Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

11. In the Anthropology Building

295 11. In the Anthropology Building Impressions are so tabulated and arranged as to afford a means of tracing with scientific accuracy the physical as well as the intellectual development of mankind. William J McGee, 1904 After viewing the Anthropology Villages and the Indian School some visitors braved yet more mud and walked north past the Physical Education stadium and the Administration Building to Cupples Hall to see static displays “of the curious or more conventional products of [Native] peoples’ hands and brains.” There were over fifty thousand densely packed objects according to the official catalogue.1 One of Skiff’s lpe themes was that the past is the guide to the future. Major pavilions and subsidiary exhibit halls (like anthropology) were to demonstrate that civilization was advancing in a known, purposeful direction in their exhibits. Hundreds of thousands of objects, variously displayed, made the point. Skiff argued that the past as evidenced in archaeological remains provided the opportunity to teach visitors how to interpret the progress Americans had made, especially in technology. McGee illustrated this theme in the Anthropology Building but used recycled Smithsonian exhibits, called the synthetic series, as his corporation exhibits; he argued they were useful only to illustrate anthropological principles dealing with time, technological change, and how culture had developed in the prehistoric past. To McGee it was the living groups who brought the past into the living present. McGee had originally wanted a holistic, seamless unity of message inside his Anthropology Building, one without categorical distinctions to “facilitate interpretation” and illustrate what he considered to be the most important generalization of the Science of Man: that “the various races and peoples advance along nearly parallel paths, so that the industries and ideas of living savages and barbarians represent fairly the industries and ideas prevailing among the prehistoric ancestors of more advanced peoples.”2 But the fair was not structured for intellectual authoritarianism and Skiff vetoed his fluidity and | In the Anthropology Building 296 the inclusion of a new category, the protohistoric. McGee had little control over most anthropology exhibits and the resulting rhetoric was confusing and contradictory, especially as it reflected on the role of Natives in the contemporary world—should they be celebrated for their heritage or denigrated as peoples who were to make way for civilization? This duality was especially reflected in evolutionary assumptions that it was imperative for Native people to progress toward civilization or perish. Traditional arts and lifeways were celebrated as “interesting, though primitive,” or as “old ways” being shed for “new ways.” If, however, Native people clung to the old ways, then traditionFig . 11.1a–b. Destiny of the Red Man by A. A. Weinman, front and side views. Photographs by D. W. C. Ward. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis. Front view: Ward negative 523; wf 1078; side view: Ward negative 519; wf 0939. In the Anthropology Building | 297 alism was denigrated as “holding them back” from the blessings of civilization . To nonanthropologists, Native peoples were making way for civilization around the world, and this assumption was reflected in the layout of the exposition grounds, where the glories of American and European technology and advancement centered on the Main Picture and the Native peoples and nature were pushed to the perimeter. This conception as it applied to the Louisiana Purchase Territory was also made symbolically clear by major statues sited on the plazas in the Main Picture . Sioux Chief was Cyrus Dallin’s “idealized chief . . . protesting against the advances of the Whites upon what he had considered his domain” (Bennitt 1905, 85, 171). The second was Adolph Weinman’s powerful Destiny of the Red Man, with its robed and hooded Indian skeleton of death pointing Indian Fig. 11.2. A Step toward Civilization by Solon Borglum. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Negative 71, no. 31041. In the Anthropology Building | 299 people and the buffalo toward extinction. This message was heightened by a vulture perched menacingly on a totem pole (fig. 11.1). In contrast was Solon Borglum’s A Step toward Civilization (fig. 11.2) with an Indian man clutching a book and pointing his son toward the “White man’s way.” On the ground were his stone tools, which he had cast away, and his wife, weeping for her son and her traditional lifeway. This duality was mirrored inside the Anthropology Building. The first floor contained celebratory archaeology and ethnology while...