 All right. Well, thank you, Christina, for the lovely introduction. And thank you. I really want to thank the librarian, especially Christina, for all the work that she did to get me here. I really appreciate it. And I certainly appreciate also the libraries helping me get the great images into this book that I did. So I will tell you a little bit about how I came to this topic, because a number of people have been asking me, especially when they know that I teach in Wisconsin. They're trying to figure out how I ended up writing about a fair in San Francisco. So it's a little puzzling. But I grew up in Santa Rosa. That's the Sonoma County connection. And I've always been interested in California history. With full disclosure, I grew up the child of a history professor who taught California history. So it was a little hard to escape, but I did my best. It just didn't work. I did my undergraduate thesis and then my master's thesis also on issues dealing with Northern California. And so when I was looking for a dissertation topic, which can be a very stressful time in one's life, I was in San Francisco and I went to an exhibit. And I wish I could remember what the exhibit was now. But it displayed art from at least the 39 Fair and I believe the 1915 Fair that I found really interesting. And I started to think about how I could use these world fairs to explore questions that I'm interested in. And I'm particularly interested in questions of race and gender and questions of power and questions of the way in which different communities exert power with each other and in relationship to different power structures. And the fair seemed like a great place to be able to explore some of those things. So although I'm trained as a women's historian, I wanted to do something that allowed me to use gender but also allowed me to explore some other things as well. And so I soon discovered that world's fairs are a world unto themselves. And there are many, many questions to ask and to answer when we come to world's fairs. And I just want to say that being in San Francisco is amazing at this moment. It's great to see how much interest there is in the fair, how much the exhibit at the Historical Society is really well done. I urge you all to go there if you haven't been there yet. It's a great exhibit. And there's just a lot of interest. And what I'm struck by is how many people have memories and not necessarily personal memories, but family memories and memorabilia of the fair. And it's really fun for me to hear those stories. Since I've done my, since I live so far away, I don't get to immerse myself in that the way that I might like to. And so it's just been a fun experience. And so I tell one particular story. There are a lot of other stories to tell about the fair as Laura Ackley over here, another author who's written a book about the fair, whose book I certainly recommend as well, can tell you fairs have so much stuff in them. But today what I want to talk about is the way in which local politics and local communities participated in the fair and participated in what I call the spectacle of the fair. So let me back up and just give you a little tiny bit of background about the fair for any of you that might not be familiar with it. The fair, obviously, occurred in 1915. We all know that, right? Okay. If you're my students, I'd say, okay, so when did the fair begin? So 1915, it was opened from February 20th to December 4th of 1915. It covered 635 acre fairgrounds in what we now know as the marina. So that's the location, as probably most of you know, the Palace of Fine Arts is the one, not necessarily surviving, but the one lasting building. It's a reconstruction of the Palace of Fine Arts from the exposition. Almost 19 million people, 19 million visitors, walked through the gates of the fair, which means that many, many people in San Francisco around California and the nation and the world were able to witness what was inside and what was happening inside the fair. And what I wanna look at is not the official narrative of the fair, but the way in which different communities tried to use the fair as a space from which to forward their own visions of society and their own narratives. So the fair was designed to boost San Francisco. As I titled my book, Empress San Francisco, the fair was an attempt to claim San Francisco's position as the preeminent economic power of the Pacific. Plain and simple, it was a booster venture. It was in the planning stages even before the 1906 earthquake, but the earthquake added momentum to the cause. It was only after the earthquake quake that large numbers of San Francisco businessmen came together to start to talk about planning the fair, to talk about actually convincing Congress to endorse San Francisco as the site for this international exposition. Now what did it mean to be Empress San Francisco? It meant that the city was interested in drawing business in declaring itself the center of the Pacific and Pacific trade and also drawing tourists and potential settlers to the state as well. So there are multiple goals going on here. Now officially the fair commemorated the completion of the Panama Canal as well as the 400th anniversary of Balboas subsiding of the Pacific. So I had to do the math there. There was a historic element as well as a contemporary element. One of the features of the fair that is important to understand is the participation of both China and Japan. Both nations were seen as essential participants in the fair. Fair