IAH 211C World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 paper Drawing on at least 5 sources, analyze how the EXPO reflected the race OR gender climate in the time pe

IAH 211C World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 paper Drawing on at least 5 sources, analyze how the EXPO reflected the race OR gender climate in the time period.

750-1,000 words.

10%

Works Cited required for this assignment. Please use proper grammar and punctuation.

Use any of these website:

http://www.shoppbs.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/chicago/filmm…

http://www.shoppbs.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/chicago/filmm…

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wells/expos…

EXPO WEBSITE:

http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1386….

http://columbus.iit.edu/about.html

http://ecuip.lib.uchicago.edu/diglib/social/worlds…

http://web.archive.org/web/20121209023302/http://m…

http://columbus.iit.edu/dreamcity/midway.html

http://www.friendsofthewhitecity.org/architecture/…

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1…

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1…

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/93tw…

http://columbus.gl.iit.edu/index.html —>

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Introductory Essays

THE BLACK PRESENCE AT “WHITE CITY”:
AFRICAN AND AFRICAN AMERICAN PARTICIPATION
AT THE WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION,
CHICAGO, MAY 1, 1893 – OCTOBER 31, 1893.

Christopher Robert Reed
Roosevelt University <-------- Chicago, Illinois http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3g02096/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140318051012/http://... https://web.archive.org/web/20140318052351/http://... https://www.eiu.edu/historia/2010Wolski.pdf The Advent of "The Nigger": The Careers of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry 0. Tanner, and Charles W. Chesnutt1 Matthew Wilson Pretext: The Chicago World's Columbian Exposition as Racial Locus In 1893, America celebrated itself in the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago2 in the aptly named "White City." Although the term came from the dazzling quality of the architecture surrounding the Court of Honor, the term "white" was inevitably racialized at the end of the nineteenth century. An example of this racialization is a poem by Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of the Atlantic, entitled "The White City." In this paean, he connects the exposition to the world of ancient Greece: "Her white-winged soul sinks on the New World's breast. /Ah! happy West - / Greece flowers anew, and all her temples soar!"3 He constructs a tradition in which the Greeks were "white" and the United States the fruition of that whiteness, a connection reinforced by the pastiche of classical allusions in the architecture of the fair. Thus, the White City could be read as emblematic of the triumph of whiteness in a decade that saw the repression of African American political and economic aspirations. Since the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South following the election of 1876, African Americans had been progressively robbed of their political rights. As Charles Chesnutt himself noted in his essay "The Disfranchisement of the Negro" (1903), "the rights of Negroes are at a lower ebb than at any time during the thirty-five years of their freedom, and the 0026-3079/2002/4301-005$3.50/0 American Studies, 43:1 (Spring 2002): 5-50 5 6 Matthew Wilson race prejudice more intense and uncompromising."4 In addition, the lynchings in Atlanta in 1892 of three African American businessmen and the coup d'état/ pogrom in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898 (the subject of Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition) signaled that African Americans in the South would not be allowed to compete economically with European Americans. And this deprivation of African American rights received the sanction of the Supreme Court in its 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. In his brief in support of Homer Plessy, an African American light enough to pass as white who had been arrested for riding in a whites only railroad car, Albion Tourgée asked the court whether it would "'hold that a single drop of African blood is sufficient to color a whole ocean of Caucasian whiteness?'"5 Indeed that was the court's finding, and under the rubric of "separate but equal," the seemingly permanent inferiority of African Americans was written into the fabric of American legal and social practice. Given these developments, it is no surprise that African Americans were largely invisible at the fair, and their official absence was bitterly resented in the African American community. At the time, the writers of the "Preface" to the pamphlet, "The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition," asked: "Why are not the colored people, who constitute so large an element of the American population, and who have contributed so large a share to American greatness,—more visibly present and better represented in the World's Exposition?"6 For instance, African Americans were not allowed to participate in the planning of the fair; on Dedication Day, there was no person of color on the platform; African Americans were excluded from the exhibition halls; and they were discriminated against in hiring.7 All the Commissioners of the