibid. 14. “Interview with Rose, “ Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 15. “Study of a Family,” Box 93, Folder “Family in America,” 1938–1939, LCP, 10. 16. Ibid., 11. 17. “Interview of M. P.,” Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 2–4. 18. “Mary—Greek,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 19. Stephen Orlando, “Children of Foreign Parentage,” Box 65, Folder “Italians in U.S.—the Boy and His Family,” LCP, 21–22. On the psychological strain young women faced when torn between the world of their mothers and their own, see Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers, 121. 20. Interview of M. P.,” Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 6; Weinberg notes that mothers were more likely to give in to their daughters than were fathers; Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers, 121. 21. TON-88, ICOHP, 33. 22. “Study of a Family,” Box 93, Folder “Family in America,” 1938–1939, LCP, 13; Weinberg also notes that parents generally acquiesced rather than ostracize a daughter. Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers, 122. 23. HOJ-040 (4–5), Box 3, OHACP, 46. 24. DEP-127 (1–2), Box 2, OHACP, 23–24. 25. ANON-089 (3–4), Box 10, OHACP, 14. | 274 |

Notes to Chapter 6 26. CAR-35, ICOHP, 21. 27. TON-88, ICOHP, 5, 19. 28. Ibid., 33–34; Angeline did emphasize that her parents were more liberal than most Italians because they were from northern Italy. 29. Many immigrant parents, as Robert Orsi argues, absolutely refused to accept their daughters’ understanding of intimacy and leisure, which not only led to a considerable amount of conflict and “generated burdens of guilt, anxiety, anger, and frustration” but also compelled the members of the second generation to repress “their own needs and emotions.” See Robert Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street, 127–129. 30. Stocking, A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh, 21. For other examples of sneaking out see Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 70, and Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 213–214. 31. Interview M. B.,Second-Generation Italian, Box 22, Folder 109: 2, CES, 7. 32. Investigator’s Report, November 2, 1913, Box 39, COF. 33. Ork-115 (3–4), Box 7, OHACP, 10–11. 34. Investigator’s Report, “Public School 63,” September 20, 1919, Box 28, COF. 35. “Life History No. 2,” Box 85, Folder 187:4, CES, 9. 36. Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 107–108. 37. True, The Neglected Girl, 47–49. 38. “Study of a Family,” Box 93, Folder “Family in America 1938–1939,” LCP, 8. 39. True, The Neglected Girl, 47–49. 40. “Study of a Family,” Box 93, Folder “Family in America 1938–1939,” LCP, 8. 41. Historians have noted the practice of sneaking out, but they have overlooked how such a strategy led to changes in courtship patterns. See Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 70; Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 214. 42. C. L. Jepelino, “Italo-American Family Problems,” Box 93, Folder “Family Problems,” 1941, LCP, 6–7. 43. “Mrs. Rose P.,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 44. “Helen C.,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers; Ewen emphasizes sibling solidarity; see Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 212–213. Peiss shows how one woman’s experience differed from her sister’s; see Peiss, Cheap Amusements, 70–71. 45. “Helen C.” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 46. “Study of a Family,” Box 93, Folder “Family in America, “ 1938–1939, LCP, 8–9. | 275 |

Notes to Chapter 6 47. Ewen also emphasizes how sisters watched out for one another and worked together. See Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 212–214. 48. “Interview with Florence B.,” Box 31, Folder 5, YWCA Papers. 49. Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 196–197. 50. BAC-72, ICOHP, 18–19. 51. MAT-030 (5–6) OHACP, 8, 12. 52. Susan Glenn, for example, cautions us to not draw too rigid a line between daughters and mothers with regard to leisure and consumption. After all, Glenn argues, many mothers were just as eager to take part in these urban pleasures as their children, and their “daughters would soon drop out of the work force to become wives and mothers themselves and were bound to take their own fascination with consumerism into the world of domestic life.” See Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 162–163. 53. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl, 161. In a similar fashion Weinberg suggests that mothers also took part in this new would of consumption through their daughters. See Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers, 123. See also Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumerism and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), chapter 6. Heinze argues that what distinguished daughters from mothers was that mothers had well-developed bargain-hunting skills that they applied to the world of urban consumer life. Mothers undoubtedly had more experience than their daughters, but as noted in chapter 3, young women could be particularly shrewd at bargaining for certain treats. 54. MAT-030 (1–4), Box 5, OHACP, 8, 48. 55. DOM–87, ICOHP, 61. 56. Ibid. 57. “The Story of Mrs. B,” November 17, 1937, Box 89, Folder 195:2, CES, 1. 58. “Personal History of Early New Britain Residents,” Case Number 1, February 20, 1939, Box 87, Folder 187:7b, CES, 5. 59. HOJ–040 (4-5), Box 3, OHACP, 52-53. 60. Orsi, Madonna of 115th Street, 131-133. 61. ANON-089 (3–4), Box 10, OHACP, 6. 62. HOJ-040 (4–5), Box 3, OHACP, 52. 63. BAJ-087, (1), Box 1, OHACP, 7. 64. MAT-013 (2), Box 5, OHACP, 13. 65. Dabkowski, “Polish Marriages,” Box 86, Folder 187:7a, CES, 4. 66. HOJ-040 (3–4), Box 3, OHACP, 52; see also SIW-097, Box 8, OHACP, 49. | 276 |

