Square Dancing

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy V.

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

00:00:17
Speaker 2: In our episode on Scott Joplin, we briefly discussed the cake walk and its origins is sort of a competitive entertainment during the era of chattel slavery in the US, and in that discussion I briefly mentioned that square dancing also has some thorny backstory, and we immediately got a lot of email asking for an episode. So here it is to be clear upfront, square dancing is still a thing. There are active square dancing clubs all over the US, as well as some in Canada. There are regional and national square dancing conventions every year. There are also square dance organizations outside North America, although it does seem like some of those have disbanded over the last few years. At least one of them, like specifically mentioned the effects of the COVID nineteen pandemic is their reason for disbanding. So while square dancing is not as popular today as it was at its peak, we're not talking about a pastime that's totally gone.

00:01:23
Speaker 1: For anybody that doesn't know. Square dancing is a social dance in which four couples dance in a square. For a long time, it was basically assumed that each couple would be made up of one man and one woman, or, in the case of gym class, which how a lot of us got introduced to it, yet one boy and one girl, unless maybe gym class was not evenly split into boys and girls. Some square dancing guides written in more recent years point out that the dancer's gender does not really matter, and they switch over to using words like left partner and right partner, or lead and follow. But a lot of the time the calls, which are sort of this part of square dancing, still use more gendered language. It kind of varies a little bit.

00:02:09
Speaker 2: Those calls, though, are one of the most recognizable hallmarks of square dancing. The caller is a person who calls out the instructions to the dancing couples, usually intertwined with a sort of pattern. The moves that they are calling out are known as figures, so for example, the dosy dough also called the doc doe, or various other like slight regional pronunciations that comes from the French for back to back. It's one of several figures whose name does come from French. So partners face each other, they pass each other right shoulder to right shoulder, and then kind of step sideways, so they pass back to back, and then backwards so that they pass left shoulder to left shoulder, so they kind of go around one another back to back. There are dances that use a specific sequence of figures in a specific order, which dancers can memorize, but a lot of the time, especially in modern square dancing, the caller is really the person who's leading the dance, and the dancers are following the caller's direction. A common theme in a lot of writing about square dancing is that it has very old roots. S Foster Damon was a poet, a William Blake scholar, and a square dancing enthusiast, and in nineteen fifty seven he published a short book called The History of Square Dancing, and that book begins quote anthropologist report that the great apes have been observed dancing in lines and circles. If this be so, folk dancing is probably older than mankind. Most other writers don't go back quite that far. I sort of love that idea, though.

00:03:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, me too.

00:03:49
Speaker 2: Even with not going back quite that farther, there's this general sense that we're talking about something with very old roots, and so a lot of writing about square dancing starts the story with Morris dancing. That's an English folk dance that probably dates back to sometime in the mid fifteenth century, was well established by the mid sixteenth century. This was traditionally performed by men, although that's not always true today. Dancers formed two lines facing one another. A lot of the time they would have bells tied to their lower legs. This is a really energetic dance, involves a lot of jumping and leaping.

00:04:24
Speaker 3: A lot of times.

00:04:25
Speaker 2: The dancers have wooden sticks or swords that they tap together or strike against the ground. There are similar folk dance traditions in other parts of the world, and Morris dancing is also likely connected to other traditions like mummers plays. Not everyone agrees with this connection to Morris dancing, though. In a two thousand and one paper in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Colin Quigley describes the inclusion of Morris dance in the family tree of modern Western square dance as rather fanciful Quigly is a professor whose research work focuses on folklore, ethnomusicology and dance ethnology, and he is also a fiddler and a dancer himself. But there is a clearer connection between square dancing and country dances that were developing in parts of Britain in the sixteenth century. A lot of country dances also started with people in rows facing one another, but while the morris dancers were usually all male, in country dances these were couples, with the men in one row and the women in the other. Long Ways dances started with the couple at the head of the line dancing together, and then the dance moved down the line from there. Latecomers could join the end of the lines without interrupting anything, and people who maybe weren't really all that familiar with the dance could get the gist of what they were supposed to do by the time it was their turn.

