During the exposition, the building that would become The Art Institute of Chicago was used for a series of international cultural exchanges, the most important being the World Parliament of Religions. The purpose of the parliament, according to opening remarks, was to explore the "grounds for fraternal union in the religions of different people." 5 Since Douglass had spent his life trying to establish among the races what the parliament was seeking among religions, he accepted an invitation to speak. But the parliament did not prove a satisfactory forum for issues of race, nor did the exposition.

Douglass’ experiences at the Chicago fair reveal much about the man pictured in the daguerreotype made over forty years earlier. His involvement with the Haitian pavilion gave him a perspective on the proceedings that sadly disappointed and ultimately angered him, for he saw that a conception of human progress he despised and had denounced at every turn persisted still. This was apparent in the very layout of the Midway, for the sequence of exhibits was supposed to demonstrate the advance of civilization from so-called primitive cultures, such as those in Africa, to the supposedly higher stages represented by Europe and North America. Although this neat scheme became rather jumbled in execution, the idea remained clear in displays such as the Dahomey village, for which African Americans were hired to pose as African natives in jungle costumes. Douglass observed that, “as if to shame the Negro, the Dahomians . . . exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.” 6

The man in charge of the Columbian Exposition’s ethnological displays was F. W. Putnam, who published after the fair closed a souvenir volume entitled Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance. 7 This book was intended as an illustration of the idea of progress from race to race that Putnam had wanted his plan for the Midway to embody. A Harvard professor, Putnam was heir to the legacy of the naturalist Louis Agassiz, who had taught at the university earlier in the century. Agassiz believed in the practice of body typing and in comparing the measurements of skulls as a way to rank the races. As Agassiz was a mentor to Putnam, so was a group of daguerreotypes that Agassiz had commissioned in 1850 the precedent for Putnam’s Portrait Types. Inspired by an earlier comparative anatomy text, Dr. Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana, Agassiz toured plantations in the vicinity of Columbia, South Carolina, and selected five male and two female slaves to pose nude for a sequence of daguerrean plates (see figs. 2–3). 8