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Classical Nudity and Eugenics at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE)

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Notes

  1. P. J. Holliday, American Arcadia: California and the Classical Tradition, Oxford, 2016. References to the classical past conferred a sense of order and prosperity in the ‘Wild West’.

  2. This study focuses on the classicizing imagery of the PPIE. For a more general treatment of the aesthetics of ‘racialism’ at the PPIE, see A. M. Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, 2nd edn, Berkeley, 2016, pp. 36–9; also R. W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916, Chicago and London, 1984, pp. 208–33; B. Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, London and Berkeley, 1983.

    The centennial of the PPIE was celebrated in 2015 with a number of events, exhibitions, and new publications. See especially: L. A. Ackley, San Francisco’s Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, Berkeley, 2014; L. Bruno, Panorama: Tales from San Francisco’s 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exposition, Petaluma, California, 2014; J. A. Ganz, ed., Jewel City: Art from San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Berkeley, 2015.

  3. The exaggerated musculature and dynamic pose of the figure recall two well-known ancient sculptures, the Hercules Farnese and Belvedere torso. Both statues are featured in Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, Plate 1 (Fig. 11), which seems to have inspired the imagery of the Race Betterment booth at the PPIE (see below, n. 34).

  4. Stern, Eugenic Nation (n. 2 above), p. 30.

  5. S. J. Moore, ‘Manliness and the New American Empire at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition’, in Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, eds. T. J. Boisseau and A. M. Markwyn, Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, 2010, p. 76.

  6. S. J. Moore, Empire on Display: San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, Norman, Oklahoma, 2013, pp. 171–72.

  7. Abigail Markwyn likewise ignores the classical past in her identification of the ideal, white, woman at the PPIE as the antithesis of the racialized other, especially the Chinese and Japanese (‘Encountering “Woman” on the Fairgrounds of the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition’, in Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, eds. T. J. Boisseau and A. M. Markwyn, Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, 2010, pp. 169–86; expanded discussion in A. M. Markwyn, Empress San Francisco: The Pacific Rim, the Great West, and California at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, Lincoln, Nebraska, and London, 2014, pp. 121–44).

  8. Ancient references extended also to the individual structures dedicated by the nation of Greece, and by the state of Oregon, which contributed a replica of the Parthenon with columns made of Douglas fir trees.

  9. J. Sund, ‘Columbus and Columbia in Chicago, 1893: Man of Genius Meets Generic Woman’, The Art Bulletin 75.3, 1993, 443–66.

  10. D. Rozas and A. B. Gottehrer, American Venus: The Extraordinary Life of Audrey Munson, Model and Muse, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 68.

  11. Munson’s nudity on screen again brought her notoriety, which only increased after she was accused of the murder of her lover’s wife. Audrey spent most of her remaining long life in a psychiatric institution. She died in 1996 at the age of 105.

  12. E. N. Armstrong rightly notes that these images of powerful males, like the Hercules of the official PPIE poster, are in stark contrast to the ‘subdued’ and ‘listless’ females throughout the fair (‘Hercules and the Muses: Public Art at the Fair’, in The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, by B. Benedict, London and Berkeley, 1983, p. 115). Feminine passivity was certainly a desirable trait at the time, and may reflect antipathy towards women’s suffrage.

  13. For the German appropriation of ancient Greek sculpture in the conceptualization of the eugenically pure, Aryan, athletic, ideal body, see J. Chapoutot, Greeks, Romans, Germans: How the Nazis Usurped Europe’s Classical Past, trans. R. R. Nybakken, Berkeley, 2016, 155–92, esp. 170–5 and 183–4 on the role of Brecker.

  14. I have been unable to establish whether Munson herself ever appeared in these entertainments.

  15. In these attractions, fairgoers threw balls at a target; if they hit it, the victim would be plunged into a tank of water.

  16. Marin Journal, vol. 53, no. 22, 3 June, 1915.

  17. Stern, Eugenic Nation (n. 3 above), p. 38–9. Nevertheless, some African-American groups embraced the PPIE as an opportunity to protest Jim Crow laws in California. See L. M. Hudson, ‘“This is Our Fair and Our State”: African Americans and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition’, California History 87, 2010, 26–45.

  18. Anti-Chinese sentiment had existed in California since the Gold Rush, but was especially fervent at the time of the PPIE on account of fears of infectious disease brought by immigrants (Stern, Eugenic Nation, [n. 3 above], p. 35).

  19. The display of living peoples was popularized in Britain in the first part of the nineteenth century; see S. Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Chicago, 2011. I thank Katherine Harloe for this reference.

  20. In the course of researching this article, I discovered that my own middle school was renamed on account of David Star Jordan’s promotion of eugenics. Until recently, most Californians were unaware of the ‘hidden history’ of eugenics in the state: R. Brave and K. Sylva, ‘Exhibiting Eugenics: Response and Resistance to a Hidden History’, The Public Historian 29.3, 2007, 33–51.

  21. R. W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions, Chicago, 1993, p. 40.

  22. J. R. Hurley, ‘Hygiene and Sanitation: Exhibits Shown at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition’, Public Health Reports 30, 1915, pp. 1377–81.

