Canceled look-alike contest stirs more debate

loading...

PRESQUE ISLE – The cancellation of a look-alike contest, which organizers said was supposed to make local history more accessible to area residents, has left some blaming the media and others raising questions about whether the event was ever appropriate.

The Jim Cullen Look-Alike Contest, scheduled to take place Aug. 4 at the Northern Maine Agricultural Fair and Music Festival in Presque Isle, was to focus on a white Canadian man – recounted in local legend as a 6-foot-tall, 250-pound brute with a reddish beard – who was lynched by an Aroostook County mob in 1873 after he supposedly killed two men sent to arrest him.

Event organizer Dena Winslow repeatedly stated that the canceled event was supposed to be about the man, not his lynching – a misunderstanding that she said led to media reports “creating a controversy through the perpetration of even more misinformation.”

But two local professors pointed out that it is not that easy to separate the victim from the lynching, and that a look-alike contest is not an appropriate way to draw attention to a piece of history connected with lynching and its “dreadful past.”

Because of recent controversy over the issue, the Northern Maine Fair Association’s board of directors voted unanimously last week to withdraw from hosting the event.

Ed Nickerson, the fair’s president, said this week that fair officials had received a few letters, phone calls and comments concerning the glorification of murder and misunderstanding that the event would include a re-enactment of the lynching.

Nickerson noted that though the vote was unanimous, two directors “didn’t feel they should bow to a few complaints when they had received a lot of positive comments about it,” but said they would vote with the majority.

After the fair association’s decision, the Haystack Historical Society announced last week that it was canceling the event due to a lack of both support and registered contestants.

Three people registered for the event, but organizers said they knew of at least four more who had planned to participate.

“We’ve missed a wonderful opportunity to draw attention to history that would have certainly had an impact on people’s views on history in general,” Winslow, an Aroostook County historian and Haystack Historical Society member, said this week. “It would have given us the opportunity to compare the folklore and the legend with the real story. That’s basically been lost because of the cancellation.”

Voscar Nelder, vice president of the Haystack Historical Society and the man who came up with the idea for the look-alike contest, said this week that organizers thought they were creating a fun and appropriate way to share local history and get some publicity for the Mapleton Historical Society.

“We didn’t think it would be controversial,” Nelder said. “Nobody knew what he looked like and we thought we’d have a contest and select somebody that we thought in our own minds resembled Jim Cullen. That was as far as it was going to go.”

John Defelice, history professor at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, said he has been uncomfortable with the idea of the contest from the beginning and was glad to hear it was canceled.

“Historians do all kinds of events to raise historical awareness, but I can’t think of any event where someone tries to commemorate [an instance of] mob violence in a poignant way that is supposed to be entertainment,” Defelice said on Wednesday.

The history professor pointed out that, despite a statement that organizers were focusing the contest on Jim Cullen, the man, and not his lynching, “It’s hard to separate the two once you use the word lynch.”

Dick Ayre, criminal justice professor at UMPI, said that he thought the contest was “incredibly tacky” and that a local event connected to lynching and its “dreadful past” deserved more gravity.

“This is a very legitimate subject of historical inquiry, but to use this kind of event to draw attention to it is in very poor taste,” he said. “There are far better ways to address this issue. This is just not the way to do it.”

Dick Graves, a local historian who worked with the historical society on the contest and wrote a series of newspaper articles about Cullen, said the majority of the community supported the event and that it was a vocal minority that spoke out and “got their way.”

“Most of us thought there wasn’t a thing wrong with it,” Graves said on Wednesday. “There were a few local people who thought the contest shouldn’t go. But that wasn’t the 99 percent who thought it was a good idea.”

Heidi Samuels is one of those people. The local woman, whose great-great-great-grandfather helped search for Cullen after he supposedly killed two men, said she saw the event as a good way for the historical society to gain some attention.

“I thought the look-alike contest was in poor taste, but more in a ha-ha, all-in-fun way instead of a scandal,” she said Thursday. “The general consensus I’ve heard is that people don’t understand what the big stink is all about.”

Graves said the contest was not meant to be a serious event, nor was it meant to glorify lynching – it was meant to be a portrayal of real history in a new and different way that would grab people’s interest in local history.

Winslow agreed.

“The event served our purposes of presenting historical information,” she said. “If it hadn’t, I’m not sure how many people would have shown up to learn about the history. I don’t think history has to be serious. My perception is if you make history dull and dry and serious, it’s not going to be interesting to people.”

The society’s intent, Winslow said, was to talk about this man and the myth of him, comparing the fact and the folklore and discussing the fact that he was a victim of violence.

“We were going to have to mention the lynching, but we were going to focus on the man,” she said.

Winslow and Nelder said the society is not planning to present its information on Cullen in a formal manner anytime in the near future.

It will, however, host a display on Cullen at the Historical Pavilion in the Forum on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.