00:05:51
Speaker 1: There were also country dances in other formations, including squares and rounds. In sixteen fifty one, John Playford published a book called the English Dancing Master, or Plain and Easy Rules for the Dancing of Country Dances, with the tune to each dance it's usually noted as the first book to document all these dances. Many editions followed through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which included more and more dances over time. Other dances that evolved during this era that are sometimes included in the history of square dancing include maypole dances, Scottish reels, and Irish jigs, and set dances.

00:06:30
Speaker 2: These English country dances were, like their names suggests, associated with the country. Upper class people did them in their country homes, while working class people did basically the same dances in fields or taverns or other gathering places. When these dances were introduced to France in the early eighteenth century, the name country dance morphed into contra dance contract meaning against or opposing, referencing those two lines of dancers facing one another. That then became contra dance, which still exists today. Meanwhile, as English country dances were being held in fields and homes, other styles of dance were being developed in the ballrooms of France. A court dance called the branles involved a chain of dancers in a line or a circle. The courtellon, named for a French word that at the time meant petticoat was a court dance in which four couples danced in a square. When the courtillon was introduced into English speaking areas that name morphed, it got an extra syllable as cotillion.

00:07:36
Speaker 3: Extra eye.

00:07:37
Speaker 1: Sometimes it comes out as a syllable, depending on how southern your accent is. In the eighteenth century, the courtillent grew into the quadrille, which again had four couples dancing in a square formation, but tended to be longer and more complex and intricate than the Courtillan quadrilla was complicated enough that things like playing cards and fans were printed that included all the steps.

00:08:01
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:08:02
Speaker 1: Of course, when these were introduced into English, it just became quadrille or quadrille.

00:08:08
Speaker 3: Yes.

00:08:09
Speaker 1: I used to have a an acquaintance who I met through the family who would say quadrille. Sure they got a very short, clipped version of it, which is ye, yeah, quite cute.

00:08:21
Speaker 2: There were, also, of course, dances from other parts of Europe, but the ones that are usually referenced in terms of square dancing history were mostly from England and France, sometimes also with the inclusion of Scotland and Ireland, and then during the colonial era. In the early years in the United States, a dance or other social event might include a mix of these and other dances. For example, this description of a seventeen eighty two ball was written by a tutor at Yale quote. The ball was opened with a menuet and a country dance was immediately called. They succeeded each other till supper, which was a good one, but plane A few cotillions were then danced with one or two reels, and the whole closed with a set of country dances. Broke up around three, and each retired with his partner. Just a note here, since we talked about calling earlier. When he says called here, that just means that somebody called for a country dance to start the calling out of the figures that is part of square dancing. Like that was not a thing yet.

00:09:24
Speaker 1: Yes, that was more like a let's have a minuet.

00:09:28
Speaker 3: Yes.

00:09:29
Speaker 1: In the early nineteenth century, French quadrias started to overtake English country dances in popularity in the US, again as a quadrille. Some of this probably stems from the aftermath of both the Revolutionary War and the War of eighteen twelve. While there were still pockets of people that felt a kinship and even loyalty to Britain. There was also a lot of anti British sentiment. Meanwhile, France had helped the United States win the Revolutionary War, and in eighteen oh three the Louisiana Purchase also meant that a lot of land that had previously been claimed by France instead became part of the United States.

00:10:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, that just met.

00:10:08
Speaker 2: More people with more potentially French ancestry and knowledge of French culture. These dances, of course, also continued to evolve after being introduced to North America, and we will talk about that after a sponsor break. English country dances and French dances like the quadriy continued to evolve after being introduced to North America, including through influences from outside of the European colonists who brought them. For example, colonists took inspiration from indigenous people's round dances, in which a chain of dancers forms a circle, and ones in which indigenous dancers formed a line that coiled into the center and then back out again. There are also letters and journals from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries written by Europeans that describe Indigenous people learning European style dances, or Indigenous women as dancing partners at places like army forts during the United States westward expansion. Some of these accounts, especially earlier ones, seem to suggest a cultural exchange between Europeans and Indigenous people, including descriptions of indigenous communities choosing to do both European dances and ones from their own cultures and traditions during their celebrations, But other accounts of this describe it more as a form of cultural imperialism. For example, Francois de Chateaubrian's accounts of his travels through North America in seventeen ninety one include a description of a French dancing master named Monsieur Violets teaching among the Hedenashone. Taubran's descriptions of the indigenous dancers are racist and insulting, and he frames violets teaching efforts as bringing civilization quote even unto the air and hordes of the New World. Another big influence on the social dancing of colonial North America and the early United States came from enslaved Africans. This included ring dances and ring shouts that originated in Western and Central Africa, which people continued to do after being brought to the Americas by force. But the biggest African influences on square dancing were in the music and the practice of calling. In that earlier Scott Joplin episode, we talked about entertainment being one of the few careers during his lifetime that was open to black people and didn't involve domestic work or manual labor. Joplin was born after the US Civil War, but prior to the Civil War it was also extremely common for enslaved people to work as musicians in the homes and gathering places of white people, and based on all the documentation we have, of the first people to call square dances were black.

