Setting the Stage

Abstract

Once through the turnstiles of Mechanics Building, visitors traveled to Japan for a cup of green tea, witnessed an Indian wedding, heard an experienced missionary lecture about the evils of opium in the markets of China, and viewed moving pictures of a medical missionary at work in a leprosy hospital in India. The World was advertised in newspapers and journals as a “trip around the world” taken in Boston’s largest exhibition hall, which covered an entire city block. Its organizers intended people to “see missions” because “the best way to interest a man in missions [was] to have him visit the field and see the work and the workers with his own eyes” (Harold 1911a:9). Introducing the concept of the missionary exposition to North America, Rev. A. M. Gardner emphasized: “The attempt is to put [exposition-goers] in the same opportunity as they would have if they could visit the fields personally and see the need of the heathen world and the efforts that are being made by the church to extend the Kingdom of our God” (1911:6). Although the exposition gave audiences, who might not otherwise have the spirit or the finances to travel, a chance to travel to six continents, it was more than a world tour; it was a first-class missionary exposition that offered a bird’s-eye view of mission lands from home. The activities of each foreign mission field were brought to life in an exposition that collapsed global space and time. Travelers had the chance to experience a real and absolutely authentic fragment of a world elsewhere—a world that had been touched and improved upon by missionaries (cf. Greenblatt 1998:121–22).¹

We will join the throngs and go with them into this fairy land of strange faces and far-away places, picked up from the twenty corners of the earth and all huddled together within the limits of Boston’s largest exhibition hall.

—Rev. Ilsey Boone, 1911

There are the American Indians with their teepees and blankets and feathers, the cowboys with their lassoos and feather breeches, the Eskimos of Alaska with their totems and huts, the alluring Hawaiians, the alert Japanese, the sober Chinese, the brilliant Burmans, the wild Assamese, the sad-faced Hindus, the stately Mohmmedans, the kinky haired Africans, and the European races which are swarming to America as immigrants.

—Missions, 1911