Deborah Walk, Curator: America was an agrarian society. And it was a hard life that you had. You woke up early, and you worked through the day. And then all of a sudden, if you were so lucky, for one magical day, you were transported from your work-a-day world, into the spangles, into the spectacle that crisscrossed the country: the circus.
Dominique Jando, Circus Historian: You saw extraordinary animals that you sometimes had never seen. Whether you were a child or an adult, seeing a giraffe was totally unheard of and seeing wild cats, zebras, African animals, Asian animals.
Janet M. Davis, Historian: It looked like an invasion because there would elephants, there would be cages of wild animals, there would be teams of horses, there would be a band, and there would be hundreds of people lining the streets.
Narration: For generations, the story was familiar. The circus crashed in on everyday life, loud and brash, then vanished like an illusion, leaving some child dreaming of a different life.
Roger Smith, Wild Animal Trainer: I was four years old. And my mother said, “Look back there, Roger. That’s Clyde Beatty.” He came running toward us, and began to crack the whip and in came these animals that I had never seen. And the excitement was something that got into me. I knew I would do that work
Richard Reynolds, Circus Historian: I first remember the circus when my father would take me to bed, and he would hum the elephant entry song from Hagenbeck-Wallace in 1932, and it went, [mimics the song]. And I've never forgotten that. My father inspired me to the circus. He loved it himself, and I took it from him.
Narration: The circus had arrived in America in the nation’s earliest days, small and insignificant.
Narration: But as the country grew, the circus would evolve with it into a gargantuan, industrialized entertainment, appealing to both the humble and the illustrious. It would stitch into one nation a patchwork of disconnected communities, and dazzle not just Americans but the entire world.
Janet M. Davis: A 19th century writer called the circus, “our season of imaginative play.” What the circus offered is this ability, in a way, to dissolve oneself, to have an out-of-body experience.
Janet M. Davis: The act of dancing on a horse's back, the act of performing on a trapeze, on a rope, or doing a strength act, all of these forms of circus arts, they push the boundaries of human strength, of the limited nature of our humanness in ways that allow us to transcend it. For me, that is the essence of circus.
Narration: A swell of humanity flocked to Brooklyn on April 10, 1871 to see the most elaborate entertainment ever mounted in the United States—a dizzying array of human oddities and acrobats, museum exhibits and wildlife, jugglers, trapeze artists, and strongmen.
Narration: Its largest tent, or big top, featuring sixty performers, could seat five thousand people. The museum tent boasted a slew of sideshow attractions including a so-called midget known as Admiral Dot.
Narration: A third pavilion housed a zoo, or what was called a menagerie. It displayed thirty cages of animals, including twelve camels, four lions, two elephants, and a rhinoceros. Some thirty-five other circuses toured the country that summer. None was as spectacular.
Matthew Wittmann, Historian: It’s this incredible combination of entertainment. It’s a circus. It’s a menagerie. It’s a museum. It’s a truly massive show.
Robert Thompson, Historian: This is a village, a village of entertainment, a place that Peter Pan goes, the land of the Lost Boys. This looks like a place that a bad boy running away from home would love to go to because everywhere you turned there was a smell or a sight or a sound that was delectable.
Narration: Though the attractions were without rival, many came hoping simply to catch a glimpse of the owner. Over the past three decades, Phineas Taylor Barnum had become one of the most famous men in America.
James W. Cook, Historian: Barnum was the most widely visible and widely known American of the 19th century. It’s not an American president. It’s not a great scientist or someone who actually had achieved, you know, a breakthrough to improve humankind. It was a showman.
Narration: Like many circus impresarios, P.T. Barnum came from humble beginnings. His father, a Connecticut innkeeper and tailor, died when Barnum was fifteen, leaving the family destitute.
Narration: Young Phineas tried just about everything to avoid a life of manual labor. He was a shop clerk, he sold lottery tickets, and he hawked bibles door-to-door.
Narration: In the spring of 1835, Barnum bought the rights to exhibit a frail enslaved African-American woman named Joice Heth.
Narration: He plastered New York with posters advertising the old woman as George Washington’s 161-year-old nursemaid. Though Heth had little choice in the matter, she played the part and the ruse worked. Barnum hoodwinked the press and thousands of others who paid twenty-five cents see her. Then he took Heth on tour through New England.
In Boston, when his hoax finally stopped attracting paying customers, Barnum came up with another one.
Narration: He does something remarkable. He decides to accuse himself of fraud by taking out anonymous notices and advertisements in the paper saying that in fact Joice Heth is not a 161-year-old African-American woman who raised George Washington. In fact, she is an automaton made of India rubber and mechanical springs. She’s a robot. This is a trademark Barnum strategy, to draw attention to the possibility of criminal fraud and to invite viewers to make up their own minds.
Narration: With Heth, Barnum had made himself famous for humbuggery.
Narration: In 1841, Barnum took over a fading collection of natural history exhibits in lower Manhattan, reopening as Barnum’s American Museum.
Robert Thompson: If I had a time machine, one of the first things I would do would be to set it for about 1842 or ’43 and I would go back to lower Manhattan and I’d go visit the Barnum’s American Museum. This sounds like the coolest place. He had a theater. He would do melodramas. He invents the matinee. They played them during the day. And it was also, in essence, a zoo. Right there, he had animals in the museum. At one point, he got whales in a big aquarium. This is all in this one spectacular museum.
Narration: In time his roster would include gymnasts and magicians, fortune-tellers and snake charmers. But perhaps more famously he introduced a revolving cast of so-called “human freaks.” There were fat boys and dwarfs, bearded women and a family of albinos.
James W. Cook: Barnum is really the central figure in making freakery a dominant theme in 19th century mass entertainment. What Barnum really does is institutionalizes it, commercializes it. What he cares about is what the public cares about, and he cares about giving it to them in a package which is exciting and profitable and will generate buzz.
Narration: Between 1842 and 1868, some forty-two million people swarmed through the doors of his museum.
Narration: Shortly after midnight on March 3, 1868, while Barnum was asleep, a fire broke out in the museum building. It took firefighters more than an hour to arrive. When they did, it was so cold the water from their hoses froze. The next day, passersby came to stare at the ruined building encased in ice.
Devastated, Barnum retired from the museum business.
Narration: But he soon found retirement dull. “I have lived so long on excitement, pepper and mustard,” he admitted to a friend, “that plain bread don’t agree with me.”
Barnum would not have to wait long for a new opportunity.
Narration: In the fall of 1870, two up-and-coming showmen— Dan Castello and William Cameron Coup—wrote to Barnum asking if he would invest in their circus.
Fred Pfening Iii, Author: Coup and Castello had a show that they took around the Great Lakes and made a lot of money in 1870. And they were both ambitious, young show guys, particularly Coup, and they realized the value of the Barnum name. And so, they approached him and they wrote him and said, “Would you be interested in doing, you know, getting together with us?”
James W. Cook: Here are two energetic young circus impresarios who will help him get out of the business of brick and mortar exhibition. He doesn’t want to build another American museum that will go up in flames. So, this is a very attractive proposition.
Narration: Tickled at the prospect of one more adventure, Barnum signed on. “If you want to… use my name,” he wrote Coup, “…it may be used by allowing me [a] small percentage.”