Notes to Chapter 6 67. STA-029, (1–2), Box 8, OHACP, 2. 68. SIW (1–2), Box 8, OHACP, 51–52. 69. Teresa L. Amott and Julie A. Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 113, 301; on comparisons between black and Italian women see Elizabeth H. Pleck, “A Mother’s Wages: Income Earning among Married Italian and Black Women, 1896–1911,” in A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979): 367–392. 70. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 5–6. 71. Veronica Siwek paid $80 for her dress; see SIW-097 (1–2), OHACP, 49–51, 53. 72. DOM-87, ICOHP, 70–71. 73. Elizabeth Ewen notes that the second generation could no longer afford the expensive hall weddings, but she does not explain what took their place. See Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, 237. 74. LES-032, Box 4, OHACP. 75. CZA-063 (1–2), Box 2, OHACP, 31, 35. 76. MAD-046 (3–4), Box 5, OHACP, 22–24. 77. MAT-030 (5–6), BOX 5, OHACP, 13–14, 20. 78. ROL-059 (3–4), Box 7, OHACP, 17. 79. See Pacyga, Polish Immigrants, 118. 80. BLA-008 (3–4), Box 1, OHACP, 9. For a discussion of the ways in which immigrants invented traditions or recreated themselves see Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Kathleen Neils Conzen et al., “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.,” Journal of American Ethnic History, 12 (Fall 1992): 3–41. See also Mary C. Waters, Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 81. “Personal Life History of New Britain Poles,” Box 87, Folder 187:2b, CES, 5–6. 82. DOM-87, ICOHP, 70. 83. CAR-35, ICOHP, 22. 84. COS-2, ICOHP, 20–21. 85. Interview Pasquale Russo, January 11, 1939, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 2. 86. Interview Liberato Dattolo, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 5. 87. New Britain Herald, 28 July 1890, in “Polish Marriages,” Box 86, Folder 187:7a, CES, 4–5. | 277 |

Notes to Chapter 6 88. GOL-027 (7–8), OHACP, 21; Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 256. 89. Sinclair, The Jungle, 13. 90. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants, 138. 91. Andrew Devich, “My Memoirs,” IHRC, 11. 92. GOL-027 (7–8), Box 3, OHACP, 22. 93. Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 175–176. 94. ORK-115 (3), Box 6, OHACP, 27. 95. HOJ-040 (4–5), Box 3, OHACP, 53–54. 96. SOW-090 (1–2), Box 8, OHACP, 44. 97. Interview Liberato Dattolo, Box 23, Folder 109:13b, CES, 6; According to Yans-McLaughlin, wealthier Italians went on honeymoons during this period; see Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community, 256. 98. GOL-027 (5–6), Box 3, OHACP, 3. 99. INT-15, ICOHP, 45. 100. MAT-013 (2), Box 5, OHACP, 13. 101. MAT-030 (5–6), Box 5, OHACP, 23–24. 102. MAR-106 (1–2), Box 5, OHACP, 23. 103. MON-024 (3–4), Box 6, OHACP, 4–6, 10. 104. MAR-106 (1–2), Box 5, OHACP, 23–24. 105. HOJ-040 (4–5), BOX 3, OHACP, 55. 106. STO-136 (1–5), Box 8, OHACP, 1–10, 112. 107. MAD-046 (3–4), Box 5, OHACP, 24–25. 108. LES-032, Box 4, OHACP, 1, 8. 109. RUT-033 (5–6), Box 7, OHACP, 5–6, 25–26; see also Bodnar et al., Lives of Their Own, 156–157. Bodnar, Simon, and Weber found that “older, midstage families (those with married or working children) showed a greater propensity to own—twice the rate of all families.”

