Microphone
But among Jefferson's descriptions of rivers and seaports, mountains and climate, he expressed his views on the inhabitants of the new land.
People from America, Europe and Africa.
I advanceth as a suspicion only that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites.
And the endowments both of body and mind.
Microphone
It is possible to make the argument that Thomas Jefferson is the first person to truly articulate a theory of race in the United States.
And in effect, he has to do so.
He has said in the Declaration of Independence that we are all created equal.
Well, if, in fact, we're all created equal, and if, in fact, we're entitled to our liberty, then how can he possibly own 175 slaves and going up to about 225 slaves at the peak of his slavehold?
Microphone
It notes Jefferson's words appeared to justify slavery at a time when many were admonishing the Founding Fathers for espousing freedom.
while continuing to support a system of human bones.
The power, they had to because, how can promote liberty, freedom, democracy, on the hand, and the system of slavery, and exploitation, of peoples who are non white, on the other.
And the way you do that is to say,
Yeah, but you know, there's something different about these people.
Microphone
This whole business of inalienable rights, that's fine, and only applies to certain people.
In the moment when we become a nation is critical for our understanding of both American nationality and race, we accept the notion that all men are created equal, but then perhaps some of those people who are enslaved are not quite men.
Microphone
That is, we'll keep our ideas of American nationality, but will write certain people out of the human family.
The suspicions of black racial inferiority, raised by Jefferson, had evolved over time.
Shaped in part by an intense need for labor in the American colonies.
Microphone
In 1619, when the first Africans arrived in Virginia, religion and wealth, not physical...
Blackness and whiteness were not yet sheer categories of identity.
They were more likely to distinguish between Christians and Evans than they were between our people's cars.
They regarded a person's status in life as somehow more fundamental than what color they were or what their particular background was.
Microphone
The different ways in which those hierarchies of social class and social power became filled in with the content of race, so that the lowest class would be a black class, and the highest class would be some particularly pale white class.
That was a very gradual process.
For the first 50 years in the American colonies, most of the laborers were European indentured servants, many toiling on tobacco plantations in wretched conditions.
Microphone
With fewer Europeans braving the treacherous journey across the Atlantic, planters facing a potential labor shortage, turned to the transatlantic slave trade, and gradually replaced invention servants with African slaves.
They found what they considered an endless labor supply.
People who could be readily identified, and so when they ran away, they couldn't just meld into the population like Native Americans could.
Microphone
People who knew how to grow tobacco, people who knew how to grow rice. From their standpoint, the ideal labor source.
Colony by colony, new laws made slavery, permanent, and inheritable for black people.
And for the first time, the word white, rather than Christian or Englishman, began appearing in colonial statues.
To what extent, you could say this was actually a conscious strategy, or what extent was the result of a number of unthinking decisions that resulted in this, but it did buttress a kind of social structure.
Microphone
As Africans, slavery increased, lower class Europeans would...
Bout dungeons responsible for policing the growing slave population.
The ordinary white people are not gonna be complicit, just unless they get something out of them.
My belief is that payoff was in a certain status prestige recognition, ego enhancement that ordinary white people could derive from racism.
Microphone
And so there was a kind of bargain struck.
In any of the European descendant poor whites, began to identify themselves, if not directly with the rich whites, certainly with being white.
And here you get the emergence of this idea of a white race as a way to distinguish themselves from those dark skinned people who they associate with perpetual slavery.
Slavery became identified with Africans. Blackness and slavery went together.
Microphone
That gave the white American the idea that Africans were a different kind of people.
There's a racial divide emerging that people begin to see as natural.
That's part of where the idea of race comes from, is just in the tendency for people to see existing power relationships, as having some sort of natural quality to them.
Microphone
By the time Jefferson sat down to write notes on the state of Virginia in 1781, a plantation economy dependent on slavery was deeply entrenched.
Slavery had become so widespread that to many whites it seemed the natural state for black people.
But when Jefferson turned his attention to Indians in notes, one of their natural about them was their status as a free people, brave warriors protecting their lands.