  23. F. M. Todd, The Story of the Exposition; being the official history of the international celebration held at San Francisco in 1915 to commemorate the discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the construction of the Panama Canal, San Francisco, 1921, p. 38.

  24. For an earlier precedent, see: K. Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854–1936, Oxford, 2015, pp. 217–24.

    Despite the general decline in popularity of casts, the Greek pavilion at the PPIE displayed casts of sculptures from the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, which are now held by the Classics Department at the University of California, Berkeley (R. Dreyfus, ‘The Classical Ideal in the New Athens’, in Jewel City, ed. Ganz, pp. 61–9).

  25. California State Journal of Medicine, November, 1915, p. 453.

  26. The appropriation of classical imagery to illustrate eugenic ideals was not limited to the PPIE or the United States. See: F. Brauer, ‘L’art eugénique: Biopower and the Biocultures of Neo-Lamarckian Eugenics’, L’Esprit Créateur 52, 2012, pp. 42–58; Nichols, Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace, pp. 217–24; D. Stillwell, ‘Eugenics Visualized: The Exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, 1932’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 86, 2012, 216–20; C. Katsari, ‘Inter-War Ideology in Nelly’s Nudes: Nationalism, Fascism and the Classical Tradition’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 31.1, 2013, 1–27.

  27. The role of elite colleges and universities in eugenics pageantry reappears in the 1936 Hollywood film College Holiday, a madcap comedy in which ‘Vassar Venuses – Wellesley Wenches – He-men from Harvard – Amherst Apollos [and] Swarthmore Sirens’ are matched up at a ‘Eugenic Mating Headquarters’ to create a ‘Greek-like Super Race’. The film contains many parallels with ‘Redemption’ and the Race Betterment displays at the PPIE. See K. A. Keely, ‘Scientific Selection on the Silver Screen: Madcap Eugenics in College Holiday’, in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, eds. S. Currell and C. Cogdell, Athens, Ohio, 2006, pp. 308–31.

  28. Ibid., p. 316.

  29. Official Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Race Betterment, Battle Creek, Michigan, 1915, p. 138.

  30. D. J. Galton, ‘Greek Theories on Eugenics’, Journal of Medical Ethics 24.4 (1998) 263.

  31. F. Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences, London, 1869, p. 340.

  32. Ibid., p. 343.

  33. Y. Anagnostu, ‘Forget the Past, Remember the Ancestors! Modernity, “Whiteness”, American Hellenisms, and the Politics of Memory in Early Greek America’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 22.1, 2004, pp. 25–71.

  34. W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty. Written with a view of fixing the fluctuating ideas of taste. London, 1753, p. xii.

  35. J. J. Winckelmann, ‘Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom,’ Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freien Künste, Leipzig, 1759, p. 33.

  36. Over the course of the nineteenth century, an ‘ethnic Hellenomania’ emerged in Britain and Europe, in which the ancient Greek ideal of physical beauty was celebrated as a marker of superior (Aryan) European racial stock. See A. Leoussi, ‘Making Everyone Greek: Citizens, Athletes, and Ideals of Nationhood in Nineteenth-century Britain, France, and Germany,’ in Hellenomania, eds. K. Harloe, N. Momigliano, and A. Farnoux, London, 2018, pp. 100–25, esp. pp. 106–18.

  37. N. I. Painter, The History of White People, New York and London, 2010, p. 54.

  38. For an expanded discussion, see W. Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom, Berkeley, 2001. Following the PPIE, eugenics exhibitions remained popular throughout the United States until the Second World War (Rydell, World of Fairs, pp. 38–58).

  39. Stern, Eugenic Nation (n. 3 above), p. 30.

  40. Painter, The History of White People (n. 36 above), esp. chs. 8 and 9.

  41. Smith was one of the few institutions of higher learning to have a presence at the PPIE. Why Smith chose to participate, and not nearby Mills College, which was at that time a women’s college, is unclear. The emphasis on demographics in the Smith display suggests that recruitment was a goal.

  42. Indiana was the first, in 1907.

  43. Kline, Building a Better Race (n. 37 above), p. 31. The California eugenics programme was considered so successful, it was emulated by the Nazis (Stern, Eugenic Nation [n. 3 above], p. 107; S. Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, New York and Oxford, 1994, pp. 42–5). Stern has recently called for compensation for the victims of forced sterilization: A. M. Stern et al., ‘California’s Sterilization Survivors: An Estimate and Call for Redress,’ American Journal of Public Health 107, 2017, 50–4.

  44. A. Stubblefield, ‘“Beyond the Pale”: Tainted Whiteness, Cognitive Disability, and Eugenic Sterilization,’ Hypatia 22, 2007, 162–81.

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  1. Department of History of Art, Vanderbilt University, PMB 0274, 230 Appleton Place, Nashville, TN, 37203-5721, USA

    Mireille M. Lee

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This paper is dedicated to the memory of my father, whose love for the San Francisco Bay and for California history inspired my own. I am grateful to Lynn Hudson, who first brought the Race Betterment booth at the PPIE to my attention, and to the anonymous reviewers of this journal, especially regarding the scholarship on eugenics. Any errors or omissions remain my own.

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Lee, M.M. Classical Nudity and Eugenics at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE). Int class trad 28, 51–69 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-019-00531-5

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