| 278 |

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Addams, Jane. “The Failure of the Modern City to Provide Adequate Recreation.” Charities and the Commons 21 (5 December 1908): 365–368. ———. Twenty Years at Hull House. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Ade, George. The Old-Time Saloon: Not Wet, Not Dry, Just History. New York: R. Long & R. R. Smith, 1931. Alexander, June G. “Staying Together: Chain Migration and Patterns of Slovak Settlement in Pittsburgh prior to World War I.” Journal of American Ethnic History 1 (Fall 1981): 56–83. Amott, Teresa L., and Julie A. Matthaei. Race, Gender, and Work: A Multicultural Economic History of Women in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1991. Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Knopf, 1927. ———. The Great Illusion. New York: Doubleday, 1950. Bailey, Beth. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Barrett, James R. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Barton, Josef J. Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians, and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975. Bell, Rudolph M. Fate and Honor, Family and Village: Demographic and Cultural Changes in Rural Italy since 1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Bernard, Richard M. The Melting Pot and the Altar: Marital Assimilation in Early Twentieth-Century Wisconsin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. Berrol, Selma. East Side/East End: Eastern European Jews in London and New York, 1870–1920. Westport Conn.: Praeger, 1994. Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. | 279 |

Bibliography Bodnar, John, et al. Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Bowen, Louise DeKoven. “Dance Halls.” Survey 26 (3 June 1911): 383–387. ———. The Public Dance Halls of Chicago. Chicago: Juvenile Protective Association, 1917. ———. The Road to Destruction Made Easy in Chicago. Chicago: Juvenile Protective Association, 1916. Buckman, Peter. Let’s Dance: Social Ballroom and Folk Dancing. New York: Paddington Press, 1978. Bukowczyk, John. And My Children Did Not Know Me: A History of the Polish Americans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Burt, Ramsay. The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities. New York: Routledge, 1995. Calkins, Raymond. Substitutes for the Saloon. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901. Capozzoli, Mary Jane. Three Generations of Italian American Women in Nassau County, 1925–1981. New York: Garland, 1990. Carnes, Mark C. Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Caroli, Betty Boyd. Italian Repatriation from the United States, 1900–1914. New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1973. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922. Cinel, Dino. From Italy to San Francisco: The Immigrant Experience. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982. Clark, Mary, and Clement Crisp. The History of Dance. New York: Orbis, 1981. Clark, Norman H. Deliver Us from Evil: An Interpretation of American Prohibition. New York: Norton, 1976. Clawson, Mary Ann. Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Cohen, Lizabeth. Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Learning from the ‘Outsider Within’: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems 33 (1986): 514–532. ———. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. London: Routledge, 1991. Conzen, Kathleen Neils, et al. “The Invention of Ethnicity: A Perspective from the U.S.A.” Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (Fall 1992): 3–41. | 280 |

Bibliography Cressey, Paul. The Taxi Dance Hall: A Sociological Study in Commercialized Recreation and City Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932. Dannett, Sylvia G. L., and Frank R. Rachel. Down Memory Lane: Arthur Murray’s Picture Story of Social Dancing. New York: Greenberg, 1954. Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. New York: Harper Collins, 1990. Davis, Michael M. The Exploitation of Pleasure: A Study of Commercial Recreations in New York City. New York: N.P., 1910. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. De Mille, Agnes. America Dances. New York: Macmillan, 1980. Desmond, Jane C., ed. Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Dorr, Rheta Childe. What Eight Million Women Want. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1910. Dubinsky, Karen. Improper Advances: Rape and Heterosexual Conflict in Ontario, 1880–1929. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Duis, Perry R. The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Edwards, Richard Henry. Popular Amusements. New York: Associate Press, 1915. Ellis, Leonard H. “Men among Men: An Exploration of All-Male Relationships in Victorian America.” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1982. Erenberg, Lewis A. Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Ewen, Elizabeth. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars: Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925. New York: Monthly Press Review, 1985. Fass, Paula. The Damned and the Beautiful. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Fox, Paul. The Poles in America. New York: George H. Doran, 1922. Fox, Richard Wightman, and T. J. Jackson Lears. The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Freeman, Joshua B. “Hardhats: Construction Workers, Manliness, and the 1970 Pro-War Demonstrations.” Journal of Social History (Summer 1993): 725–744. Gabaccia, Donna. “Women of the Mass Migrations: From Minority to Majority 1820–1930.” In European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Moch. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. ———. From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820–1990. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. | 281 |

