St Louis World’s Fair: the Good, the Bad, & the Ugly by Steve Wiegenstein

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The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition of 1904, better known as the St .Louis World’s Fair, is remembered for many things. Today, most of us think of the St. Louis World’s Fair as the setting of Meet Me in St. Louis, the delightful 1944 movie that starred Judy Garland. Or we have a vague recollection of the fair as the place where modern innovations made their debut, such as wireless telegraphy (largely true), the X-ray machine (also largely true), and the ice cream cone (mostly false, although it was a popular novelty item).

            But the fair was a far more complex event than these simple images suggest, and it had a dark side. As I researched the fair for Land of Joys, I realized that it was a revealing snapshot into the American mind of the turn of the century in all its optimism, energy, and innovation – and also in its racism, inequality, and vulgarity.

More than anything else, the fair was designed to be a spectacle. Exhibit buildings were constructed on an insanely grand scale despite the brief time of their intended use. To save on construction costs, most were built from a material called “staff,” a mixture of plaster of Paris and a binding agent such as straw or jute, which gave the appearance of stone. Of the twelve “palaces” that made up the core of the fair, ranging from 4.1 to 18.4 acres in size, only one – the Palace of Fine Arts – was built to be lasting. The rest were only intended to last out the year.

One motivation for the extravagance of the fair was a desire to refurbish the reputation of St. Louis, which had suffered over the previous decade. A violent and divisive transit workers’ strike and a series of high-level public corruption prosecutions had damaged the city’s image. But more significantly, the rise of Chicago on the national scene threatened St. Louis’ place as the dominant city of the west. By the turn of the century, St. Louis had fallen behind Chicago in population, economic power, and political influence. And when Chicago was selected over St. Louis as the site for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, St. Louis civic leaders began searching for an opportunity to mount a fair that would outstrip Chicago in every way. The inconvenient fact that the Fair Board was dominated by the same small circle of wealthy businessmen (nicknamed locally “The Big Cinch”) who had recently been tarred in the corruption scandal was pushed aside.

            The St. Louis organizers were determined that their fair would be larger than Chicago’s, more focused on scientific and technological achievement, more educational, and more wholesome. They managed to snatch the first North American Olympics away from Chicago as well to accompany the event and planned other ancillary events, such as an auto rally, to add to the festivities. The entertainment area of the fair, known as the Pike, was intended to be just as exciting as Chicago’s Midway, but less seamy.

            Intended to be held in 1903, the hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, the fair suffered from funding delays in Congress and was instead held over to 1904. The delay gave organizers time to amass additional displays and exhibits. A particular focus of the exhibition was to be the developing science of anthropology – the scientific study of human beings.

            Nowadays, we cringe at some of the activities that took place under the name of anthropology. Most early anthropologists were unable to free themselves of the ethnocentrism that permeated American society, giving rise to anthropological claims that were based on faulty assumptions and expressed in biased language. Ethnic groups were routinely ranked from “primitive” to “advanced,” with white Americans of “Anglo-Saxon” or “Nordic” descent conveniently landing at the top of the heap. The St. Louis fair embraced these practices, and under the leadership of WJ McGee, [note: McGee did not use periods with his initial letters] formerly employed in the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, the fair directors embarked on an ambitious plan to make anthropology one of the central elements of the fair’s educational mission.

            Showcasing anthropology took two forms. One was the construction of a separate Anthropology Building, where artifacts would be displayed and demonstrations of native crafts and customs would take place. The other, far more attention-getting, was the display of human beings in individual and group settings for the edification of fairgoers.

            The “human zoo” concept did not originate with the St. Louis fair. Such exhibitions, with varying degrees of scientific pretext, had been popular at fairs since the 1870s, having evolved from circus and carnival freak shows into quasi-educational displays. But the sheer scale of the St. Louis made it memorable. Native people from across the globe were displayed: Native Americans from Mexico, the United States, and the District of Alaska; Ainu from northern Japan; Tehuelches from Patagonia; several ethnic representatives from Africa, including the famous Mbuti (pygmy) Ota Benga. But the most prominent display was the Philippine Reservation, which occupied 47 acres in the southwest corner of the park. The Philippine exhibit was the fair’s most-visited attraction.

Within the Philippine Reservation, ethnic groups were sorted in model villages, with each group displaying the crafts and activities of its daily life. The groups were described and presented within a Social Darwinist framework of “advanced” and “primitive,” with the more Westernized groups portrayed as advanced. The most popular site with visitors was the model village of the Bontoc Igorot, from a mountainous region of Luzon, whose scanty dress and unorthodox eating habits attracted a great deal of attention from visitors and the press. The tropical Bontoc customarily wore little or no clothing, which scandalized the orthodox and titillated the rest. And their ceremonial “dog feast,” which in their native land was an extremely rare celebration, became commodified into a daily ritual performed for the entertainment and horror of onlookers. The name of today’s neighborhood of St. Louis known as “Dogtown,” just south of the city’s Forest Park, is a relic of that long-ago controversy.

            The Louisiana Purchase Exhibition was a must-see event of 1904. It was a magnificent spectacle that almost every visitor admired for its grandeur and beauty. It was also a celebration of America’s entry into the small club of imperial powers, and an unapologetic endorsement of the idea of white supremacy. It was all those things and more, and we owe it to ourselves to remember them all.

Sources:

Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition (University of Nebraska Press, 2007).

James Gilbert, Whose Fair? Experience, Memory, and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764-1980 (Missouri Historical Society Press, 1981).

Steve Wiegenstein is the author of five books, most recently Land of Joys, a historical novel that takes place at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair and in the fictional Ozarks village of Daybreak. His short story collection Scattered Lights was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. He has written three earlier historical novels, also set in Daybreak: The Language of Trees, This Old World, and Slant of Light. Steve grew up in the Missouri Ozarks and worked there as a newspaper reporter before entering the field of higher education. He taught journalism, English, and communication for a number of colleges and universities during his career, but is now retired from teaching and writes full-time. An avid hiker and canoer, he returns to his home region every chance he gets; he also writes and blogs about rural and Ozarks issues at stevewiegenstein.wordpress.com. The son of a rural librarian, he received the Missouri Author Award from the Missouri Library Association in 2022.  

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