Taxi Dance Hall - Social and Economic Forces

Social and Economic Forces

At the start of the 20th century, America would for the first time have more inhabitants living within its cities than in rural and small-town areas. Cities were experiencing extreme growth; indeed, Chicago's population doubled between 1900 and 1930. Many young men and women were leaving their rural and small-town neighborhoods for the same promise of adventure that the Old West had previously provided. At this time, America was experiencing a flood of male-dominated immigration.

Entertainment in America's cities was becoming a big business. New forms of mass entertainment were the baseball stadium, the football stadium, the amusement park, and the motion picture theater. Cressy and other sociologists like Ernest W. Burgess came to see taxi dance halls, and these other new forms of mass entertainment, as "commercializing the human interest in stimulation".

For this uprooted culture, cities provided a type of anonymity that was not found in their previous rural and family-oriented neighborhoods. Once inside a city, young men and women were free to do as they pleased without moral criticism from their families or neighbors. Cressy felt that cities became "inhabited by rootless, detached people who connect with each other primarily on the basis of mutual exploitation." The taxi dance hall was just such a place where very different people from very different backgrounds—patrons and dancers—would meet for temporary and unlikely alliances. Frequently inside the taxi dance hall, the human needs of unassimilated males would meet the economic needs of taxi dancers.

Near the time when Cressy finished his book in 1932, he noticed reform movements were attempting to shut down the taxi dance halls. Cressy was disturbed by the fact that if taxi dance halls were eliminated without appropriate substitutes, the human needs that fueled the phenomenon would go unanswered and possibly find self-destructive forms of expression. For Cressy, the taxi dance hall became a symptom of the isolation, loneliness, and alienation that plagues many cities.