Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition

"The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read this continental page from west to east we find the record of social evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of civilization."

—"The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Frederick Jackson Turner

"It is not a circus, nor indeed is it acting at all, in a theatrical sense, but an exact reproduction of daily scenes in frontier life as experienced and enacted by the very people who now form the 'Wild West' Company."

—Illustrated London News, 16 April 1887

"All was simulacrum: the buildings, the statues, and the bridges were not of enduring stone but lath and plaster."

—Claude Bragdon 1893 ¹

Scholars have not been slow to notice the collisions and contradictions presented by and represented in the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Alan Trachtenberg depicts it as the culminating spectacle of The Incorporation of America in the nineteenth century. Richard Slotkin examines the Fair as the high point in the performance history of "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" and traces the show's role in the creation of the Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Richard White explores the connection between "Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill" and representations of The Frontier in American Culture that offered images of peaceful or of violent conquest (Turner presented his "frontier thesis" at the American Historical Association convention during the Fair and William F. Cody's "Buffalo Bill's Wild West" performed next to the fairgrounds). Historians of the Fair itself and of organizations contributing to it (such as the Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of Indian Affairs) have produced a rich literature often critiquing the Fair's racist and sexist organization and displays, while historians of Buffalo Bill and wild west shows examine the man, the productions, their performers, their publicity, and their impact upon U.S., indeed international, culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A substantial scholarship has also taken up Frederick Jackson Turner and the impact of his view of American history. Many studies written recently about these subjects reflect a revised view of United States history, and specifically of "the frontier," indebted to scholarly research exposing much that is deplorable about the policies and behavior of the U.S. government and white Americans toward Amerindians. ²

What more needs to be said? What more can be said about these large and complex subjects, particularly in the foreshortened format of an article? Two issues seem to rise from the extensive (and increasing) scholarly literature about the Columbian Exposition, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, and Buffalo Bill's Wild West that can, at least, be located, if hardly excavated, here. First, there is the legacy of binary thinking about history to which the late Michel Foucault alerted us. It is the legacy of seeking to drive out commanding narratives, "to pacify them by force," in order to replace them with our own. Rather, Foucault argues, the task is to map propositions "in a particular discursive practice, the point at which they are constituted, to define the form that they assume, the relations that they have with each other, and the domain that they govern." The injustices of history and of historical writing simultaneously do the work of the appeal of commanding narratives and of their undoing. Second, the binary view is particularly obstructive for what I have elsewhere called theatre culture, that is, the interconnection between performance and culture and culture and performance. Representation is not a single but a multiple and simultaneous relationship—performer to audience to role to culture to venue to cast to means of production to image, and so on—which defies the analysis it is so frequently given in cultural histories as an ahistorical problem or 'reality.' ^3...