Displaying Ireland: Ireland, Irish America, and the Irish Village at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair

On May 4, 1904, the Irish Village opened in St. Louis at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, more popularly known as the World’s Fair.  The Irish Village boasted reproductions of Blarney Castle, Drogheda’s St. Lawrence’s Gate, the ancestral cottage of President William McKinley, and the Old Irish House of Parliament. It also featured Irish industries, agriculture, art, and historic items.  Controversy erupted over theatrical performances when Irish-American audiences denounced what they saw as negative “stage Irish” stereotypes depicted on stage but despite this hiccup, the Irish Village was popular and widely acclaimed among fair attendees.

This paper examines the creation of the Irish Village at the St. Louis World’s Fair. While many scholars have examined the ways that the Irish were stereotyped by outside groups, less attention has been paid to tensions between the Irish in Ireland and in the United States.  Central to the Irish Village was the question of representation and authenticity.  How did the Irish hope to present Ireland to the outside world and how did this fit with Irish-American images of the homeland?  Whereas Irish representatives desired to focus on Ireland’s possibility for modernization and economic development, Irish Americans presented an Ireland wrapped in a nostalgic celebration of their ancestral past. Drawing upon correspondence, accounts of the fair, and Irish government reports from both countries, this paper demonstrates the transatlantic competition to define and craft Ireland’s image to the wider world. Such an approach also ties in naturally with the conference theme of “Historical Scale: Linking Levels of Experience,” by demonstrating how separation across spatial and temporal scales created an opportunity for the Irish at home and abroad to challenge the meaning of what “Irishness” should mean to themselves and outsiders in the early twentieth century.