Simultaneously, many Americans feared that "progress" threatened to erase the last vestiges of an
older, simpler way of life, both in the built environment and in the nation's values. Preserving the
relics of the past and erecting commemorative statues and arches held both threats at bay by
affirming and marking the importance of an American past. By constructing a beautiful and
historically resonant urban landscape, many Americans hoped to impose order on an unruly
society and a chaotic urban landscape.
But the creation and celebration of a canonical narrative of the American past was not the only
response to these threats. Another was to incorporate ethnic and racial minorities into the
narrative of American progress as picturesque urban peasants. Their supposedly traditional,
colorful lifestyles could then serve as tonics for those who suffered from the stresses of modern
life. Moreover, their "picturesque" neighborhoods were the aesthetic complement of the historical
statuary and stately, beautiful business and public buildings appearing in many cities. This method
of dulling the twin threats of the backward and the modern was typical of turn of the century
urban guidebooks and urban sketches. It was a part of an uncoordinated campaign to repossess
the nation's large cities for well-to-do white Americans.
Ethnic slumming was integral to the increasingly popular city tour at turn of the century. In the
1850s, the authors of urban description had portrayed cities as dangerous places whose social
institutions were only beginning to impose order on urban chaos. By 1900, a rapidly growing
tourist industry was beginning to market urban destinations along with the more customary rural
tours. In order to make cities hospitable for refined tourism, the guidebook authors drew on the
model provided by the industrial expositions. In the case of ethnic slumming, the midway
provided the example.
Usually separated from the main fairgrounds, the midway comprised a series of national or ethnic
villages, streets, or typical buildings, intermixed with the freak shows, novelties, and food
concessions. While national exhibits in the main halls of the exposition displayed the fine arts,
manufactures, and agricultural products, those on the midway displayed the people themselves.
Writing in 1893, teenager John Lunneen wrote a list of "The things, etc. that I seen in Chicago
and at the Fair," including "The foreigners I seen." His list placed the Japanese, Chinese,
Esquimaux [sic], Italians, and French, among others, on par with the first bell rung in America,
Pope Pius IX's chair, a $15,000 cloak, a pyramid of oranges, "A very large turtle, Blood sucking
sharks," and more (1).
The midway exhibits made ethnic differences a salable commodity literally by charging visitors a
fee to view dances or skits. They also did so more subtly by packaging them for the tourist's visual
appropriation. Claiming to be educational displays and occuring within the genteel boundaries the
exposition, these exhibits allowed visitors to enjoy themselves publicly, watching belly dancers or
partly nude men and women, without risking their respectability (2). The temporary, stylized
quality of the contact between tourists and the peoples on display vacated it of the social and
physical dangers that such mixing posed in real cities. These were not people with whom the
well-to-do Americans who dominated exposition crowds would interact on a daily basis. Nor
could they be mistaken for the tourists' social equals.
Guidebook authors transferred this commercialized confidence in the solidity of racial or ethnic
difference to their portrayal of the ethnic and racial minorities who lived and worked in American
cities. For instance, an advertisement for the midway concession "Street in Cairo" (1893)
described it as "a composite structure which combines the most beautiful architectural features of
Cairo" peopled by "a throng of natives" who daily performed artisanal crafts, sword, candle, and
belly dances, and a full-blown wedding. Just as the advertisement claimed, "Enter the eastern
portal..., and you realize your dream of the Orient" (3).
The neighborhoods of ethnic and racial minorities in large cities hardly resembled the carefully
designed midway villages. Most residents did not spend their lives staging "traditional" wedding
ceremonies for the delectation of outsiders. But increasingly, guidebook writers and tour
operators represented the places and the people as if they were midway concessions. In 1904, a
guidebook writer described San Francisco's Chinatown as a "panopticon of peepshows" (4). As
at a peepshow, the tourist could observe without having to interact with the people at whom he or
she peeped.
In fact, San Francisco's Chinatown came the closest of any minority neighborhood to being
constructed as a midway concession. As early as the 1870s, this small, densely crowded and
impoverished neighborhood just above the city's business section was the stage for an increasingly
standardized tour. Almost invariably, the tour was a three-hour, night-time visit in the company of
a hired guide. Initially, these guides were moonlighting police detectives, but by the 1890s there
were small firms specializing in this work.
The guide conducted his party through the streets to see the residents, the stores with their signs
in Chinese characters, and the decorated balconies. Next came the joss house or temple, followed
by the theater, where the slummers paid extra to enter, sat on the stage, mocked the music and
acting, and always left after half an hour. Descending to the depths, they visited a gambling den if
one could be found and always peeped in at an opium den. They concluded their tour at a
restaurant, where they nibbled and poked at a few strange cakes and turned up their noses at the
unsweetened, milkless tea (5).
