Fun Fair

JOANNE: The women’s building sat near the entrance of what was known as the midway. Here’s historian Robert Riedel, who we heard from earlier in the show.

ROBERT RIEDEL: The midway, technically the Midway Plays On set, the Chicago fair, was a mile avenue of fun, instruction, frolic all rolled into one.

ED: At its heart was a 290 foot tall revolving wheel named after its inventor, George Ferris. The Ferris wheel, now a carnival staple, was the midway star attraction. But wait there’s more. Fair-goers could wander among a series of outdoor museums, ethnological villages that displayed people from around the globe. The term village wasn’t just a nice way to gloss over what was, in essence, a kind of human zoo, people lived there.

ROBERT RIEDEL: There’s an Algerian palace, a Tunis village. The African village was called the Dahomean Village after Dahomey. There are Chinese villages, a Javanese village. There are food concessions, there are breweries. There’s a German village, an Austrian village, Japanese bazaar. It’s just an extraordinarily lively place. And I guess it’s usually something that people, if they know about it, they think about what it looked like. But I think it’s so important to understand what it sounded like.

The music ranged from every quarter of the globe, although it’s interesting that time for most commentators, people from Africa and the Middle East didn’t play music so much has produce sound or noise. Music came from the Austrian village and the German village. There are no barriers. So the sounds intermix. The smells from the different [INAUDIBLE], the extraordinary cuisines from different places on the globe mingle. It was one of these just surround sound places where one could exercise all of the senses from sight to sound to touch, because in these ethnological villages it was not uncommon for visitors to go up and try to actually touch, sometimes quite inappropriately, people who were deemed as savages or primitives.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: Visitors had the idea they were stepping into a sort of primitive zone or an exotic backward set of cultures.

JOANNE: That’s Tracy Jean Boisseau again.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: And so you see lots of things like the hoochie coochie dance.

NATHAN: Hoochie coochie dance, what’s that?

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: The hoochie coochie dance was what we would think was fairly close to a strip tease, where a woman who was partially dressed would move around a lot of veils and titillate the male audience with the display of her body.

ROBERT RIEDEL: It was called the danse du ventre, translated the belly dance. And there’s a little theme song for the belly dancers to dance to. And it was called the hoochie coochie.

JOANNE: Well, now that you’ve mentioned that, you’re going to have to hum it.

ROBERT RIEDEL: Well, you probably don’t want me to, but it goes something like this, [HUMMING] My humming is not so good but I think you get the drift.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: This was a dance that was imagined as representing all of the Middle East in its exotic, oriental splendor. And it was performed by several different women, actually. But they were often imagined as one woman who was referred to as little Egypt.

JOANNE: The hoochie coochie dancers were actually the entertainment at the Algerian village, and they were a huge hit, much to the annoyance of onlookers at the nearby woman’s building.

TRACY JEAN BOISSEAU: If you sat on the rooftop deck of the women’s building, which millions of women over the course of the five or six months of the fair did, you had a view not only to the court of honor in the White City, but in the other direction you had a view directly over the midway. And smack in the middle of that was the Temple of Beauty, where 40 young women from, presumably, 40 different nations were all doing a version of the hoochie coochie dance. And so there was lots of conversation and lots of criticism about, sort of, the terrible, salacious things that were happening in their sightline on the midway.

ROBERT RIEDEL: How interesting that the woman’s building, one of these quite large neoclassical buildings is put right at– it hinges the midway to the White City, as if white middle class women are really supposed to be the arbiters between something called civilization and something called savagery.

JOANNE: Reidel says the scandalous, entertaining midway was supposedly educational.

ROBERT RIEDEL: One of the chief purposes of the fair was to show the rest of the world, here meaning New York City, that Chicago was as civilized as any east coast city, and certainly as any Parisian capital. So civilization, culture, both spelled with a capital C, were animating drives. So the midway itself was not necessarily considered a primary part of the fair at the beginning. But as it became clear that the fair was going to cost a lot of money to put on, it was clear that these sorts of exhibits, these villages, and these concessions with food and beer, actually were moneymakers.

So the midway takes form in a curious way because the exposition directors did not want it to detract from capital C culture, capital C civilization. They want at the midway to augment it and to be an educational strip, to be a kind of outdoor ethnological museum. So they affixed it in the exposition catalog and gave it a department letter, department m, which was also the category in which anthropology was placed.

