Since the movie “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” hit the screens in 1969, perceptions of Depression-era dance marathons branded them as the harshest of Darwinian contests. While this is true, marathons originated as record-breaking competitions for fame-seeking Jazz Age moderns and then transformed during the Depression to full-scale spectator events that blended the best and worst of vaudeville, circuses, and amusement park sideshows. This paper presents a view of the shift in America’s entertainment values and practices as evidenced through these unique events that created an industry. It also demonstrates how that industry faced challenges from local and state authorities and suffered from the lack of standards and regulations. It responds to the questions: How were marathons shaped into a culture industry? What distinctive patterns emerged? To what degree do the marathons conform to the stereotypes about popular culture in the 1920s and 1930s? What led to their demise? To determine patterns, I created an event database of more than five hundred dance marathons and walkathons culled from articles, columns, editorials, and display and classified advertisements in Billboard, Variety, and local newspapers from 1921 to 1938. Start and end date, city/state, venue, promoter, number of spectators, number of contestants, and other variables factored into the analysis of events that revealed four distinctive phases of marathons/walkathons: (1) Phase I: The Record-breaking Marathon, 1921-1928; (2) Phase 2: The Big Show, 1928-1930; (3) Phase 3: The Drag-Your-Partner Walkathon, 1931-1936; and (4) Phase 4: Regulation Strangulation, 1935-1936. In the end, dance marathons successfully transitioned from fad to entertainment at a local level. They offered mobility and security to professional contestants during the Depression. They offered fame and prize money to amateur contestants and offered entertainment organizers the opportunity to shape a new amusement. But the culture industry they represented could not sustain itself.
About the presenterBarbara Krasner
Barbara Krasner holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MA in History from William Paterson University where she teaches in both the English and History departments. She served as a 2015-2016 Jacob Rader Marcus Center Fellow at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati. She is the author of more than 200 articles and 20 books. Krasner lives in New Jersey.