After an extraordinarily successful run in Brooklyn, the circus set off on a six-month tour of the Northeast. It took 245 horses pulling one hundred wagons to move the show.
To make sure audiences came, Coop had contracted with railroad lines to offer excursion tickets: cheap fares that included admission to the show.
Barnum plastered the area surrounding each stop with advance publicity.
Matthew Wittmann: In his typical fashion, the show was a blitz of publicity posters, news in the Harper’s Weekly. Barnum preps this for six months as he gets more and more excited about the whole operation.
James W. Cook: This is an enormous production on a scale unprecedented in the history of Western show business. And so, you can’t survive if you don’t bring five, ten, twelve thousand people under the tent for each performance and that requires enormous skill.
Narration: In addition to circus posters, Barnum circulated a courier—a self-published newspaper given away by the hundreds of thousands that exaggerated the many virtues of the show. He wrote a lot of the copy himself.
The advertising worked. The show was mobbed everywhere it went. Crowds
In the village of Waterville, Maine, people came from seventy-five miles away, some in wagons, others on foot. For the show in Albany, folks in nearby Coxsackie chartered a steamboat.
By the time the circus played its final stop, it had made an unheard of half a million dollars in profit. The success of the tour had shaken up the established wisdom in the show trade. By advertising many miles further from the circus lot than usual, Barnum had been able to draw audiences from greater distances than any showman ever had before.
Janet M. Davis: Even though it’s a one hundred wagon show, unprecedented size, which, one might think, would lead to unprecedented losses, but the opposite is true. The show makes enormous amounts of money. So much so that Barnum and his partners realize that big can mean extremely profitable.
Narration: It was clear to all who took note that P.T. Barnum had taken the circus a long way from its modest beginnings.
Dominique Jando: The elements of the circus have been there forever. There’s a need for the human beings to try things for no reason whatsoever, just try to do something that nobody else does. And there is a need for human beings to watch that. It’s something which is in human nature. You need to go beyond your own possibilities.
Narration: Though the urge to astound is ancient, the origin of the uniquely American circus dates back to the founding of the nation.
The first American circus was launched in Philadelphia in 1793, during President George Washington’s first term in office. The show took place in a circular wooden arena constructed by a British trick rider named John Bill Ricketts.
Dominique Jando: Ricketts was by all accounts, even while he was still in England, quite an extraordinary equestrian.
Matthew Wittmann: One of the things that was most remarked upon was a flying mercury act. This is when Ricketts would go around the ring holding a child with his hands on top of his head. And so, it’s an act that took real skill.
Narration: His show included a ropewalker, clowns, acrobats, as well as Helena Spinacuta, an equestrian who galloped on two horses at once.
Janet M. Davis: Those essential elements of using the horse as kind of the centerpiece of the show, then clowning as part of the show too, and rope walking, those are defining elements of the circus. And that foundation is what Ricketts sets up.
Narration: The circus proved an incredible hit. Washington celebrated his birthday at the show. Enslaved people were sometimes in the audience. And those who couldn’t afford admission peeked through the knotholes.
Matthew Wittmann: Probably one of the biggest indicators of Ricketts’ success is this wonderful painting by Gilbert Stuart. Although it’s unfinished, it’s very dignified. You get the sense that Ricketts is someone important. It’s a real indication of how he was valued by the elite, as it were, in the early United States.
Narration: Despite his many successes, Ricketts had trouble turning a profit. In 1800, a fire gutted his amphitheater and he left America for good.
New arrivals and homegrown talent did their best to keep the circus tradition alive, but the nation was vast and sparsely populated. With just a handful of large cities and very few exhibition halls, showmen struggled to attract audiences.
Then in 1825, a circus owner decided to commission the construction of a canvas tent. With his new “Pavilion” circus, he could travel from one small town to the next, stopping for just one night, if the local population was too tiny to justify a second one.
Janet M. Davis: What the tent show does is, more than anything else, it establishes the rituals of itinerancy, the one night stand, the ability to go into country that is essentially bereft of infrastructure. What the tent establishes, is this way of circusing that becomes distinctly American.
Narration: Showmen left their home base, called winter quarters, in early spring, returning in late fall. They traveled every day, as far as a horse could pull a wagon, from one small town to the next.
Matthew Wittmann: A lot of these guys tried to sleep in these bumpy wagons, roads not being what they are now. When they got to town the next morning, they’d maybe set up, take a few hours of sleep and then there was the parade and then there was an afternoon performance, and then there was an evening performance and then you did it all again. For nine months out of the year, moving every day, it was a hard life for sure.
Narration: Almost everywhere the circus went it met with disapproval. In the early 19th century, the country was experiencing a religious revival. Church leaders claimed that hard work was virtuous and entertainment of all kinds sinful.
Richard Reynolds, Circus Historian: The preachers would wail against that waste of time. And to the bible thumpers of those days, wasting one's time was sinful. And some places in New England actually banned circuses; they couldn’t exhibit at all. Because this was the day when the church ruled the roost.
Narration: Local communities had other legitimate concerns. Circus ticket sellers were often unpaid. They earned a living by short-changing their customers. The crowded circus lot was a perfect breeding ground for pickpockets. And performers in their skimpy costumes violated every notion of decency.
Richard Reynolds: You're spending your money to see people in tights, shorts, and tight costumes, was considered immoral.
Dominique Jando: There was an attraction of the circus which was really sexual. It was the place where women can show their legs. So, that was a big attraction of the circus and people came to see that too.
Matthew Wittmann: It’s very hard to think of the circus as not being for children now, but through the mid-19th century, it was really not aimed at children. It was an adult form of entertainment.
Narration: The addition of a small animal menagerie by a New York showman in 1828 helped to squash some of the objections.
Richard Reynolds: The menagerie, it brought the blood-sweating behemoth, the hippopotamus, for example, and that was out of the bible. And you see the lions and they are mentioned in the bible. That was considered educational.
Narration: Noting how a collection of animals elevated their businesses in the eyes of local authorities, most circuses added menageries.
The early travelling tented shows were modest outfits. A typical circus might feature one advertising wagon a sixty-foot tent, and a dozen performers.
For decades, the performances all began pretty much the same way.
Matthew Wittmann: Everyone that was a performer in the show would put on a costume, get on a horse, ride in to this thundering music, some kind of march, and just parade around the ring. It was a way to show off how many performers there were, and sort of set the stage for what was going to come.
Jennifer Lemmer Posey, Curator: There would be men balancing on horseback. There would be trainers presenting the wonderful feats that horses could do. These would be broken up with tumblers and clowns.
Dominique Jando: The clowns at the time spoke and sang very often. And they had topical songs, which were about political events, about something that everybody was speaking of. Clowns were quite important in the show for that because they had this human contact with the audience.
Narration: As tents got bigger, performances became more perilous. By the early 1860s, shows began presenting an act that would become emblematic of the circus. It was invented by Frenchman Jules Leotard.
Dominique Jando: Leotard was a gymnast. His father has a gymnasium in France, in Toulouse. And to experiment, he jumped from one trapeze to a pair of rings and to another trapeze. His father thought that could be a pretty good act and started developing an apparatus where his son could jump from one trapeze to another.
Narration: Circuses claimed their shows provided young American males examples of true manliness. Many observers agreed.
