Blushing at the Fair: Indigenous Workers, Academics, and Competing Modernities in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition

Abstract

Blushing at the Fair: Indigenous Workers, Academics, and Competing Modernities in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition Douglas K. Miller (bio) David R. M. Beck, Unfair Labor?: American Indians and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. xxviii + 299 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00. Talking to a reporter at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, James Deans, a collector and agent for the Pacific Northwest Kwakwaka’wakw people, claimed, “A more honest people never lived, and their love of home and family would put many a civilized nation to a blush” (p. 13). As a stakeholder in Kwakwaka’wakw success at the fair, Deans might have been trying to rhetorically pit his favored “civilized” people against a “treacherous” people, as he characterized Sioux people, also in attendance. It could also be that he sought some credit for the romanticized attributes of the Indigenous people with whom he collaborated, or some sort of esteem through association. But then, twenty years after the Panic of 1873, thirty years after the Battle of Gettysburg, ninety years after the Louisiana Purchase, 110 years after the Treaty of Paris, 120 years after the Boston Tea Party, and 401 years after Columbus “sailed the ocean blue . . . ” (fair organizers missed their target date of 1892), here stood in Chicago Indigenous workers and tourists from the far side of the continent, exhibiting the virtues that perpetually eluded settler newcomers through all of those formative experiences. Maybe Deans was not boasting or bluffing. Maybe he was blushing. Harvard anthropologist Frederic Ward Putnam was certainly cynical about the implications that colonization (he used the euphemism “contact”) held for Indigenous peoples. “It’s the real old Native things that I am after,” he instructed a fair exhibit collector. “That which relates to the life and customs of the Indians before their art was ruined by contact with the whites” (p. 70). On one hand, Putnam confessed the corrupting power of colonization. At the same time, he implied that Native people could only produce reputable art in a state of isolated purity, and that Native art could not withstand, let alone reflect, history and change over time. Somehow in the context of a global [End Page 283] cosmopolitan event, he failed to understand that global cosmopolitanism was relative, but not unique to Western European people. Or the irony that individuals like him who fetishized notions of purity did as much to harm the value and potential for Native American art as did its subjection to cash economies. Putnam was probably not blushing. The Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition portrayed an America ascendant, but purportedly founded on traditions dating back to the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. Fair organizers arranged living exhibits of supposedly dying cultures—Arabs, Africans, Aztecs—in a fashion that rendered them support acts for the more magnificent main attractions, including Juicy Fruit gum, a 264-feet Ferris Wheel, and the Canadian Mammoth—an eleven-ton block of cheese that earned a diploma at the fair. Bear with me as I ask the obligatory following question: Were these the hallmarks of civilization? From the fair’s glaring “White City” buildings coated in cheap Acme cement plaster, to Inuit actors being forced to wear sealskin clothes that they had never worn before, to Nikola Tesla’s magic dynamo in the Electricity Hall, to the Lakota actor Short Bull posing as a Potawatomi person for a Carl Rohl-Smith sculpture because he supposedly looked more “Indian,” was it all an illusion? Not entirely. The significant number of Indigenous peoples present at the fair challenged illusory celebrations of humanity, civilization, and progress. But the power was real. How and why Native peoples attempted to harness and conduct currents of power, like those exhibited in the fair’s Electricity Hall, is the central story in David Beck’s splendid and important new book Unfair Labor? In the context of the Second Industrial Revolution, with a selective and exaggerated past on display for millions of people to consider and an uncertain future on the horizon, fairgoers above all confronted modernity, or at least some version of it defined by cash, consumerism, and colonialism. This...