Chicago (that Toddling Town)
Chicago, Chicago, that toddling
town . . .
The town that Billy Sunday
couldn’t shut down . . . .
They have the time, the time of
their life . . .
I saw a man he danced with his
wife,
In Chicago, Chicago, my home
town.
Fred Fisher,
“Chicago (That Toddling Town),” copyright dated June 15, 1922.
(Listen to an early
instrumental recording of “Chicago” on the Library of Congress’ National
Jukebox)
When Fred
Fisher wrote “Chicago” in 1922, Chicago was in the throes of a “modern dance”
craze. Following in the footsteps of the
Fox Trot and the Shimmy before, everyone was doing “the Toddle.” “The Toddle” and other modern dances were associated
with everything fun about the Roaring Twenties; fast living, speakeasies
and Jazz;
precisely the sorts of things that pioneering, uptight Evangelist Billy Sunday,
of Chicago, wanted to shut down. Although
people in places as far-flung as New York[i]
and Paris[ii]
had been doing “the Toddle” since as early as June 1920, Chicago appears to have
been the epicenter of toddling culture.
 |
| Image from New York Public Library Digital Collections. |
In 1921, the year before Fred Fisher called Chicago, “that toddling town,” the Melrose
Bros. music publishers of Chicago advertised their newest “toddle
tune” from “Toddle Town”:
“Take
It Easy”
THE TODDLE SONG THAT BEATS ‘EM ALL
Now on the market.
IT’S THE TODDLE TUNE FROM
TODDLE TOWN
MELROSE BROS., Publishers . . . Chicago
The Music Trades, Volume 61, Number 21, May
21, 1921, page 45.
(Update: Chicago was not the first "Toddle Town." - see my post, The Pre-History of "That Toddling Town".)
In 1921, a
popular variant of “the Toddle,” “danced with the motion of the hips instead of
the feet,” was called “the Chicago”; a
fashion designer named a new gown “the Chicago Toddle”;[iii] and the Benson Orchestra of Chicago recorded
the song, “Toddle
– Medley Fox Trot,” (Victor Records, recorded April 11, 1921).
 |
| The Lake County Times (Hammond, Indiana), June 17, 1921, page 7. |
 |
| The Philadelphia Inquirer, February 19, 1922, Feature Section page 7. |
 |
| Chicago Daily Tribune, March 3, 1921, page 13. |
Chicago was also
home to the world’s first (and perhaps last?) “Toddle Wedding” where you might
see a groom who “danced with his wife” – and the clergyman joined in:
 |
| The Washington Times (Washington DC), February 20, 1921, page 1. |
The earliest
unambiguous reports of the toddle-craze that I could find first appear in mid-1920;
but a news report of the difficulties faced by Chicago on the first day of a
transit strike in late-July, 1919, may be an early allusion to Chicago’s roll
as progenitor of the “Toddle;” or it may be just a happy coincidence:
Chicago, July 30. – Like an
infant, Chicago toddled today. Because of the car strike, business crept
where it usually rushed.
The Daily Gate City and
Constitution-Democrat (Keokuk, Iowa), July 30, 1919, page 1.
Despite (or
because of) the popularity of “the Toddle,” moralists like the fiery, no-fun,
Chicago-based Evangelist Billy Sunday tried to stem the tide. Several early attempts to suppress “the
Toddle” in Chicago and elsewhere in Illinois were widely reported in the
national press.
“The Toddle”
was banned at the University of Illinois:
Dances at the University of
Illinois lost all popular favor among the student body following the ban placed on the shimmy, the toddle and other
objectionable forms of dancing . . . .
Bridgeport
Times and Evening Farmer (Connecticut), November 1, 1920, page 12.[iv]
Not to be
outdone, Northwestern University soon followed suit:
An eleventh hour ban was placed on the “toddle” last night at the junior
prom at Northwestern university . . . .
Chicago
Daily Tribune, December 4, 1920, page 17.
But
Northwestern quickly relented; at least to a limited extent:
Northwestern will tolerate
limited “Toddle” and “Shimmy.”
