AUTHOR’S NOTE
I’ve tried to depict the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition as accurately as possible in this book. With the exception of the fictitious Nile River ride, everything from the statue on the top of the Festival Hall to the exhibits and layout of the Pike is based on historical maps, original guidebooks, and pictures I found during my research. While the Nile River ride is an invention of my own, I based it on the research I did, especially about the problematic ways the fair represented race and culture. Because the 1904 characters experiencing the fair can’t possibly be aware of the future repercussions of the event, I wanted to give readers a better understanding of the Exposition’s complexities and contradictions and how they still remain with us today.
The fair had an enormous impact on St. Louis, the Midwest, and the country as a whole. Between April 30 and December 1 of 1904 nearly twenty million people visited the 1,200-acre fairgrounds, which included seventy-five miles of roads and walkways, fifteen hundred buildings, and exhibits from more than fifty countries and forty-three states. A visitor to the fair could have experienced wireless telegraphy, observed fragile infants being kept alive by incubators, watched the first public dirigible flight, or perused 140 different models of personal automobile. Theodore Roosevelt visited, Helen Keller gave a lecture, Scott Joplin wrote a song, and John Philip Sousa’s band performed.
From its sheer size, the fair billed itself as the largest and most impressive display of man’s greatest achievements. But as I showed in the story, alongside some of the most astounding scientific and technological breakthroughs of the age, the fair also displayed people. In doing so, the fair became part of the larger history of race, culture, and social evolution in America. This was not accidental. The planning committee curated anthropological displays that worked specifically in the service of imperialism and Western exceptionalism.
It’s important to note that in 1904 most Americans didn’t have access to foreign travel. The Exposition presented a solution—an opportunity to experience the world in miniature. However, the fair presented a very specific version of the world, one seen through the lens of the West. The organizers of the fair did try to separate the serious and “educational” exhibits that were brought by individual nations from the more scintillating and exotic “entertainment” attractions on the Pike, but the average fairgoer regularly confused the two. The effect was that the fair presented a world in which ethnicity and exoticism became a form of entertainment. People and cultures became objects to consume.
As I show in the story, the representation of different nationalities on the Pike was highly problematic, but the rest of the fair wasn’t much better. The educational exhibits were purposely selected by the planners as scientific evidence of the natural progress of human history. Fairgoers could understand the superiority of their own culture in contrast to the so-called “primitivism” of foreign cultures. In 1904, anthropology was still a fledgling discipline of study, but the Exposition and other world’s fairs like it demonstrated anthropology’s usefulness in ordering people. Specifically, the fair helped to justify the dominance of the West and the usefulness of imperialism in scientific terms.
For example, the large Igorot Village exhibit was the direct product of America’s recent victory—and acquisition of territories—in the Spanish-American War. Fair organizers brought people from the Philippine archipelago and displayed them as a sort of human zoo. Fashionably dressed fairgoers who observed the villagers’ dress and customs saw the Igorots as less modern—and therefore inferior.
Another example of anthropology used in the service of Western imperialism was the appearance of Native Americans and First Nations peoples as exhibits at the fair. The fair itself was a celebration of the Louisiana Purchase, the very event that permitted westward expansion and spurred on the ideals of manifest destiny that led to the slaughter and decimation of Native peoples. Harte and Esta see the Cliff Dwellers concession, but those weren’t the only Native Americans at the fair. Apache, Cocopah, Pueblo, and Tlingit peoples were also present as attractions. Attendees could purchase an autographed photo from Geronimo himself, who was then still the American government’s prisoner of war, or view an operational model Indian School, where children maintained a routine for the viewing pleasure of tourists.
While the fair provided some, like Geronimo, a chance to be entrepreneurs, it also exploited them with unsanitary living conditions and poor compensation. Moreover, the Exposition’s display of Native peoples depended on nostalgia and perpetuated the stereotype of a once-heroic and noble people, now defeated and dying. These stereotypes have persisted to this day and continue to cause harm to Native peoples.
Finally, it’s also important to note that while the fair displayed diverse people, it was primarily attended by white Americans. When a planned Negro Day to celebrate emancipation was canceled, the chair of the local committee revoked Booker T. Washington’s invitation and told him that “the negro is not wanted at the world’s fair.” W. E. B. DuBois, whose landmark book, The Souls of Black Folk, had been published to critical acclaim the year before, was not invited. The Eighth Illinois Regiment, an African American regiment, made an encampment at the fair but were prohibited from using the commissary by white soldiers, who refused to share. In short, the fairgrounds were not a welcoming space for people of color.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that the Exposition had such a problematic and often offensive relationship to race and culture. It was a product of its time, after all, but it was also a product of larger social forces. Eleven of the twelve committee members who organized and planned the fair were members of the Veiled Prophet Society, including the president of the committee, David Francis. As I reveal in the story, the VP Society’s formation was a reaction to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a strike that involved large numbers of African Americans and immigrants. The creation of the VP Society and parade was a direct attempt by white city fathers to reclaim racial and class superiority in the city, and much of the design and experience of the fair—both historically and in my book—echoes that same agenda.
For all it might have done to bring technological advances and exposure to foreign nations, at its heart the Louisiana Purchase Exposition cannot be seen outside the larger system of white supremacy and Western imperialism that it helped to perpetuate. It wasn’t alone in this project, however. The Exposition and other fairs like it were common around the turn of the century. Their mixture of exoticism as entertainment and cultural exploitation taught white Americans a version of the world steeped in Western superiority. That understanding had far-reaching effects that continue to impact Americans’ understanding of race and culture even today.
For further reading:
Whose Fair? Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition by James Gilbert
From the Palaces to the Pike: Visions of the 1904 World’s Fair by Timothy J. Fox and Duane R. Sneddeker
“ ‘The Overlord of the Savage World’: Anthropology, the Media, and the American Indian Experience at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition” by John William Troutman
A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904 by Eric Breitbart