Microphone
This led Jefferson to suspect that Indians were not much different from Europeans.
Their vivacity and activity of mind is equal to ours in the same situation.
We shall probably find that they are formed in mind, as well as in body, on the same module with the Homo sapiens Europaus.
The original knew the Indians was that they were naturally white people, and they looked slightly brown, because of exposure to the sun, and because of the way they treated their skin.
Microphone
Jefferson felt that, among many people at that time, felt that the Indians were good human material, and the problem was, it was not race, but culture.
That the Indians were savages, but they could be civilized.
Jefferson and his contemporaries were also influenced by European enlightenment thinkers, who believe that education and environment could improve people.
But when Jefferson wrote about the Indians, he had little direct contact with them.
Microphone
Most Virginia tribes had been pushed west, or killed off by war and European diseases.
Those in direct conflict with the Indians, those who were crossing the mountains to Kentucky or Tennessee, didn't think of the Indians in an enlightenment view.
They thought of Indians as savages who were trying to destroy peaceful settlers coming in, and thought they should be driven out or exterminated.
Microphone
There was an error encroaching my population.
We wanted our land.
As a people, we were hunters, as, you know, as anthropologists would describe us as hunters and gatherers.
We saw ourselves as equal people, we were free people.
We had always been free people.
Many Indians fought to maintain their freedom and land.
Within a decade of independence.
Microphone
Wars with frontier tribes like the Shawnee, Miami, Kickapoo, and others.
threaten the stability of the young nation.
The United States decided that the cheapest, easiest way to avoid an Indian war along its entire frontier, and also to acquire Indian land, was to civilize the Indians.
Civilization included Christian religion.
Microphone
It included an English education and commercial agriculture.
If you could convert Indians from hunters into farmers, if you could confine them to a small acreage, then you would have all this surplus land, which could be open to white settlement.
Civilization policy was actually designed to assimilate us into America.
Microphone
It was ultimately to make us farmers to live like the colonists lived. The civilization policy was to make us brown white men.
In notes on the state of Virginia, Jefferson implied Indians could be assimilated into American society.
But he did not support assimilating black people.
He wrote a deep rooted prejudices, entertained by the whites, and of physical and moral differences separating the groups.
Microphone
Jefferson seems to have thought about it as a Virginia plantation owner, who has been brought up among slaves, and who, it is part of heart, I would suppose, finds it difficult to conceive that those slaves are fully as equal.
It was through those eyes that the man who wrote the nation's credo, all men are created equal.
The fourth, as a suspicion only, that the blacks are inferior to the whites, and the endowments both of body and mind.
Microphone
This difference is not simply a product of circumstance.
It's not simply a product of the environment, but Jefferson broaches this possibility that it is something much deeper, something innate.
We would say, in our own language, Jefferson didn't have this language, we would say genetic.
But he says we will not be able to know this until science gives us the answers.
So he calls on science.
He accepts American science on the path of trying to figure out what it is scientifically that makes blacks inferior to whites.
Microphone
And, of course, if that's the question the scientist asks, then that's the question the scientist will answer.
And so, from that moment on, you start to build a case that is specifically geared to tell the world that these people are different.
Theories of a race are used to do that.
In the next century, as the nation expanded, so would ideas about human difference.
Microphone
Science and slavery would help focus the nation's attention on the nature of black people.
But land would propel Native Americans into the racial spotlight.
Arising nation spread over a wide and fruitful land, traversing all the seas with the rich productions of their industry.
Microphone
advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye.
The hopes expressed by Jefferson in his first inaugural address were partially realized two years later in 1803.
when the United States purchased the Louisiana territory from France.
doubling the size of the country.
Jefferson believed that the United States had a great future because it could expand through space.
Microphone
That the agrarian ideal of American independence could be maintained by expanding the country westward.
Obviously, there are very big problems with this.
The land was not empty.
One did overrun Indians.
