In the summer of 1893 the Danse du Ventre took hold of the media’s imagination as much as it did the tourists who frequented its performance. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, Aug. 10, 1893, cover.
The scene, as Craddock actually witnessed it in the Egyptian Theatre, partook more of an ethnological display of folk dance than of the darkened nightclub and libidinous carnival evoked in the press’s sensationalized coverage. The caption to this souvenir photograph nonetheless recalled that it was “a matter of serious public debate in the councils of the Exposition whether the customs of Cairo should be faithfully reproduced, or the morals of the public faithfully protected.” Halsey C. Ives, The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (St. Louis: Thompson, 1893), n.p.
Despite the protests (and in part because of them), the Cairo Street dancers triumphed in the court of popular appeal and public voyeurism. The fair’s organizers, acutely aware of the bottom line, had little interest in discouraging tourist fascination. They made a few modest concessions with the dancers’ costuming and then let the show go on. In another battle already fought out in court, Protestant moral reformers had failed to keep the fairgrounds closed on Sundays in deference to the Christian Sabbath, and now they had to endure this slight as well. The exposition’s management, for all its professed decency and respectability, was showing little remorse. Sol Bloom, the illustrious promoter of the Midway’s entertainments, exulted in all the controversy and attention that the Danse du Ventre was generating: “I had a gold mine.”15
Comstock was dumbfounded over this flouting of his moral ideals. Returning to New York in early August 1893, he continued to shake his head at the Chicago spectacle he had witnessed the month before. He announced that “the very lowest places of public amusement” on his home turf would not tolerate the Danse du Ventre for a moment. (He seemed to be trying to prove that point when he subsequently had three of these “heathen” dancers arrested and fined when they ventured to New York with their “obscene & indecent exhibition.”) In the immediate battle over the Midway performances, however, Comstock could only express bewilderment that the young women were allowed to “go on every day defiling the magnificence of that Columbian Exhibition with [their] nastiness.”16
Comstock, an object of satire as much as heroic celebration, often saw his vice campaigns turned into cartoons. In this one—captioned “New York’s Great Viceologist on a Voyage of Discovery to Chicago”—he sets sail to discover the sins of the Columbian Exposition, specifically those on the Midway’s minaret-marked “Street in Cairo.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 6, 1893, 18.
Exasperated with the country’s lack of moral clarity over the Danse du Ventre, Comstock tried to pull off a bit of didactic theater for a reporter—his own “imitation” of the dance. Rising from his office chair, he arched his arms over his head and shook his own imposing midsection. “Of course I can’t do it exactly as they did,” he lamely explained. “I am not as little as they are.” Comstock’s vice-fighting career was spotted with moments of public ridicule (he was, for example, later lampooned for raiding the Art Students’ League over a brochure that contained nude sketches). Here was another incident—a stout rendition of what he had witnessed on the Midway—in which he left himself wide open for caricature, a buffoonish stunt that undercut his larger effort to dim the spectacle of the culture’s burgeoning sex industries. Over the course of a lifetime of chasing down smutty publishers and booksellers, Comstock considered himself (as did his Protestant benefactors) a heroic fighter with far more victories than defeats, but the Danse du Ventre was proving surprisingly hard to suppress. “The most shameless exhibition of depravity” continued unabated in Chicago, while Comstock’s flamboyant outrage had itself become an object of satire.17
AMID THE HUBBUB, little more than a week after Comstock’s ill-fated simulation, belly dancing gained a new and unexpected defender in Ida C. Craddock, an unmarried thirty-six-year-old freethinker, an advocate for women’s rights, and a teacher of stenography. On August 13, 1893, Craddock published a lengthy defense of the Danse du Ventre in the Sunday pages of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, an immensely popular paper with a famously sharp eye for controversy. At the same time she sent a long defense of the show to one of the fair’s managing boards, urging its leadership to stand strong against the censoring impulse of “Anthony Comstock and his helpers.” Craddock’s apologia for belly dancing came without warning, and her ideas flew in the face of everything the vice reformer believed about what he had seen on the Midway.18
