Shelley S. Lee

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Shelley S. Lee | The Contradictions of Cosmopolitanism: Consuming the Orient at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and the International Potlatch Festival, 1909–1934 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3 | The History Cooperative

The Contradictions of Cosmopolitanism: Consuming the Orient at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and the International Potlatch Festival, 1909–1934

Seattle's Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition and International Potlatch provide windows to the construction of a "cosmopolitan" urban ethos in the early twentieth century. Noting the ways this idea embraced Japan and the city's Japanese residents while serving white elites' pursuit of urban and commercial advantage, the essay also comments on the space between cosmopolitan ideology and the persistence of anti-Japanese prejudice.

IN SEPTEMBER 1936, the monthly Seattle cultural journal, the Town Crier, began its publication of a series entitled "Cosmopolitan Seattle." Written by the local historian and paper's publisher, Lancaster Pollard, it comprised installments profiling the city's German, Chinese, and Japanese communities. Pollard was impressed by the findings of the 1930 Federal Census, which had counted nearly 73,000 foreign-born whites, 8,448 Japanese, 3,303 blacks, and 1,347 Chinese out of a city population of 365,583, and determined that these numbers merited exploration. Further, by highlighting Seattle's local color and ethnic fare, he hoped the series would "do something toward correcting the attitude, which is held by many persons elsewhere and by not a few Seattleites, that Seattle is the most provincial city of its size in the United States."¹ Pollard was not alone in this mission; "Cosmopolitan Seattle" was part of a larger public discussion aimed at shedding the city's frontier image and elevating it to the status of a major metropolis.

The "Cosmopolitan Seattle" series and the broader discourse of which it was a part celebrated ethnic minorities in a pluralistic Seattle, yet glossed over a striking set of contradictions. Pollard argued that these "cultural communities" enhanced Seattle's appeal, but he did so by exoticizing and objectifying them. Focusing two out of three installments on Asians gave a disproportionate amount of attention to Chinese and Japanese, who, combined, made up only about 3 percent of the city's population. Japanese may have been Seattle's largest non-white group, but they were only the fourth largest national group behind several European nationalities. The series' exultation of Chinese and Japanese contributions to the local scene was also curious considering the not-so-distant history of anti-Asian racism and violence in Seattle and the American West. Chinese especially suffered as targets of brutal riots throughout the Pacific Northwest during the 1880s and an attempted forced eviction from Seattle in 1886.² Nor were Japanese welcomed in Seattle with open arms, as they were segregated to a few downtown city blocks, continually subject to discriminatory laws, and frequently exposed to racial insults.

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