KU ScholarWorks | http://kuscholarworks.ku.edu Please share your stories about how Open Access to this article benefits you. Swing: From Time to Torque (Dance Floor Democracy at the Hollywood Canteen) by Sherrie Tucker 2013 This is the published version of the article, made available with the permission of the publisher. The original published version can be found at the link below. Sherrie Tucker. (2013). “Swing: From Time to Torque (Dance Floor Democracy at the Hollywood Canteen.” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 142(4):82-97. Published version: http://www.dx.doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00243 Terms of Use: http://www2.ku.edu/~scholar/docs/license.shtml KU ScholarWorks is a service provided by the KU Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright. Swing: From Time to Torque (Dance Floor Democracy at the Hollywood Canteen) Sherrie Tucker Abstract: The Hollywood Canteen (1942–1945) was the most famous of the USO and USO-like patriotic nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations during World War II. It is also the subject of much U.S. national nostalgia about the “Good War” and “Greatest Gen- eration.” Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the Hol- lywood Canteen, this article focuses on the ways that interviewees navigated the forceful narrative terrain of national nostalgia, sometimes supporting it, sometimes pulling away from or pushing it in critical ways, and usually a little of each. This article posits a new interpretative method for analyzing struggles over “democracy” for jazz and swing studies through a focus on “torque” that brings together oral history, improvisation studies, and dance studies to bear on engaging interviewees’ embodied narratives on ideo - logically loaded ground, improvising on the past in the present. There is No Color Line at This Coast Canteen –Chicago Defender, January 30, 1943 What does it mean to have a body that provides an institution with diversity? –Sara Ahmed, On Being Included1 Democracy! That’s what it means, Slim! Everybody equal. Like tonight! All them big shots, listening to little shots like me, and being friendly! –Sgt. Brooklyn Nolan, Hollywood Canteen (1944) SHERRIE TUCKER is Professor of The Hollywood Canteen (October 3, 1942– American Studies at the University November 22, 1945) was the most famous of the of Kansas, Lawrence. She is the au - thousands of uso-like nightclubs where civilians thor of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands entertained military personnel during World War of the 1940s (2000) and coeditor of II. Patterned after New York’s Stage Door Canteen, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz the club featured volunteers who hailed mostly Studies (with Nichole T. Rustin, 2008). Her articles have appeared from the guild and unions of the motion picture in such journals as American Music, industry, including glamorous stars like Rita Hay- Black Music Research Journal, and worth, Deanna Durbin, and Hedy LaMarr. Bette Critical Studies in Improvisation. Davis was the president of the Hollywood Can- © 2013 by Sherrie Tucker doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00243 82 teen; John Gar½eld was vice president. In This article is part of a larger study in Sherrie its own time, the Hollywood Canteen be - which I take the dance floor of the Holly- Tucker came a powerful backdrop for publicity wood Canteen as a lens for exploring photos of movie stars appearing patriotic swing culture as war memory in the United by jitterbugging to swing music with sol- States. By war memory, I am thinking of diers, feeding them, signing autographs, the cultural repository that literature and gen erally being friendly and gener- scholar Marianna Torgovnick has called ous with their time, beauty, and fame. the war complex, or the particular ways The Canteen remains one of the most rec - that national memory of World War II ognizable articulations of swing as a sym- continues to express, for many Ameri- bol of the United States, its jitterbugging cans, “how we like to think of ourselves soldiers and glamorous hostesses epito- and to present ourselves to the world, mizing a selfless, innocent “Greatest Gen- even at those times when the United eration,” a uni½ed nation of “Good War” States has been a belligerent and not- nostalgia. much-loved nation.”4 The Hollywood Yet the Hollywood Canteen is also Canteen is part of a larger package of nos- remembered as the site of conflict when talgia of uncomplicated American good- Canteen board members fought over ness during World War II that has played, whether people could dance across race and continues to play, a powerful role in lines. When challenged by those less constructing national memory and re - keen on integration, Bette Davis and John cruiting patriotic identi½cation (even for Gar½eld, along with members of the seg- those too