I’ll Never Look at Square Dancing the Same Way Again

At some point in my Minnesota elementary school gym class, we were taught square dancing. Kids for groups of eight, with four pairs starting in a square, facing each other. I can still remember the caller on the record played saying, “Swing Your Partner, Do-Si-Do!” While we were square dancing at Field Elementary, the same thing was happening across the country, even in Alaska and Hawaii. As of 2025, at least 31 states continue to recognize square dancing in law as their official dance or folk dance, a legacy of lobbying campaigns in the late 20th century. Check whether your state still designates the Square Dance as the official dance.

Here are examples of states that still designate square dancing as their official dance or folk dance:

Alabama — Square dance (1981)
Arizona — Square dance (1990)
Arkansas — Square dance (1991)
California — Square dance (folk dance, 1988)
Colorado — Square dance (1992)
Connecticut — Square dance (1995)
Florida — Square dance (1986)
Georgia — Square dance (1996)
Idaho — Square dance (1989)
Illinois — Square dance (1990)
Louisiana — Square dance (1999)
Maryland — Square dance (1994)
Massachusetts — Square dance (1990)
Mississippi — Square dance (1995)
Missouri — Square dance (1995)
Nebraska — Square dance (1997)
Nevada — Square dance (1997)
North Carolina — Square dance (1995)
Oregon — Square dance (1991)
South Carolina — Square dance (1994)
Tennessee — Square dance (1980)
Texas — Square dance (1991)
Utah — Square dance (1994)
Virginia — Square dance (1991)
Washington — Square dance (1979)
West Virginia — Square dance (1992)
Wyoming — Square dance (1989)

In 1984, the House Subcommittee on Census and Population held hearings on House Resolution 1706, which would have designated square dancing as the national folk dance.

“A bill to designate the square dance as the national folk dance of the United States.”

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the square dance is hereby designated as the national folk dance of the United States.”

One of the arguments for the square dance came from the Square Dance Associations:

“Square dancing is uniquely American, born of our frontier spirit, and deserves recognition as our national folk dance.”

A dissenting voice was heard from Joe Wilson of the National Council for the Traditional Arts:

“Designating square dancing as the national folk dance would have a chilling effect on traditional dances performed by Indians, Blacks, and other ethnic groups in America.”

One name that never came up during the 1984 hearings was Henry Ford. That’s a little surprising in that Ford was responsible for the push to recognize square dancing across the nation, beginning as early as the 1920s. Then again, perhaps Congress didn’t want to discuss that Ford’s advocacy for square dancing stemmed from his hatred of Jews and Negroes. Ford often published his opinions about the Jewish threat to America. In 1919, he purchased the Dearborn Independent newspaper and used it to publish a series of antisemitic articles, later compiled into the book The International Jew.

In one chapter, he wrote that “Jewish Jazz Becomes Our National Music.” Here is a sample:

Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent parlors and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. A clue to the answer is in the above clipping. Popular Music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.

Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of cave love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes and admitted to homes where the thing itself, unaided by the piano, would be stamped out in horror. Girls and boys a little while ago were inquiring who paid Mrs. Rip Van Winkle’s rent while Mr. Rip Van Winkle was away. In decent parlors the fluttering music sheets disclosed expressions taken directly from the cesspools of modern capitals, to be made the daily slang, the thoughtlessly hummed remarks of high school boys and girls.

While Ford demeaned the role of Black musicians within jazz, he was obsessed with Jewish people infiltrating American culture. He wrote diatribes against Jewish participation in baseball and America’s monetary affairs. The fixation some current Americans have with globalization could have come straight from Henry Ford’s writings.

“Nevertheless, they form such a formidable force, and with their international connections constitute such a political problem, that the mere fact of their failing to top the column of control is not so reassuring as it sounds.

The great Jewish banking houses of the United States are foreign importations, as perhaps everyone knows. Most of them are sufficiently recent to be considered in their immigrant status, while the thought of them as aliens is stimulated by their retention of oversea connections. It is this international quality of the Jewish banking group which largely accounts for Jewish financial power: there is team-play, intimate understandings, and while there is a margin of competition among themselves (as at golf) there is also a wiping out of that margin when it comes to a contest between Jewish and “Gentile” capital.”

Back to square dancing: while most people recognize jazz as an African American art form, born from Black musical traditions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ford saw jazz as a wholly Jewish creation, spreading corruption.

“Jazz is a Jewish creation… sly suggestion, abandoned sensuousness.

In response to what he saw as a Jewish and Negro conspiracy. Henry Ford saw the square dance as the remedy. He promoted square dancing as wholesome, orderly, and “truly American.” It was framed as a way to restore moral discipline and cultural purity.

Ford funded fiddle contests, published dance manuals, and pressured schools to teach square dancing in gym classes. He wanted to replace jazz’s popularity with square dancing’s “clean” image. Square dancing wasn’t just entertainment for Ford — it was a cultural weapon. By elevating it, he sought to erase jazz and impose his vision of an Anglo-Saxon American identity.

Ford didn’t recognize that what he saw as iconically white square dancing incorporated the call-and-response form of calling out dance moves, which originated with enslaved Black people who were required to perform at white dance balls, reproducing the steps without formal dance training.

Ford and a few others behind him attempted to force square dancing down America’s throat. For Ford and others, square dancing was a tool of white supremacy and an attempt to shape America in his own image. In schools, teachers and administrators who resisted were often accused of being “unpatriotic” or “out of step with American tradition,” since square dancing was framed as wholesome Americana. States that didn’t adopt square dancing were portrayed as failing to honor “American tradition,” though there were no legal penalties. My home state of Minnesota never officially adopted the square dance, but it was taught in public schools all the same.

Ford would probably turn over in his grave if he were to see what evolved from the square dance. A choreographer named Ric Silver worked with square dancing. He created a modern square dance called the Texas “Silver” Star Squaredance that premiered on the Country Music Awards TV show in 1989. Silver is credited with creating the Electric Slide and inspiring a revolution in country line dances. Many of the dances that later emerged in dance halls and parties across the country evoke the sensuality Ford was trying to wipe out. The dance instructors he hired to teach him and his wife to square dance might now be demonstrating “Boots on the Ground.”

Square dancing, in Ford’s hands, became more than a pastime — it was a symbol pressed into service, a cultural instrument wielded to shape identity and belonging. The dance itself, innocent in form, became a stage where questions of power, purity, and exclusion played out. That transformation reminds us how even the most ordinary traditions can be repurposed to carry extraordinary ideological burdens.

And yet, the endurance of square dancing beyond Ford’s campaign reveals something more complicated: traditions can outlive the motives that once animated them. What began as a tool of control now survives as a communal ritual, stripped of its original agenda but still echoing with its history. In that tension lies the story’s proper conclusion — the recognition that culture is never neutral, and that every step, every call, every turn in the square carries with it the shadows of the past alongside the possibility of renewal.

P.S. Thanks to Brian Alnutt for the inspiration.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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