Saturday, January 8, 2011: 9:20 AM
Room 202 (Hynes Convention Center)
In August of 1887, a group of Sioux City, Iowa businessmen formed the “Sioux City Corn Palace and Grand Harvest Jubilee Festival.” Two months later, the building they envisioned and that the ladies of town decorated became the nation’s first Corn Palace. For the next four years, Sioux City’s boosters and ladies’ organizations entertained hundreds of thousands of visitors with ever-grander iterations of the original Corn Palace and with festivities featuring local Indians, electric lights, national dignitaries, and international displays. Though Sioux City’s festivals ended after 1891, its five corn palaces served as more than ephemeral amusements: Sioux Cityans hoped that their corn palaces would act as magnets for the additional capital that would enable the city to transform its hinterlands and thereby become the next Chicago.
The gendered and racialized meanings attached to the construction and decoration of the Corn Palaces suggest that the construction of rural modernity was deeply linked to the capitalist transformation of social and environmental landscapes. For Sioux City’s male boosters, the Corn Palaces could bring about crucial bridge, rail, and slaughterhouse development. For ladies’ organizations, Corn Palace bounties signaled the potential of capitalist development to improve cultural affairs and the home. Collectively, Sioux Cityans used copious displays of regionally produced grains to show that their city—though peripheral to Chicago—was more modern than the Native peoples who came before them and was ideally situated to send Dakota and Nebraska hinterland riches to dining tables across the continent. The modernity written in Sioux City’s Corn Palaces, therefore, was drawn in relation to a history of Native removal and to the city’s capacity for further hinterland exploitation. The buildings and events attending the Palaces’ creation thus articulate a set of pathways through which peripheral communities believed they had to travel in order to modernize.
The gendered and racialized meanings attached to the construction and decoration of the Corn Palaces suggest that the construction of rural modernity was deeply linked to the capitalist transformation of social and environmental landscapes. For Sioux City’s male boosters, the Corn Palaces could bring about crucial bridge, rail, and slaughterhouse development. For ladies’ organizations, Corn Palace bounties signaled the potential of capitalist development to improve cultural affairs and the home. Collectively, Sioux Cityans used copious displays of regionally produced grains to show that their city—though peripheral to Chicago—was more modern than the Native peoples who came before them and was ideally situated to send Dakota and Nebraska hinterland riches to dining tables across the continent. The modernity written in Sioux City’s Corn Palaces, therefore, was drawn in relation to a history of Native removal and to the city’s capacity for further hinterland exploitation. The buildings and events attending the Palaces’ creation thus articulate a set of pathways through which peripheral communities believed they had to travel in order to modernize.