“It can do no harm to boys,” the poet Walt Whitman wrote after visiting the circus, “to see a set of limbs display all their agility… A circus performer is the other half of a college-professor. The perfect man has more than the professor’s brain and a good deal of the performer’s legs.”
Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A Circus passed the house – still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out. Emily Dickinson
Robert Thompson: The circus was a topsy-turvy world. It was about possibility. The emotional physics of the world did not apply under the big top. It was a flip-flop. It was transgressional. And it was loud, and it was colorful, and it was beautiful. It was a kind of pure version of reality, something that’s stripped down to its most elemental parts.
Jonathan Lee Iverson, Ringmaster: There’s nothing like circus. There’s nothing in the world like it. You cannot come to a circus and still believe as you previously did. Circus is a peek into what we could be, how great we could be, how beautiful our world could be. It’s about making your own miracles, conjuring your own miracles. We’re coming for the transcendent.
Narration: It was the most remarked upon train journey of the decade. At almost every stop along the route from Boston to San Francisco, local dignitaries and jubilant crowds turned out to greet the first passengers to take a train trip across the country. When the luxury Pullman cars finally arrived on June 1, 1870, the travellers gloated that the journey had taken just eight days.
Narration: The completion of the first transcontinental railroad had capped a frenetic era of railroad construction. Over the course of the 1860s, the nation’s network of railroads had almost doubled to more than fifty thousand miles.
In 1872, when P. T. Barnum and WC Coup began planning their second season, it dawned on them that this expanding web of track could unlock larger profits if they put their circus on rails.
Fred Pfening Iii: Coup realized that, “We could really make a lot more money if we could skip the small towns and just play the big ones.” By train, you could go up to, you know, a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and fifty miles a night. To show guys, it was like nirvana to not have to play these little crossroad towns.
JAMES W. COOK: What they begin to imagine in the early 1870s is something that hadn’t really existed before, which is a traveling show with truly national reach.
Narration: Coup spent the winter haggling with railroad companies, insisting they clear their tracks at night to guarantee his circus would arrive at its destination by 6 a.m. every day. “I urged and argued and argued and urged,” Coup remembered, “until they said I was the most persistent man they had ever seen.”
On April 18th, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Coup supervised the loading of the train for the very first time. It took the inexperienced men twelve hours to accomplish their task. In the process, a camel slipped and broke its back.
Coup realized what he required was an entire train of some sixty cars designed specifically for his needs.
In Ohio he found an outfit that built him on short notice flat cars on which to load the wagons, cages and carriages. Then he bought secondhand sleeping cars for his staff, boxcars for the equipment and stock cars for the animals. All the railroad companies provided were the locomotives, cabooses, crews, and track.
Janet M. Davis: It transforms the circus into a modern industrial corporation, complete with manager systems, with bosses of different departments, contracting agents. They hire attorneys, they have to make contracts in the towns in which they’re performing, scattered across the country, and they have an advance team that, over time, travels on four separate trains.
Robert Thompson: The first railroad circus is really the best example of the first really big entertainment industrial complex. The circus has become big business. You know, today, we talk about big oil and big pharma. 1872, we could talk about big circus.
Narration: In 1871, Barnum and Coup’s show had been confined to the Northeast.
In 1872, the railroad circus left New York travelling through the Mid-Atlantic states, before heading west and to Minneapolis. After five months on the road it turned back east, finishing the season in Detroit at the end of October. It was a marathon run of 146 stops and nearly 7,000 miles.
Travelling by rail had been so successful, the show grossed a million dollars, the first time a circus had ever made that much money.
That winter, Barnum housed his circus on 14th Street in New York City. At around 4am on Christmas Eve, a fire broke out in the building, destroying the performers’ costumes, instruments, and almost the entire menagerie. Only two elephants and a camel survived.
Coup was distraught. He saw no option other than sitting out the following season. But Barnum was not ready to give up.
James W. Cook: Barnum is relentlessly optimistic. He has remarkable energy. He fashions himself a go-ahead Yankee who is relentlessly entrepreneurial, full of energy and self-made individualism.
Narration: The tents, wagons, and draft horses had been spared. All that was needed to move forward, he insisted was energy, pluck, courage, and a liberal outlay of money. “Just put a little electricity in your blood,” Barnum urged Coup, “and we will beat the world.”
The docks of Manhattan were thick with fog when P. T. Barnum’s first shipment of animals arrived on January 16, 1873, less than a month after the fire.
There was a double horned black rhinoceros from Abyssinia, four large African lions, six Bengal tigers, a pair of leopards, and, according to The New York Times, a “wilderness of monkeys.”
Like many American circus owners, Barnum got most of his animals from the German dealer, Carl Hagenbeck.
Nigel Rothfels, Historian: His original market was in the city of Hamburg but then, very quickly, he became known by circuses as somebody who could supply animals. He was incredibly reliable and he delivered animals with cash on delivery, not cash up front. If you bought an animal from Hagenbeck and it died soon after arrival, as they tended to do, he would replace it.
Narration: Typically, Hagenbeck contracted with European agents, to capture his animals. They would set up camp in the bush, sending local men on the hunt. After a stay of many months, the assembled menagerie accompanied by a vast staff of handlers, marched to the coast. From there, they traveled by steamship to Suez, by rail to Alexandria, by ship across the Mediterranean and then by train to Hamburg.
Full grown animals were too difficult to handle on the journey, so the hunters only captured the young.
Nigel Rothfels: When your whole method is to try to acquire the young animals, it’s going to be a pretty brutal process. There’s a story of four rhinos that were captured in India, and there’s a letter from Hagenbeck where he says that forty adults were killed in the process of capturing these four young rhinos. Their mortality rate is pretty high as they transition to captivity. You have to get them to the coast. Then you have to ship them to Europe. In the end, it’s a very small percentage, you know, maybe under twenty percent of the animals that you actually begin with are the ones you’re left with. I don’t think the public really understood what was involved in acquiring these animals. I don’t think people really thought about the backstory.
Narration: The cost of creating an impressive menagerie was exorbitant. Circus owners could spend several thousand dollars on a single elephant. Yet Barnum knew not to stint.
Richard Reynolds: You’ve got to remember there were no zoos to speak of then. People to see the animals, they went to see the circus because that’s where they were, and advertising for circuses in those days, the posters and so forth, they featured exotic animals as much as they did the performers.
Nigel Rothfels: The opportunity was there to pet the animals. The skin of some of these animals isn’t like anything else you will touch. If you can touch a hippopotamus, it doesn’t feel like anything else that you can touch in the world. Or if you can touch an elephant, it doesn’t feel like anything else you can find in Iowa. There is no other thing that feels like that. And I think that’s one of the moments of these places that’s magical.
Narration: While Barnum replenished the menagerie, the work of pulling the show together fell to W.C. Coup. He oversaw the repair and redecoration of one hundred and fifty wagons and carriages. And he ordered a dozen new tents including a big top that Barnum claimed could seat thirteen thousand people.
Narration: The tent had grown so large—no longer round, but oval —that people left their seats to get better views, creating pandemonium. To restore order, Castello proposed a revolutionary idea: two rings of simultaneous entertainment.
Narration: Barnum exploited the innovation in his advertising. His cast was so huge, he claimed, a second ring was all but essential.
Promoting their circus as the Greatest Show on Earth, Barnum and Coop hired a twenty-two-person advertising department. For the first time in circus history, Coup commissioned three-sheet color lithographic posters, which were about seven feet tall.
