Basic Instructions by Scott Meyer for November 18, 2024

Henry Ford hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet!

Ford thought square dancing would counter the Jewish plot to corrupt Americans with jazz music.

I refuse to dance. Nobody gets me to gyrate wildly just by playing music! I reserve that for moments when I’m being shot at.

Thanks, Heinrich.

Yeah, Ford believed that traditional American folk dances, like square dancing, were an important part of the nation’s cultural heritage (i.e. white heritage). He wanted to promote them as a “wholesome alternative” to modern, urban entertainment like jazz, which he disliked (i.e. music liked by people of color).

Is Square Dancing really taught in American schools???

Square dancing is not uniquely american, it’s a variant of Quadrille. Still called that on St. Croix.

Huh,who knew?

When I was in grade 5, the thing that impressed me about square dancing was that I got to hold hands, albeit briefly, with this pretty girl whose name is lost in the mists of time.

The original public school system, in Frederick ‘The Great’s’ Prussia, was designed to create standardized units of cannon fodder and bearers of cannon fodder. The American public school system was designed to create standardized units of (Protestant) factory workers.

Going to school in the 1950’s and 60’s, I often said that school was to train us to work in the factory – show up and be bored all day. But now that the factories are gone, are the schools any different?

The headline says it all — “America’s wholesome square dancing tradition is a tool of white supremacy” — and explains the reason countless kids in countless gym classes have been swinging their partners round-and-round for the past 90 years. It is not — as I supposed — some vestige frontier tradition that lodged in public school physical education and somehow survived the lash of time, but a direct result of … well, better let Pennacchia explain it:

To understand how square dancing became a state-mandated means of celebrating Americana, it’s necessary to go back to Henry Ford… Ford hated jazz; he hated the Charleston. He also really hated Jewish people, and believed that Jewish people invented jazz as part of a nefarious plot to corrupt the masses and take over the world—a theory that might come as a surprise to the black people who actually did invent it.I knew that the inventor of the Model T was a poisonous anti-Semite, an inspiration to Adolf Hitler and the only American mentioned by name in Mein Kampf. But the jazz stuff is new. Pennacchia quotes volume three of Ford’s The International Jew, written in 1921:

Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

Pennacchia explains how Ford loved to square dance and he “saw these dances as intrinsically white, and thus more intrinsically wholesome.” In 1925, he announced that he would supplant jazz with square dancing and brought 200 Midwest dance instructors to Dearborn to learn the steps. Ford’s personal instructor, Benjamin Lovett, published a book, Good Morning: After a Sleep of Twenty-Five Years, Old-Fashioned Dancing is Being Revived by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford and went across the country, teaching square dancing.

I prefer a more traditional form of American dancing, mostly because I can play it on the keyboard: (Hint: That’s what it’s all about.)

I dunno…given that Henry Ford died in 1947, I don’t think he was very influential in promoting square dancing in the latter 1960s when the fad briefly showed up at my elementary school. A lot of grown-ups were trying to tune out Vietnam, Woodstock, and the counter-culture stuff with various nostalgic and “down-home” programming like Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, Hee Haw, and so forth. The old horse opera shows were fading, but many have said that Star Trek was just a cowboy show set in space. At that point, rock’n’roll was the threat, and the only jazz I remember from that period was the music on the Charlie Brown specials (Vince Guaraldi!). The girls weren’t going to give up the Beatles for square dancing.

I think trying to get us to square dance at that point was just an innocent attempt by our teachers to get us moving when the outdoor weather was awful. Remember, Kennedy’s physical fitness push was still happening and gym teachers tried to get us to do push ups and the other stuff that would keep America strong. Anyway, whatever their motivation, square dancing didn’t go over well because the grade-school boys thought it was (a) unmanly and (b) a disgusting exposure to girl cooties. After a couple of weeks of steadfast resistance from the boys, the teachers gave up and we went back to roller skating and dodgeball.

So, it might have been a good conspiracy theory back in the 40s and 50s, but I don’t think it was relevant to the fads of the 60s. As some guy said long ago, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…