Exposition were white; the entire Board of Lady Managers was white; the Columbian Guard all white—in total, apart "from porters, the Negro staff included an Army chaplain... a nurse, two messengers, and three or four clerks."8 While relegated to invisibility and excluded officially from the representations of the fair, African Americans (and Africans) were permitted to fill the role of spectacle, as part of what Alan Trachtenberg has termed "pedagogies of culture," as object lessons in mainstream ideology at the turn of the century. These pedagogies were enforced through "a reality composed... in the mode of theatrical display, of spectacle" which Trachtenberg contends represented a "new form of urban experience" and "a new way of experiencing the world."9 The 21 million visitors to the World's Columbian Exposition10 became spectators at a "frank illusion, a picture of what a city, a real society, might look like. The White City represented itself as a representation, an admitted sham. Yet that sham, it insisted, held a truer vision of the real than did the troubled world sprawling beyond its gates."11 The primary locus of racial spectacle at the fair was the Midway which contained, among the various "ethnological" exhibits, a Dahomian village. Edward B. McDowell reported in his article in Frank Leslie's Popular The Advent of "The Nigger" 7 Monthly that some sixty-nine "natives" were present "in all their barbaric ugliness, blacker than buried midnight and degraded as the animals which prowl the jungles of their dark land. It is impossible to conceive of a notch lower in the human scale than the Amazon, or female Dahomey warrior, represents."12 McDowell did, however, acknowledge that they had "some human traits," but clearly these traits were outweighed by the animalistic, bestial ones, and these he linked to African Americans: "[i]n these wild people we can easily detect many characteristic of the American negro."13 Although he went on to say that blacks in America had "learned the language of civilization" and were thereby "raised above the deplorable level" of the Africans, one can easily see how African Americans were read by the white majority, in the late-nineteenth century, as essentially little different from Africans. Frederick Douglass recognized that connection when he wrote that "as if to shame the Negro, the Dahomians are here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage."14 McDowell's representation of the Dahomians' place in the spectacle of barbarity could also be seen in the exposition proper. Consider, for example, this contemporary photograph from the exposition, entitled "An African Bimba"(see figure 1). The boat was located in the Transportation Building, and the text below the photograph notes that this exhibit "was constantly surrounded by visitors, who could only with difficulty believe that it had been used as a canoe in an African Figure 1: "An African Bimba," from The Dream City: World's Fair Art Series, (November 23, 1893). 8 Matthew Wilson river." After listing a number of boats at the fair, the writer concluded "this bimba seemed to be the worst boat at the World's Fair."15 Africans (and their material culture) functioned, then, as a kind of gauge of "progress," as a baseline of barbarity against which to measure the accomplishments of American civilization, and the representations of African Americans as "essentially" African performed much the same cultural function. Indeed, Frederick Ward Putman, who organized the ethnological exhibits, explicitly stated the aims of those exhibits which would be "arranged to teach a lesson; to show the advancement of the evolution of man."16 "Man," obviously, had evolved toward civilization (while all others had remained essentially the same), and as Gail Bederman has pointed out, like the word "man," the term "civilization" itself was a racialized term at the turn of the century; it was a "racial trait, inherited by all Anglo-Saxon and other 'advanced' white races."17 And by "celebrating civilization, the organizers celebrated the power of white manhood."18 As a counter-response to this triumphalist vision of white manhood and to the subject positions that had been imposed on them through high and low culture representations, African Americans attempted to claim the power to represent themselves at the fair by organizing a Congress on Africa (August 14-21, 1893) and by celebrating Colored People's Day (August 25, 1893). The congress was designed to fill the absence of material culture of Africa which a newspaper noted was "a deficit" at the fair—but it was also designed, wrote Frederick Perry Noble, whose brainchild the congress was, to "throw new light on the negro question," and to "surprise people with negroes as able in debate as white men."19 As one speaker observed on the first day of the meeting, the Congress on Africa was to help "save American negroes from an obscurity and mortification which the failure to award them place in the Exposition has caused them to feel keenly."20 Conceived "as anything other than a cultural conclave, the Congress on Africa combined the intellectual with the ideological, religious, philosophical and scientific. . . ."21 The congress had a dual focus: first to discuss how to move Africans and African Americans closer to the cultural and social assumptions of Europeans and Americans, how to create "a new person . . . who conformed more readily in temperament, disposition, and level of