The Genesis of Mass Culture: Show Business Live in America, 1840 to 1940

THE GENESIS OF MASS CULTURE

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THE GENESIS OF MASS CULTURE SHOW BUSINESS LIVE IN AMERICA, 1840 TO 1940

John Springhall

THE GENESIS OF MASS CULTURE

Copyright © John Springhall, 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–60449–0 ISBN-10: 0–230–60449–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Springhall, John. The genesis of mass culture : show business live in America, 1840 to 1940 / John Springhall. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–60449–8 1. Performing arts—United States—History—19th century. 2. Performing arts—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. PN2245.S67 2008 791.0973⬘09034

2007039231

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: April 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For the three Scribner boys from Seattle, especially Robbie, who as neighbors enthused me with a passion for American popular culture

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CONTENTS

Introduction The Show Business American Mass Culture Organization 1

1 1 3 7

The American Museum: Barnum’s Great Leap Forward America’s Greatest Showman Barnum’s Early Career The Dime Museum Barnum’s American Museum Barnum’s Second and Other Museums Barnum and Middle-Class Identity Endnote

13 14 16 19 22 28 30 34

2

The Freak Show Business: “Step Right Up, Folks” Classification and Presentation of Freaks American Museum Freaks “General” Tom Thumb Dime Museum, Circus, and Carnival Freaks The Freak Show in Context Endnote

37 38 40 44 46 49 54

3

Blackface Minstrelsy: The First All-American Show Forerunners of Minstrelsy The First Minstrel Shows Antebellum Minstrelsy The Politics of Minstrelsy African American Minstrelsy Minstrelsy Diversifies Endnote

57 58 61 65 68 70 74 78

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6

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CONTENTS

The Americanized Circus: Barnum & Bailey In Excelsis The American Circus under Canvas Emergence of the Railroad Circus Three-Ring Circuses and Parades Barnum’s Circuses before Bailey The Barnum & Bailey Circus The American Circus after Barnum Endnote

81 82 85 87 89 93 99 102

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: American Culture Crosses the Atlantic Buffalo Bill as a Transatlantic Phenomenon Bill Cody’s Early Life Buffalo Bill’s Theatrical Career The Wild West as Show Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in London The Wild West and American Identity Endnote

105 106 108 110 113 118 123 126

Vaudeville I: Rise and Decline of an Emergent Mass Culture The Cleanup of Variety The Keith-Albee Vaudeville Circuit Vaudeville Circuit Programs Vaudeville’s Ethnic Diversity Vaudeville’s Star Female Performers Decline of Vaudeville Endnote

129 130 133 136 138 144 147 149

Vaudeville II: Cultural Exchange, Departure, and Transmutation Music Hall Stars Journey to America Vaudeville Stars Journey to Britain Revue: The Ziegfeld Follies The Disappearance of Vaudeville Vaudeville as Training for the Mass Media Endnote

151 152 154 159 161 164 168

Conclusion Barnum’s Place in Show Business History Forerunners of Mass Culture Endnote

171 171 174 177

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Appendix I: P. T. Barnum: Humbug and Reality Representations of Barnum Image and Reality

179 182 186

Appendix II: Harry Houdini’s Early Career

189

Acknowledgments

195

Notes

197

Bibliography

215

Index

227

Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth with Jumbo’s Skeleton, circa 1885–87 Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZC4-912).

INTRODUCTION

he general aim of this historical overview is to provide a synoptic account, for the nonspecialist reader, of various forms of commercial or popular entertainment (but excluding sporting activities that meet this description). The account examines what entertained ordinary American citizens for the price of admission; asking why, and how were they amused, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; where were paid-for amusements largely performed—on stage, in arenas, “museums,” and show grounds, or under canvas? Most prominence given here is to sites in New York City. Thus the emphasis is on people “going out” to be amused rather than on what they did for entertainment if they stayed in at home. The live exhibits or performances of the period under consideration, such as freak shows, vaudeville, three-ring circuses, and wild west shows, preceded, helped initiate, and overlapped with the new electronic media that began to appear from the end of the nineteenth century onward. Both Marconi’s transmission of the first “wireless” coded message and Edison’s first projection of moving images on a screen made their debut in 1896. Yet the actual “genesis of mass culture” can be traced further back to the live performance shows that pioneered new commercial forms of organization and publicity much earlier in that century. Overall, the intention has been to make this book’s colourful subject matter both interesting and comprehensible for those not conversant with the topic, as well as to provide historical information that is as accurate as possible about a representative and wide-ranging selection of the embryonic American entertainment industry.

T

The Show Business The first recorded use of “the show business” as a generic or all-purpose term to embrace the multifarious forms of public amusement that required some payment for admission appears to have been in the mid-nineteenth

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century; the business reached its apogee in Irving Berlin’s Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946) as unlike any other. “Show” or “shew,” denoting a display or exhibition for the purpose of entertainment, had a much longer pedigree. “Showman” first appeared as impresario, according to the standard American English dictionary, in some 1851 memoirs of theatrical New York, as in “Barnum however displayed a little of the show-man,” albeit the English satirical journal Punch applied the term without a hyphen to Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–91) as early as 1844. Evidently the most eminent showman of the age, P. T. Barnum is a key figure in several of the following chapters. His show business life endured until the last decade of the nineteenth century, while his iconic reputation lives on into the present day.1 In the late 1860s actress and playwright Olive Logan poured scorn on the presumptions of self-styled “professionals” in the field of entertainment for whom “the Show Business” embraced any and every public performance given to a paying audience. She preferred to discriminate between those with some genuine talent dedicated to tasteful “art,” whether in “the drama” or opera or ballet, and the “charlatans of the amusement world,” the performers from dime museums, circus tents, and minstrel halls, who pandered to the prejudices and ignorance of their new mass audience solely for monetary gain. The process of establishing taste differentials evidenced here becomes a symbolic weapon, according to one academic theorist, in the struggle between classes for ideological domination. How cultural and taste hierarchies were established is significant because the construction process allowed cultural authorities such as Logan to amplify social anxiety or rejection of popular culture that threatened established “good taste.” To use Logan’s term, those “disreputable” people such as Barnum who saw entertainment as primarily a business and not as an art are, unrepentantly, the chief focus of this study.2 To save space and spare the reader a tedious inventory of now obsolescent theatrical performances, the host of Broadway comedies, revues, musicals, operettas, and musical comedies regularly categorized as “show business” are only touched on here, with the noteworthy exception of the Ziegfeld Follies. Among the show forms discussed at greater length are blackface minstrelsy, whose New York debut was in the early 1840s, alongside Barnum’s first American Museum (1841–65), to be followed in a later chapter by his circuses of the 1870s onward. Also surveyed are the transatlantic outreach of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and “refined” variety theatre or vaudeville entertainment that together commence from the early 1880s. The history of these commercially popular forms of the

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business of show or performance in America is of intrinsic interest because a great deal of their content, style, and ethos fed into the all-pervasive mass media of the twentieth century. The reader may also feel that this survey is of more than historical interest because much of twenty-first century politics, academia, and the mass media have become so shaped by the need to entertain that they have been turned, unwittingly, into branches of the show business. All the major topics dealt with here—vaudeville, circuses, wild west shows, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums—have had substantial academic histories devoted to them in the last decade or so, and none of these I can hope to supersede. Regrettably, the general or undergraduate student reader is mostly unaware of them, because such specialized studies are either too detailed, and lengthy or theoretical to reach a wider audience. So the chapters that follow provide a condensed version of much of this recent scholarly research (here I stand on the shoulders of others) together with some new information of my own, while pretty much following a broadly chronological narrative. The emergence of what eventually came to be called “mass culture” is seen to arise out of the show business past of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hence this general survey is intended to be a thematic and comparative (Britain and America) study of show business history, with an opening emphasis on Barnum, aimed at students of historical, cultural, and American studies. Why was a large section of the American public so enthralled with Barnum’s various shows, exhibits, circuses, and museums, and how can we explain the appeal of these entertainment forms? What distinctions can be made between commercial entertainments in America and circuses, variety shows, or freak shows, on the other side of the Atlantic, particularly in Great Britain? How far did the vociferous live amusement forms of the past, such as vaudeville, help to shape what is now referred to as mass entertainment or mass culture?

American Mass Culture To start with, before looking in subsequent chapters at how far nineteenthcentury American show business preceded, instigated, or shaped the mass media culture of the twentieth century, we need to ask how and why “mass culture”—a term that only came into common usage in the 1930s— was first given shape and transmitted in the United States. For, a welcome account of the Americanization of the world up to the early 1920s argues, much as the present account, that American mass culture was “running at

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full throttle before the First World War,” at least in terms of entrepreneurial flair, extensive advertising, large-scale investment, and mass ticket sales. This was in response to the new mass market opportunities made possible from 1869 onward by the transcontinental railroad, new corporate forms of organization, and subsequent mass immigration. The proliferation of national railroad networks, together with the spread of the telegraph and telephone, the rise of the unscrupulous “robber baron,” and the stirrings of the emerging automobile industry, helped destabilize an older, localized, and more rural way of life.3 A provincial “nation of loosely connected islands” was hence giving way to an anonymous, modern, urban-industrial society as the American republic began to overtake even its former colonial ruler, for, England at that time was the world’s first industrial and mostly urban nation. Speculative investments in land and capital, overseas colonization, the formation of large oil, steel, and railway corporations, and accelerated industrialization, defined the growing American economy. Popular historian and evolutionist John Fiske (1842–1901), the best-known American popularizer of Charles Darwin, forecast with great prescience in his 1885 article for Harper’s on “Manifest Destiny” that within a century the United States would be “a political aggregation unmeasurably [sic] surpassing in power and in dimensions any empire that has yet existed.” The United States had overtaken all of Europe as the region with the greatest economic output in the world by 1919, following its boom in industrialization, the opening up of the interior’s vast wheatlands, and the successful refrigeration of meat supplies delivered by rail. In the meantime, the Barnumesque development of circuses, wild west shows, dime museums, and vaudeville—all of which received an enormous boost on what became known as the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair—“facilitated the commercialization of American culture and its packaging for a mass, ethnically diverse, transcontinental audience.”4 Mass circulation penny weekly and daily newspapers, for example, spread across the nation from the 1830s, doubling their numbers in the early 1840s, and “borne on the rising tide of mass literacy, their page production expanded by steam, their information sources interlinked by the railroad and telegraph.” By the time of the Civil War (1861–65), America had seen the first mass-educated and mass-literate generation in the modern world come of age, largely through schools adopting en masse William H. McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers. Yet the ordinary American did not learn to read solely to scan the local newspaper. He or she also desired to read popular fiction for entertainment and to escape from the daily grind of earning a living. Entrepreneurs were quick