Bibliography Garceau, Dee. “I Got a Girl Here, Would You Like to Meet Her?”: Courtship, Ethnicity, and Community in Sweetwater County, 1900–1925.” In Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, ed. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. Gardner, Ellen. Public Dance Halls: Their Regulation and Place in the Recreation of Adolescents. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929. Garson, Barbara. All the Livelong Day: The Meaning and Demeaning of Routine Work. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. Gilfoyle, Timothy. City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790– 1920. New York: Norton, 1992. Glenn, Susan A. Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Gorn, Elliott J. The Manly Art: Bare Knuckle Prize Fighting in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. Gotfrit, Leslie. “Women Dancing Back: Disruption and the Politics of Pleasure.” In Postmodernism, Feminism, and Cultural Politics, ed. Henry A. Giroux, pp. 174–195. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. ———. “Dancing Back in the Jazz Age: Discourse of Danger and Possibilities of Pleasure.” Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1992. Graff, Ellen. Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Griswold, Robert. Fatherhood in America: A History. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Gutierrez, Ramon, and Genevieve Fabre. eds. Feasts and Celebrations in North American Ethnic Communities. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. Boston: Little, Brown, 1951. Hareven, Tamara K., and John Modell. “Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (August 1973): 467–479. ———. “Family Patterns.” In Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Heer, David. “The Marital Status of Second-Generation Americans,” American Sociological Review 26, no. 2 (1961): 233–241. Heinze, Andrew. Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumerism and the Search for American Identity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. | 282 |

Bibliography Hewitt, Nancy A. Women, Families, and Communities: Readings in American History, Vol. Two: From 1865. London: Scott, Foresman, 1990. Higham, John. Strangers in the Land. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955. Holli, Melvin G., and Peter d’A Jones. Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, 4th ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. Hutzel, Eleonore L. The Policewoman’s Handbook. New York: Columbia University Press, 1933. Hvidt, Kristian. Flight to America: The Social Background of 300,000 Danish Emigrants. New York: Academic Press, 1975. Israels, Belle Lindner. “The Way of the Girl.” Survey 22 (3 July 1909): 487–497. Jamieson, Lynn. “Limited Resources and Limiting Conventions: Working-Class Mothers and Daughters in Urban Scotland, 1890–1925.” In Labour and Love, ed. Jane Lewis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. ———. Intimacy: Personal Relationships in Modern Societies. Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press, 1998. Juvenile Protective Association. Recreation Survey of Cincinnati. Cincinnati: Juvenile Protective Association, 1913. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. Men and Women of the Corporation. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Kasson, John. Amusing the Millions: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century. New York: Hill & Wang, 1978. Kelley, Robin. “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South.” Journal of American History 80 (June 1993): 75–112. Kessler Harris, Alice. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Kessner, Thomas. The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Kett, Joseph F. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present. New York: Basic Books, 1977. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996. Kingsdale, Jon. “The ‘Poor Man’s Club’: Social Functions of the Urban Working-Class Saloon.” In The American Man, ed. Elizabeth Pleck and Joseph Pleck, pp. 255–283. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. Knobel, Dale T. America for the Americans: The Nativist Movement in the United States. New York: Twayne, 1996. Krause, Corinne Azen. Grandmothers, Mothers, and Daughters: Oral Histories of Three Generations of Ethnic American Women. Boston: Twayne, 1991. | 283 |

Bibliography Kulbitsky, Olga Kulbitsky. “Dance—A Sport For Men.” In Focus On Dance VI: Ethnic and Recreational Dance, ed. Harris Ericson, pp. 63–65. Washington, D.C.: American Association for Health, Physical Education, and Recreation, 1972. Lewis, Earl. In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Poverty in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Lunbeck, Elizabeth. The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Lystra, Karen. Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Madison Board of Commerce. Madison: The Four Lake City, Recreational Survey. Madison, Wis.: Madison Board of Commerce, 1915. Maffi, Mario. Gateway to the Promised Land: Ethnic Cultures on New York’s Lower East Side. New York: New York University Press, 1995. Mariano, John. The Second Generation of Italians in New York City. Boston: Christopher, 1921. Mason, Gregory. “Satan in the Dance Hall.” American Mercury (June 1924): 175–182. May, Elaine Tyler. Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ———. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. May, Lary. Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry. New York, 1980. Meckel, Mary V. A Sociological Analysis of the California Taxi-Dancer: The Hidden Halls. New York: Edwin Mellen, 1995. Meyerowitz, Joanne J. Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1890–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Modell, John, and Tamara K. Hareven. “Urbanization and the Malleable Household: An Examination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families. Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (August 1973): 467–479. Morawska, Ewa. For Bread with Butter: The Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown Pennsylvania, 1890–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Mormino, Gary Ross. Immigrants on the Hill: Italian-Americans in St. Louis, 1882–1982. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Mumford, Kevin J. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New | 284 |