Rock Island
Daily Argus (Illinois), January 13, 1921, page 4.
But
following Northwestern’s concessions, and consistent with the Maria Von Trapp corollary
(“When God opens one window, he closes another.), the Chicago public schools clamped
down on dancing less than one week later:
The “shimmy”
and the “toddle” are not proper dances for school entertainments,
Superintendent Peter Mortenson ruled today . . . .
Capital Journal (Salem, Oregon), January
18, 1921, page 1.
The decision
to ban the “Toddle” in Chicago’s schools did not meet with universal approval. Eliminating the “Toddle” with the “Shimmy”
was like Prohibition’s ban on beer along with whiskey – or, perhaps, like
throwing the baby-walk out with the bathwater:
The judgment is right as
regards the “shimmy,” for it represents terpsichorean delirium tremens, and moral breakdown
But the “toddle,” which is an imitation of an infant’s walk, the sort of
dancing that a baby does when its father whistles, is altogether harmless. The “toddle,” outlawed with the “shimmy,” can
sympathize with light beer, which was banished with whiskey – and the whiskey
came back wickeder than ever, but the beer didn’t.
The Washington Times (Washington DC),
January 19, 1921, page 1.
The
administration of the University of Chicago criticized “the Shimmy” and “the
Toddle,” but stopped short of an outright ban.
They blamed the “selfishness” of such indulgent dances on a natural
reaction to the military discipline many of the students had recently experienced
during World War I:
The Washington Times (Washington DC),
February 6, 1921, page 1.
The city
council of East St. Louis, Illinois, on the other hand, enacted a total ban:
Arizona Republican (Phoenix), February 8
1921 page 2.
Across the
river, in St. Louis, Missouri, dancing master, F. Lester Clendenen, voluntarily
closed the doors of his dance hall “until public tastes and manners improve,”
rather than let his hall become a den of iniquity:
“The ‘toddle,’
or ‘shuffle,’ craze has driven decent people off the dance floor,” he
declared. . . . “When young girls come to dances with their bodices cut as low
and their skirts as high as possible, and young men enter the ball room with
whisky flasks on their hips and a pint or so under their belts, and when such
dances as ‘toddle’ and ‘shuffle’ are tolerated, the
result is something hard to picture in printable terms. . .
[He] declared the “shuffle,”
sometimes referred to as the “Chicago,” to be a
strictly St. Louis perversion of the art of Terpsichore. “I don’t know where it came from,” he
declared, “but I do know where it is leading the youth of this city. St. Louis has gained a nation-wide reputation
for vulgarity and license because of it.”
Los Angeles Herald, February 12, 1921,
page A-6.
The
anti-Toddle forces were not confined to the Midwest. Soon, students at Barnard self-censored the
“Toddle” walk, smoking and cheek-to-cheek dancing (same sex and boy-girl)[v];
the Syracuse Common Council banned the toddle, the camel walk, and the Chicago
flop;[vi]
and a State Senator in New York introduced a bill to impose a statewide ban on
“the ‘shimmy,’ the ‘toddle,’ the ‘bear hug,’ the ‘camel walk,’ and a few other
prides of dance halls.”[vii]
In Bayonne, New Jersey, the police were
asked to enforce a ban on dances such as “the camel walk, cat step, Frisco,
Chicago roll, toddle and shimmy”:
New York Clipper, August 24, 1921.
 |
| Cartoons Magazine, Volume 19, Number 5, May 1921, page 839. |
The “Toddle”
Despite the
best efforts of the moralists to stop the dance, people just kept “toddling”
along. By today’s standards, the
“toddle” seems fairly tame. It appears to
have been situated somewhere between the “fox-trot” and the “shimmy” on the
spectrum of modern dance. The Chicago Tribune described the “toddle”
as “the shimmy without the shiver;”[viii] dance instructors in Chicago, trying to wean
their students away from more the provocative dances, developed a hybrid step
called “the toddle foxtrot”;[ix]
and the Benson Orchestra’s song, “Toddle,” was billed as a “Fox Trot Medley.”
 |
| The Topeka State Journal, May 24, 1921, page 1. |
A dancing
text published in 1922 describes the “Toddle” as “the Fox Trot with a rise on
each foot on each count of every step – except in the figure of the ‘Old Corte’
and ‘the doubles’ – the 1,2,3 at each side.”