INTRODUCTION

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to supply this new market demand from an ever-expanding urban, working and immigrant population with an appetite for sensational and formula stories. Dime novels, or paper-covered, complete Western novels in a continuous series at a cheap fixed price of 10 cents, such as Beadle’s Dime Novels, were sold at newsstands, station kiosks, and on the trains.5 Soldiers with time on their hands increased the Beadle firm’s total sale of these novels during the Civil War close to the immense figure of five million. From the late 1870s, “half-dime novels” such as The Five Cent Wide Awake Library, featuring the serialized adventures of heroes such as Buffalo Bill, Deadwood Dick, Nick Carter, and Frank Merriwell, were directed more explicitly at a younger audience (as the earlier English “penny dreadfuls” were). The secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock (1844–1915), a name synonymous with American prudery, portrayed “half-dimes” as “corrupting the young, glamorizing criminal behavior,” and as responsible for the “fearful increase of youthful criminals in our cities in recent years.” Most were read by schoolchildren, craft workers, factory operatives, laborers, and servants living in the cities and mill towns of the northeast of America. Dime and half-dime novels were almost universally condemned by parents, clergy and teachers, but nothing could keep them out of the hands of young Americans, and of many older readers too.6 From the end of the nineteenth century, if not before, most European intellectuals—then almost by definition elitist and hostile to the democratization of society—were convinced that a distastefully egalitarian and democratic America bore the primary responsibility for foisting on the rest of the advanced world a new kind of entertainment culture: one based not on high art but on the consumption of a standardized marketable product, such as the above popular reading matter, intended to reach the widest possible audience. On the assumption that all commodities produced for a mass market must be shoddy and inferior, mass amusements were conventionally depicted by the intelligentsia as shoddy and inferior, just as the unsophisticated American society was considered the most responsible for the potentially harmful dissemination of these commodities. This ongoing European critique of mass society as commercialized, uniform, or homogeneous came from a variety of sources that stretched from occasional visitors to the United States such as English literary critic Matthew Arnold, German sociologist Max Weber, and Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, to long-term Jewish and/or Marxist exiles from Germany and Nazi-conquered Europe, among whom were Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, and Herbert Marcuse.7

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The last named so-called Frankfurt intellectuals housed in the Institute of Social Research at Columbia University in New York during the late 1930s and early 1940s, blamed American radio, cinema, newspapers, and pulp magazines for “the disappearance of the inner life,” the rise of the “culture industry,” and the development of “false consciousness” in the “masses.” Hollywood and Madison Avenue were depicted as threatening and degenerate, sapping the nation’s moral fiber for commercial profit. The Marxist vision of an undifferentiated and corrupting “mass culture” sweeping away genuine popular or folk culture, criticized for its lack of historical specificity or empirical grounding is currently unfashionable. European academics of the time distanced themselves from the tastes of the average citizen, such as a preference for newspaper comic strips (“the funnies”) and Hollywood genre movies. Like the actress Olive Logan, too many scholars believed in a hierarchy of cultural consumption that legitimized dismissal of nearly all forms of popular entertainment as inartistic.8 An anti–mass culture position was also emerging during the 1950s among American intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald, coiner of “masscult” and “midcult,” and David Riesman, author of The Lonely Crowd (1950). One intemperate critic, Geoffrey Wagner, in his amply illustrated study of American popular iconography, Parade of Pleasure (1954), bitterly accused the mass media of “cretinizing public taste.” Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, deputations of teachers and churchmen lobbied the British parliament in fear of American mass culture in the form of “horror comics,” such as EC’s Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, invading school playgrounds to corrupt the young and turn them into juvenile delinquents. “The problem which now faces society in the trade that has sprung up of presenting sadism, crime, lust, physical monstrosity, and horror to the young is an urgent and a grave one,” thundered The Times on November 12, 1954. Furthermore, President Eisenhower’s administration in Washington was concerned, according to the British Foreign Office, “about the extent to which American participation in the production of ‘horror comics’ is being used to foster illfeeling between the United States and this country.” The commander of American forces stationed in England even tried to get PX military stores to stop bringing “horror comics” into the country; so desperate was the threat to basic British values. All the excitement of this “moral panic” over comic book imports resulted in the passage through parliament in 1955 of the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act— a veritable legislative sledgehammer used to crack a very small nut indeed!9

INTRODUCTION

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Some years later, Leavisite critic Denys Thompson still took the dismissive view in Discrimination and Popular Culture (1964) that, because of the “debasing influence of commercial pressures,” the media offered only “satisfaction at the lowest level.” The trained student “discriminated” by rejecting all forms of popular entertainment for the Cambridge English literary or artistic canon. British academic attitudes toward mass culture slowly began to change, however, particularly after Stuart Hall, a Jamaicanborn, Oxford-educated Marxist and future director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, coauthored The Popular Arts (1964), a long-awaited and highly influential textbook of analytic exercises advocating genuine critical discernment among the mass media’s output.10 This work argued, unlike its predecessors, that the cultural struggle or disparity between what is good and worthwhile and what is shoddy and debased was not a struggle against the mass media but one among the products of the various media. Hall’s willingness to differentiate between “good” and “bad” popular culture required critical judgments of individual pieces of work in film, television, advertising, and journalism. This approach was refreshing to those until then accustomed to almost total rejection of the output of the mass media by intellectuals of all political persuasions, with only a few discerning exceptions memorable to this author, such as British novelist Kingsley Amis, whose New Maps of Hell (1960) championed science fiction, some of George Orwell’s essays, and American critic Robert Warshow, who wrote brilliantly on popular culture for Commentary magazine but sadly died young.11

Organization In terms of methodology, what follows adopts an American Studies rather than a Cultural Studies approach. The former focuses more clearly, for example, on questions of cultural and national identity raised by the show business and situates its various modes within a firm historical or sequential dimension. Its practitioners attempt to place their chosen entertainment forms, in effect, within the historical perspective of a modernizing and ethnically diverse American society. In particular, historians of popular amusements before the advent of the television age have, in recent years, set new standards for presenting their chosen forms within a proper American cultural and historical framework. To take just one American Studies program with which the present author is familiar, substantial

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works have been published by the History faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on such aspects of commercial entertainment as soap operas around the world; the cultural history of the freak show; Coney Island at the turn of the century; the story of burlesque and American culture; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and popular history, and; the challenge of modernity to representations of the perfect white male body.12 An American Studies approach should avoid the kind of uncritical populist endorsement of mass amusement forms or the “new revisionism” evident in much recent academic writing on popular culture, with its increasing fixation on strategies of interpretation at the cost of an adequate grasp of the social and economic conditions of cultural consumption. This is exemplified by the fascination with sideshow performers who exhibited a freakish physical or mental deformity or the exhibition of albinos, dwarfs, people born with missing or extra limbs, conjoined twins, those with excess hair or tattoos, Native Americans, and non-Western peoples. Not all the texts on freak shows place their subjects in an appropriate historical perspective as is attempted here. Another outcome might be to show that minstrelsy, vaudeville, circuses, dime museums, and wild west shows, were inextricably intermingled, despite their classification into separate histories, giving the impression that they were discrete forms of entertainment. For it is useful to identify the marked historical overlap or symmetry between the varieties of show business. They borrowed heavily from one another and from their overseas equivalents, as is evident from the overall shape of British music hall in relation to vaudeville and burlesques of Italian opera arias in relation to minstrelsy. Even before he became involved in circus management, P. T. Barnum’s career path offers an essential introduction to the wider and culturally important history of distinctly American forms of public amusement. So what better way to explore the preliminary appearance of popular forms of commercial entertainment in America than by taking advantage of recent scholarly work on diverse aspects of Barnum’s extraordinary career? Hence chapter 1 focuses on Barnum himself as a cultural phenomenon, his self-presentation in autobiographical form, and his beginnings in the “show” or exhibit business. Discussion of Barnum’s career-making revival of the American Museum in New York and creation of its Lecture Room theater then follows. His subsequent livelihood as a circus impresario is dealt with in chapter 4. The concluding chapter makes an attempt to gauge Barnum’s ultimate role in show business history, while the famous impresario’s elevation to iconic status in American society and

INTRODUCTION

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culture, partly through his representation in various media, is dealt with in Appendix I. In chapter 2, the different categories of “freaks” are first outlined. Emphasis is then given to Barnum’s promotion of “natural freaks,” commencing with the “human anomalies” exhibited in the American Museum. Although ordinary people had been fascinated by the unusual and the bizarre on exhibit at fairs and festivals since colonial times, from the 1840s onward Barnum’s New York-based museum bears the primary responsibility for bringing to the “freak show” greater prominence. A further section goes on to examine the career of “General” Tom Thumb, probably Barnum’s most successful freakish performer and a unique instance of the showman as both discoverer and original exhibitor. As a showman, he was not interested in disinterested scientific enquiry but in exhibiting giants, dwarfs, living skeletons, bearded ladies, conjoined twins, and other “human curiosities” for the amusement or instruction of paying customers. A brief account of freaks found in dime museums, circuses, and carnivals is followed by an attempt to place the “freak show” in some kind of contextual frame. This should help explain both its renewed popularity during Barnum’s ascendancy and the possible benefits brought to its participants, aside from the rewards of taking quarters out of the public’s hands. Minstrelsy was the first distinctively American form of popular musical culture at a time when America was exposed to overwhelming foreign influences. Yet chapter 3 shows that Italian and English influences on minstrelsy were arguably as significant as anything borrowed from black culture, albeit cultural interactions between the plantation South and the urban North can be underestimated. The new blackface minstrel troupe form not only restructured popular stage entertainment in the 1840s, but also grew out of the blackface song-and-dance performance of earlier decades. Consideration is also given to the emergence of African American minstrel performers who brought at least part of their musical culture into the American mainstream for the first time. The first black or “colored minstrel” troupes began to appear in the mid-1850s and took off ten years later; however, white minstrels in blackface were first on the scene not only for chauvinistic but also for pragmatic reasons. The final section of chapter 3 looks at minstrelsy’s eventual onstage decline, if only as a monothematic type of professional entertainment. With its exciting pageantry and spectacle, the circus functioned as a key cultural form in the effort to reconstruct the post–Civil War national identity. The emphasis in chapter 4 is on those characteristics that

