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Sex, Censorship, and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age
by Amy Sohn
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The fair drew half the nation's population—28 million people—and introduced such marvels as ragtime music, Cream of Wheat, Pabst Blue Ribbon, the dishwasher, and the Ferris wheel, which took 2,160 people 264 feet above Lake Michigan and the city. A visitor could see a fluorescent lightbulb and eat an omelet made from the eggs of ostriches that lived at the fair.
The Woman's Building, a showcase of women's achievements, was installed in an Italian Renaissance–style villa. It was an optimistic moment for women, despite the fact that the suffrage fight was still raging, forty-five years after the Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, had launched the movement. The Woman's Building was managed by a Board of Lady Managers, who also hosted important dignitaries and addressed the concerns of women visitors and performers.
Radicalism was flourishing in the nation, and the International Anarchist Convention, which coincided with the fair, was banned by the police but held secretly at the offices of The Chicago Times. Several years earlier, at a rally for an eight-hour workday in Chicago's Haymarket Square, a bomb had detonated in the middle of a group of policemen. Eight anarchists were arrested and eventually convicted; four of them were executed, igniting fury among radicals. During the fair, on June 25, about eight thousand people attended a dedication of a monument to the Haymarket Square anarchists in the city's Waldheim Cemetery. A day later, the governor of Illinois unconditionally pardoned the remaining Haymarket anarchists on the grounds that they did not have a fair trial. Later that summer, in New York, a rising anarchist activist named Emma Goldman would give speeches advocating for labor rights and rights of the unemployed. She would be arrested and charged with incitement to riot.
The centerpiece of the fair was the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long stretch from Jackson Park to Washington Park conceived as a living outdoor museum of the world. Curated by a Harvard ethnologist, its highlights included an Algerian village, a Samoan settlement, an Eskimo camp, a Lapland village, and an Austrian village—but the hottest attraction was A Street in Cairo, which featured camel rides, donkeys, bazaars, snake charmers, fakirs, and child acrobats. Up to four hundred performers of Egyptian, Nubian, and Sudanese descent, and their dogs, donkeys, camels, and snakes, lived on Cairo Street for the six-month duration of the exposition.
The belly dance, or danse du ventre, was the Cairo Street Theatre's most controversial show, performed for forty minutes every hour on the hour. The Midway Plaisance general manager Sol Bloom called it "a masterpiece of rhythm and beauty." He had discovered the dancers at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris and bought the rights to bring them to the Americas. He claimed to have composed the song associated with belly dancing, which would be called the "Hoochy-Koochy," "Koochy-Koochy," "Huta-Kuta Dance," and "Muscle Dance," performed at burlesque shows and dance halls around the country, and which may even have inspired the hokey pokey. The term hoochy-koochy derived from the French word hochequeue—to shake the tail—from a bird that flutters its tail feathers while standing. At a press preview of the dance, only a pianist was provided, and to give him an idea of the rhythm, Bloom hummed a tune and then sat down at the piano and picked it out with one finger himself. A score was arranged from that improvisation, and the melody became better known than the dance. Children still sing it today, with the lyrics "There's a place in France / Where the naked ladies dance." In his 1948 memoir, Bloom lamented that his failure to copyright the song cost him at least a few hundred thousand dollars in lost royalties.
When the public learned that danse du ventre meant "belly dance," Bloom recalled in the memoir, "they delightedly concluded that it must be salacious and immoral. The crowds poured in. I had a gold mine." The Princeton Union (a weekly newspaper published in Princeton, Minnesota) and The New York World called it an "abomination" and "veiled wickedness." The Chicago Tribune pronounced it "a depraved and immoral exhibition." As one reporter described it, "The dusky beauties, with a clatter of cymbals, execute the dances, more peculiar than poetic—somewhat more gross than graceful, til one feels a touch of sympathy with the chap near us who, after wondering observation, turned to his mother with the query: 'What ails the lady, is she sick?'"
* * *
It was only a matter of time before word of the belly dance reached the nation's chief vice hunter, Anthony Comstock, who served as a post office inspector (a federal position with law enforcement power) and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV). Forty-nine years old during the fair and rounding out his second decade in power, he had red muttonchops covering a scar inflicted by an irate smut dealer who stabbed him in the face. He had enormous shoulders, a big chest, short tree-trunk legs, a dome-like forehead, light blue-gray eyes, a broad brow, and the build of a fighter. Walking on the balls of his feet, he was short and stout, resembling "a New Englander who eats pie for breakfast, dinner and supper." He favored starched shirts with bow ties. Beneath his clothes, no matter the weather, he wore red flannel underwear. His shoes, which he bought from a police and fireman supply store, were size thirteen heavy-soled boots. While crossing the street in New York one day, he was nearly run over by a mail wagon. He shook his badge at the horse and cried, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Anthony Comstock!" A reporter once called his office and asked an assistant whether Comstock had been punched in the face that morning. The answer was concise: "Probably."
Excerpted from The Man Who Hated Women by Amy Sohn. Copyright © 2021 by Amy Sohn. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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