Dance Hall Days: Intimacy and Leisure Among Working-Class Immigrants in the United States

4. "That's Alright, I Have My Gang Here": Working-Class Male Culture and the Struggle over Gender, Identity, and Dance

F O U R “That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here” Working-Class Male Culture and the Struggle over Gender, Identity, and Dance On a rainy Chicago night in 1925, Julia Podraza met her future husband, George Matiasek. George was a friend of Julia’s oldest brother, Frank, who played baseball with George on the neighborhood corner lot. On that night, Frank brought George home with him to “get protected from the rain” after a storm interrupted their game. When the pair arrived , they unexpectedly ran into Julia. Her brother introduced the two, and from that night on, Julia recalled fondly, “we became friendly.”1 During their courtship, the pair often visited the zoo at Lincoln Park or took Sunday afternoon rides to Starved Rock, a park outside Chicago. Sunday evenings were set aside for dinner at George’s parents house and usually consisted of roast pork, duck, or goose and Bohemian dumplings and sauerkraut. And Julia loved to dance. “I’d rather dance than eat,” she declared. Julia and George went to all “the big places in the 20s,” including the Aragon, the Trianon, and the Merry Gardens, which featured the big-name bands and conductors such as Wayne King and Lawrence Welk. When not attending the larger ballrooms, they went to the neighborhood “Polish Hall,” which also doubled as a union hall, for dances. Julia recalled that “they have big doings there” and “all these dances,” like the Chocolate Dance, the Donut Dance, and the Rose Dance. Yet, while Julia loved to dance, she and her friends “would all get together and have ballroom stepping” “maybe every two weeks,” and| 115 | the only time George ever danced with her was on their wedding night, to the song “Home Sweet Home.” On the other nights they went dancing , Julia recalled that “he’d sit and wait for me till I got through dancing and then he’d take me home.” Julia explained that she used to dance “with all the fellows [she] knew there. ’Cause we used to have like a gang.”2 Dancing, then, figured prominently in Julia’s and George’s courtship. But their dancing, or her dancing and his watching from the sidelines, also sheds light on the meaning of dance for men and women and on commercial leisure’s impact. While dancing was all the rage throughout the early twentieth century, the couple’s experience suggests that most men were not as enthusiastic about dancing as the women they so eagerly pursued and that commercial leisure—and dance halls in particular—did not play as significant a role in working-class dating and courtship as some historians have assumed. After all, Julia may have loved to dance, but she and George went ballroom stepping “maybe every two weeks.” The reasons men and women only occasionally visited dance halls varied as much as the different steps they performed on the dance floor. In some cases, their infrequent attendance reflected a lack of spare cash to pay for more than an occasional outing. In others, the workplace either consumed too much time and energy, or the wages they made were too meager to afford more than a weekly outing. In addition, men’s consumption of commercial leisure revolved around their relationships with women on and off the dance floor. While many men boasted that, at dance halls, they did whatever they “damn please,” their female partners were never quite willing to accommodate them. All men found themselves being passed over for dances; dates usually refused to “come across” or accept escorts home; and women were usually more adept dancers—all of these factors contested male-defined ideas about intimacy and leisure and challenged the manner in which men had grown accustomed to constructing a gender identity.3 The new social dances that gained popularity at the turn of the century not only were organized around couples instead of danced in a group formation but also favored spontaneity and individual expression over a more predictable routine, potentially undercutting the collective safety of the group and the collective process that gave meaning to the manner in which men understood their masculinity and heterosocial relations. “That’s Alright, I Have My Gang Here”| 116 | For working-class men, the anxiety and humiliation that generally accompanied finding a dance partner or “making dates,” as well as the manner in which women challenged their use of public space, were...