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Spectacular Work: Labor as Entertainment at the World's Columbian Exposition Fairgrounds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2021
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Night is falling in the city. Holiday shoppers bustle down the sidewalk, some pausing to gaze at a colorful billboard publicizing the delights of an upcoming exposition. A few crafty rats scamper along a tall wooden fence, stalked by a sinister ratcatcher of the Dickensian mold. Children frolic, fight, and tease one another in front of the fence, the familiar syncopated strains of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker overture underscoring their exuberant street play. This is not, however, the early 1800s Germany of the upper-class Stahlbaum family. It's 1892 Chicago. In the Joffrey Ballet's 2016 production of The Nutcracker, the story of Clara Stahlbaum's innocent Christmas Eve dalliances with an anthropomorphic nutcracker and their journey to the Land of Sweets becomes the story of Marie, the daughter of a Polish immigrant single mother, whose fantasyland is the future Chicago World's Fair. Marie's mother, we learn, is a hired artist working on the fair's sculptures. Marie, Fritz, and their mother inhabit a wooden shack in the heart of the construction site, surrounded by the skeletal structures that will become the White City's buildings. Drosselmeyer is now “The Great Impresario,” a character of vision and magnetism inspired by the fair's Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham, and Marie's working-class mother transforms in the second act into the embodiment of the fair's golden Statue of the Republic, a less saccharine substitute for the Sugar Plum Fairy. The mutual affection of Mother and The Great Impresario spans both acts, and though the ballet leaves unclear the outcome of their budding romance, in it young Marie sees the promise of her American dream: a contented nuclear family.
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References
Endnotes
1 Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1918), 343CrossRefGoogle Scholar; quoted in Julie K. Rose, “Reactions to the Fair,” http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA96/WCE/reactions.html, accessed 5 June 2019.
2 Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence,” from The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961), in On Violence: A Reader, ed. Bruce B. Lawrence and Aisha Karim (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 79–100, at 83.
3 Descriptions of the new Nutcracker's development process and performances are based on the WTTW/PBS documentary Making a New American Nutcracker, first aired on 16 November 2017.
4 Chris Jones, “Joffrey's Chicago-Set Nutcracker Has Become Truly Alive,” Chicago Tribune, 3 December 2017, www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/theater/reviews/ct-ent-nutcracker-joffrey-review-1204-story.html, accessed 11 October 2019.
5 LaPier, Rosalyn R. and Beck, David R. M., City Indian: Native American Activism in Chicago, 1893–1934 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, David R. M., Unfair Labor? American Indians and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Silkenat, David, “Workers in the White City: Working Class Culture at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 104.4 (2011): 266–300Google Scholar.
6 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995; Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 128Google Scholar.
7 An increasing number of scholars of color challenge the ubiquitous use of the term “body,” as in “Black body” and “Native body,” within contemporary discourses. In a 2018 ASTR Forum roundtable, Alesha Claveria urged settler scholars to avoid separating the indivisible Native person into a divisible body, mind, and spirit. In this article, I use the term “bodies at work” with caution and economy, so as to make explicit the processes by which the Chicago World's Fair profited from its workers’ bodily labors.
8 Bank, Rosemarie K., “Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition,” Theatre Journal 54.4 (2002): 589–606CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dabakis, Melissa, Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880–1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Reed, Christopher Robert, All the World Is Here!: The Black Presence at White City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Rinehart, Melissa, “To Hell with the Wigs! Native American Representation and Resistance at the World's Columbian Exposition,” American Indian Quarterly 36.4 (2012): 403–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Bank revisited her work on the fair at 2020's Mid-America Theatre Conference, where she described the heterochronic variances in its Native performances.
10 Silkenat, 268 and 296 n. 4. An estimated eighteen to thirty workers died building the fair; sixteen people, many of them firefighters, later perished in a fire in the cold storage unit. Following the fire, charges of criminal negligence were filed against Burnham and three others.
11 Ibid., 276–8.
12 For a medical assessment of the fair's sanitation and sewage procedures, see Bronwyn Rae, “Water, Typhoid Rates, and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago,” Northwestern Public Health Review 3.1 (2014): 22–32, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.northwestern.edu/dist/6/2724/files/2019/01/nphr-winter-2015-219exyu.pdf, accessed 8 June 2019.
