Growing up in St. Louis I heard a lot about the 1904 World's Fair. It gave us ice cream cones and ice tea! It brought Geronimo to St. Louis! In hosting a fair, we joined the likes of London, Chicago, and Paris! More personally, it located my grandmother's childhood in time; its legacy continued in the ragtime pieces she and my father played on the piano as I grew up. For St. Louisans, it defined who we were. Even after I became a historian, fair trivia, however questionable historically, retained palpable civic meaning for a city long in decline. In his new book, James Gilbert delves into the meaning of such local lore as he explores how collective memory and identity intersect with scholarly study. Gilbert interweaves them masterfully to deepen understanding of both the St. Louis Fair and historical methodology.
Gilbert has two purposes: to consider how archival sources have shaped the historiography and collective memory of the fair, and to consider whether a more thorough investigation of visitors' experiences challenges scholarship and public memory. These goals structure the book as he organizes chapters around sources and interpretive methods. In the first several chapters, he examines the goals of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company (LPEC), describing how organizers promoted the fair as a catalog of the world's knowledge, showcasing exhibits of anthropology and technology, among others. In guidebooks, exhibits, and photo souvenirs, organizers hoped to impress on visitors the orderliness and hierarchal designations of civilized nations. To memorialize the fair, company president David Francis built the archival collection of the LPEC papers and founded the Louisiana Purchase Historical Association. The archive served as the key source for the fair's “official” history, and it structured collective memory as its curators collected souvenirs and memorabilia and sponsored anniversary celebrations. Other forms of popular culture, such as novels and especially the Judy Garland film, Meet Me at the Fair, contributed a collective memory that idealized the event. Gilbert then turns to historiography, to illustrate how historians have relied extensively on this same archive to build a very different narrative—that the fair promoted “a racialized anthropology and the justification of imperial conquest” (52). Recognizing the uneasy relationship between such popular history and academic history and their competing narratives (and purposes), Gilbert aptly explores how they might inform one another.
However, he also critiques the historical scholarship. Noting that the archive is selective, he argues that historians' dependency on it has yielded a limited history that describes the fair from the organizers' point of view, failing to capture the experience of millions of visitors. Juxtaposing official papers and promotional materials with diaries, oral histories, visual sources, and a more careful review of concession revenues, he suggests that visitor experience was quite different from the imperialist project portrayed by historians. Fairgoers scheduled family reunions and professional meetings around the fair and visited their state pavilions. Using theories of individual and collective memory, reader response, visual culture, and spectatorship to more fully interrogate sources, he concludes that visitors generally ignored the goals of fair organizers. They experienced the fair as entertainment, an amusement park where fairgoers made sense of displays and concessions through the lens of their own experiences and agendas. They followed their own itineraries and in the process both reframed and reinforced their identities as they made sense of their place in a rapidly changing industrial culture and expanding nation. Although he argues his point elegantly, he leaves unexamined the extent to which the racial and cultural hierarchies so evident at the fair reinforced white visitors' own unconscious cultural and racial beliefs, even if they ignored the organizers' itineraries and agendas.
By reconsidering the role of memory in history and adding experience into his array of sources, Gilbert raises one of the central problems in historical research, that “there is an assumed coherence between [historians'] interpretations and [people's] actions in the past, even if this assumption is rarely explored” (153). Both collective memory of the fair and its historiography insist that it is possible to reconstruct a stable meaning of the fair for those who experienced it. However, his research exposes the problems with such assumptions. In one chapter he examines a single provocative photograph of a white woman “Teaching an Igorrote-Boy the Cake Walk,” a popular but slightly risqué dance. Showing how the picture does not lend itself to a stable or conclusive interpretation about the identities of either subject, Gilbert questions dominant historiographies about how individuals in the Progressive Era navigated the official narratives of race and culture. By problematizing historical interpretation, he challenges the idea that there is a stable meaning to the past. As he explores this epistemological question, Gilbert carefully delineates his methodology, making the book extremely useful for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses and those seeking a sophisticated example of the historical methodology.
Gilbert concludes that the historical meaning of the fair lies in what it reveals about modernity's effect on identity: spaces of entertainment like those at the St. Louis World's Fair afforded arenas in which Americans sought to secure and experiment with new identities. Blending theory with meticulous historical research, Gilbert underscores how modern technologies popularized in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era wrought new experiences, new ways of thinking about experience, and most importantly, generated new sources of memory and identity, both for historians and for their subjects as well. These conclusions reinforce a body of scholarship to which Gilbert has been an important contributor throughout his career. Here he deepens understanding of the ways that culture and identity reinforce one another, but not always in ways historians expect. In Whose Fair? Gilbert reveals the complexity of the past and the efforts to understand it. His reinterpretation of the St. Louis World's Fair and his ability to make historical methodology visible makes this an important read for academic scholars, public historians, and history students alike.