officials believed it was really important to bring those nations to the fair because they wanted to make the fair international and they wanted the fair to feature Pacific nations. They wanted this to become an economic, a place where European and Eastern businessmen could come to see the wares that were being offered by China and Japan and those connections could be made. And I'll talk a little bit more about what that meant for local Chinese and Japanese communities as I go forward, but I just wanted to clarify that particular issue. So I'm gonna focus today, there are numerous examples that I can talk about when I talk about special days, I wanna excuse me, when I talk about communities, but I'm gonna focus on four distinct cases. I'm gonna talk about Germans, Chinese, Irish and African-Americans and talk about their participation in the fair. I'm gonna mention the Japanese as well, actually Japanese as well, excuse me. And there are certainly other discussions to be had, but these are some of the most interesting cases that allow us to ask and answer some really interesting questions. Before I do that, I wanna show you this picture of Chinese students' day at the exposition. Opposed picture, obviously, it happened in, I believe, August or September of 1915. And I look to it, unfortunately I don't have the original photo, this is from the cover of a book, Bridging the Pacific. But this photo demonstrates to me something I think was really important about the fair, which was that it allowed different groups outside of mainstream American society to participate, to show themselves, to claim space on the fairgrounds. Here we see rows of ethnically Chinese young men and women students posed for a picture after spending the day at the fairgrounds. They are dressed in Western clothes, they are not dressed in clothes that identify them as an exotic other, they are not dressed in clothes that identify them as traditional Chinese in any way. They are dressed to look like mainstream American students. And here I believe they are, in some ways, presenting a spectacle that claims space for them as students on an equal basis with other Americans. And this, I just think, is a great example of some of the themes that I'm gonna explore today. So one of the things that exposition officials sought to do was to involve local communities, because they believed it was essential to keep local communities interested and involved in the fair, partly because the fair was not reliant on federal funding. You may, if you've heard other things about the fair, you may know this. The way in which San Francisco convinced Congress to give them the fair was to say, hey, we'll do it without any federal funding. We'll raise the money ourselves. What I argue is that that meant that fair officials were particularly reliant on keeping certain communities happy and certain special interests happy so that they could actually make the fair happen. And thus part of what we'll see as the story goes on is the way in which the fair officials are actually trying to placate various groups to make sure that they are happy with what's happening on the fair grounds. But one of the things that happened was fair officials organized with the help of local ethnic organizations, organized ethnic auxiliaries, I think we could call them. And these included, I think there were 16 total and this included, some of the most prominent included the German-American auxiliary, the British-American, the Finnish-American, Swedish-American, Italian-American, and Dutch-American. These groups chose to publicize the fair. They became actively involved as a part of the exposition in raising awareness of the fair in their country of origin or their homeland. They weren't necessarily first generation, but in that country and also in raising awareness within the community in San Francisco as well. So they'd host events for visiting officials. They would send letters and telegrams to friends and relatives to convince them to support the fair. They raised money to stage events. Some members were actually traveled with official PPIE delegations to various countries to try to convince officials there to agree to send, to participate in the fair and to raise money for the fair. So for instance, delegations went to Finland, Greece, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and Serbia. It's an interesting array of countries. Not all of them were successful. Of these nations, only Greece, Norway, Portugal, and Switzerland committed to participation. But these activities demonstrate the depth of commitment from these men to the success of the fair and the importance that they saw in seeing their ancestral homelands represented therein. Sometimes, oh good, oh, I forgot to show you this, sorry. Here's an aerial view of the pavilions. For those of you who have not recently seen an aerial view of the exposition, this is a lovely colored view of the exposition that gives you a sense of scope. This is not the whole fair by any means. This cuts it off at the Palace of Fine Arts and you can't really see the zone on this particular picture. It's simply the pavilions. But this is, of course, facing the bay right at the northern tip where the marina is today. I'll let you look at that for a minute. So one of the things that local communities did, local ethnic communities, was help convince their home nations or their ancestral homelands to send exhibits. Norwegians, it was only through the forceful persuasion of local Norwegians that Norway decided