13 Quoted in Rebecca S. Graff, “Dream City, Plaster City: Worlds’ Fairs and the Gilding of American Material Culture,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16.4 (2012): 696–716, at 700.
14 Quoted in Nathan, Marvin, “Visiting the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in July 1893: A Personal View,” Journal of American Culture 19.2 (1996): 79–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 82 and 81.
15 See the World's Columbian Exposition's Dedicatory and Opening Ceremonies of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago: World's Columbian Exposition, 1893); Rand McNally's A Week at the Fair (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1893); and Julian Ralph's Harper's Chicago and the World's Fair (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893). These and many others have been digitized by archive.org.
16 According to Robert Bogdan, visitors were not always convinced of the performers’ authenticity, with a number of guests suspecting that the “exotic” dancers and musicians were costumed Chicagoans. See Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 50.
17 Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 40.
18 Fanon, 80–1.
19 Bank, Rosemarie K., “Labor, Theatre, and the Dream of the White City,” in Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor, ed. Osborne, Elizabeth A. and Woodworth, Christine (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 170–80Google Scholar, at 172, 171, and 170.
20 According to Burnham and Francis Davis Millett, “Jackson Park inclosed [sic] an area of 620.85 acres, and the Midway Plaisance an area of 66.50 acres” (15). Daniel Hudson Burnham and Francis Davis Millet, The Book of the Builders (Chicago and Springfield, OH: Columbian Memorial Publication Society, 1894).
21 Silkenat, 267.
22 Rand, McNally & Co.'s A Week at the Fair; Illustrating the Exhibits and Wonders of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1893), 35.
23 Mrs. Mark Stevens, A Lecture on What You Missed in Not Visiting the World's Fair (n.p.: 1895), 12.
24 Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 119. Larson's bestselling popular history intertwines Burnham's planning of the fair with the gruesome preparations of serial killer H. H. Holmes.
25 Burnham and Millet, 35.
26 While ascertaining the exact starting date of Burnham's admission fee has proven difficult, a March 1892 notice in a West Virginian newspaper promised readers the fairgrounds were open to anyone with a quarter. “World's Fairs,” Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, 7 March 1892.
27 Mrs. Mark Stevens, Six Months at the World's Fair (Detroit: Detroit Free Press Printing Company, 1895), 12.
28 Bernstein, Robin, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the Performance of Race,” Social Text 27.4 (2009): 67–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Department of Publicity and Promotion, Official Guide to the Grounds and Buildings of the World's Columbian Exposition during Construction (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Co., 1892).
30 Henry M. Hunt, “The Latchstring Outside,” Portland Daily Press, 4 January 1893.
31 For image collections capturing the fair and its construction, see Peter Bacon Hales, Constructing the Fair: Platinum Photographs by C. D. Arnold of the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1993); Russell Lewis, Historic Photos of the Chicago World's Fair (Nashville, TN: Turner Publishing, 2010); and The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record, with text by Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover, 1980).
32 Cooks, Bridget R., “Fixing Race: Visual Representations of African Americans at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893,” Patterns of Prejudice 41.5 (2007): 435–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 461.
33 Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing, The World's Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 18. Mrs. Mark Stevens wrote of the workers constructing the Ferris Wheel, “They were professional bridge workers and trained acrobats in the fullest sense”; Six Months at the World's Fair, 104.
34 The Official Directory of the World's Columbian Exposition, May 1st to October 30th, 1893, ed. Moses P. Handy (Chicago: W. B. Conkey Co., 1893), 68.
35 Ibid., 68–9.
36 Hunt, Portland Daily Press, 4 January 1893.
37 Ralph, 134.
38 Quoted in James P. Boyd, Columbia from Discovery in 1492 to the World's Columbian Exposition (Philadelphia and St. Louis: P. W. Ziegler, 1893), 760.
39 Hales, 7.
40 Quoted in Larson, 117.
41 Ellen P. Conant, “Japan ‘Abroad’ at the Chicago Exposition, 1893,” in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art, ed. Ellen P. Conant (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), 254–80, at 255. The Hō-ō-den has variously been called the Phoenix “Hall,” “Palace,” or “Pavilion.” Other Japanese contributions to the fair included several teahouses, a Midway bazaar, and exhibit spaces throughout the White City.
