In 1890, when planning was just beginning for what would become Chicago’s glittering 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, officials assigned 100 explorers to fan across the world to visit remote tribal hunting and agricultural societies.
Those expeditions came back with 50,000 artifacts, many of them extraordinarily beautiful art objects and most of which now reside unseen in storage at the Field Museum.
Among the items are prehistoric gold jewelry pieces from Colombia, brilliantly colored Javanese puppets, Sri Lankan tribal masks, vibrant tribal headdresses from Africa, Asia and the Americas, and finely crafted weapons and household items from all over.
During the World’s Fair, they were exhibited either in the Anthropology Building or in venues along the Midway Plaisance. The idea was to introduce fair attendees both to exotic world cultures and to the then newly emerging science of anthropology.
Now, Field Museum officials have decided to reconstitute the collection as an online exhibit, massing together digitized photos of artifacts that charmed 27 million visitors to the fair.
Curators have started retrieving and photographing fair items to re-create the fair’s anthropology exhibit digitally as a permanent, online exhibit available free at the museum’s Web site 24 hours a day. A preliminary version is scheduled to go online this fall, with the final version, featuring photos of more than 20,000 exhibit pieces from the fair, to be ready in 2007.
The anthropology collection is one of the great legacies of the six-month fair, held to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the New World. The collecting expeditions helped establish the legitimacy of anthropological discipline, and at the end of the fair the Field Museum was founded to keep the collection intact.
“When these things were collected 115 years ago, anthropologists liked to find the eye-popping things,” said Steve Nash, the Field’s anthropology department collections manager. “They wanted to come home with things that represented the pinnacle of artistic achievement in the cultures they were studying.
“Now anthropologists spend less time looking for the luxury items of a culture. They’re more interested in the everyday items that show how people live.”
The fair continues to loom as a watershed event, recalled with surprising frequency in documentaries and literature like Erik Larson’s recent best seller, “The Devil in the White City.” The fair’s fabulously opulent neo-classical exposition halls and its exciting and scandalous entertainments seem to capture the vision and conceit of the maturing United States at a particularly vibrant time, the cusp of the 20th Century.
The committee organizing the Chicago fair looked to popular exhibits at earlier fairs in London, Paris and Philadelphia and decided it needed a sizable exhibit examining human culture. Among the committee’s first hires was one of America’s first anthropologists, Harvard University professor Frederic Ward Putnam.
Putnam, given $100,000, hired two young assistants who would go on to become legends in anthropological history, German-trained Franz Boas and George Dorsey, Putnam’s prize graduate student at Harvard who in 1894 earned the first anthropology PhD granted in the U.S.
The three men selected 100 men–graduate students, soldiers, sailors, diplomats and missionaries–to fan out through 50 countries to seek out and bring home outstanding artifacts for display.
Each of the collectors was given detailed instructions on how to properly excavate and scientifically record a prehistoric ruin. If the expedition was visiting living tribal cultures, collectors were told what sorts of items to acquire:
“Particular attention should be paid to the fact that the most important things to be collected are those of genuine native manufacture, and especially those objects connected with the olden times. Objects traded to the natives by whites are of no importance, and are not desired.”
It was an unprecedented undertaking for its time, not exacting or professional by today’s standards, but more scientifically rigorous than other expeditions of that period.
“They did it right and raised the bar for everybody else,” said Donald Fowler, an emeritus professor of history of anthropology at the University of Nevada in Reno.
Beyond boxes of artifacts, many of the expeditions returned with groups of people they had studied, along with whole houses and portions of their villages to be displayed at the fair–a practice that would horrify today’s anthropologists.
One expedition, for instance, brought back 69 loin-clothed, barechested men and women from a tribal village in Benin, then known as Dahomey, a French West Africa colony, along with 30 of their houses.
In the fair’s early plans, the anthropology display was to be in the largest of the great pavilions that lined the canals of the White City: the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. With 44 acres of interior floor space, it was enormous even by today’s standards.
Demand for space in the pavilion was so intense, however, that the anthropology exhibit was kicked out. A separate building for anthropology had be built at the last minute on the south end of the fairgrounds.
“The Anthropological Building was a plain and unpretentious structure,” sniffed the fair historian. At a puny 157,000 square feet, it was the size of a large department store or an average urban high school today. Putnam filled it with orderly rows of glass cases containing the thousands of artifacts.
He also planned to install tableaus of ethnic villages as “a dignified and decorous ethnological display” on an 80-acre strip of land called the Midway Plaisance. Among the 3,000 indigenous peoples brought to the fair were Laplanders, Alaskan Eskimos, North and South American Indians, Melanesians, Maoris, Javanese, Sri Lankans, Africans, Arabs and Egyptians.
Fair directors, however, were looking for ways to recover the millions of dollars in Chicago money invested in the fair. They took control of the Midway away from Putnam and gave it to Sol Bloom, a young protege of showman P.T. Barnum.
Under Bloom, who sold concessions to entertainment vendors, the Midway became a sort of early Disney World with honky-tonk undertones, an instant hit with visitors and the salvation of investors.
The Midway delights were not all entirely educational in nature. There were beer halls and restaurants featuring food and music from around the world, a huge circus of performing wild animals, Buffalo Bill Cody’s internationally famous “Wild West Show,” and notorious entertainers, including belly-dancing “hoochie-coochie” girls. Tucked among the Midway hubbub were all the “native” villages.
When the fair was over, much of the material in those villages joined the artifacts in the anthropology building to form part of the founding collection of the Field Museum, launched in April 1894 in the Palace of Fine Arts building–the only structure from the fair whose roof and walls were sturdy enough to last.
The anthropology collection took up perhaps half the exhibit space, but the museum also housed important collections of plants, animals, rocks and fossils left from the fair.
Within 20 years, however, the building’s flimsy facade was weathering away and its interior falling into disarray. The Field moved in 1921 to the south end of Grant Park, and in 1933 the old Fine Arts building was restored with a real cut-stone facade and a refurbished interior to house the Museum of Science and Industry.
Decades later, the museum is using a $145,850 grant from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation to put the historic anthropology collection from the 1893 fair before the eyes of the public once again.
“It’s a way to show Chicagoans things their great-grandparents saw,” Nash said.
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wmullen@tribune.com