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distinguished the Americanized circus from its British and European equivalents. This requires a discrete focus on such uniquely American occurrence as the earliest canvas-tented circus; the successful three-ring circus format; the railroad-driven and long-distance circus, and; the grand circus parade along Main Street. All these contributory features helped transform the circus from an entertainment form imported from England into a far more American phenomenon, bigger and hence, supposedly, better than its European rivals. Ensuing sections go on to look at Barnum’s significant circus career before his partnership with James A. Bailey, followed by the emergence of the combined Barnum & Bailey circus along with Jumbo the elephant. The short account, at the end of the chapter, of the American circus after Barnum’s demise continues into the twentieth century. The topic of chapter 5, the Buffalo Bill Wild West, acted as a link between national identity and popular culture because the show achieved international recognition as a symbol for the American nation. A remarkable theatrical innovation, the Wild West show brought stage drama together with other entertainments such as the circus, sportsmen’s exhibitions, parades, and equestrian performances. This chapter is devoted to examining Buffalo Bill as a genuine phenomenon, unraveling invention from veracity concerning his early life and stage appearances, together with the creation of his Wild West show, its first appearance in London and, finally, exploring how the Wild West came to represent American popular culture. Even in his own lifetime, Buffalo Bill was a true multimedia brand name and star, before featuring posthumously as the hero of comic books, paperback novels, radio and television shows, and talking pictures. Chapter 6 goes on to examine the popular stage form of “respectable” or refined vaudeville, beginning with earlier claims to moral propriety by museum Lecture Room managers such as P. T. Barnum, followed by the late nineteenth-century “clean up” of old-style variety by theater proprietors such as Tony Pastor and B. F. Keith. The subsequent focus is on vaudeville’s contribution to the cultural formation of New York City’s uneasy multiethnic identity, conspicuous then as now to any out-oftown visitor riding the subway. Female performers receive some attention, in particular “blue vaudeville” star Eva Tanguay and one of her rivals, the more durable chanteuse Sophie Tucker. The final section of this chapter seeks to explain the reasons for vaudeville’s progressive decline. The penultimate chapter 7 touches on the neglected transatlantic cultural exchange between those performing in American vaudeville and British music hall. Despite the eventual disappearance of vaudeville, an

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apprenticeship on the vaudeville stage served as a valuable training ground for those migrating to the new mass media of radio, the phonograph, moving pictures, and eventually television. Finally, the chapter titled “Conclusion” offers some final remarks about Barnum’s part in show business history and the overall contribution of past live entertainment forms to our modern-day mass culture.

Nagel and Lewis Lithograph, “Sleighing in New York,” 1855 Source: American Social History Project, CUNY.

CHAPTER 1 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM: BARNUM’S GREAT LEAP FORWARD

s will become evident, no credible account of those who influenced the emergence of a distinctly American form of commercialized live entertainment, or the show business, can exclude Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–91). He became central, over the course of his own lifetime, to the transition of the American people’s culture into profit-making, marketdriven, mass entertainment. “More than any other nineteenth-century impresario, Barnum was the driving force who transformed the show trade from a set of vernacular traditions and local markets into a global industry,” writes an eminent Barnum scholar. The ongoing revival of academic interest in this showman’s cultural universe also testifies to Barnum’s significance as a prototypical nineteenth-century American, receiving confirmation, as shown below, from his opportune alignment with America’s emerging mercantile middle class.1 Equally, Barnum’s first American Museum (1841–65) in New York City, started decades before he won international fame as a full-time circus proprietor, is now seen as a pivotal institution in the development of American forms of popular culture. It could lay claim, in its heyday, to be the nation’s premiere entertainment showplace. Dioramas and panoramas, freaks and magicians, aquariums, waxworks and menageries, obscure relics, and stuffed animals—all attracted the gaze of the spectator under one roof at Barnum’s spacious and multitiered palace of amusements. His hustler energy and ingenuity as a manager also meant, as Barnum himself put it, that “my ‘puffing’ was more persistent, my advertising more audacious, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic and my transparencies more brilliant than they would have been under the management of my neighbors.”2

A

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America’s Greatest Showman An adaptable and inventive American entrepreneur, Barnum’s celebrity as a showman was indeed extraordinary. The London Times obituary exclaimed that “one wanted a [Thomas] Carlyle to come forward to discourse upon the Hero as Showman,” no doubt convinced of Barnum’s iconic status after he had brought over his immense circus to entertain Londoners. The famous self-promoter became one of the most recognizable and talked about of all Americans during the second half of the nineteenth century. Calling on his acquaintance former president Ulysses S. Grant not long before the general’s death in 1885, Barnum later claimed the following exchange took place: “ ‘General, since your journey around the world you are the best-known man on the globe.’ ‘By no means,’ Grant replied without pause. ‘You beat me sky-high; for wherever I went—in China, Japan, the Indies, etc.—the constant inquiry was “Do you know Barnum?” I think, Barnum, you are the best-known man in the world.’ ”3 Yet according to biographer Neil Harris, “deception, hoaxing, humbugging, cheating, these were some of the words Americans commonly associated with Barnum, during his lifetime and ever since.” Such uncharitable language provides only a partial insight into why Barnum became, and has remained, such a familiar and important archetype. Credited inaccurately with the saying “there’s a sucker born every minute,” Barnum did use the more equivocal expression “the people like to be humbugged,” explaining that “the public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.” So to emphasize Barnum’s treating the public as gullible dupes is to misrepresent the man, who was too smart a businessman to treat his customers with disrespect. Also, Barnum’s legitimate show exhibits, such as Tom Thumb, Jumbo the elephant, the Nova Scotia Giantess, or Chan and Eng (the Siamese Twins), far outrival his hoaxes, despite his reputation as the “Prince of Humbugs” for his assumed hypocrisy and hucksterism. On the other hand, Barnum’s museum enterprise publicized but did not, as often credited, actually initiate any particular form of commercial amusement and nor was he the first to display most of his well-known exhibits (see Appendix I).4 The man has been called by another biographer “the prototype of all entrepreneurs forever after,” but not solely because he was, as in one dictionary definition of the term, “an organizer, especially of entertainments for the public.” Barnum’s name also became shorthand for the American entrepreneurial capitalist’s relentless energy and acquisitiveness, to the gratifying extent that investors, business, or sales personnel, were able to admire a more expansive representation of themselves in the showman’s

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persona. In the first edition of his autobiography, Barnum even published as an addendum ten Rules for Success in Business (“Let hope predominate, but be not too visionary,” “Advertise your business,” “Be polite and kind to your customers,”etc.). Following his temporary bankruptcy, he toured Britain and America from 1859 to 1860 to raise funds with an entertaining lecture on the “Art of Money Getting or, Golden Rules for Making Money” that fleshed out the above success rules with jokes, anecdotes, and quotations. As Barnum jokingly remarked at the time, he was better qualified to speak on “the Art of Money-Losing.”5 Even before he became a circus proprietor in his sixties, Barnum was identified with a sense of massive show-business overachievement. For, contained within his American Museum and its Lecture Room stage was the promise of modern American popular amusements, from the freak show and the menagerie to variety and vaudeville. While running his New York museum, Barnum successfully toured Europe with the famous midget “General” Tom Thumb (see chapter 2) and in mid-century also became Swedish soprano Jenny Lind’s American concert manager (see below “Barnum and Middle-Class Identity”). Furthermore, the showman became his own tireless promoter long before he took up circuses, following publication of the famously candid first edition of his remarkable and best-selling autobiography, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1855). Retitled and updated several times, its admirers claim this may well have been, after the Bible, the book most widely read by Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century. Barnum’s printed exposure of his various hoaxes and of his rollicking adventures from obscurity to fame scandalized his more pious contemporaries, particularly in a censorious mid-Victorian England. For, he presents himself throughout this first autobiography as an ingenious fraudster who is always one step ahead of his “mark” or intended prey. Little personal revelation is vouchsafed in a subjective text that is more an anecdotal narrative of the audacious Barnum’s experiences in the public world of the show business. The showman’s rousing account has no ideal American personality to commend except that of the vainglorious but self-made achiever, emulating the same trajectory from rural poverty to urban wealth as in Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Characteristically American, Barnum believed in the tireless improvement both of himself and of new modes of public entertainment.6 Famous from mid-nineteenth century onward not only for his showmanship but also, after publication of this first life history, for outright fraud and chicanery, Barnum was adopted by the new democratic republic as one its cultural heroes. The Connecticut Yankee of the time was known for astute calculation or cunning and so for Barnum to hoax the paying

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customers for an exhibit became a badge of success, at least before he tried to clean up his public image. Various later biographical revisions, including the 1869 one renamed Struggles and Triumphs or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, were strenuously marketed at his circuses as a self-promotional tool. In the preface to this new version, Barnum assured his readers they would find in it not only his life story but also “amusing anecdotes, funny passages, felicitous jokes, captivating narratives, novel experiences, and remarkable interviews.”7 The constant adjustments to Barnum’s autobiography, largely to make the ageing showman appear more reputable, indicate an upwardly aspiring and quintessentially American temperament. Men may make their own life history but, to paraphrase Karl Marx, only a few do so in circumstances of their own choosing. Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind, whose tours Barnum managed, are given more space in Struggles and Triumphs and his famous deceptions such as Joice Heth less of an emphasis. Accounts of contemporary critics who saw Barnum as making money by deceiving the public with fake exhibits, while remaining indifferent to his reputation or integrity, are misleading. He remained a supreme promoter but one who, in midlife became outwardly bourgeois, sought to acquire respectable status by, for example, building an opulent mansion (“Iranistan”) modeled on the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, in Sussex, and also by befriending the local Protestant clergy.8 Barnum’s Early Career As Robert C. Toll reminded us over 30 years ago, Barnum’s life history is “more than the story of the foundation of American show business, more than the story of an advertising and promotional genius. It is, in a real sense, the story of the mid-nineteenth-century American.” The sheer size and complexity of his extraordinary show business life nonetheless resists easy analysis or the attempt to set it in historical context with real precision, but the new century has seen the publication of several important scholarly works on various aspects of Barnum as a social and cultural phenomenon that make the task less daunting. Born in Bethel village, then a section of Danbury, in Fairfield County, Connecticut, on July 5, 1810, P. T. Barnum was the eldest of five children, and his life was to span the ensuing decades of the nineteenth century. His father worked as a farmer, tavern keeper, livery-stable proprietor, and country-store merchant, but despite his versatility was not very successful. Barnum became the clerk in a village store not far from home and ran a well-advertised lottery business while still in his teens.9

