Discussion 5 – Progressive Era and the Eugenics Movement
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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, eugenics became a popular movement. The idea that human behavior was largely shaped by genetic factors gained a wide following in the United States and throughout the globe, perhaps most notoriously as demonstrated in the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. While eugenics has a very long history, during the late nineteenth century American proponents focused on how science could presumably solve social problems and create a more "perfect" society. Today most evaluations of the eugenics movement points to how science was misused, typically to justify the targeting of certain "undesirable" groups. Proponents of eugenics supported such policies as immigration restriction of certain groups and forced sterilization and institutionalization of individuals deemed "feebleminded" or otherwise unfit.
Your task with this assignment is to examine concerns about modernity and change during the Progressive Era in the United States. Please utilize the attached document to respond to this forum. The document is part of a larger study on eugenics, though you will find that the chapter (Chapter 4) you are examining is not as much focused on eugenics per se, as on the kinds of issues of the Progressive era that were of interest and concern to many Americans. You will select one of the readings (there are 10 in this chapter). Summarize the selected reading with attention to what it reveals about the time period.
In addition to posting your original response, you must respond to at least TWO other students. Your replies must be substantial and specific.
Rubric (100 points possible) – 60 points for original posting (x1) and 40 points for responses (x2)
IDEAS (50 points)Ideas reflect original thought and substantial depth, and are relevant to the topic(s)WRITING/CONVENTIONS (10 points)Post and replies are well-written and reflect proper academic conventions for grammar and mechanicsCONTRIBUTION (40 points)Replies contribute in a meaningful way to the learning community and include specific details (3-4 Sentences minimum)TOTAL100
“4. In an Age of "Progress"
We are all of us immigrants in the industrial world, and we have no authority
to lean upon. We are an uprooted people, newly arrived and nouveau riche.
Walter Lippmann
Chapter 3 described the growth of eugenics, a branch of scientific inquiry devel- oped by Francis Galton, an English mathematician. He based the new science on the idea that individuals are born with a “definite endowment” of qualities like “character, disposition, energy, intellect, or physical power”—qualities that in his view “go towards the making of civic worth.” Eugenics therefore promised to “raise the present miserably low standard of the human race” by “breeding the best with the best.”
Chapter 4 considers how eugenics was related to other aspects of American life at the turn of the 20th century. Many of the readings place the movement in an historical context by focusing on some of the changes that transformed American life in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Industrial Revolution had swept away familiar ways of working and living, altered social expectations, and redefined the relationship between citizens and their government. In a book of reminiscences entitled The Age of Confidence, editor Henry S. Canby wrote of his own responses to those changes and those of other white middle-class Americans in the late 1800s:
We had been trained to fit into certainties, educated to suppose that Mr. [Andrew] Carnegie’s steel mills, Sunday observance, the banking system, the Republican party, the benefits of Latin, algebra, and good handwriting . . . were parts of one quite comprehensible plan. . . . Yet whispering at the back of the new liberal mind was always a question which became more insistent as the years went on. The community in which we had been brought up and the education ground into us were ordered, self-contained, comprehensible, while this new society was incoherent, without fixed aim, and without even a pretense of homogeneity. We were like pond fish who had been flooded into a river.1
Americans like Canby were ambivalent about change. Their pride in the nation’s scientific advances and technological innovations was tempered by their discom- fort with social and economic transformations. A number of them looked back at the world they had known as children with a deep sense of loss. Each year
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fewer Americans made their home on farms or in small towns where people knew their neighbors. More and more now lived and worked among strangers in huge metropolitan areas. By 1900 New York City was home to over 4 million people. Chicago had a population of over 1.7 million and Philadelphia 1.4 mil- lion. Some smaller cities were doubling and tripling in population in the course of a decade.
