Historical Pageants

I've been thinking about historical pageantry this week - with new beginnings, lots of hope, lots of promise as the season turns to the new academic year.

As a culture we stage re-enactments and re-creations of past events as commemoration of our historical roots. Crowds today flock to "King Richard's Fair" and such fanciful re-creations of the late 1100s in England for novel entertainment. But there also are serious hobbyist re-enactors who focus on authenticity of Revolutionary War and Civil War battles, down to study of an historical person. Over the years, commemorative mock battles have been features of various festival occasions around the world.

The post-Civil War period in America was a muscular and optimistic commercial era. The west was being populated, the expansion was being consolidated and Americans needed to celebrate their achievements. Periodic grand pageantry was the answer for the times, as was seen in Victorian England and Europe.

In 1800 the US was 17 years old, contained east and south of the Ohio River, plus Ohio newly added. The total citizen population of 5.3 million included 1 million slaves. A century passed and by 1900 there were over 76 million Americans spread from coast to coast. The cities in America mounted big commemorative events, celebrating their founders and founding.

In 1900 learning and knowledge meant experience with classical sources. In secondary school the classics were enforced study for a disciplined mind. Latin was a graduation requirement, not just for Catholics. Learning was dominated by reading and recitation. Memorization was highly valued. The Victorian love of symbolism and metaphor pervaded literature. It all was a formula for pageantry and grand symbolic gestures, usually with Greek or Roman themes. Some high schools had exercises with costumes and ceremonies conducted in Latin, typically celebrating virtue and honor.

Communities also established periodic festivals celebrating their own founding in the national expansion of the 1800s. Wrapped in community boosterism and celebrating growth, they featured pageant re-enactments, commercial preening, and always a parade or "procession." These were - and many continue to be - offered on a long cycle of once in five or ten years. The celebrations commemorate early settlers and public figures in the town and region, their hardships and their notable achievements, in many cases not a century past in the 1950s.

Older sections of the country had their own celebrations. Hathitrust listing of historical New England founding festival pageants includes six in Massachusetts 1897-1916, others in Vermont and Connecticut. By that time those states were approaching 250 years old.

There are contemporary re-enactor groups today that focus on particular wars and battles. Participants may research specific historical characters and authenticity is highly valued. These differ greatly from the community boosterism of the founding pageants.

I have a particular pageant memory from the early 1950s in Kansas of seeing my father, as one of Coronado's soldiers in a skirmish with Indians, had fallen from a horse on the football field. He was a farm boy, although not a horseman. The horse was spooked by the shiny cuirass and clamshell helmet he wore - it looked like a foreign creature on his back. My father was unhurt, but it stopped the battle for a time. The field was full of faux-Indians and make-believe conquistadors. The grandstands were full of everybody else in several towns around.

We have many distractions today, with multiple broadcast media, streamed movies and serialized entertainment, social media and other online resources. It's a far different entertainment environment than the early 20th Century. The sense of community is challenged as people select a home for other reasons. The broad range of media makes organizing perspectives difficult, and the pace of living makes broad participation problematic.

Historic celebrations today tend to be much more nuanced in interpreting events through modern American thought. Treatment of Indians and non-Caucasians is particularly difficult for some historical narratives. With a few years of retrospection, it does not appear that the turn to the 21st Century exhibited quite the robust pageantry and assertiveness as the beginning of the 20th.

Arthur Dirks

04 Sept 2013

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