Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place

10: The Returning Hosts

10 / The Returning Hosts T he seattle spirit, the story of a city’s birth in pioneer stalwartness, could take its adherents in strange new directions. On the centennial of the landing at Alki, it could lead them into the Cold War. The Founders Day celebrations of 1951 were like those in the past, full of pomp and pageantry. Some celebrants attended performances of “The Landing of the Calico Pioneers” followed by baton twirling and a “God Bless America” sing-along at the Alki Field House, while more studious participants visited City Hall to view the city’s original charter and various other “musty old files.” And like other Founders Days, the centerpiece of the centennial was a reenactment of the Denny Party’s landing, where junior high school boys in badly dyed wigs played Indian, awaiting the arrival of grown-ups playing pioneer . As the founders strode ashore, Mayor William Devin smashed a bottle containing the commingled waters of Seattle’s lakes and rivers against the Alki Monument, the Hiawatha Sparklers did an “Indian dance,” and serial salute bombs closed the program.1 The reenactment of the landing at Alki was the heart of the centennial program, but its headliner was General Douglas MacArthur. Thousands of Seattleites went to the University of Washington the next day to hear him extol the lessons of Alki Point. He told his audience that Seattle had been the “full beneficiary of what the pioneering spirit has wrought upon this continent” but warned that said spirit was still very much needed. “Should the pioneering spirit cease to dominate the American character,” MacArthur continued, “our national progress would end. For a nation’s life is never static. It must advance or it will recede.” Invoking long-standing anxieties about the loss of the frontier, the man who so famously strode ashore in the Philippines proposed an agenda for 1 8 4 the nation: “To the early pioneer the Pacific Coast marked the end of his courageous westerly advance—to us it should mark but the beginning. To him it delimited our western frontier—to us that frontier has been moved beyond the Pacific horizon.” Broadcast on national television— one of Seattle’s first appearances in the medium—MacArthur’s speech linked the Seattle Spirit to the nation’s interests in the Pacific. The story of Seattle’s birth in a wilderness with its own “red menace” could now resonate for a new generation, and the Seattle Spirit, always linked to the nation’s own place-story, helped lead the nation, for better or mostly for worse, into new places around the world.2 For all its historical rhetoric, MacArthur’s speech had little to do with the past and much more to do with the future. It was much like another centennial event: the burying of a time capsule on Alki Beach. The capsule ’s contents were not listed in the Post-Intelligencer story announcing its burial, but the author’s vision of the future was richly detailed. Seattleites might, for example, “shoot over” to Alki Point in their “personal atomic cruisers” to watch the opening of the time capsule on 13 November 2051. “We’ll probably be wearing a spun air afternoon dress with radium buttons,” imagined journalist Dorothy Hart, “and nary a qualm about the weather! Before the days of atmospheric control, we understand, Seattle women carried umbrellas!” Here was Seattle’s space age future, full of technocratic optimism and personal affluence despite threats abroad. Here was a Seattle that had escaped its past (not to mention its ecology).3 Although surely tongue in cheek, Hart’s vision of twenty-first-century Seattle reflected its time, that period in the 1950s when consensus politics , consumer confidence, and scientific progress augured a bright future for Americans. In the years to come, however, history would intervene . The consensus would crack as social unrest transformed public discourses on race, inspired in part by the unjust ways in which postwar affluence had been distributed. The American Indian Women’s Service League and United Indians of All Tribes made that point beautifully . Meanwhile, Hart’s atomic cruisers and radium dress buttons would come to seem like naïve paeans to a nuclear industry that, only a few short decades after its inception, was seen by many to be an ecoT H E R E T U R N I N G H O S T S / 1 8 5...