Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition 0803237596, 9780803237599, 9780803213944

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Anthropology Goes to the Fair

       Series Editors Regna Darnell Stephen O. Murray

Anthropology

 The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition 

Goes to the Fair

U N I V E R S I T Y OF N E BR A S K A PR E S S

•

L I NCOL N A N D LON DON

NANCY J. PAREZO & DON D. FOWLER

©  by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Parezo, Nancy J. Anthropology goes to the fair : the  Louisiana Purchase Exposition / Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler. p. cm. (Critical studies in the history of anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index.  ---- (cloth : alk. paper) . Louisiana Purchase Exposition ( : Saint Louis, Mo.) . Indians of North America—Exhibitions. . Indians in popular culture—History. . Indians of North America—Public opinion. . Public opinion—United States. . Human zoos—United States. . United States—Ethnic relations. . United States—Race relations. . United States—History. . McGee, W. J., –. I. Fowler, Don D., – II. Title. ..  .—dc  Set in Adobe Garamond by Bob Reitz. Designed by R. W. Boeche.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Series Editors’ Introduction Prologue: Setting the Stage for St. Louis

vii ix xi 

. Organizing the Louisiana Purchase Exposition



. WJ McGee and the Science of Man



. Planning the Anthropology Department and Model Indian School



. Assembling the “Races of Mankind”



. Presenting Worthy Indians



. The Model Indian School



. The Philippine Reservation



. The Anthropology Villages



. The Polyglot Pike



. Being a Living Exhibit



. In the Anthropology Building



. Anthropological Performances



. Celebrating the Fair and Going Home



. The Experiences of an Exposition



Epilogue: Passing into History and Moving On Appendix : McGee’s Racial Classification Schemes Appendix : Native Participants Notes References Index

     

Frontispiece Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure . Figure .

Illustrations

“Overlord of the Savage World” David R. Francis,  Plan map of exposition Transportation parade in Grand Basin Government Building beyond Sunken Garden Frederick W. Lehmann,  Frederick J. V. Skiff William J. McGee,  William Henry Holmes, ca.  “The Missing Link,” a Negrito from Bataan Samuel M. McCowan,  George A. Dorsey with Colojo, a Tehuelche participant Frederick Starr,  Ground plan of the ethnological exhibits Pawnee earth lodge Arapaho family Chief Geronimo Navajo hogan and Arapaho tipis Mon-e-do-wats, “Mrs. Spirit Seeker” Model Indian School exhibit O’odham basket weavers, Effa Rhodes and Amy Enos Indian School student, Mary Shelby Indian School Band, Lem Wiley, conductor Bontoc Igorot men Bontoc Igorot men dancing in Western attire “Is it beef trust . . .” cartoon by Chopin, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

xiv                         

Figure . Colony of Samal Moros, Philippine Reservation Figure . Visayan Village, Philippine Reservation Figure . Tehuelche family Figure . Batwa Pygmies in front of the Manufacturing Building Figure . Batwa Pygmies perform a beheading pantomime Figure . William J. McGee, Edward J. Cushman, and Cocopa Indians Figure . Bob Harris, a Kwakiutl from Fort Rupert, British Columbia Figure . Chief Atlieu, Nootka Figure . Tobin’s Cliff Dweller’s exhibit Figure . Fake Hopi Snake Dance, in Tobin’s Cliff Dweller’s concession Figure . Inuit exhibit, Eskimaux concession Figure . Old Jerusalem concession Figure . Acoma Indian pottery sellers Figure . Cheyenne men at Indian School Figure . “Rubbernecking” cartoon by Chopin, St. Louis Post-Dispatch Figure . Navajos visit Igorot Village Figure .a–b Destiny of the Red Man, A. A. Weinman, front and side views Figure . A Step toward Civilization, Solon Borglum Figure . Bureau of American Ethnology ceramic design exhibit Figure . Haida totem poles at Alaska exhibit Figure . Models of Mesoamerican temple and stelae Figure . Archery competition, Anthropology Days competition Figure . Javelin competition, Anthropology Days competition

                      