At the time of the Louisiana purchase, dozens of Indian tribes populated the vast U territory west of the Mississippi, and some Indian nations, like the Cherokee, still own massive tracts of land in the southeast.
Microphone
Indians in the South lived in the region in which wealth was very firmly grounded in land.
Planters needed land on which to grow tobacco, grow cotton, grow other staple props.
Indians occupied that land.
Indians owned that land.
And consequently, Indians were under constant pressure for that land.
In response to this pressure I defeats on the battlefield.
Microphone
Some tribes, like the Cherokee, embrace the government civilization policy, the first year down in the 1790s.
They would prot to test Jefferson's words.
We shall all be Americans.
Your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great continent.
Most people consider the Cherokees to be the great success story of the civilization policy.
The Cherokees were able very quickly to transform, at least on a superficial level, their culture.
Microphone
The Turkey's made many accomplishments that led their supporters to proclaim them to be civilized Indians.
One of the largest tribes in America, the Cherokees, had lived in small villages and parts of what is now Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Georgia.
By 1819, they had signed treaties ceding over 90% of their land in the United States.
Microphone
With the civilization policy, many territories had switched from being hunters to farmers.
Some even ran plantations and owned slaves.
Their children learn Christian religion, and English admission run schools.
A Cherokee alphabet was created, and in the 1820s, the Cherokee Nation began publishing a bilingual newspaper.
They established a government and constitution that was patterned after the United States.
Microphone
Civilization policy was looked upon as a tool for survival.
We began to see that, that might be the only way for it, that you know, people to live in peace with the United States.
Not so much that we wanted to become white people.
As the Cherokees became more and more prosperous along more or less classic white Southern lines.
The nature of white government in America was changing.
Microphone
Federal government had to appeal to a much wider base of white American men than it had previously in the revolutionary period.
One of the main interests of this demographic of less well off white American men was to get land, they could become better off white American men.
The main result of this, which was from the white point of view, an expansion of democracy, and of democratic representation of the inclusion of more and more people in American democracy, from the point of view, was the gradual empowerment of exactly the population, which would like to take what they had.
Microphone
Every year, more white settlers arrived in Georgia seeking to settle on what was still Indian land.
The federal government had promised to remove all Indians from the state in 1802.
But 25 years later, when the Cherokees appearing even more entrenched, George's legislature took action, asserting.
The lance in question belonged to Georgia.
She must, and she will have them.
Microphone
The state held the lottery, giving White's title to Cherokee property.
Whites invaded their land.
They killed people, they stole their property.
They forced them out of their houses.
Cherokees were really being pressed from all sides, it seemed.
The pressure on Cherokees, and all Eastern Indians, increased in 1828, when Andrew Jackson was elected president, on a platform championing opportunity for the common man.
Microphone
Removing all Indians east of the Mississippi, was central to his agenda.
When Jackson, who speaks out in a kind of a populist way, speaking for the little guy, speaking out against privilege, his little guy, his citizen, is increasingly a white male citizen.
As America is becoming more democratic for white males, it is becoming increasingly more waste based.
Microphone
It's believed that only white people can maintain the land, preserve it, protect their own independence, and then using that independence have some sort of fitness for self government.
that enables them to be proper citizens.
Nationalism begins to be, in many respects, equated to race.
People began to think that nations should be composed of people who had inherent qualities in common.
Microphone
They thought the same way they believed the same things.
They spoke the same language.
They lived to the same.
And this is very contradictory to the enlightenment notions of, uh, united humanity.
The conflict between Indian removal and America's founding ideals surfaced during bitter national debates.
Slavery.
Yes, yes. B, A, B.O. to his fellow congressman.
Microphone
New Jersey Senator Freyling Heisen asked.
If we abandon these... They are the proprietors of our soil, how shall we justify that?
So hurry.
How shall we justify this trespass to ourselves?
But Michigan Territory governed, this cast provided a justification.
One that needs race to focus on the nature of the needs.
Microphone
They have listed every effort to meteorate their situation.
There must, then, be an inherent difficulty arising from the institutions, character, and condition of the Indians themselves.