Jennifer Lemmer Posey, Curator: When you get to a three-sheet poster, at that scale you’re approaching life size. And so, when you walk up to that poster, you get the sense that that performer is real, is right there in front of you, and you get an idea of what you really are going to see when you enter into that circus tent.
Narration: When the show hit the road in April 1873 after a two week run in Manhattan, everyone was astounded to see how much bigger it had become.
A typical visit to the circus lasted hours. It started with a trip to the sideshow tent, followed by a visit to the menagerie. Finally spectators streamed into the big top for one of three daily performances.
The acts there unfolded much as they had for the last several decades. Featured among the fifty big top performers that season were acrobats, equestrians, strong men, aerialists, and Monsieur D’Atalie, the man with the iron jaw. D’Atalie lifted a forty-gallon barrel as well as a man carrying two hundred pound weights, with his teeth alone.
Though audiences found the big top performances thrilling, it was the sideshow tent that most distinguished Barnum’s circus. His interest in human curiosities turned the sideshow performances into an essential feature of the circus.
Matthew Wittmann: What we think of sideshow performers had existed in the circus before. They were part of it, but it’s really Barnum’s specialty. So, part of what he brings is a new focus to that particular part of the show. It becomes the defining feature of the Barnum Circus and then other circuses have to follow because they can’t offer less.
James W. Cook: There’s no question that there’s a large dimension of exploitation. There’s a large dimension of racialization running through. There’s a kind of exoticism. In some cases, Chinese are presented as human oddities. All of that said, however, these are not pure victims. These are people who make choices and think strategically about what forms of upward mobility are available to them in a world, without support for those with disability.
Matthew Wittmann: Ann Leek was an armless woman and her quote-unquote “act” was basically to sew and do different domestic tasks on this elevated stage in the sideshow tent. She used her toe to write out cards for individual people and date them. For her, it was a way to make money.
Narration: By the time the show reached Rutland, Vermont in the middle of June, the promotion had so saturated the area that visitors came by the thousands from villages in neighboring New York State. Some arrived a day early.
Whereas in years past many New Englanders had seen circuses as immoral, there was nothing in Barnum’s show, the local paper said, “to offend the most refined modesty.”
Barnum banned drinking on the show grounds and hired detectives from the Pinkerton Agency to keep everyone’s wallets safe.
James W. Cook: He knew that the circus had a morally suspect reputation on many different levels, and what he does really, in a remarkable way, is create a kind of marketing campaign with testimonials from clergy, from famous writers, and other celebrity figures, who attest to the wholesomeness of his circuses.
Robert Thompson: Barnum knew that in the end, if you really wanted to make it big, you had to appeal to a huge audience and that included women and children. Barnum, more than any, began to see that the circus as something for kids.
Narration: The show returned to New York in the middle of October having traveled as far west as St. Louis. With audiences averaging around ten thousand people every performance, by season’s end the circus had grossed one and a half million dollars.
But the partners had far more than their extraordinary profits to be proud of. In just three years, they had completely transformed the circus business.
Matthew Wittmann: What Barnum’s entry into the circus business touches off is a new era of rivalry and competition-- the biggest and the best show, the most incredible advertising. Everyone else has to follow. So, in short order, every large American circus is travelling on the railroads. That’s how you make bigger money. Every American circus is having herds of elephants. So, it becomes a function of your show. You can’t just have two elephants anymore. You have to have six. And then if one show has six, one show has ten. There’s this unbelievable drive for new attractions, new forms of advertising, new forms of entertainment that can be incorporated into the circus.
Narration: At the very thought of circus, a swarm of long-imprisoned desires breaks jail. Armed with beauty and demanding justice and everywhere threatening us with curiosity and Spring and childhood... E.E. Cummings
Robert Thompson: The American spirit, a lot of it would be about reinvention, the idea of something giving you promise. The spirit that brought people over from the Old World to the New, the spirit that rejected the established culture of Europe, was the same spirit that got people to leave a small town and join the circus.
Janet M. Davis: We often like to think about running away with the circus as a kind of stereotype or a cliché. But it’s true. People ran away with the circus. And they did so because it offered opportunities for people who were perhaps outsiders in their own community.
Jennifer Lemmer Posey: A lot of people would watch this wonderful show roll into town, a magical world filled of people doing extraordinary things and see that as a chance to jump out of their everyday, and follow that.
Ammed Tuniziani, Trapeze Artist: Many of those people that run away, they run away to—to look for their dreams, to make their dreams come true. It’s a very different life from any kind of other life.
Deborah Walk, Curator: People have called it a big top fever that you never got over. To join the circus, to crisscross the country, to showcase the wonders of the world, what a lure to that.
Matthew Wittmann: Part of the circus industry was that you had to make promises that your show maybe couldn’t keep, that you had a herd of twenty elephants, that you had this unbelievable attraction. You had to advertise, something new, something exciting to get people to come to the show. You overpromise, but as long as people show up, it doesn’t really matter.
Narration: As the 1874 circus season got underway, the hyperbole heated up. Every showman wanted to outdo Barnum. No one was more eager than Adam Forepaugh.
Like Barnum, Forepaugh had grown up poor, starting out as a butcher’s apprentice at the age of sixteen. By the time the Civil War broke out, he had turned to horse-trading, making a fortune supplying the Union Army with cavalry mount.
In 1863, Forepaugh sold horses to a shady circus manager who proved unable to pay his bill. In place of his fee, Forepaugh took part ownership of the circus.
Fred Dahlinger Jr., Circus Historian: It turned out he had a great knack for it, and eventually over the next thirty years, ended up being one of the finest showman in America.
Fred Pfening Iii: He was the first circus to have two tents. He had a tent for the menagerie and then one for the performance. In the 1860s and 1870s, there were still some moral opposition from church groups that saw the circus as kind of an unworthy waste of time. So what he would do is he would charge them a quarter if they wanted to just go through the menagerie and see the animals, which a lot of people did because there’s an unquestioned educational value to that. Nobody ever accused Forepaugh of not being able to make a buck. He was extremely good at that.
Narration: The two-tent circus was “how I caught the church people,” Forepaugh explained. Within a few short years, every other circus had followed suit.
In 1874, he copied Barnum by introducing a second ring and vastly exaggerating his line-up of performers.
Like Barnum, he received gushing reviews. “No triumph decreed to Roman generals,” wrote one reporter, “could have equaled the procession of Forepaugh’s Aggregation of Animals… Even Alexander the Great would have made a poor show in comparison.”
While Forepaugh could rival Barnum for size, The Great International Circus, could not. Owners James Cooper and James Bailey had their ambitions, nonetheless.
Bailey in particular was a striver. Born James Anthony McGinnis in Detroit, he had lost both his parents by the age of eight.
James W. Cook: He’s raised as a ward by his eldest sister. By his own account, she is a cruel and often brutal person. She beats him relentlessly. She has him working before he goes to school and he arrives at school late and then he’s beaten at school for being late and then he gets home and he’s beaten again for doing badly in school.
Fred Dahlinger Jr.: After Bailey decided he needed to leave home, to escape the clutches of his sister, he decided the way to do it was to go swimming with a bunch of his buddies down in the river. And what they did, they went skinny-dipping, they took their clothes off, laid them on the side of the bank, went in the river, and that was the last they saw of James A. Bailey. And because his clothes were still there, everybody thought, “he’s drowned.”
