Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

Prologue: Setting the Stage for St. Louis

1 prologue Setting the Stage for St. Louis The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (lpe) was held in St. Louis, Missouri, from May to December 1904, to commemorate the United States’ 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France for sixty million francs, or roughly three cents an acre, arguably the best land deal in American history. Popularly called the St. Louis World’s Fair, the exposition extended over 1,240 acres, the largest in area of any exposition up to that time, or since. The exposition pavilions alone enclosed 128 acres and were filled with wonders. The organizers wanted to be sure that their fellow Americans understood the historical importance of celebrating the Louisiana Purchase. The federal government, states, and historical societies sent precious iconic heirlooms and reproductions to document American history, patriotism, and nationalism : Daniel Webster’s rocking chair, Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood cabin, and President Teddy Roosevelt’s Western ranch house. New Jersey reconstructed a tavern Washington used during the American Revolution, and Mississippi replicated Jefferson Davis’s home, Beauvoir. The exposition also glorified America’s increasing control over the world’s natural resources and in particular how business acumen and ingenuity, coupled with scientific and technological know-how, were pushing the United States to the forefront of the industrialized nations. Visitors exclaimed in awe over the symbols of immense accumulated wealth. They gaped at the gigantic electric generators that illuminated buildings and the artificial lagoons. They saw hundreds of the newest technological advances including small electric motors to run factory machines, intended to eliminate the steam engines and belt systems of nineteenth-century factories. There was a Biograph movie showing the giant Westinghouse factory complex in Pittsburgh that covered fourteen hundred acres and employed eleven thousand workers. They saw the first successful “wireless telegraph” that would soon change world communications . Crowds flocked to see the fossil remains of a triceratops in the Gov- | Prologue 2 ernment Building, a recreation of a mining camp at the Nevada State pavilion, floral gardens, livestock shows, giant cheeses, and a twenty-foot-tall knight on horseback made of prunes from what is now Silicon Valley. Visitors listened to thousands of concerts, from the great John Phillips Sousa Band to operettas and the elegant ragtime music of composer Scott Joplin, then living in St. Louis. Everyone played, hummed, or sang the “official” fair song, “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis,” by Broadway songwriter Andrew Sterling. The exposition was designed to impress the world—and it did. Massive in scope, utopian in intent, the lpe made St. Louis the capital of the American Midwest and seemingly America’s most progressive city, at least for seven months. The exposition was a bold, ambitious undertaking for a medium-sized Midwestern city with a long history of corrupt and inefficient government, and it was expensive, costing over fifty million dollars. The leaders of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company (lpec) labeled it the “University of the Future” and an “exposition of processes,” not simply things. Under this broad umbrella they had seven major objectives: first, to promote the city of St. Louis and demonstrate its urbanity and economic clout, especially compared to hated Midwestern rival Chicago; second, to make money for stockholders and stimulate regional economic development; third, to demonstrate the superiority of middle-class American democracy, capitalism, and culture; fourth, to celebrate American industrial, commercial, and technological progress ; fifth, to directly or indirectly support U.S. foreign policies, especially the nation’s recent foray into international imperialism and colonization with the acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands; and sixth, to shape the future using education as a tool for directed, purposeful, progressive change. Finally the entire exposition was designed to celebrate the perceived inevitability of the March of Progress and the unqualified fitness of the white American “race” to lead that march. To do this they had to entice many, many visitors to come to the fair. There had be something to interest everyone. The lpe, according to its president , David Francis, would be an encyclopedic place providing a summary or compilation of all existing knowledge at the turn of the twentieth century. Colorado College president, William F. Slocum, wrote in Harper’s Weekly that it would give visitors “new standards, new means of comparison, new insights into the condition of life in the world” and help them discover a sense of Prologue | 3 purpose in America...