Although the authors believed that the “Toddle” was “gradually toddling
away,” they included a description of the “Toddle” because people were
incorporating its bouncy steps into the regular Fox Trot.[x] The same book described a variant of “the
Toddle” called “the Chicago,” which apparently received a certain amount of
attention in the press when it first came out; accounting, perhaps, for
Chicago’s reputation as a “Toddling Town”:
For a brief moment the Chicago appeared, which was somewhat similar to the Toddle in its counting, but it was
danced with the motion of the hips instead of the feet, so it was quickly
relegated to the limbo of forgotten things and is only mentioned here as its
initial appearance was heralded by the press as something new.
The dance website,
StreetSwing.com,
connects the “Toddle” craze of 1921-1922 to an earlier “Toddle” dance based on
something called “the Todalo.” Contemporary
sources point to some sort of continuity from the “Todalo” straight through the
“Two-Step,” the first “Toddle,” the “Fox Trot,” and the later, more popular
“Toddle.”
The lyrics
of the song, “Toddling
the Todalo”, recorded in 1911, refer to “that toddling two-step.” Recordings
of the songs, “Let’s Toddle Fox Trot” and “Toddle All Over Town (Fox Trot)” were
released in 1914 and 1915. By late-
1916, the “Inner-Circle,” an organization devoted to the development of the
“modern dance” decreed that, “We Must “Toddle” in 1917.” They described this early “Toddle” as
something akin to the “Schottische”:
The “Toddle” is danced to music
in the same tempo as the old schottische . . . . According to the official description, the
new dance consists of a few walking steps, some turns, several running steps,
and a jump in the air – and there you are.
It was explained that the “Toddle” came at the end of each figure and
was like the “break” that the old time stage dancers were wont to use at the
end of their dances.
The News Journal (Wilmington, Delaware),
December 29, 1916, page 7.
In 1918, the
Two-Step Publishing Company sold descriptions of two types of “Toddle”:
Ballroom Dances with music and
description, 50 c each.
“The Chinese Toddle” fascinating
oriental dance, “The Toddle” pleasing dance in schottische rhythm.[xi]
These earlier
“Toddles” may or may not be the same or similar to “the Toddle” of the 1920s,
but it is clearly in the same tradition; and has the same name as the dance
that take the nation by storm four years later, with Chicago in taking the lead.
The roots of
the 1911 song, “Toddling the Todalo,” may extend even further back. Portions of “The Toddle Song,” published in
1903, [xii]
bear a strong similarity to portions of “Toddling the Todalo”:
We’ll toddle,
we’ll toddle along, With a wad, wad and waddle,
(The Toddle Song – 1903)
Round we go a waddlin’ a toddlin’ a waddlin’ . . .
(Toddling
the Todalo – 1911)
And a tod,
tod, toddle, We’ll waddle and toddle along.
(The Toddle Song – 1903)
. . . while we tod, tod, toddle, a Todalo tune.
(Toddling
the Todalo – 1911)
For whatever
reason, and by whatever mechanism, “the Toddle” (either the dance or the name)
survived long enough, in one form or another, to make a big splash in Chicago
in 1921. Although Fred Fisher
immortalized Chicago’s status as “that Toddling Town” in 1922 (with later help
from Frank Sinatra), the passing years served to obscure the original meaning
of the moniker. Perhaps more memorable dance
crazes of the ensuing years, like the Charleston and the Lindy Hop, helped
erase the brief “Toddle” craze from our collective memories.
But some
people remembered. When the Chicago Tribune published an article with
various guesses about how Chicago had earned the title of “ Toddling Town,” dozens
of people old enough to remember the dance contacted the paper to set the
record straight.[xiii] You can read
their recollections here. The dance
site, StreetSwing.com,
also seems to have gotten it right, as they list “Chicago (That Toddling
Town)” in a list of songs related to
“the Toddle.”
