"The days of old, the days of gold, the days of '49": Identity, history, and memory at the California Midwinter International Exposition, 1894

Public Historian

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 2003, Pages 25-49

  Berglund, Barbara ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949955349     PISSN: 02723433     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/tph.2003.25.4.25     Document Type: Review

References (77)

1. See Arthur Chandler and Marvin Nathan, The Fantastic Fair: The Story of the California Midwinter International Exposition, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1894 ([California]: Pogo Press, 1993) for a very useful descriptive history.
2. and James D. Phelan, "Is the Midwinter Fair a Benefit?" Overland Monthly, 23, 2d series (April 1894): 390-92.
3. Attendance figures are based on Chandler and Nathan, The Fantastic Fair, 77,
4. and The Official History, n.p.
5. Just to provide a sense of scale, 27,529,400 people attended the Columbian Exposition; Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 40.
6. My understanding of International Expositions has been shaped by Rydell, All the World's a Fair;
7. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982);
8. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);
9. Curtis M. Hinsley, "Strolling Through The Colonies," in Michael P. Sternberg (ed.), Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 119-40,
10. and "World as Marketplace: Commodification of the Exotic at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893," in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991);
11. James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
12. and William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).
13. Mention of "charming señoritas," can be found in Taliesin Evans, All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts Concerning California (2nd ed.) (San Francisco: W.B. Bancroft & Co, 1894), 155-61.
14. Data about the size and the location of the '49 Mining Camp comes from: Taliesin Evans, All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts Concerning California (1st ed.) (San Francisco: W.B. Bancroft & Co, 1894)
15. and The Official Guide, 106.
16. Quote about "auriferous districts" is from Evans, All About the Midwinter Fair (2nd ed.), 157.
17. Descriptive passages from The Midwinter Appeal, 27 January 1894.
18. The Midwinter Appeal and Journal of '49, 24 January 1894.
19. The incorporation of the '49 Mining Camp Company is mentioned in the San Francisco Chronicle, 24 November 1893.
20. Information about the "business principles" governing the camp as well as Sam Davis is from The Official History, 152.
21. There was some opposition to The Midwinter Appeal and Journal of '49 from the Concession Bureau over the advertising content, as they contended another group had been given exclusive rights to advertising. See The Midwinter Appeal, 10 February 1894.
22. Information about the publication schedule of The Midwinter Appeal is from The Official Catalogue, 154. The California Midwinter Exposition Illustrated contains information about the '49 Mining Camp Company's officers and managers.
23. For a discussion of the functions of local history celebrations in California and elsewhere see David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). He writes, "To the extent that civic celebrations represent a collective history, they are representations of and for the collective but not necessarily by the collective. Such representations primarily serve as tools that some groups use to structure a common reality for others" (p. 62).
24. "Mexicans, Spaniards, and miners will mingle on the street,"Chronicle, 14 January 1894;
25. Robert G. Lee's work in Orientals on racialization and popular songs called my attention to the significance of the recurrence of this tune.
26. Some examples of its repetition are as follows: "This is especially true of those things treating of the 'days of old and the days of gold'," The Monarch Souvenir of Sunset City and Sunset Scenes: Being Views of California Midwinter Fair and Famous Scenes in the Golden State (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1894);
27. "California's Midwinter Exposition would be incomplete without a representation of 'The days of old,/the days of gold,/The days of '49," Official Guide, 106-107;
28. Full text of the lyrics to The Days of '49 can be found in Richard E. Lingenfelter (comp.), Songs of the American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 558-59.
29. Midwinter Appeal and the Journal of '49, 17 February 1894;
30. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensible Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 116-21;
31. and Lee, Orientals, 22 and 31.
32. The concept of herrenvolk democracy is taken from George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind; The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York; Harper & Row, 1971), 61.
33. Fredrickson draws upon the ideas of Pierre L. van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Wiley, 1967), 17-18 and applies them to the African-American context yet the concept of herrenvolk democracy is certainly applicable to the multiracial society in nineteenth-century California.
34. The problem with this version of history had as much to do with what it said as with what it silenced. The region as a whole often saw the convergence of women as well as men, Indians, Europeans, Latin Americans, Asians, and African Americans in interaction with each other as well as with the natural environment. This version of history also uncritically glorified the steady forward march of progress and placed an overly optimistic faith in improvement that often obscured the routes of western expansion and development that resulted in harm or failure or both. Three important correctives to this history of Gold Rush society that actively grapple with and disclose its diversity and complexity are Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000);
35. Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999);
36. and Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
37. See also Glassberg, Sense of History, for a discussion of how Anglo Californians "came to identify themselves with a 'white' pioneer heritage" and to recognize "other people's history on the land only selectively" (p. 170).
38. Curtis Hinsley, "Strolling Through the Colonies," 138.
39. Hinsley provides a theory of the ways the historical narratives presented at expositions can simultaneously incorporate and exclude. Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 15.
