In 1893 the Unites States celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing by opening the Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in Chicago. The intentions of its organizers were to present a modern image of the United States, to highlight its progress and mark its accomplishments, while at the same time to educate its citizens in patriotism and art. The Columbian Exposition was, as intended, a self-portrait of American values and a broad advertisement of the nation’s cultural and technological achievements over the last century. Culminating in White City, the exposition laid bare the underlying messages of previous architectural and landscape fashions. Finally iterated in the last years of the century were attitudes formed by the material culture of its preceding decades. White City was a public display, a performance on the national level that echoed the many minor performances enacted in the everyday lives of upper- and middle-class white consumers before the Civil War. In a sense, the white things of White City provided a nostalgic retrospective, a romantically realized geography where the classes, genders, and races were clearly situated, labeled, and valued. In a sense, White City was also a hopeful projection—just as the everyday antebellum white things were—that attempted to expunge the problematic darker elements of society.
One of the organizers of the fair, George Brown Goode, envisioned it as an illustration of the “ ‘steps of progress of civilization and its arts in successive centuries, and in all the lands up to the present time’ ” (qtd. in Hinsley 346). At the center of the exhibition was White City, a model city built of iron framework and “staff”—a white, plaster-like material. Surrounded by Greek and Roman revival architecture and staff-covered sculptures, White City housed the nation’s finest technological and artistic advances. Among the displays were artifacts from Native North and South American tribes, collected by anthropologists Frederick Ward Putnam and Franz Boas, and along the periphery of White City, living displays of native groups—Eskimos and Kwakuitl Indians—camped outside and performed everyday chores and native ceremonies for onlookers. These native groups represented the beginning of America, an imaginary view of its undeveloped origins before Columbus arrived. “ ‘After a stroll amid the scenes I have only briefly sketched,’ ” Putnam suggested, “ ‘one will visit the other departments of the Exposition with singular feelings and with an appreciation which could only be aroused by such contrasts’ ” (Hinsley 348–389).
At the “exact junction” between the Court of Honor in White City and the outlying entertainment district of the Midway Plaisance—officially within White City but confined to a separate territory—stood the Woman’s Building (Fryer 23). Here were presented women’s accomplishments throughout the ages, including art and philosophy as well as quilting and cooking. Harpers magazine announced that one could view simultaneously a woman darning a sock and a painting produced by an American woman. The report adds, however, that viewers could not expect to see “ladies” of the latter group doing work as they might observe the former; in fact, the labor of the more cultivated class would not be displayed at all—only its products. The building’s architecture was described by viewers according to Victorian feminine standards, called “ ‘the most peaceably human of all the buildings … like a man’s ideal of woman’ ” and “ ‘chaste and timid’ ” (Fryer 25).
In contrast to the seriousness of White City’s displays, the Midway Plaisance featured carnival exhibits to be seen for a fee. Here was the entertainment side of White City’s accomplishments, filled with carnival attractions, side shows, and a “jumble of foreignness” (Hinsley 351). The Midway included attractions such as “ ‘Dwarf Elephant Lily, 35 inches High,’ ” “ ‘jugglers and magicians, camel drivers and donkey boys,’ ” as well as “ ‘dancing-girls from Cairo and Algiers, from Samoa and Brazil’ ” and other “ ‘plump and piquant damsels’ ” (Hinsley 346, 353). The Midway as an evolutionary journey was understood. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son commented, “ ‘You have before you the civilized, the half-civilized and the savage worlds to choose from—or rather to take one after the other,’ ” and Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote, “ ‘All the continents are here represented, and many nations of each continent, civilized, semi-civilized, and barbarous, from the Caucasian to the African black’ ” (qtd. in Weddle 115–116). African blacks, representing an exotic culture with strange tools and garb, were accorded a place in the fair, although only the lowest.
African American blacks, by distinction, were “systematically excluded from the fair,” except for a few contributions by black women displayed in the Woman’s Building. When blacks protested this erasure, a Jubilee Day was designated for them, which they boycotted (Weddle 116). In its year-long coverage of the fair, Harper’s magazine offered an official, if insulting, status for African Americans within the bounds of Chicago’s Jackson Park. The journal presented numerous pictures and sketches of well-dressed white fairgoers at the exhibits, backgrounded by the striking architecture and machinery, or gazing on the strange costumes of Egyptians and Chinese. The African American family entered the fair represented by the “Johnsons,” to whom a number of derogatory cartoons were devoted. In the first, a large black man with flashing white eyes and teeth accompanies his large wife and two children, speaks in exaggerated dialect, and otherwise betrays ignorance of all cultured events (Harpers 770). Their unwelcome presence at the site of America’s self-definition becomes clear in the cartoon labeled, “The Johnson family visits the village of the South Sea Islanders.” Here, surrounded by thatched huts and gazed upon by well-dressed white gentlemen, Mr. Johnson looks at a near-naked Islander the same shade as he is. He asks the man, “Does you speak English?” and the native replies, “Yes. Does you?” (Harper’s 914).
In its messages and visual presentation, White City was only a more self-consciously staged version of the plantation mansions and middle-class dining rooms of the early nineteenth century. The successful design of White City encouraged, as it celebrated, a resurgence of whitening at the end of the nineteenth century. It signaled the culmination of the century’s work, but also the beginning of its own conclusion. The whitening trend in material objects fanned out to touch other areas, die out in some, and become entrenched in others. The ideological remnants of whiteness, however, did not cease: they only began to lose their precision of form. The whiteness of houses and dishes would afterwards be overwhelmed by their commonness; the whiteness of gravestones and women would be critiqued, pushed underground, or refashioned into darker models. Louis Sullivan, teacher to Frank Lloyd Wright, complained that White City halted all architectural progress by resurrecting the fashion of white revival houses for perhaps another half century (H. Morrison 184). In 1901, Ladies’ Home Journal editor Edward Bok began publishing house models by Frank Lloyd Wright, and “[t]housands of readers sent in $5 for a complete set of plans and specifications” for his white modern architecture (Wright 164). The modern buildings designed in the 1920s by Le Corbusier were starkly white, and in 1925 he could declare that “ ‘Whitewash is extremely moral’ ” (Wigley xvi). The modern middle-class house of the twentieth century, although devoid of Gothic ornamentation, nonetheless shared whiteness with its early nineteenth-century precursors. But the popularity itself rendered whiteness in houses inconspicuous—as it did with dishes. The white ceramic, finally achieved by European manufacturers at the turn of the nineteenth century, was unremarkable by the turn of the twentieth.
Suellen Hoy argues that cleanliness as a democratically applied ideal did not take hold in America until the middle of the nineteenth century, although it then surpassed European standards of cleanliness and peaked in the 1950s. Personal hygiene, arising at the beginning of the nineteenth century, radiated outward, as did home beautifying and landscaping ideals, to encompass clean cities and countrysides. Magazine advertisements marketed cleanliness as a prerequisite of good citizenship: Fels-Naptha soap addressed immigrant women’s ignorance with ads entitled “Teaching Mrs. Rizzuto American ideas” and “Mrs. Zambruski doesn’t quite understand” (Hoy 86). At the turn of the twentieth century cleanliness was marketed as “American,” but it was still white and still economically productive. For household interiors, “[w]hite was revered as a sign of sanitary awareness. At first, concrete basements were white-washed; then living rooms and dining rooms were whitewashed as well. Specifications for kitchen walls called for washable tiles or less expensive enameled sheet metal, lightweight oilcloth, or enamel paint—always white. Even appliances had touches of shiny white porcelain” (Wright, Building 162). Readers of The House Beautiful were told that “physicians who studied the effects of color on the mind considered bare white walls as effective as a rest cure.”1
As with the kitchen itself, the food at the end of the nineteenth century became whiter: “[o]ne of the major civilizing influences in the American kitchen was widely recognized to be white sauce” (Shapiro 91). The basic white sauce, made from flour, butter, and milk, was recommended as a covering for vegetables, meats, soups, salads, and desserts. Even the choice of words used to describe the role of white sauce reveals how the message of white things could reach the minutest corners of the house: among “scientific cooks,” there was “virtually no cooked food that at one time or another was not hidden, purified, enriched, or ennobled with white sauce” (91). Certainly, whiteness as a synonym for civilized, pure, rich, and noble was well established by the end of the century, if a viscous layering of it could effect such drastic ends. The “fondness for whiteness” shown by women’s journals and their followers at the end of the nineteenth century rendered meals refined, nutritious, and suggestive of “harmony and order” (95). Many of the scientific dinner recipes offered meals that were “entirely white.”2
Blanketed food served to whiten the place settings which, after the Civil War, began to change from entirely white vessels with white molded trim to white dishes with increasingly colorful decorations. As technological advances increased mass-production of ceramics, an “arts and crafts” movement also arose that valued hand-crafted and hand-painted vessels. By 1886, the author of the Crockery and Glass Journal proclaimed that one could no longer find an “ ‘American family of the great middle strata of this country that has not abolished the sepulchral white for the more pleasing and attractive decorated services for the table’ ” (qtd. in Blaszczyk 147).
In the final third of the nineteenth century, rural cemeteries with elaborately sculpted monuments planted among willow trees and winding paths gave way to the rolling smoothness of park cemeteries. Cemetery superintendents, promising perpetual care for the interred, preferred lawn cemeteries as easier to tend. They began regulating against enclosing fences and condemned monuments as individualistic and misdirected. Suggestions of “ ‘death, sorrow, or pain’ ” were to be eliminated in favor of a level “ ‘sod covered grave marked only by a single stone sunk even with the turf’ ” (Farrell 120, 122). By 1887, the popularity of white marble gravestone had clearly passed, when an Association of American Cemetery Superintendents speaker assumed, “ ‘as the most beautiful and the best in every way, that the so-called park plan will be adopted’ ” (Farrell 116).
The endings of a trend should be examined as well as its beginnings: what disappears may reveal more than what remains popular. An object’s absence from the material record may not signal the death of an idea, but rather that idea’s cultural entrenchment. By the twentieth century, the cultural work of white things had changed, as had their appearance in the material and literary record. My use of examples from twentieth-century novels to begin each chapter began as an attempt to demonstrate the vestiges of what white things wrought on racial, class, and gendered constructions. The messages of these things remained, I hypothesized, since they could signify similarly in literature of even a century after the trend’s wane. Only in reviewing my examples did I discover how they ordered themselves symmetrically. Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936, the same year as Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Both are written by white Southerners born at the turn of the century (Faulkner in 1897; Mitchell in 1900); both are set in the antebellum South. Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Morrison’s The Bluest Eye were published in 1969 and 1970, respectively, by African American women born at the beginning of the Great Depression (Angelou in 1928; Morrison in 1931). Mitchell’s and Faulkner’s work, perhaps as with White City, hearken to a time when the actual landscape was integrated but the world of material things ideally imposed a social order. On the other hand, Morrison’s and Angelou’s stories are set in the years before World War II (or before Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas), when social and physical space was legally segregated; their young, female, black characters are aware that almost all things continue to signify racially—teeth, clothes, dishes, front yards, even dolls. Their characters attack the racial codings violently, materially, through these things.
Because race is a primary social designation for nonwhite Americans, it continues to be proclaimed loudly in everyday things; although many of the things have changed, meanings cling to previously powerful goods such as china and plantation architecture as well. One of the accomplishments of white things was that their work erased itself, for these white things to become so common as to become invisible, so standardized as to seem dependable, so obtainable as to be “normal”—so that the meaning of racial whiteness also seems inherent, inevitable, monolithic. Thus white things contributed in the early nineteenth century to the problems faced by “whiteness” scholars today-that “white” does not register as a racial designation, but rather describes the social norm, an unchallengable universal. Casting back to when these things were remarkable, we find that they were also making marks. The everyday object must be studied, because the most insignificant coffee cup might alter our behavior incrementally—but indelibly.