42 Ibid., 255.
43 Ibid., 265.
44 Wendelken, Cherie, “The Tectonics of Japanese Style: Architect and Carpenter in the Late Meiji Period,” Art Journal 55.3 (1996): 28–37Google Scholar, at 28.
45 Catherine Yeh et al., “Construction of the Ho-o-den,” in “At the Fair: The Japanese Pavilion at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago,” Asia at the World's Fairs, Pardee School of Global Studies, Center of the Study of Asia, www.asiaworldsfairs.org/architecture-room-2, accessed 3 January 2021. My sincere thanks to Michelle Liu Carriger for her assistance in analyzing the workmen's outfits.
46 Bruce Richardson, “Japan Took Center Stage at Chicago's 1893 World's Fair,” Norton Center of the Arts, Centre College, https://nortoncenter.com/2015/01/07/japan-took-center-stage-at-chicagos-1893-worlds-fair/, accessed 3 January 2021, and Yeh et al.
47 Halsey C. Ives, “Japan's Dedication” and “The Japanese Ho-o-den,” in The Dream City: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World's Columbian Exposition (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Co., 1893–4), n.p., http://columbus.iit.edu/dreamcity/00034060.html, accessed 13 June 2019.
48 “World's Fair Gossip,” Barton County Democrat, 20 April 1893.
49 Ibid.
50 Rose, Alexander, American Rifle: A Biography (New York: Delta, 2009), 215Google Scholar.
51 Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 36.
52 The name of the village necessitates my use of the derogatory term “Eskimo.”
53 Beck, 27. Midway attractions typically charged between 10 and 50 cents; Bank, Rosemarie K., “Telling a Spatial History of the Columbian Exposition of 1893,” Modern Drama 47.3 (2004): 349–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 353.
54 Moses, L. G., “Indians on the Midway: Wild West Shows and the Indian Bureau at World's Fairs, 1893–1904,” South Dakota History 21.3 (1991): 205–29Google Scholar, at 208, 210.
55 Simon Pokagon, The Red Man's Rebuke, later retitled The Red Man's Greeting (both printed on white birch bark) [Hartford, MI: C. H. Engle, 1893]. Pokagon's pamphlet was already available when he spoke at the exposition's Chicago Day celebration on 9 October 1893.
56 See Rinehart, 414–18. For period newspaper treatments of the Inuit labor strike and legal suit, see “Our World's Fair Letter,” Wood River Times [Hailey, ID], 25 April 1893 (special correspondence of the Times, 21 April 1893); “The Columbian Exposition,” The Enterprise [Wellington, OH], 28 June 1893; and “Esquimaux Strike,” Wheeling Intelligencer, 1 April 1893.
57 For a comprehensive study of the fair's Native employees, see Beck.
58 Most likely prompted by employer instructions, some villagers convivially mingled with fairgoers or struck up impromptu “friendships.” Through these contrived interactions, writes Huhndorf, “sometimes the message that natives welcomed Western dominance, or at least easily tolerated it, became stunningly explicit.” Huhndorf, 48.
59 Bank, “Telling a Spatial History,” 356.
60 Jim Zwick, Inuit Entertainers in the United States: From the Chicago World's Fair through the Birth of Hollywood (West Conshohocken, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2006), 11.
61 “News from the Field,” Richmond (Indiana) Enterprise, 28 October 1892, 8, cited in Beck, 138.
62 “A Strange People: Arrival of a Band of Esquimaux,” Boston Globe, 15 October 1892.
63 Curtis M. Hinsley, “Anthropology as Education and Entertainment: Frederic Ward Putnam at the World's Fair,” in Coming of Age in Chicago: The 1893 World's Fair and the Coalescence of American Anthropology, eds. Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016): 1–77, at 40–1.
64 Zwick, 12.
65 Other notorious solutions to the “Indian Problem” included displacement and eradication.
66 “The Life of an Esquimau,” Indiana Sentinel, 12 April 1893, 12.
