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THE CAMP TRACE IN CORPORATE AMERICA 141
thrills when the girls do their machine-gun bobbing and kicking” (qtd in Heimer
n.p.). As Anson Rabinbach has pointed out, from the metaphor of machinery, or
the motor, so central in the intellectual history of labor,
it followed that society might conserve, deploy, and expand the energies of
the laboring body: harmonize the movements of the body with those of the
industrial machine. …If the working body was a motor, some scientists
reasoned, it might even be possible to eliminate the stubborn resistance to
perpetual work that distinguished the human body from a machine.
(2)
In positivistic terms, Markert calculated that a Rockette danced fifty miles a year
and wore out two pairs of shoes a month (Petrie n.p.). Elsewhere, he noted, “no
stage is too large,” adding, “a small stage represses the flair for work; it makes
one feel small and often inadequate” (Markert n.d.: 11). The preoccupation with
hard work was evident further when Markert once asserted, “my girls work too
hard to spend their nights on the cabaret circuit, and they are usually too serious
about their careers to be distracted by fast company” (Markert 1955:112). The
Rockettes embodied the history of labor power in Western thought and politics,
what Rabinbach called “transcendental materialism” (4, 92), the union of all
material being, organic and inorganic, human and machine, in their mutual
subordination to work.
The Rockettes created the illusion of a machine through their focus on
uniformity. In order to conceal all differences, their heights ranged no more than
three inches from the shortest to the tallest, and they lined up side-by-side in such
a way as to suggest that they were all the same height. Usually they wore
identical hats to cover variations in hair color. As their choreographer succeeding
Markert, Violet Holmes, affirmed:
the mirror image is what I must go after all the time in rehearsal. These
ladies are all individuals who, naturally, want to do things their way. But
Rockettes have to conform, lose their individuality onstage, and learn to be
like everybody else to the point where they work as one person.
(qtd in Wentink 57)
Indeed, the emphasis on uniformity was often the reason given in the popular
literature for not racially integrating the group. “A system which is indifferent to
variations of form,” Siegfried Kracauer has argued, “leads necessarily to the
obliteration of national characteristics and to the fabrication of masses of
workers who can be employed and used uniformly throughout the world” (69). The
Rockettes literally stood for, and embodied, this kind of laborer.
The popular literature, most of it originating with. the Music Hall’s publicity
department, portrayed the Rockettes as all-American girls, who work long hours,
have no social life, but somehow find a husband and get married after about four