“The Healthful Art of Dancing”: Luther Halsey Gulick, Gender, the Body, and the Performativity of National Identity

By the early twentieth century, concerns with bodies and the American body politic proliferated with a new interest in physical exercise for men and women, the ideal of a reinvigorated "muscular Christianity," the playground movement, temperance activism, the social hygiene and eugenics movements, to name but a few. At a time when the United States spread its imperial wings, while facing a renewed upsurge in immigration, reformers and political activists shared heightened anxiety and concern with a wide range of body-centered issues which, in their mind, could both promote, or undermine, or even pollute American bodies and the body politic. Through simultaneously shaping and reinvigorating the bodies of native-born Americans and policing the bodies of so-called "new immigrants," these reformers hoped to stabilize and reinvigorate the American body politic (Diner 73-74, 261; Kimmel 177-81, 196; Freedman and D'Emilio 165-66, 203-8, 211-15; Riess 24-26, 138, 142, Budd, esp. 43-54, 64-79, 81-99; Bederman 8, 15, 42; Edwards 153-66).' This interest in effecting change through shaping the body and this dual concern with social progress and social control was part of Progressive Era reforms. Historians of the Progressive Era have emphasized the often contradictory nature of the reforms and the reformers' motivations. Progressives' desire to reconcile conflicts between individual and community, old ideals and new social realities, often led them to precarious balancing acts between social justice and social control. Torn between a belief in human progress and equally as firm conviction as to the immutability of racial, ethnic, and class differences, Progressives frequently embraced ideas of social control in the attempt to ensure progress and social justice (Rodgers 113-32; Buenker 187-204). In the Progressive Era, social control through physical discipline became understood as a social good by many Americans who hoped to ensure social progress and national cohesiveness. In 1908, the New York Public Schools joined the choir of body reformers and instituted a folk dance instruction program. The primary goal of the New York program was to teach school-age girls folk dances. Over a course of four years, about 3,000 children in 68 classes and 125 teachers participated. The New York program served as a model for other cities, such as Baltimore, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. By 1910, 17 cities had organized similar programs, linking together concerns with social control, physical health, and the promotion of American values (Tomko 156; Riess 141 ). Linda Tomko has investigated these folk dance activities with a focus on the gendered meanings of the instruction program and the role of the female instructors. She argues that "the reciprocal relationship between women and dancing...proved instrumental in women's assertion of professional and political agency" (156, 172). Tomko places folk dancing and its instructors in the context of the formation of a "new middle-class," whose political interests grew alongside their professional concerns (Wiebe 111-32). Scholars have neglected to examine the connections between notions of gender and national identity prevalent in these folk dancing activities. Tomko notes that "a certain American nationalism" (163) was part of the program, and she registers the cultural marginalization of ethnic groups of non-Anglo-Saxon descent through the selection of folk dances designated suitable for the program. Tomko, though, neglects significant implications of folk dance performance for the construction of national identity in connection with the female body. David Glassberg focusses on the ways in which pageants, which often used folk dancing, historicized national identity in a "ritual of social transformation" (Glassberg 4), creating and affirming social hierarchies and national identity. But whereas Tomko underemphasizes the significance of national identity, Glassberg neglects the role of gender in pageantry and folic dancing. …