Recollections From Mostly United States YouTube Commenters About Square Dancing Being Taught In Gym Classes

Cracked, May 26, 2021  #HenryFord #Cracked #SquareDancing

You know how you hated learning square dancing in gym class? Well, now you have a good reason. Henry Ford forced schools to teach swinging your pardner round so he could fight against jazz (which he thought was invented by the Jews?).

Hosted by: Melissa Aquiles

Written by: Jack Frederick & Melissa Aquiles

Edited by: Jack Frederick

00:00 - Intro

00:43 - Henry Ford is behind it all

01:24 - It's to fight against jazz

02:11 - Ford gave money to schools so they'd teach it

03:46 - Square dancing isn't even white

04:40 - Chicken pot pie?

****
Edited by Azizi Powell

This pancocojams post showcases a 2021 YouTube video entitled "The Surprisingly Racist Origins Of Square Dancing In Gym Class". This post also presents some comments from the discussion thread of that video. Most of these examples* refer to commenters' recollections about learning square dancing and/or other dances in their elementary, middle school, and/or high school gym (physical education) classes.

As at least one person noted in a comment that is given in this post's discussion section) that this  YouTube video is largely based on a 2017 online article by Robyn Pennacchia entitled "America’s wholesome square dancing tradition is a tool of white supremacy Not so innocent."  The beginning portion of that article is given below.

The content of this pancocojams post is presented for historical and socio-cultural purposes.

All copyrights remain with their owners.

Thanks to the producers and publishers of this showcased YouTube video and thanks to Robyn Pennacchia for her 2017 article. Thanks also to all those who are quoted in this pancocojams post.
-snip-
For full disclosure, I added three comments to this discussion and included them in this pancocojams compilation.

****
EXCERPT FROM 2017 ARTICLE ABOUT SQUARE DANCING

https://qz.com/1153516/americas-wholesome-square-dancing-tradition-is-a-tool-of-white-supremacy

America’s wholesome square dancing tradition is a tool of white supremacy

Not so innocent.

By Robyn Pennacchia, Published December 12, 2017
"If you live in the United States, chances are high that, growing up, you had to take square dancing in gym class. I myself spent a week at my Rochester, New York, high school learning to allemande left and right—skills I was highly unlikely to ever need again. At the time, although I thought it was odd, I was merely grateful for not having to change into my gym clothes.

As it turns out, there’s an unusual reason why so many American students spend their formative years learning to do-si-do. Twenty-eight out of 50 states have declared square dancing their official dance. This is part of a coordinated campaign—a dancespiracy, if you will—to make square dancing the official dance of the United States, in the hope that doing so “would give square dancing and its related activities more visibility and have a positive effect on recruiting new dancers.”

But the institutionalization of square dancing isn’t just about the joy of dance. It’s also about America’s legacy of racism and anti-Semitism—and the surprising tools that get used in the effort to uphold whiteness.

Henry Ford was scared of jazz

To understand how square dancing became a state-mandated means of celebrating Americana, it’s necessary to go back to Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Vehicles. 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.

In volume three of Ford’s The International Jew series, written in 1921, he writes:

“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.”

Like Hitler, who greatly admired Ford and even mentioned him approvingly in Mein Kampf, Ford believed that Jewish people were evil geniuses diabolically planning to control the world. Black people, he thought, were not necessarily evil, but certainly not as swift as white people, and were particularly prone to being manipulated and controlled by “the Jews.”

Ford believed he would be able to counteract what he saw as the unwholesome influence of jazz on America."...
-snip-
The made up word "dancespiracy"  is written in italics in that article.

****
SELECTED COMMENTS FROM THE YOUTUBE DISCUSSION THREAD 
For the video entitled "The Surprisingly Racist Origins Of Square Dancing In Gym Class"

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxEZMXnQGs8

This is a sample of comments from that YouTube video about commenters' recollections of learning square dancing in school. Numbers are added for referencing purposes only.