Okay, you know the black, the past in 18th... Husbandation groom.
When some tribes, including the Cherokees, resisted removal, President Jackson's response reflected the government's shift in racial thinking about the Indians.
Microphone
They have neither the intelligence, the industry...
In tradition.
Nor the desire of improvement, which are essential to any change in their condition.
established in the midst of another and superior race, they must necessarily yield to the first circumstances, and heir law disappear.
Microphone
The Cherokees felt betrayed that we were considered savages. Jackson has remembered him on Cheracuse as someone to be vilified.
The identity of being Indian or, in this case, of being Cherokee, which they had been told for decades to abandon is part of the past, as part of paganism, as a relic of primitive times.
They were now told was inherent in them, and that they should, in some way, embrace it.
Microphone
They should not become like white people, they should preserve themselves as Indians, and not only that, they should preserve themselves as Indians a very long way away.
The Cherokees vigorously fought approval against relentless pressure.
But finally, in 1838, the United States Army forced them to leave their homes at gunpoint.
Microphone
One fourth of the Cherokee Nation died in camps, or on the journey west that became known as the Trade of Tears.
I can...
By 1840, more than 70,000 Southeastern Indians, had been relocated west of the Mississippi.
The story of the Cherokee, their ultimate removal, was also about who could be civilized, and who couldn't, could be white, who could be a citizen of this country, and who could reside within its borders.
Microphone
And as the country moves west, that question gets answered in the same fashion over and over again.
Eight years after the train of tears, America went to war with Mexico to acquire more land.
Supporters of the war argued that Mexicans were an inferior Mongol race.
A popular guide for homesteaders described them as mere Indians.
Microphone
Barbara savages, who intend to hold this delightful region against the civilized world.
When the war ended in 1848, the United States annexed one third of Mexico's land.
Most white Americans really believe the West was for them and for them alone.
But this was part of a whole philosophy of manifest destiny, of what impelled Westward expansion throughout the middle part of the 19th century.
Microphone
This is idea that the West belong to white Americans.
As they continued their expansion westward, some white Americans would use science to justify their actions and support their belief in racial superiority.
Microphone
During the 19th century, there were lots of public lecturers on the races of man.
Science was, because it was new, it was something people were avidly interested in science in the 19th century was expected to reveal all the mysteries of the universe.
You even see specific references by this period, where they're saying, race is the great issue of the age.
The nation's interest in race was more than idle fascination.
Microphone
In the 1840s, the question of whether slavery would expand to newly acquired Western lands was bitterly dividing the nation and fueling attacks on slavery.
There was significant momentum towards the abolition of racial slavery.
But there were also very strong countervailing trends, and in the end, this created an enormous tension within white society, because it was caught in this contradiction that was inescapable.
Microphone
As people begin to oppose slavery, the whole question of what the difference between the races is and what the status of black people should be becomes more debated.
In the context of this debate over slavery versus anti slavery, ideas about race really flesh out.
In 1846, 5,000 people gathered in Boston to hear the plan of creation in the animal kingdom.
the first American lecture by a renowned Wisconsin...
Microphone
Interested, Louis Agassi.
As methods, valued observation over speculation.
Agassiz was quickly pulled into the scientific question of the... Are all people, no matter their physical actors, members of the same or different species?
There's a debate between people who look at the Book of Genesis and see what they call a single creation, God created an.
Microphone
scientists who say, Well, actually, these races could possibly have come from the same place.
There must be different and separate creations.
Adam arrived in America, supporting the theory that all humans were united in a single creation.
But he soon began to rethink his position after meeting one of America's most...
Felony... Samuel Morton.
A Philadelphia physician, Morton owned the world's largest collection of human skulls, and had written two influential books, to what he claimed were innate differences among humans.
Microphone
One focused on American Indians.
The foundation work was a work called Crania Americana, in which he argued that he was using purely scientific methods to investigate the question of skull size, skull capacity, which had implications for brain size, which he thought was vital in how races progressed.
Microphone
No wonder old, he discovers the white American males are the smartest people on Earth, followed in gradation by the English, the French, and then other Europeans.
And then other races with blacks, always on the bottom.
Curiously, some English scholars do the same thing.
They discover English men are actually smarter than Americans, followed by French and other Europeans.
And guess what?
The French discover that the French are really smarter than both.
Somehow, he managed to make sort of systematic errors in favor of what was the, you know, the sort of understood hierarchy of the races of the day.
Microphone
Samuel Morton drew wild conclusions based on the very careful studying and ranking of these skulls.
I don't care how many times you measure a skull or even anything physical about an individual or a group of people.
You cannot predict their morality, their behavior, their achievements, potential for achievement.
But that was what was important about this idea of race at the time.
Microphone
Southerners were actually delighted at what the scientists were doing.
They were hearing from, if you like, non special interests, that there were huge differences between the races.
Now, this meant that the South began to argue quite vigorously, that the best scientific opinion is saying that slaves cannot exist within a freeway society.
and that they are inferior.
That's kin, kind of.
Microphone
The ultimate defense of slavery is a racial defense.
And blacks are inferior, and therefore, they are ready made slaves.
God created them as slaves.
Why all this rant about Negro equality, asked John Campbell in his book, Negro Manian?
Seeing that neither nature or nature's God ever established any such equality.
Josiah Nash, a Southern doctor and disciple of Morton, firmly believe that black people were a separate species.
Microphone
and used science to wage a vigorous defense of slavery.
Though he was a good doctor, I mean, for the period, and, uh, well regarded as expert on yellow fever, he immediately starts to show, from these very first ratings, that when he writes about race, he throws off, really, any saying...
where he lives on the door and rise from his prejudices. African... How exaggerated. It looks like the publication you'd get on a sort of a dirty little leaflet that some fringe organization has published, and yet it's accepted scientific effect for a time.
Microphone
These ideas took hold.
Pro slavery advocates argued that the enslavement of black people did not violate the Democratic spirit of America, because Jefferson's term all men did not scientifically include black people.
Silly.
In 1850, Louis Agassin, by then Harvard's most prominent professor, told his fellow members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Microphone
That. Viewed zoologically, the several races of men were well marked and distinct.
Josiah Nott wrote to Samuel Morton, With Agassi in the war, the battle is ours.
Here was the most objective, the pinnacle of the scientific man influenced by American races, and who transformed his deeply held belief in the unity of mankind.
Microphone
I think that says, more than anything else, that the power of the ideology of race can change people's mind.
Three years later, Agassi contributed a chapter to a forthcoming book, co authored by Nott.
The 738 page types of mankind was greatly anticipated.
It pre sold its entire first edition.
Microphone
Types of mankind was tremendously influential.
It was the first time that scientists pulled together all of the research that justified the argument that African Americans, Native Americans, Asians, et cetera, were different species.
Nations and races, black individuals have each a special destiny.
Some are born to rule, and others to be ruled.
Microphone
And such has ever been the history of mankind.
No two distinctly marked races can dwell together on equal terms.
Types of mankind was one of the best selling science books of its day.
Among the first to buy it were the United States Departments of State, Navy, and Treasurer.
Microphone
Science and the politicians, and popular opinion, well together in a way that is extremely useful for both.
The politicians and the general population are very happy to have scientific views to lean on.
We say that the fact that this successful republic is not destroying Indians, just for the lot of it, they're not enslaving blacks because they're selfish, not overrunning Mexican lands, because they're avaricious for men.
Microphone
But this is part of some great... initability of science, of, really, the way races are constituted, that is, the Caucasian race, and even some branches within the Caucasian race, are superior.
It's a way of sort of naturalizing a social structure, which everyone understood and clearly saw that the Negro are in other regions of the country, the Native American, or the Chinese.
Microphone
We're at the bottom of the social and political hierarchy.
And if you can say that they are fundamentally biologically different, then they should be.
