Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West and California at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition by Abigail M. Markwyn (review)

The 1915 Panama-Pacific International Expedition (PPIE) was very much a creature of its time. The same can be said for Abigail Markwyn’s account of the fair. Celebrating completion of the Panama Canal and its consequent boon for the West Coast, exposition organizers championed muscular imperialism, Anglo and male dominance, technological achievement, and a dynamic city’s remarkable ability to recover from the devastation of earthquake and fire. These themes now typify our understanding of the early twentieth century’s dominant moods.

Markwyn’s book, however, challenges that single dimension “narrative” and convincingly argues that San Francisco’s elite businessmen, who created the exposition, could not solely control its meaning. Rather, numerous interests, nations, races, and ethnicities, plus women, contested the PPIE’s official message and asserted their own views upon the exposition. The fair became a contested space where various groups jockeyed for social, political, and explanatory power. Rather than an escape from Progressive era politics—a place simply to have fun—it became in Markwyn’s rendering yet another landscape where Americans fought over meaning. Her emphasis on power, particularly regarding issues of race, class and gender, typifies today’s social history. It is a valuable and viable approach. But if one wants to know more about the actual experience of attending the exposition, what it meant to most people who attended, or any one of a number of alternative ways of looking at the event, one must look elsewhere.

To be sure, much of the fairground’s art and architecture trumpeted American expansion across the continent, the technological wonder of the Panama Canal, and the nation’s presumed destiny to dominate the Pacific in the future as primarily masculine and white accomplishments. Markwyn has the good sense to probe beyond the outward appearances, however. She quickly uncovers the “others” who insisted on having a voice, as well. Most notably were white women who, among other things, created a Woman’s Board, since the official board was completely male. They did not particularly push for women’s rights, but they insisted on a prominently displayed pioneer mother statue—a nod to white women’s roles in American expansion. Hawaiian women, daughters of white and nonwhite parents, donned shirtwaists and visibly challenged the supposed divide between the civilized and the primitive. The Congressional Union for Women established a booth, produced pageants and parades, and proselytized for a federal woman suffrage amendment. Over the course of the fair’s first seven months, they acquired 500,000 signatures on a petition demanding such an amendment and organized the very first national convention of women voters. Ten thousand men and women attended the convention pageant on the Court of the Universe grounds.

African Americans asserted their position as equal citizens of the Bay Area by creating floats and participating in the Alameda County Day parade while refusing to sanction a racist and segregationist Negro Day. Local Catholics, Chinese, and Irish—objects of discrimination in everyday life—visited, worked and performed at the fair on their own terms as well. Latin American nations used the exposition to define themselves and to pursue their own economic interests, particularly hoping to attract investment capital to their shores. Of course, it is difficult to assess how successful any of these groups or interests were in shaping others’ perceptions of them. The larger point, however, is that they tried.

Markwyn’s evidence is compelling, the research impressive, and the writing clear. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, one-hundred years later, that anything intending to speak for all of San Francisco would be contested. This close study of a fleeting but significant event underscores the diversity, vitality, and complexity of not only a city on the cusp of the continent and the century, but also the foundation upon which it, and the nation itself, continues to wrestle with fundamental questions...