1. (More) Unfinished Business: Structures of the American Psyche
Champion boxer Joe Lewis, Fredi Washington, and others in a skit in the ‘Gay New Orleans Village’ in the Amusement Zone.
In 1930s America, the study of Eugenics was actively pursued by many who sought to prove a scientific basis for the superiority of a white, Nordic race. The archive’s representation of blacks at the Fair seems overwhelmingly to portray celebrities in acts of minstrelism or product placement.
An exhibit analyzing race was organized by Dr. Gerald Wendt, the Fair’s director of science and education. (Wendt, 1950s author of The Prospects of Nuclear Power and Technology, You and the Atom, and Atomic Energy and the Hydrogen Bomb, later headed the publication center at UNESCO. During WWII Dr. Wendt served as a captain in the Chemical Warfare Division and aided in the development by the United States military and chemical experts of several new toxic gases and the gas mask.)
Professor Franz Boas, exhibit collaborator and national chairman of The American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, writes, “Ignorance, prejudice and unwillingess to examine uncongenial facts are elements that endanger the wellbeing of a republic which is governed by the will of the people. [The Committee} considers it one of iits main tasks to lay bare the sources of prejudice...”
Boas (a German immigrant known as the founding father of anthropology in the United States) worked to refute the premises of Eugenics:
Anthropology is the investigation of human being. Franz Boas’ dream was of a big anthropology that studied the ‘whole’ of this being, which included the interconnection of the cultural and the biological in all places and all times. Sadly Boas never attained his dream because it was so necessary at the beginning of the 20th century to demonstrate that one biological-cultural connection did not exist, that between race and culture. (Stephen Reyna, “Boas’s Dream and the Emergence of Neuroanthropology,” Anthropology News)
(above) Black celebrity Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson performs in costume, with telescope; Robinson christening the Temple of Jitterbugs.
Robinson with members of the National Association of Colored Women.
‘Native costume’ and crafts in the Amusement Zone’s Seminole Village. Films of the time reveal the poorly constructed amusement features as tawdry sideshows. False and sensational representions of the lives and customs of native cultures were mixed among attractions of nude burlesque and other carnival acts.
(below) Today at the Fair, Thurs August 17, 1939. Amidst minor sideshow articles, ‘Seminole Indians On Death Fast’ reports on the mysterious death within the Amusement Zone‘s Seminole Village.
Racism persists as America’s ‘original sin’ and continues to vex almost every aspect of our democracy, with the current administration embracing xenophobic policies for handling voting, policing, and immigration. It’s impossible to keep up with every news story, both here and abroad, with massive migrations due to climate events and genocidal regimes testing every nation’s borders and policies.