Acknowledgments Conducting a study as complex as this, in which the data are scattered in libraries and archives across the country, has meant that we have met and relied on countless people over the years as we visited the many institutions listed in the index. We were aided by many curators, archivists, librarians, secretaries, registrars, and students, and we deeply appreciate the time and effort they expended on our behalf. We would especially like to thank those at the Missouri Historical Society, the National Anthropological Archives, the Library of Congress, the University of Chicago Library, the Oklahoma Historical Society, the Omaha Public Library, and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, who spent hours guiding us through their collections, including Jerice Barrios, J. Gail Carmanda, Martha Clevenger, Nina Cummings, Paula Fleming, Jean Gosebrink, Eadie Hedlin, Sara Heitshu, Robert Leopold, Becky Malinsky, Victoria Monks, Steve Nash, Duane Sneddeker, Jeff Todd, and Andrew Walker. Special thanks to Patricia Afable and Mary Ellen Morbeck for providing and verifying information, respectively, on Filipinos and physical anthropology. Our sincere thanks to those individuals who over the past fifteen years helped us locate the rare document, newspaper, and photograph, as well as to photocopy and organize data. Especially we would like to thank former and current students Rebecca Greeling, Aviva Rubin, John Troutman, and Fritz Vandover, who spent many hours of labor. Thanks also to Charles Sternberg for drafting the maps. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Quincentenary Fund of the University of Arizona provided funding for this project. We would also like to thank our friends and loved ones who provided support for this project, especially our spouses, Richard Ahlstrom and Catherine Fowler, who never complained about our time-warp involvement with  and St. Louis and who listened to our stories about those who went to the fair. Rebecca Allen, Sydel Silverman, Regna Darnell, and David Wilcox read drafts and offered many useful suggestions to improve the manuscript. Karen Brown,

copyeditor extraordinaire, saved us from numerous, egregious errors. Our special thanks to her, and to Gary Dunham, Joeth Zucco, and all the others at the University of Nebraska Press who have helped this project come to a completion. To our many colleagues who have listened to us give papers on various subtopics of this book or laughed at some of the outrageous things we found over the last ten years, our gratitude for their tolerance and appreciation for helping us hone our ideas.

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Acknowledgments

Series Editors’ Introduction     . 

The critical history of anthropology, at least as written by practicing anthropologists, habitually employs ethnographic methods. Nancy Parezo and Don Fowler bring to this project their long-established commitments to archaeology, ethnohistory, museum studies, and ethnography as well as the history of anthropology. They, and we as readers, stand as heirs to past traditions whose baggage we have yet to transcend. Using archival documents and contemporary oral and written commentary, the authors have catalogued exhaustively a single extended occasion for the ritual display of American anthropology and Social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. They have delved into the documents, not just about anthropology at the St. Louis World’s Fair, but the fair as a whole. For most, especially the entrepreneurs in charge of the profit-generating capacity of the exhibits, anthropology was a peripheral player in the self-aggrandizement of “the American way.” American success in technology and its underlying science was the key to the overall display. The Indian village, school, and crafts posed a sharp contrast. It was a self-referential display, with little international participation or content, given the claim to be a “world’s” fair. Yet audiences came, from across the country, particularly from the Midwestern heartland of the United States, to celebrate the century’s triumphs, past and yet to come. The authors have further situated the events of  among those of their predecessors and successors. The  Louisiana Purchase Exposition, in retrospect, was the swan song of American evolutionary progressivism, wherein Manifest Destiny was performed in contrast to primitivism. In , at the better-known Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, voices of nineteenth-century imperialism were counterbalanced by those of the future, of what would become Boasian cultural relativism. St. Louis in  produced nothing comparable to the permanent institutional framework left behind in Chicago’s Field Columbian Museum, and WJ McGee was very much a figure of the anthropology of the nineteenth century. McGee was willing to play upon the exoti-

cism of the “living exhibits” of Indians, including the notorious Apache Chief Geronimo, for the grander purposes of public edification. McGee embodied the government and museum mandate of service to non-expert audiences, whereas the discipline of anthropology was already in  moving firmly toward an academic institutional base, toward research carried out by credentialed professionals for whom public education was at best a secondary goal. The narrative explores the range of characters who participated in the  and the inherent conflicts of their constituencies and goals. The intervention of museum and government personnel into the public display of national achievement reflected less concern with scientific rigor than with attracting audiences, loosening their purse strings. Advertising the new science of anthropology and its potential for framing all of human history and nature was at most a bonus. The optimism and hucksterish enthusiasm of McGee failed to attract such an audience in the larger public sphere despite general interest in the exhibits. This was the last of the world’s fairs to attract major attention as a performative encyclopedia of knowledge. The increasingly academic character of anthropology and the other social sciences moved them away from such public display. Books for specialists and articles in academic journals were becoming the primary mode of communication. Political and scientific interpretations of cultural and racial diversity were becoming more discrete, with the Philippines of greater interest to Theodore Roosevelt’s expansionism than to the Native American mandate of the government’s Bureau of American Ethnology where McGee spent his anthropological career. The Philippine exhibit was far distant from the Indian Village to which the anthropological living exhibits were consigned. McGee’s envisioned grand synthesis literally failed to materialize. The anthropology of only a century ago is vastly anachronistic by contemporary standards. Evolutionary theory, at least of the kind envisioned by Lewis Henry Morgan, Lester Frank Ward, John Wesley Powell, and the follower of those men, WJ McGee, was already well past its prime. The year  also saw Franz Boas’s seminal essay in Science on the history of anthropology, in which his critique of evolutionary theory was taken as having been concluded and his rivals as having been vanquished — to the point where they are not even mentioned by name, and observations and interpretations by those not accredited with anthropology degrees were obliterated from history by Boas — who also did not have a degree in anthropology.