To a growing number of middle-class white Americans, the city represented all that was new and disturbing in their world. In Our Country, one of the most popular books of the era, author Josiah Strong, a Protestant minister, described the “seven perils” that he claimed threatened the nation. The first six were Catholicism, “Mormonism,” intemperance, socialism, wealth, and immigration. The seventh peril was the city itself—the base for the “alien army that invaded the nation,” “an army twice as vast as the estimated numbers of Goths and Vandals that swept over Southern Europe and overwhelmed Rome.”2
Beginning in the late 1800s, a number of middle-class white Americans set out to save “civilization” from the “perils” Strong and others described. Known as “progressives,” these Americans tried to make their chaotic world more rational by tackling problems caused by rapid industrialization, migration, immigration, and urbanization. Unlike social Darwinists who believed in the survival of the “fittest,” progressives believed they had a duty to intervene in society, a responsi- bility to help the less fortunate become as “fit” as possible. These Americans placed their faith in education and legislation. They were not an organized group, although they shared similar views on the dangers of child labor, over- crowded neighborhoods, and unsanitary living conditions. Their numbers included Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Although most were mid- dle-class white Americans, on some issues they had the support of labor union leaders, immigrants, African Americans, and even wealthy industrialists.
1. Quoted in Life in Twentieth Century America by John W. Dodds. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965, 1972, p. 52. 2. Quoted in The Free and the UnFree by Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble. Penguin Books, 1977, 1988, p. 240.
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“Marvels of a Marvelous Age”
Reading 1
Many Americans at the turn of the 20th century viewed the changes that had taken place in their lifetimes with pride and amazement. In 1889, author Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, expressed those feelings in a let- ter to congratulate poet Walt Whitman on his 70th birthday:
You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world’s history and richest in benefit and advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done more to widen the interval between man and the other animals than was accomplished by any of the five centuries which preceded them.
What great births have you witnessed! The steam press, the steamship, the steelship, the railroad, the perfect cotton gin, the tele- graph, the phonograph, the photogravure, the electrotype, the gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine and the amazing infinitely varied and innumerable products of coal tar; those latest and strangest marvels of a marvelous age. And you have seen even greater births than these; for you have seen the application of anes- thesia to surgery-practice, whereby the ancient dominion of pain, which began with the first created life, came to an end on this earth forever; you have seen the slave set free, you have seen monarchy banished from France and reduced in England to a machine which makes an imposing show of diligence and attention to business, but isn’t connected with the works. Yes you have indeed seen much—but tarry for a while, for the greatest is yet to come. Wait thirty years, and then look out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon marvels added to those whose nativity you have witnessed; and conspicuous above them you shall see their formidable Result—man at almost his full stature at last!—and still growing, visibly growing while you look. Wait till you see that great figure appear; and catch the far glint of the sun upon his banner; then you may depart satisfied, as knowing you have seen him for whom the earth was made, and that he will proclaim that human wheat is more than human [seeds], and proceed to organize human values on that basis.1
Had Whitman lived until the turn of the century, he would have witnessed many more of the benefits of “a marvelous age.” Historian John Milton Cooper, Jr. writes that by 1900:
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Not only had the United States grown to continental size, but its population had swelled to seventy-six million, spread from coast to coast in forty-five states, and concentrated in thirty-eight cities of more than one hundred thousand people. In 1900, no aspect of American life was more striking that this rapid, fantastic growth. The ballooning numbers of people sprang in part from a high, but now declining, annual birth rate: 32.3 live births per thousand of population (down from 55 in 1800 and 43.3 in 1850.) Greater growth resulted from lowered infant mortality and lengthened life span, which had reduced the annual death rate to 16.5 per thousand, the lowest in the world. But by far the greatest numbers of new Americans came with the waves of immigration from overseas. Nearly 425,000 Europeans arrived . . . in 1900 alone.
