Modern Dancing Is Damaging Our Youth, March 22, 1921

The modern dance is doomed.

Ministers, educators, eugenists, physicians, police, and now even the dancing masters themselves, have been arrayed against it.

Ministers, educators, eugenists, physicians, police, and now even the dancing masters themselves, have been arrayed against it.

For a decade the dance craze has swept the nation, endangering the health and morals and blasting the spiritual life of millions of people. Millions of dollars have been wasted in educating the wrong end of the human anatomy, and many of our national ills can be directly traced to this untoward hysteria. Ministers, educators, eugenists, physicians, police, and now even the dancing masters themselves, have been arrayed against it.

Not long ago the seriousness of this thing was brought to our attention by a visit to our old alma mater—a state university in the Middle West. A very noticeable weakening in the morale led us to ask those in authority concerning the causes. To our intense interest, the dance was cited as one of the most direct. Of the lists of students “flunked” or “conditioned” during the first semester of the present school year, an astonishingly large percentage was made up of those who danced to excess. All of the social functions of the sororities and fraternities of the institutions, with practically no exceptions, are dances. The social calendar is jammed with these events so that the more popular students are in a continual round of pleasure and until the wee hours of the morning. It was therefore, no wonder to us when one professor said to us that one of these little society ladies had not answered a single question in his classes during the semester. Neither were we greatly surprised when we learned from a local physician that he had himself, in this same period, ordered 18 of these sweet young things home to mother because of physical irregularities directly due to the dance. The minister in one of the leading churches cited us instance after instance of young women prominent in church work becoming infatuated with the dance and wholly abandoning their former zeal. Steps are now being taken to bring about dance reform int his university. As early as last June, President Hibben of Princeton and Dean Jones of Yale University, sounded a note of warning concerning the evil influence of the dance upon the morale of university students.

Possibly men and women will listen to such impartial testimony. There has been a marked tendency to ignore the righteously indignant voices that have been continually raised by the pulpit and the religious press against the dance. There has scarcely been a time when observant and thinking ministers have not condemned the dance as an immoral institution periling the respect of woman, the continence of man and the whole Christian social order. It seems that these fiery prophets are going to be vindicated.

From the front page of The Enterprise, Williamston, N.C., March 22, 1921