Bibliography York in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Nasaw, David. Children of the City: At Work and At Play. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. ———. Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Nye, Russel B. “Saturday Night at the Paradise Ballroom: or Dance Halls in the Twenties.” Journal of Popular Culture 7 (Summer 1973): 14–22. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day. New York: Paragon House, 1989. Orsi, Robert Anthony. The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. ———. “The Religious Boundaries of an In-Between People: Street Feste and the Problem of Dark-Skinned ‘Other’ in Italian Harlem, 1920–1990.” American Quarterly 44 (September 1992): 313–347. Pacyga, Dominic A. Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the South Side, 1880–1922. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986. ———. “Leisure and the ‘Woman Question.’” In For Fun and Profit: The Transformation of Leisure into Consumption, ed. Richard Butsch, pp. 105–117. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Perkins, Bert. “The Taxi Dance Hall.” Box 145, Folder 5, Ernest Burgess Collection, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Perry, Elisabeth I. “‘The General Motherhood of the Common Wealth’: Dance Hall Reform in the Progressive Era.” American Quarterly 27 no. 5 (Winter 1985): 719–733. Phelps, Ray D. “The History of the Eastside Dudes, A Black Social Club in Central Harlem, New York City, 1933–1985: An Exploration of Background Factors Related to Adult Criminality.” Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1987. Pleck, Elizabeth H. “A Mother’s Wages: Income Earning among Married Italian and Black Women, 1896–1911.” In A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, pp. 367–392. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Powers, Madelon Mae. Faces along the Bar: Lore and Order in the Workingman’s Saloon, 1870–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ———. “The ‘Poor Man’s Friend’: Saloonkeepers, Workers, and the Code of | 285 |

Bibliography Reciprocity in the U.S. Barroom, 1870–1920. International Labor and Working-Class History no. 45 (Spring 1994): 1–15. Prus, Robert. Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: Intersubjectivity and the Study of Human Lived Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 630–660. Rieder, Jonathan. Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New York: Verso, 1991. Rosen, Ruth. The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Ross, Andrew, and Tricia Rose. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Rothman, Ellen K. Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America. New York: Basic Books, 1984. Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. New York: Basic Books, 1993. Ruiz, Vicki L. “The Flapper and the Chaperone: Historical Memory among Mexican-American Women.” In Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States, ed. Donna Gabaccia, pp. 141–158. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. Sarna, Jonathan. “The Myth of No Return: Jewish Return Migration to Eastern Europe, 1881–1914.” American Jewish History 71 (December 1981): 256–268. Satori, Don Luigi. Modern Dances. Indiana: St. Joseph’s Printing Office, 1910. Schwartz, Laura Anker. “Immigrant Voices from Home, Work, and Community: Woman and Family in the Migration Process, 1890–1938.” Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1983. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York, 1976. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Smith, Judith E. Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Immigrant Lives in Providence, Rhode Island, 1900–1940. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. | 286 |

Bibliography Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America.” In A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women, ed. Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, pp. 311–341. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Stearns, Marshal. Jazz Dance: The Story of the American Vernacular Dance. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Stearns, Peter. Be a Man: Males in Modern Society. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979. Steiner, Jesse F. Research Memorandum on Recreation in the Depression. New York: Social Science Research Council, 1937 Stivers, Richard. A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Stocking, Collis A. A Study of Dance Halls in Pittsburgh: Made under the Auspices of the Pittsburgh’s Girls’ Conference. Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh’s Girls’ Conference, 1925. Strom, Sharon Hartman. Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Takaki, Ronald T. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little Brown, 1989. Tentler, Leslie Woodcock. Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900–1930. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Thomas, William I., and Florian Znaniecki. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Abridged. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966. Thrasher, Frederic. The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago. Abridged. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Timberlake, James H. Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900–1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. True, Ruth S. The Neglected Girl. New York: True Press, 1914. Turner, Victor. On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985. ———. Blazing the Trail: Way Marks in the Exploration of Symbols. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. | 287 |