Americans were proud of the drawing power of their political and religious freedoms, which had long since made them a “nation of immigrants.” From the beginning of the nineteenth century, European migration to the United States had steadily mounted and had become more diverse than in the colonial period, when most settlers had been English and Scottish Protestants. Starting in the 1840s, thousands of Irish immigrants, most of whom were Roman Catholics, as well as Germans of various religious persuasions, flocked across the ocean. After the Civil War, the sources of European immigration broadened still further to encompass growing numbers from Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, and Eastern Europe. . . . In 1900, the rate of immigration was still accelerating. During the first decade of the twentieth century, over eight million more immigrants would come to the United States— the largest number in any decade before or since. These newest arrivals would account for more than 10 percent of the entire American population.
Size, population, wealth—each marked how far the United States had come in such a short time from its raw, humble beginnings. Only two countries, Russia and Canada, occupied larger land areas. Among the Western nations—those with predominately European ethnic origins, languages, and cultures—only Russia had a larger population. No country anywhere enjoyed so large and dynamic an economy. American commerce, transportation, industry, and agricul- ture were wonders of the world. By almost any measure of economic performance, the United States excelled. Steel production in 1900 amounted to over ten million tons, more than a third higher than Germany’s, the closest competitor. Railroad trackage stretched to 167,000 miles, or one-third of the world’s total. Per-capita income
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was estimated at $569, far above the nearest rival, Britain. Literacy rates stood at nearly 90 percent of the populace. The country had over 2,200 newspapers and nearly one thousand colleges and uni- versities, with a combined student body of nearly 240,000. School enrollment amounted to over sixteen million pupils—the world’s largest in both numbers and percentage of the population. Of these students, nearly one hundred thousand would graduate from sec- ondary schools in 1900, also ahead of every other nation in num- bers and percentages, and nearly double the total in 1890.2
CONNECTIONS
Some people define the word progress as “growth” or “movement,” while others view it as “a step forward” or a “ladder reaching upward.” How does Mark Twain define the word? What achievements does he regard as central to progress? How do you define progress? How does the way one defines the term shape an understanding of the world?
Scientist Jacob Bronowski created “The Ascent of Man,” a television series and a book on the history of humankind. He explained his use of the word ascent: “Man ascends by discovering the fullness of his own gifts (his talents or facul- ties) and what he creates on the way are monuments to the stages in his under- standing of nature and self.”3 How is his view of ascent similar to Twain’s view of progress? To those expressed by people like Samuel Morton (Chapter 2) and Charles Davenport (Chapter 3)? How do these views of progress differ? Which view is closest to your own definition of the term?
How does the word progress apply to individuals? What does it mean to regard yourself and others as those “for whom earth was made”? How does that view shape the way Twain ranks humankind in relation to other animals? How are his efforts to arrange the natural world similar to those of Johann Blumenbach or Petrus Camper (Chapter 2)? How do you think someone like Charles Davenport would respond to Twain’s view of the nation’s future? On what might they agree? On what points might there be debate?
Cooper writes, “During the first decade of the twentieth century, over eight mil- lion more immigrants would come to the United States—the largest number in any decade before or since. These newest arrivals would account for more than 10 percent of the entire American population.” How do you think these new- comers may have contributed to the dis-ease Henry Canby describes in the
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Introduction to Chapter 4? What other signs can you find in Cooper’s account that might explain the dis-ease experienced by Americans like Canby? Their sense of loss?
Interview someone who has lived 70 years or more to find out what changes have taken place in the world in his or her lifetime. How might Twain have described those changes? Which might he regard as “marvels of a marvelous age”? If he were alive today, how might he have revised or expanded his assess- ment of the marvels of his own age? His assessment of the future of humankind?
1. Quoted in Letters of a Nation edited by Andrew Carroll. Kodansha America, Inc., 1997, pp. 396-397. 2. Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 by John Milton Cooper, Jr. W.W. Norton & Co., 1990, pp. 1-3. 3. The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. Little Brown, & Co., 1973, p. 24.
