by Michael Daly
AFTERWORD
The following year, 1906, the big news in the show world was the death in April of James Bailey, who had fallen ill after overseeing the opening of another season at Madison Square Garden. The initial reports were that he caught a chill after removing his coat to help unload snow-heavy soil for the ring. Subsequent, more likely accounts suggested that the control-obsessed patriarch who had ordered the killings of at least seven elephants had suffered a tiny insect’s bite that developed into acute erysipelas, colloquially known as holy fire.
The Ringling Brothers bought the Barnum & Bailey operation after his death. The Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus continued in seeming perpetuity, billing itself as the Greatest Show on Earth, the name and the superlative eventually covering two shows, one transported by train, the other, smaller one by truck. Both carried Barnum’s name into the future, just as he had hoped, complete with publicity stunts as if he were still alive to pull them. That included having the elephant John L. Sullivan, once the Light of Asia and now just Old John, carry a wreath fifty-three miles from Madison Square Garden to the monument in Somers, New York, that Hachaliah Bailey had built a century before to Old Bet, the second elephant in America and the first of her species to be murdered here. The newspapers dutifully reported Old John’s progress as he trudged up the length of Manhattan and through the Bronx and into Westchester. He finally arrived at the granite pillar that the original Bailey had erected outside the original Elephant Hotel, which was shaped like a hotel, not an elephant, but had been the headquarters of the circus in America and was now destined to become the town hall and a museum. The crowd that gathered likely included the younger Forepaugh’s ex-wife, the humane Lily Deacon, who still lived nearby on an estate turned animal refuge.
The elephant John L. Sullivan’s former boxing partner Eph Thompson died in 1909 in the Egyptian city of Alexandria and was buried in England, where he left a family. Thompson was able before his death to make a return visit to his hometown of Ypsilanti, Michigan, which he had left as a young teen after going circus crazy. He brought his four elephants, who did “all new and original tricks, no copy from anyone,” including “Mary, the only somersaulting elephant in the world.” He was described in the local Daily Press as the man “who ran away from Ypsilanti and become one of the most renowned elephant trainers in the world.” He must have proven what he needed to prove, for not long afterward he put the elephants up for sale.
His mentor, Stewart Craven, had died at age 56 in 1890, but his widow lived long enough to celebrate her 102nd birthday by dancing as her son played the harmonica. The tricks pioneered by Craven and Thompson were approximated if not quite equaled over the years, though the general approach remained rougher than either man favored. That began to change as the public started to show actual concern, occasionally even outrage.
In 1995, two private citizens founded a 2,700-acre sanctuary in Tennessee for “sick, old, and needy elephants,” exclusively female save for the occasional male admitted only in extreme circumstances. That gave the U.S. Department of Agriculture a suitable place to lodge elephants whom the agency found to have been mistreated, usually by animal dealers or the smaller circuses. The humans there of course had their rivalries, and the cofounder Carol Buckley was ousted by the board of directors. Buckley sued, saying, “I don’t believe I could live” if she continued to be barred from seeing the elephants.
The same year the sanctuary was founded, the Greatest Show on Earth sought to better its image by establishing the Ringling Brothers Elephant Conservation Center, “in the interest of the species’ present and future well being.” The stated purpose was “reproduction, research, and retirement,” and by 2010 the center had reported the successful birth of twenty-three calves.
The ASPCA was not to be mollified. The organization founded by Bergh brought suit in federal court against Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus accusing it of cruelty to its elephants in violation of the Endangered Species Act. The case was filed in 2000 and finally came to trial in 2009. Judge Emmet Sullivan found for the defendant, ruling that the plaintiff’s star witness, former Ringling trainer Tom Rider, had lied about receiving payment from animal activists.
Trainers continued to use bull hooks, but the ones employed by the Ringling show have hooks so small as to be barely visible from even a few feet away. There have been no recent reports of beatings anything like those of old, though the elephants continue to display stereotypic behavior that suggests significant stress. The Ringling show visits Madison Square Garden at its present location farther uptown, arriving by train in Queens, then walking the elephants through the Midtown Tunnel and across West Thirty-fourth Street, to the surprise and delight of late-night pedestrians. The elephants turn just before they come to the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla ended his days in hopeless love with a white pigeon, saying after it died, “Yes, I loved that pigeon. I loved her as a man loves a woman and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was purpose in my life.”
As for the elephants, one of the Garden’s security staff in 2009 marveled at how they took turns keeping watch while the others slept. He wondered aloud why they swayed back and forth, back and forth.
In the summer of 2010, the smaller Ringling show, the truck show, made a prolonged appearance in Coney Island. The Internet age had not changed the fundamentals of publicity and it was arranged for the show’s star elephant, Susie, to lead the Mermaid Parade that now marks the start of the summer season there.