00:13:04
Speaker 1: This probably had some roots in the call in response that was part of both African and African American traditions, but it also had a really practical use. Black musicians learned music to play at the homes of white people who already knew how to do the dances. They had been taught by a dancing instructor or possibly a family member or a friend. But when the musicians played these same songs for their own communities, people did not already know the steps, so the person playing the fiddle or the banjo or some other instrument also called out the figures so that the dancers would know what to do.

00:13:38
Speaker 2: As a note, it is possible that this calling really got its start among enslaved people in the Caribbean, and that enslaved people then introduced it to North America from there, and European dances were introduced of course to the Caribbean as well. For example, there are a lot of variations on the quadrille and the Caribbean, with a lot of different styles, a lot of slightly different names. They vary a lot from island to island, in country to country, but like this dance has become a big part of those cultures.

00:14:11
Speaker 1: S Foster Damon described calling this way, although he credits it to some smart American, which, given the context he was writing in, suggests that he thought that this person was white.

00:14:22
Speaker 3: Quote.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: Like all great inventions, it was simple. The fiddler or the leader of the orchestra merely kept telling the dancers what to do next. Nobody who knew the six or eight fundamental calls could go very far wrong. The fiddler thus ceased to be an accompanist. He became the creator of the dance. He could vary the figures at any moment just to keep the dancers on their toes. He could invent new dances. He could even call at random anything that happened to pop into his head. These fancy figures, when nobody knew what was coming next, became popular as the last dance in a set. The prompter could in a actually did sing the calls, weaving rude rhymes and filling out the calls with comments on the individuals present. Thus the ancient trio of melody, verse and dance was identified once more, and the collar was the modern equivalent of the antique corugus. But most important of all, he kept square dancing alive, fluid growing at the very time it was becoming formalized in Europe.

00:15:25
Speaker 2: It's not clear exactly when white musicians or white dancing instructors started to call dances. The first known reference to a white collar is from Chicago in eighteen thirty six, but that was almost two decades after the first descriptions of black callers at dances. An eighteen forty one book called The Ballroom Instructor, containing a complete description of cotillions and other popular dances, mentions Squadrill's being called, so by that point the practice seems to have become pretty well established, regardless of who was playing at the dance or doing the calls.

