Downfall Voyeurism: Jazz Dancing and the Making of Moral Concern in America

Abstract This article examines white Americans’ concern about jazz dancing around the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing from primary sources in national publications, newspapers, and the archives of the Southern Baptist Convention, the essay finds patterns in the response to jazz dancing that set the stage for the making of moral concern throughout the twentieth century. A focus on young people, interracial sex, the emerging specter of homosexuality, black musical forms, immigrants, and traditional gender roles amounted to what I call “Downfall Voyeurism,” in which American decline is portrayed as a spectacle that elicits both fear and titillation. Downfall Voyeurism helps explain the rise and fall of the jazz panic of the 1910s, but it also presages the central tactics of the New Right that historians more traditionally see as emerging in the 1970s and 1980s.