With the easy elephantine amble that forces humans to scurry if they want to keep pace, Susie came up Surf Avenue, a magician and his girlfriend straddling her neck. Tenders armed with tiny but no doubt sharp hooks surrounded her, a muttered instruction from one of them enough to prompt Susie to raise and curl her trunk, a supposed sign of luck. A half dozen cops also scurried alongside as Susie passed the former site of Steeplechase Park. It had been torn down in 1966 by Donald Trump’s real estate developer father, Fred, who held a party at which people were invited to throw bricks through the facade bearing George Tilyou’s famous trademark, a smiling face.
“Do we have to stop at the stop light?” a tender now asked.
“No,” a cop said.
Susie and her escorts continued on past the very spot where the cops’ predecessor Roundsman Clark had ordered Whitey to desist with the pitchfork as Topsy struggled to budge the Trip to the Moon. The curbs on both sides of the street were now packed with people who smiled and cheered on seeing the elephant.
Susie crossed Stillwell Avenue, named for the acquisitive male who secured ownership of all of Coney Island after the demise of Lady Moody and her egalitarian matriarchy. A block ahead and on the seaward side was the Coney Island Museum, where an artist had fashioned a memorial to Topsy featuring a hand-cranked Mutoscope viewer, but one whose workings were more like those of a kinetoscope and loaded with the film clip of her final moments. The viewer stands safely on copper plates while watching what can be seen on YouTube by searching for “Topsy” and “Coney Island.” The clip begins with a card bearing the title and a lone credit that some now consider a condemnation.
Electrocuting an Elephant
Thomas A. Edison
The company that so obligingly provided the deadly volts was still serving Coney Island, along with the rest of the New York, though the Edison Electric Illuminating Company had become Brooklyn Edison and then joined with the city’s other power companies into Consolidated Edison. The company’s name had been shortened on vehicles, such as one now parked on the street, to Con Edison. People now generally shortened the Wizard’s name as well and spoke of Con Ed with little thought of the Wizard who for all his bitterness regarding his name had been so revered upon his death in 1931 that the nation observed a minute of darkness the night of his burial, by chance the fifty-second anniversary of the first successful test of a practical incandescent bulb.
No such
honors had accompanied the passing of George Westinghouse in 1914, despite his victory in the War of Currents. He, too, had suffered the humiliation of losing control of the company he founded in 1909, though his name remained even as the company began selling off pieces of itself. It then bought CBS and named itself CBS Corporation and, in turn, was acquired by Viacom, which subsequently divided itself into Viacom and CBS Corporation.
As this was Mermaid Parade Day, there was a reviewing stand, just down the street from a collection of carnival rides that calls itself Luna Park and just across from the western edge of where the original Luna Park stood before the great fire of 1944. The Electric Eden’s owners had long since died, both of natural causes, Dundy just four years after Topsy, Thompson in 1919, having lost control of his Billion-Dollar Smile and so broke his grave went without a tombstone for three years before some show world cronies kicked in to buy one.
The reviewing stand judges now watched the parade participants pass them in the eminently imaginative, ocean-themed costumes that make the Mermaid procession an annual escape from the ordinary. There was, of course, no escape for Susie, who had on a red leather version of the harness worn by her predecessor in the Edison film. Susie’s included a medallion that fitted on her forehead reading “Greatest Show on Earth.”
“Here comes Susie!” a woman on the reviewing stand announced over the public address system. “Hello, Susie!”
As compliant as her predecessor up to the very end, Susie stopped on command and raised her left foot in what could be taken as a salute but was just another learned trick. The voice again came over the PA system.
“Do not refer to Susie as Topsy, whatever you do.”
Only a few people seemed to understand the reference, but that was still more than your average long dead elephant could expect. Susie was ordered to continue on up to West Tenth Street, once the far end of Luna Park, now where she was supposed to swing back around. A police supervisor cleared a large area, as if for some monster tractor-trailer to make a U-turn. The elephant pivoted about almost in place and returned down Surf Avenue at the same easy pace that now had some of the escorts huffing, the cops in particular.
A dozen blocks down, Susie and her escort turned into a parking lot. The magician and his girlfriend slid off her neck and Susie stood at the side entrance to the circus grounds while a truck that had pulled in ahead of her was unloaded. She could have tossed and trampled any of the people around her. Nothing was immediately stopping her from just ambling away, across the beach and into the sea for a long swim of her own if she so desired.
She stayed where she was, the trunk that could kill anybody in reach seeming harmless, her size not the least threatening, her whole manner conveying the same kindliness the witnesses had seen in Topsy in those final moments just up Surf Avenue. Her huge eyes shimmered with that same benevolence, now as then not in response to anything, more likely despite almost everything.
What was conveyed by Susie’s manner and eyes was simply what was in her, what had always been in her, what makes elephants giants by measures that are ultimately even more remarkable than their height and weight.
The truck pulled away. Susie went in through the gate.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I set out to tell the story of Topsy after seeing Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant on YouTube. I soon discovered that because of the subterfuge accompanying Topsy’s arrival in America and her subsequent status as just a member of the herd, there was relatively little documentary material directly concerning her. I was left feeling all the more that the tale of how she came to meet such a cruel end so far from her native land deserved to be told. I have sought to do so largely by recounting the history through which her life progressed. In that effort, I relied on the work of many other writers, ranging from underpaid reporters to underpaid historians to underpaid scientists, who together produced a wealth of knowledge and insight.