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Series Editors’ Introduction

At the time, the Bureau of American Ethnology’s evolutionary synthesis and Boas’s emerging historical particularism appeared to coexist, with the outcome for the character of American anthropology still in question. In retrospect, the inevitability of this trajectory is obvious, but the context of the conflict must be recovered by self-conscious historicism. For such a reflexive exercise, the  Louisiana Purchase Exposition provides an ideal vehicle and case study.

Series Editors’ Introduction

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“Overlord of the Savage World.” Cartoon, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July , . WJ McGee Papers, box , newspaper scrapbook, Library of Congress.

prologue Setting the Stage for St. Louis The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (lpe) was held in St. Louis, Missouri, from May to December 1904, to commemorate the United States’ 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France for sixty million francs, or roughly three cents an acre, arguably the best land deal in American history. Popularly called the St. Louis World’s Fair, the exposition extended over 1,240 acres, the largest in area of any exposition up to that time, or since. The exposition pavilions alone enclosed 128 acres and were filled with wonders. The organizers wanted to be sure that their fellow Americans understood the historical importance of celebrating the Louisiana Purchase. The federal government, states, and historical societies sent precious iconic heirlooms and reproductions to document American history, patriotism, and nationalism: Daniel Webster’s rocking chair, Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood cabin, and President Teddy Roosevelt’s Western ranch house. New Jersey reconstructed a tavern Washington used during the American Revolution, and Mississippi replicated Jefferson Davis’s home, Beauvoir. The exposition also glorified America’s increasing control over the world’s natural resources and in particular how business acumen and ingenuity, coupled with scientific and technological know-how, were pushing the United States to the forefront of the industrialized nations. Visitors exclaimed in awe over the symbols of immense accumulated wealth. They gaped at the gigantic electric generators that illuminated buildings and the artificial lagoons. They saw hundreds of the newest technological advances including small electric motors to run factory machines, intended to eliminate the steam engines and belt systems of nineteenth-century factories. There was a Biograph movie showing the giant Westinghouse factory complex in Pittsburgh that covered fourteen hundred acres and employed eleven thousand workers. They saw the first successful “wireless telegraph” that would soon change world communications. Crowds flocked to see the fossil remains of a triceratops in the Gov-

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ernment Building, a recreation of a mining camp at the Nevada State pavilion, floral gardens, livestock shows, giant cheeses, and a twenty-foot-tall knight on horseback made of prunes from what is now Silicon Valley. Visitors listened to thousands of concerts, from the great John Phillips Sousa Band to operettas and the elegant ragtime music of composer Scott Joplin, then living in St. Louis. Everyone played, hummed, or sang the “official” fair song, “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” by Broadway songwriter Andrew Sterling. The exposition was designed to impress the world — and it did. Massive in scope, utopian in intent, the lpe made St. Louis the capital of the American Midwest and seemingly America’s most progressive city, at least for seven months. The exposition was a bold, ambitious undertaking for a medium-sized Midwestern city with a long history of corrupt and inefficient government, and it was expensive, costing over fifty million dollars. The leaders of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company (lpec) labeled it the “University of the Future” and an “exposition of processes,” not simply things. Under this broad umbrella they had seven major objectives: first, to promote the city of St. Louis and demonstrate its urbanity and economic clout, especially compared to hated Midwestern rival Chicago; second, to make money for stockholders and stimulate regional economic development; third, to demonstrate the superiority of middle-class American democracy, capitalism, and culture; fourth, to celebrate American industrial, commercial, and technological progress; fifth, to directly or indirectly support U.S. foreign policies, especially the nation’s recent foray into international imperialism and colonization with the acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands; and sixth, to shape the future using education as a tool for directed, purposeful, progressive change. Finally the entire exposition was designed to celebrate the perceived inevitability of the March of Progress and the unqualified fitness of the white American “race” to lead that march. To do this they had to entice many, many visitors to come to the fair. There had be something to interest everyone. The lpe, according to its president, David Francis, would be an encyclopedic place providing a summary or compilation of all existing knowledge at the turn of the twentieth century. Colorado College president, William F. Slocum, wrote in Harper’s Weekly that it would give visitors “new standards, new means of comparison, new insights into the condition of life in the world” and help them discover a sense of

