27. The Moral Panic Over Canoe Romance
Before car ownership spread across the land and the backseat became the mobile ground zero for romance, America’s youth often coupled in canoes. In the early twentieth century, young Americans’ options for make out spots were pretty limited, so they took to the water. Canoes, which had recently become widely available, offered young folk an escape from finger-wagging parents and baleful chaperones, and a bit of privacy for a bit of romance. Once that bit of knowledge spread, canoe sales and permits exploded, and teenagers took to the water with the urgency of salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn. In Minneapolis, for example, 200 canoe permits were issued in 1910. Two years later, that number had exploded to more than 2000.
A term was even coined for the watery romance: “canoedling”. Unsurprisingly, buzzkill pious and prudes, appalled at the thought that some people might be having fun somewhere, hit the alarm buttons for a full-blown moral panic. A contemporary Minneapolis Tribune warned the public that: “Girl Canoeists’ Tight Skirts Menace Society”. Other coverage decried the “misconduct in canoes” that threatened to “bring shame upon the city”. Accordingly, a midnight curfew was declared, and park police began to patrol the waterways in motorized boats equipped with spotlights to catch and fine canoedling canoeists. The canoe romance trend finally died out in the 1920s, when cars and car backseats became more widely available to the masses.