Bibliography Tuttle, William M. Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. New York: Atheneum, 1970. Vecoli, Rudolph J. “Contadini in Chicago: A Critique of The Uprooted.” Journal of American History 51 (December 1964): 407–417. Vorse, Mary Heaton. A Footnote to Folly: Reminiscences of Mary Heaton Vorse. New York: Arno Press, 1980. Waller, Willard. “The Rating and Dating Complex.” American Sociological Review 2 ( 1937): 727–734. Waters, Mary C. Ethnic Options: Choosing Identities in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Weinberg, Sydney Stahl. The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. White, Kevin. The First Sexual Revolution: The Emergence of Male Heterosexuality in Modern America. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. Willett, Julie A. Permanent Waves: The Making of the American Beauty Shop. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Woods, Robert A., and Kennedy, Albert J. Young Working Girls: A Summary of Evidence From Two Thousand Social Workers. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

| 288 |

INDEX

Abortion, 208 Addams, Jane, 84–85 Ade, George, 46, 126, 193–194 Affair, 28, 53–54, 67. See also Dance halls Alcohol, 4–5, 74–75, 77–78, 167, 181–182 Animal and rag dances, 63. See also Dance Anti-Semitism, 162 Automobiles, 69, 109–110, 124–125 Bachelor subculture: 42–49, and “chipping in,” 138–139; and cutting in, 140–142; and dance, 132–134; and dance halls, 104–106, 126–129, 170–171, 175, 177, 181; and dress, 134–135; and ensemble dances, 136–137; and fear of homosexuality, 178–179; and fighting, 142–147; and Prohibition, 130; saloons, 126–127; songs about, 179; and sports, 123; and taxi-dance halls, 148–150; and women, 125–126, 150–154. See also Barber shops; Boarding; Prostitution; Saloons; Social clubs Barber shops, 43–44; and coming-of-age rituals, 44; and ethnicity, 43–44; and female patrons, 131. See also Bachelor subculture Beauty shops, 129 Boarding, 37–38, 97–98, 152. See also Immigrants Bonadonna, Robert: and “cutting in,” 141–142; and dance, 92–93, 100, 105, 134, 144–145, 148; marriage, 68 179; and special dates, 124–125 Breadwinner ethic, 175. See also Social clubs Candy stores, 166 Chaperones, 28–30, 88–89, 182, 210–211. See also Immigrants Chauncey, George, 130, 158 Chicago race riots (1919), 175–176. See also Social clubs

“Child brides,” 33, 37–40. See also Immigrants Cliques, 135 Committee of Fourteen, 12, 64, 82 Courtship, 1–2, 23–24, 29–31, 33–36, 67–68, 191–193 Cressey, Paul, 56–58. See also Taxi-dance halls Dance: “breaking it up,” 90; and “cutting in,” 140–142; ensemble dances, 136; gender roles, 98–99; and immigrants 22, 137–138; instruction, 101–104; and male culture, 136; and masculinity, 132–133; and men’s frustration, 117, 125–126, 147–148; and the Paul Jones, 136; pivoting and spieling, 63; and practice, 100; rag and animal dances, 63; and regional variation, 64–65; same-sex partners, 90–91; and sex, 63–64; shadow dance, 74; and social clubs, 136; South Side dance, 90–91; and taxi-dance hall, 64; variations, 99; the waltz, 63 Dance palace, 55–56 Dance halls, 52; advertising, 118–119; the “affair,” 28, 53–54, 67; age of dancers, 52–53, 66; alcohol, 4–5, 74–75, 77–78; appearance of, 56, 59; attendance, 60, 115–116, 119–120; and bathrooms, 55; boredom of dancers, 91–93; and “chipping in,” 139; choosing partners, 90–92; and Cinderella, 85–86; and class, 4, 134–135, 140–141; classification of, 65–67; and cliques, 135; cost and its effect on attendance, 123–124; dance palace, 55–56; dancing academies, 54; and dating patterns, 119–120; dress, 85–86, 134–135; and escorts, 86; and ethnicity, 4, 135–136; and fights, 117–118, 144; and floormen, 71; and “the gang,” 147; heat of, 121–122; and heterosocial relations, 3, 4–5, 10, 67–68,