to send exhibits and likewise enthusiastic Swedes convinced a Swedish government to erect a building at yet another exposition. Historian James Kaplan argues that the 20th century was a time when there was a lot of rivalry between different ethnic groups and so ethnic groups within cities would compete against each other with things like tugs of war and various drill team competitions and all sorts of different things. And San Francisco, of course, was a city, a very cosmopolitan city with many, many different ethnic groups. And so Kaplan argues, and I believe it's certainly a reasonable explanation, that the fair was another way to do this, right? This was a place where ethnic communities believed that they could increase their prestige and show off elements of their distinct culture. What you see in this slide is a depiction of the Swedish pavilion. This is, I believe, Swedish day, two different views of Swedish day. And Kaplan, who was written on Swedish day in particular, argues that Swedish day offered urban San Francisco Swedes a chance to differentiate themselves from popular stereotypes that depicted Swedes as taciturn Midwestern farmers, which I think we can probably understand. Now, fair officials, I suspect, probably saw the involvement of local ethnic communities simply as a way to drum up support and funds for the fair. They weren't interested in affirming ethnic heritage necessarily. But other groups, I think, perceived their work very much in that way. So local Welsh residents organized to bring a huge, I stood food, anybody speak Welsh? I stood food to the fair. And I stood food was a traditional celebration of Welsh music and poetry that dated to medieval times. And they did it because they believed, and this is in their own words, it would quote, it was in the best interests of the Welsh people to preserve and perpetuate its traditions, literature, music, customs, and language. I can't see a stronger affirmation of the way the fair could actually affirm culture for local people. Now, letters poured into the exposition office in support of this idea from both Wales and the United States. So I'm sure that officials simply acquiesced because they saw it as a way to drum up visitors and support, but certainly the local Welsh community saw it as an important part of affirming their heritage. The Swedes, to return to the Swedes again, upon the dedication of the Swedish pavilion, the local Swedish paper reported that there was no one in the crowd who did not quote, feel the indescribable joy of having the privilege of being Swedish. And I have the privilege of being Swedish so I can laugh at that particular joke. So let me turn to another community, and that's the German community. And the German community offers us a really interesting way to look at the way in which a community chose to involve itself, both when the home country didn't participate and also when they became embroiled in a very complicated international situation. So, German-Americans tried early on to urge the participation of Germany in the fair. They were very interested in bringing Germany itself. And the head of the German-American Auxiliary to the fair was a man named Edward Delgar. And he actually traveled across the United States, stopping at cities with heavy German populations, excuse me, such as St. Louis, to try to drum up support for the fair. But despite this enthusiasm, the German government resisted overtures by fair officials and declined the invitation to participate. Source decided frustration with a large number of previous expositions and a sense that the expense was staging an appropriate exhibit for Germany was simply not justified. But after Germany chose not to participate, the local Germans weren't willing to give up this idea. So they mounted a campaign to build a palace of German-American history and culture at the fair. They solicited money from Germans around the U.S. I'm sorry. But the beginning of the war in 1914 frustrated those plans as well. And in July of 1914, the Auxiliary formally gave up their sight and chose to stage a week-long celebration during German week at the fair. And they arranged for the donation of a Beethoven monument in Golden Gate Park from a New York Beethoven Association, a Beethoven choir as a permanent tribute to their German heritage. So this is German day. This is the parade on German day. And the Chronicle reported that the celebration would include, quote, no floats, no military display. The idea being to represent merely the numbers and loyalty of Germans in this country. However, as this photograph suggests, subsequent reports that I read about the day suggest a very different story. The parade included 35,000 participants, including a group of Irish volunteers bearing the Irish flag, a clear reminder of the Irish community's loyalty to German or inclination to be supporting Germany in the current conflict. It also included a group of German military veterans marching in goose step. Now, I do not know if these are the veterans marching, no, probably not, maybe at the beginning. The headline in the paper informed readers that the, quote, exposition is captured by German Americans. It contained multiple references to war and military strategy, making it pretty hard to believe that the author was not trying to link this celebration of German-American-ness to the ongoing war in Europe. Another interesting detail that appeared not in the chronicle, but in some other papers that I read from around the nation, said that the