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purpose in America’s rapidly changing society.1 To aid in this process, the lpe would do something novel. They would host “the world’s first assemblage of the world’s peoples.” Native people, some two thousand to three thousand strong, would be on display to help visitors understand how the other half (indeed, how the other 98 percent) of humanity lived in comparison with their own lives. Its ultimate purpose was to serve as a guide toward a future, albeit vague, utopia. As Francis argued, [e]xpositions accentuate the deficiencies of the past, give us a realization of our present advantages, predict the developments of the near future, and equip the arm and the brain alike of the mechanic, the engineer, and the philosopher for future and immediate advances into the realms of the possible. The World’s Fair at St. Louis furnishes a magnificent example of what mankind may do when it shall substitute united exertion for contention in one great anthem of harmonious effort.2 Brave words at the beginning of a century during which organized “contentions,” coupled with starvation and diseases, would kill more humans than had died in all previous wars combined. Similar rhetoric had been evident at every fair since 1851, and there would be more at subsequent fairs during the twentieth century. A second major feature of the St. Louis fair was the conscious use of nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropological concepts. These undergirded a major theme in exposition rhetoric and interpretive displays to celebrate the assumed racial and cultural superiority of Northern European and American nations and to justify their imperial and colonial ambitions. This book is about how then-current, but now long passé, anthropological theories were used for these purposes, and how “Native peoples” were assembled, cared for, treated, displayed, and interpreted. World’s Fairs and Exposition Anthropology before the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World’s fairs began with London’s Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations (dubbed the “Crystal Palace” by Punch magazine) in 1851. From then until 1915 world’s fairs sprang up like mushrooms to celebrate the

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heyday of European and American industrialism and imperialism. In Europe international exhibitions became grandiose stages on which nations bragged about their industrial, financial, technical, intellectual, social, and scientific “progress,” their ability to extract raw materials from their colonies, and their successes in “civilizing” their colonial subjects.3 The United States began its own bragging process with the 1876 Philadelphia extravaganza and continued through celebrations of the Panama Canal in 1915. Major expositions came to have standard features, all of which would be seen in St. Louis in elaborated forms. Popular exhibits, events, or practices established at one fair were expected at subsequent fairs, and visitors were disappointed if they were absent. The first feature was the display of industrial machinery, mining technology, trade goods, and agricultural products in gigantic pavilions; the second was “cultural” exhibits, sculpture, painting, music, and other fine arts. The third feature was the establishment of permanent public institutions initially funded by exposition corporation profits and gifts from private donors. The architecturally eclectic Trocadéro complex, which later housed natural history exhibits, was built for the 1878 Paris fair. In the United States, the 1876 Philadelphia fair resulted in Memorial Hall in Philadelphia and the U.S. National Museum in Washington, while the Field Columbian Museum emerged from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the Museum of Man from San Diego’s 1915 celebration.4 The fourth feature was government funding as direct subsidies or supplemental monies to aid exposition corporations. The process varied from country to country. In the United States, Congress provided loans to the private companies but demanded they be paid back. The United States never accepted total financial responsibility for any exposition but did appropriate money for the construction and operation of government buildings and expeditions to obtain natural history and anthropology collections for exhibits. The largest subsidy for anthropology was for the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. The exposition company funded a large, separate anthropology department under the direction of Frederic Ward Putnam and Franz Boas who sent out a number of fledgling anthropologists on collecting expeditions to North, Central, and South America. These materials became part of the Field Columbian Museum. Other governments, most notably Britain, France, Holland, and Belgium, similarly provided large subsidies to underwrite expeditions to

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amass archaeological and ethnographic collections. These resulted in exhibits that created a prehistoric and historic cultural heritage that supported current nationalist and colonialist ideologies.5 At the 1878 Paris exposition, the French added a fifth feature: the public display of new scientific knowledge by emerging disciplines, such as anthropology, and established fields at “international congresses,” held as part of the exposition. Numerous scholarly, professional, trade, and benevolent associations and interest groups were invited to hold congresses, drawing many attendees and providing a major venue for airing and debating theoretical, practical, and public policy issues. The 1878 Paris congresses led, for example, to international copyright laws, the international postal union, and international adoption of the Braille system. Congresses were prominently featured at the 1889 Paris fair, including the International Congress of Anthropological and Prehistoric Sciences, and in Chicago in 1893 (Curti 1950; Mason 1894a, 1894b). The sixth feature of major expositions was extramural entertainment that included “exotic” peoples. Fairs, held for many centuries in nearly all the world’s trade centers, were mixtures of commerce, entertainment, and theater with dancers, musicians, actors, circuses, jugglers, food vendors, thieves, prostitutes, hawkers, and con artists. Similar congregations gathered at or near modern expositions and included displayed people, billed as “savages” from Africa or Polynesia, who could be gawked at for a fee. These unofficial, outside-the-gates “public nuisance” sideshows posed major crime-control and public-health problems for fair officials. In Philadelphia a “Shantyville” grew outside the exposition gates with such edifying exhibits as a “gigantic fat woman,” talking pigs, fire-proof women, and two “Wild Men of Borneo.”6 Paris’s 1867 world’s fair coped with unauthorized entertainment by developing a huge amusement park, installed and operated by the City of Paris, together with international restaurants, arranged around the perimeter of the ovoid-shaped exposition hall. In 1893 Chicago organizers created the Midway Plaisance — a “pleasure area” connecting two sections of the exposition grounds. In the shadow of the great two-hundred-and-fifty-foot-tall Ferris wheel, concessionaires presented dozens of “authentic” peoples from Africa, the Pacific, Arctic, Middle East, and Far East. The most notorious concession was the Streets of Cairo where “Little Egypt” and other women performed