In Craddock’s opinion, the Danse du Ventre was not at all scandalous or disgusting. It was also far more than another diverting museum exhibit to take in once one had ridden the Ferris wheel or visited the ostrich farm. It was actually a “religious memorial” that offered a venerable, edifying, and much needed blend of sexuality and spirituality. Here, in the agitation of hips and abdomen, in the snapping of castanets and shaking of tassels, was “a most valuable object lesson,” a performance that managed to combine “the apotheosis of female passion” with graceful self-control. Instead of warranting suppression, the Danse du Ventre, Craddock argued, should be “performed far and wide through our country”—and not for mature audiences only. It would prove an excellent “pre-nuptial educator of our young people,” a valuable introduction to both the sensual and the sacred dimensions of marital relations. In Craddock’s estimation, the show was worth seeing for the good of body and soul.19
Craddock’s perspective was so deeply at odds with Comstock’s evangelical sensibilities as to be almost unintelligible in its offensiveness. It was a standing conviction among the devout that dancing feet (let alone undulating hips) placed praying knees in serious jeopardy. Nineteenth-century evangelicals often banned dance entirely from their lives as part of stringent codes of holiness—alongside other vices like card-playing, drinking, smoking, swearing, theater-going, and immodest dress. Not all American Protestants, of course, were so rigorous, but the two largest and most influential denominational groups, the Baptists and Methodists, regularly made such rules a constitutive part of the Christian life. Even those ministers who wanted to distance themselves from the “squeamish class” thought the Danse du Ventre crossed the line. As one prominent Episcopal clergyman reminded the faithful at the height of the controversy, “We must remember after all that Terpsichore was a heathen divinity, and that, taken as whole, dancing is a heathen institution,” holding a prominent place in “the Sodoms and Gomorrahs” of idolaters. “In a word, knowing as I do the story of ancient heathenism,” he continued, with a direct blast at Craddock’s position, “this plea itself that the Midway Plaisance dance is ‘a religious dance’ appears in my eyes simply as the sentence of its condemnation. Indeed, the plea affords a powerful and all-sufficient reason for its banishment not only from the World’s Fair but from the face of God’s earth.”20
To say the very least, Craddock had a tough sell on her hands to make this idolatrous art palatable to a Christian nation. Was it any wonder that both Isadora Duncan and Loie Fuller, American innovators in modern dance, found it advantageous to leave the country later in the decade to join the French avant-garde? In a religious culture so suspicious of the sensuousness of dance, there was little breathing room for the creative license associated with its contemporary elaboration—let alone for the dancers themselves. In another decade or two, choreographer Ruth St. Denis would redeem the art and spiritual exoticism of “Oriental dance” for her bohemian American audiences, but Craddock’s exploratory efforts in the early 1890s looked to the nation’s Protestant opinion-makers like no more than a tawdry burlesque.21
Having stirred up the fire-and-brimstone element with her defense of libidinous heathenism at the expense of Christian civilization, Craddock would have been well advised to let the matter rest. “No ordinary Western woman looked on these performances with anything but horror,” a popular souvenir volume had warned in prescribing disgust as the only appro
priate response of white women to the Cairo Street dancers. These were strong stipulations—of race, religion, and gender—and, yet instead of letting the controversy quiet down, Craddock decided to broaden her defense of the Danse du Ventre. She expanded her essay into a stand-alone pamphlet, began circulating it for fifty cents a copy, and offered to take up the subject on the lecture circuit of freethinking clubs.22
A souvenir volume from the World’s Fair juxtaposed a “frightful” Cairo Street performer of the Danse du Ventre with the “Western beauty and grace” of a European dancer. “Only Darwin could expatiate impartially on the variations of taste in the human kind,” the caption insisted. Halsey C. Ives, The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition (St. Louis: Thompson, 1893), n.p.