In April 1906, Chinatown burned to the ground, along with most of the rest of downtown San
Francisco. A longstanding campaign to remove the Chinese from the center of the city to its
periphery, or even across the bay to Oakland, gained renewed energy. But countering the
venerable anti-Chinese campaign was a coalition of white American and resident Chinese
businessmen. They argued that Chinatown was so valuable to the city as a tourist attraction that it
should not be removed. Instead, it should be reconstructed and made to look more authentically
Chinese. Endorsing the proposal in 1907, the San Francisco Board of Real Estate stated that "the
rebuilding of the fronts of buildings in the Chinese style of architecture will make it picturesque in
appearance and attractive to tourists and visitors...." (6).
The reconstruction involved putting pagoda roofs on a few ordinary American buildings that
housed Chinese bazaars; a pagoda-topped telephone exchange, in which the female operators
wore "traditional" dress; and fanciful, dragon-embellished lampposts. The Chinese-American
leader of the reconstruction campaign, Look Tin Eli, declared that "San Francisco's new
Chinatown is so much more beautiful, artistic, and so much more emphatically Oriental, [thanl the
old Chinatown....[It is] an ideal Oriental city" (7). In other words, Chinatown was transformed
physically into what it had become imaginatively by 1906: an idealized depiction of Chinese life
that white American tourists could safely visit for a taste of the exotic. In short, a midway
concession on a grand scale.
Even without the physical reconstruction of ethnic minority neighborhoods, the slumming tour
often mimicked the experience of strolling down the midway from concession to concession. In
1891, the author of Rand, McNally's Handy Guide to New York conducted his readers on a
"ramble at night" into the Italian areas on Mulberry Bend, then to Chinatown on Mott Street. The
Bowery, the Russian Quarter, and "Judea" appeared in quick succession. In the 1850s and 1860s,
similar tours of urban slums had served as sensationalist exposes of the misery and vice gnawing
at the nation's vitals. By contrast, turn of the century tourists were unaffected by what they saw.
They sauntered out of Little Italy "with no sense of alarm, since no vendetta has been declared
against us," and had "no temptation to heed" the beckoning of the jaunty prostitutes (8). The
point of the turn of the century tour was seeing the sights, not revealing the depths.
The midway was not the only model for the festive public deployment of racial difference. Ethnic
or national origin became increasingly important in organizing the representation of a city's social
order in parades and other public events. Ethnic contingents began to replace trade-based ones in
many parades. Gendered symbols of national origin, such as the Maid of Erin or Columbia, grew
increasingly common. The businessmen who organized many public festivals deliberately
reinforced this sense of cultural affiliation by seeking to include groups of men from most of the
city's minority communities. Division Five in Chicago's Centennial parade (1903) marshalled
several of that city's national societies, whose members dressed in their "native" costume. No
parade in San Francisco was complete without the appearance of the great Chinese dragon. The
notable exception was African-Americans, who were very rarely asked or permitted to march (9).
Like the exposition midway, the floats and marching delegations gave ethnic differences a
discrete, conventionalized form. In celebrating and packaging these differences, both the
exposition concessions and the parade floats drew upon the notion that culture--literature, arts,
and popular folkways-grew out of race or national origins. This belief allowed tourists to regard
the living and working conditions of ethnic minorities as cultural expressions of their nature:
"About whatever these strange people do, there is an elusive, indefinable touch which is
distinctively racial and picturesque ....it serves at once to create atmosphere" (10). These foreign
peoples were artifacts their culture, like the inhabitants of midway villages. They were not
members of a social realm or a history shared with the tourists.
Guidebook writers also employed time to establish an unbridgeable social distance between
tourists and the people they toured. Evolutionary thinkers maintained that the different races
represented different stages in the process of evolution. Just as they occupied the top of the racial
pyramid, Caucasians stood at the forefront of progress. White, nativeborn Americans understood
racial and ethnic minorities as living at a different time, meaning both in the past and at a slower
pace (11). Mired in "tradition," non-whites and non-Anglo-Saxons still lived just as they had for
centuries. Writing in 1902, Charles Keeler apostrophized San Francisco's Chinese residents as
"Oh, that strange mysterious horde in the center of San Francisco..., living in a civilization as old
as the pyramids!" (12).
In contrast, white Americans considered themselves the most modern of peoples. In place of
tradition, they had reason; in place of superstition, they had science; in place of stasis, they had
progress. But modern life unfortunately had its costs. Its fast pace, the insistent pressure of
"progress," and the erosion of older certainties and social connections made living at the leading
edge of civilization stressful, cold, and bland. The elimination of foolish superstitions and useless
traditions was the way of civilization, but the rationalized result lacked the warmth, color, and
meaningful social ties of "traditional" ways of life (13).
Ethnic slumming thus offered white, well-to-do Americans something more than simply an
evening of risque enjoyment. Soothing the strains of the incessant haste that plagued the most
civilized of peoples, ethnic slumming offered an ersatz, itinerant sense of place. Defined as living
outside of time and lacking history, the ethnic peoples who were the objects of tourism embodied,
for white American tourists, a strong sense of place both ethnically and socially. The "tradition"
said to govern their lives expressed not simply their temporal backwardness, but also their
acceptance of their low social place.
