Today -100: April 16, 1923: Dance dance dance

A letter from Fanny Garrison Villard, daughter of William Lloyd Garrison and an impressive activist for women’s suffrage, peace, and civil rights in her own right, responds to a story I must have missed about the War Dept planning to investigate pacifist groups because War Secretary John Wingate Weeks thinks pacifists are all socialists or Communists. She says they aren’t.

A dance marathon in New York is disrupted by police enforcing a law against events going on dangerously long, originally enacted against bicycle races. The couples dance into a van, dance onto the ferry, and continue dancing in Jersey, as was the custom. (Update: tomorrow they’ll continue dancing back to NY, chased out by the Fort Lee cops,  then to Connecticut). Mayor James Curley of Boston says he will ban dance marathons, even in private homes, as a public nuisance. And there’s a new dancing record: 65½ hours, Magdalene Williams of Houston. “A waiting limousine carried her to a Turkish bath”. Before that, there were another couple of records broken since yesterday, though an L. Kessler was disqualified “as a result of his apparent inability to keep time to the music or to do any real dancing.”

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