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At 17 he went to Brooklyn and opened a porter-house there. Almost immediately he sold it at a profit and crossed to Manhattan to become a bar-tender at a drinking place. He returned to Bethel in 1828 to become a partner with his grandfather in a fruit and confectionary store. Barnum’s autobiography recounts at some length a significant episode involving this admired maternal grandfather, Phineas Taylor, who had made much of presenting his namesake at birth with a valuable tract of land called “Ivy Island.” Barnum was embarrassed to discover at age 12 that this was just an inaccessible piece of barren land. To the amusement of the local community, where joking and story telling were a way of life, the boy had long been the subject of a Yankee hoax or practical joke. Characteristically, in recalling his negotiations almost 20 years later with the owner of the American Museum building, Barnum bragged of using the same useless five acres as unencumbered collateral or security.10 When he was 19, Barnum married a buxom local tailoress, Charity Hallett, and two years later became the editor of his own faith-based newspaper, the Herald of Freedom and Gospel Witness (1831–32). A believer in the certainty of universal salvation, he had joined the Universalist faith (presently merged with the Unitarian Church), whose egalitarian central teaching was the love of God for all His children, not just an “elect” few, thereby rejecting Calvinist doctrines of hell and damnation. Barnum’s radical politics at this time were those of an old-style Jeffersonian Democrat who, in conservative and rural Connecticut, argued for the separation of church and state. The 21-year-old editor also opposed overzealous congregational and evangelical clergy for sponsoring a “blue law” banning various forms of amusement, among them the state’s lottery business in which he was himself engaged. When Barnum denounced Bethel church elder Seth Seeley (or Seelye) in his Universalist newspaper as a “canting hypocrite,” he was sued for libel, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 60 days in the Danbury jail. On the young man’s release, his supporters greeted the prisoner warmly before providing a celebratory dinner and then a festive parade back to Bethel drawn by a six-horse coach. Interestingly, as he grew older and more respectable, the famous showman increasingly turned to members of the cloth for his most intimate friends.11 In a typically American act of self-emancipation from small-town life, Barnum started working in New York City again not long after, since he had resigned as the Herald’s editor and lotteries were now banned in Connecticut. Barnum appears to have performed legerdemain (sleight-ofhand tricks) and also to have exhibited an “educated goat.” His other early showbiz moneymaking schemes during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, as a medicine show pitchman and with a traveling circus troupe (see below),

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gave the energetic young Barnum some insights into what the rapidly expanding, semiliterate, increasingly affluent populations of America’s urbanizing northeast demanded as a release from their daily working lives. Yet many years of determined hard work both in Connecticut and in New York, and later with traveling exhibits and circuses, yielded only disappointing returns for the young Barnum. For with the exception in 1835 of crowd-pleaser and former Kentucky slave Joice Heth, his great flair for promotion was expended on miserably poor show or variety attractions. Exhibited by Barnum as the youthful George Washington’s 161-yearold former nurse, Joice Heth has been used by one scholar to tease out or “unpack” the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. For, this incredible and endlessly fascinating hoax “mixed the racist denigrations of the freak show and the dizzying inversions of the minstrel show with the nostalgic images of the cult of Washington.” Barnum also first discovered with Heth, the commercial value of casting doubt on the authenticity of his own exhibits in order to arouse a continuous public interest in them. So visitors flocked to see the ex-slave to amuse themselves by speculating over whether she was really a mechanical doll or as ancient as presented and, if neither, to debate their theories of how such a hoax was executed. Further, making sense of this supposed living relic of America’s colonial and revolutionary past on tour provides entry to the “unspoken assumptions” of the Jacksonian period with “its underlying and competing fictions of national, racial, regional, class- and gender-based, religious and individual identities.” Ultimately, in becoming the nurse of the Father of the Nation, Joice Heth put herself in the “deathly embrace of the northern public,” especially under Barnum’s direction, and “found a captivity that was perhaps even more cruel than the one she had left behind.”12 Barnum next gained his first experience of a circus in April 1836 when at age 25, he joined Danbury neighbor, former shoemaker, and English expatriate Aaron Turner’s Old Columbian Circus, an early traveling show featuring this showman’s multitalented children, with the benefit of a round, center-poled, canvas tent. Barnum was to tour the American South for six months as the circus ticket seller, secretary, and treasurer for 20 percent of the net profits. Thus 35 men and boys set off from Connecticut where, registering protests from Protestant clergymen who denounced the circus as “the devil’s own playhouse,” state law now banned itinerant shows from appearing until 1840. So Turner’s road show first wound north to nearby Massachusetts and then down hundreds of miles to South Carolina. When the relatively small show moved back up to North Carolina, Barnum took his $600 profit and set off on his own for the next couple of years with his own traveling variety show.13

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While touring successfully the year before with Joice Heth, Barnum had placed under contract Italian acrobat and plate spinner “Antonio,” whom he renamed “Signor Antonio Vivalla.” Despite the juggler being unable to draw audiences, even with such an exotic foreign-sounding name, Barnum now had to provide further employment. So his own traveling show consisted of two wagons, a small canvas tent, Signor Vivalla, clown and magician Joe Pentland, black song-and-dance man James Sandford, and a few musicians, all billed as “Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical theater” to avoid the disreputable term “circus.” When Sandford abruptly ran off in Camden, South Carolina, Barnum himself was briefly obliged to put on blackface over the winter of 1837–38 and fill the gap in the advertised program: “It was decidedly a ‘hard push,’ but the audience supposed the singer was Sandford, and, to my surprise, my singing was applauded, and in two of the songs I was encored!” The following spring, on March 19, 1838, a New Orleans newspaper reported that “Captain Barnum” had arrived on his steamboat Ceres “with a theatrical company.” Thus our hero was brought into contact with yet another mode of the show business, for, after several unhappy experiences with his little caravan of horse-driven carriages, Barnum had sold them and purchased a steamer at Vicksburg and had headed south by river to put on tent shows at small towns along the banks of the Mississippi.14 So Barnum briefly became a riverboat showman, to add to his more well-known accomplishments. Unfortunately, not even a week in New Orleans proved worthwhile financially and so the circus troupe dispersed when Barnum returned to New York on June 4, 1838, as the meager profits were not nearly enough to compensate for the hardships of the road and absence from his wife and family. “The itinerant amusement business is at the bottom of the [entertainment] ladder,” the disillusioned Barnum later observed. “I had begun there, but I had no wish to stay there; in fact, I was thoroughly disgusted with the trade of traveling showman.” Not until Barnum was virtually retired 32 years later was he persuaded to become a circus proprietor once again.15 The Dime Museum Searching for a way to support his wife and two children, over the summer of 1840, small-time showman and entrepreneur Barnum leased the saloon theater in New York’s Vauxhall Gardens, hoping to succeed there with variety acts, including singing, dancing, and telling “Yankee stories.” By early September he was out on the road again from Buffalo to New Orleans, promoting a small troupe featuring a white “negro-dancer” and a single fiddler (see chapter 3). A man of inexhaustible energy, the future

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showman continued drifting from venture to venture, such as becoming the American agent for Sears’ Pictorial Illustrations of the Bible for around six months or writing newspaper articles and advertisements for the Bowery Amphitheater. Then Barnum learned in 1841, seemingly by chance, that the profit-making American Museum, across from what is still St. Paul’s Church in Lower Manhattan, a typical “dime museum” assortment of curiosities, displays, and exhibits formerly owned by John Scudder Jr., was up for sale for $15,000. Despite a more generous rival bid, the impoverished Barnum managed to purchase the museum from its board of trustees, using borrowed capital, by means of sharp Yankee business practice (see below).16 How did the peculiarly American institution of the “dime museum” first emerge? The privately owned museum open to the public for ten cents or a dime owed its origins to the celebrated portrait painter and naturalist Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) and two of his sons, Rubens (1784–1865) and Rembrandt (1778–1860), in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. The father, a staunch Democrat, set up one of the earliest American art galleries in 1782 with his neoclassical Portrait Gallery of the Heroes of the Revolution, followed by the Peale Museum a few years later. Over the period from 1786 until 1843 when their first museum opened its doors—starting long before the first great public museums and zoos—the family was compelled to adopt some aspects of popular culture, because the senior Peale, as proprietor, found he had to combine natural history and scientific displays with animal and human “curiosities” to survive commercially.17 After his father’s retirement from managing the Philadelphia museum in 1810, Rubens Peale, then in his mid-twenties, began shifting the museum’s emphasis even further from scientific instruction to popular amusement by featuring distorting mirrors, live animals, “human prodigies,” and even magicians. The popularity of “amusements” was such that when Rubens opened Peale’s New York Museum in 1825, its contents were much closer to a late nineteenth-century dime museum than to his father’s original Philadelphia museum. In 1830 Rubens lost control of the former museum to his creditors (later the Peale Museum Company) and the rival American Museum, then managed by Scudder Jr., moved into a five-storey building on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street in Lower Manhattan. Rubens continued to operate Peale’s Baltimore Museum, inherited from his less showmanlike brother Rembrandt, in the meantime.18 From its inception as a “cabinet of curiosities,” the distinctly American phenomenon of what later became the dime museum went on to contain a diversity of amusements ranging from dioramas and panoramas, to

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waxworks and menageries, to stuffed animals, and obscure relics. It also offered chambers of horror and live “human oddities” who exhibited themselves on high wooden platforms in a “curio hall.” Animal and human “freaks,” following the English fairground model, were referred to jointly as “living curiosities” and became a major part of the dime museum’s appeal in nearly all major cities of America. The simple partnership between exhibit and manager, as represented by Barnum and Joice Heth, was fast becoming part of a larger “show business” collectivity. By becoming attached to such museums and later on to circuses and carnivals, isolated showmen and their exhibits, including bearded ladies, dwarfs, or human skeletons, were gradually incorporated into the burgeoning popular entertainment industry (see chapter 2). The declining American Museum was put on the New York market late in 1841 and, alert to a new business opportunity, P. T. Barnum began making complex financial arrangements with the building’s owner, Francis W. Olmsted, who agreed to purchase and then lease the museum to him at an annual rent. Before this took place, Scudder’s board of trustees sold the assorted collection to the Peale Museum Company for $15,000, with $1,000 as down payment and the remainder to be paid by December 26, 1841. Convinced that the Peale Museum Company was purchasing the Scudder collection solely to manipulate its stock value, Barnum wrote to various New York newspapers to expose the company’s speculative intent. So the Peale Museum board, in an attempt to buy his silence, hired Barnum to manage their almost-acquired collection at an annual salary of $3,000. An astute Barnum then returned to the Scudder trustees selling the museum and negotiated an agreement whereby, if the Peale Company failed to pay the $14,000 balance by December 26, he would be permitted to buy the collection, through Olmsted, on December 27 for his original bargained down $12,000 offer. Unaware of other bidders, the Peale Company decided to wait until all the fuss had died down before actually purchasing the collection, as Barnum had calculated, and so as a result they failed to make their promised payment on December 26, 1841. The following day, Barnum acquired the dilapidated American Museum on credit from its trustees for less than half its value. He was able to pay back Olmsted’s loan in less than two years. Barnum himself recognized that this purchase was for years “the ladder by which I rose to fortune.” The new proprietor turned his purchase into a full-fledged, outwardly grandiose dime museum, albeit at a higher admission price for adults. By 1843 Barnum had also forced Peale’s New York Museum out of business and secretly purchased its collection for $7,000. Within easy walking distance of the Lower East Side and nearby moderateincome districts, the American Museum went on to become one of

