Burning floors

Dancing was so much a part of Catholic social life in the 20th century West, and forbidding dancing so much associated with Anabaptist sects, that it came as a surprise to me to discover that there had existed, throughout the history of the Church, a number of Catholic pastors who objected to the practice.

It may sound funny, but it’s true. There exists on the internet florilegia of saints’ strictures against dancing. These quotations have been sheared of their historical, cultural and pastoral contexts and clearly were compiled to “prove” a thesis in a manner my professors deplored as “proof texting.” One wishes only trained theologians would make sweeping claims in the names of the saints, but here we are in the internet age.

The strivings of proof-texters to stop people from dancing has led better educated Catholics to seek out the contexts for the saintly or merely clerical disapprobation. A recent blogpost at Unam Sanctam Catholicam entitled “Dancing, Moral Panics, and Boomerism” examines 19th century American sermons against dancing and draws some conclusions. I do not agree with them all–for example, class snobbery against the waltz had vanished by 1820, and so it is unlikely that this would colour the homilies of a Catholic backwoods preacher in 1860. It seems to me much more likely that that the revivalists were influenced by the strains of Puritanism that still existed in the United States at that time and/or the Jansenism brought by priests from Ireland.

As it happens, several branches of my father’s family arrived in America in the 1630s, and another was grafted on from Ireland in the 1840s. Thus, I am well aware that, before the Irish mass migration, there was a distinct, centuries-old Anglo-American culture and also that the native population bitterly resented the Irish Catholic newcomers. Thus, this anecdote really hit home:

On one occasion a Redemptorist, preaching a mission in New Trier, Illinois, was so persuasive in his denunciation of a local dance hall that “all turned against the ballroom-keeper, his two sons were sent out of their situations, and on the day after the mission not only his, but all other ball-tents were broken to pieces.” 

Just terrific. New Trier—that’s in Cook County, not far from Chicago where yet another branch of my family was doing very well in the liquor trade. Clearly I must check the source to be sure, but that sounds to me like my Irish ancestor’s co-nationals went off to listen to an imam a priest of famed oratory powers, were persuaded to turn against a local businessman, got his children fired from their jobs and destroyed a lot of private property. How pious. How really very respectful of local customs. Model immigrants, the lot.

But something else strikes me in the passage Unam Sanctam Catholicam cited: the dance hall. Jay P. Dolan, in his 1978 Catholic Revivalism: The American Experience 1830-1900, notes that the dance hall came in for severe denunciation:

In avoiding those places which gave rise to sins of impurity, one institution in particular came in for severe denunciation—the dance hall. The code of morality fostered by the revival strongly condemned dancing; at the last judgment the sinner’s body would be recognizable not only by “drunken lips,” but also by “dancing feet.” For the young girl who “lost [her] soul at the night dance,” there was waiting for her “in Hell a burning floor for her giddy feet.”  

Yes, Dolan conveys the idea that the preachers were also against dancing itself, but I’m intrigued by the emphasis on the dance hall because it shows–once again–that something other than a communal or cooperative moving of feet to music seemed problematic.

Sermons against unregulated country dance halls (or road houses) were a feature of Catholic life in 19th century Ireland, when people of all classes danced in private homes. And, as I’ve noted before, parish priests began to build parish halls, their construction paid for by the dances held in them. Of course, certain dances were condemned by priest and prelate alike, depending on which dances were new, or had been presented to them as Foreign and Bad. A bishop who found Irish national dancing permissible might have been horrified by tango and jazz. But the Irish episcopal dislike for dance halls continued into the 20th century, and the Irish Bishops even put out a statement in 1925, to be read at all “principal” Masses, to blame dance halls for extramarital sexual activity, out-of-wedlock pregnancies and dodgy jobs in the big city:

We know too well the fruit of these [dance] halls all over the country. It is nothing new, alas, to find Irish girls now and then brought to shame, and retiring to the refuge of institutions or the dens of great cities. But dancing halls, more especially, in the general uncontrol of recent years, have deplorably aggravated the ruin of virtue due to ordinary human weakness. They have brought many a good innocent girl into sin, shame and scandal, and set her unwary feet on the road that leads to perdition’. 

The contrast between the early 20th century parish hall and the public dance hall must have been stark indeed, perhaps as dramatic a difference as exists today between Edinburgh’s The Hive and Sacred Heart Lauriston Place’s parish hall. Incidentally, there are frequent ceilidh dances at the Jesuits’ Lauriston Hall, which tourists should not miss. When I was still a tourist, Mr McLean took me to one and, reader, I married him. No dens of great cities for me!

The problem with the old dance halls, as with discos, was chiefly booze, but there were also the dangers of mixing with complete strangers, far from loved ones’ anxious gazes (unless you brought your siblings, which I bet people very often did) or even the chaperonage of my ancestresses in dance organisation. Very likely girls changed out of decorous clothing into racier numbers or borrowed a lipstick from their wilder cousins.. Even so, I bet your 1920s Irish road house never witnessed the kinds of scenes I saw back in Velvet Underground on Toronto’s Queen Street West.

That said, Lucy Maud Montgomery described a rural Ontario dance hall gathering in her lovely 1926 novel The Blue Castle in alarming detail. (And how, I wonder, did the Presbyterian parson’s wife conduct her research?) Here is what her heroine experienced at the infamous Chidley Corners:

The big room was decorated with pine and fir boughs, and lighted by Chinese lanterns. The floor was waxed, and Roaring Abel’s fiddle, purring under his skilled touch, worked magic. The “up back” girls were pretty and prettily dressed. Valancy thought it the nicest party she had ever attended.

By eleven o’clock she had changed her mind. A new crowd had arrived—a crowd unmistakably drunk. Whiskey began to circulate freely. Very soon almost all the men were partly drunk. Those in the porch and outside around the door began howling “come-all-ye’s” and continued to howl them. The room grew noisy and reeking. Quarrels started up here and there. Bad language and obscene songs were heard. The girls, swung rudely in the dances, became dishevelled and tawdry. Valancy, alone in her corner, was feeling disgusted and repentant. Why had she ever come to such a place? Freedom and independence were all very well, but one should not be a little fool. She might have known what it would be like—she might have taken warning from Cissy’s guarded sentences. Her head was aching—she was sick of the whole thing. But what could she do? She must stay to the end. Abel could not leave till then. And that would probably be not till three or four in the morning.

The new influx of boys had left the girls far in the minority and partners were scarce. Valancy was pestered with invitations to dance. She refused them all shortly, and some of her refusals were not well taken. There were muttered oaths and sullen looks. Across the room she saw a group of the strangers talking together and glancing meaningly at her. What were they plotting?

Now you will have to read the book to find out what happens and then you will thank me, for The Blue Castle is delightful. Meanwhile, you’ll notice that the big problem at Chidley Corners was the whiskey, not the Virginia Reel, etc.

Anyway, read “Dancing, Moral Panics, and Boomerism” to see what you think, and try to ignore the fact that I posted the same comment twice. And then read The Blue Castle. Later I will write about the differences between dogmatic theology and pastoral theology and point out (yet again) that while the doctrines of the Church do not change, pastoral solutions to problems change as the problems change.