In the 1857 Red Scott case, the Supreme Court decided that people of African ancestry, enslaved or free, could never become citizens of the United States.
The opinion stated that black people had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
Microphone
There's been a remarkable transformation, because if you're thinking, say, 50, 60 years before in American history, you've got Jefferson ambiguously talking about where he thinks, possibly blacks are not quite of the same capacity as wise, but he is insured.
If they get to the 1850s, people are rating, There are deep, irrevocable gulfs between the races.
Microphone
The conflict over slavery led the nation to war.
After President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, his administration consulted Lewis Abbacy on how to deal with a newly freed black population.
At the sea advised, Beware of how we give to the planet's rights by virtue of which they may endanger the progress of whites.
Microphone
They are incapable of living on a footing of social equality.
If America had just looked the world in the eye and said, We hold these people in slavery 'cause we need their labor, and we've got the power to do it.
Now, that would have been much better, because then when the power was gone, when slavery is over, it's over.
But what we said was, there's something about these people.
By doing that, it means that when slavery is over, that rationalization for slavery remains.
Microphone
In the late 19th century, as the United States expanded beyond its continental borders, ideas of racial difference would become widely accepted at home.
and help define it for America abroad.
At the turn of the century, popular culture promoted stories of race as a unified force of national identity.
Microphone
Race was a common topic in the new monthly magazines.
A whole new middle class readership was interested in reading about it.
They had people from the House of Representatives, Supreme Court justices, experts, scientists, writing in these magazines, purporting their particular visions, and views on the so called race question.
Microphone
The Indian question, the Negro question.
People consumed it without even understanding the science that went behind it, that, hey, if this expert's talking about race in the North American Review, it must be correct.
Popular magazines contribute to an emerging sense of what is and what isn't American, who's white, who's not, who's better, who's worse.
Microphone
The unifying principle is the principle of, um, white supremacy.
It's a principle of shared racial identity.
And if you are a white, or if you can be made to identify with whiteness, you are going to be considered to be in, and that line of whiteness comes across class lines and provides a way to unify Americans on the basis of race.
Microphone
All through the late 19th century, there is this constant message hammered at poor white people.
You may be poor.
You may have miserable lives right now, but the thing that's most important, the thing we want you to focus on, is the fact that you're white.
In 1898, the United States took possession of Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines after defeating Spain in war.
Microphone
When McClure's magazine published the poem, The White Man's Burden, Americans seized on the phrase that embodied the country's new role as a world power.
Rudyard Kipling's poem was a rallying cry for empire, and a racial justification to send American troops across the Pacific to put down the Filipino rebels fighting for independence from the U.S.
Take up the white man's burden.
Microphone
Send forth the best ye breed.
Go, bind your sons to exile, to serve your captives' need.
Two weeks in heavy harness, unflattered folk, and wild.
Your new court, silent peoples, half devil and half child.
People who wrote the poem to try to encourage the United States to manex the Philippines.
And clearly, it probably provided more support for the those who want to take on the white man's burden, because some of the imperialists said, Oh, we can bring them along.
Microphone
Maybe not to equality, but our little brown brothers, we can advance them in civilization.
Even advertising took up the phrase.
Pair of soap claimed to be a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances.
Not all Americans supported the Philippine War, but race fueled the arguments of many anti imperialists as well.
Microphone
One Southern senator declared, We of the South have borne this white man's burden of a colored race in our midst since their emancipation and the fool.
It was a burden upon our manhood and our ideas of liberty before they were...
Should still a bird.
If you look at the way Filipinos are represented, they are represented, not as Filipinos.
Some Filipinos are portrayed as being akin to African Americans.
Microphone
Some are portrayed as being akin to Native Americans.
Use of the imagery of African Americans and Native Americans would have been important, because these were familiar people, their faults were familiar to the citizens of the Republic.
At the end of the 19th century, race is a kind of integrating totality. It embodied this sort of pain... Physic psychological moral...
Microphone
biological characteristics into the concept itself.
I think so.
And...