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belly dances seriatim, ten hours a day, six days a week, ogled by tens of thousands of onlookers. The Streets of Cairo grossed eight hundred and eighty thousand dollars, more than the Ferris wheel, and the exposition company took 20 percent of the gross profits, as it did from all concessions. Subsequent exposition organizers were quick to see how lucrative the strange and exotic could be. A related phenomenon, beginning in the early 1880s, was the Wild West show. The most famous was “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s, which played six hundred and sixty performances in Chicago — outside the exposition gates. These shows employed American Indians, especially Lakotas, who made a much better living as “show Indians” than starving on government rations back on the reservations. Wild West shows rapidly became sanctioned attractions at expositions in the United States and Europe, including St. Louis (Fowler 2000, 205; Moses 1996; Kasson 2000). The seventh feature was official “living exhibits” organized, funded, and managed by the exposition companies. At the 1855 Paris fair, static exhibits from French colonies focused on “primitive” material culture, stressing “cultural differences, especially exoticism.” Bringing officially sanctioned, living “exotic” people to expositions came later. There was an attempt to have a federally sponsored exhibit of American Indians in Philadelphia, but Congress balked at the price tag. At the 1883 Amsterdam International Colonial Exposition, the Dutch government underwrote model villages inhabited by “Natives” from its colonies in the Caribbean and Southeast Asia; the price tag was large. Not to be outdone, the French government prominently featured Natives from its far-flung colonial empire at the 1889 Exposition Universelle extravaganza: “On the Esplanade des Invalides side by side with the latest inventions and with the whole civilized world as spectators . . . [were] twelve types of African, besides Javanese, Tonkinese, Chinese, Japanese, and other oriental peoples, living in native houses, wearing native costumes, eating native foods, practicing native arts and rites” (Mason 1890, 31; emphasis added). The colonial village also included a Streets of Cairo concession, Angkor Wat models, and replicas of West African mosques. “Human Habitations” was arranged as a “tour” of architectural types, from rock shelters to modern houses. At the 1900 Paris fair, Britain and Belgium erected officially sponsored live and static colonial exhibits, grouped together under the “Moral and Material Work of

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Colonialization” stressed the “White Man’s Burden” to civilize the rest of the world.7 Smaller fairs also saw living Native peoples as essential to their success. In 1889 St. Louis held a modest trade exposition. An enterprising promoter convinced the Indian Service to let him bring San Carlos Apaches “in all their pride and strength” to perform “their weird dances, ceremonies, and incantations” and to demonstrate (it’s uncertain just how) “their modes of savage warfare.” The Apaches were of great interest, since the U.S. Army had “subdued” them only three years earlier. This seems to be the first officially sanctioned exhibit of Indians in the United States, soon followed by others, including model Indians schools to demonstrate the value of Indian Service assimilationist policies. The most celebrated gathering of Indians was Omaha’s 1898 Trans-Mississippi Exposition, which promoters called the “Last Great Congress of the Red Man.” It was designed as an ecumenical assembly of “all” Indian tribes, brought together for the first and last time, apparently to commiserate together before they all “vanished.” When fiscal reality set in, the Last Great Congress shrank to about four hundred people from Plains and Southwest tribes. The 1901 Buffalo fair also had a Last Great Congress of the Red Man in 1901, and publicists billed the lpe Wild West show as yet another “Last Great Congress” (Fowler 2000, 205; McCowan 1899; Moses 1996; Rosewater 1897). Exhibits of “native peoples” included both sideshow attractions presented by individual entrepreneurs and “official” exhibits of subjugated indigenous peoples sponsored and interpreted by their colonialist masters. After 1883, colonial powers officially exhibited subject peoples under the guise of educational endeavors to demonstrate how much better off Natives were under the benevolent care of their imperialist overlords. Private entrepreneurs unofficially exhibited subject people, especially those of color, as ethnic-racial stereotypes to make money. But it was often superficially difficult to distinguish the official from the unofficial, as each played on the other. The underlying difference was that government agencies were consciously promulgating propaganda to justify colonialism and forced acculturation policies. But both the official and the unofficial exhibitions used the same stereotypes — benighted “primitives” who could only be raised to civilization by “enlightened” benevolent white men.