assembled crowd went wild, cheering the German victory when told about the fall of Warsaw. There was a public speech given by the keynote speaker of the day, a man named Dr. CJ Hexammer, who was the president of the German-American Alliance. He focused primarily on German contributions to American culture, but he also insisted on the importance of preserving German-ness, and he decried the move toward hyphenated Americans. Now this rhetoric obviously avoided the war in getting into such a dicey subject, but there were concurrent meetings of the German-American Alliance held at the fair, which squarely addressed the grievances of German-Americans and brought the war and the questions of the war and loyalties much more squarely into view. Newspapers reported in great detail about a debate that ensued over a proposed, quote, hot letter, that was their words, to President Wilson that heavily criticized his administration for their policies, both toward Britain, as well as toward potential Germans, to Germans in the country, and to potential immigrants. As we can see, German Week at the Fair therefore brought the national discussion about the war, of the relationship to German-Americans, to the U.S., to the fore. Now the U.S. doesn't enter the war for another 20 months, but tensions were already rising between supporters of Britain and Germany, and of course this eventually flares up into explicit anti-German violence and rhetoric after the U.S. enters the war. But at the Fair, German-Americans attempted to negotiate these tensions. They tried to assert themselves both as U.S. citizens with the rights to criticize their government, that's what came out of those German-American Alliance meetings, and as loyal children of the German fatherland. Now the majority of local communities that participated, like the Germans, did not have much conflict with the Fair. Germans themselves, the German group, I don't see any conflict of, that ensued either within the German community or between the Fair and the German community. But some local groups did experience debates about their participation in the Fair. And it's to those debates that I now want to turn, because they help us understand the significance that local communities placed on the Fair, and the ways that the Bay Area's political and social culture changed the way they could or could not participate. So I'm gonna talk about, I'm gonna divide this part of the talk sort of into two parts. So I first wanna talk about the pre-Fair relationship between Fair officials and local communities, and then I'm gonna talk in more detail about how some groups actually use the Fair during 1915. So I will return to some of the groups that I start to talk about. So I'll let you look at this while I introduce what's going on with the Chinese. So local Chinese and Chinese-Americans hope that the Fair could improve the status of Chinese-Americans in California and boost China's worldwide reputation. The Chinese Republic was founded in 1912, and local Chinese immigrants and their children, Chinese-Americans, were really eager to support China's efforts to demonstrate itself a strong nation at the Fair. The editor of the San Francisco paper, Young China, urged, quote, at the Panama Exposition, we must devote all our energy to it so that Americans will know the reality of our national power. The Chinese Western Daily, these are translated titles, emphasized how important the Fair could be to the development of China since overseas Chinese could actually learn things at the Fair and then take them back to China to help improve Chinese civilization. Others, and this is the part I find most interesting, urged that city residents take the opportunity to improve Chinatown's image, to clean up Chinatown, so that it can impress visitors who'd be pouring into the city who might come to Chinatown with, in their words, Chinatown's fame, and in one of the things they wanted to do was raise money for electric lighting so that their neighborhood could be on par with what they called Western neighborhoods. Local Japanese residents also urged support of the Fair and hoped that a strong display by Japan might help counteract the state's virulent anti-Asian sentiment. A 1912 editorial in the San Francisco's Japanese-American News argued, quote, it would not be trifling to say this exposition would be an ideal opportunity and a rare chance for us to combat anti-Japanese sentiment. The local Chinese community remains skeptical of the Fair, however. Chinese merchants, many Chinese merchants pledged a lot of money early on to support the Fair, but as the Fair approached, their enthusiasm grew a little less so. A harsh immigration bill was proposed in Congress. There were, of course, debates over the 1913 alien land law and there were a series of issues about bringing Chinese laborers onto the grounds, all kind of complicated relations between Chinese residents and the Fair. By early 1914, a Fair official, a local attorney, told Moore, quote, the Chinese people feel they're being called upon to assist a government exposition while at the same time they are, as they see it, being unduly harassed by a government with which they are friendly. The harassment that they were talking about, including crackdowns on activities in Chinatown, changes in immigration procedures that made it harder for resident merchants to return to the state. In response to these concerns, Fair officials took action. They took this seriously. They wanted to keep local Chinese merchants and