2021

1. @twothreebravo
"I grew up in New England and we had Square Dancing in gym class at all levels and they always told us it was a "Southern" thing. Fast forward to my 20s when I enlist in the Army and end up in Georgia, I ask around about Square Dancing and they say, oh that's a "Western/Cowboy" thing. Fast forward to my 30s and I'm out of the army living in Colorado and I ask around about Square Dancing and they say, oh that's a "New England/Farmer" thing. That was when I knew something wasn't right with all this square dancing thing."

**
2. @angrynoodletwentyfive6463
"my gym teacher REQUIRED square dancing partners to be boy girl... and made a boy who was already being bullied by the other boys wear a wig and a skirt when there were 2 more boys than girls... all of the girls in our class complained to the principle but he was the only gym teacher for both the junior high and highschool, and they were trying to find a replacement but basically couldn't."

**
3. @TheFairyGoblin
"I learned square dance in grade school. Everyone in my school had to learn!

Our gym teacher actually went to that same school when he was a child, and was taught square dancing then as well.

He never had an answer to explain why we were learning, it’s really nice to know it wasn’t just a weird old man telling us to do a weird old dance."

**
4. @hunterG60k
"In Scotland we learned country dancing in primary school (age 5-11), which is funny because the only other time we do it is at a Ceilidh; Scottish version of a barn dance I suppose, involving ridiculous amounts of alcohol. The training starts young lol"

**
5. @Dk._
..."I learned the Electric Slide in school every year for years. Rebel teachers refusing the toe the square dance line? I’d like to think so"

**
6. @n_spin
"At least my school (early 80s) offset it by also teaching us to dance "the bus stop" (a disco line dance) to "Upside Down" by Diana Ross 😅"

**
7. @loungefly1
"In the 80's in my school we learned the Michael Jackson "Thriller" dance in gym."

**
8. @moortak
"Oddly enough my school did the square dancing thing, but always paired with some other traditional dances, including the  hora and jazz associated dances like the Charleston."

**
Reply
9.@cracked
"Ford would have been PISSED"

**
10. @NimhLabs
"They stopped trying to get us to dance in school, when most of the class just didn't bother to join in the dance"

**
11. @EmilyExplosion27
"Well, I guess that explains why we were never taught square dancing at my super progressive elementary school...

We did have a couple days of hip hop in middle school, though."

**
12. @rayrowley4013
"Square dancing is the state dance in Washington. Pretty sure that was why we did it. Never knew that other states did it too. We also did salsa (my school was 70% hispanic). "

**
13. @andreabrown4541
"I'm a black woman who attended white schools in the '70s and yes I learned to square dance and waltz in gym class.  Strangely, we weren't taught to salsa, which I would have enjoyed.  I was also asked to debate the merits of slavery, twice. But I grew up in the Jim Crow South."

**
14. @robertvincent4042
"I'm a "Black" man...46.grew up in Detroit about 15 minutes from Dearborn. .and I definitely remember square dancing in gym...it was so forced upon us"

**
Reply
15. @donjuan2421
"Yeah, I'm 49 from Chicago, and they had us doing that in like 2nd and 3rd grade"

**
16. @thelucywho3983
"Jersey over here and we square danced in elementary school. I always wondered why. Salsa would have been better 💃 or even learning about mortgages"

**
Reply
17. @azizip171, 2023
"@thelucywho3983  I'm also from New Jersey. I have a vague remembrance of learning a square dance routine in the mid 1950s* in Atlantic, City New Jersey. I remember that our all Black students school performed this dance at some kind of city wide out door event where other students also performed. I think some of the other performing groups were from White schools (It wasn't until what we called "junior high school- grades 7th & 8th and also in high school)  that Atlantic City public school were integrated. I also believe the teacher who taught other students and me that square dance was White, although the principal and almost all of the teachers in my elementary school were Black (That ratio changed in middle school and high school. In those grades the principal and vice principal and almost all of the teaches were White.).

I don't remember learning any other dances in that elementary school or in the junior high or high school grades. But I remember one time when I was in college the only other Black student and I volunteered to teach our fellow students (who were White) how to do this new dance that had just been introduced to the world- the twist.
-snip-
*I wrote "the early 1950s" in this comment, but since I believe I was around seven years old when I participated in this square dance event", I changed the time period to "the mid 1950s". I read all of the comments in that discussion thread and didn't come across any other comments that included decades that referred to learning square dancing in schools in the 1950s. Nor did I read any other comments that mentioned dates that referred to the 1960s. This doesn't mean that square dancing wasn't taught in Unites States schools during those decades. 