Craddock also sent the piece to Moses Harman, activist editor of Lucifer the Light-Bearer: A Journal of Investigation and Reform Devoted to the Emancipation of Woman from Sex Slavery. That December Harman, the granddaddy of marriage reformers who himself had been in and out of the Kansas penitentiary for violating Comstock’s anti-obscenity laws, published a substantial excerpt from Craddock’s essay under the title “Sex Modesty—The True and the False.” The appearance of her work in Harman’s infamous journal served, in effect, as public notice that Craddock was joining the ranks of unbuttoned radicals. Hitherto she had been seen as an up-and-comer among liberals and freethinkers: A Unitarian “of the most advanced kind,” she had been elected an officer of the American Secular Union, a group promoting strict church-state separation, and had actively campaigned for women’s equal access to higher education. Still, she had hardly been a wild-eyed dissenter, definitely not a sex radical. The brouhaha over belly dancing was the hinge: “I have come to stay in the reform work of which my essay treats,” she now told Harman proudly.23
Making the Danse du Ventre the occasion for coming out as a marriage reformer was a quirky decision on Craddock’s part. No two ways about that. She was nonetheless quick to point out that her ideas actually derived from a large body of learning focused on ancient “Sex Worship.” The Midway exhibition, Craddock insisted, looked vastly different once one had digested the writings of antiquarians, historians, and ethnologists on “phallic” rites, symbols, and traditions. Having taken stock of those quasi-academic investigations, she saw how deeply and thoroughly religion was entwined with fertility and sexual reproduction. “We have traveled fast and far since those old uplifting days of Phallic or Sex Worship,” she observed, but we have “lost something” important in that evolutionary process: namely, “the recognition of sex as the chief educator of the human race in things material and in things spiritual.” Primeval forms of worship, Craddock was sure, offered not a lesson in fetishistic depravity, but a vehicle of erotic redemption. Free sexual expression was potentially retrievable through the bookish pursuit of archaeology, folklore, anthropology, and comparative religions. Once Americans learned about the sexual history of religion, they would see more clearly the liberties they had forfeited through the ages of Christian repression. We still have much “to learn from heathen nations,” Craddock concluded, “and I, for one, rejoice that this Danse du Ventre should have been one of the appointed means of grace.”24
Whether the Danse du Ventre really served Craddock’s emancipationist purposes remained, of course, an open question. On this much, at least, Comstock and company were correct: Such routines easily became the stuff of nightclub revues, stag parties, and peep shows, a staple in the various haunts of sporting men. In March 1894 the National Police Gazette, a sensationalist rag of its day, pictured on its cover a performance of the Danse du Ventre in Brooklyn with “A CROWD OF SPORTS” gaping at the “FASCINATING EXHIBITION.” The accompanying story, with its account of strip-teasing flirtations and roguish howls, left little doubt about the kind of attention this exotic entertainment was arousing. Even Craddock had to admit that some ogling men at the Egyptian Theatre had “looks on their faces” that they would have been “ashamed to have their mothers or sisters see.” She also explicitly criticized one of the dancers in Cairo Street for smiling coquettishly at the crowd rather than treating the performance with the solemnity that the rest of the company did. Perhaps that “would-be cajoler” proved the exception at the World’s Fair, but Craddock was nonetheless on treacherous ground. As shrewd impresarios turned the Danse du Ventre to their own lucrative purposes, her claims about its liberating potential looked all the more dubious.25
Much to Craddock’s chagrin, belly dancing’s standing as a lewd entertainment soon seemed everywhere in the ascendancy. By September 1894, slightly over a year after Craddock’s initial published defense of the dance, a columnist in Milwaukee was complaining of the “latest fad” to be taken up by the worldly youth of that city—“private subscription dances” at shadowy roadhouses where “a young woman named Habeebe” performed “the danse-du-ventre in all of its oriental splendor, appearing entirely naked!” Craddock had no desire to clothe such strip shows in a feminist covering, but it certainly looked, thirteen months on, like her defense of women’s sexual expression had simply been absorbed into the larger commercialization of female sexuality. Within another year or so, even Thomas Edison had gotten into the act of exploiting belly dancing’s titillation, making the Danse du Ventre the subject of two of his earliest moving pictures. Concocting these silent shorts for the new kinetoscope parlors just coming into urban fashion, he cheekily offered at least one of them in censored and uncensored versions.26
Despite the imposing hurdles, Craddock wanted to save the Danse du Ventre from Christian indignation, stag-party voyeurism, and commercial exploitation. She herself loved to dance and had fond memories of the graceful movement of her own body as a young woman, shorn of corsets and the encumbering constraints of Victorian fashions. “I am accustomed to the various swayings and balancings of a person who rises on the ball of the foot as a dancer,” she recalled in her diary in 1894. “For three years, I stood head of the class at [the] dancing-school of the leading dancing-master of Philadelphia. . . . I know every phase of the balancing of a dancer’s body in ordinary good dancing. I have several times danced . . . such dances as the Spanish cachuca, requiring swaying, passionate movement.” In watching the young women who performed at the Egyptian Theatre, Craddock had been reminded of her own youthful pursuits, the hours she had spent bending and balancing “from sheer love of the movements.”27
The Danse du Ventre was soon being fully exploited as a form of nightclub entertainment. The National Police Gazette captured the lurid spectacle with the journal’s typical flair for the scandalous with this cover in March 1894.
