When on September 24, 1993, President Bill Clinton appeared on tele-
vision to explain his national health plan, he promised to answer in de-
tail every single question put to him by the studio audience assembled
to simulate a town meeting. Maureen Dowd, on special assignment
for the New York Times, noted that the president's promise to tell all
"alarmed his staff members, who envisioned the policy equivalent of
the dance-marathon movie They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Why is the
seemingly endless, round-the-clock entertainment of the 1920s and
1930s still alive enough in the public imagination to characterize the be-
havior of someone in 1993? Dowd did not have to explain to her readers
what a dance marathon was; she knew they would understand exactly
what the president's staff feared.

Dance marathons still have a hold on the imagination of the Ameri-
can public not only because of the notoriety they attracted during the
Great Depression, but also because they seem to epitomize the "Ameri-
can dream" in one of its crazier and more contradictory manifestations.
Marathons signaled grit and hope, determination and foolishness, flim-
flam and patriotic bunting, athleticism and a wild mix of musical
numbers, good clean fun and off-color jokes, nice "boys and girls" and
prostitution, tireless endurance and utter exhaustion. Few Americans
in 1993 can recall these events directly. Most people know of them
through a popular 1969 movie starring Jane Fonda, They Shoot Horses,
Don't They? The film was based on a 1935 novel of the same name writ-
ten by Horace McCoy, who worked as a bouncer at several marathons
in California. The Fonda film acquainted a whole new generation of
Americans with dance marathons--or at least with Hollywood's inter-
pretation of McCoy's version of a fictional dance marathon.

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