Death, Desperation, and Dollars: The Walkathon Craze of the 1920s and ’30s

As the woman dragged the exhausted man draped over her shoulders, the assembled crowd in the auditorium screamed encouragement.

“Don’t let them get you, Eddie,” they called.

Eddie Lopez, his face drooped in a mask of misery, didn’t look up. He could not do much more than allow himself to be dragged along by his partner, Mary Martin. Ahead of them, another couple walked around and around in circles, an emcee calling the turtle-like race from a microphone. “It’ll be over soon,” he said. “Eddie’s going fast.”

He was right. Lopez finally collapsed; every cell of his prone body had used the last possible amount of energy. Desperate, Martin tried pulling him along.

Lopez and Martin were one of two finalist couples left in the Summit Beach Walkathon in Akron, Ohio, on December 12, 1933. The winners would receive $1000 in cash, near the average annual salary at the time, provided they could continue moving for days on end with only brief rest periods. That money was a lifeline for many: the United States was mired in the Great Depression and people everywhere struggled with economic disaster. Roughly 3000 spectators came to watch Summit Beach Walkathon, a scene that was being repeated in virtually every major city across the country.

Blinking back tears and ignoring her own exhaustion, Martin continued tugging at Lopez’s listless frame, willing him to get back on his feet.

It was the 144th day of the competition.

Dance Fever

Many people had a lot of free time in the era between world wars and before the advent of television. Live entertainment like vaudeville, music, and plays were popular. So were outlandish feats that attempted world records, like stuffing people into phone booths or balancing precariously on telephone poles.

Amid this irreverence stepped Alma Cummings. In April 1923, 32-year-old Cummings decided to set a world record for consecutive dancing. At the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, Cummings fox-trotted without pause with a total of six partners, each one discarded when they reached their physical limits. By the time she was done she had earned considerable press attention as well as a pair of shoes that were worn all the way through. She had been dancing for 27 hours.

“And I can go longer than that,” Cummings said. “If my shoes and stockings and partners hadn’t worn out, I’d be waltzing yet.”

Though Cummings was not the first dance marathoner, she was likely a major influence on the dance marathon fad that swept the country. Over the next several weeks, people eager to get some fleeting fame of their own broke the record. (Cumming herself returned to retake it at 50 hours.) Just as quickly, competitions began springing up offering prizes for singles and couples who could dance the longest without interruption. People were expected to eat, wash themselves, shave, and sip water, all while remaining in motion. Some promoters would offer breaks every hour to prolong the events and give entrants a chance to use the bathroom; others would insist contestants remain on their feet for hours at a time.

Audiences paid admission to watch—not out of any appreciation for dance ability but for the sheer endurance challenge. Any semblance of skill soon gave way to a kind of morose shuffling. One cagey promoter for a dance marathon at Madison Square Garden arranged for doctored images of the dancers to be published in a New York newspaper so they looked drawn and near-death. After days of poor attendance, spectators showed up in droves.

The danger didn’t really need embellishment. In North Tonawanda, New York, a man named Homer Morehouse, just 27, was heading to a chair to rest during a break when he fell over dead. The apparent cause was heart failure; Morehouse had been dancing for 87 hours. An untold number of contestants collapsed, fainted, or suffered from extreme sleep deprivation. Hallucinations were not uncommon.

Health concerns led to a kind of unsolicited intermission: police raids. In Los Angeles, California, cops stormed the dance floor of one 1927 marathon, dragging participants off after 20 hours of shuffling. Contestants screamed and resisted, believing they still had a chance at the prize money.

Moral leaders were also worried the contests might be prurient in nature, with contestants embracing one another in front of an all-ages audience. Never mind that many were clinging to consciousness rather than having a single salacious thought.

Reverend Charles Koehler railed against the contests in Spokane, Washington, in 1931. “This is only the beginning,” he said. “People are going to get tired of seeing just walking. Now they are going to have bathing beauties and what next only God knows.”

Sometimes community members objected to their seeming simplicity. Wrote one Green Bay, Wisconsin resident: “Under no circumstances can it become a menace to mental faculties where none exist.” Contestants dropping dead, the person added, “would mean no great loss to the intellectual life and welfare of the community.”

Promoters had their counter-arguments. Organizer Will Maylon insisted the contests employed dozens of people. They also engendered domestic ideals. Maylon pointed out that one married couple kissed each other good night at each rest period—24 times a day.

