The birth of modern Seattle

Seattle has wound up a nearly year-long celebration of its first world's fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909. Already being planned: the 50th anniversary of the city's second: 1962's Century 21 Exposition in 2012. If expos themselves, at least in America, are considered virtually extinct (the last USA fair was in 1984), is it really worth the time and public funds to maunder over expos past?

The AYP centennial produced books, Web articles, a TV documentary, and shows at various museums (the Burke, MOHAI). It helped to surface artifacts and even old film footage in collections and closets around the state. There were re-enactments of AYP events, including a transcontinental car race and the re-construction of an AYP Viking ship.

Highlighted in stories, pamphlets, and lectures were ways in which the exposition ushered in modern Seattle. AYP came the end of the growth surge — between 1880 and 1910 — that transformed Seattle from a frontier village of a few thousand people to a city of a quarter million, and the fastest growing burg in the country, fully connected by telegraph, railroad, and steamships. It left us the layout of University of Washington campus, expanded the Olmsted legacy of boulevards and parks, and served as a catalyst for upgrading urban infrastructure with more trolley lines.

The fair expanded and refined the commercial memes of Cascadian and Pacific Rim connections that have only gained momentum in the century since. It was, it can be argued, the birth of modern Seattle.

But, AYP shows us that we're also the children of the boomtown of our Gold Rush forefathers, a city still obsessed with growth, hype, real estate, and the expansion of commercial empires. Railroad robber baron James J. Hill, the Moses-headed mascot of AYP (his impressive bust still keeps vigil outside More Hall, the UW's engineering school) was the Bill Gates of his day, the entrepreneur whose coattails we would ride to prosperity in a global economy.

Scholarship has changed the pictures of the exposition, however. Today's expo academics see world's fairs of the AYP era as cheerleaders for racism and class visions. The "White City" of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition was more than glittering architecture (emulated at AYP); it was also the embodiment of the "white man's burden," a call to save the world by colonizing it.

AYP celebrated the exploitation of natural resources and stretched Manifest Destiny across the Pacific. As the U.S. was still in the process of subjugating the Philippines, the fair featured an Igorot village of "wild" Filipino "dog-eaters" who danced for the crowds and were cited as evidence for the necessity of white civilization's ambitious terraforming. Other exhibits displayed stolen Indian relics, Eskimos from the Arctic, and Nez Perce fresh from their own trail of tears.

AYP was not alone in, let's call it the expo-tation of race and ethnic groups, from the Hottentots who had their buttocks probed and prodded in Paris to Ota Benga the Pygmy who was exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, and later in a cage at the Bronx zoo. People flock to fairs not despite such outrages, but because of them.

A world's fair's lure is the exotic, the curious, the incredible: playing up ethnic and racial differences, claiming the nearest brown man is a cannibal. Presenting the violent Wild West of Wounded Knee as a circus of wonders, as Buffalo Bill Cody did, makes for great box office. As with most expos, even the mundane are tarted up to get attention. In AYP's California Building, visitors saw a life-size elephant made of walnuts, and a cow made of almonds. One other legacy of AYP: it popularized Seattle's Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe as a source of Northwest relics, from fossils to Indian art to tourist junk.

A global bazaar tends to encourage exhibitors to ham it up, and provides an educational gloss for the wicked. Victorians who covered their bodies in garments could see nearly nude dancers in public if they were loin-clothed Igorot tribesmen or "Egyptian" belly dancers." The dirty secret of most expos is that the most popular features are the carnival midways, like AYP's "Paystreak" zone. Where scholars see imperialism, the average citizen remembers the fun. When Bill Gates' biographers asked him about his memories of Century 21, where the Microsoft founder was likely exposed to his first computer, what he really remembered was riding a roller coaster.

If scholarship is clucking its disapproval over the excesses of empires-at-play, neither have they ignored the sometimes complicated response of the people being exploited. The Burke Museum has an exhibit called "Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Indigenous Voices Reply," and it hosted a symposium on that topic. Expo historian Robert Rydell of Montana State University spoke about how expos often evoked a response from exploited or neglected peoples: Booker T. Washington made his famous Atlanta Compromise speech at the Cotton States Exposition of 1895.