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The End of the Frontier
Reading 2
In 1890, the Census Bureau announced that the nation had become so settled that it was no longer possible to draw a line on a map of the United States to indicate the nation’s frontier. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner saw the announcement as the end of an era. In speeches and essays, he maintained that with the closing of the frontier, something distinctive and even precious in American life had been lost. In 1926, journalist Mark Sullivan mourned that loss in Our Times, a history of the early 1900s. He argued that at the turn of the 20th century, “the average American in great numbers had the feeling he was being ‘put upon’ by something he couldn’t quite see or get his fingers on; that somebody was ‘riding’ him; that some force or other was ‘crowding’ him.” Sullivan explained:
Vaguely he felt that his freedom of action, his opportunity to do as he pleased, was being frustrated in ways mysterious in their origin and operation, and in their effects most uncomfortable; that his eco- nomic freedom, as well as his freedom of action, and his capacity to direct his political liberty toward results he desired, was being circum- scribed in a tightening ring, the drawing-strings of which, he felt sure, were being pulled by the hands of some invisible power which he ardently desired to see and get at, but could not. This unseen enemy he tried to personify. He called it the Invisible Government, the Money Interests, the Gold Bugs, Wall Street, the Trusts. During the first [William Jennings] Bryan campaign [for President in 1896], the spokesmen of the West spoke of the businessmen of the East, collec- tively, as “the enemy.”
That mood was the source of most of the social and political movements of the years succeeding 1900. . . .
The principal cause of the loss by the average American of a degree of economic freedom he had been accustomed to enjoy since the first settlement of the country was the practical coming to an end of the supply of free, or substantially free, virgin land. . . . During the 1890s occurred the last important one of these openings of Indian reservations to settlement, which were the principal means by which the Federal Government gave opportunity to landless men to acquire farms at small cost. That marked the end of that gloriously prodigal period . . . during which a man with a family of sons need give little concern to their future, knowing that when the urge of manhood
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came, they could go out and acquire a farm by little more than the process of “squatting” upon it. The time had come to an end when a man of independent spirit, feeling distaste for going to work as any one’s hired man in a factory or elsewhere, could go West, settle upon a quarter-section of public land, and in course of time possess himself of it without being called on to pay more than a nominal sum. The average American, who had been able to look out on a far horizon of seemingly limitless land, now saw that horizon close in around him in the shape of the economic walls of a different sort of industrial and economic organization, walls which, to be sure, could be climbed; but which called for climbing. . . .
The end of free land was the largest one of those causes which, in the years preceding 1900, gave rise to a prevailing mood of repression, of discomfort, sullenly silent or angrily vocal. . . . It took time to pass from an easy-going assumption that our land, our forests, all our natural resources were unlimited, to uncomfortable conscious- ness that they were not. The average American, more readily visualiz- ing a personified cause for his discomfort, dwelt more upon causes that proceeded from persons, or organizations of persons—corpora- tions, “trusts,” or what-not. There were such causes. But they were minor compared to the ending of the supply of free land.
. . . . In 1900, many men could remember when they could take their rifles, go out among the buffalo-herds, and get as much meat as they wanted, without . . . hindrance. To men with that memory, regulations, hunters’ licenses, were irksome. This is a small illustration of what happened in many fields. The frontiersman had hardly ever encountered law or regulation. With increase of popula- tion came limits on liberty, “verbotens,” “forbidden by law,” “no tres- passing.” Later, with machinery, came another variety of regulation. In the days of the horse-drawn vehicle, “keep to the right” was about the only traffic code. With the coming of the automobile, stringent traffic rules came into being.1
CONNECTIONS
Whom does Mark Sullivan regard as the “average American”? How does he describe the mood of that “average American” at the turn of the 20th century? To what does he attribute that mood? Why does he see it as the “source of most of the social and political movements in the years succeeding 1900”? As you continue reading, look for evidence that supports or challenges Sullivan’s views.
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Each of us has a “universe of obligation”—a circle of individuals and groups toward whom we feel obligations, to whom the rules of society apply, and whose injuries call for amends. Whom does Sullivan consider “one of us”? Who lies beyond his universe of obligation?
