Morganmobile: In Disguise

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Facing a cast of players that look ready for their supper, a local studio’s photographer attempts to frame the participants in one town’s patriotic holiday pageant. The minute-long panning exposure of his banquet camera records some two hundred characters derived from history, civic heraldry, literature, and legend. Pilgrims, Conquistadors, and Betsy Ross rub elbows with Liberty, Johnny Appleseed, and a troupe of bobbed-haired ukulelists. Inclusive though the script of the event appears to have been, one feature of costuming signals profound exclusion. The disenfranchised of history—Black and Mexican laborers and native peoples of the continent—are represented by players in blackface and brownface. The clear, if unconsidered, message to today from Labor Day, 1925: the nation’s saga, however rich and varied its interpretation, was still understood as a story fit to be enacted—and embodied—by white Americans only.

C. Hart Studio, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, 7th Annual Pageant, Held at Hinckley, Ohio, Labor Day, September 7, 1925. Gelatin silver print. Purchased on the Photography Acquisition Fund, 2018.62.