The focus of this article is the transformation of ragtime dancing into modern social dance by hundreds of teachers, writers and performers working in an emerging dance industry, rooted in New York City. Based on dance manuals and magazines of the period, I argue that dance professionals worked collectively to create new products (i.e. dances) that could more easily be mass-produced and marketed. Importantly, they called their efforts a ‘refinement’ of ragtime and justified their work through discourses of artistry and morality. Upon closer examination, however, the changes they made to the dances indicate that artistry and morality were actually achieved by removing the black associations of ragtime dancing and instead, using modern social dance to construct an idealized white racial identity.