Sullivan focuses on life at the turn of the 20th century. In looking at that same period, anthropologist Lee Baker expresses concerns about the role of the “aver- age American” in “the violent chaos that erupted at the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, race and labor riots in 1892, terrorizing lynch mobs, and reports that African Americans composed the most criminal element in society.” To what extent is there a connection between “feeling put upon” and outbreaks of violence? Historians have noted that in times of uncertainty, it is all too easy to blame someone else for all that is new and disturbing. Whom does Sullivan’s “average American” blame for his troubles? What do your answers suggest about the conditions that seem to encourage intolerance? What conditions then might foster tolerance? Find examples in current events.
Look up the words squatting or squatter in a dictionary. What do the definitions suggest about the way some Americans acquired “free land”?
How does Sullivan define the word liberty? What relationship does he see between individual liberties and the law? How do you define that relationship?
Many historians today disagree with the views expressed by Turner and Sullivan. In the book Into the West, historian Walter Nugent writes that by 1890 “Native American armed resistance had collapsed after four hundred years of European pressure. That, not the frontier, was what really ended in 1890.” What point is Nugent making about the settlement of the West and the role of Native Americans in the process? Find out more about the frontier in American history. To what extent is the picture Sullivan paints reality? To what extent is it a myth? It has been said that what people believe is true often has more power than truth itself. How does the popular view of the settlement of the West support that idea?
In 1776, soon after the American Revolution began, each of England’s 13 for- mer colonies wrote a constitution that gave the right to vote to “free men” who owned property. By the mid-1800s, most states had revised their constitutions to allow all “free white men” to vote. What does Sullivan suggest about the links between land ownership and citizenship? Why do you think the Americans he describes felt that they had a right to the land?
1. Our Times: The United States 1900-1925 by Mark Sullivan. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926, pp. 137-138, 141-143, 144-149.
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A Celebration of “Progress”
Reading 3
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, expositions and fairs were a way of educating people not only about their nation and its place in the world but also about their own place in American society. In 1893, over 27 million people attended the World’s Columbian Exposition—an exposition that used architecture, arti- facts, and “living exhibits” to celebrate “American progress.” Held in Chicago to mark the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyages to the Americas, it attracted over 13 million Americans—about one of every five people in the nation. The fair was designed to prove that “the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people,” is the result of natural selection. Many of the exhibits illustrated “the steps of progress of civilization and its arts in successive centuries, and in all lands up to the present time.” The aim was “to teach a lesson; to show the advancement of evolution of man.” That lesson was rooted in social Darwinism—the idea that competition rewards “the strong” (Chapter 3).
That kind of patriotism appealed to many Americans, including Francis J. Bellamy, an editor of the popular children’s magazine Youth’s Companion. At his urging, Congress made October 12, 1892, a national holiday. On that day children gathered at schools and churches to celebrate Columbus’s achievements and the fair by reciting a “Pledge of Allegiance” that Bellamy wrote for the occasion: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” At the exposition, hun- dreds of schoolgirls dressed in red, white, and blue formed a living flag as they
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A view of the “White City”, as the World’s Columbian Exposition was known.
recited the pledge. In years to come, children across the nation—immigrant and native-born alike—would stand and recite that same pledge at the start of every school day.
To underscore the progress of the flag and the “inevitable triumph” of “white civilization” over Native Americans, the organizers invited several Sioux chiefs to the opening ceremonies. They made a brief appearance and then quietly left center stage, as a chorus sang “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” A reporter for the Chicago Tribune noted, “Nothing in the day’s occurrences appealed to the sym- pathetic patriotism so much as this fallen majesty slowly filing out of sight as the flags of all nations swept satin kisses through the air, waving congratulations to the cultured achievement and submissive admiration to a new world.”1
That message also shaped the design of the exposition. The White City, as the fair was called, was supposed to represent the crowning achievement of American cultural and economic progress. In The City of the Century, historian Donald L. Miller writes:
The spacious exhibition halls were arranged in sympathy with their natural surroundings and were conveniently interconnected by picturesque walkways and two and a half miles of watercourse. At almost every major point on the grounds, footsore sightseers could climb aboard a “swift and silent” electric launch or flag down a smaller battery-run boat—like hailing a cab—and head to the next spot on their guidebook agenda. The railroad that circled the grounds was the first in America to operate heavy, high-speed trains by electricity, and it ran on elevated tracks, posing no danger to pedestrians at a time when trains, trolleys, and cable cars killed more than four hundred people a year on the streets of Chicago.
