| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Randy B. McBee. Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure among Working-Class Immigrants in the United States. New York: New York University Press. 2000. Pp. ix, 293. $40.00.

Tattered memories of dances enjoyed long ago show up occasionally in on-line auction listings. There are dance cards, song books, band advertisements, and advertising posters, but it is the pictures that are especially evocative. To the urban historian, these snapshots and posed portraits are not only mementoes of pleasure-filled evenings but also documents of the way that public dancing in twentieth-century America long suffered from the contradictory images of innocence and evil. Settlement house workers and anti-delinquency reformers cast the cheap dance halls that appeared after the turn of the century as icons of evil. The dark interiors and reinforcing atmosphere of loose morality in makeshift venues created opportunities for sinful experimentation, while the sensuous music hastened the loss of inhibition. By contrast, the polished floors, escapist architecture, and veneer of respectability that was available for the price of admission to the large commercial ballrooms built during the 1920s created the terpsichorean equivalent of the popcorn palace movie theater. Only a few of the latter, including Chicago's Aragon Ballroom, still survive. Somewhere in between those extremes was the real world of amusement that was inhabited by working-class young people.

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