Oh,
You Boys, You Boys!
By Davis Bitton
Latter-day Saints have
long been known as dancers. We could be serious, but
we could also kick up our heels and have fun. How well
some of us remember Gold and Green balls, the annual
ward dance with its colorful decorations and the crowning
of a queen. And year after year at the general Mutual
Improvement Association conference in June, a huge dance
festival was held in the stadium at the University
of Utah.
From all over the Church
came young people who had learned
the assigned dances. After rehearsal in the stadium,
the dances were performed in a gigantic, coordinated
display of rhythm and color.
But some dance styles seemed
inappropriate for the Church setting. Sometimes young
people would show up at ward and stake dances in inappropriate
attire. On occasion they were rowdy and uncouth. Ward
and stake officers were left with the ticklish task
of keeping the parties fun and lighthearted while excluding
corrupting influences.
This
general situation, the desire to encourage dancing as
wholesome recreation while avoiding evil, has a long
history. In eighteenth-century England
the threat came from across the channel as suggestive
French dances replaced some of the simpler English dances.
Writing to a friend, an English father described his
reaction:
I was
amazed to see my girl handled by and handling young
men with so much familiarity, and I could not have thought
it had been my child. They very often made use of a
most impudent and lascivious step called setting to
partners, which I know not how to describe to you but
by telling you that it is the very reverse of back to
back.
At last
an impudent young dog bid the fiddlers play a dance
called Moll Patley, and, after having made two or three capers, ran to
his partner, locked his arm in hers, and whisked her
round cleverly above ground in such a manner that I,
who sat upon one of the lowest benches, saw further
above her shoe than I can think fit to acquaint you
with. I could no longer endure these enormities, wherefore,
just as my girl was going to be made a whirligig, I
ran in, seized my child, and carried her home.
For much of the late nineteenth
century, as hard as it is for us to imagine, the dance
ruled out as dangerous was the waltz. Those accustomed
to patterned line or square dancing saw the waltz as
a less-than-innocent excuse for the two partners to
hold each other close. It simply could not be right,
they thought, for a young man and young woman to be
locked in close physical proximity for a long dance,
or (horrors!) a whole evening. The waltz seemed a willful
abandonment of wholesome entertainment in favor of dangerous
flirtation with temptation.
As the waltz demonstrated
its appeal and as people became more accustomed to it,
it was reluctantly allowed for two dances during the
evening. Not surprisingly, many young people loved the
waltz and considered their elders stuffy fuddy-duddies.
One of my favorite stories
takes us back to the 1870s. Brigham Young was still
alive. A young man from the Eighteenth Ward named Heber
J. Grant was in charge of the evening’s entertainment.
On the grounds that they had to compete with other wards,
Heber persuaded Bishop Edwin D. Woolley to allow three
waltzes. Invitations were extended to President Brigham
Young, who came with some members of his family.
At the end of the evening
after many square dances and the three waltzes had been
enjoyed came the final dance. After starting as a square
dance, it segued into a long conclusion with the couples
waltzing around and around the square. "They are
waltzing," said President Young.
"No," said young Heber
Grant in response, "they are not waltzing; when
they waltz they waltz all around the room; this is a
quadrille."
Brigham Young couldn’t
help but laugh as he said, "Oh, you boys, you boys."
We can chuckle but should
not, I think, be so superior as to fail to recognize
that a real problem was being addressed. By the way,
although you knew this of course, some readers may need
to be informed that Heber J. Grant became an apostle
and then, from 1918 to 1945, president of the Church.
In the middle decades of
the twentieth century, Mutual Improvement Association
officers had the unwelcome duty of telling mischievous
teenagers that the "twist" (or the current
dance craze of the moment) was not appropriate for Church
dances. When young ladies showed up at the door of the
dance hall in suggestive, skimpy attire, the adult sisters
in charge, in as friendly a manner as they could, handed
them an attractive shawl to provide more adequate coverage.
No doubt, many young people considered the Church ridiculous
and straight-laced.
From the Salt
Lake Herald on 19 September 1880 comes an
interesting statement on the subject:
We have
yet to hear a sound and convincing argument why a follower
of Christ may not dance, go to the theater, attend the
concert, etc., without suffering injury to his morals
or endangering his belief in the Savior. To say that
a man or woman cannot do these things and still be Christians,
is to say that the gospel taught by Jesus cannot be
lived up to by men and women whose natures are normal.
In order to be good and obtain salvation they must smother
the pleasant features of their dispositions and crush
out prominent inclinations and not wicked desires implanted in them by God himself.
This is
not reasonable, while God is. The ordinary human requires
a certain amount of entertainment and amusement for
the body and the mind, and if he does not obtain it
he must suffer mentally and physically. If that amusement
can be found in the innocent dance or in witnessing
a stage performance, where is the harm in them? We can
discover none.
Although the writing shows
signs of haste, there is common sense here. Certain
activities are allowed, are indeed necessary, for "normal"
human beings. God does not expect us to denature ourselves.
But for this editorialist
there were implied qualifications.
Injury
to morals or endangering belief in the Savior were
obviously unacceptable. Behavior that wounds the Spirit
or violates the moral code is not defended. Boundaries
are drawn. The "pleasant features of their [our]
dispositions" are allowed to flourish, but not
to the detriment of reaching our eternal goal.
Is there a principle here
that is applicable "rave" parties, "adult"
movies, and the overtly sensuous dancing sometimes seen
in high schools, colleges, and other locations?