| 289 |

Index Dance halls (continued) 125–129, 132, 139–140; hours of operation, 109–110; and immigrants, 60–61, 69–70, 87–89, 137–138; intermission, 75, 144–145; location of, 56; mailing lists, 118–119; marriage and sex, 67–68, 79–80; and men’s hats, 127; men’s side of the arena, 128–129; middle-class men, 142–143; pass-out checks, 78; and peer culture, 52–53, 67; pluggers, 118; and police, 72, 78–79; police matrons, 71; popularity of, 84, 118; prizes, 75–76; prostitution, 87; rise of, 3; and saloons, 54–55; season, 120–121; sex ratios, 94–95, 105; and singalongs, 144–145; small towns, 60; and social clubs, 53–54, 134, 139–140; and songs, 93–94; and special dates, 124–125; and the spieler, 72–73; and stag lines, 126; taxi-dance halls, 56–57; and tobacco, 126–127; and treating, 129; and working-class clientele, 60–61, 69–70 Dancing academies, 54 Dating, 119–120, 124–125; and “chipping in,” 139; and social clubs, 164 Depression: and family life, 165, 204–205; and middle-class leisure, 163–164; and social clubs, 163 Domesticity, 21, 172–174. See also Social clubs Ensemble dances, 136. See also Dance Escorts, 55, 86. See also Dance halls Family economy, 40, 202–205 Fictive kin, 177. See also Social clubs Filipino immigrants, 145–146, 149. See also Immigrants Funerals, 26–27, 51–52. See also Immigrants Gambling, 170, 180–181. See also Bachelor subculture; Social clubs Gold diggers, 107–108 Hair, and conflict with parents, 215 Harlem, 161. See also Social clubs Home ownership, 230–232 Homosexuality, 178–179. See also Bachelor subculture Honeymoons, 228–230. See also Immigrants House parties, 52

Immigrants: abortion, 208; barber shops, 43–44; boarding, 20–22, 37–39, 97–98, 137; brothers vs. sisters, 201–202, 208–209; chaperonage, 210–211; and “child brides,” 33, 37–39; and children, 19–20; church events, 27–28; and city life, 16–17; and collective strategies, 9; courtship, 1–2, 23–24; and dance, 22, 52, 137–138, 211–212; and dance instruction, 102; and dating, 198–199, 200–202, 208–209; Depression, 204–205; and domesticity 21; English language, 216; family economy, 40; first impression of U.S., 41; funerals, 26–27, 51–52; hair, 215; home ownership, 230–232; honeymoons, 228–230; and house parties, 52; housing, 17–19, 22; intermarriage, 206–208; “knocking down,” 212–213; and leisure, 22–23, 42, 51; living conditions, 40; and makeup, 200; marriage patterns, 190–191, 218–219, 220–221; and migration patterns,15–16; and movies, 52; and mutual aid societies, 28; and parents, 198–199, 208–209, 214–215, 216; parks, 24–25, 51; picnics 25–26, 51; plays, 52; and pregnancy, 206–208; premarital sexual relations, 206–208; and Prohibition, 130–131; and religious festivals, 26; and saloons, 43; and sex ratios, 9, 15, 32–33, 95–96; “sneaking out,” 211–212, 213–214; sports, 201, 214; street life, 22–23; and treating, 200; and wage work, 13–14, 18, 41–42; weddings, 27–28, 222–223, 224–228 Immigration: from southern and eastern Europe, 2; restriction of, 96 Intermarriage, 206–208. See also Immigrants Jolsen, Al, 99 Jungle, The, 221–222 Juvenile Protective Association, 55, 71–72 Lemons, 110–111 Liminality, 158–159, 174–175. See also Social clubs Main street clubs, 161–162, 181–183. See also Social clubs

