Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

2. WJ McGee and the Science of Man

35 2. WJ McGee and the Science of Man William John McGee (fig. 2.1), a practitioner of the new science of anthropology , was also a government bureaucrat, geologist, inventor, agriculturalist, conservationist, policy maker, promoter, and science advocate. He had published more than three hundred articles in several fields by 1903. He liked to do things differently than anyone else. He was known as “no period McGee” because he used “WJ McGee,” without the periods following each initial. His over-weaning ambition, desire for personal visibility, and need to popularize and legitimize anthropology as the highest form of enlightened science, has had a lasting effect on how the public viewed Native peoples for years following the lpe and after anthropology had changed its theoretical paradigm. WJ McGee: Self-Trained Geologist McGee (1853–1912) was a self-defined Horatio Alger character. His father, James McGee, was an uneducated man of Irish ancestry who worked as a lead miner, and his mother, Martha Anderson, was a teacher from Kentucky. Born in Farley, Iowa, McGee grew up on a small farm, the fourth of nine children . He cultivated a self-made-man image, emphasizing how he overcame adversity and illness in his youth. While his two oldest brothers were able to attend college, he apparently had only five to seven years of irregular rural schooling and tutoring by his mother and oldest brother. McGee liked to claim that he taught himself German, French, Latin, higher mathematics, law, and astronomy, despite limited access to public libraries. He had a remarkable memory and a facility to grasp new knowledge; according to his wife, he read the unabridged Webster’s dictionary several times.1 McGee learned the rudiments of land surveying from a maternal uncle, worked briefly in a justice court, and dabbled in blacksmithing. In 1874 he invented, patented, and manufactured a number of agricultural implements, building machines in the winter and traveling on foot to sell them during the summer. He recorded archaeological sites and studied local geology as he went, climbing down wells to look for stratigraphic sections. | WJ McGee and the Science of Man 36 Starting in 1875, McGee spent four years making a geologic and topographic survey in northeastern Iowa. He covered some seventeen thousand square miles, the most extensive area ever surveyed without federal aid. His first published work on glacial geology “was audacious, characterized by a slim foundation of careful, even brilliant observation and a large superstructure of theory. He moved easily from present formations to imaginative reconstruction of earlier processes and structures.”2 These same features were evidenced in McGee’s anthropology and were reflected in his activities at the 1904 Exposition. McGee met John Wesley Powell at the 1878 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting where he presented his first scientific paper. Powell quickly became the most important individual in McGee’s professional life and their careers intertwined. Powell secured a position for him with the Tenth Census (1880) to gather economic geological data and then a position in Fig. 2.1. William J. McGee, 1900, Chair of lpe Department of Anthropology. Photograph by DeLancey Gill. Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, negative no. 02861200. WJ McGee and the Science of Man | 37 the U.S. Geological Survey in 1883. He gained a reputation for hard work and administrative acumen and became an advisor to Powell on policy development .3 By the late 1880s McGee was successful, influential, and self-confident, identified as Powell’s protégé. He published scientific treatises on structural and historical geology and water resources, and wrote numerous popular articles on geology, resource conservation, and archaeology in the popular journals . He developed influential political and intellectual contacts, including Lester F. Ward, the founder of American sociology and a proponent of Social Darwinism and unilinear evolution. In 1888 McGee married Anita Newcomb (1864–1940), the daughter of Simon Newcomb, America’s foremost astronomer and a force in Washington’s intellectual and social communities, and the wealthy Mary Hassler. The Newcombs saw McGee as an uneducated, unsophisticated bumpkin, lacking the appropriate social ancestry or wealth to fit into elite Washington society. But Anita was strong-willed and saw in McGee a self-made intellectual who had overcome poverty and would achieve notoriety. According to one biographer, she followed “her father’s dictum that one decided first that a certain person is...