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New York’s chief attractions during the antebellum period under Barnum’s resourceful management.19 When the much-pirated British author Charles Dickens visited the United States in the first six months of 1842 he was greatly impressed by American enterprise and ingenuity, even though seemingly he did not visit Barnum’s new museum venture during his time in New York. As related in his famously dyspeptic American Notes (1842), Dickens was also appalled by the hypocrisy of slavery and the Yankee preoccupation with commerce and moneymaking at any cost. The famous novelist was so impressed by various mercenary deals encountered in passing that he even refers colloquially to “the national love of ‘doing’ a man in any bargain or matter of business.” A contemporary and indicative example of such a strategy can be found in Barnum’s self-congratulatory account of how he acquired the American Museum and its collections by outsmarting the rival bidder. As he bragged in retrospect: “They thought they had caught me securely. I knew that I had caught them.”20 Barnum’s American Museum Though the American Museum’s original trustees had managed to acquire a stable clientele under the management of the Scudder family, the new owner, budding showman P. T. Barnum, soon changed the relationship of his acquisition to its respectable locale, not far from City Hall, the celebrated Astor Hotel, and later on Mathew Brady’s photographic studio. Barnum did this by importing much of the Bowery “flash,” such as transparencies, Drummond roof lights, and a brass band to attract customers, having learnt from his previous experience of briefly putting on variety at Vauxhall Gardens. He then plastered the five-storey high, white building facade with brightly variegated banners and planted on the rooftop scores of colorful international flags. Looming over the banners was a gigantic lighthouse lamp whose powerful beam swept the city every evening, illuminating Broadway from the Bowery to Niblo’s Garden. The entire exterior was bedecked, meanwhile, with literally hundreds of oval paintings of every imaginable species of bird, beast, and reptile that enticed passersby with the prospect of the creatures to be found within.21 Barnum had transformed the building into a composite entertainment center, “a place to exchange money for wonder.” He upped the admission price to an exorbitant 25 cents (unlike “dime” museums) with half price for children. According to one calculation, Barnum’s first “department store of amusements” actually sold more tickets in proportion to the existing population than over a century later did Disneyland. The reinvigorated American Museum was also on the itinerary of visiting notables, such as

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English Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray; American author, poet, and transcendental philosopher Henry David Thoreau; and in the fall of 1860 the young Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. An 1849 promotional pamphlet promised “a description of the mysteries, marvels, miracles, phenomena, curiosities and nondescripts contained in that Great Congress of Wonders, BARNUM’S MUSEUM . . . embracing among its six hundred thousand curiosities, all that is rare and wonderful in the world of nature, or unique and striking in the world of art.”22 Between the museum and associated Lecture Room’s miscellaneous attractions, Barnum himself suggests the sheer, chaotic profusion of the American Museum’s myriad showplace attractions with the following list taken from his autobiography: Industrious fleas, educated dogs, jugglers, automatons, ventriloquists, living statuary, tableaux, gipsies, albinoes, fat boys, giants, dwarfs, rope-dancers, caricatures of phrenology, and “live Yankees,” pantomime, instrumental music, singing and dancing in great variety, (including Ethiopians,) etc. Dioramas, panoramas, models of Dublin, Paris, Niagara, Jerusalem, etc., mechanical figures, fancy glass-blowing, knitting machines and other triumphs in the mechanical arts, dissolving views, American Indians, including their warlike and religious ceremonies enacted on the stage, etc. etc.23

The various wildly eclectic exhibits listed above were all displayed concurrently in the American Museum’s hodgepodge of ascending “saloons” or exhibition rooms. Following extensive renovations in the 1850s, visitors were, on entry, faced by a grand staircase that led up to the second floor, but on the rear ground floor they would encounter the First Saloon, better known as the Cosmorama Department. Its walls were fitted with peepholes and lenses through which could be seen colored views of the Crystal Palace, London, St. Marks Church, Venice, and the Tuilleries in Paris. The staircase led visitors up to the Second Saloon with its glass cases holding natural history specimens, such as preserved insects and butterflies, minerals and crystals, and anatomical specimens. The Third Saloon alongside contained a miscellany of bows and arrows, waxwork figures of celebrated historical personages, stuffed birds, and famous autographs. The Aquaria Department with its fish tanks was located in Saloon Four, to the right of the Second Saloon, an imitation of the one Barnum had seen at London Zoo. The Fifth Saloon occupied the third floor with landscape and portrait paintings, engravings, and also stuffed animals of every imaginable variety. The Sixth Saloon was in a large chamber directly above the fifth and featured various curiosities, such as an Egyptian mummy, snowshoes from

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Norway, and a collection of shoes and slippers. Another flight up was the Seventh Saloon, where visitors could see more paintings, the museum’s skeleton collection, and various exotic live animals from armadillos to zebras, including “The Happy Family” of different animal species living together in the same cage. Freaks such as the “What Is It?” (see chapter 2) were shown in various saloons during the daytime, sometimes in a “Hall of Curiosities,” and also in the evening. Entrances to the museum’s Lecture Room or theater were located on the third, fourth, and fifth floors. With regard to sheer quantity at any rate, Barnum could not be accused of defrauding his patrons. Thus within this single large building or “emporium of antebellum entertainment” in Lower Manhattan, were centralized all the branches of the mid-nineteenth-century “culture of exhibition”— waxworks, freak shows, dioramas, menageries, and aquariums—that in the London of that period had their own highly specialized sites.24 In the American Museum’s adjoining Lecture Room or large theater were performed a range of variety acts, operetta, pantomimes, ballets, and sentimental but popular melodramas. “My plan,” wrote Barnum in a circular letter following the theater’s renovation in June 1850, “is to introduce into the Lecture Room highly moral and instructive DOMESTIC DRAMAS, written expressly for my establishments and so constructed as to please and edify, while they possess a powerful reformatory tendency.” The presence of numerous respectable ladies in the audience was made palatable by the “Lecture Room” euphemism, in addition to an increase in pious or temperance melodramas on stage that restrained hitherto boisterous male spectators. By the 1850s Barnum was trying to attract a more middle-class audience in addition to the working-class Bowery crowd that had filled his museum during the 1840s. The aim was to make his museums (also eventually in Boston and Philadelphia) totally unobjectionable to the religious and moral community, “and at the same time combine sufficient amusement with instruction to please all proper tastes and to train the mind of youth to reject as repugnant anything inconsistent with moral and religious tastes.”25 The budding showman had learned early to command the discourse of self-improvement, scientific instruction, and cultural refinement, in promoting his museum attractions. So Barnum adopted a clever strategy, for sound commercial reasons, to convince the public that, in the name of propriety, his moral Lecture Room differed markedly from the many “immoral” New York playhouses in mid-century: The most fastidious may take their families there, without the least apprehension of being offended by word or deed; in short, so careful is the supervision exercised over the amusements, that hundreds of persons who are prevented visiting theaters, on account of the vulgarisms and immorality

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which are sometimes permitted therein, may visit Mr. Barnum’s establishment without fear or offence on that point.

Barnum also boasted that his newly refurbished Lecture Room or theater, replacing traditional pit benches with comfortable “orchestra” seating, was “surpassed in its elegance, taste, refinement, delicacy and superb finish by no royal saloon in the world.”26 Well-intentioned comedies or moral reform dramas therefore appealed to a new audience of the religious middle classes and women who would not previously have set foot in the “immoral” halls of the public theater. Barnum’s New England family background, Universalist faith, conversion to teetotalism, and his subsequent close friendships with neighboring Bridgeport clergy, probably meant that the language of moral piety came to him quite naturally. “The public will have amusements, and they ought to be those of an elevating and an unobjectionable character,” he announced in 1873, not long after becoming a circus proprietor. “For many years it has been my pleasure to provide a class of instructive and amusing entertainments to which a refined Christian mother can take her children with satisfaction.”27 A highly popular temperance melodrama put on by Barnum was that perennial tract The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved (1843) by William H. Smith “and a gentleman.” The program of a recent musical revival of this hoary standard summarized the plot thus: “Young Edward Kilcullen’s life is blighted by alcohol. Lawyer McGinty desires possession of all the Kilcullens ever owned and relishes the prospect of his demise. However, the temperance preacher and philanthropist Sir Arden Rencelaw is at hand. . . . Can the young Kilcullen be saved? And what is Agnes, the maniac’s, hidden secret?” A contemporary Museum handbill, however, summarized the play in more didactic fashion: In the first act we behold THE MODERATE DRINKER. In the second act, we have his progress, step by step, to ruin; his increased appetite for strong drink; the distress of his relations; the embarrassment of himself, and family. In the third act, we have his DRUNKEN ORGIES in Broadway, his bar-room debauchery, and the degradation of himself and vileness of his associates, loss of time, etc. In the fourth act we have DESPAIR AND ATTEMPTED SUICIDE and in the fifth act, his restitution to sobriety and society, by the aid of a TEMPERANCE PHILANTHROPIST. It is a most thrilling and affecting performance.

