JF Ptak Science Books Daily Dose from Dr. Odd
Hitler was dead in 1946, but dance--the devil's reach of hellfire and something worse than Hitler, according to the author of this pamphlet--wasn't.
The author, Dan Gilbert LL.D., wrote a very _______ summation of modern dance, which was an assault on morals (well, Christian morals) and decency. He does actually make the case that dance music (jitterbug, swing, and jazz) was more dangerous than Hitler and was "Hitlerizing" American youth to its utter destruction. "Jitterbug dens" preached a "faster jitterbuggery" (which was "conceived in the brothel to stimulate lust and vice") which led youth into the Underworld. The children of America were being lost to "razzy jazzy spasm bands" which would "strouse uncontrollable sex desire" and "infect youth with the disease of immorality" then to "produce(s) a state of emotional and nervous derangement, which is scientifically indistinguishable from intoxication induced by stimulants or narcotics". And on and on.
These are just a few of the very choice morsels found in Gilbert's 42-page diatribe, picked out by me rather quickly, plucked from the text with toothpicks--I just didn't want to spend very much time with this book at all. That said, I'm sure that there are tastier items than these, salted through a text of salt.
I don't know why Gilbert became this deeply interested in dance/death/Hell in the year following the end of WWII--after years of destruction, it seems hard for me to imagine to wake up, look out the window, and see the next assault on the U.S. coming in the form of dance. He did carry on some about the "jitterbug insanity" of "improvisation", and how dancers would abandon the appropriate and constrained methods of dance to simply move according to feeling and need. This was the root of it all--happy feet.
An earlier post on this blog addressed a direct relative to this pamphlet:
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