00:16:03
Speaker 1: Although Damon described this as a great invention, a lot of the people who wrote about it in the mid eighteenth through early nineteenth centuries were really critical of the practice of calling. For example, in eighteen fifty six, dancing master Charles Durang described called dances as annoying and described calling itself as quote a vile custom marring the melody of the heirs. This was in his book The Fashionable Dancer's Casket or the Ballroom Instructor, a new and splendid work on dancing, etiquette, deportment, and the toilet. In eighteen ninety three, Gallop, which was a publication of the American National Association of Masters of Dancing, ran an article that described the typical caller as quote a very poor musician with a big voice, who has got all his knowledge from cheap handbooks. That said dancing was an extremely important social activity in the nineteenth century when it came to community gap gatherings, and a lot of the us the only thing that was more important than a dance was church. Over time, regional styles of square dancing started to develop, with different dances and practices in New England, the Southern Appalachian Mountains, and the western United States. But around the eighteen nineties, even as the magazine Gallop was complaining about callers, this type of dancing was starting to wane as a pastime. People still hosted social dances, but they were more likely to be dominated by waltzes and two steps. This was especially true in cities where trends had shifted to other types of dances, and dancing schools started focusing on those rather than things like the quadrille. Square dancing and other similar dances held on in more rural areas, though. From nineteen sixteen to nineteen eighteen, Cecil Sharp and Maud Carpels traveled through the Southern Appalachian Mountains as song catchers. They were collecting and documenting folk songs. This was during the First English Folk Revival, which stretched from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries and was an effort to collect and preserve folk music before it could fade from memory. Both of these folks were British. Sharp was co founder of the English folk dance society. In the US, Sharp and Carpels found areas where folk dances and folk music were still really popular, and Sharp came to the conclusion that what he was witnessing was quintessentially American. He also thought the ballads he heard being performed in Appalachia were British folk songs essentially unchanged, which were simply no longer being performed in Britain at all, So there's an irony here. You could argue that square dancing was quint essentially American because it incorporated influences from Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous peoples, becoming its own unique style of social dance. But Sharp really framed this more as an untarnessed preservation of Anglo Saxon heritage. He ignored the spirituals and hymns written by Black people that are also part of Appalachian music, disregarded any potential influence from indigenous people. S Foster Damon pointed out that he also disregarded the much more obvious influence of music and dance from Ireland and France. Sharp and Carpels did influential and really important work by documenting hundreds of Appalachian folks songs that might have gone unrecorded if they hadn't. But this was really skewed, and that skewed perception fit right into an attempt to revive square dancing as something quintessentially American, meaning white like in American Country Dances twenty eight Contra Dances largely from the New England States by Elizabeth Burschenel, published in nineteen eighteen. The author writes, quote, this is one of the old, most truly American sections of our country, where many generations of the same stock have grown up undisturbed by foreign influences, and where sufficient time has elapsed since the days of the early settlers for the building up of certain traditions and customs. The social group dances which have originated or evolved through common usage under such conditions in this country are as truly folk dances as those found in the older countries, and have elements which are almost universally characteristic of folk dances. And yet it has often been said that our country has no folk music or folk dancing of its own other than that of the American Indian. We are today a nation of immigrants, not of Indians, and the folk traditions that are most essentially our own are those which have developed from traditions brought to us by our early immigrants into something peculiarly our own. Later on, she specifically mentions those early immigrants as coming from England, Ireland and Scotland.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: And also this attempt to revive square dancing sort of the first revival and one that just continued to keep being re revived. That was happening at the same time as xenophobia and racism were really escalating in the United States, and a lot of people really thought these dances were a return to a forgotten art form that had been developed by white people and was emblematic of white American culture. That doesn't necessarily mean that the people who started trying to introduce square dancing in schools and things like that doesn't mean that they were explicitly intentionally doing it as a way to reinforce white identity. But there was definitely a sense of nostalgia for what people imagined as a better time using a form of dance that was similarly imagined as having been created by white European immigrants. We are going to talk more about all of this after we pause for a sponsor break. In the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties, more and more educators in the United States started incorporating folk music and square dancing into their curricula. One person who's often credited with spearheading this is Grace Laura Ryan, who was a physical education and dance teacher from Michigan and author of Dances of Our Pioneers, which came out in nineteen thirty nine. Another big proponent is Henry Ford. There's spent a lot of popular writing about him and his advocacy of folk music and square dancing over the past few years. A lot of this followed a Twitter thread and a Courts article by Robin Panakia, and it's included, among other things, a segment on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee V.