the local Chinese community happy. They established an official Chinese committee of the exposition, held a series of meetings with representatives of the Chinese community. They organized outings and tours of the fairground for these men as well as visiting Chinese officials in order to show off the grandeur that was going to be the Fair. They tried to convince local Chinese that the Fair should not be held responsible for government immigration laws. And they hoped that these would help convince local Chinese that they should still support the Fair. However, as some of you know, when the Fair opened, this is one of the spectacles that greeted all visitors to the Fair. This is the Chinese village. And it includes underground Chinatown. Sadly, I have never seen any image of the inside of underground Chinatown. You can probably guess from the name. Underground Chinatown was kind of a variation of the ethnic villages of the zone. One of the things that these World Fairs did was they exhibited non-white peoples in ways that tended to juxtapose their supposed primitive civilization cultures against quote, what, civilized American culture. That's the short version. Underground Chinatown was a version of this. This was one that introduced visitors to what were supposedly conditions in pre-earthquake Chinatown. Visitors entered a warrant of underground passages that featured Chinese drug addicts, gambling, and forced prostitution. Supposedly, this was authentic. The Chinese community reacted in horror, as we might imagine, to what they saw, as rightfully saw, as an extremely offensive concession. They deluged the fair management with letters, protesting, asserting that they were upright residents, they were American citizens, and they deserved to have their voices heard and that this attraction needed to be closed. Sympathetic white ministers and others who worked in Chinatown and supported the Chinese community also wrote into the exposition. But it was not until the Chinese commissioner to the fair, Chen Qi, weighed in on the issue as an official representative of the Chinese government that the fair officials actually finally decided to close Underground Chinatown. The problem was that Underground Chinatown reopened, and it reopened as a concession titled Underground Slumming. So, in exactly the same spot, all they had to do was change Chinatown to slumming. So, yes. The advertising, I've seen an ad for it that said it would promise a glimpse of the evils of the drug habit, and it was more effective than any play, book, or sermon. It was clearly playing on the same tropes, the same ideas, but without using the name Chinatown and without using Chinese figures within it. This demonstrates how difficult it was, even for the Chinese community, even with the backing of the Chinese government, to be able to combat this level of racism and animosity. Other groups attempted to negotiate their representation on the fair grounds as well. One of those was local African-Americans, and I'm gonna return to them a little bit later, but from what I can tell, local African-Americans attempted to communicate with fair officials in the years before the fair about potentially participating or staging some kinds of events, and they seemed to have been rebuffed. They do not seem to have been received in any kind of real way. Thus, in early 1915, when someone suggested that a Negro day be held at the fair, this created a huge internal debate within the African-American community, and people discussed with the newspapers whether or not this was a good idea. Would this actually highlight anything reasonable about African-American culture, or would it simply perpetuate stereotypes since there really wasn't enough time for anybody to get together a reasonable exhibit or celebration within a month or however much time they had? So, the result was that the consensus was this would be more damaging than to have no event at all, so they chose not to have a Negro day event, and I'll return a little bit later to tell you what they did choose to do. The local Irish community, on the other hand, entered into discussions with fair officials about its representation at the fair as well. Fair officials were very aware of the power of the Irish in San Francisco, and were very much wary of offending them, and so they had a committee in which they discussed and sort of cleared things through before any exhibits and discussion was on the grounds, that were appeared on the grounds. So all these stories make clear that ethnic groups took their representation at the fair very seriously and perceived the power of the fair to either include or marginalize various groups. So now what I wanna talk about is the way some of these groups actually did participate and constructed their own spectacles for fairgoers. So one of the things that allows us to do this work is to understand the special days. German day was an example I presented to you, right? This idea that Germans would be able to stage their own event at the fair, they would have speeches. Now every day at the fair, there were multiple special days. It was not like only one group got a special day at the fair, but there were special days for ethnic groups, there were special days for counties, there were special days for states, there were special days for labor unions, for insurance agents. I mean, all kinds of different groups were recognized with a special day at the fair. And on these days, the groups for whom it was a special day were able to stage