Narration: James drifted from place to place, picking up work as a farmhand and stable boy. In 1860, he was working as a bellboy at a hotel in Pontiac, Michigan, when Fred Bailey, an advertising man for the Robinson & Lake Circus came to stay.
Twelve-year-old James was intrigued by Bailey’s roving line of work. He begged Fred to let him tag along as an apprentice.
Fred Pfening III: He becomes the advance man and the billposter. He had this little buggy that he’d go around, and he’d put up the posters in the towns ahead of the route of the Robinson & Lake Circus to announce that it was coming. He got intimately involved in understanding all the local conditions that are so important in a circus being successful that another circus man years later said, “Any fool can start a circus. It’s the smart show man that knows where to put it.”
Since James felt greater affection for the circus, than he ever had for his family, he took Fred Bailey’s last name.
James W. Cook: He becomes in some ways the archetypal story of someone who runs away to the circus and that the circus provides a place to reinvent yourself.
Matthew Wittmann: He very quickly rose in the ranks of the American circus. At thirteen years old he is an advance agent. At thirty, he is running a circus. In between he does a little bit of everything. It’s really a remarkable, remarkable story.
Narration: Bailey had started out with James Cooper in 1870, running a concert after the main show. Within three years, they were partners.
In 1876, the nation marked its centennial with an elaborate exposition in Philadelphia, which would draw almost ten million visitors eager to see the engineering marvels of the day.
Wanting to avoid the competition, Bailey and Cooper headed west to California.
When they got to San Francisco, James Bailey decided to keep on going. He took six elephants, five camels, two tigers, two lions, forty horses, and some thirty performers across the Pacific to Australia. The seventy-five hundred mile journey via Honolulu and Fiji took six weeks.
Matthew Wittmann: The flash of insight that Bailey has is what if I went to the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s summer during our winter, and the show can keep going for a consecutive year.
Bailey spent 1877 touring his show around Australia. Everywhere he went audiences showered his circus with accolades. “It is large,” wrote one reporter, “excellent in character and eminently calculated to impress the sight-seeing mind. Nothing equal to it has ever appeared in the colony.”
Matthew Wittmann: The big thing that wowed Australian audiences was the size of the show. There was no tent that big in Australia. And what’s more is he had five tents housing five separate attractions. So, there was a sideshow tent. There was a museum. There was a menagerie, and then there was the main tent where the performance took place.
Narration: From Australia, the circus toured the island of Java, where it picked up local musicians to play in the band. When the strongwoman came on the Javanese were so astounded, they stopped playing completely.
After touring New Zealand, Bailey charted a sailing vessel to take the circus back across the Pacific for a tour of South America. The ship didn’t see land for more than fifty days.
In December the show packed up and headed home.
From the moment they had set sail across the Pacific, Bailey and his troupe had ricocheted from one harrowing moment to the next. Four circus workers died in Java of tropical diseases. Turbulent seas almost sunk their ship on the way to New Zealand. And at one point a tiger escaped its cage in the hold. But Bailey survived it all. After more than two years of almost constant travel, his circus had covered more than seventy-six thousand miles.
When the intrepid showman arrived back in New York, he was worldly, daring, and ready to take on the toughest competition.
Bailey returned to a country in the grip of momentous changes. More than a quarter of Americans now lived in cities. Some ninety thousand miles of railroad tracks carved their way across the nation. That ever-expanding network was fueling an unrivaled period of industrialization and innovation.
Alexander Graham Bell had just invented the telephone; Thomas Edison the phonograph. And the month Bailey’s ship docked in New York’s harbor, a Cleveland-based inventor demonstrated his system of electric lighting in a Philadelphia department store.
Bailey was so impressed, he became the first circus owner in the country to buy an electric lighting system.
His circus was lit up by electricity before any city in America had a system of electric street lighting. It was the focal point of his advertising. He even sold tickets for a tour of the generator.
Fred Pfening III: A huge percentage of Americans saw electricity for the first time on a circus. You can just imagine the, you know, to go to some little town in Arkansas or some place and to be able to see that.
Matthew Wittmann: Part of what makes the circus such a powerful cultural form is its ability to absorb various influences and essentially program them anew for American audiences. Anything that’s happening in American culture and American entertainment soon get sucked into the circus. Really any innovation you can think of gets repackaged and then branded into the American circus.
Whether it was the lighting, or the herd of ten elephants, or the nighttime parades, Cooper and Bailey turned away crowds at stop after stop.
Bailey began the following season with an aggressive advertising campaign. He ordered the design and production of eighty-two different lithographs and then sent his publicity team out on three advance cars to plaster the route with posters.
Matthew Wittmann: Circuses could spend many thousands of dollars on advertising whether it was newspapers, posters. Circuses put money into advertising in a way that no other business did. The average circus poster was so much bigger than any rival ad that it was meant to grab your attention.
Narration: Barnum’s posters that season focused on his most dangerous act yet: Zazel, the fearless human cannonball.
Jennifer Lemmer Posey: She got her start at the Royal Aquarium in Britain, and it was the concept of a showman named Farini. He came up with the idea of shooting a person, most specifically a woman because that added to the excitement of it.
Janet M. Davis: Zazel's inclusion in the circus program is a reflection of a growing emphasis on death defying spectacle over the intricacies of individual artistry. And the act of claiming hundreds of yards of space vertically, horizontally, in defiance of death, really becomes the signature of this enormous new form of circus.
Narration: It was dumb luck, however, that gave the greatest promotional coup of the season to Barnum’s main rival. James Bailey’s elephant, Hebe, unexpectedly gave birth to a 213-pound baby. She was, Bailey claimed, the first elephant born in the West since the Roman Empire.
Matthew Wittmann: They name it Columbia. He names it that because this is the first elephant born in the United States and it’s a publicity coup. I mean, people love elephants and then, people really love baby elephants. It creates media publicity all over the country.
Barnum stoked the media frenzy. He wired Bailey and offered him $100,000 for his elephant calf. Bailey used the telegram against Barnum, publishing it widely with the caption: “What Barnum Thinks of our Baby elephant.”
Barnum encouraged the press to believe he was distraught by Columbia’s birth and saw no path forward other than to merge his show with Bailey’s.
Fred Pfening Iii: It turns out, that’s completely untrue. Barnum & Bailey signed a contract on May 26th, 1880. You don’t see any of this business about Barnum wanting to buy the elephant until after the contract had been signed and it was a publicity stunt and I think Barnum probably cooked it up.
Narration: That fall, both Barnum and Bailey severed their relationships with their partners. Then the two veteran showmen announced that they were joining forces. Barnum had watched Bailey closely enough to know he had just signed a deal with the most ingenious impresario in show business.
Matthew Wittmann: One of the things that would make the Barnum & Bailey partnership work so well was that they had very different personalities. Barnum was very much the man that wanted the spotlight. He lived his entire life in public. Bailey, on the other hand is very private, very reserved. He just had a real organizational acumen with logistics, with performance.
Fred Pfening Iii: Bailey would set himself up a little table near the front entrance of the circus and he was constantly receiving telegrams from his advance people, telling him what they were doing and him sending an advice out. He micromanaged the show and particularly the advance of it. He was a tremendous risk taker and a very creative, innovative guy
Narration: Some observers predicted that the Barnum and Bailey amalgamation would be too unwieldy to put on the road.