00:23:00
Speaker 1: Ford was vocally anti Semitic, and among other things, he thought that Jewish people had taken over the entertainment industry to the detriment of American culture. His newspaper, The Dearborn Independent published a series of essays called The International Jew that spoken deeply anti Semitic terms about jazz as Jewish music and described the music itself in terms that evoked racist stereotypes of black people. Attorney Aaron Sapiro later sued Ford over material written about him elsewhere in this series, leading forward to recant and apologize, but Ford also claimed to have no knowledge of what had been published in The International jew Henry Ford also did a lot to promote folk dancing. He was born in eighteen sixty three, so he was in his teens and early twenties, sort of at the end of the peak popularity for these dances. In his late teens, he had joined the Greenfield Dancing Club. He even met his wife, Claire, at a dance. He also started playing the violin at age ten, and eventually bought stratavarius. So Henry Ford's promotion of folk music wasn't just about jazz. It was about trying to bring back the pastimes of his youth. In nineteen twenty three, when he was sixty, Ford bought and restored the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He wanted to host dances there, the kind that he remembered from when he was young, but he couldn't remember all the steps. He hired dance instructor Benjamin Lovett, who went to older dancers and dance teachers when he didn't know how to do specific dances that Ford wanted. Eventually, Ford brought Lovett and his wife to Dearborn, Michigan to teach old fashioned dances there. By late nineteen twenty five, newspapers in Detroit were reporting on Ford's plan for a national revival of folk dances. I think at this point we're on revival number two. Of the many revivals of folk dancing, the revival, of course, included square dancing. He built ballrooms, including one named after love It. He established dancing schools, sponsored folk dancing programs and training programs for teachers. He donated money to impoverished schools in the South, and some of that money went to folk dancing, music, and instructional materials. Ford also bought the Boxford Inn outside of Detroit and restored it and started trying to rehire the musicians who had played there forty years before. Many of those musicians had long since retired or died. He launched a fiddling contest in nineteen twenty five, although this quickly grew beyond his control and he wasn't really part of the national contest that grew out of it. When more people started having their own radios. At home, Ford sponsored a radio program called Early American Dance Music. There are aspects of this that just seemed kind of deranged to me, Like, well, it's like it's an exemplar of the danger sick can happen when like wealth and nostalgia collide in in somebody that has a bias for action. Right, So, in nineteen twenty six, Dearborn Publishing Company put out a book titled Good Morning After a Sleep of twenty five years, Old Fashioned Dancing is being revived by mister and missus Henry Ford. In addition to including definitions for the most common figures and music, and diagrams for square dances and the Virginia reel and waltz's and others, this book also includes Ford's thoughts on why old fashioned dancing is better. The writing of this book is actually, I think credited to Love It, but it's clear that this is like reflecting Ford's opinions. He wrote quote, unless a dance be sociable, it cannot live long. Unless it promote the spirit of play, it will soon weary its devotees. And it is just here that dances requiring eight or twelve or sixteen persons as the unit for their performance, make their appeal more persons thrown together, the spirit of grown up play is irresistible. And besides, there is a wider scope and a stronger demand for skill and style. The bane of the modern dance was its almost utter lack of grace, style, and skill. Oh, I have so many thoughts. Regardless of how much of this was specifically about jazz and how much was more about Ford's own intense nostalgia, these attempts to revive folk dancing were absolutely connected to his opinion that the United States was moving in the wrong direction. He was pushing back against changing social norms and trying to return the country to what he remembered from his youth, which he imagined was a better time. Another irony here is that one big part of all the social and economic changes that were rippling through the country was the automobile. Yeah, he did not seem all that critical of his own businesses. Wrong. Oh, No, transportation evolved, but nothing else so uh.

