History on the Midway

Today I experienced a harmonic convergence of concepts from two very different classes. My American literature class is immersed in the literature and culture of the 1890s while my honors literature class is discussing the Holocaust as portrayed in Art Speigelman's Maus. What could these two classes possibly have in common?

The honors class today began with an excerpt from Theda Purdue's book Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895 describing the "Old Plantation" section of the Midway, where visitors were invited to experience an "authentic" display of slave life: happy slaves singing, dancing, cracking wise. Purdue explains, "The depiction of slavery at the Old Plantation resonated with northern as well as southern whites, since both had been schooled in the sentimentality of Negro spirituals, antics of minstrel shows, and stereotypes of coon songs. Slavery, in their minds, had not been so bad."

As I often point out in my American literature classes, this nostalgia for the Old Plantation was quite common in the 1890s and early 20th century, when minstrel shows abounded and fairs all over the country put re-enactments of slavery on display (for an example and photos from Buffalo, New York, in 1901, click here). But if portrayals of slavery as a benevolent institution were so common 100 years ago, why don't we see an Old Plantation display at Epcot? Why doesn't Disney World have an "Escape from the Old Plantation" thrill ride? Why has the Old Plantation booth disappeared from the Midway?

My students have no problem coming up with answers for these questions: slavery meant more than spirituals and cake walks; the Old Plantation myth sanitized and suppressed the messy, painful parts of history. We know better now.

And then we get to the Holocaust. Maus asks us to consider how "survivors" are marked by history, whether it's acceptable to profit from the pain of others, and how art and literature can represent history too horrible to comprehend. In the 1890s, some Americans sanitized slavery and contained it safely in easily digestible form for fair-goers; Spiegelman, on the other hand, repeatedly emphasizes the messiness of history, its resistance to control, its insistence on spilling outside the bounds of his comic-strip panels. His story is never slick and tidy like a theme park but instead fragmentary and incomplete, pockmarked with ugly facts and details that seem to shift shape at will.

The most interesting parts of the story are simply gone--the mother's journals burned, the fate of many characters unknown. About one character Vladek explains, "He got killed. Or he died. I know they finished him." In the next panel he suggests one possible narrative: "Maybe on the walk to work, a guard grabbed his cap away. So what could he do? He ran to pick it up. And the guard shot on him for trying to escape." But in the next panel he adds, "I don't know if this was how it was with Mandelbaum-only that very often they did so."

The Midway version of history has no room for "maybe" and the Theme Park no space for details that don't fit into tidy boxes. Everyone's smiling on the Midway, even President Grover Cleveland, who visited the Old Plantation display at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895 and found it quite entertaining. Why couldn't fair-goers in 1895 see through that slick, smiling, one-sided portrayal of history? Why did they accept the artificial image instead of demanding the whole messy story?

And are we doing any better today?