| 290 |

Index Marriage: age at, 33; arranged, 29–31; and parents, 152–154; upon short acquaintance, 9, 14, 31–32, 34–35, 67–68, 79–80. See also Immigrants Masque balls, 73–74. See also Dance Migration patterns, 15–16. See also Immigrants Movies, 14, 52 Mutual aid societies, 28. See also Dance halls; Immigrants Parks, 24–25, 28–29, 51. See also Immigrants Pass-out checks, 78, 128–129. See also Dance halls Paul Jones (dance), 136. See also Dance Peer culture, 52–53; and age of dance hall patrons, 60–61; and parents, 184; and sexual culture, 68–69, 78–80; and “system of social graduation,” 64–67 Peiss, Kathy, 61–62, 85, 163 Picnics, 2, 25–26, 51 Pivoting and spieling, 63. See also Dance Pluggers, 118. See also Dance halls Police, 72, 78–79 Police matrons, 71 Pregnancy, 206–208 Progressivism, 3–4, 69–71 Prohibition, 127, 130–131; and immigrants, 130–131; and speakeasies, 130–131 Prostitution, 177, 182 Race riots (Chicago 1919), 175–176. See also Social clubs “Rushing the growler,” 45 Saloons, 43, 45; dissatisfaction with, 47–48; and domesticity, 47–48; kitchen, 130; and the Police Gazette, 45; prostitution, 45; “rushing the growler,” 45; and social clubs, 160; and songs, 46–47; and treating, 129. See also Bachelor subculture Sex ratios, 32–33, 95–96. See also Immigrants Shadow dance, 74. See also Dance Side street hide outs, 161–162, 180–181 See also Social clubs Slumming gentleman, 4, 142–143 Sneaking out, 211–214

Social clubs, 7–8, 10–11; affairs, 167; and anti-Semitism, 162; athletics, 190; and bachelor subculture, 170–171, 175, 177, 179, 181; and boss politics, 160; closed clubs, 190; and commercial leisure, as replacement for, 158–159; and community, 168–170, 184; cost of, 161; and curtains, 185; and dance, 164, 167, 185, 208; and dance instruction, 101–102; and dating, 164, 166, 176–177; and decorations, 164–165, 180; and Depression, 163, 165, 169, 170–171; as domestic space, 173–174; as escape, 162–163; ethnic traditions, 182–183; and family, 159; gambling, 181; gentlemanly conduct, 181, 184; and Harlem, 161–162; and homosexuality, 178–179; and homosocial leisure, 158; and immigrants, 162; and intimacy, 140; and life cycle, 165; as liminal spaces, 158–159, 174–175; location of, 161; main street clubs, 181–183; and marriage, 175; and masculinity, 171; and middle-class men, 142–143, 163–164; and mistresses, 168; and moral reformers, 158; numbers of, 163; objectification of women, 176–177; and older men, 169; and parents, 8, 165–166, 182; picnics, 167; political activity, 182–183; and privacy, 165–166; and prizes, 166–167; and Prohibition, 161; and prostitution, 177, 182; race riots, 175–176; and “roamies,” 167; rules of common decency, 185, 187–188; and saloons, 160; and samesex relations, 177; and sex, 162; and side street hide outs, 8, 161–162; and small towns, 163; and social nights, 166; souvenir journals, 167; and sports, 164; stunt nights, 166; and summer fun, 123; and the “terrace,” 183; and unemployment, 172; and violence, 140, 175–176, 178; and wage work, 171–172; and women, 165–166, 179–180, 184–185, 189–190; women-controlled clubs, 188–189; as workshops, 171–172; and World War II, 179 Songs: mammy, 193–194; the flapper, 193–194; about women, 110 South Side (dance), 90. See also Taxi-dance halls Spieler, the, 72–73. See also Dance halls Stag lines, 126. See also Dance halls

| 291 |

Index Taxi dancers: as gold diggers, 107–108; and prostitution, 106–107; wages of, 57 Taxi-dance halls, 56–57; and Barbary Coast, 57; and dance, 64–65; and ethnicity, 145–146, and fights, 143–144; and Filipino immigrants, 145–146, 149; “kiddy night,” 73; and instruction, 101, 103; and intermission, 144–145; location of, 58; number of, 57; sex ratios, 94; size of, 58–59; and the South Side, 90–91; and violence, 145–146 Tobacco, 126–127. See also Bachelor subculture Treating, 104, 105–106; male distaste for, 106–109, 110–111, 138–139

Waltz, 63 Weddings, 9, 27–28, 35, 222–223, 224–228; home weddings, 223–224. See also Immigrants Willett, Julie, 129. See also Beauty shops Women: and alcohol, 112; as better dancers, 101–102, 104; as dance instructors, 102–103; employment of, 61–62; and homosocial relations, 151–152, 218, 220–221; hours of work, 62; and the “psychological moment,” 108; “putting on style,” 6; and relationships, 96–97; songs about, 110; and treating, 104, 111–113; and wages, 203; white-collar work, 61–62

| 292 |

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Randy D. McBee is an assistant professor of history at Texas Tech University.

| 293 |