JOANNE: So it’s sort of adding a humanity component to this larger cultural experience.

ROBERT RIEDEL: Well, it’s a humanity component but it’s a humanity with a particular vision attached to it. In particular, hierarchical ways that reinforce the dominant ways of thinking about people from foreign colonies and even internal colonies like American Indian reservations.

JOANNE: And how did they communicate that particular message about ranking peoples?

ROBERT RIEDEL: Well, let me come at that question in a couple of ways. One of the ways that this message got communicated was through the organization of midway’s shows. So at one extreme, remember, the midway’s a mile long. So at one extreme of the midway, the farthest from the White City, you have the Dahomean village, the American Indian villages. And then one could make one’s way towards the White City, passing the Austrian village, passing the Middle Eastern villages, the German village. So in a sense, as the newspapers described it, one could follow the spiral of evolution from its most primitive and barbaric towards civilisation, heading towards the White City.

So that’s one way that this message gets conveyed. And the other is contractual. And so for the Dahomeans, the Africans who perform at the fair, their contract very explicitly states that they are to perform as savages. And when it becomes apparent time in the eyes of the concessionaire, who is a Frenchman of sort of dubious background, when his concession isn’t making quite as much money as he thinks it should, he concludes that it’s because his performers aren’t being, in quotes now, “savage enough.” So he basically forces them to drink beer from the brewery next door on the other side.

JOANNE: So staged, carefully staged lessons about the supposed change in civilization.

ROBERT RIEDEL: Oh, yes. Yes, they’re very carefully staged. And at the same time, it’s just so interesting to see how that careful staging sometimes collapses under its own weight because the people who are there to perform, the entrepreneurs and the fair managers might have seen them as specimens. But the people who are there to perform are actually pretty adept at counteracting the intentions of fair organizers. And that gets to be a pretty interesting story as well.

JOANNE: Well, so what did some of those people do?

ROBERT RIEDEL: Well, And I’ll just stick with the African village for a moment. So every day the so-called denizens of the midway would organize an ethnological parade and they would start at the far end of the midway and March towards the White City. And as several scholars have noted, the Africans would, as they paraded, would chant in their own languages. And they would sing songs. And there would actually happen to be someone from West Africa, a European who claimed that he understood what the West Africans were saying. And it was something along the lines of, well, please come to Dahomey and we’ll slit your white throats.

So the Midway’s and these representations are just– they’re remarkably interesting and remarkably complex, and really underscore the importance of why historians study these cultural representations and why they matter so much.

JOANNE: It’s so fascinating because the mix of entertainment and really deep statements is such a strange brew of things to yoke together. And yet obviously, it’s a strong combination that pulls people.

ROBERT RIEDEL: Oh yes, absolutely. And it’s going to continue with subsequent fairs. It’s not– remember, there’s a tradition of fairs before Chicago. And there’s certainly a tradition of fairs that comes after Chicago. So by locating the midway with really a lot of fun, somewhat maybe really sleazy performances and calling them ethnological villages, and you can go watch the hoochie coochie dance and say, oh no, I’m going there to learn about different cultures.

JOANNE: I’m studying a culture.

ROBERT RIEDEL: I’m studying the culture. By actually suggesting that the midway could have this higher, nobler, educational purpose is terrifically important because it basically sets in motion an argument you’re going to hear across the 20th century, that education of course can and should be entertaining.

JOANNE: Well, that actually leads me to maybe my last question here, which is, what would you say is the legacy of the midway?

ROBERT RIEDEL: Oh my. The legacy of the midway is– it’s not a single legacy. There are multiple legacies tied to the power of media, and this is a prototype mass media, how it can inform the way people think. And then maybe the most compelling legacy for your listeners might well be in the context of what is about to be built pretty much right where that midway [? Plaisance ?] intersected with the White City. And what is about to be built I think everyone in Chicago will know, is President Obama’s library. And so if you think about the midway and you think about the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition as this vehicle for disseminating some really quite horrible ideas about African-Americans and people of color around the world, I think it’s really quite a tribute to the legacy of resistance that the Obama library is going to be right where the White City once stood.

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JOANNE: Robert Riedel is a historian at Montana State University. We also heard from Tracy Jean Boisseau. She’s a historian at Purdue University and co-editor of Gendering the Fair Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs.