by Duncan Wall
Meanwhile, hard circuses across Europe were suffering similar fates. A few were converted to theaters or boxing halls. Most were torn down. In America, every last circus was destroyed. Out of the hundreds of circuses that once dotted the Continent, fewer than twenty remain. Amsterdam has one. Munich has one. In London, all that remains is a façade, the front of the Palladium, once the entrance to the Corinthian Bazaar.
What was causing this scourge? In a word: America.
WHEN THE Delaware Gazette hit newsstands on November 15, 1825, it contained a curious notice: One week hence Wilmington would host a circus under the direction of a fledgling producer, Joshua Purdy Brown. The show itself was nothing new. At the time, circuses were common in the New World. More than thirty years earlier, on April 3, 1793, John Bill Ricketts, the English rider educated by Astley’s nemesis Charles Hughes, had opened America’s first venue. In the one-ring amphitheater in the center of Philadelphia, he performed for, among others, the young country’s first president, George Washington. Other circus proprietors quickly followed. In 1808, Victor Pépin, one of Ricketts’s students, brought the circus to New York, setting up shop at the corner of Broadway and Magazine. Before long, families were flooding over from France, Spain, and Italy, lured by the dearth of competition. By the 1820s, America had more than twenty shows and was in the middle of what could rightly be considered its first circus boom.
What made Brown unique was his venue. Like the European circus producers, early American entrepreneurs staged their circuses in one of two ways: in buildings or in open-air arenas, often appropriated horse pens or village greens. Brown invented a new, in-between model. He assembled what his advertisements called a “pavilion,” a thirty-six-foot, umbrella-shaped sailcloth tent. (Technically, he wasn’t the first to have done this. Astley had experimented with a tent during a visit to Liverpool in 1788, but almost immediately abandoned the idea.) Brown took his show from town to town, but, rather than staying for weeks, as was the custom, he would offer his show for a limited time, as little as a night or two, and then push on. “If the weather should prove favorable,” his notice stated, “there will be a performance tomorrow evening; otherwise this evening will be the last.”
No innovation would have a greater impact on the shape and nature of the circus than Brown’s tent. In the decades to come, his circus would become the model for circuses first in America and then around the world, and in the process change everything from how the art was marketed, to where it played, to the type of acts it featured. Economically, the tent opened up new markets. Previously limited to long runs in cities big enough to support a permanent building, circuses were now able to appear in smaller towns. The tent brought the circus west, which made it aesthetically rougher, ruddier, and more rural. It also made the circus more spectacular. Free of the logistical constraints of a building, circus producers could analyze their earnings from the year before and adjust the size of their show accordingly. By the turn of the century, the circus boomed in a way that would have been incomprehensible to Brown: hundreds of performers and thousands of staff all chugged across the continent with a logistical complexity that even the military admired. As Pascal once put it, “You can literally watch the circus grow with America.”
Not that Brown himself was expecting any of this.
“I’m sure that Brown’s sole thought was, ‘How can I take my show to the settlers out west?’ ” Fred Dahlinger, Jr., curator of circus history at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, told me. Dahlinger is widely considered one of America’s most knowledgeable circophiles and an expert on the growth of the American circus in the nineteenth century. “Brown came from a region populated by traveling menagerie proprietors,” he said. “He realized that the canvas pavilion could enable a circus to tour the hinterlands.”
Brown wanted to go to the hinterlands because that’s where everyone else was going; his arrival on the scene corresponded not just to the explosion of the American circus but also to the explosion of America as a whole. Every week, many thousands of immigrants poured through America’s ports and headed west in the hope of forging a life in the wilderness. Unprotected by justice, unencumbered by the rules of the past, these American dreamers forged a new society: free, landed, self-sustaining—and looking for a good time. “They were desperate for entertainment!” Dahlinger said. “Their lives consisted almost exclusively of work and church. They celebrated any excuse for respite.”
The circus trouped out to find them. After his tour through Delaware, Brown pushed south to Virginia in 1826, then into the Mississippi valley, where he played Natchez and New Orleans. That same year, Nathan Howes, a New York farm boy turned showman, lit out with Aron Turner, a Connecticut shoemaker, playing in New England under a tent stitched of Russian duck, a white linen canvas.
Most of these early shows were small, almost ramshackle affairs. Creaking into town with a canvas tent rolled into a pair of covered wagons, the team of performers and crew, usually fewer than a dozen men, would divvy up the work and set up camp. One group would knock on doors to scrounge up an extra horse for the show, while another dispatched themselves to the forest to cut down a tent pole. The tents were small and often umbrella-shaped, with room around the outside for people to stand or set up chairs. Since lighting was expensive and a fire hazard, performances were often scheduled for the afternoon. Horses were the main attraction; “grand and brilliant” stunts of trick riding were interspersed with other easily transportable acts: leapers, clowns, a perch-pole act, a trained mule.
The shows were simple but popular; within a decade after Brown’s first tented circus premiered, other entrepreneurs had pushed across much of the country. As the art spread across the plains, it evolved. Like Dejean, who had adapted the circus for his high-class clientele, the circus entrepreneurs of America recast their shows to fit the demands of frontiersmen and farmers, rough-and-tumble men with rough-and-tumble tastes. Equestrians performed cowboy stunts in spurs and britches. Clowns in beat-up knickers swilled moonshine from barrels and told dirty jokes.
With time, the circus troupes became rough-and-tumble themselves. “The manager of a circus is hard because the business makes him,” Glenn H. Wakefield, a well-known circus con man, once noted. In the lawless and fierce environment, circuses sabotaged one another by slashing tents and stealing horses. They shortchanged ticket-buyers and openly supported what was known as “grift,” sanctioned criminal activity, from pickpocketing to con games. If locals found out and came looking for a fight, the circus crew would shout “Hey, rube!” and dive into a “clem,” a raucous brawl involving dozens of men wielding sledgehammers and chains.
Towns rebelled. Spurred on by the puritanical fervor sweeping the country, towns passed anti-circus legislation similar to the vagabond decrees of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Connecticut banned circuses outright. Sunsbury, Pennsylvania, prosecuted six acrobats for witchcraft in 1829, for “having private conferences with the spirit of darkness,” as well as exposing their populace to such “performances of magic” as “leaping over a horse through hoops.”
Some stars fought religious prejudice by cultivating acts specifically engineered for a Christian crowd. Van Amburgh, one of the great early lion-tamers, trained his lion to lie down with a lamb, and later a child. Others were less accommodating. Regardless, the circus continued to boom. By 1852, over thirty circuses were trudging across America. In cities, circuses had ballooned into immense and spectacular pageants, usually accompanied by menageries of imported exotic animals—lions and pythons and camels. By 1868, the centennial of Astley’s first circus in the Thames, the circus was easily the most popular entertainment in the American West, and maybe in all of the country. Circus performers were household stars. Dan Rice, sometimes referred to as “President Lincoln’s Court Jester,” became so famous that he ran for president in 1868. Circus producers such as Seth Howes, who retired in 1870 with a fortune of more than $70 million (almost $1 billion in tod
ay’s money), ranked among America’s richest men. All because of the tent.
Why hadn’t other forms of performance also adopted tenting—the theater, or even the ballet or the opera? Dahlinger speculated that the difference between the circus and other forms was partly practical. Because the circus appeal was primarily visual, it could play through conditions that would have quashed other shows—winds whipping the canvas, a driving rain clattering the roof. The circus also appealed to a wide variety of cultures speaking a wide variety of languages, essential in an America made up of immigrants.
The most critical aspect, however, was what you might call the circus’s “constitution.” Life on the road brought a host of challenges: bandits and belligerent natives, prairie fires and disease. As circus manager and then owner W. C. Coup wrote in Sawdust & Spangles, “No other human being can realize like the showman the volume of dread hardship and disaster held by those two small words, ‘bad roads.’ ” The other arts weren’t equipped to handle these challenges. “Think of an actor on a stage,” Dahlinger suggested. “He goes to the theater every night, then goes home. That’s a nice clean life.” The circus wasn’t so proper. It took place not on a stage but with horses in a circle of dirt. The cacophonous fairgrounds were woven into its DNA. Pioneering, spectacular, adventuresome, resourceful—the saltimbanques of the Middle Ages were quintessentially American before America ever existed. How interesting, then, that it would take another quintessential American to push the form to a whole new level.
IN 1860, at the height of his European fame, Jules Léotard passed a poster on the way home from his performance at London’s Alhambra Theatre. As he recounts in his memoirs, the poster had bright-red letters on a blue background. It read:
Barnum has the honor of alerting his English brothers that in a public lecture next Monday he will teach them the honest and natural way to make 30,000 pounds by profiting from the idiocy of his contemporaries.
Like practically everyone in the Western world, Léotard knew the legend of P. T. Barnum. Merchant, journalist, banker, showman, the garrulous New Englander had elevated himself, through abiding industry and a genius for self-promotion, into a captain of American entertainment, the father of what writers had taken to calling “popular culture.” Curious, Léotard decided to investigate, and on the day of Barnum’s lecture, made his way to Cheapside Road, where he pressed into the theater with a garrulous crowd.
When Barnum appeared, he looked every bit the legend. Almost fifty, with curly black hair slicked back and energetic hazel eyes, he was corpulent, with what the actor Otis Skinner would later call “an air of having lunched heartily.” Arranging himself behind the podium, he eyed the multitude for a long moment, as a sly smile pressed into the corners of his lips.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in his New England twang, “your total number here today is three thousand. Each of you has paid a shilling. Imagine, then, this session reproduced ten times. Do the math.” He paused and studied the crowd, imperious yet benevolent. Another satisfied grin spread across his face. “I have nothing else to teach you.”
In the history of the circus there are countless stars: Astley, Hughes, Franconi, Saqui. But P. T. Barnum is the name most Americans offer when asked about the circus. As Hugues Le Roux notes in his 1890 study Acrobats and Mountebanks, “To write a book about the traveling class and omit to celebrate Barnum would be equivalent to erasing the venerated name of the Prophet from a commentary on the Koran.”
Before Barnum, the circus of the American West remained an Astleyesque affair, with horses galloping around a single ring. Barnum, in combination with a fine team, refashioned the form through marketing, promotion, and logistical genius, creating the circus as it exists in our collective imagination: colossal, crassly commercial, bamboozling, inspiring, populous, simplistic, joyful—a three-ring show of spectacular overabundance that dominated the American entertainment landscape.
Surprisingly, these changes came late in his career, in 1871, when he was sixty-five years old. Their roots, however, lay in his experience decades before.
Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810, the son of “a tailor, a farmer, and sometimes a tavern-keeper.” His youth was marked by the now familiar hallmarks of circus greatness: energy, ambition, thirst for adventure. His father passed away when Barnum was just fifteen, leaving the son to support his mother and four younger brothers and sisters, which he did first by founding a fruit-and-confectionery shop and then, at the age of twenty, a newspaper, the Herald of Freedom.
Quickly, however, Barnum found himself tiring of what he would later denounce as “the ordinary trade.” Just across the state line, a town called Somers, New York, had become an epicenter of early circus action. The town was home to the Zoological Institute, a trust of thirteen menageries and three circuses, and the old showmen liked to visit Barnum’s shop and regale him with stories. Captivated, Barnum decided to join them on the road. Bidding farewell to his mother, he hitched on as secretary and treasurer to Aron Turner, one of America’s earliest circus entrepreneurs, heading south as part of the country’s first circus boom.
The experience proved a disaster. Turner was a roughneck, morally dubious, and unremittingly cheap. Within a year the show had folded. Barnum persevered, marshaling a four-horse company of his own, “Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical Theatre.” This, too, proved a mess. “We were not successful,” Barnum later wrote. “One of our small company was incompetent; another was intemperate—both were dismissed; and our negro-singer was drowned in the river at Frankfort.”