Yet true to Barnum’s prescription, the drama was relieved by comic characters, funny scenes, country dances, songs and choruses that “serve to render the piece as amusing as it is instructive.”28

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Barnum, himself a reformed drinker or total abstainer and temperance advocate, had secured the play’s New York rights from his close friend and counterpart Moses Kimball (1809–95). The latter’s Boston Museum Lecture Room was the first of its kind and Smith, the play’s chief author, was Kimball’s stage manager. The Drunkard was first produced in New York at the American Museum in 1850 and, after each performance, audience members were urged to go to the box office and sign a pledge against drinking. “Incorrigible inebriates have been brought by their friends a distance of forty miles to witness this drama and never, to my knowledge,” proclaimed Barnum devoutly, “has this been done without resulting in their signing the temperance pledge; and I am personally cognizant of the fact that thousands have been induced by this drama to renounce intoxicating drinks in toto.”29 In November 1853, after a long run at Kimball’s Boston Museum, Barnum’s resident dramatist Henry J. Conway’s melodramatic stage version of the famous Northern abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1851–52) opened in the Lecture Room theater. At least nine American theatrical versions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best seller were produced in the 1850s. Barnum’s advertisement for the essentially proSouthern or temporizing Conway play exhibits its inherent racism and implicitly censures any sympathetic slave portraits in its competitors: It represents the Southern Negro embracing all its abhorrent deformities, its cruelties, and barbarities . . . It does not foolishly and unjustly elevate the Negro above the white man in intellect or morals . . . It exhibits a true picture of Negro life in the South, instead of absurdly representing the ignorant slave as possessed of all the polish of the drawing room, and the refinement of the educated whites.30

Conway avoids Stowe’s outright condemnation of the slave-owning classes and even gives the story a happy ending: his Uncle Tom is rescued in the nick of time from evil slave driver Simon Legree to regain both his freedom and family. “Instead of turning away the audience in tears, the author has wisely consulted dramatic taste by having Virtue triumphant at last,” Barnum announced. Simultaneously, George L. Aiken’s sentimental stage version of Stowe’s runaway success, put on at New York’s National Theatre, focused equally on the tragic death of little Eva but retained the antislavery content of the best-selling novel, including the sale and death of Uncle Tom. Barnum’s more calculated and less controversial production, in contrast with the National’s long-running play, “tried to convince patrons that they could simultaneously support Stowe and Compromise, slaveholders and slaves, North and South.” Barnum had himself purchased

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a black servant in 1838, while with his small circus company in Vicksburg, Mississippi, not to mention his previous ownership rights over Joice Heth. Now turned a hesitant Republican abolitionist, commercial profit determined Barnum’s choice of a middle-of-the-road version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin rather than an outright antislavery melodrama, even if he did put on the Aiken version once the Civil War was over.31 Resident dramatist Conway specialized in “exciting moral drama” such as the above, and a foggy-London-set Out of the Depths or, The Story of a Woman’s Love and Life. He also in 1859 penned a new American comedy Wills and Ways: To Make and Break, set in Cambridge and Boston. This was advertised on museum posters as uplifting for the following reasons: Young people of both sexes may, by witnessing this drama, be saved from life-long regret and misery. Let them behold the terrible effects of one act of disobedience! Sons and daughters, children! Remember your parents have nourished and brought you up, watched over you from infancy, lavished on you their time, means, care and affection, and forget not your parents are entitled to your love, duty and obedience in return. Fathers, mothers, parents, remember “your will can make or break” your children’s happiness and peace of mind for life.32

By offering such a morally conservative lesson about current American family relations, doubtless, Barnum hoped to increase his own stock of respectability among middle-class family audiences. On the declaration of war between the states, Barnum finally nailed his political sympathies to the mast. Hence the strongly pro-Unionist The Patriots of [Fort] Sumter was put on in his Lecture Room from June 12, 1861, only two months after the Confederacy had opened hostilities by firing on federal troops in Charleston harbor. A previously overlooked participant account describes how a 21-year-old from rural Indiana made the American Museum his first New York port of call that summer. The midwesterner fast swallowed his lunch and then entered “the place of wonders” to stare at the exhibits for several hours. Having never before seen a dramatic performance, he next used his museum entrance ticket to visit the associated Lecture Room/theater where The Patriots was being performed. The young man’s loyal Unionist feelings were aroused by this unquestionably partisan drama and, quickly working his way home, he enlisted under the next call. Interviewed 30 years later, following Barnum’s death, the now middle-aged man vividly recalled the occasion: “Oh, it was all very, very real to me, and even now I love to tell my own boy of my first and only visit to Barnum’s Museum.”33

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Barnum’s Second and Other Museums The crucial nature of the American Museum for Barnum’s career and also his belief in providing value for money was made clear early in 1860, when he was no longer the museum’s owner because he had become temporarily insolvent. Replying to a misguided English publisher about to issue a brief biographical sketch of Barnum as “a celebrated American charlatan,” he explained his famous deceptions, in retrospect, by claiming that they were mere lures designed to increase attendance at his museum: The [Feejee] Mermaid, Woolly Horse, Ploughing Elephants, &c. were merely used by me as skyrockets, or advertisements, to attract attention and to give notoriety to the Museum & such other really valuable attractions as I provided for the public. I believe hugely in advertising and blowing my own trumpet, beating the gongs, drums, &c. to attract attention to a show; but I never believed that any amount of advertising or energy would make a spurious article permanently successful. No man really believes less in shows than myself. I should dislike to be thought so poor a student of human nature as to believe that money can be made from the public without giving a full equivalent therefore. I don’t believe in “duping the public,” but I believe in first attracting & then pleasing them.34

At nearly 50 years of age, Barnum no longer wanted to be characterized solely as a loveable rapscallion or Wizard of Oz-type “charlatan” who had “duped the world” from behind the curtain with such notorious frauds as Joice Heth and the Feejee Mermaid (a shrunken composite of a monkey’s head and upper limbs sewn to a fishtail). He now preferred to be known for his civic qualities—as in a newly written sketch by “a highly respectable clergyman” that Barnum thoughtfully supplied—and primarily as a “showman,” the mid-century manager of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, who had attained some lasting celebrity as the “Prince of Humbugs.” Subsequently, in March 1860, after all Barnum’s debts from a disastrous Bridgeport development had been paid off—with the help of Tom Thumb’s latest highly successful European tour—the showman repurchased his no longer prosperous museum. Five relatively successful years later, on July 13, 1865, Barnum’s first American Museum burned to the ground. The fire started in the huge building’s engine room and spread quickly, but all the paying customers escaped, albeit the freaks and animals on show had a more difficult time, since they were all on the floors above the main staircase. A laughing crowd in front of the building, displaying its familiarity with the museum’s contents, reportedly cried out: “‘Throw me out one of the canoes’ or ‘Pitch me the boa constrictor, I wants it for a

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tippet [hangman’s rope]’ or ‘How are you, learned seal?’” The Nova Scotia Giantess, Anna Swan, required 18 firemen to create an escape hatch and lower her to the ground; many animals died, and those that escaped the burning building created chaos on the streets of New York. Once again Barnum was ruined because his insurance cover was only about one-tenth of the estimated damage to his total museum collection.35 Yet somehow, during the spring of 1865, he took over a building once occupied by the Great Chinese Museum, located further up on Broadway near the St. Nicholas Hotel between Spring and Prince Streets, and by the fall had transformed it into Barnum’s New Museum, which proved to be never as successful as its famous predecessor. Therefore in 1866 Barnum entered into a partnership with famous lion tamer and menagerie owner Isaac van Amburgh (see chapter 4). The museum became known under both their names and with its picture gallery, wax figures, “cosmoramic rooms” and ample Lecture Room, was very similar to the old American Museum. Sadly, on the night of March 2–3, 1868, the new Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum and Menagerie at 541 Broadway was, in its turn, destroyed by fire and Barnum never owned and operated a museum of his own again, although he did lend his name, reputation, and expertise to help promote various other New York dime museums, to a selection of which we now turn.36 If by the mid-nineteenth century, dimes museums dominated as the place to view “living” or “human curiosities,” they ranked just above beer gardens and medicine shows in the hierarchy of the theatrical world. The notorious Bowery in Lower Manhattan, with its German beer gardens, theaters, photography studios, concert saloons, and brothels, had more dime museums than any other place. “Bowery museums were the true underworld of entertainment,” claims a New York low-life specialist, “and their compass could include anything too shoddy, too risqué, too vile, too sad, too marginal, too disgusting, too pointless to be displayed elsewhere.” Primary audiences for Bowery museums in the 1870s were the poorly educated and non-English speaking migrant laborers crowded into nearby tenements. Consequently, after Barnum had left the business, dime museums began to proliferate, reaching their peak over the next two decades.37 George B. Bunnell, with whom Barnum had been in partnership from 1876, ran a large traveling museum and menageries under canvas but also in late 1880 had opened the first museum for only a dime admission on the Bowery. This new museum on Broadway and Ninth Street, nicknamed “The Hub,” catered to a more sophisticated uptown Manhattan clientele and was moderately selective when it came to hiring both variety performers and freaks. At the end of his first season, with no less than four giants

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exhibited in the same room, Bunnell was presenting six to ten shows daily to over 3,0000 spectators and The Hub was acknowledged as the city’s leading dime museum. In New York, with its constant supply of fresh “marks” or customers, dime shows tended to run the year round, set up in storefronts and theater lobbies, rather than in tents or circus wagons as in “the burgs and backwaters.” By 1882, Bunnell, now recognized as “the legitimate successor of the great Barnum,” had added a second museum, the Annex, in Brooklyn. He remained in business for five more years before retiring to Connecticut.38 New York was the dime museum capital but almost any decent-sized American city contained at least one, such as Keith and Batchelder’s Mammoth Museum (later Gaiety Hall and Museum) in Boston, Brandenburgh’s Ninth and Arch Museum in Philadelphia, and the Miracle Museum in Pittsburgh. Promoters George Middleton, George H. Huber, and C. E. Kohl ran dime museums in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Cleveland. Changing titles and ownership, and in addition some museums being located in rented stores rather than their own buildings, make any estimate of accurate numbers difficult. One contemporary observer guessed that at least 50 were scattered about New York City alone at different times, with Huber’s Palace Museum being one of the most popular tourist attractions until it closed down in 1910. Eventually, the rise of vaudeville shows out of concert saloons and variety, which also employed unrelated minstrelsy and circus acts, drew patrons away from the now archaic museums already in decline as places of amusement and enlightenment.39 Barnum and Middle-Class Identity Barnum’s efforts to cultivate a “middlebrow” sensibility for his various amusement endeavors, in particular the once reviled circus with its halfnaked acrobats, and to manage his own carefully crafted public persona are highly significant. The famous showman’s Connecticut Yankee sense of individuality was, indeed, based as much on respectability, Christianity, and self-help as on trickery, bogus piety, and hard business dealing. Meanwhile, various forms of playing with fraud or “artful deception” with which Barnum was linked as a promoter, from Joice Heth and the Feejee Mermaid to the “What Is It?” exerted a powerful fascination over nineteenthcentury America’s expanding middle class. Just as, in mid-century, the American entertainment industry flourished and gained momentum, the amazing concert hall success of the “Swedish nightingale” Jenny Lind (1820–87), whose American tour Barnum managed, enhanced his reputation