67 The 2 November edition of the Salt Lake Herald, for example, announced Manak's birthday as the previous day. Under the header “Esquimaux Baby All Right,” the Evening Capital Journal of Salem, OR, announced: “Chicago, Nov. 1—An Esquimaux baby has been born to two members of the colony from Labrador, now quartered on the world's fair grounds. It is a girl, and its name is Columbia Susan Manak” (“Esquimaux Baby All Right,” Evening Capital Journal, 1 November 1892).
68 Rinehart, 414. Rinehart implies that Columbia's birth inspired Daniels to start charging the twenty-five-cent admission fee. Rinehart names Daniels as the president of the expedition company; Jim Zwick lists the expedition's commissioners as W. D. Vincent and Ralph G. Taber (Zwick, 12).
69 Ray Johnson, “Columbia Susan Manak—First Baby Born at the World's Columbian Exposition,” Chicago History Cop, 19 February 2015, www.chicagonow.com/chicago-history-cop/2015/02/columbia-susan-manak-first-baby-born-at-the-worlds-columbian-exposition/, accessed 13 June 2019.
70 Quoted in Rinehart, 414–15.
71 “First in Life and Death,” Chicago Inter Ocean, repr. in Watertown Republican, 9 November 1892.
72 “Lived But a Week,” Chicago Tribune, 8 November 1892, 1.
73 “Eskimo Village,” National Tribune, 30 March 1893, 11.
74 Ibid.
75 “The Life of an Esquimau,” Indiana Sentinel, 14 April 1893, 12. I am using the name spellings of the Inuit babies provided in Beck's comprehensive appendix of Native employees, 201–23.
76 Quoted in Patricia Jasen, “Race, Culture, the Colonization of Childbirth in Northern Canada,” Social History of Medicine 10.3 (1997): 383–400, at 384. Harboring what Miriam Rich calls a “fixation of the gendered parturient body as a locus of racial difference,” physicians in the United States often used parturient pain and distress to justify their expanding medical authority over the white laboring female body. Miriam Rich, “The Curse of Civilised Women: Race, Gender, and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine,” Gender & History 28.1 (2016): 57–76, at 59. Insentience during childbirth, some physicians hypothesized, conveyed not only the Native woman's deficiencies of refinement and sensibility, but the lack of a strong bond between mother and offspring.
77 Sangster, Joan, “Making a Fur Coat: Women, the Labouring Body, and Working-Class History,” International Review of Social History 52.2 (2007): 241–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 251. An essential component of such labors, which could include trapping, drying fur, carrying mail, collecting wood and water, sewing, cooking, and cleaning, was the “unpaid reproductive work” (252).
78 James William Buel, The Magic City: A Massive Portfolio of Original Photographic Views of the Great World's Fair and Its Treasures of Art, Including a Vivid Representation of the Famous Midway Plaisance (St. Louis: Historical Publishing Co., 1894; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1974), 279. Francisca died within two weeks. Her parents had performed at the Chicago World's Fair before traveling to California.
79 Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth, “Introduction: The Work of Play in Performance,” in Working in the Wings, ed. Osborne and Woodworth, 1–20, at 7.
80 Graff, “Dream City, Plaster City,” 705. According to Graff, an estimated ten thousand souvenir hunters descended on the fairgrounds in a single day, collecting anything from bottles to pieces of building facades. The fires that destroyed the White City were both accidental and the result of arsonists.
81 “Lived But a Week.”
82 The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition ended not with a dazzling closing ceremony, but with a solemn memorial service for Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison Sr., who was assassinated in his home on Ashland Avenue just two days prior. Artillery guns facing Lake Michigan marked the coincident passings of Harrison and the exposition, “belch[ing] forth the signal telling the world that the World's Fair was dying with the setting sun, dying while tears were being shed,” the Richmond Dispatch colorfully reported. “End of the Fair,” Richmond Dispatch, 31 October 1893.
83 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 11–12.
84 “Searching for the Cinderella,” Chicago Tribune, 19 February 1893, 36. The piece refers to her as Sarah; as noted by Johnson, “Susan [is] (Sarah in some references).”
85 Chris Jones (see n. 3) notes that in the 2017 season, “Korean dancer Hansol Jeong now performs the Asian-themed pastiches, removing the feeling of appropriation present last year.”