The streets and pavements of the White City were free of refuse and litter and patrolled by courteous Columbian Guards, drilled and uniformed like soldiers in the Prussian army; there was also a secret service force. . . . Every water fountain was equipped with a Pasteur filter, and the model sanitary system . . . worked flawlessly, convert- ing sewage into solids and burning it, the ashes being used for road cover and fertilizer. There were no garish commercial signs, and with the concessionaires licensed and monitored, the fairgoers walked the grounds free from the nuisance of peddlers and confidence men, yet with the myriad pleasures of metropolitan life near at hand. The pavilions were vast department stores stocked with the newest con- sumer products, and in the course of a crowded day of sightseeing,
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visitors could stop at courteously staffed coffee shops, teahouses, restaurants, and beer gardens located at ground level or on rooftop terraces. The White City seemed to suggest a solution to almost every problem afflicting the modern city. . . .2
Problems that did not lend themselves to technological solutions were ignored. The week the exposition opened, a depression began in the United States. By 1894, over 16,000 businesses and 500 banks had failed. Hundreds of thousands of workers lost their jobs. The organizers paid no attention to these Americans other than to hire guards to keep them off the fairgrounds.
Officials also tried to eliminate dissent at the fair. Although many of the nation’s leading thinkers, reformers, and religious leaders spoke at the exposition, audi- ences were not permitted to ask questions nor were the speakers allowed to address one another directly. Many Americans found the idea of a clean, sparkling city without controversy or poverty refreshing, even inspiring. The Chicago Tribune described the White City as “a little ideal world, a realization of Utopia . . . [foreshadowing] some far away time when the earth should be as pure, as beautiful, and as joyous as the White City itself.” To Robert Herrick and other visitors to the Exposition, it was a magical place. He wrote: “The peo- ple who could dream this vision and make it real, those people . . . would press on to greater victories than this triumph of beauty—victories greater than the world had yet witnessed.”3
At the nearby Midway Plaisance—a strip of land a mile long and 600 feet wide across from the White City, visitors encountered a lesson in “race science” and social Darwinism. Here they saw “living exhibits”—representatives of the world’s “races” including Africans, Asians, and American Indians. The two German and two Irish villages were located nearest to the White City. Farther away and clos- er to the center of the Midway were villages representing the Middle East, West Asia, and East Asia. Then, wrote literary critic Denton J. Snider, “we descend to the savage races, the African of Dahomey and the North American Indian, each of which has its place” at the far end of the Plaisance. “Undoubtedly,” he noted, “the best way of looking at these races is to behold them in the ascending scale, in the progressive movement; thus we can march forward with them starting with the lowest specimens of humanity, and reaching continually upward to the highest stage” so that “we move in harmony with the thought of evolution.”
The fair’s organizers promoted the idea that the “savage races” were dangerous by warning that “the [Dahomey] women are as fierce if not fiercer than the men and all of them have to be watched day and night for fear they may use their spears for other purposes than a barbaric embellishment of their dances.” “The stern warning,” writes anthropologist Lee Baker, “reinforced many Americans’
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fears that African Americans could not be trusted and were naturally predis- posed to immoral and criminal behavior and thus kept away from white people through segregation.”4
Some groups were outraged at the way they were presented at the fair. Emma Sickles, the chair of the Indian Committee of the Universal Peace Union, protested portrayals of Native Americans at the exhibition in The New York Times on October 8, 1893. Her letter states in part:
Every effort has been put forth to make the Indian exhibit mis- lead the American people. I