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Bridging these supposedly different exhibit categories were anthropologists attempting to legitimize their field of study, broker their specialized knowledge, and prove their status as “scientists.” Working at expositions gave them a public forum in which to assert their claims to be experts on, and interpreters of, the physical, linguistic, and cultural similarities and differences of exotic peoples seen in relation to white Americans and northern Europeans. Official exhibits were often arranged or interpreted by anthropologists working closely with colonial administrators. As historian Robert Rydell has noted, anthropologists helped support the economic elite’s messages regarding race and social progress and “scientifically” validated and justified overseas imperialist expansion (Rydell 1984, 157). At the same time, participation in expositions was the most public way anthropology — claiming to be a distinctive profession with a unique body of knowledge, methods, subject matter, and interpretive frameworks — could present itself as socially useful and authoritative. Expositions provided them with venues in which to popularize their concepts. The message of its exhibits, both static and living, was: Here are paradigms and concepts through which the “civilized” world may meet, understand, and interpret the “noncivilized” world. Professionalizing Anthropology Participation in the exhibition of Native peoples was a part of the campaign that anthropologists had been waging for over two decades to gain public recognition of their professional identity. In the United States, during the 1880s, Lewis Henry Morgan, John Wesley Powell, Frederic Ward Putnam, and their compatriots set out to “organize anthropologic [sic] research in America,” as Powell put it in the first annual report of his fledgling Bureau of Ethnology, later the Bureau of American Ethnology (Powell 1881, xxxiii). At the time, anthropology was entirely museum based or was a leisure pursuit of educated amateurs. It can be argued that the first American “professional” anthropologists (individuals paid to do scientific work full time) were members of Powell’s “Corps of Ethnologists.” Over the next two decades, new museums with anthropology departments were founded in Chicago and Philadelphia (Harvard’s Peabody Museum was already in existence), and an anthropology department was established by Putnam at the American Museum of Natural History. Franz Boas developed graduate programs at Clark University (1888)

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and Columbia (1896), Putnam at Harvard (1890) and the University of California (1901). By 1900, courses labeled “anthropology” were being taught in over thirty American universities and colleges. When the American Anthropological Association (aaa) was established in 1901, two hundred individuals joined. Many aaa members were also members of Section H of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1900, Section H established a standing committee on university-level anthropological teaching to develop textbooks and curricula and to formulate arguments to convince university administrators to establish departments. Committee members took their case to professional meetings and academic assemblies. Calling the field “the crown and completion of the sciences,” Frank Russell, one of the first professionally trained anthropologists and a leader of the initiative, argued for majors in anthropology as the foundation for more specialized courses of study. Anthropology’s “very comprehensiveness is a virtue; for thereby it is rendered suitable to serve as a framework for all other knowledge, lacking which the student but too often builds a series of mental watertight compartments that give no unity or harmony to the intellectual edifice” (Russell 1902, 2). It was great rhetoric and became the basis for the message that WJ McGee, the first president of the aaa, carried with him to St. Louis when he became head of the lpe Anthropology Department. Anthropology could pull a fair together into a seamless intellectual whole. The world would see anthropology’s critical value for understanding a changing world. The living exhibits, official and unofficial, at expositions became sites of social interaction. There Euro-Americans and Europeans met Native peoples and interacted with them in face-to-face encounters. These engagements were based on curiosity about the exotic and foreign, safe adventure through what has come to be called the “touristic gaze.” Indeed these intercultural meetings had “the interest of strangeness” (McGee 1904a, 4). The “living exhibits” at fairs were exciting, disturbing, compelling, and educational for visitors and for Native demonstrators and performers alike, and anthropology could control their meanings. This book is the story of how anthropology achieved a pseudocentrality of place in the exposition world in 1904. The lpe organizers were aware that exotic peoples were major draws and therefore money-makers. But they did

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not want “merely” an exotic sideshow. They wanted their exotic peoples to be interpreted in a modern “scientific” manner and their exposition to be “a vast museum of anthropology and ethnology, of man and his works.” So they brought in an anthropologist, a reputed scientific expert in exotic peoples, WJ McGee.8 The anthropology that McGee and most (but not all) of his fellow anthropologists brought to the exposition centered in concepts of unilineal evolution developed since the 1860s in Europe and the United States. The concepts contained an essentialist set of assumed universal cultural, physical, and “racial” processes. These processes had inevitably produced the superior white Europeans and Euro-Americans who had created the great industrial and imperial nations and who “properly” should (or thought they should) dominate the world. This was the anthropology that the lpe organizers wanted — and got. It was holistic, inclusive, and encompassing. Everything had a place — agriculture, art, ideas, technology, and even people. By illuminating the processes that had produced the past and the present, they could be used to predict the future and legitimate the rapid societal and technological changes and advances that exposition exhibitors predicted. This kind of evolution implied that the new was natural, inevitable, and beneficial to all. Anthropology also had an added benefit; it was a new science and by definition that meant “better” to men who saw a bright future in the ideas emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. The dominant paradigm in the American anthropology of 1900 was a product of American society and reflected its values in the way it posed questions, amassed data, and interpreted evidence, particularly the racialist assumptions and Social Darwinist ideologies of the time. It reflected the deeply held and unquestioned beliefs and prejudices of fair organizers that the American way of life was the unquestioned height of civilized development. Validation was achieved by using the “primitive” as a foil for “enlightened civilization.” “Primitive” represented presumed early evolutionary stages of human society. Certain contemporary societies (hunter-gatherers, peasants) became analogs for the past stages through which “advanced” human societies had evolved. This idea — “as they are now, so our ancestors once were” — had been current in the thinking of political economists and social evolutionists since the late 1500s. One aspect of this Primitivism was the long-held premise