parades, pageants, speeches that generally were organized by the group themselves. And so these celebrations, I argue, allowed local communities to assert their status in the community and their relation to the American body politic to a very large audience. And one of the most important things that happens here is this audience was not only the people at the fair, it was also people who read the newspapers. One of the interesting things about 1915 is that the newspapers actually included news and lots and lots of news. No offense to anyone who might work for a newspaper today, but we all know how beleaguered newspapers are today. In 1915, if you do any microfilm research, I'm dating myself there, but microfilm research on newspapers, there's a whole lot of information in newspapers. And there are multiple daily newspapers in San Francisco as well. So, and I presumably, people read more than one newspaper. And the newspapers took it very seriously to report on what was happening on the fairgrounds. So many, many details about what was happening on the fairgrounds were included for people to read about. So when many of these events happened, they were reported on, which is how I, as a historian, was able to find out about them. But I argue that this brought these ideas, these brought these representations into a larger public dialogue than they would have had if they were simply contained to the fairgrounds themselves. So let's talk about one of these days. Now, this picture drives me nuts because I wanna cut the tree down every time I look at it. Darn tree. But this is China Day. And I believe that you use, the picture that you use was the China Day or the Chinese Pavilion dedication. The picture that's being used to promote my talk was another talk from another picture from China Day. Now, it's not clear to me whether China Day was solely organized by foreign officials or by local residents. But what is clear is the participants used it as a way to demonstrate pride in their Chinese heritage and their place in the Bay Area community while de-emphasizing the foreign nature of their community. So, the dedication of the Chinese building in March, which was a separate event, but another day that celebrated Chinese heritage, it included some Chinese music, but little other pageantry occurred. The featured musicians were local Chinese children who sang both American and Chinese songs in English. And reports mentioned their presence and even included their pictures and suggesting perhaps that the Chinese were interested in highlighting the presence of a Chinese American population within the city. Now, at this celebration, this celebration was marked according to the chronicle with, quote, no Orientalism for Chinese program. So, the paper itself found it necessary to note that this was not going to be a celebration of exotic others. It was going to be a very sedate celebration. The lead speaker, Kaifu Xia, the Chinese minister to the United States, emphasized China's long friendship with the US and called for their continued economic relationship. The event included speeches by exposition in Chinese officials, but none of the spectacle and pageantry that we're going to see from some other nations. It rejected traditional Chinese costumes and displays in favor of a focus on the nation's political and economic progress. At Chinese Students' Day, which I showed you the picture of earlier, the keynote speaker, YC Yang, a Chinese graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Concentrated on China's, I did not put that in there just because we share an alma mater. Concentrated on China's, quote, new consciousness, new civilization, and new understanding. Now, why might organizers choose to de-emphasize China's history? My suspicion is that organizers and participants realized that Imperial China was associated with many white Americans with decadence, with moral decay, with being backwards, and it was very stereotyped in a very negative way in the American mind. And they believed it was more important to demonstrate China's progress than to hearken back to images that might elicit negative stereotypes instead. The Japanese, however, took a very different tack. Japan Day similarly involved, and Japan Day and a number of other celebrations, involved local residents in celebrations as well, but their organizers seemed to have had no qualms about foregrounding key aspects of Japanese culture. Japan's day festivities included a ritual blessing of the national building by a Shinto priest, a huge parade containing floats designed to represent Japanese history, and the active participation of local Japanese-American children. Here you can see this photograph. I believe, as I just saw today in the California Historical Society exhibit, is a group of Japanese, I don't know if they're all local residents or not, posing on Japan Day, and you can see the Japanese wrestling, right? The wrestler's there in the middle. And here also is a group of probably some local Japanese as well, given the presence of women and children in the picture in front of the Japanese, part of the Japanese pavilion as well. Now the Japanese not only celebrated Japan Day, but they also celebrated some other traditional holidays, including the Dahl Festival and the Iris Festival. This is a photograph of the Dahl Festival. And I think the fact that they chose to celebrate those at the fair is that they had none of the qualms that the Chinese had about displaying aspects of their civilization that white