Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography o f M em ory at the Hollywood Canteen.
By Sherrie Tucker. Duke University Press, 2014.
Dance Floor Democracy recounts a multidimensional understanding of the Hollywood
Canteen where, between 1943-45, Hollywood stars and starlets dance with servicemen, “big
shots danced with little shots.” While the Warner Brothers 1944 feature film Hollywood
Canteen depicts the activities at the canteen as harmonious and simplistic, “stories of
uncomplicated American goodness during WWII,” a “torque-free,” multicultural dance floor — a
portrait that defined our national memory, Tucker’s research tells a very different story.
The Hollywood Canteen was a USO-like venue providing programs, services and live
entertainment to United States and Allied troops on leave during WWII. Hollywood’s biggest
stars participated as volunteers. Bette Davis and John Garfield headed the Organizing
Committee and Jules Stein, President of the Music Corporation of America headed the finance
committee that established and supported the Hollywood Canteen. Tucker’s many interviews
with surviving participants, recorded between 2000 and 2010, document the disparity of
recollections and attitudes toward race and politics surrounding the Hollywood Canteen. They
reveal the relationship of the Canteen organizers, volunteer dancing/jitterbugging hostesses,
busboys, cooks, servers, and the male, female, black and white soldiers who visited the
Canteen while on leave in Los Angeles. Placing the Canteen in context of the times, she gives
us the saga of the politics and race in wartime America.
The chapters are grouped into four parts each focusing on particular aspect of the
Canteen: the physical location, the jitterbug dancing, the roles and recollection of the
participants, the FBI files and the movie “Hollywood Canteen.” Included in the narrative are the
specifics of the geography of the segregation that divided str eets and neighborhoods as
exclusively black or white. Racial segregation in housing was in full play in Los Angeles, as
well as throughout the nation. She broadens our understanding of the times and activities by
including, along with interviews of the participants, documentation in the form of transcriptions
of the portions of the FBI files that have been declassified. Those who wished to implement full
integration including cross race dancing were presumed to be communists. The anti
communist obsession by the FBI was in play in wartime America, and continued into the 1950s
when it reached its peak, now known as the McCarthy Era. Many Hollywood personalities,
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