Disgusted with the traveling showman’s life, Barnum retreated. “When I consider the kinds of company into which for a number of years I was thrown,… I am astonished as well as grateful that I was not utterly ruined.” In 1841, with a wife and an infant daughter to support, he migrated to New York City to seek his fortune. His arrival corresponded with a period of explosive growth. With the machine age came a boom in business, fueled by the emigrants arriving from Europe by the boatload every day. “What a vast emporium of wholesale commerce, of retail business, of universal bustle!” wrote theater manager Alfred Bunn upon first visiting New York in 1853.
Unsure how best to profit from the action, Barnum spent several months experimenting with various entertainment endeavors. At the Vauxhall Gardens, a pleasure garden and theater near Lafayette Street, he staged three months of unsuccessful variety shows. Later, he penned a series of articles titled “The Adventures of an Adventurer: Being Some Passages in the Life of Barnaby Diddledum,” which drew from his experiences on the road and were published in the New York Atlas.
Finally, he struck upon an endeavor worthy of his energy: Scudder’s American Museum, a five-story “commercial” museum at the corner of Broadway and Ann. In young America, before state-supported cultural institutions came into being, such commercial or “proprietary” museums were common. Like most, Scudder’s featured a diverse collection, everything from paintings by famous artists to wax depictions of notorious crimes, displayed alongside ethnological and scientific exhibitions, such as two-headed calves and mummified rodents. Weary of caring for the eccentric collection after Scudder’s death, the trustees had put it up for sale along with the building. Barnum sniffed an opportunity: every week, tens of thousands of immigrants landed at the southern tip of the island and washed up Broadway; to pull the museum into profit, it would suffice, simply, to capture the horde’s attention.
So that’s what Barnum did. Through a bit of nimble financing, he acquired control of the building and immediately launched into a wholesale renovation. Dropping “Scudder” from its name, he rebranded the building “The American Museum” and festooned the exterior with brightly colored banners, fluttering flags, and huge oval paintings depicting “nearly every important animal known in zoology.”
During the day, he hired the worst brass band he could find to play above his doorway, a racket of trombones, drums, and tubas luring people in. At night, he
illuminated the whole façade with Drummond lights, the first case of outdoor limelight being used for advertising. “It was my monomania to make the museum the town wonder and town talk,” he wrote in one of the numerous versions of his memoir, The Life of P. T. Barnum.
At the same time, he expanded aggressively. He bought neighboring buildings and smashed through walls. He acquired any collection he could, and combined it with his own. He made no distinction between high and low. In 1861, he imported America’s first hippo; a giraffe, which he promoted as a “camelopard”; and a beluga whale, which he installed in a tank full of seaweed and saltwater pumped from New York Bay and kept alive via a full-time attendant paid to dab the whale’s mouth and spout with a sponge. Other hired hands included a magician, a ventriloquist, and Indians imported from the West for tomahawk demonstrations and canoe races. A resident taxidermist was on hand, receiving deceased pets from the public in the morning and returning them stuffed at night.
In his museum, Barnum was basically duplicating Astley’s vision for the codified fairground. Both were meant to be venues where a person could experience in a day all the wonders of the world—animals, spectacle, and adventure. This similarity to the fairgrounds is particularly evident in Barnum’s relationship with “freaks” (a.k.a. human oddities, living curiosities). As a concept, “freaks” date back to the ancient period. African Pygmies entertained the royals of Egypt, and Roman emperors delighted themselves with midgets dueling obese women. There were self-made and congenital or natural “freaks.” Those self-made altered themselves through body modification—most frequently tattooing or piercing—but also through weight gain or starvation, such as the Fat Boy of Peckham and Giuseppe Sacco-Homann, the famous World Champion Fasting Man, both celebrities on the English fairgrounds. Natural “freaks” were usually born with some kind of deformity or genetic condition—dwarfs, conjoined twins, and people with secondary sexual characteristics of the opposite gender (e.g., bearded women). Often they had a skill to complement their abnormality. Matthias Buchinger was born on June 3, 1674, in Nuremberg without arms or legs, but later learned to play a half-dozen instruments and perform calligraphy displays, which he did for the kings and queens of Europe.
