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A few winters ago we thought it was amusing to go to supper at a good restaurant after the theater, have something nice to eat and drink, talk a while, and go home to bed. We thought we were very devilish, and the preachers railed at the wickedness of late-supper orgies. . . . Then somebody started the cabarets. And we flocked to that. We ate the filthiest stuff and drank the rottenest wine and didn’t care so long as they had some sensational singer or dancer cavorting in the aisle. . . . But it has become so tame and stupid that it is quite respectable. At present we are dancing in the aisles ourselves, crowding the professional entertainers off their own floors. And now the preachers and editors are attacking this. Whatever we do is wrong so, as my youngest boy says, “What’s the use, and what’s the diff?”

The really shocking thing about this passage is that a woman of mature years is adopting both the slang and the morals of her youngest son; it indicates how drastically the revolution in entertainment upended settled forms of behavior. It all began with cabaret, which mixed respectable urbanites with the fast crowd of Broadway, leaving respectability much the worse for wear. Cabaret was still a passive experience, like theatergoing. But almost immediately, restaurants and what were known as cafécabarets began encouraging diners to get up off their seats and get onto the floor. And this proved an even more dizzying sensation than the cabaret itself. Dancing in couples was still a new and quite daring phenomenon; nineteenth-century American dances such as the Virginia reel had been performed by groups, in a ballroom. Yet the dance craze spread so rapidly that early in 1911 Irving Berlin wrote “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” a celebration of dance fever. (“Everybody’s Overdoing It,” the columnist Franklin P. Adams groaned.)

Berlin was a principal agent of this dismantling of Victorian mores along Broadway, and far beyond. Only a few years earlier he had been an urchin belting out tunes in Tony Pastor’s, but in that extraordinary year of 1911, when he was all of twenty-three, Berlin wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a song that, like “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” was both about a craze— for ragtime—and the most vivid popular expression yet of that craze. “Alexander” was the most popular song ever written to that time, selling a million copies of sheet music in a few months. The song had a thrilling urgency to which everyone seemed to respond. Berlin himself wrote, “Its opening words, emphasized by immediate repetition—‘Come on and hear! Come on and hear!’—were an invitation to ‘come,’ to join in, and ‘hear’ the singer and his song.” That invitation, Berlin said, became part of the song’s “happy ruction.” The wild public reaction to “Alexander” changed the musical world, for the tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley gave up their sentimental ballads and dialect songs for the more modern, urban, and black sound of ragtime. The music scholar Philip Furia goes so far as to say that “Alexander” “crystallized a crucial cultural moment as well, one when people fully realized that they were living in a truly modern age.”

The overnight success of “Alexander,” “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” and other ragtime tunes created an insatiable demand for danceable music; and the dance craze changed Times Square from one moment to the next. The essayist and flaneur Julian Street wrote Welcome to Our City, a gimlet-eyed delineation of Broadway, in 1912; the following year he was forced to add a preface to a new edition because he had failed to take account of dancing. Broadway, he wrote ruefully, “changes faster than the main street of a mining town.” By 1913, virtually every big restaurant in Times Square offered dance lessons, afternoon thés dansants, and revolving dance floors; or elaborate cabaret performances; or both. Indeed, Claridge’s, the fine restaurant of an elegant hotel, made a lonely plea for the remaining sedentary diners: “We prefer to believe that there are some people in this city who would rather dine in