(music playing)
When we think about the White City,
which is what I began this lecture with,
and think of it as a symbol that Colombian World Exposition from
1893. I think the functioning it does is a symbol is a reminder of how race and
violence
and the rationalizations that play a role in this
imperialistic ideal how they're all bound up with the United States
not just abroad but here at home. As I said earlier at the center of the White
City there existed
this symbol this monument to technology and to progress and it was white
it was plastered white. There you found the
the pavilions for technology, the pavilions for
are, the pavilions for anything that
modern contemporary I should say American Culture valued largely that
sort of middle-class
progressive sensibility. Women
had their own pavilion there but summer the leaders of the women's suffrage
movement couldn't speak,
couldn't be officers people like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Instead what was represented was the ideal of modern womanhood,
purity, domesticity,
life in the home. Spreading out from this
central sort of western aesthetic with Greek architecture and all spreading out
from this central core the, Court of Honor,
and sort of concentric rings you have
the ethnographic exotics.
And what I mean by that
you have not so much the arts, as you have
trades, not so much technology in progress in all things new, but
the older skills of society
when it comes to production. You have
as well people from all around the world
from Africa from Asia, living in
rebuilt villages. And they
(they) stay in these rebuilt villages and visitors to the fair can then go
look at them almost as if these people were exhibits in a zoo.
And they can look upon them as different in other in their native dress or
state of undress by 19th Century middle class standards.
And like anthropologist or ethnographers,
these visitors to the fair can study the other
in their natural habitat. Now
you may say we're pulling too much from this it's sort of a form of
cultural history and you're pulling a little too much out of this symbolically,
maybe so I grant it's
a read text but consider for a moment
(that consider for a moment) where
African Americans place in the Court of Honor was
it wasn't. Native Americans
should they be there at all were part of Wild West shows, they were part of the
exhibits of ethnographic interest,
but they were no way associated with progress and expansion in
industry, science, no less a figure than Frederick Douglass could not get into
the fair.
And forget for a moment that
just outside the Chicago World's Fair, just outside the Columbian Exposition, in
1893,
fenced off so they weren't easily visible to visitors
where the workers who it build it, who'd built the Court of Honor,
the workers a Chicago were not far away.
The Pullman plants, in Pullman, where the strike that I talked to you about earlier
was
it was getting ready to begin and the affects of the Depression of 1893 were
being felt.
If we think about this Columbian Exposition a symbol
and I guess what it tells us is that
the "Age of American Imperialism," really beginning
in the 1890s, is bound up, is part, and parcel
of what the United States was
not just abroad, but here at home in the 1890s,
and into the early 20th century.
I think it's something worth considering.