Bailey disagreed. “Our show for 1881,” he said, “will be known in the amusement records of America as the greatest artistic success of the time.”
The circus is a tiny closed off arena of forgetfulness. For a space it enables us to lose ourselves, to dissolve in wonder and bliss, to be transported by mystery. We come out of it in a daze, saddened and horrified by the everyday face of the world.
Edward Hoagland, Writer, Cage Hand: Circus day with a capital C, capital D, was a big deal and it was very special. It was something that happened once a year—like the fireworks on the Fourth of July—you take your children to see because it’s only once a year and you’re only a child once for heaven’s sake.
Narration: For almost a century, Americans across the country looked forward eagerly to the cherished rituals of Circus Day. They began before dawn as curious observers began turning out to watch the circus arrive on the outskirts of town.
Richard Reynolds: All of a sudden, you could hear that whistle way off and everybody would say, it's coming. And it would pull in. Oh, my Lord, people would just flock to the track to watch it come in. It was just a magical thing. There was action all around. People would speculate. You’d hear people talking, “What do you suppose that is? What’s in that wagon?” And then the elephants, twelve in number, came out of that stock car. And we just kept counting them as they came out. It was just a magical experience.
La Norma Fox, Aerialist: You come in early, and you watch, they’re pulling out different things, canvas, poles. Okay, what’s going to happen now? They open up those canvases, starting to unroll them, and then somebody get in there and start lacing the pieces together. It’s amazing to see that.
Richard Reynolds: There’d be the boss canvas man and he’d say, “You boys want to see the circus?” “Oh yes, sir, sure we do.” “Well, listen, if you help put up these side poles here, and pull out this canvas, you’ll get a free ticket.” And that’s how that worked.
La Norma Fox: You get half the town, all kids mostly, wanted to help. As you see the top come up, that is a sight. That really is the most beautiful thing.
Narration: In mid-morning, as throngs pressed together along Main Street, the circus paraded through, showing off its finery.
Deborah Walk: Up to three miles long of animals, of beautiful ladies on incredibly beautiful horses, wagons of all sizes, bands, all would parade through your town creating gridlock.
Janet M. Davis: There would be people in buildings on the second and third stories, looking down at this extravaganza. The showmen knew this, because they had beautiful scenes, gilded and painted on the tops of the wagons, so that people could see that too.
Richard Reynolds: My father had an aunt who worked in a downtown Atlanta department store and she had a space on the second floor, so that when the circus parade came, he was right there to watch the whole procession.
Matthew Wittmann: Certain people, if you grew up on a farm, had never seen a tent with ten or twelve thousand people in it. And if you include the number of people milling about the grounds and the circus folk as well, it’s probably the largest collection of people that they had ever witnessed.
Narration: As the evening show was about to begin, the cheery strains of the circus band drew the audience under the canvas.
Fred Dahlinger Jr.: Even while the end of the big top show is taking place, working men are already starting to take down the cook tents, the sideshow, the menagerie, because by the time the big top show ends, the working men are waiting there to start tearing down the seats, take down the big top and load it up.
Matthew Wittmann: It changes everything, the circus coming to town. It transformed the town in a way I don’t think any entertainment form has done since.
Narration: “[The circus] is a kingdom on wheels,” one witness noted, “a city that folds itself up like an umbrella. Quietly and swiftly every night it… [picks] up in its magician’s arms theatre, hotel, schoolroom, barracks, home, whisking them all miles away, and setting them down before sunrise in a new place.”
In preparation for their first season together, P. T. Barnum and James Bailey constructed a permanent winter quarters on five acres of land in Barnum’s hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The facility was enormous. The shed for the train cars alone was 350 feet long.
The following spring, the showmen opened their combined circus in Madison Square Garden, starting a tradition that would endure into the middle of the next century.
Audiences were dismayed to discover that the acts were now spread across three rings not two. “Even a cross-eyed man can’t look at three rings at once,” wrote one irritated spectator. But larger tents meant greater profits so the three rings became a permanent fixture.
James W. Cook: The circus becomes a kind of celebration of American profit-making, American ingenuity and entrepreneurship. And so, in many ways, it is the most visible form of corporate capitalism during the Gilded Age. Barnum is right up there with people like Andrew Carnegie in steel, John Rockefeller in oil, J.P. Morgan in banking. But his products and his business models are visible and spectacular and talked about in ways that the others are not.
Narration: Like other 19th century entrepreneurs, circus impresarios made enormous profits in part because their workers were paid poorly and their businesses were unregulated. Every season men were injured or killed. An ever-changing roster of workers did the most dangerous work. James Bailey would say it was easier and cheaper to add new men at every stop than to pay higher wages and keep them for the season.
Though he could have hired African Americans for even less, he never did.
Fred Dahlinger Jr.: The discrimination that was present in America at that time against African-Americans was embraced by the circus. You could not get white working men to work alongside black working men. And it meant that you had to have a crew that was either all white or all black. African-Americans did the most difficult work, the dirtiest work, the toughest work.
Narration: Barnum and Bailey’s biggest concern in 1881, was not their workforce, but the redoubtable Adam Forepaugh. The two rival shows played thirty-eight cities in common over the summer.
Jennifer Lemmer Posey: In their competition, Barnum and Forepaugh were both trying to elevate their own shows but also trying to demean their competitor. It became very personal. And so, you have Adam Forepaugh who is a giant among the pygmies and portrays himself in lithographs as this giant man with small versions of P. T. Barnum and James Bailey running away in fear at his amazing stature.
Both sides took jabs at each other in so-called “rat sheets.” Barnum claimed Forepaugh had bought his old dilapidated equipment. Forepaugh accused Barnum of lying.
In St. Louis, Forepaugh hung twenty-two thousand posters; Barnum and Bailey put up twenty-three thousand.
Forepaugh’s biggest coup was his creation of the first truly giant opening pageant called a spectacle or spec for short.
Jennifer Lemmer Posey: Really what it’s about is showing all of the wonders of the Forepaugh Show. So, it starts with the street parade and amazing floats and barges and the elephants that are draped in beautiful rich blankets and all of the other animals paraded through the street. And then, it also serves as a grand entrée into the performance itself.
Matthew Wittmann: It proves very, very popular, both in terms of the advertising and people that go to the show seemed to be fascinated by these things, and pretty soon, other shows get on board and start staging their own specs.
Narration: Though it would be years before Barnum and Bailey mounted a spectacle themselves, they finished the 1881 season triumphant.
When the accounts were tallied for the 11,000-mile tour through nineteen states, they showed the circus had made more than $1.1 million. Barnum took home two hundred thousand dollars himself.
Janet M. Davis: This competition with Barnum and Forepaugh is something that defines the 1880s in the circus industry. This is the two titans. It was a brawling situation, bruising situation, with competition between these rival shows.
The inventiveness born of such intense rivalry—the expanding menageries, the perilous new acts, the monstrous size of it all—had launched the American circus into its Golden Age.
Nigel Rothfels: If the circus is about big, and about unusual, and about something extreme, that’s an elephant. They’re sort of the perfect embodiment of the circus in the late 19th century. I think a lot of people are so surprised when they see elephants move, how graceful they are and how quiet their step is.