**

18. @Baconmanperson
"What is even the premise of this? Nobody square danced in school"

**
Reply
19. @Cracked
"Yes they did"

**
Reply
20. @dhwwiiexpert
"I did it in High School, and I’m probably the only person who liked doing it, based on the other comments."

**
21. @ChaosMechanica
"Never knew this was a thing. Did this get phased out in recent decades? Was this only in the suburbs?"

**
Reply
22. @Cracked
"It depends on where you live somewhat"

**
23. @TextualPredator512
"I'm from one of the southern towns in Texas that are 90% Hispanic and no Mexican hat dance but we did do way too much square dancing.  We also finished our Spanish curriculum so fast we got to do origami for the last six weeks of the last semester of 3rd grade."

**
24. @@PaucHdelRosario
"Our school here in the Philippines taught us to square dance hahaha it's like a cowboy party thing every year.. "Barn Dance" I think it was called.. hahahahaha"

**
25. @jesuschild07able
"We didn’t learn square dancing for some reason we learned about Polka music. I don’t know if this is just a PA thing but there was Polka everywhere?"

**
Reply
26. @raccoon404x7
"I dunno about everywhere but we had polka in CA ~2004. I vaguely remember we learned about polka right before learning a weird take me out to the ball game “dance” "

**
Reply
27. @morganbrokaw5190
"Not in Texas. Though we did have some Tejano music which is essentially polka X ranchero music."

**
28. @theGreenGoblin
"So I went to a predominantly black middle and high school. I legit didn’t know square dancing in gym class was a thing. 🤔

**
Reply
29. @cracked
"Yeah not everywhere, but definitely a good number of places!"

**
30. @Malaika924
"I went to a predominately Black middle school and we were taught square dancing. This was in the early 90s"

**
31. @YaBoiFatz
"I went to a predominantly black school, so no square dancing for us lmao"

**
32. @christophergonzalez3973
"This is a thing?! I grew up in South Florida where most of us were black or Hispanic so we obviously didn't get stuff like this, but I'm super surprised this is actually a thing."

**
Reply
33. @cracked
"It's much less so now, but it's not entirely gone!"

**
34. @JoeY-ml9ri
"We did the Harlem Shake in my middle school 😂"

**
Reply
35. @cracked
"Progressive! haha"

**
36. @alexiswelsh5821
"I learned Cotten-eyed Joe in gym class in the late 00’s. Is that the same?"

**
Reply
37. @cracked
"Haha I'm not sure"

**
Reply
38. @dhwwiiexpert
"My dad did Cotton-eyed Joe on a dance floor in Mexico, don’t remember when. They cleared the floor for him, as I recall! As for me, I learned it in elementary school music class. Such a good time!"

**
Reply
39. @azizip171, 2023
"@alexiswelsh5821, "Cotton Eyed Joe" is a line dance, not a square dance. There are definite similarities and differences between American line dances and American square dances. Click https://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2022/10/texas-style-dancing-to-cotton-eye-joe.html for a post on my pancocojams cultural blog entitled "Texas Style Dancing To "Cotton Eye Joe" With The "BS!" Curse Word Yell (video, information, & comments )"

 **
40. @karacampbell8508
"We did swing dancing at my high school. Was that also racist or are we good? lol"

**
41. @drdad7386
"The Irony.  Did square dancing in PE back in 82-83 in the 4th grade when living in Mississippi.  African American PE teacher even.  Name of the school was Jefferson Davis Elementary."

**
Reply
42. @cracked
"Oof"

**
Reply
43. @KasumiR
"I am not American, so I hardly know its historical figures... but lemme guess, Jefferson Davis was some sort of major slave trader. I know that all of "founding fathers" were literal slavers like raiders in Fallout (except no forehead tattoo), except John Adams who was JUST racist and sexist... His wife was an abolitionist tho, like one of really cool people from the era."