civilization to Anglo-Saxon standards."22 The second was to protest the current treatment of African Americans in the United States and to use this international forum to apply pressure to American's broad acceptance of the second-class status of African Americans. The congress could be seen, then, as a fundamental challenge to the racialized premise of the fair, one which bifurcated the world into realms of civilization and barbarism, of high and low culture,23 into the fair and the Midway. A second, more complicated, response to the failure to include African Americans in the fictive "unity" of the fair was the establishment of Colored People's Day, the idea of which "originated with whites and appeared as a salve on a festering sore."24 As Colored People's Day evolved, it became the antithesis of the Congress on Africa25 with its intellectual emphasis; the focus on Colored The Advent of 'The Nigger" 9 People's Day was cultural. Intended as a celebration of the accomplishments of African Americans in the United States since the end of the Civil War, in particular their accomplishments in high art,26 the program was divided into four parts: a speech by Frederick Douglass; oratory by a number of whites; classical musical selections; and musical numbers and recitations.27 In the last two sections, a number of African American singers performed, among them composer Harry T. Burleigh as well as various other tenors and a "mezzo contralto." Douglass' grandson, Joseph, played violin, and Marion Cook presented "an act from his opera Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Paul Laurence Dunbar read a poem.28 The seventy-five-year-old Frederick Douglass, serving in the official capacity as Haitian commissioner at the exposition, agreed somewhat reluctantly to support Colored People's Day, while Ida Wells-Barnett advocated a boycott. The white organizers of the exposition, on the other hand, clearly intended the day as a "joke,"29 as a way of relegating African Americans to what was their traditional place in the economy of racial spectacle. There were also fears in the African American community that the day "might just as easily deteriorate into a 'Jubilee Day,' during which the most objectionable features of black folk culture and expression in the eyes of the elite might be exposed to white view."30 While this did not happen, the satirical magazine, Puck, (which had a circulation close to 90,000 in this period)31 expressed the racial imaginary. African Americans were Sambos, an attitude captured in Frederick Burr Opper's drawing, "Darkies' Day at the Fair" (see figure 2). The anonymous writer of the accompanying poem, "Darkies' Day at the Fair: A Tale of Poetic Retribution," imagines an occasion like the Congress on Africa in which all the "Sons of Ham" assemble from through the world: "from far Soudan," the Congo, and "far-famed Zanzibar/Together with their Yankee friends/The Darkies all were dar!" These Africans and African Americans congregate: The plans were laid for a big parade Of great impressiveness With bands so grand, on every hand And gorgeousness in dress. No eye to right must show the white Each head must pose erect. With proud reserve each must preserve His dignity circumspect. However, a "Georgia coon, named Major Moon" resolves to disrupt the parade by buying 500 watermelons, and the predictable, within the American racial imagination, happens; they become performers in a racial spectacle: Tis a glorious sight, and all goes right The ranks are firm and bold 10 Matthew Wilson Figure 2: Frederick Burr Opper, "Darkies' Day at the Fair," from Puck (August 21, 1893). Until at a turn all eyes discern Those melons DRIPPING COLD. Teeth gleam white. With carver bright Forth stands the tempter there. He slits a melon and starts a-sellin'Tis more than flesh can bear. And so Puck relegates those Africans and African Americans to their "proper" places; they are incapable of even having a successful parade in their lust for "the luscious fruit." With one loud whoop, with one fell swoop They swarmed down on the stand; The sons of Ham in the foremost jam With big slice in each hand. And this is the end. For foe and friend Gave no thought to parade. As they gaily loot the luscious fruit And hie them to the shade.32 The Advent of 'The Nigger" 11 At the actual celebration where Frederick Douglass was scheduled to speak, the gap between the intentions of the organizers of Colored Peoples' Day and its reception among white people was further emphasized. As soon as Douglass began to read his talk, "neither his serious mien nor his topic—'The Race Problem in America'—promised amusement, and the young men in the gallery opened up with jeers and catcalls." Although Douglass was taken aback by this interruption, he was also angered enough to dispense with his prepared text and to speak extemporaneously for an hour. "Full, rich, and deep came the sonorous tones, compelling attention, drowning out the catcalls as an organ would a penny whistle. The pranksters in the gallery listened in spite of themselves [sic]"33 Douglass emphasized in his speech that there was no "Negro problem. . . . It is called Negro for a purpose. It has substituted Negro for Nation, because the one is despised and hated while the other is loved and honored. The true problem is a National problem."34 I want to underscore these moments as paradigms for the reception of African Americans in the public sphere in the late-nineteenth century: African Americans were almost completely unrepresented at the Exposition, and the man who was unarguably the most preeminent African American alive was jeered by white people simply because he wanted to speak, and because of what he represented—the unresolved question of the place of African Americans in the coming century. Clearly, the whites who jeered believed that African Americans had no business entering the public sphere (something Puck makes eminently clear). African Americans were either to be invisible or part of racist spectacle, and the history of the previous thirty odd years repressed. In contrast, Douglass explicitly connected the past to the present, connected antebellum to postbellum America in his analysis of the context of the Exposition in The Reasons Why The Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition: "So when it is asked why we are excluded from the World's Columbian Exposition, the answer is Slavery... . The people of the south are with few exceptions but slightly improved in their sentiments towards those they once held as slaves. The mass of them are the same to-day that they were in the time of slavery."35 What Douglass fails to say here is that the attitude of the South, in the 1890s, had become that of the whole nation, and that political and cultural climate presented an almost insuperable obstacle to the ambitions of African Americans. The racial scaffolding that characterized the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition was reproduced in subsequent expositions over the next decade, in Atlanta, Nashville, and Saint Louis among others. As Robert Rydell asserts, the "fair did not merely reflect American racial attitudes, it grounded them on ethnological bedrock."36 Although these subsequent fairs all shared the same set of assumptions about racial hierarchy, the status of African Americans became even more complicated because of two new developments. One was an African American initiative to establish separate Negro buildings while the other 12 Matthew Wilson was the establishment of a "'typical' antebellum scene . . . [c]alled the Old Plantation"37 which included "facsimile recreations of plantation life, complete with performances of black spirituals and folk dances."38 The Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895 was the first fair to include a separate Negro Building, which rose from African American initiatives. The building was designed and built by African Americans, and it included a symbolic program on its pediments: The one side of the pediment represents the slave mammie [sic] with the one-room log cabin, the log church, the rake and basket in 1865. On the other side is the face of Frederick Douglass, a true representative of the growth in intelligence in the colored man. Near him is the comfortable residence, the stone church and symbols of the race's progress in science, art, and literature, all representative of the new negro in 1895. The plow and well-fed mule is in the centre-for the colored man to-day plows his field, while thirty years ago he, with almost an exception, plowed for another.39 Although some African Americans objected to the logic of "separate but equal" encoded in a separate Negro Building, most felt that any effort at self-representation was better than their near invisibility at the Chicago fair. Clearly, the argument being made by the Negro Building was one of progress, the transformation of the freedmen into people who had begun to make valuable contributions to the American economy. Governor Atkinson of Georgia was fulsome in his praise of the Negro Building in his essay in The North American Review, he saw it as evidence for "advance from abjectness and barbarism to . . . a high state of progress in the arts and inventions... "40 However, he also used the Negro Building to argue for the racial status quo, writing that the building was evidence that Southerners were in the "process of solution" of the race problem in the South. So the building was used, along with Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise Speech, as a way to signify that African Americans were in their "proper" places and were socially, politically, and economically under control. Even though they had been given the visibility of an exposition space of their own, that space was used as a sign of the circumscription of their economic and political ambitions because "the displays in the Negro Building . . . were largely drawn from the black industrial schools."41 The Negro Building was read as a sign that African Americans could participate in America's industrial development, but only at the lowest levels; it was to be a sign of the tractability of the African American workforce in the South. In contrast to this effort at self-representation at the Atlanta Fair, there was a counter-representation, on the Midway, a recreation of a pre-war plantation which the Nashville Exposition of 1897 advertised in the following language: "'[y]oung bucks and thickliped [sic] African maidens as 'happy as a sunflower' The Advent of 'The Nigger" 13 dance the old-time breakdowns, joined in by 'all de niggahs' with weird and gutteral sounds to the accompaniment of 'de scraping of de fiddle' and 'de old bangjo.'"42 The Old Plantation was a nostalgic spectacle which detoxified the slave past and represented African Americans as being quite happy in slavery, a development parallel to the explosio... Purchase answer to see full attachment