The concept of a dance marathon is simple: participants dance, move, or walk to music over the course of a long period of time—days, or even weeks. Today, the concept usually seems either like a natural punchline (perhaps you’re a fan of the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia version) or the sort of outlandish endurance challenge that suits itself to team fundraisers. This wasn’t always the case, though. In the early twentieth century, dance marathons were not only common and popular, occurring all over the United States with thousands of participants at a clip, they were an entire industry—and a surprisingly hazardous business.
The formal idea of a dance marathon emerged in the early 1920s, after a plucky vegetarian New York City dance instructor named Alma Cummings decided to see if she could achieve the world record for longest continuous dance. According to a report in the News-Journal of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Cummings started just before seven o’clock in the evening on March 31, 1923, and danced the waltz, fox-trot, and one-step for twenty-seven hours straight, fueled by snacks of fruit, nuts, and near-beer and exhausting six male partners in the process. Her achievement inspired copycats and competitors, and before long, promoters started offering group dance marathons that hybridized sports, social dancing, vaudeville, and nightlife as a form of rivalry and entertainment.
To be sure, this all started as a novelty and was of a piece with other entertainments for folks seeking something—anything—entertaining in the 1920s and 1930s. (One 1931 article mentions other so-called “fatigue contests” ranging from the simply strange to the plainly dangerous, including “tree-sitting, rolling peanuts along a country road with the nose, driving automobiles with the hands tied, walking contests, roller skating contests, no-talking contests, talking demonstrations and marathons, fishing marathons, and the like.”)
The Great Depression represented the height of the dance marathon craze, for a few reasons. Promoters saw a clear opportunity for profit; contestants, many of them facing hard times, could try to win a life-changing amount of money; and spectators got cheap entertainment. What had been a slightly silly way for rural communities to enjoy a night out—the “poor man’s nightclub”—expanded to cities, turning into a circuit of highly publicized, regimented events. Doing well in a dance marathon was a way for performers to attain a sort of B-list celebrity, and indeed, many of the successful couples on the marathon circuit were semi-pro participants rather than folks who just strolled up to give it a try (most people could not, in fact, step away from their everyday lives for weeks at a time to participate, and many dance marathons were, like professional wrestling, in fact fixed for maximum entertainment value).