Americans might perceive as exotic. And this is very much in keeping with what another scholar has noted about the 1910, exhibition that the Japanese were involved in. And he argued that the Japanese were really interested in emphasizing the value of, quote, their civilization of an old and high order into which modern civilization had been grafted. So rather than the Chinese who were trying to reject their old civilization and project something new at the fair, the Japanese were trying to value their old civilization and graft this new modernity on top of it. And we can talk more about that if anybody's interested. And let's talk about the Irish. So the Irish took over the fairgrounds on St. Patrick's Day. They turned the lights green, held a huge parade, celebrated high mass on the grounds and had a concert of favorite Irish songs. More than 60 local Irish societies participated. Now that's not 60 societies from San Francisco, but from around the state participated. A number that I think really indicates the breadth of interest and participation that all of these people came to the fairgrounds. Over 75,000 people participated in this day. One of the speakers, I'm gonna talk about this guy in a minute, but before I get to him, I wanna talk about Patrick McCarthy, who was the former mayor, exposition director and labor leader, was the honorary chairman of the celebration. And part of his speech, I think, really helps us understand a lot about the tenor of the event. He says, quote, we are gathered here today to celebrate not only our national holiday, but to perpetuate the glory of our race, a race which has produced men of great deeds in all times and in all kinds of human activities. Now, choosing the word race is certainly an interesting one here, but I think he's trying to, he's indicating that Irish organizers are totally confident in celebrating their Irish identity, right? They see no qualms about celebrating themselves as both American and Irish and they see no contradiction therein. They could wave green flags and celebrate being both loyal citizens of the United States and of a romanticized Ireland. This guy, John J. Barrett, who was the keynote speaker, gave a lengthy speech that, again, affirms this relationship between the Irish community and the United States. He says, quote, I know that I would give a tongue to every drop of Irish blood that stirs in this vast audience when I declared that. Though the emerald emblem of the newborn nation across the sea is unfurled by us today in uncompromising homage, the flag that now, as ever, is next to our heart and flutters in the breezes of its palpitating loyalty is the stars and stripes. They wrote much longer sentences then. Now, the Irish community had hoped to stage an exhibit of Ireland. They wanted Ireland itself to be represented at the fair and in the years before the fair, the Irish community worked to bring Ireland. Now, it's important to remember that Ireland does not exist as a country at this point. Ireland is still under the control of Britain and Irish independence is on everybody's mind, who's Irish, at least, and so Irish independence is part of the subtext of this display. But despite the failure to be able, oops, yeah, the failure of bringing Ireland to the fair, which became impossible, particularly once the war started, the Irish still chose to use the fair as a place to claim their role as both citizens of the U.S. and Irish. The one of the representations of Ireland that did exist at the fair was the Shamrock Isle, which was a very romanticized vision of Ireland and that you can definitely hear more about if you go on Tuesday. It was a short-lived attraction on the zone. The ethnic villages in general didn't do very well at the fair and I suspect that the Shamrock Isle simply wasn't interesting to people anymore. It didn't have any of the salacious interest of underground Chinatown and it closed shortly after the fair began. And it's also interesting because the Irish community was, members of the Irish community were really worried about what kind of concession might be staged as a fair. There was a lot of concern in the years before the fair that there would be a demeaning depiction of Ireland, but yet when the fair opened, there's no concerns that I can find at all about the Shamrock Isle, the newspapers that published criticisms in the years before the fair did not seem to continue those criticisms during the fair, which means that I think they did not see this as the same kind of damaging image that they feared. Yeah, I'm not going to actually talk about this concession. I'm going to instead talk about African-American participation, but I show you this example in order to depict, to help you understand what some of the images were, the Dixieland plantation was one other attraction on the zone. There was also a very short lived Somali village, Somaliland, that featured Somalis dancing and performing other kinds of traditional tasks in an example of a so-called primitive people. What I wanna talk about is how African-Americans eventually decided and chose to participate in the fair. I told you that they vetoed Negro Day, right? They said, we don't wanna do that. So what did they do? Community leaders, particularly African-American women, turned to urging participation in the celebration of both Alameda County Day and San Francisco Day. Those were two special days at the fair. And two days that were particularly significant because they were days that would draw people from their