Among the newspaper writers, I owed a particular debt to scribes at the New York Times. I am no less indebted to the authors of numerous books. Tom McNichol’s AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War is a masterful work and served as a template for my delineation of the War of Currents. William Slout’s Clowns and Cannons was hugely helpful and a fine resource in every way, most particularly regarding another war, the Battle of the Dwarfs. Jill Jonnes’s Empires of Light is another masterwork and a fine guide to the interplay of Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse. Richard Moran’s Executioner’s Current was a clear-eyed guide to the genesis of the electric chair. Also very helpful in that regard was Mark Essig’s Edison and the Electric Chair. Alfred O. Tate’s Edison’s Open Door accorded me intimate insight into the mind of the Wizard. Charles Musser’s Before the Nickelodeon is an able history of early Edison movie making. W. C. Thompson’s On the Road with a Circus is an invaluable firsthand account of traveling with a show. Woody Register’s The Kid of Coney Island is a remarkable biography of another Thompson, Fred, cofounder of Luna Park. I am only the latest of many writers to use Oliver Pilat and Jo Ranson’s classic Sodom by the Sea as a guide to the history and buoyant spirit of Coney Island. Eric Scigliano’s Love, War, and Circuses was a particular help to me and offers much wisdom about elephants and shows. M. H. Dunlop’s Gilded City was a great resource about the fate of the elephant Tip. Paul Chambers’s excellent Jumbo was a jumbo-sized resource and showed me all that can be done with a story about an elephant. Stephen Alter’s Elephas Maximus was of great assistance regarding Asian elephants. Among the more remarkable scientific works were Caitlin O’Connell’s The Elephant’s Secret Sense and Katy Payne’s classic Silent Thunder, as well as Cynthia Moss’s Elephant Memories. Nikola Tesla’s autobiographical My Inventions offered a genius’s own words to complement Marc J. Seifer’s The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla.
Other invaluable books include S. L. Kotar and J. E. Gessler’s The Rise of the American Circus 1716–1899, Silvio Bedini’s The Pope’s Elephant, Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, Eric Ames’s Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments, and Wyn Wachhorst’s Thomas Alva Edison.
I am greatly indebted to such circus historians as Stuart Thayer, Fred Dahlinger, Bob Cline, and Bob Parkinson. I also wish to thank Erin Foley and Peter Shrake at the Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center at the Circus World Museum, a big top of scholarly devotion. I owe an equal debt to Margaret Kieckhefer of the Library of Congress as well as AnnaLee Pauls and her colleagues at the Special Collections office at the Princeton University Library.
I further wish to thank all the people at Grove/Atlantic, notably the big boss who bought the book, Morgan Entrekin, and my editor, Jamison Stoltz, who debunked many myths about the decline of publishing. I received further editorial assistance from the ever-wise Nancy Cardozo and my brilliant brother, Doulas Daly. I also wish to thank my agent, Flip Brophy, and my friend Gali Hagel, who kindly read the manuscript with the eye of someone with a long interest in elelphants.
Without my day job, there would be no book, so I thank my former employer, Mort Zuckerman, and my present employer, Tina Brown. The days off and nights would have been too bleak for writing were it not for the Daly girls of Brooklyn, just up Ocean Parkway from where Topsy met her end and Fanny made her great swim.
INDEX
Aaron Turner’s Traveling circus
Adam Forepaugh Show (Bailey ownership)
Chicago 1893 tour
downsizes after Panic of 1893
retains Forepaugh name after sale to Bailey
thieves and
Agassiz, Louis (Harvard zoologist)
Almack’s (Dickens’ Place)
American Museum
attendance at
Barnum bankruptcy proceedings and
Barnum buys
burns down
during Civil War
exhibits at
publicity for
>
stars at photographed by Brady
traveling sample sent to Washington, D.C.
American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA)
Edison’s electrocution experiments and
sues Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus
Tip’s execution and
Topsy’s execution and
Ankus (elephant hook, bull hook)
Annie (renamed Juliet)
Anthony
Antonio (Vivalla)
Armat, Thomas
invents movie projector (vitascope) with Jenkins
Arstingstall, George,
Arthur, George,
Astor, Henry,
Badger, William
Bailey
Hachaliah “Hack,”
James Anthony
Addie Forepaugh and
becomes part-owner of Cooper & Bailey’s circus
gains control of Barnum’s show
Chicago 1893 show and
childhood of
death of
opposes purchasing Forepaugh’s circus
on Tip’s behavior
Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia
Barlow, Pete
Barnam’s Great American Museum. See also American Museum
Barnum, Phineas Taylor “P. T.”
Aaron Turner’s Traveling circus and
Antonio (Vivalla) and
ASPCA and
associate troubles of
Battle of the Dwarfs and
Bergh and
Boyton, Paul and
Bridgeport home of, (Iranistan)
