Despite its libertine reputation, San Francisco was among the first to crack down on a degrading, sometimes-deadly craze that was sweeping much of a starved nation during the Great Depression: competitive endurance dancing.
Dance marathons, also called walkathons to avoid legal and moral scrutiny, were essentially the Netflix dating show of that era. As an emcee entertained the audience with dancers’ biographies over live music, the couples danced, stumbled and dragged each other for weeks on almost no sleep in the pursuit of money and glory.
In San Francisco, at least two contestants reportedly died due to natural and unnatural causes near the dance floor. Many more merely passed out. Some dancers married for prizes during the competitions, occasionally getting jailed for bigamy.
Few dancers who weren’t properly connected to the promoter ever won.
A Bay Area alliance of women’s and religious groups, lawmakers and newspapers formed to help cut the music on a trend one local woman called “unmoral, disgusting and conducive to delinquency and crime.”
Though the dance marathon era has been extinct for almost 90 years, depictions of sleepy ballroom contestants live on in pop culture. Examples include episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “The Muppet Show,” as well as the 1969 film “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
There are news reports of dance marathons in San Francisco from the sport’s earliest days. In March 1910, the San Francisco Police Department broke up a marathon at the Dreamland Rink after it had gone almost 15 hours, with $250 at stake. There were five couples still dancing with two bands playing waltz and two-step music, and several doctors working. Dancers’ friends were also on hand to feed them during breaks.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, after police had ordered dancers to stop, “several of them still continued to dance and had to be led to the dressing rooms, the supposition being that they had become temporarily unbalanced because of the strain which they had been under.”
Opposition to the marathons formed immediately. When many of the same San Francisco dancers competed in San Jose, they were met by protesters including local ministers and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.
Marathon dancing was banned in San Francisco later that year. In 1923, San Francisco police Chief Daniel O’Brien told the Chronicle an anti-dance marathon ordinance was passed in 1910 after one person died and several others collapsed during an event.
Violating the ordinance meant a $100 fine or 30 days in jail, whether the marathon happened in public or private.
"No one, no matter how thin, will be permitted to break a world's record to syncopated music in this city while that ordinance stands," O’Brien said.