respective communities, right? Alameda County Day means all these people in Alameda County are gonna come and stage floats and parades and all these other things, participate in this parade. And San Francisco Day, of course, is designed to bring everybody from San Francisco to the fair. And the women, particularly who organized this, drew on conceptions of citizenship and civic pride as they thought about their participation, as they talked about their participation in this event. The Civic Center, which was an organization of Oakland Black women, held repeated meetings to organize their community's participation in the event. One local black paper, the Oakland Sunshine, urged the community to attend because, quote, they wanted to show visitors that this is our fair and our state and that we appreciate it. And on June 10th, the Alameda County Day parade included two floats of African-Americans, one designed by the Colored Women's Clubs and the other held 50 school children, including and featured the appearance of Virginia Stevens, who was the young African-American girl who actually won the call post contest to that coined the name Jewel City for the fair. A very interesting story. After the fair, after that day, the sunshine noted, quote, it was indeed a great day for our country and especially our county, excuse me, and especially our people. Now this is an image not unfortunately of Alameda County Day, but this is a float from San Francisco Day. And I chose it, A, because it's from San Francisco Day, but it also gives you a sense of what these floats might have looked like and what these parades were like. In November, leading up to San Francisco Day, again, local black newspaper editors called for the participation of their local community in the day in order to claim space for themselves in the community. After the event, the paper proudly noted, quote, we helped swell the throng by members of the race from all over parts of the state and we're in evidence all over. Local blacks still wanted to claim to the exposition. They wanted to claim their citizenship, they wanted to claim their participation in San Francisco and in California. And they took what opportunity they could to claim that space as their own even as they were being ignored by fair officials. Yet even as the African-American press praised their participation, I've seen no evidence that the white San Francisco papers mentioned their participation at all, indicating again that they were not necessarily being acknowledged as equal members of the community. Now the final thing I wanna turn to before I'm happy to answer all your questions is that one of the other ways that I see ethnic groups, ethnic and racial groups participating in the fair is by the opportunity to hold their conferences and their conventions and their congresses during the months of the fair. The PPIE featured 928 conferences and conventions. Groups from all over the country of all different kinds of groups came to the fair in order to hold these events. In the years before the fair, fair officials sent letters soliciting participation of every group they could think of, unions, sororities, alumni groups, all kinds of professional organizations, ethnic groups, all of them religious organizations, they urged them all to hold their annual meetings in San Francisco during the fair. The American Historical Association met in San Francisco during the fair, for example. And records show that Chinese American groups took advantage of this, as did African American groups. Those are just a couple of examples. And certainly religious groups, all kinds of different groups chose to come to the fair, Chinese Student's Day obviously is one example. In October, the United Parlor of the Sons of the Golden State, which was a newly formed group of second generation Chinese Americans, sort of a civil rights group, assembled on the grounds and met on the grounds. And again, the fact that these groups were meeting on the grounds meant that it was noted in local papers, sometimes they staged events that were public that people could actually watch, people could see, and contributed to the spectacle of the fair and the different things that people were able to experience as they walked around the grounds. In conclusion, fair directors invited the participation of local communities because they knew that local support was necessary to the event's financial success. And so they tried to make sure that powerful local communities were happy and they paid less attention to less important and less powerful groups. At the same time, local residents within the Bay Area debated how their group should be represented and whether or not they should participate because they realized that the representations of the fair carried immense power. They understood that the constructions of race, ethnic, and religious identities that were created on the grounds had the potential to deeply influence millions of people. And although the racial hierarchy that was laid out in pre-fair publicity and in the art, sculpture, and government exhibits clearly labeled California as the land of the white pioneer and something else I'm happy to talk about. I didn't dwell on here, but the racial hierarchy of the fair is very much premised on social Darwinist ideas, on ideas of scientific racism. Although that is the backdrop, I argue that Bay Area residents, among others, seize the opportunity to use the ground to construct their own racial and ethnic identities. Thank you very much.