00:28:04
Speaker 2: Interest in square dancing dipped again and then revived again, this time starting more in the Western United States. A major figure in this next revival was actually a Chinese American man named Song Chong, who learned some folk dances on a ship en route to Europe and then started a folk dance club in San Francisco after he returned in nineteen thirty seven. He spearheaded the creation of the Folk Dance Federation of California, which was formed in nineteen forty two with Henry buzz Glass as its president. Another key figure in this revival was Lloyd Shaw, also known as Pappy. Shaw worked at Cheyenne Mountain Schools in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and had started encouraging dance as a safer pastime than football. He also wanted the schools to get away from an identity that was tightly connected to whether they were winning games. Shaw started promoting square dances, publishing Cowboys Dances in July of nineteen thirty nine and establishing a school for square dance teachers in nineteen forty one. Shaw also established a summer school for callers in nineteen forty nine. Tracy found one source saying that Ford, who died in nineteen forty seven, funded some of Shaw's work, but that is not something that she was able to confirm. Yeah, I just found one mention of it in one source. Square dancing's popularity continued to grow again during the nineteen forties and fifties. In nineteen forty eight, Bob osgood established a square dancing magazine called Sets in Order, later renamed Square Dancing, which ran until nineteen eighty five. A lot of state and regional square dance associations were established in the nineteen fifties, and the first national square Dance conventions were held in the nineteen fifties as well. S. Foster Damon's History of square Dancing, which we've referenced a few times in this episode, came out in nineteen fifty seven and it described as that time as quote a great period of square dancing, just putting it out there that this great period of square dancing also included Brown versus Sport of Education in nineteen fifty four and the Montgomery Bus Boycott in nineteen fifty five, So the civil rights movement is also part of the context for the popularity of a dance form. It was mostly associated with white people, which was widely imagined as a return to old fashioned Anglo Saxon heritage. In nineteen seventy one, Bob Osgoode an eleven other callers established Collar lab to train new square dancing scholars and to standardize the calls. Collar labs still exist today. Its twenty twenty three convention was held this past April, and the twenty twenty four convention is planned for March of that year in Grapevine, Texas. The International Association of Gay Square Dance Clubs was established in nineteen eighty three that also still exists and is hosting a convention in Ottawa in July of this year and in Durham, North Carolina next year. Both of these organizations were established during a movement to name square dancing as the national folk dance of the United States. A lot of the organizations spearheading this movement were involved with modern Western square dancing, but the nineteen fifties, most square dancing had started to fall into two broad categories. One was traditional square dancing, often accompanied by a live fiddler, with regional differences in how dances were done, and the other was modern Western square dancing, which had really started to coalesce starting in the nineteen fifties. Modern Western square dancing is more formalized and standardized in terms of figures and calls, and it's often done to pre recorded music. There are four main levels, Mainstream plus, Advanced, and Challenge, and as their names suggest, each level is a bit more complex than the one before, with more figures for dancers to learn. Yeah that the musical styles more often used with traditional folk dancing usually include things like folk music, fiddle music, what you might describe as a hoedown, that kind of thing. Modern Western square dancing, though like uses music across a lot of different genres. During this campaign, roughly twenty states made square dancing their state dance, and a handful of others made square dancing the state folk dance specifically, and the campaign to make square dancing the national folk dance saw some limited success in the early nineteen eighties. On June first, nineteen eighty two, President Ronald Reagan signed a joint resolution naming square dance as the National Folk dance of the United States for the years nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty three.

00:32:46
Speaker 1: That resolution read quote Whereas square dancing has been a popular tradition in America since early colonial days, Whereas square dancing has attained a revered status as part of the folklore of this country. Whereas square dancing is a joyful expression of the vibrant spirit of the people of the United States. Whereas the American people value the display of etiquette among men and women, which is a major element of square dancing. Whereas square dancing is a traditional form of family recreation, which symbolizes a basic strength of this country, namely the unity of the family. Whereas square dancing epitomizes democracy because it dissolves arbitrary social distinctions. And whereas it is fitting that the square dance be added to the array of symbols of our national character and pride. Now, therefore be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled that the square dances designated the National Folk Dance of the United States of America for nineteen eighty two. In nineteen eighty three, this is just so, Ronald Reagan's yes.

00:33:54
Speaker 3: So.

00:33:55
Speaker 2: Other similar mills were introduced unsuccessfully in the years of five trying to make this like a permanent thing, not just nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty three, and at various points public hearings were held on the matter. Proponents of making square dancing the national folk dance talked about square dancing is something that was cooperative, collaborative, accessible, and uniquely American. Leon Panetta, who at the time was serving in the House of Representatives but would later hold a number of other positions including White House Chief of Staff, Director of the CIA, and Secretary of Defense, was a big proponent of this. One of his statements quote, square dancing is an activity that symbolizes, I think the country's basic strengths, the unity of the family, and a spirit of equality in which all people can equally enjoy this form of dancing. It is truly, I feel, symbolic of the vitality, diversity, history, and wholesomeness of this country.