**
Reply
44. @hickorymccay2994
" @KasumiR  He was the president of the Confederacy."

**
45. @pizzamon795
"I hated square dancing. We had to do it, 3rd - 6th grade"

**
46. @WillieWeed
"I sure had to in elementary school during the 70s"

**
47. @bjam89
"We had line dance.

For one reason, the song had instructions, and the sub was lazy."

**
48. @NIgHTMaReFortyTwo
"My 90s primary school in the UK made us all squaredance to. Could it also be because of Ford that countries outside the US has to do it too?"

**
49. @allonzehe9135
"When did square dancing in gym end? I started school in 89 and never learned to square dance at all, let alone in school. Did it end before 89 or is this just in some parts of the country?"

**
Reply
50. @cracked
"Maybe some parts of the country! A lot of us still had to learn it."

**
Reply
51. @danielgehring7437
"I started school in '84 and we had to take square dancing every year until I got to high school.  So it looks like we can start pounding out the exact moment it stopped being a thing.

Although in the school's defense they always had the same substitute teacher who taught the square dancing so I'm pretty sure they just taught it when the gym teachers went on vacation."

**
52,  @General_Nothing
"At my school we did the Cha Cha Slide... does that make my curriculum anti-racist?"
-snip-
"The Cha Cha Slide" is an African American line dance that appears to also be well known among non-African Americans in the United States.

**
Reply
53. @cracked
"For sure"

**
Reply
54. @azizip171, 2023
"@cracked  i'm assuming that you are being facetious. My answer would be "Not necessarily"."

**
55. @Nirvana262
"Is that why my very mixed race school never had it? Or is it racist that we didn't? I'm confused."
-snip-
In this comment "mixed race" probably means racially integrated" (and perhaps also integrated ethnically (with "ethnicity" in the United States specifically meaning "Latino/as").

**
Reply
56. @cracked
"I'm sure the vast majority of schools had no idea why Ford was pushing it"

****

2022

57. @TheLokiBiz
"We had to take a square dancing class in my elementary school here in Ontario, Canada too. Ours was a voluntary extracurricular though. I wonder if it had the same origins? Probably. I remember I was devastated because while I was originally paired with the girl i had a crush on (the only reason I signed up for that sh-t* was cus she did and I wanted to dance with her!), she didnt show up on the performance date, and my teacher paired me instead with my sister. It was humiliating!"
-snip-*This word is fully spelled out in this comment.

**
58. @AmusedChild
"Oh, what BS. We learned a Jewish circle dance, the polka, the walz, and the foxtrot in addition to square dancing. By contrast, the woke teachers in Loudon County, Virginia forbade salsa dancing as "cultural appropriation." Not everything that has its origin in Europe (which, incidentally, would include Marxist thought) is "raayyycist!" My God."

**
59. @bobvanwest
"I often wonder why people like this think they know everything, but really look at one side of the equation and then condemn anyone who is associated with Modern Western Square Dancing.  I learned more Contra Dance in school than Square Dancing.  This presenter only looks at Henry Ford as a racist, jew hater, yadda yadda yadda.  Henry Ford most likely would turn over in his grave if he saw what MWSD has become.  We use all kinds of music genres like Jazz, Pop, Gospel, Rock, Broadway, Techno, Soul, Rap.  She fails to mention that.  She fails to mention the reason we don't have booze before or during a dance.  MWSD is a "Team Sport" so having someone who is drunk will break down the square.  So, no booze before or during, but we do have after parties where booze is served.  I don't know about your, but I sure don't want to dance with some sloppy drunk.  You have completely missed out on what MWSD is about today by only focusing on what happened int the past.  With this logic, we should all just stay home, not interact with anyone.  Not go to school, Church, nothing.  Or we can learn from the past and not repeat the same mistakes."
-snip-
"MWSD"= Modern Western Square Dancing

****
2023

60. @SusanMarie3
"This is ridiculous- square dancing was FUN - we all loved it in gym class 1970s Ohio"

**
61. @youngfogo
"my school still does this and forces opposite gender dancing"

**
62. @drrd4127
"Huh! I am from Scotland we were taught to ceilidh dance in School, it is not unusal.

P.S. Jews can be white too, you know!!"

****
Thanks for visiting pancocojams.

Visitor comments are welcome.