But
regardless of who is to blame for “the Toddle’s” descent into obscurity, we
know that it was not Billy Sunday. Try
as he might, he never could shut Chicago down.
Billy Sunday
Billy Sunday
was the most successful evangelical Christian preacher of the early 1920s. A native of Ames, Iowa, he grew up a Civil
War orphan and played professional baseball in Chicago, Pittsburgh and
Philadelphia during the 1880s. He went
through a religious conversion during his baseball years, and was later
ordained as a Presbyterian minister.
Based in
Chicago, Billy Sunday built a large following throughout the Midwest, and
eventually the entire United States. He
was also one of the most influential advocates of Prohibition, which went into
effect in 1920.
He also
hated dancing. The early-1910s brought a
spate of dance-bans. “Modern dances”
like the “Turkey Trot,” the “Chicken Flip,” the “Bunny Hug,” the “Bear Hug,”
the “Grizzly,” “Tango” and the “Maxixe” (among other “speed dances”) were
regularly banned at various times and in various places by aging Victorian
moralists who, like Billy Sunday, feared the cultural revolution portended by
the new, suggestive dances – much like the anti-Rock and Roll crowd several
decades later.
One of Sunday’s
anti-dancing anecdotes closely mirrored the old joke about why Baptists won’t
have sex standing up – “Because it might lead to dancing”:
A young man and a girl in
evening dress sat in a conservatory. A
fountain trickled and gurgled in a marble basin before them. Palms drooped their long leaves over
them. The light was dim. Distant music sounded softly. Suddenly the young man, overcome by the
girl’s beauty, seized her in his arms and crushed her madly to his breast.
“Shy, Mr. Travanion,” she said,
putting her white hand on his shirt bosom and pushing him coldly away, “you
forget yourself. This sort of thing
isn’t proper – here.”
So saying, she took his arm and
they went out on the ball room floor and indulged in a maxixe [(one of the
“modern dances”)].
Four years
later, he was still preaching against the evils of dance – Kevin Bacon would have had a
word or to say to him:
If America would stop dancing
and get on its knees before Christ, we can put over the great fight we are
making for humanity.
The Washington Herald (Washington DC),
February 16, 1918, page 4.
 |
| Rock Island Argus (Rock Island, Illinois), February 20, 1918. |
Four years
later, the “jazz” and dance scene were still going strong in Chicago – despite
the onset of Prohibition.
“Chicago, that “Toddling” town”
. . . really
was the town that
“Billy Sunday couldn’t shut down.”
[i] The Evening World (New York), June 17,
1920, page 28 (“Should a drunken man attempt to dance the Toddle in a public
trottery while his wife is home suffereing with boils of the neck?”).
[ii] Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26,
1920, page 4 (In Paris and London it is the same thing. All the smart cafes are filled with toddlers
toddling to the stirring strains of an American jazz band.).
[iii] Great Falls Tribune (Montana), September
4, 1921, page 6.
[iv]
The same article appeared in numerous papers across the country.
[v] The Evening World (New York), February
7, 1921, page 15.
[vi] Plattsburgh Daily Press (Plattsburgh,
New York), Februry 24, 1921, page 2.
[vii] The Washington Times (Washington DC),
February 19, 1921, page 17.
[viii]
Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26,
1920, page 4.
[ix] Topeka State Journal (Kansas), May 24,
1921, page 1.
[x]
Charles J. Coll, Dancing Made Easy, New York, E. J. Clode, 1922, page 261.
[xi] The Two Step (Buffalo, New York),
Volume 28, Number 6, June 1918, page 44.
[xii] Chas. K. Harris’ Complete Songster,
Chicago, F. J. Drake, 1903, pages 138-139 (text only; “The music of this song
can be obtained form Charles K. Harris, Music Publisher, 31 W. 31st
St., New York City. Send for catalogue.”)
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