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with middle-class audiences who might never have set foot in his American Museum and also satisfied his show businessman’s craving for social respectability.40 The visiting Swedish soprano’s 1850–51 concert schedule as arranged by Barnum embraced cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Nashville, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Havana, Cuba. The singer and her entourage greeted almost everywhere with accolades equal to those she received in New York. The success of the concert tour testified not only to Barnum’s managerial supervision but also to Jenny Lind’s widespread reception as the personification of sentimental Victorian womanhood. The scale and management of Lind’s enthusiastic crowds has been compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s reception after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin the following year. The difference was that Lind was one of a series of Europeans celebrated for bringing “culture” to America, whereas Stowe was an American who became lionized in Europe.41 Barnum’s remarkable marketing efforts, instinctive promotional sense, and extraordinary control over schedules, ticketing, and speculators, all contributed to the Divine Jenny’s unrivaled success during the nine-month campaign. Hence late in 1850 Barnum negotiated financial terms with theatrical managers Sol Smith and Noah M. Ludlow, his shrewd “old friends,” for Lind’s appearance at their New Orleans theater and elsewhere along the Mississippi: What about your St. Louis theater? Can you give me its exact capacity & your terms? You are pretty fellows to talk about wanting to make money out of Jenny Lind excitement. Why, she fills every theater, hotel, store, & shop with money wherever she goes, & sheds blessings on cab drivers, shoemakers, milliners, tailors, and every calling under heaven. But you should be satisfied with your share in the general scramble & not try to make money out of me!42

While the commercial rewards of managing Jenny Lind were indeed considerable, Barnum also benefited from the change the successful tour brought to his public image. By presenting Jenny Lind as both a pious and artistic celebrity, he effectively altered traditional bourgeois social and moral attitudes toward a novel acceptance of public concerts. Not only was he an advocate of the new, popular, and garish, amusement business, but he also had a great showman’s ability to bring decent “middlebrow” culture to the vast hinterlands of America, as testified by his management of this concert tour. Consequently, Barnum transformed himself from

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museum showman into cultural impresario. For, there was an enormous breadth of consumption at all social levels in the new democratic republic that made it easier for Barnum to cross the cultural divide than in a more class-bound, elitist, and hierarchical society such as that of nineteenthcentury Great Britain.43 Bearing in mind the casual use of “national identity” as a catchall for different and quite distinct forms of national consciousness, Barnum’s selfinflated career rapidly became a significant element in the cultural shaping of a particular white, middle class, and east coast American self-identity, assisted by the huge sales of the different versions of his autobiography. As a self-made man, Barnum made an obvious appeal to the upwardly aspiring, but he also played a more general role in helping to articulate a sense of white American individuality based on the continuing centrality of the Anglo-Protestant way of life with its shared belief in individual responsibility, the gospel of success based on the work ethic, and civility or good manners. The coexistence in post–Civil War society of a feverish scramble for personal wealth, alongside a deep middle-class civic and philanthropic instinct, finds expression both in Barnum’s unrelenting ascent and his subsequent generosity toward his adopted town of Bridgeport, Connecticut.44 Until becoming widely known as a circus impresario, however, Barnum carried a great deal of baggage with him from his early, less reputable, career as a hoaxer. Before the reopening of his short-lived museum Lecture Room in 1864 with a dramatized version of Charles Dickens’ late masterpiece Great Expectations (1860–61), he delivered a rhymed speech opening with this self-exculpatory verse: “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: ‘That Prince of Humbugs, Barnum,’ so it appears/ Some folks have designated me for several years./ Well, I don’t murmur; indeed, when they embellish it,/ To tell the truth, my friends, I rather relish it,/ Since your true humbug’s he, who as a host,/ For the least money entertains you most./ In this sense I’m a ‘humbug,’ I succumb!” Despite absolving himself of insincerity, a few years later Barnum’s short-lived attempt at a political career in Washington saw a return of the same charge. His running for high office also offers us a keen insight into the fragility of his newly acquired middle-class status.45 All the old puritanical New England prejudices against showmen resurfaced when Barnum was nominated to run as a Republican candidate for Connecticut’s Fourth Congressional District in 1867, after two terms as the state legislature’s Republican representative for Fairfield. “He [Barnum] is the personification . . . of a certain low kind of humbug . . . which, funny as it often appears, eats out the heart of religion and morality,” blasted the Nation, an influential reforming weekly. Referring to Barnum’s “intense and concentrated vulgarity,” his having been “for twenty or thirty years a

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depraving and demoralizing influence,” the Nation concluded that Connecticut should be ashamed about finding “no fitter representative of its ideas than the proprietor of the woolly horse and bearded woman.” Barnum correctly believed, as a result, that with “half the Christian Community” now convinced he wore “horns and hoofs,” his candidature for Congress was doomed.46 Joseph Roswell Hawley (1826–1905), the then disappointed Republican candidate for reelection as governor of Connecticut, certainly felt he had been damaged by Barnum’s unsuccessful stand for Congress. “Our platform is the best that we ever had,” he wrote on April 2, 1867 to his friend the lawyer and author Richard Henry Dana Jr., “and the party is cleaner and purer, save for the great blunder (of Talleyrand’s kind) in nominating Barnum.” Yet if Barnum had hurt the Republicans, continued Hawley, and “horrible as his book [The Life of P. T. Barnum] is,” he was also “a better man than many out of the state suppose” for “[h]e is one of those fellows who have double characters, one professional & scoundrelly, the other private, church-going, decorous, and utterly abstinent from pocketpicking. We have known such in our profession [law]. He is a teetotaller, generous, hospitable, enterprising as a citizen, &c. &c. But he was a burden, save that by his frightful activity he got out a full vote, at the tail of which he ran.” This characterization, by one who admired the showmanpolitician, aptly sums up the schizophrenic nature of Barnum’s bourgeois persona in energetic middle age. Barnum was yet to emerge as the avuncular circus promoter of international fame, so his failure to secure a seat in Congress was in part because it was almost impossible to erase his “humbug” or trickster image from various past hoaxes.47 Conversely, in his 1901 memoirs Major J. B. Pond, a prominent American theatrical agent who specialized in booking lecture tours for well-known writers or celebrities, characterized Barnum—employed in 1876 as a temperance lecturer—as the “most prudently economical man that I have ever known.” Carrying a light valise, to save on the expense of a horse-drawn cab, Barnum always walked from the station to his hotel. Pond also recalled being taken by him to watch “The Greatest Show on Earth” circus while staying in Boston. “A more plausible, pleasant-speaking man was never heard. It was as good as the show itself to listen to him in conversation.” Yet the showman also epitomized for Pond a calculating businessman: “That afternoon one of the Amazons in the great Amazon march, which was a feature that year, was run over and killed by a chariot near the entrance of the [circus] ring. Mr. Barnum did not move, and I said: ‘That is dreadful, isn’t it?’ ‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘there is another waiting for a place. It is rather a benefit than a loss.’ ” Unusually critical of Barnum for a turn of the century account, the major claimed he “never knew a

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more heartless man or one who knew the value and possibilities of a dollar more than P. T. Barnum.”48 Despite this account, Barnum’s careful self-portrayal as a man who succeeded by his own efforts and who espoused customary Christian values formed a large component of his appeal to the perennially rising middle class, for whom self-exertion was an influential defining myth of commercial success. As a young man Barnum drew inspiration from small circus proprietor Aaron Turner (see above) who recommended such Ben Franklin-like virtues as determination, industry, perseverance, and economy. Along with a bourgeois sense of moral propriety and respectability, instruction combined with amusement became the Barnum mantra. He arguably became “the most famous of a generation of entrepreneurs, ideologists, and cultural innovators—many of them the showman’s collaborators and friends—who taught the [American] middle class what it meant to be a class.”49 Endnote A wide-ranging work on performance and evolution in the nineteenthcentury age of Darwin frequently refers to Barnum’s exhibits in relation to the cross-breeding between performed entertainment, natural history, and the museum business. Puzzles and trickery, such as were displayed in the “artful deceiver” Barnum’s American Museum and in texts by contemporary magicians such as Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, also blurred the line between reality and illusion, producing public debates over the shifting American boundaries of race, class, value, and truth. Showmen and their audiences were “playing with fraud” says James W. Cook, by taking the fears and anxieties of an emerging market economy society and making them into a new form of entertainment in which deception and illusion were key components. Yet middle-class values were also endorsed by show-business impresarios for, as another scholar remarked, “Barnum’s enormous, heterogeneous [museum] collection found a coherence of sorts through its promotion of entrepreneurialism, Christianity, domesticity, and temperance.”50 The underlying emphasis in the chapters that follow is on how various aspects of American middle-class cultural identity, including a flattering representation of the entrepreneur as showman, were shaped by the longterm significance of Barnum’s first New York museum and his later, more widely recognized role as a circus proprietor. For Barnum tends to be identified today as America’s greatest showman largely because, in the 1880s, he became a proprietor of the famous Barnum & Bailey circus, sideshows, and menagerie that featured Jumbo the elephant (see chapter 4).

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Yet his American Museum of the 1840s onward was the key exemplar for much that followed in commercialized popular culture: accustoming audiences to expect sensationalism, spectacle, and technical ingenuity. It also both foreshadowed and helped promote commercial expansion of the freak or sideshow, Barnum’s less acknowledged contribution to the history of the show business to which we now turn.

“Living Curiosities at Barnum’s Museum,” Harper’s Weekly, December 15, 1860 Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-109736).

