Human zoos

Much has been written in the Philippines about the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, where more than a thousand Filipinos were displayed, put on exhibit, and made to perform rituals, including one which was faked—slaughtering and eating dogs—and probably one of the most remembered by Americans who went to the exposition, stereotyping Filipinos as dog-eaters.

The exposition opened on April 30 so we just had its 120th anniversary, one which is being commemorated by the Missouri History Museum, which recognizes that the exposition was both “grand and shameful.”

But first, a point of clarification about the name. Many people, including myself, call it the 1904 St. Louis Exposition but that name was used for a fair that was held almost every year for several decades in the 19th century and meant more as an agricultural county fair.

The 1904, although held in St. Louis, Missouri, took a different direction. It was actually meant to be the United States’ first world fair, a grand affair to commemorate the Louisiana Purchase a century earlier that greatly expanded the US territory.

The event in 1904 was meant not just to commemorate the Louisiana purchase but also to proclaim American might, and what better way to do this than to include an exhibit of Filipinos, natives of its new territory across the Pacific.

The exhibit was meant to project the US’ belief in Manifest Destiny, expressed by US Sen. Alfred Jeremiah Beveridge, in a speech delivered at the fair: “We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world … He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.”

William Taft, the Philippine governor general, praised the fair for helping in the US’ pacification of the Philippine Islands, for opening new markets for American goods, and opening access to the archipelago’s natural resources.

It’s not surprising there was more than a display of Filipinos. The human exhibits moved and performed. A schoolhouse was built with real classes daily, to show how America was educating the natives. There were three categories of Filipinos with “Visayans,” all dressed up singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the morning to represent the fruits of America’s civilizing mission.

This was not the first time Filipinos, or people of color, were put on exhibit by the colonial powers. During the Spanish colonial period, Filipinos were put on display in international fairs in London (1851), Paris (1855, 1867), Vienna (1873), Philadelphia (1876), Amsterdam (1883), Madrid (1887), Chicago (1893). After the St. Louis fair, some of the Filipinos were practically kidnapped by entrepreneurs and moved to other places in the US, still for display.

Jose Rizal and other Filipino members of the Propaganda Movement in Spain were furious about Madrid, writing in La Solidaridad, “Let the Philippines not forget that her sons have been treated like this, to be exhibited and ridiculed.”

In 2023, The Washington Post ran a series of exposés about the Smithsonian Museum’s “racial brain collections” put up by Ales Hrdlička, sometimes called “the father of physical anthropology.” Hrdlička was a racist and collected brains to use for his pseudoscientific research trying to prove racial differences in the brains.

Among the brains were at least four obtained from Filipinos who had been part of the 1904 exposition. One young woman, given the name “Maura,” had died of pneumonia on her way to St. Louis. Her skull was found but not her brain. All of these “research” activities were done without the permission of the Filipinos and their families.

We need to include this exhibition in our social science and history textbooks, including its broader context of racism and imperialism. The racism included the maltreatment of African-American visitors to the exposition, who received such shabby treatment that the National Association of Colored Women declared a boycott of the exposition.

The discussions in our schools should be broadened to discuss the other human zoos where Filipinos were displayed, together with other people from the colonies of other Western countries.

We have to remember, too, that the young country that was the US also preached Social Darwinism, an imaginary world where whites were believed to be at the pinnacle of evolution. This is why the exposition in St. Louis included exhibits of impressive technologies still new even to the American public, including a wireless telephone, an improved x-ray machine, personal automobiles … and incubators for infants born premature.

The incubators were disastrous, using live infants put on display inside the incubators for the public to watch. Of the 43 babies used for the exhibits, 39 died.

The fair had many other exhibits to show the world what America had achieved in science and technology.

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