00:34:55
Speaker 1: I read that, I'm like how soon. But a lot of people were opposed to this whole idea, including folklorists, dance historians, and black, Hispanic and Indigenous dancers. One active square dancer who spoke in opposition was Bob Dalcimer, who was not part of the square dancing organizations that were promoting the bills. Dalcimer objected to the inclusion of clogging, the Virginia reel, and other dances under the umbrella of square dance. He also pointed out that rural communities that had been square dancing for generations aka doing traditional square dance would probably not recognize modern Western square dance at all. Some of the testimony against this bill circled back to some ideas we've already discussed. Raina Green at the time, president of the American Folklore Society, referenced attempts to force Indigenous children to assimilate with white culture. We've talked about a number of those attempts on the show before. Quote, when my grandmother was a girl, and when my great grandmother was a child, they were forbidden to speak their language, forbidden to dance their dances by the American government and by missionaries in this country. How ironic I think it would be if my grandmother, who danced the square dance in school, the only place she ever danced it, but could not dance her own tribal dances, were now to be dishonored, and all of our ancestors were to be dishonored, in fact, with the designation of a dance that represented the overturn and repression of our own dances and the oppression of our people. Green also noted that if Congress were instead to consider an indigenous dance as the National folk dance, tribal peoples would have difficulty choosing which of all the round dances it should be, because the round dances are all different, and the communities involved respect and honor those differences. And even if there had been more acknowledgment that European, Indigenous and African influences all played a part in the development of square dancing, that still left out a lot of Americans. For example, in the words of activist Juan Gutierrez during congressional earrings, quote, first of all, our community doesn't have even the slightest idea of what square dance is. I am director of a Puerto Rican folk music group. I respect the traditional square dancing form as well as others, but I believe in national diversity. I don't think that square dancing will ever represent the diversity of people in the United States. Efforts to make square dancing the national folk dance seem to have fizzled out in more recent years, and by the late nineteen eighties, square dancing was also starting to fall out of favor as part of school pe classes, which again it's where Holly and I were exposed to it. I'm sure we'll talk about that more on Friday. As we said earlier, though there are still local, regional, national, and international square dance clubs. A lot of the most active square dancers and callers today are elders, and these organizations are predominant white, but there are people who are trying to attract younger and more diverse participants. There's an episode of Radio Lab called Bertie in the Cage from October of twenty nineteen, in which reporter Tracy Hunt went to the National Convention and talked to some square dancers there about, among other things, how this social dance is trying to evolve. Oh, I'm very excited for behind the scenes this time around, me too. Do you have some listener mail to take us out?

00:38:30
Speaker 2: I do this Sister mail is from Vaughn and Von wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I found your episode about knitting, and I have now listened to all the episodes. You keep me company as I hike drive to and from work and while I'm doing things at home. Your sense of humor, respectful approach to topics, and empathy to all the topics is so appreciated. I learned so much from your episodes, and most of the topics don't have relevance to my working.

00:38:52
Speaker 3: Day until Mother Goose.

00:38:55
Speaker 2: I teach kindergarten in the San Francisco area. We use the Mother Goose poems to teach rhyming. We act out the poems and draw our own interpretations of them. I've been meaning to write in when you've done the previous Mother Goose Impossible episodes, and I'm finally doing it. I've enclosed the art I use as a sample for Humpty Dumpty and Jack be Nimble. Also included are the motions in case you'd like to act out the poems. I hope you will enjoy the kindergartener's artwork as much as I do. This Jack be Nimble is from a current student. I've also enclosed my nine year old pug Finn, who puts up with me making him wear hats. This one is an eggplant hat. Thank you again for introducing me to many new topics and all your hard work. I wish you continued success, Love Vaughn, So thank you so much, Vond for these pictures.

00:39:49
Speaker 3: Something.

00:39:49
Speaker 2: There's one that's a drawing of Humpty Dumpty. Something about this drawing of Humpty Dumpty. There is what looks like a suggestion of legs in blue. But then what I think is the body of Humpty Dumpty reminds me a little bit of like like a whole chicken, like with the two chicken legs sticking up.

00:40:12
Speaker 3: It is adorable. And then the Jackbie Nimble one Check.

00:40:18
Speaker 2: Has like a very green head and feet that look like an anchor to me, so that is fun. And then of course a pug and a hat with the like pug tongue lall thing going. So anyway, thank you so much for sending these adorable pictures.

00:40:40
Speaker 1: That seems like a great way to teach kids about rhymes. And there are lots of like sort of easy gesture based dances that you could make to go along with a lot of these things. So thank you Von for this note.

00:40:51
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