The St. Louis World Fair of 1904 introduced and perpetuated a magnitude of racist ideologies. The fair was meant to memorialize the Louisiana Purchase, hence its official name, “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition.” Though this deal was a huge success for the United States, almost doubling its size, it resulted in the displacement of multiple Indigenous tribes who originally inhabited the land. The exhibits in this event were intended to be used as a form of education, but they appeared to be more of a form of entertainment for the intended audience: white people who   had an extreme superiority complex and believed that the white race was genetically more advanced than any other race. To demonstrate this ideology and to spread awareness and information about different cultures, the fair held “a comprehensive anthropological exhibition, constituting a Congress of Races, and exhibiting particularly the barbarous and semi-barbarous peoples of the world, as nearly as possible in their ordinary and native environments” (Rydell 1984:162). This agenda was violently carried out by using twelve hundred Filipino people as live props and forcing them to “live in villages on the forty-seven-acre site set aside for the display” (Rydell 1984:168). 

These exhibits were promoted all over the country and were especially aimed at college students. One program through the University of Chicago encouraged students to come to the St. Louis exposition by giving them free admission and credit in a course called “The Louisiana Purchase Exposition Class in Ethnology” if they took an exam after a three week session at the fair. The class focused on subjects such as cannibalism and physical characteristics of race (Rydell 1984: 167). Along with the so-called information that was given by this event, the fair also contributed to the development of music studies that would turn into ethnomusicology.

Frances Densmore, an Oberlin student and famous ethnographer, visited the St. Louis World Fair and claimed to have learned a great deal from it. She spent her time visiting the Philippine exhibits and learning about their style of life and also their music. She undertook the task of transcribing a handful of traditional Filipino songs that she heard there. By documenting Indigenous music using Western methods and distributing these arrangements without permission, Frances Densmore used transcription and extraction to aid in the colonization of Indigenous people. While Densmore’s  efforts were some of the first in the field that would become ethnomusicology, her methods of preservation were a harmful example of extraction. Moreover, after visiting the live exhibits, she continued to write about her experiences and referred to Filipinos as “primitive” and insisted that they would be a successful race if they were directed in the proper way. 

Unfortunately, this practice allowed for American composers to be able to  use samples of indigenous music in composing works for American orchestras. Overall, the St. Louis World’s Fair was a cruel attempt to learn more about indigenous communities, not only because of the inhumane living environments that people were forced to inhabit as part of the  live exhibits, but also because it furthered ideas of social darwinism and white colonialism.