I have found, when I talk about this ugly chapter in our history, that many people literally refuse to believe me. It sounds like a fantasy from a dystopian movie like “The Hunger Games.” Surely Americans would never tolerate a form of entertainment in which fellow citizens were not only required to humiliate themselves for food, but also to place themselves in danger of madness, physical collapse and even death for the entertainment of others. Not Americans. Not here!

Yet it did happen, and happened for a more than a decade, thanks to the Great Depression that began in 1929. Dance marathons began innocently as college stunts in the late 1920’s, but when the Crash came and people started jumping out of windows (or so the story goes), it quickly mutated into the most heartless form of profit-making entertainment ever to disgrace American shores. This was the old U.S. of A entrepreneurial spirit in its most sinister form. 

Promoters organized dance marathons as the perfect blend of cheap labor, soap opera sentiment, music and sadism, and the business was a bonanza. Desperate, unemployed contestants agreed to dance until they dropped ( they were only allowed ten minutes of “rest” every hour, around the clock, for months on end) in return for regular meals (that they often had to eat while dancing), with the added challenge of enduring variations on the dancing theme that turned them into the equivalent of gladiators or performing chimps. And spectators paid a dollar a day to watch, listen to music, and feel great about the fact that they were better off than the poor saps being exploited.

They were saps too, however, because the “competition” was as fixed as Monster Truck rallies and professional wrestling are today. Many of the contestants were regulars on the dance marathon circuit, and the unsuspecting local entrants who entered were usually sloughed off as the hours rolled on, thanks to sabotage, tricks, and psychological warfare. The marathon promoters made up rules as they went along, and those brave, exhausted kids who triumphed at the end were usually either hard-bitten veterans ready to move on to the next city and dance ordeal, or lucky tyros who would soon learn that that big cash prize they thought they won had been reduced to pennies by charges for food, medical care and lodging.

The dance marathons were banned by public health advocates in the Forties, and entered the crowded memory hole where our culture stuffs embarrassments it would rather pretend never happened. This one might stayed there were it not for the efforts of June Havoc. The actress, once the perpetual child vaudeville circuit star billed as “Baby June” (later “Dainty June”)—yes, Gypsy Rose Lee’s younger sister, right out of the Sondheim-Stein  musical—avoided the soup lines by becoming one of those canny dance marathon regulars. Later, when she was an established adult star, she realized that it was the formative experience of her life, one that stiffened her spine to make it on Broadway and Hollywood, which she did with success and versatility.

In her two autobiographies, “Early Havoc” and “More Havoc,” June told the harrowing tales of her dance marathon traumas, and they supplied much of the inspiration and source material for both the book and the Academy Award nominated film, “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”  “Marathon ’33,” the show I directed, was Havoc’s stage recreation of the marathons that she co-directed on Broadway in 1963, garnering her a Tony nomination. But despite her efforts, the Depression dance marathons continue to be too painful for popular history to recall. “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” is almost never on TV; “Marathon ’33” is rarely produced or even mentioned.

The Washington Post couldn’t be bothered to review my production.

Although the slimy techniques used by the marathon promoters survive as standard gimmicks on TV reality shows, the motive for contestants now is instant celebrity, not survival. That’s progress, I suppose. Still, the dance marathons need to be lifted out of that memory hole, because what we can learn from them is crucial.

They teach us that we must be vigilant to hold on to our humanity in a crisis, and that future generations will judge us, not by how we behaved  when things were good, but how we treated each other when they were not.

Footnote: Reading that old post on this topic, I was intrigued to find that two of the only three commenters on it were two now self-banished Ethics Alarms-haters: The libertarian Windy Pundit, who later turned his blog into a veritable “Jack Marshall is Satan” cornucopia, and uber-woke cartoonist Ampersand, aka. Barry Deutsch.