The satisfactions she took from dance came not from the stares of spectators, male or otherwise, but from the liberty and the discipline of her own body in such practiced motion. Not surprisingly, in those instances in which she noted in her diary attempting to perform the Danse du Ventre herself, she did so in the privacy of her own room, intentionally trying to remain out of sight and earshot of anyone else. Once she reported happily, for example, that she was looking forward to her mother being out for the evening, since “when she is home, I don’t feel like performing a very vigorous Danse du Ventre, lest she hear me.” A few years later in 1898 the sexologist Havelock Ellis, whose work Craddock admired, invented the designation “auto-erotism” as an elastic term that potentially included everything from sexual fantasy to artistic daydreaming to mystical experience. “Auto-erotic phenomena,” by Ellis’s account, went far beyond the old moral hobgoblin of masturbation. In making the Danse du Ventre her own personal affair, Craddock offered a striking embodiment of such intimate and fanciful self-exploration. Sensually charged—she said it gave her a “delicious” feeling—the Danse du Ventre allowed Craddock to relish her undulating physique wholly apart from her mother’s eavesdropping and the lothario’s leer.28
Craddock was attracted to dance not only for its bodily pleasure, but also as a religious exercise. In the aftermath of the
uproar over the Midway performances, her spiritual curiosities had intensified, and she had started dancing again as part of that metaphysical turn. To Craddock, nimbleness of body and vivacity of soul were joined together, and she even started to dream of “being levitated,” of being lifted off the ground in a moment of perceptible spiritual elevation. Those extravagant hopes, too, were nurtured through dance. After a particularly exhilarating practice session Craddock confided in her diary in 1894 that she had sensed, at least hazily, an “unseen force” moving with her as she swept up onto the ball of her feet and held one supple pose. Not exactly a glittering epiphany, but it was indicative of where she was headed with dancing—and everything else. Though she had so far kept the news mostly to herself, Craddock, the amateur scholar and active freethinker, was also a budding mystic. Those spiritual aspirations would give her sexual politics an increasingly visionary cast and make her a dual threat to Comstock’s Christian America: both shameless marriage reformer and brash religious innovator.29
Craddock’s potential as a double menace was already well foreshadowed in the Danse du Ventre episode. Viewing that performance as a kind of marital aid, she saw in belly dancing a brilliant fusion of spiritual idealism and erotic abandon. Her conviction that married couples needed to bring a mood of religious aspiration into the bedroom grew more detailed over the years, but the outlines of it were clearly present in her defense of belly dancing. Without an ambiance of religious longing, sexual partners would not experience “complete satisfaction”; they would fail to become “one in flesh and one in spirit.” Craddock was quick to add that those who found such pious talk off-putting need not worry: Ecstatic union could be achieved by partners of any religious affiliation—or none. Her cosmopolitan openness was of a variety that would have made most of the delegates at the World’s Parliament of Religions blush. “If you believe in Jesus, aspire to be in unison with His will from the moment the [sex] ecstasy sets in;” she advised in her Danse du Ventre pamphlet, “if you believe only in God the Father, aspire in joy and thankfulness to him; if you are an Atheist, aspire to be in harmony with the law of the Universe.” Religiously inclusive and sexually explicit at the same time, Craddock laid the gauntlet down for Comstock and his fellow backers of a Christian America.30
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