Taft’s Chair, Serra Cross, and Other Props: Mission Revival Hospitality Pageants with Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, 1899-1909

As Carey McWilliams notes in Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946), theatricality has persisted as a central tactic of empire in the U.S. borderlands—from the rituals Spanish missionaries used to attract Native Americans to the historical dramas of Anglo-American boosters. The early decades of the twentieth century saw a number of plays that, in the words of Chelsea K. Vaughn, “romanticized the Spanish and Mexican periods of California history before assigning them comfortably to the past.” These include John S. McGroarty’s The Mission Play (1912) and Garnet Holme’s adaptation of Ramona (1923) as well as his original drama The Mission Pageant of San Juan Capistrano (1924). Such dramas were anticipated by ceremonial pageants that took place at Mission Revival hotels throughout the early twentieth century—to wit, Governor Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to the 1899 Rough Riders Reunion at the Castañeda Hotel in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and President William Howard Taft’s 1909 Columbus Day sojourn at the Glenwood Mission Inn, in Riverside, California. Each of these “hospitality pageants” casts the visiting dignitary as a typological protagonist—the Anglo-American “antitype” of the Spanish “type” embodied in conquistadores and/or missionaries.