Commentary on the Discussion Paper of Marilyn Fischer, “Addams on Cultural Pluralism, European Immigrants, and African Americans”

with her usual concern with accuracy and clarity, Marilyn Fischer’s explanations are exemplary models of the value of historical scholarship. Concern with context in its many forms is integral to pragmatist philosophy, but the range and depth of Fischer’s research make her papers especially valuable. She helps us understand the extent to which the horizon of understanding is bounded by the particularities of time and place. Careful elucidation of less familiar concrete horizons can give us a better understanding of unfamiliar beliefs and values and illuminate our own pre-suppositions.

Such concreteness cuts two ways. It can re-invigorate current debates by challenging our assumptions of what particular texts mean based on what we assume they meant at a particular time or place. Such contextual contingencies are at the same time boundaries that contain and constrain. They focus interpretation on the state of knowledge and cultural assumptions that have since been discarded or bypassed or that have been newly acquired rather than keep in play shifts in perspective from past to present or from the familiar to the unfamiliar. In both cases, re-evaluation is required, and its viability and worth for us depend on the hermeneutical or interpretive rules used (see Seigfried, “Role of Place”).

Fischer’s paper is especially good at clarifying the confounding of ethnicity and race in the culture at large during the first decades of Hull House. Ethnicity was not only racialized, but also hierarchized according to Lamarkian assumptions of progress. The supposedly “superior” Anglo-Saxon “race” was at the top, and the so-called “inferior” Southern European and Eastern European peasants and African Americans were at the bottom. Given that Addams’s experience and theorizing focused on European immigrants, their linkage with African Americans in the public and, indeed, the academic mind, provides hints for applying theories and practices primarily concerned with one group to a less theorized but not neglected comparable group.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—William Faulkner

The need for such hermeneutical astuteness is amply demonstrated by the Field Museum of Chicago’s Web page for their exhibition “Opening the Vaults: Wonders of the 1893 World’s Fair” (displayed 25 Oct. 2013 through 7 Sept. 2014). It invites us to travel back in time to experience the excitement of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition. The exhibit is particularly significant because it showcases, for the first time in over 120 years, the natural science and anthropology collections displayed at the fair. The Columbian Museum of Chicago (1893) was subsequently created to house many of these collections. This became the Field Museum of Natural History in 1905. The “Opening the Vaults” exhibit would seem to provide the perfect opportunity for the Field Museum to reflect on its origins as it re-exhibits the displays and narratives of racial progress from “inferior” to “superior” races. But this opportunity is ignored. Neither in its explanation of the history of the museum nor in its pedagogical guides to the current exhibit does it help the public to reflect on the kinds of questions and analyses Fischer raises.

As I toured the exhibit, the larger narrative was strikingly absent. Some of the display cards alluded to the more blatantly racist original exhibits, which were not displayed, and some attempts were made to showcase the accomplishments of indigenous peoples in the artifacts shown, which were collected from around the world. However, no explanation or thought was given to the way they were originally displayed. The exception to the lack of context comparing past beliefs to present ones was the recognition of the overwhelmingly commercial nature of the original 1893 exhibits, which is still obvious in their current re-creations, and the explicit distancing of the museum’s present scientific mission from such commercialism. But even this seemed to concern style rather than substance.

Contrast this failure to provide a framing narrative with the pinpoint accuracy of Fischer’s description of the state of social evolutionary theory during the first decade of the twentieth century, which provides the...