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of the “Vanishing Savage” — that nonliterate cultures were doomed by technological and imperialist expansion.9 The lpe, like the Omaha and Buffalo expositions, would thus provide the “last chance” to see the “authentic” Native peoples of the world before they “vanished.” But unlike Omaha and Buffalo, the lpe would provide hope for the unfortunate “primitives.” The exposition would give Natives a chance to understand that Euro-American civilization was the pinnacle of evolutionary development. It was a way of life so superior that they would embrace it once they saw it. In contrast to the fair’s overall evolutionary theme, anthropology as a distinct department was almost an afterthought. It was the first department proposed but the last to be implemented. While the field’s ideas proved useful for the exposition’s explanatory and taxonomic framework, an anthropology department was not considered absolutely necessary — unlike the departments of manufacturing, electricity, or fine arts. The lpe organizers recognized that anthropology exhibits were expensive, especially if living peoples were included. Like all expositions, the lpe was a venture intended to be profitable for shareholders, hence the directors wanted to keep expenses to a minimum. There were in fact anthropological exhibits all over the exposition grounds — in government displays, foreign pavilions, business booths, and on the Pike — but other exhibitors or concessionaires paid for them. Getting the lpec to pay for static and living people exhibits was another matter. A major theme of this book is about that struggle. About This Book This book is about how anthropology “came to the fair” in 1904. It has several interwoven stories. There are stories about the men and women, professional and vocational anthropologists, exhibits designers, educators, traders, government officials, hucksters, and entrepreneurs, who used Native peoples and their arts and cultures to both educate and entertain visitors, and to advance their own economic, sociopolitical, and ideological agendas. There is also the story of how concepts of then-current evolutionary anthropology were disseminated and how they both reflected popular culture and influenced public opinion. One story, woven throughout, is about how one anthropologist, WJ McGee, tried to articulate and popularize his vision of anthropology as the Science of Man of the present metamorphosing into the Science of Human-

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ity of the future. The story of exposition anthropology at the lpe is in large part McGee’s quest for professional authority and recognition and his use of anthropology’s “subject matter” to obtain his objectives. The second major story focuses on the almost three thousand indigenous peoples who resided (often under miserable conditions) on the exposition grounds while almost continuously performing, or demonstrating, their “traditional” lifeways for thousands of gawking visitors six days a week. This book is the first attempt to systematically discover the names, cultural affiliations, and individual and family stories of these men, women, and children.10 What has been garnered, however, is woefully incomplete, especially in regard to the observations, reactions, and feelings of the Native participants. We know they all came voluntarily, but we do not know why many came. Some were professional entertainers and had worked at previous expositions. Others had never been outside their homelands and were traveling thousands of miles to an unknown land. We have gleaned some idea of their experiences, some good, some bad. They must have been frightened and elated, bored, awed, and offended, and as interested in the fairgoers, officials, and anthropologists as the latter were in them. They observed and interacted with fairgoers while they went about their daily tasks. There are hints of the tenor of their observations; they were incredulous and appalled at the rude and unthinking behavior of fairgoers, but also made friends with some. Unfortunately their gaze is simply not very accessible in the archival record. We wish that we could have included their oral histories. We wish that there could be people to talk about their memories, but all participants have long since passed away. We leave it to others to discover if the stories told by participants when they returned to their homes were passed on to descendants. Simply locating participants’ names and cultural affiliation has proven to be a daunting task involving over ten years of research.11 We have based our stories on primary documents held in the archives listed in the endnotes. We have consulted lpec records, correspondence, exhibit plans, departmental records and reports, scrapbooks, daily programs, and photographs. We have surveyed the many newspaper accounts about the exposition — accounts that conveyed information and shaped public expectations and attitudes about the anthropology displays. All sources tell us much of “what went on” during the fair and reflect something about the social, political, economic, and racialist ideologies of the day.

