Dance halls are notoriously great factors in breaking down morality

 

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Rubbishing all those etiquette strictures, the freedoms allowed partaken of by female swing fans also included sex. "The girls would wave at us and many of the boys in the band would motion to the girls to meet them at the stage door." Goodman remembered seeing his first jitterbug in 1934, when a dancer started to go "off his conk. His eyes rolled, his limbs began to spin like a windmill in a hurricane - his attention, riveted to the rhythm, transformed him into a whirling dervish." The Catholic bishop of Dubuque denounced swing as "evil" and "communistic": "We permit jam sessions, jitterbug and cannibalistic rhythm orgies to occupy a place in our social scheme of things, wooing our youth along the primrose path to hell." ...

Secretly attending a February 1940 dance, the Gestapo agents were horrified: "There was only swing of the worst sort. Sometimes two boys danced with one girl, bent double, with the top half of the body hanging loosely down, long hair flopping into the face, they dragged themselves round practically on their knees. The band played wilder and wilder items; none of the players was sitting down any longer, they all 'jitterbugged' on the stage like wild creatures. Several boys could be observed dancing together, always with two cigarettes in the mouth, one in each corner." The swings' lifestyle reversed almost every Nazi tenet. Instead of uniformity, they proclaimed difference; instead of aggression, overt sexuality.