Nigel Rothfels: The trunk of an elephant has the dexterity of a couple of fingers and yet the power of many people. And an elephant can take the penny from your hand. That’s an extraordinary experience. It’s kind of unimaginable that there’s this animal several tons in weight that can take a penny out of your hand.
Narration: In the winter of 1882, P. T. Barnum made the most rewarding purchase of his career. For ten thousand dollars he bought Jumbo, England’s treasured elephant, from the London Zoological Society.
Nigel Rothfels: Jumbo was a very, very big elephant. Most of the elephants that were showing up in this country are female Asian elephants. He was a male African elephant; the males are much, much, much bigger.
Narration: The sale caused an uproar.
James W. Cook: He was a beloved creature in London, and schoolchildren are weeping over the departure of Jumbo, newspaper editors are writing about the horror of the idea of Jumbo leaving behind his buns and his good diet from the London Zoological Society and eating waffles and popcorn at an American circus.
NIGEL ROTHFELS: A lot is made of Jumbo being essentially taken from the British and that is in a way a metaphor for America’s rise. And so Barnum captures that moment where America can take the prize gem of England.
Narration: When all the protests failed, Jumbo was shipped in a crate aboard a British vessel, and greeted by crowds at New York’s Castle Garden pier.
Matthew Wittmann: Jumbo delivers, by all accounts. I mean, the animal was big, but it’s Barnum’s publicity made him seem even bigger. And if you see the posters, you see an unbelievably large elephant. The man knew how to get people talking.
Narration: The whole country became caught up in Jumbomania. The elephant’s name became a way to say enormous. His likeness appeared on ads for cigars, dry goods, and spools of thread.
Fred Pfening Iii: Jumbo made a fortune for Barnum and Bailey. Their profit for the year was $602,000. That just had to have been just an absolutely slam bang season for him to do that and it was because of Jumbo.
Narration: Forepaugh didn’t take the Jumbo-craze lying down. He countered with his own enormous pachyderm, Bolivar, claiming he was the most gigantic beast on earth.
Forepaugh also boasted having twenty-five performing elephants trained largely by Eph Thompson, one of the few African Americans ever to appear under a 19th century big top.
Sakina Hughes, Historian: Thompson saw the Forepaugh Circus when he was a teenager. He was one of these people that got circus fever, and he left with the circus. His first job was to clean up after elephants. He falls in love with elephants, and he learns how to train them. He’s trained these elephants in this really amazing way.
Janet M. Davis: the way that he performed, not by his own choosing, was in a boxing elephant routine. As they sparred, the elephant would always have the upper hand. The elephant would literally box Thompson into the ring bank, often times flipping him over. It was extraordinarily frustrating because the act was clownish. It did not allow him to display his talents in working with big animals in a way that created dignity and power.
Narration: As the herds got bigger, and trainers tried to outdo each other with more sophisticated tricks, the strain on circus elephants increased.
Not all trainers were gentle. “Talk about training an elephant with kind words,” Thompson told a reporter. “Why that’s all bosh. The kindest treatment I believe in is … a steel lashed whip.”
Nigel Rothfels: Different trainers, working with different animals, with their own different skills and experiences, trained each animal differently. There were undoubtedly trainers who were clearly able to use more of the positive techniques that we would call, sort of positive reinforcement now. But the animal has to understand that the trainer is powerful in ways that the animal is not. In some cases, that has undoubtedly been done through just brute violence.
Janet M. Davis: The vast majority of elephant trainers and handlers deeply loved their elephants. The relationships that they forged with these animals were often incredibly tender and attentive, but one thing that happens throughout the history of the American circus is that elephants go ugly or go bad. And while these incidents were relatively rare, they do reflect the conditions of their confinement and their frustration for these deeply social animals. If an elephant killed someone, then that elephant could face execution. These executions were often protracted and horrific and deeply disturbing, violent affairs.
Narration: The most famous elephant in America came to a grisly end himself, though his death was accidental.
On September 15, 1885, Jumbo was struck by an unscheduled freight train after an evening performance. His skull was fractured in several places. The circus star died within minutes.
Jumbo’s death, which made headlines across the country, was a huge financial blow to Barnum. The show had made more money in the two years after his arrival than it would until the end of the century.
Anxious to minimize his losses, Barnum arranged for a taxidermist to preserve the country’s most celebrated elephant.
Fred Dahlinger Jr.: They mounted his skeleton and his hide, both, and they were presented in one of the tents of the show. So even in death, Jumbo was a great attraction.
Narration: “Dear Sir,” wrote P. T. Barnum, “I desire to carry out as far as possible an idea I have long entertained of forming a collection, in pairs or otherwise, of all the uncivilized races in existence… a group of 3 to 6 or even 10 would be specially novel.”
In 1882, Barnum sent his letter to U. S. consuls around the world, seeking help with what he called an “Ethnological Congress of People.”
James W. Cook: The Ethnological Congress is an expansion of the sideshow. So, in the past, the sideshow had involved twelve, fifteen, twenty different figures or acts. Now, Barnum wants to create a kind of living taxonomy of cultures and races and nationalities from around the world. It’s also quite literally a form of colonialism and imperialism because they are being acquired, transferred, shipped back to New York City through diplomatic agencies.
Narration: “The remuneration of these people,” Barnum wrote, “is usually minimal. I shall see that they are presented with fancy articles… and small allowances monthly.”
Over the next two years, Barnum contracted with people from Asia, Australia, Europe, the American West, and Africa. At least one of them, an indigenous Australian named Tambo Tambo, was brought to America against his will.
Barnum advertised the exhibit as a “Huge Ethnological Congress of Barbarous and Savage Tribes.”
The group was exhibited in the animal menagerie. When the big top performance began, Chang the Chinese Giant led them into the main pavilion for the opening procession.
Nigel Rothfels: Part of that opportunity was to touch them, was to touch their skin, touch their hair. That touch is about a kind of separation of who you are and what the object is. And it is acceptable for you to control it and touch it in that way. One of the experiences of these types of exhibits is an “us and them.” There’s the group of us who are observing and we’re connected to each other. And then there’s the “them” that we’re looking at. They are the other, they are the difference, they are what, in a sense, gives us a shared identity as an audience.
Narration: By the spring of 1885, the constant turmoil of the circus trade was wearing on James Bailey. Physically and emotionally exhausted, he took a leave of absence.
It took him two years to feel strong enough to come back. Without Bailey, Barnum’s once meteoric profits began to sag.
In 1886, Barnum and Forepaugh temporarily made peace. They mounted a joint show under canvas in Philadelphia. Some 15,000 people poured into a big top as long as three city blocks, to see sixty-six acts perform in four rings and one stage.
The following year, with posters from both great shows festooning the outside of Madison Square Garden, the two impresarios combined their circuses for an opening run in New York.
As the profits rolled in, Forepaugh and Barnum divided up the country between them. Barnum played the West one year, and the East the next.
The Adam Forepaugh Circus, however, would not much longer be the greatest threat to “The Greatest Show on Earth.” A thousand miles west of Bridgeport, five sons of a poor immigrant harness-maker had just launched a one-ring wagon show.