The urban sketches of Hapgood Hutchins (1910) reveal this dynamic clearly: "The middle-class
person..., striving constantly to rise, to get where he is not, is comparatively vulgar, graceless, and
unformed." But the Irish tough, the east side Jew, or the spieling girls in the slums knew and were
content in their place; therefore, they were straightforward, honest, and vigorous in their
expression. In company with other anxious moderns, interaction with such people was something
for which Hutchins' "nerves and his intelligence sometimes 1onged" (14).
But, significantly, Hutchins himself had no place in his own narrative--except for the crucial fact
that he orchestrated it. While celebrating the publicness of the poor, he retained his own privacy
by traveling from his own world into theirs at his own convenience. While "getting at" the low, he
offered them no access to himself. His literary pretensions notwithstanding, Hutchins was a
tourist. With the rise of organized tours, even the ladies could indulge in this kind of vacation
from the stresses of modernity without risking their reputations.
Slumming was part of the revolt against the strictures of gentility, yet it also recouped public,
urban spaces for respectable people. Tourist agencies encouraged their customers to believe that
they could repossess the city, culturally and spatially, without any loss of respectability. Historic
preservation, the recreation of a noble past in a chaotic present, was one method. Ethnic
slumming, incorporating ethnic and racial minorities into the narrative of American progress as
reservoirs of "tradition," was another. The two complemented each other both imaginatively and
physically, in the built environment of the city. Even as Americans laid claim to a heroic history
and thus to progress itself, they cast ethnic and racial minorities as outside of history. Similarly, as
Americans sought to make their cities magnificent and to preserve and memorialize their chosen
past, they cast the neighborhoods of minority peoples as picturesque oases amid the grandeur of
modernity.
ENDNOTES
1. John Lunneen, "My Visit to Chicago and the World's Fair," 7-8, diary written in Oct. 1893,
Chicago Historical Society. Lunneen was fifteen at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition.
On the midways, see Robert Rydell, All the World's A Fair: Visions of Empire at American
International Fxpositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and David
Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993),
ch. 6.
2. Nasaw, Going Out, ch. 6, points out the way in which expositions legitimized otherwise
marginally respectable activities.
3. "Street in Cairo, World's Columbian Exposition," World's Expositions, box 8, Warshaw
Collection of Business Americana, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.
Edward Said, Orientalism, has demonstrated how this "dream" was a systematic distortion of the
complexities of "Oriental" societies in service to western imperialism.
4. C.A. Biggins, To California and Back: A Book of Practical Information for Travelers to the
Pacific (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1904): 235.
5. This summary is taken from my unpublished essay, " 'Chinatown, of course, One Must see' :
San Francisco's Chinatown as a Tourist Attraction, 1870-1915" (1993). Visits to lodging houses,
brothels, a segregated hospital and the leper colony were also possible but less usual. In 1904, the
Chinese six companies, representing the community s merchant elite, protested against the tour's
misrepresentations to the city's police commission. It agreed to regulate the tours but their content
remained unaltered.
6. "Oriental Buildings for the New Chinatown," San Francisco Merchants' Association
Review11:124 (Jan. 1907): 7. Also, whites owned most land in Chinatown and made good profits
renting it at high prices. Chinese San Franciscans could not obtain housing elsewhere in the city
until after World War II.
7. Look Tin Eli, 'Our New Oriental City--Veritable Fairy Palaces Filled with the Choicest
Treasures of the Orient," in San Francisco, The Metropolis of the West (San Francisco: Western
Press Association, 1910?): np.
8. Ernest Ingersoll, Rand, McNally & Co.'s Handy Guide to New York City, Brooklyn, Staten
Island and Other Districts Included in the Enlarged City, 11th ed. (Chicago and New York:
Rand, McNally: 1901): ch. 7; quotations from 152 and 157 respectively. The "englarged city"
referred to Greater New York, established in 1898.
9. Official Program/Chicago Centennial Jubilee, Containing a Complete Daily
Program...(Chicago: Chicago Centennial Committee, 1903): np; Tuesday, Sept. 29. Mary Ryan,
Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1990): ch. 1; David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the
Early Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990): ch. 5. The
exception to the exclusion of black Americans was when they were asked to portray Native
Americans, who were sometimes in short supply.
10. Charles Reeler, San Francisco and Thereabout (San Francisco: A.M. Robertson, 1906;
reprint of 1902 edition published by the California Promotion Committee): 60. He was referring
to the city's Chinese residents.
11. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the
United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995): ch. 1, 2; Lears, No Place
of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York:
Pantheon, 1981): ch. 3.
12. Keeler, San Francisco and Thereabout, 59.
13. Lears, No Place of Grace; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.
14. Hapgood Hutchins, Types from the City Streets (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1910): 18,
158. Hutchins described middle-class people as leading a "Cook's-tour-like voyage through life," 18.