The concept is quite rich.
It carries all these kinds of connotations.
There's not a gap between what the regular person on the street understands about race.
and what scientists, anthropologists, or social scientists think about raising...
America crushed the Filipino Independence movement, and the Philippines became a U.S. territory.
Microphone
The United States gave a strategic support in the Pacific, and began accounting...
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. America entered the 20th century, as the world's most prosperous station.
So, your name...
Microphone
Hey, again, there you go.
In 1904, St. Louis, Missouri, staged the World's Fair to showcase America's achievements.
and celebrate the 100th century of Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana purchase.
Labor and system.
In the 1980s, it was fair, was America's triumph of civilization, imperialism, and a new century.
Microphone
It was filled with hope and optimism.
That was really serious. I wanted to... show America's unbridled progress.
People go to have fun to be sure, but world's fairs are not about entertainment.
Their build is worlds, universities.
Microphone
In Neoclassic palaces of progress, fargoers wandered through technological and cultural incidents.
But on the other side of the fairgrounds, they were captivated by human exhibits.
People on display, in their so called natural habitats.
They would have these exhibits of little brown people to show, oh, that's a savage.
Look at the way they carved that wood.
Microphone
And the barbarians, as you moved up, the evolutionary tree.
Oh, isn't that interesting?
I see it's different than the savages.
Ferrigo, we're seeing an enormous number of people who, perhaps they've only read about, maybe even never heard about it.
But here they are, living flesh and blood, they're to be seen.
World Tears are very adept at organizing categories of human beings on this continuum, from savagery to civilization.
Microphone
One fair organizer described it as a practical illustration of the best way of bearing the white man's burden.
On display for all to see were the subjugated people of America's recent past.
An exhibit titled Old Plantation, served of a bucolic view of slave life.
And Geronimo, the legendary and recently defeated Apache warrior, signed autographs for a fee.
Microphone
Here you have, not only American Indians put on display, as a kind of vanquished people, but you also have, at the fair, a direct link made between manifest destiny on the home front, and America's burgeoning drive to expand overseas.
The Philippine exposition was one of the largest and most popular exhibits.
created to demonstrate the benefits of America's civilizing presence.
Microphone
The exhibit gave Americans a chance to see.
The people they recently conquered.
Part of the World's Fair was also about showing where you were as a white citizen, and a lot of people took pictures next to the so called savages, and having a white body next to a dark body demonstrated how civilized they were.
Microphone
Nearly 20 different visitors to the fair received an object lesson, that connected an understanding of race to a vision of America's future.
What the metaphor is, it's constantly used, over and over again, of affairs, the metaphor of the highway of human progress.
Who's in the fast lane?
Are you part of this advancing order of Caucasians, or are you... somebody else, somebody other?
Microphone
White people saw their advance as being historical, and this gave them an enormous motivation to see the lives of people who were not white as being outside of history and not part of this progressive, advanced.
Most Americans believed that race was one of the most important parts of national life, that race mattered because it guaranteed this country a future in the history of the world.
Microphone
The United States would rise towards glory, towards history, towards its destiny.
After six months, the St. Louis World's Fair closed on December 1st, 1904.
Its grand exhibit halls demolished soon after.
But race, a story first told to rationalize deep social divisions in a society that proclaimed its belief in equality.
Microphone
To be carried forward.
into the 20th century, and beyond.
It's okay.
Yeah, society based on principles, literally to die for principles that are so wonderful, it brings tears to your eyes.
We're a society that so often... allows itself to ignore those presidents.
Yeah, it's okay.
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I mean, there's not a kind of heightened state of anxiety, because we know we are, but we could be, or we say we are.
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How do we continue to create race today?
Find out in the next episode of Race.
The Power.
To learn more about rethinking rates, visit PBS online at pbs.org. To order the video set of rates, the power of an election, for 1877 811-7495 for educational needs.
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Major funding for this program provided by the Ford Foundation.
a resource for innovative people and institutions from one.
And the corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Additional funding provided by these funders.