40. Jacksonian democracy was predicated on white male supremacy. Rights of citizenship for white men meant as much as they did, in part, because others were excluded from them, especially women and people of color. By the 1820s, ideas about the inherent equality of white men had fused with the ideology of republicanism. The result was the expansion of suffrage, greater voter control over branches of government that had previously been shielded from the pressure of public opinion and, overall, an increasing democratization of American politics for white men. Yet, as white men gained political rights, white women and free black men lost what little opportunity they had possessed for formal political expression. As legal loopholes that allowed some property-holding white women and free black men to exercise the vote were closed, the concept of the equality of all white men and the consequent inequality of all others hardened. While white men worked to level what they perceived to be artificial social distinctions among themselves, at the same time they began to emphasize what they came to believe were natural differences that distinguished them from white women and people of color, which worked to further justify the exclusion of these groups from political or economic arenas of competition. Paradoxically, the rhetoric of the equality and equal opportunity of all white men was most powerful and most fervently embraced precisely when economic changes were actually increasing the economic and social stratification present in America to make the ideal of an egalitarian society much less real. For further discussion of Jacksonian democracy, see Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).
41. See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). As Stallybrass and White point out, "The low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is instrumentally constitutive of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture" (pp. 5-6).
42. The Monarch Souvenir of Sunset City and Sunset Scenes and Official Guide, 16-17.
43. "Charming Señoritas" were mentioned in Evans, All About the Midwinter Fair (2nd ed.), 155-61.
44. Coverage of the first public performance can be found in the Examiner, 14 January 1894.
45. The article that positioned the dancers in the fair's racial hierarchy was: Annie Laurie, "The Midwinter Fair Sex," Examiner, 28 January 1894.
46. The ways in which white bourgeois men of the late nineteenth century projected themselves into more "primitive" styles of masculinity have been developed by Bederman, Manliness and Civilization
47. and E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
48. San Francisco Call, 24 November 1893.
49. Hinsley, "Strolling Through the Colonies," 120-21.
50. Official History, 162;
51. Eames, Ninetta, "The Wild and Woolly at the Fair," Overland Monthly 23, 2 series (April 1894): 356-73.
52. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1993), 28-31.
53. John Higham, "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s," in John Weiss (ed.), The Origins of Modern Consciousness (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1965);
54. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981);
55. Rotundo, American Manhood;
56. Peter Filene, Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998);
57. and Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). Although some scholars date the emergence of the ideology of "the strenuous life" to the early years of the twentieth century, I, following Filene and Rotundo, see its emergence in the late nineteenth century. Theodore Roosevelt's famous "Strenuous Life" speech was delivered in 1899. As Rotundo points out, the martial ideals that it advocated had been presaged by the growing association of violence, strife, and force with manhood in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the related urge to go to war that "developed a growing urgency in the 1890s and culminated in the Spanish-American War in 1898 (226, 235). Filene contends that "Americans throughout the nineteenth century had talked about the strenuous life, although in different eras they had located it in different environments. The frontier context had given way, during the Civil War, to the battlefield, which in turn had been succeeded by the athletic field, the arena of civic corruption, and again the wild-west frontier. By 1899, Roosevelt had in mind the jungles of Cuba and the Philippines, where Americans would prove their nation's manliness" (p. 76).
58. Lears, No Place of Grace, xv. Details about Frank McLaughlin can be found in The California Midwinter Exposition Illustrated.
59. The increasing dominance of corporations in the late nineteenth century is described by Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America;
60. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987);
61. Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977);
62. Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, The Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
63. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State 1900-1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968);
64. and Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (London: The Free Press of Glenco, Collier-Macmillan Limited, 1963).
65. the editorial policies were described in The Official Catalogue, 154.
66. Filene, Him/Her/Self, 76;
67. "Success in the Mines," Chronicle, 8 January 1894;
68. Information on John W. Mackay, George C. Perkins, and Major Downie from Evans, All About the Midwinter Fair, 2nd ed., 155-61;
69. The Midwinter Appeal and the Journal of '49, 17 January 1894.
70. The Monarch Souvenir of Sunset City and Sunset Scenes; Chronicle, 14 January 1894.
71. Call, 19 November 1893;
72. Examiner, 14 January 1893.
73. The outline of the Midwinter Fair's Grand Court of Honor exists today at the today as the Music Concourse in Golden Gate Park. Until 1921, the Fine Arts Building served as San Francisco's first public art museum, the de Young Memorial Museum, in memory of the Midwinter Fair. Although the building was demolished in 1928, the two sphinxes at the entrance of the current de Young remain from the fair. See Taliesin Evans, All About the Midwinter Fair, San Francisco, and Interesting Facts Concerning California (1st ed.), (San Francisco: W.B. Bancroft & Co, 1894), 71-75, quotation from 75.
74. and The Official Guide, 43, 55, 67.
75. and Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
76. In addition to the imperial stance noted above, the city had long been secure in its imperial dominance of its regional hinterlands. See Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
77. Quote from James D. Phelan, The Official History, 75. As a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired varying levels of dominion over Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. During the Spanish-American War, thousands of troops camped in the Presidio in tent cities awaiting deployment in the Philippines. Returning sick and wounded soldiers were treated there in the army's first permanent general hospital. Moreover, a year before the Midwinter Fair, the Columbian Exposition's White City had offered a utopian vision of a well-ordered American city, emphasized the consolidation of the country's landed empire, and displayed America in a dominant position in relation to the other nations of the world. If some of the first ideological steps toward realizing the nation's nascent imperial ambitions were taken at Chicago, the second steps were taken at the San Francisco Fair.