young to remember the war). regated locals of the Los Angeles musi- What explains the persistent appeal of cians unions, threatened to pull their swing dance, and what alternate narra- support. While the “knockdown drag out tives are forgotten when swing memory ½ghts” about integrated dancing (in seg- as war memory is the only one remem- regated Hollywood) might suggest that bered? Of the sixty people I interviewed, all was not well at the dance floor of the most of the white participants remem- nation, the narratives that circulated bered an integrated dance floor, while about these battles served to prove that most people of color remember a segre- the Hollywood Canteen was an especially gated, or partially segregated, space. democratic space. Such civil rights angles Nearly everyone thought the Canteen dominated Canteen coverage in the na - had something to tell us about democracy tional black press, popular front press, in the United States. It is in the push and and Down Beat, while mentions of race- pull of those multiple, contradictory, dif- mixing at the Canteen were absent from ferently embodied orientations to Holly - the mainstream press.2 The democratic, wood Canteen memory that I’ve found a integrated dance floor became promi- new way to dance as a swing scholar in - nent in biographies and autobiographies terested in music, race, and democracy. of celebrities of the era, and is well cov- This essay focuses, in part, on Amiri ered in scholarship by historians of jazz Baraka’s (then LeRoi Jones) grammatical and swing, World War II, and Los Ange- intervention indicated in the title of his les, as well as in World War II documen- Blues People essay “Swing: From Verb to taries and museum plaques.3 Nonethe- Noun.”5 In this piece, Baraka identi½es less, the lasting image in national mem - effects of cross-cultural musical travels ory is the white jitterbugging starlet and from black to white America by tracking soldier. the historical route of swing from some- 142 (4) Fall 2013 83 Swing: thing African American musicians did with one who is not at home.”7 Mackey argues From Time pulse and forward motion in big band for a practice that would remember that to Torque music in the late 1920s through the 1930s, other is what people do; it is not what peo- to the static commodity that became ple are. Drawing a distinction between known as Swing, a brand name genre that two verb forms of other, he identi½es 1) after 1935 spoke primarily to mainstream artistic othering as a practice of “innova- white America (and middle-class black tion, invention, change on which cultural America), and that largely withheld pro½ts health and diversity depend and thrive”; and jobs from African American musi- and 2) social othering as “the centralizing cians. In the war years, swing was not of a norm against which otherness is only a brand, but a kind of national anthem measured, meted out, marginalized.”8 for the United States, then ½ghting for The cultural verb “to swing,” then, is but world democracy with segregated armed one of many examples of artistic othering forces, segregated blood supplies, and a practices of African Americans, people social, legal, material, and spatial land- who have been subjected to social other- scape entrenched in uneven and incon- ing. Guests and volunteers at the Holly- sistent rules about race that white people wood Canteen did and experienced both. often were oblivious to. The Hollywood Social dancing and its music are both Canteen, with its iconic jitterbugging social and artistic practices–and dancers hostess and soldier, functioning as war who swing to music that swings may navi- memory about a Greatest Generation gate social othering and artistic othering conceived as diverse, but nearly always in dynamic tension, even in the most depicted as white, would seem to epito- noun-destined times and places. Writing mize the noun-side of Baraka’s analysis. about another dance floor in her book But my adherence to Baraka’s verb/noun I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a analysis was challenged by conversations Practice of Freedom, dance and movement with diverse former Canteen-goers, who scholar Danielle Goldman argues that told wildly different stories about their although New York’s Palladium was bodies on the late swing era dance floor. unique in its integration in the 1950s, it Poet and novelist Nate Mackey’s 1995 was still “not a ‘free’ space where every- twist on Baraka’s essay, “Other: From thing was equal and anything was possi- Noun to Verb,” helps our understanding ble.” But rather than taking evidence of with an alternative grammatical inter- contradiction as occasion to debunk the vention, moving the concept of other, integrated dance hall, Goldman empha- rather than swing, from noun to verb sizes the importance of attending to mul- form.6 Mackey intended to shake up tidirectional desires and interpretations.