It was a small, inconsequential circus. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
There are no spectators. Every last one of us, svelte and lithe and sheathed in silk, is swinging in space… There is not a flabby muscle, not an awkward limb, not a sagging knee in the whole tent. The Nation
Deborah Walk: Within each of us is that desire to do something spectacular. It's that yearning of being able to defy gravity, to fly through the air, to be that princess on a back of the horse that everyone is looking at.
Jackie Leclaire, Clown, Aerialist: It's a glory there. I thought, “I'm better than anybody else. I'm up in the air. What are they? They're just on the ground.” It just lifts you beyond anything you can imagine.
Ammed Tuniziani: You’re flying. You’re literally flying. My mind, it’s completely at ease. It’s just peaceful. You find peace.
Marjorie Cordell Geiger, Aerialist: It is an act of creation, but it has to come from the heart. You have to light the fire. You have to light the desire. There has to be something burning to give.
Johnathan Lee Iverson: For eight minutes most performers cease to be human beings. They’re gods.
La Norma Fox: When somebody tell you, you got sawdust in your veins, that’s exactly what it is. I used to love to pick a few people there and smile especially at them. You got to make it look easy, look beautiful, and have them pay attention to you. The public, you want them to love you. The more applause you get, the happier you are, and walking out of there makes you feel so good.
Narration: “One of the very best ways to lose a lot of money and to lose it quickly,” a reporter for Fortune Magazine observed, “is to start a circus.” Every year through the 19th century, circuses proved the point, surviving one season or maybe two before going belly up the next. Yet every year, a few more plucky dreamers tried their hands at the trade.
In 1882 there were thirty-three circuses touring America. In 1884, there were almost fifty.
Among the newcomers were five brothers living in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
Al, Otto, Alf T., Charles, and John Ringling had seen their first circus in Iowa as children. They had scrambled out of the house before dawn to meet a steamboat carrying a travelling show up the Mississippi River.
Michael Lancaster, Great-Grandson, Charles Ringling: The kids were out of their minds even from the moment they off-loaded the equipment. You have a steamboat with a calliope loaded and smoking and steaming. By the time they put together a parade, the kids were just awestruck.
Narration: Al, the eldest, never gave up hope of creating his own circus. In 1882, he persuaded his brothers to produce a traveling musical show. Over several winters, performing in small town halls, the Ringlings saved a thousand dollars, enough money to buy three secondhand wagons and a tent that could seat a few hundred.
With veteran showman Yankee Robinson’s name to promote the show, the brothers opened the season in Baraboo in May 1884. Their circus featured a handful of contortionists and jugglers, one clown, and Al’s wife Louise.
Deborah Walk: All the boys, at that point of time, in 1884, did something. So, John Ringling was a singing Dutch comic clown. You had Charles playing instruments. Al, who knew how to juggle, balanced plows on his chin.
Narration: After the packed first show a critic wrote, “the performances were very creditable considering the boys had never had any practice.”
Then, the Ringlings loaded up twelve wagons and hit the road.
Janet M. Davis: Local kids served as teamsters. The boys often fished for their dinner or shot food for their dinner. And so, this operation was something that was really invisible to the likes of Barnum & Bailey.
Michael Lancaster: They were so small they did the wire act, walking the high wire was done on top of the tent, usually for free, and it helped move people into the show.
Narration: The first season, the Ringlings played 114 towns, mostly one-night stands, in four states. The frail and aging Yankee Robinson died half way through the season. But losing their mentor didn’t slow the brothers down.
Michael Lancaster: Everything went wrong, but everything went right. As much as things could fail, the crowds were there and so was the money. That first season, they paid everybody well and they came back home and they emptied out their sack of money and they had a lot of it and they were really amazed.
Narration: The following few years, the show grew steadily; each season they swapped out their tent for a slightly larger one. By 1886 the brothers owned a bear, an eagle, and several monkeys. Two years later, they bought a pair of elephants.
Paul Ringling, Grandson, Alf T. Ringling: They were quite young when they started. John Ringling was a teenager. My grandfather and his brothers never had a partnership agreement, nothing in writing. They were five brothers that got along.
Michael Lancaster: They were disciplined, highly disciplined. They took very little money out in those first few years for themselves, but they really enriched the show.
Narration: “It wasn’t that they were so smart,” a nephew said, “but that there were so God-damned many of them.”
Fred Dahlinger Jr.: If you were going to mess with one of them, you were gonna to mess with all five of them. They stuck together. Once they took a vote, that was it. Everybody ponied up, got in line, and they all supported the decision that had been made. And I think that unity is really the secret to their great success as showmen.
Fred Pfening Iii: Their circus was always on the up and up. They called themselves the leaders of the new school of American Showman, and the Sunday School Showman because they didn’t have all these nefarious stuff like other circuses did.
Michael Lancaster: They had rules for everything. These were tight rules. They couldn’t drink. No swearing. They had Pinkertons on their lot so the public could see they meant business, and this earned them the reputation the Sunday School Circus and is probably the thing that really catapulted them into their success.
Narration: For the first few seasons, the Ringlings were a regional outfit. In the fall of 1889 that changed when Adam Forepaugh agreed to sell them eleven railroad cars on the cheap.
Fred Pfening III: The Ringling Brothers Circus went on rails in 1890. It was their first season on the railroad track and that’s what really put them into the big leagues. That was the differentiating factor between a big and a little circus.
Narration: The following season, John Ringling routed their show eastward from Iowa to Wisconsin, Ohio, West Virginia, and Maryland.
Narration: For the first time, the Ringlings hit cities with populations of more than ten thousand people, right in Barnum and Forepaugh’s territory.
The Ringling brothers returned home heroes. “The boys are hustlers and no mistake,” crowed one local paper. “They are Baraboo boys.”
Adam Forepaugh wasn’t around to see how the Ringlings fared with his railroad cars. In early 1890, Forepaugh caught a cold, which turned into pneumonia. On the evening of January 22nd, at the age of fifty-eight, the great showman passed away at home in Philadelphia.
Scores of circus folk went to pay their last respects, including two of the Ringling brothers. Neither Barnum nor Bailey attended, but they took note.
Posey: When Adam Forepaugh died, the reality was, there wasn’t any other equal competitor for the Barnum & Bailey Show. It had been Forepaugh and Barnum for so long, that the death of that rival was significant.
Narration: Barnum didn’t outlive his adversary for long. That November, the eighty-year-old impresario suffered a major stroke.
Five months later, surrounded by family and friends, Phineas Taylor Barnum died in his sleep.
James W. Cook: Barnum is eulogized and talked about in a way that’s virtually unprecedented in American history. Barnum is remembered and debated on the front page of literally hundreds of newspapers around the world, every major western capital, small towns across the United States. Hundreds of thousands of words spent trying to make sense and trying to understand what it was to think about P. T. Barnum’s significance and legacy for American culture.
Narration: Just days before he died, Barnum wrote his younger partner with some parting advice. “You must… have always a great and progressive show,” he told Bailey. “I am too weak to write more now, but let me entreat you to never allow the honorable… title of “The Greatest Show on Earth” to be in any way … lessened in fame.”
Some observers doubted Bailey was up to the task.
Shortly after Barnum’s death, a journalist predicted that the old man’s show was too centered on his remarkable personality to survive without him. The writer laid his bets instead on five young men from Baraboo.
“The Ringling Bros….” he declared, “have hardly more than started on their career as a leading big show… Conjecture fails to place a limit on their… future possibilities.”
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