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We begin our tour of the fair with planning efforts, focusing on the lpe’s desire for civic bragging rights. Civic leaders wanted to show the rest of the country that “in public spirit and in private enterprise,” St. Louis “stands with the first.”12 We then discuss why the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company organized an anthropology department, since the original goal was to show the development of civilized life in the Louisiana territory, using displays of Indian life in 1800. This would be the “primitive before” picture to contrast with the “civilized after” of American technological and cultural achievements during the nineteenth century. We then turn to McGee and his vision of anthropology as background for his grandiose exposition plans, his initial attempts to convince fair and government officials to fund them, and the fiscal realities and shifting political winds that required frequent changes in those plans. Major factors forcing changes were the decision by the Indian Service to build a model Indian school and use adult “traditional” Indians as foils and the federal government’s desire to bring large numbers of Filipinos to demonstrate how well it was caring for America’s new “wards.” This is followed by the story of the lpe-sponsored expeditions to convince Native peoples to come to the exposition. With the lpe ready to open on May 1, we turn to the displays of living peoples whom visitors saw, focusing on the almost three thousand indigenous peoples. Five chapters describe the children and adults associated with the Indian Service’s model school and the associated Indian Village, the Philippine Reservation, the lpec-funded Anthropology Villages, and the “Ten Million Dollar Pike.” We look at daily life as these groups lived it, how they coped with fairgoers, earned money, and waded through the mud after torrential rains. It was not easy being a living exhibit in the heat and extraordinary rain of a St. Louis summer and the cold and wet of autumn and early winter. We next discuss static anthropological exhibits and McGee’s attempts to make the exposition a place of original research on Native peoples, including a Special Olympics, a competition designed as part of the third modern Olympic Games. Most projects dealt with anthropometry and psychometry, resulting in what would later charitably be called the “mismeasure of man” (Gould 1977, 1981; Findling and Pelle 1990, 18). We also discuss special events that affected the demonstrators’ lives, such as parades and performances, and scientific congresses, arranged to further McGee’s professional agenda. We end

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with the closing and celebration of the fair and a discussion of how the lpe marked a turning point in Americanist anthropology. Before we begin, a word must be said about derogatory language and cartoons, dubious assumptions, problematic conclusions, incorrect names for peoples, and strange logic sprinkled throughout the book in quotations. We have retained some of the ethnocentric and racist stereotypical language and slang used by organizers, participants, newspaper reporters, and fairgoers. We recognize that this language may cause pain for many descendants of the people who acted as “living exhibits.” But to omit or edit it would negate the point of the book. The early 1900s was a time of intense racism in the United States against Indians, blacks, Asians, and Southern Europeans. One of the major points of the book is how some anthropologists at the time fought against these prejudices and how others supported them with their nineteenth-century ideas about human physical and cultural evolution. From the perspective of the history of Americanist anthropology, the lpe was a turning point. WJ McGee, the director of the lpe Anthropology Department and president of the nascent American Anthropological Association, and Franz Boas, who in 1904 was becoming a major force in anthropology, were close personal friends. At the fair’s anthropological congress both gave papers. McGee’s paper was filled with the bombast and racialist assumptions of nineteenth-century unilineal anthropology. As things turned out, it was a swan song for an outmoded set of ideas, at least within museum- and university-based anthropology. Boas’s paper basically destroyed all the theory underlying McGee’s anthropology and laid out the cultural relativism that would permeate Americanist anthropology in the twentieth century. It was McGee’s vision of anthropology, in conjunction with that of lpe organizers, that most of the millions of visitors took away with them. And it was a tenacious vision that can unfortunately still be seen today in expositions, in films, and on television.

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1. Organizing the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Discussions among St. Louis business and political leaders about hosting a national exposition began as early as 1889. Governor David R. Francis led a delegation to Washington dc to seek the exposition to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery of the New World” for St. Louis. Rival Chicago won and staged its World Columbian Exposition in 1893. Interest waned until early 1896, when St. Louis’s Congressman Richard Bartholdt advocated a Louisiana Purchase Exposition to improve the city’s sagging economy. Francis again took up the cause along with Pierre Chouteau, third generation scion of a great St. Louis merchant family. On June 7, St. Louis elite met to rally support. Francis declared, “There is one event in the history of this city, second in importance only to the Declaration of Independence . . . and that is the Louisiana Purchase. St. Louis should celebrate its centennial by a great international exposition, second to none ever held in the world.”1 Tentative planning began. In 1898 Congressman Bartholdt introduced a bill seeking federal recognition for a fair and financial support. A Committee of Fifty began to conceptualize an exposition. A meeting of the governors of the fourteen Louisiana Purchase states and territories was held in January 1899 to solicit their support. A planning committee, with Chouteau as general chair and Francis as chair of the executive committee, began fund-raising; five million dollars was pledged in a single evening and Congress soon matched with it five million in subsidy loans. In 1900 the City of St. Louis passed a bond issue for the fair. On April 29, 1900, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company (lpec) was formally incorporated, with authorized capital of six million dollars and nine million in credit. Francis served without compensation, and ninety-three civic leaders formed a board of directors. The goal was to erect an exposition more spectacular than Chicago’s. Civic pride and status were at stake. Intangibles compensated for the financial risk:

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Fig. 1.1. David R. Francis, 1903, lpe president. Photograph by L. Strauss. St. Louis Public Library, image no. lpe01617.

increased commerce for the community and new educational and cultural opportunities. An exposition would allow St. Louis to “gain a cosmopolitan habit that elevates its citizenship and broadens its social life.”2 Such elevation was badly needed in turn-of-the-century St. Louis. After the Civil War it grew as a major rail center and river port with a wide variety of manufact