Such debates were echoed throughout the country. Major cities like Los Angeles and Boston passed laws or ordinances prohibiting the grueling events out of concern for entrants. But promoters found a novel solution. Instead of calling them dance marathons, they were dubbed walkathons, a brazen attempt to circumvent the law that often worked.

By the 1930s, the contests were no longer strictly entertainment. For many, they became a desperate bid for survival.

Walk Hard

The 1929 stock market crash gave way to a decade of financial disaster for Americans. In the 1930s, unemployment was hovering at 25 percent. Food and jobs were scarce. A walkathon was something akin to a lottery ticket: It gave indigent people a chance to win prize money—as much as $1000 (equivalent to nearly $18,000 today), enough for months and months of sustenance—as well as other perks. Entrants got medical attention as well as up to 12 free meals daily to fuel their exertion. There was even free housing in the sense you remained indoors for the duration of the contest and got a bed or cot to briefly rest.

For some, it was essentially a job, and there were even designations assigned to entrants. Amateurs were just that: people off the street who wanted a chance at the money. Pros entered contests on a regular basis, subsisting on the perks. They were dubbed “horses” owing to their ability to sleep (or at least rest) while standing. They were also often given the most cruel mandates, resting as little as three minutes per hour. Other times, horses might be ringers, dispatched by promoters to outlast the amateurs so they wouldn’t have to pay out the full cash prizes.

Horses were part of a subversive aspect to the walkathons. Promoters, sensing the audience’s emotional investment in contestants, often manipulated things to maximize the drama. Couples on the floor would “break up,” only to be reunited later; others nurtured romances that led to wedding ceremonies mid-contest. Emcees might relate stories about entrants to draw out sympathy. Participants might get a small tip of $2 to pretend to faint for dramatic effect. It was not substantially different from professional wrestling, though walkathon participants had the more physically grueling task.

Promoters also knew there was an element of sadism in spectators that had to be fed. When walkathon action hit a lull, contestants would be forced to sprint across the floor or move to high-tempo music. Failing to continue moving could result in a sharp strike with a yardstick. Couples might be chained or tied together and made to move in circles. Some might even be ordered into blocks of ice to further challenge their endurance. When contestants finally and inevitably dropped to their knees, they would be roused with smelling salts or drenched with ice buckets. If their rest period was up, someone would blast an air horn.

Many of the contests went on for months. When some cities tried to curtail them by enacting a maximum eight-hour daily limit, promoters simply ushered audiences out when the time was up and then stated contestants were choosing to continue moving for the remaining 16 hours independent of the contest.

It paid off. A promoter might earn as much as $50,000 to $70,000 in admissions over a period of days. At the height of their popularity, walkathons were thought to be in almost every American city with a population of at least 50,000 people.

The Finish Line

What finally curbed the walkathon was not human decency but an even more resounding human tragedy. The bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the United States’ subsequent entry into World War II made any kind of frivolity an afterthought. With democracy in danger, there was simply no time to spend days, weeks, or months watching or competing in an endurance contest. The war itself was the endurance challenge.

The question remains: What did people get out of seeing such extreme human suffering? It certainly wasn’t the activity itself. As one Kansas City Star columnist pointed out in 1932, spectators could watch people walk around town for free; they could see terrific dancing on stage.

For some, there was a genuine awe in seeing contestants push their physical limits, which could sometimes demonstrate gender equality. A slight woman could prevail over a man, as in the case of “Mazie,” whom the Oakland Tribune dubbed a “chit of a girl” dance marathoner in Oakland who outlasted “two husky youths,” fox-trotting for 98 hours, 14 minutes, and 44 seconds.

Contestants like Mazie seemed to be the key. Promoter Leo Seltzer told the Tribune that audiences became emotionally attached to certain people. “It’s favorites that do it,” he said. “Half the public is waiting to sympathize with someone.” Once an attendee chose someone to get behind, they would keep coming back, day after day, to cheer them on. Comparisons to modern reality television are probably apt: a walkathoner would likely find much in common with a contestant on Survivor.

Eventually, the cheers subsided. In Akron, Ohio, Eddie Lopez and Mary Martin spent their remaining moments hoping to grab the victory. But Lopez fainted, and Martin finally quit, too. The contest had gone on for so long that the promotion was by that point in receivership and under the control of the county so it could pay creditors. Instead of $1000, the winners would get just $100. Lopez and Martin, due $500 for second place, would get nothing. As Lopez was carried off, the crowd booed.

Read More About the 1920s: