Creating Identity: Exhibiting the Philippines at the 1904 Louisiana

Purchase Exposition

BEVERLY K. GRINDSTAFF, University of California

Abstract The Philippines Reservation at the 1904 Worlds Fair was a living display of
nearly 1200 Philippine people. This exhibit presented a fused Philippine/Filipino identity
through a series of strategies which first naturalised, then normalised, United States policy
surrounding the Constitutionally illegal but de facto colonisation of the Philippines;
impending Congressional assessment of Philippine competency for self-rule; and
incarceration of Filipinos in American-administered prisons and reconcentration camps.
The exhibit radically disavowed claims of a unified Philippine national identity through
extensive, racialised display of disparate Filipino tribes, effectively shifting the grounds of
identity from the political discourse of nation to the scientific discourse of the
anthropological object.

Introduction: Exchanging Living Objects for Text-Books

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, The Greatest Exposition the World has Ever Seen, was held
from 30 April to 1 December 1904 to commemorate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. It
was by far the largest international exposition yet held, notable for its cost ($20 million, five
million more than was paid for the Louisiana Territory itself) and its huge size (at 1240 acres it
nearly doubled the Previous largest fair, with over 200 acres of this being exhibition space).
Emerging in the mid-19th century, the Worlds Fairs were government-sponsored international
showplaces for nations to present and hence compare their cultural, industrial and technological
accomplishments and innovations. Along with similar international trade shows, congresses and
small-scale fairs, World Fairs provides arenas in which to promote a cohesive image of nation
predicated on and derived from the cumulative effect of its display. In effect, each nation
presented its preferred identity relative to its peers. Within the conditions of this general program,
the St. Louis event presented a thematic celebration of the once-controversial Louisiana Territory
Purchase, and its massive scale glorified US expansionism in terms of realized economic gain. In its
desired role as mass educational tool, the 1904 Worlds Fair in St. Louis relied on visual images and
displays to convey particular forms of knowledge; it sought to exchange pictures and living objects
for text-books, and to make these the means whereby instruction is given and individual
development [is] obtained.

The Fairs instruction also encompassed contemporary political issues. The pressing American
political issue of 1904 was the newly-purchased Philippine archipelago, with concerns centred on
Philippine assertions for independence, the so-called Philippines Problem, and the impending
1905 Congressional assessment of Filipino competence for self-rule. It is in this context one must
consider the Fairs most prominent and widely visited attraction, the Philippines Reservation, a 47-
acre display featuring nearly 1200 Filipinos exhibited from June through December 1904 (Fig. 1).
As Exposition President David R. Francis observed at the official dedication of the million-dollar
 exhibit in mid-June, the display from the Philippines
alone justified the expense and labour that went
into the entire fair; an extremely popular
attraction, it was ultimately visited by 99 out of a
100 fairgoers, or roughly 18.5 million people.

The living display of native peoples was not a new

concept in 1904; indeed, small-scale Philippine
villages had appeared in the midway areas of the
1898 Trans-Mississippi and International exposition
in Omaha and the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in
Buffalo. Ample American precursors existed, with
waxwork displays of the races of man established by Charles Willson Peale in 1797 and the living
exhibit itself tracing back at least to the 1816 establishment of William Clarkes Western Museum.
Commercial versions of the living display included travelling ventures such as P.T Barnums
Ethnological Congress of 1884-85, which promised to place upon exhibition the various types of
humanity from all sections of the earth, and Buffalo Bills Wild West Show; the latter ran for 6
months near the 1893 Columbian exposition, attracting 4 million viewers to see, among other
things, two hundred Indians, of various tribes.

Nor was the St. Louis emphasis on racialised display of the living subject without precedent in
illustrating and figuring political agendas. One prototype was British ethnological congress of all
the races of India, an adjunct display to the proposed General Industrial Exhibition of 1869-70
explicitly charged with addressing questions of miscegenation or separation. Imperialism
informed popular European ethnography and anthropology exhibits such as the Briton, Boer and
Black in Savage Africa programme of the 1899-1900 winter season at Olympia in London,
productions which played a significant role in the construction of the colonies to the British
exhibition public. Living displays operated as literal demonstrations of colonial precepts, with race
the driving mechanism. David The Goldberg notes the entry of raceAnd the coterminous
emergence of the concept of nationinto European consciousness with the late-15th century
voyages of discovery, expansion, and domination, and posits that the basic human conditionand
so economic, political, scientific, and cultural positionswas taken naturally to be race
determined.

Defining race as the various designations of group differentiation invoked in the name of race,
Goldberg writes that:

Race undertakes at once to furnish specific identity to otherwise abstract and alienated
subjectivities. Sufficiently broad, indeed, almost conceptually empty, race offers itself as a
category capable of providing a semblance of social cohesion, of historical particularity, of
given meanings and motivations to agents otherwise mechanically conceived as conduits
for market forces and moral laws. It is an identity that can be stretched across time and
space, that itself assumes transforming specificity and legitimacy by taking on as its own
the connotations of prevailing scientific and social discourses. (emphasis in original)

The Worlds Fairs and related expositions provides ideal venues for displaying visual evidences and
giving meaning to the racialised subject, and all colonial powers ultimately exhibited their subjects
in at least one exposition. At the St. Louis exposition, the Philippine Reservation was presented in
immediate parallel to the fairs overall presentation of the Louisiana Territory and its indigenous
peoples, an advantage as the Reservation sought to justify the Philippines expenditure and
subsequent American government and military activities. Reliance on the racialised subject
allowed the exhibit to give visible form to political metaphor, a form which effectively collapsed
proto-nationalist Philippine claims to self-rule into issues of biological race. What was at stake was
the crafting of Philippine identity relative to the United States, and here the Exhibit presented a
Philippines which centred on a scientifically racialised construal of the indigenous and manifestly
uncivilised Igorot native.

The Philippines Problem

Invested with issues of national identity and additionally overlaid with an explicit glorification of
American expansionism, the 1904 Worlds Fair presented a particularly apt venue for satisfying
American curiosity surrounding the new insular possession and, as this article will argue, for
resolving the Philippine Problem. The Philippines had largely entered American consciousness
with the first major American victory of the Spanish-American war in Manila Bay in May
1898.Filipinos under Emilio Aguinaldo had allied with America, and soon after gained control of
most of the Philippines following a revolution against Spain. The Filipinos subsequently pro
claimed their intent towards independence. Rather than supporting their erstwhile allies in this
claim, however, America instead purchased the Philippines from Spain under the 1898 Treaty of
Paris at the end of the Spanish-American War, adding nearly 116 000 square miles to US
possessions and effectively replacing the Spanish colonial presence with that of the US. This
intensified pre-existing Filipino assertions to self-rule and spurred a greater political organization.
Strong anti-imperialist forces within the United States also opposed Americas new position as a
de facto colonial power in the Philippine annexation, and so divided the Senate that the treaty was
ratified by a single vote on 6 February 1899. Other American opposition centred on the related
likelihood of additional military action, a fear realized by the Philippine American War of 1899-
1902. Preliminary positioning of the purchase as an American business opportunity also
threatened economic competition from Philippine labour and products.

Standard Worlds Fair formulae positioned St. Louis to function as a source of expedient
information about the new possession, and in August 1901 the Worlds Fair Committee on State
and Territorial Exhibits established that a Philippines exhibit would be included towards the
specific end of making:

The exhibits of our insular possessions one of the most important and interesting features
of the Fair. The people of America are anxious to know just what we have acquired, and,
so far as it is possible, we propose to show them without making necessary a trip to the
islands in the pacific.

By the time of this announcement extensive anthropological planning was well under way and the
proposed Philippines exhibit already occupied a central place in the Fairs merging of human
evolution and technological development.
The stated intention of the Philippines Reservation was to provide a scientific demonstration of
the possessions resources, geography and inhabitants in order to assuage American trepidations
over the value and role of American involvement in the Philippines. But the final exhibits
emphasis was squarely placed on the Philippines indigenous peoples, however, and presented a
narrow vision built from the seeming-objectivity of science, architectural gesture, and the
language of popular press accounts, racial slurs and political metaphor. Positioned literally and
conceptually at the margins of the Fairs twinning of human accomplishment and biological
development was the Philippines Reservation. Unlike countries participating in the Fair proper, the
Philippines was not presented through its contemporary industrial products and cultural
accomplishments as these were viewed as being European or American in origin. Representation
was instead accomplished through ethnographic objects such as Igorot headhunter axes which,
while technically accurate to a specific population, presented within the context of evolution and
human progress an archaicising if not a prehistoric view of the Philippines. These objects were
held exactly commensurate with their makers, and critically supported the mechanism by which
the Reservations 47 acres built an image of the Philippines upon its living people. Thus the
Philippines was made synonymous with Filipino, and Filipino was first fragmented into President
Theodore Roosevelts Dismissive description of the Philippines as a jumble of savage tribes, a
destabilizing act which obviated Philippine nationalist claims of political cohesion, then collapsed
into the Fairs singular and sensationalized image of the uncivilisedalthough civilizableIgorot
native: Breechclouted, dog-eating, tightly enclosed and closely guarded, nominally human.

The Classification of Progress

The daunting task of spatially arranging and visually expressing the St. Louis Expositions process
of development fell to Frederick J.V. Skiff, Director of Exhibits, and former executive director of
the Chicago Field Museum and former Colorado commissioner of immigration and statistics with
15 years of acclaimed experience organizing international exposition. The scientific and intellectual
vitae of Skiff and his Exhibitions Advisory Board was a crucial legitimizing factor which allowed the
Philippines Exhibit to logically expand from a modest display of anthropological artefacts to an
exhibit to illustrate the benefits of American attentions, and to finally open as a giant enclave filled
with 75 000 anthropological objects and populated by 1102 people (gradually increased to almost
1200), funded by over a million dollars received directly from the United States Government with
additional funds for postal, telegraphic and transportation facilities supplied by the Insular
[American] government.

Skiff understood his task at St. Louis as the ordering of a massive encyclopaedia possessing
complete and authentic data on all subjects, prepared and classifield so as to be effectively
presented and of easy access. He devised a rigorous system which thematically overlaid the Fair
site and its displays with a steady upward progression, conceptually splitting the Fair into 16
Departments corresponding to the developmental stages of man. Skiff accordingly divides the
sites 1240 acres into 16 departments, 144 groups, and 807 classes following the process of the
development of the various arts, industries and sciences; their evolution from small and
insignificant beginnings. In effect, the Fairgoer constantly followed an intricate map of
evolutionary development arising from small and insignificant beginnings: Manufacturers and
their raw materials; the great displays of the Electricity and Machinery Buildings juxtaposed to
primitive tools; American and European cultural exhibits housed in the Main Pictures
Neoclassical opulence at farthest remove from the near-naked inhabitants of the thatched Igorot
display.

Showing the Wild Tribes in the Philippines under Natural Conditions

Now, for a moment, a typical Skiff speech of late 1902 began, may I speak of a few of the
features which the Exposition of 1904 anticipates in its great plan of life and motion? The markers
of civilization privileged by Skiff included landscaping, physical culture, special instruction classes
illustrating the education of the Indian, the deaf and dumb, and the blind, the Fairs main power
plant and modern garbage destroying plant, and the Philippines exhibit:

Families, groups and tribes of living people, an exhibition of the representatives of peculiar
faraway aborigines, possibly fifteen different villages, designed for the scientific
demonstration and conducted under the personal supervision of one of the well-known
ethnological scientists of the United States. In this distinguishing contribution to life and
motion of the Exposition the participation of the government of the Philippines Islands [as
outlined previously by Civil Governor Taft] will provide a most attractive and instructive
exhibit.

Race critically underlies the machinations of Skiffs most attractive design, with the Philippine
body politic replaced by the Filipino body, and tribes effectively shifting the grounds of identity
from the political discourse of nation to the scientific discourse of the anthropological object. This
action was already tautological.

In October 1898 Dean Conant Worcester, then an assistant zoology professor at the University of
Michigan, published a popular press article, Knotty Problems of the Philippines, in conjunction
with the third printing of his larger work Philippine Islands and Their People. Equal parts
travelogue, naturalist account and political treatise, Worcester noted that Filipinos utter
unfitness for self-government at the present time is self-evident. On the basis of the popularity
and scientific authority of his works, Worcester was invited to the White House in December 1898
by President McKinley, where he communicated certain facts relative to the Philippine situation.
By the end of this visit the young zoologist had become McKinleys personal representative in the
Philippines, where he served as commissioner and secretary of the interior from 1900 to 1913,
conducting census surveys, compiling photo-documentation and writing additional works on the
Philippines. Worcester also drafted the scientific portion of the 1899 investigative report of the
Schurman Commission, a Report undertaken to facilitate the most humane, pacific, and effective
extension of authority throughout these islands and to study the existing social and political state
of the various populations.

Worcesters contribution to the Schurman Report was the biological fragmentation of the
Philippine population into 84 distinct units, which he designated tribes. Utilising a racial taxonomy
informed by his studies in botany and zoology, Worcester charted peoples according to primary
criteria of skin colour, physical stature and intelligence (as determined by him), and then by
acquired traits such as literacy and religion. This information was tabulated into three sharply
distinct biological races (Negrito, Malayan, and Indonesian), with each of these three columns
further divides into rowed categories based on the remaining criteria (21, 47, and 16 per column,
respectively). In short, Worcester provided a visual map that evolved from his darkest, denigrated
Negrito (little, woolly headed, black, dwarf savages) and culminated with the civilised tribes of
the Europeanised Indonesian (physically superior [and] the colour of their skin is quite light. Many
of them are very clever and intelligent). Worcesters table lends racism a spatial dimension.

While Worcester does not appear in the Fair documentation by name, he belonged to the
supporting Philippine Commission, and methods detailed in his academic and government text,
report, and especially photographs and census work undertaken in his official capacity, inform Fair
planning and its categories of civilization:

Classed in terms of blood, the peoples of the world may be grouped in several races; classed in
terms of what they do rather than what they merely are, they are conveniently grouped in the
four culture grades of savagery, barbarism, civilization, and enlightenment.