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. The Final Contest d"À©[To view this image, refer tothe print version of this title.]Figure 19.Young Women Plucking the Fruits of Knowledge or Science, 1893.ImpressionistMary Cassatt turned her fascination with women and children into a mural for theWoman s Building at the Columbian Exposition, using her subjects as an allegory forwomen s education and its benefit to society.This mural was destroyed when the WhiteCity burned, but many of Cassatt s paintings from this period reflect the same themes sheexplored here.Courtesy of Harvard College Library.In 1892, the handbook of the American Federation of Labor claimed only675,117 members.This meant that nonunion workers were far more commonthan union labor, a fact clearly reflected in the exposition.ÀHow black Americans should fit into the fair was unclear.African Ameri-cans wondered whether it would be better for them to have separate exhibitswithin the exposition or to integrate their products into the general exhibitsdominated by white men.For African Americans this question was vital.Since the renewed call for a federal elections bill and a federal education act in1888 90, and the consequent rise of Tillman s virulently racist populism inthe South, the popular press had increasingly denigrated all African Ameri-cans as lazy criminals waiting for special treatment from the federal govern-ment.In this atmosphere, southern states had been revising their constitu-tions to curtail black voting, and lynching had risen dramatically.And yet thefair did not reflect this southern pattern; Illinois had a civil rights law andChicago had integrated its public schools.African Americans di"ered onhow to gain access to a place in mainstream culture and to the fair thatd"+"`" 1893 1897represented that culture.Was it better to acquiesce in the plans of the fair swhite organizers and showcase the black community s great artists and inven-tions as part of white exhibits, or was it better to fight the white organizers forequal participation in the fair with events or even days dedicated to blackculture and achievements?+"Ida B.Wells had no doubt that African Americans must boycott theexposition to call the world s attention to their plight.Despite the vociferousopposition of a number of prominent African American newspapers, whoseeditors worried that agitation would hurt the black cause by reinforcing theidea that African Americans wanted something for nothing, Wells put to-gether a pamphlet:   The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in theWorld s Columbian Exposition.  Wells herself wrote three of the pamphlet ssix chapters, and as her name was the only one on the pamphlet s cover, herradicalism seemed to speak for all the opponents of black participation in theexposition.Her chapters   Class Legislation,    The Convict Lease System, and   Lynch Law   began straight o" with a complaint that after the CivilWar,   no foot of land nor [agricultural] implement was given  to ex-slaves.From there, Wells went on to marshal evidence that the political, legal, andeconomic systems of the United States were structured to subordinate Afri-can Americans to whites.Supporting her point was the statistic that of thethousands of exposition s employees, only two of the blacks were clerks; therest were janitors, laborers, and porters (yet other African Americans ap-plauded the organizers willingness to hire blacks at all).Wells s pamphlet correctly identified the increasing exclusion of blackAmericans from middle-class society, but with its demand for governmentsupport one chapter complained that Congress had refused to fund a spe-cific black exhibit at the fair and its defense of apparent criminals as itattacked lynching and the convict lease system, it also fit perilously within themainstream image of a grasping, disa"ected African American manifesto.Incontrast, middle-class Americans looked with complacency on those AfricanAmericans who did choose to participate in the fair: Edmonia Lewis, one ofthe nation s premier sculptors; George Washington Carver, who won honor-able mention for his painting Yucca Glorioso; Booker T.Washington, whospoke at the Congress on Labor; the black college exhibitors who providedproducts for the Palace of Liberal Arts and Education.African Americanswere present at the fair, it appeared, and as the presence of Montana multi-millionaire Charles P.Grove indicated many of them were fitting well intoAmerican society without any government action on their behalf.©The Final Contest d"+""There was another side to the middle-class acceptance of black achievers.Perhaps the most visible and acceptable African American at the fair wasNancy Green, who had been hired by the R.T.Davis Milling Company torepresent the company s new product: the Aunt Jemima pancake mix.Greenperformed her role by acting as a stereotypical plantation mammy, and thecompany provided visitors with buttons featuring her picture and the slogan,  I se in town, honey.  A fifty-seven-year-old former slave who had been aservant for a Chicago judge, Green s elevation to fair sensation was in somesense a personal triumph.It was also a fierce reminder of the place of AfricanAmericans in mainstream culture.A few Edmonia Lewises were welcome inthe elite ranks of society, but most African Americans were popular onlywhen they played the role of happy servants."`"This relentlessly determined celebration of the American middle-classdream revealed the fear that America could easily slide away from the individ-ualist ideal to a world in which di"erent interests battled for governmentbenefits.Bu"alo Bill s Wild West Show was a feature of the exposition,taking up almost as much space as the buildings themselves [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]