FADS AND CRAZES

Crossword Puzzles

In 1924 Richard Leo Simon and Max Lincoln Schuster published their first volume, The Cross Word Puzzle Book, which was also the world's first collection of crossword puzzles. Simon and Schuster were so concerned the book might fail that they published it under a separate imprint, Plaza Publishing Company, to conceal their identities. They attached a pencil to each copy, vigorously advertised it, and turned crosswords into a nationwide rage. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad put dictionaries on their trains to help puzzle players. A headline in the Ohio State University student newspaper in February 1925 read: "Cross Word Puzzle Craze Gripping American Campuses." College newspapers published puzzles, college teams competed in puzzle contests, and the University of Kentucky offered a course in crosswords, approved by a dean who commented that

DANCE HALLS IN THE 1920s

"By 1920 there were at least five types of places for dancing open to the public. There were dances sponsored by social-work agencies, particularly those concerned with juvenile behavior. Some municipalities, in fact, established their own dancehalls where, under close supervision, young people could dance free or for a small charge. These, of course, tended to draw almost wholly adolescents. Second, there were club dances, lodge dances, 'charity balls/ and the like, sponsored by ethnic groups, police or firemen, athletic clubs, fraternal societies, and similar organizations, open to the public for a token 'membership fee.' These dances had been tradition-ally part of city life since the earlier nineteenth century, chiefly at the lower and lower-middle class economic and social level. The 'fireman's ball/ since the days of volunteer firefighters, had always meant rowdyism, deservedly or not. Third, there was public dancing at hotels, restricted to guests or a socially desirable clientele; at restaurants; and at cabarets or night clubs, which often provided vaudeville-type entertainment in addition to food and drink. (Beyond city limits these were usually termed 'roadhouses.') Since high costs naturally restricted attendance to the urban minority who could afford it, the hotel ballroom and cabaret were almost exclusively big-city places.

The fourth kind of public dancehall, the 'taxi-dance' ballroom, drew more customers and much more criticism. A few so-called 'open' taxi-dance halls allowed women to enter; most were 'closed/ that is, for men only, offering 'hostesses' or "instructresses" for partners. Taxi-dance halls charged an admission fee and sold tickets to be exchanged for each dance, which lasted about 60 seconds, followed by an intermission of 30-60 seconds. The standard price was 10 cents a dance, sometimes two for 25 cents or 40 cents for three in better establishments, the girls retaining half of the ticket charge plus tips. Large city dancehalls offered 200 to 300 hostesses; a survey in New York in 1925 showed about 8,000 girls so employed in the city. A hostess, by collecting 70-100 tickets per night plus tips, could make about $30 a week, as compared to $18-$20 a week for office work.

Although licensed and regulated, these taxi-dance halls were under constant attack throughout the twenties and thirties. The Commissioner of Licenses for New York City, after a four-month survey in 1924, found 'immoral behavior' in twenty per cent of them, that is, drinking, drug peddling, 'sensual and promiscuous dancing' and prostitution 'A fringe of immorality is constant with every dancehair of this type, an investigator for the Women's City Club reported that year. All were closed in the early thirties and allowed to reopen only after close inspection; they were banned completely from the grounds of the Chicago World's Fair of 1933. Nonetheless the hardy ones survived, and a few still do, although in depleted numbers since the mid-forties.

The fifth type of public dancehall, and by far the most widely attended in the twenties, was the 'dance palace' (which might also be at an amusement park or outdoor pavilion) a direct descendant of the original Grand Central of the pre-World War I years. Huge, brilliantly lighted, elaborately decorated with gilt, drapes, columns, mirrors, and ornate chandeliers, often with two bands, these became synonymous with glamor and romance. Capable of holding crowds of 5,000, these Gardens, Pal-aces, Parks, and Ballrooms attracted millions of patrons yearly—six million in New York City alone in 1924, nearly that many in Chicago. Every city or country town had one or more, for singles of both sexes and young and older marrieds. The range of age was about 16-50, most patrons in their twenties, men usually outnumbering women by about 20%. An admission fee—__BODY__ to __BODY__.50 for singles and $2.00 for a couple—ordinarily entitled one to 3-5 dances, after which tickets at 5-10 cents admitted a couple to the floor which was guarded by velvet ropes and uniformed ticket-takers. New York's Roseland and Savoy, Chicago's Trianon and Aragon, Boston's Raymor, the Hollywood Palladium and the Palomar in Los Angeles, Detroit's Greystone, Cleveland's Crystal Slipper, Cincinnati's Castle Farms, Denver's Elitch's Garden, and many more had nation reputations, but every small town had its Avalon, Dreamland, or Paradise."

crosswords were "educational, scientific, instructive and mentally stimulative as well as entertaining."

Emile Coué's Twelve-Word Mind Cure

"Day by day in every way I am getting better and better." This sentence, repeated over and over, was French pharmacist Emile Coué's simple formula for health and happiness. When Coué, a supersalesman, brought his system of "Self-Mastery by Auto-Suggestion" to the United States, masses of suggestible Americans swallowed his prescription whole, Coué's notion was that a person's imagination was his strongest faculty, capable of winning any contest with internal or external negative forces. Coué made his first tour of the United States in 1923 and had to fight off crowds of followers.

Cures—and Denunciations—of Coué

The American Medical Association attacked Coué as ua purveyor of cloudy stuff" whose system of healing would bring "tears of laughter and pity" from real doctors. In spite of this denunciation, the Frenchman conducted a second popular cross-country lecture tour in 1924. Although his followers insisted that his cure healed varicose veins and grew hair on bald heads, Coué himself claimed more modest results. He announced that a man seized by yawning cut his yawns from seven per minute to one every ninety minutes under his "treatment"; he also demonstrated that two stuttering boys could say "good morning" and "I won't stutter anymore" without a slip. Coué Institutes opened in cities across the country, but by the middle of the decade patients abandoned them. In truth sick people did not get "better and better" with Coué's mind cure.

Mah-Jongg

The ancient Chinese game of Mah-Jongg, introduced in the United States in 1922, had millions of enthusiasts playing within a year. Members of women's Mah-Jongg clubs shouted Mah-Jongg words—"Pung" and "Chow"—at one another and donned silk kimonos to play in proper attire. The game also caught on in colleges, rivaling bridge as a staple of fraternity and dormitory entertainment. Mah~Jongg? a combination of dominoes and dice, required a set of 144 carved bone tiles. In 1923 Mah-Jongg sets outsold radios, and Chinese manufacturers ran out of calf bones used to make the tiles. American manufacturers soon entered production, and beef packers in Chicago sent bones to China for carving by Chinese artisans. A fine Mah-Jongg set from China sold for $500 in the United States, though American-made celluloid copies soon sold for just a few dollars. The difficult and constantly changing rules of the game inspired more than twenty rule books during the decade, and Chinese Americans often were recruited to teach novice American enthusiasts.

Flagpole Sitting

Alvin "Shipwreck" Kelly, the most famous flagpole sitter of the 1920s, called himself "The Luckiest Fool Alive." Kelly, a former boxer, started sitting on flagpoles in Hollywood in 1924 when a theater hired him to draw crowds. He balanced himself on a small disk with stirrups to prevent him from falling, took five minute naps every hour, and consumed only liquids hoisted to him on ropes. Kelly was quickly in demand as a publicity gimmick for hotels and theaters, and in 1929 he sat for a total of 145 days on various flagpoles. Kelly popularized flagpole sitting across the country, in Baltimore twenty flagpole sitters—three of them women—were in action during a single week in 1929.

Dance Marathons

"Of all the crazy competitions ever invented, the dancing marathon wins by a considerable margin of lunacy." So exclaimed the New York World in 1923. At contests across the country, couples danced for days on end and competed for thousands of dollars in prize money. Since winning the contest depended on being the last couple to drop out or collapse, dancers used every method to keep their partners awake: some offered smelling salts and ice packs, others kicked and punched their partners. In 1928 ninety-one couples lasted nearly three weeks in the $5,000 "Dance Derby of the Century," which was closed down after 482 hours.

First American Dance Marathoner

The first American to set a record was Alma Cummings. A thirty-two-year-old dance teacher at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, Cummings had six male partners, all younger than she, and remained in motion on the dance floor for twenty-seven hours. She conserved enough energy to end with a flourish, spinning to the middle of the floor in a whirlwind waltz to the cheers of her audience. Her achievement, on 1 April 1923, surpassed the existing record set in England. It also, according to one observer, challenged the primacy of youth and the preeminence of male fortitude. Within weeks dance-endurance contests spread to cities across the country.

Dance Marathon Records

Less than a month after Alma Cummings's triumph, eight young people, who had already danced a record twenty-eight hours and fifty minutes at the Audubon Ballroom, were warned that the police were about to raid the place. Law enforcement officers were invoking an old statute that pertained to six-day bicycle races and made it illegal for any contestant to participate in a race or contest for more than twelve hours in a twenty-four hour period. The contestants eluded the police with the help of parents and friends, who at midnight provided them with a van that transported the still-moving dancers to the Edgewater Dock in New York. They danced off the van and onto a ferry that took them across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Urged by Fort Lee, New Jersey, police to move on, they reached a hospitable destination in Connecticut, where Vera Shepard finally set a new record: sixty-nine hours of continuous dancing in three states, two dance halls, one private parlor, four moving vans, and a ferry. But her record had already been topped in Cleveland—by June Curry, who danced for ninety hours and ten minutes.

Sources:

Frank M. Calabria, "The Dance Marathon Craze," Journal of Popular Culture, 10, no. 1 (1976): 54-67;

Paul Sann, Fads, Follies and Delusions of the American People (New York: Bonanza Books, 1968);

This Fabulous Century (New York: Time-Life Books, 1988).