CHAPTER 2 THE FREAK SHOW BUSINESS: “STEP RIGHT UP, FOLKS”

tep right up, folks” might cry the “spieler” (talker or barker) hawking the sideshow attractions of the “Congress of Wonders” from a podium outside of the exhibit area at either a circus, dime museum, or carnival (carnie), while near the ticket window a fire-eating or sword-swallowing act (the bally) might take place to lure the customers (marks) inside. “See the most astonishing aggregation of human marvels and monstrosities gathered together in one edifice.” Over many centuries, grotesquely malformed or mutant specimens of humanity— “freaks” in common parlance—have exerted a continuing appeal as fairground and carnival attractions, reliant upon the comforting fiction that there is a permanent, qualitative difference between deformity and normality.1 During the period covered by this history of the show business, the “freak show” became common to American circus midways, dime museums, world’s fairs, state fairs, carnivals, and amusement parks. “Sweltering heat, the smells of popcorn and animal dung, abusive exchanges between carnies, freaks, and customers—these are the freak show’s Proustian mnemonics, capable of summoning back powerful recollections in those who once were there,” empathizes Rachel Adams. If not the first to profit from the display of so-called human oddities, P. T. Barnum was largely responsible for transforming freak exhibits into an exemplary commercial entertainment, enhanced by advertising, promotional materials, and celebrity appearances. This will become apparent from a brief account of freaks such as the “What Is It?” exhibited in Barnum’s American Museum, together with his discovery and exhibition of the famous midget “General” Tom Thumb. From their initial dime museum and lecture room appearances, by the late nineteenth-century, collective freak exhibits had become a staple of

“S

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the midway sideshows preceding entrance to the circus big top and of carnivals in rural areas.2 Classification and Presentation of Freaks In general, five classes of human anomalies, mutants, or freaks have been identified by most commentators as on display in the “platform entertainment” of museums, carnivals, and sideshows: (1) natural freaks, who were born with actual deformities, such as midgets, giants, and “pinheads”; (2) self-made freaks, who cultivated their status, such as tattooed people, bearded ladies, or living skeletons; (3) novelty act artists, who were freaks because of their “freakish” performances, including snake charmers, mesmerists, hypnotists, and fire-eaters; (4) non-Western freaks, who could be promoted as exotic curiosities, such as “savages” and “cannibals,” usually billed as being from the Dark Continent of Africa; and finally (5) fake or “gaffed freaks,” such as “Siamese Twins” who were not attached or the “Armless Wonder” whose arms were hidden under his or her costume. The preceding was the standard typology used by those in the business, although it largely ignores the pervasive and flagrant misrepresentations or deceptions that were characteristic of the entire freak show enterprise.3 An authority on the history of presenting “human oddities” for amusement and profit makes a further distinction between two specific modes or strategies for promoting them: (a) the exotic mode of presentation and (b) the aggrandized status mode. In the (a) exotic mode, the job of the “talker” or “outside lecturer” standing before the tent entrance was to appeal to people’s voyeuristic interest in the culturally strange, the primitive, the bestial, or the exotic. Hence promoters told a potential audience that the person on exhibit came from a mysterious part of the world—darkest Africa, the wilds of Borneo, a Turkish harem, an ancient Aztec kingdom. Thus in 1857 Barnum obtained a family of albinos, the Lucasies, in Holland, while visiting Amsterdam, and brought them back to his American Museum where they were billed as of exotic “black Madagascar lineage.” Retarded brothers Hiram and Barney Davis, long-haired dwarfs born to English parents and raised on an Ohio farm, became stars of Barnum’s 1880 circus as the bloodthirsty “Wild Men of Borneo.” Similarly, the “Wild Australian Children,” according to Barnum’s official museum booklet, were spotted by a party of gold hunters who first thought they were kangaroos, evidently belonging to “a distinct race hitherto unknown to civilization.” In actuality, they were severely retarded microcephalic siblings from Circleville, Ohio.4 “Freak” was not an inherent quality but a performance identity realized through gesture, costume, and staging. Thus white Americans had no

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interest in seeing the run-of-the-mill Negro, but they were prepared to pay to see Zulu warriors, bestial African tribesmen, and pygmies. “Showmen thus had a mandate to mould the presentations of the Africans they exhibited to justify slavery and colonialism, that is, to confirm Africans’ inferiority and primitiveness,” writes one scholar. Presenters of ethnic exhibits continued using the (a) exotic mode of presentation well into the twentieth century to attract audiences. At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, for example, ethnic Filipinos were displayed as primitive, barbaric, and un-Christian in an attempt to help justify imperial expansion after America acquired the Philippines six years earlier from Spain. This emphasis on the exotic not only constructed nonwhites as inferior, but it also helped to mitigate many middle-class anxieties about racism. Whether those on display were from Africa, Asia, or the Pacific, they were commonly presented as culturally inferior and socially barbaric. Freak shows did not challenge but supported the status quo concerning Western racial hierarchies, consistently relying on negative representations of nonwhites to draw crowds. Such shows never asked their audiences to see those on stage as part of a common humanity, let alone as fellow citizens.5 The (b) aggrandized mode paid less attention to racial difference and hence inferiority by laying claim to the superiority of the freak, and therefore prestigious titles and social position or achievements were fabricated or exaggerated, though this mode also required dressing up for the part in stylish clothes, evening gowns, or top hat and tails. Since Europe and especially England were admired just then by Americans as culturally superior, Barnum carefully prepared 5-year-old midget Charles Sherwood Stratton (1838–83), of modest Connecticut family background, to mix with the social elite as “General” Tom Thumb of English descent (see below). Equally, Millie-Christine, black conjoined twins born in slavery, were presented by Barnum in the aggrandized mode as either “the celebrated Victorian singing nightingales” or later as “the renowned two-headed lady, eighth wonder of the world.” While the exotic mode of presentation borrowed its socially constructed narratives from imperialistic excursions and natural science exploration, the aggrandized mode carefully groomed and trained its famous discoveries for exhibit as of superior or elevated status.6 Significantly, the scientific urge to collect what were once labeled “monstrosities” or “freaks” is now seen by evolutionary biologists as a way of examining part of the spectrum of human form. Throughout the world, people with physiologies or physiognomies that are in some way or other unusual have been catalogued, photographed, and pedigreed. The genetic mutations of those who were once exhibited by showmen such as Barnum for the amusement of paying customers are now the raw material for a vast biomedical enterprise, one in which thousands of scientists are collectively

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engaged, and which has as its objective nothing less than the elucidation of the laws that make the human body. In this sense, the study of human mutations or people with deficiencies in particular genes helps us to better understand, counterintuitively, what those genes meant to the body in the first place. Mutations are “virtual scalpels that slice through the genetic grammar and lay its logic bare.”7 American Museum Freaks Barnum’s self-proclaimed sponsorship of “living human curiosities” is usually omitted from picture book biographies of the man, but he essentially invented the freak show as a “formally organized institution” during the 1840s. Although one of the cornerstones of his cultural production, the freak show has been greatly overshadowed in many accounts of the famous impresario by those Barnumesque amusements that today strike us as less morally offensive: the Feejee Mermaid, the moral dramas, the Jenny Lind concert tour, Jumbo the elephant, and the circuses. So Barnum’s American Museum will receive proper credit in what follows for bringing the freak show to prominence as a central part of what would soon constitute the popular amusement industry. Later on confined to carefully segregated down-market venues such as dime museums, carnival midways, or seaside amusement parks, freaks were considered reputable family entertainment during Barnum’s long-term management of the American Museum.8 Before Barnum purchased it in late 1841, this New York museum was little more than a moribund imitator of Charles Willson Peale’s original vision (see chapter 2). The skills of Barnum as a showman-promoter soon helped to transform an indigestible eighteenth-century “cabinet of curiosities” into the new museum as an amusement center but with human oddities or freaks now as a major attraction. By extending their compassion to the exhibits in the American Museum’s “Hall of Curiosities” rather than laughing at them, spectators could also celebrate their own sincerity and sensitivity to the Wonders of God’s Nature. The numerous freak exhibits that Barnum exhibited in the “aggrandized mode” thereby demonstrated the apparent democracy of the norms of respectability. If Barnum’s human displays attracted the elite of New York society, “surely all Americans who could afford to enter a museum could count themselves among the genteel.”9 Dime museums brought together all those with an interest in the exhibit business and the freak show took on a life of its own, “becoming institutionalized as part of an increasingly complex urbanizing America.” Yet the American Museum was the prototype and contained all the elements that dime museums would capitalize on in the decades of their greatest

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popularity, starting in the 1870s and continuing in major American cities through to the turn of the century. By presenting an image of “otherness” that was primitive, erotic, or bestial, Barnum’s “exotic” museum form of freak presentation recalled fears of Calvinistic sin and damnation for northeastern Protestant spectators. Freak show customers were both relieved to discover their own normality in contrast to “pinheads” and “fat ladies,” and shocked to see frightening images of what they might become if they gave way to temptation. Or as the boss of the sideshow with Barnum & Bailey’s 1937 circus put it, “When I look at freaks, it makes me content by comparison to be less than perfect.”10 Striking images of the “educational” or “human curiosities” on exhibit in the American Museum by the 1860s have come down to us as part of a large batch of glass negatives from daguerreotype portraits taken by Civil War photographer Mathew Brady (1843–96) whose studio was nearby. Also extant are many of the carte de visite or small cardboard-backed photographs that freak performers sent to managers to help secure engagements or sold to museum patrons for a nominal sum. Around this time, paying customers at Barnum’s museum would have had the opportunity to see the following freak exhibits: Rudolphe Lucasie, his wife and son, the aforementioned albinos whose troublesome behavior, Barnum thought, might be improved with a stay in jail; Zalumma Agra, the original “Circassian Girl” supposedly released from a sultan’s harem, who exhibited Afro-style frizzy hair and more than the usual amount of décolletage; a “leopard child” or piebald example of abnormal pigmentation; Anna Shannon Swan, the sensational “Nova Scotia Giantess”; the famous Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, if only for a short engagement; Mme Clofullia, the celebrated “Swiss Bearded Lady,” and; the “Highland Fat Boys.” Most bizarre of all was the regular museum appearance of the “What Is It?” or “missing link” (see below).11 One or two of these were fake or “gaffed freaks,” and consequently Neil Harris coined the term “operational aesthetic” for Barnum’s crafty technique of inviting audiences to pay the museum’s price of admission for the opportunity of being misled. Actually, he succeeded less by deceiving the public than by inviting them to reach their own conclusions as to how genuine or fabricated his various displays were. Modern day fictionalized memoirs, documentaries, and confessional books trade on the same marketing technique: “Is this genuine or isn’t it?” So visitors flocked to Barnum’s Museum to amuse themselves by speculating over what exhibit was real and what was fake and also to debate their theories of how a given hoax was executed. From Joice Heth onward, Barnum even resorted to invented scientific testimony to “verify” his freak exhibits, which he published in the press alongside fake letters from nonexistent experts

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denouncing his frauds—all to cultivate controversy and thereby expand his audience.12 Some freakish performers with high earnings purposely made themselves grossly overweight or extremely thin (“self-made freaks”) to try to climb on the show business bandwagon. The original Barnum “fat girl”— the first of a long line of similar exhibits—was Annie Wood, who with her broad shoulders tipped the scales at 450 pounds. Living Skeleton exhibits could be found in various forms at museums and carnivals across the United States at this time: people who had systematically reduced their weight over a period of years to achieve a near-skeletal appearance. Barnum’s thin man or “human skeleton” was Isaac Sprague, a twicemarried native of Massachusetts who left a large family of strong, healthy boys. India Rubber Men, performers who seemed to have an extra layer of skin, were sometimes singled out by their parents and trained from childhood for a career in fairgrounds and museums. As soon as their skin was strong enough to withstand manipulation, it was softened with oils and pulled and stretched for hours until, over the years, it hung in flexible bunches all over the body. “Bearded lady” Annie Jones who also first appeared in the American Museum, was “discovered” when she was only a child, and as the years passed her beard grew and her income naturally increased. She was twice married to circus property men and, advertised as the “female Esau,” was exhibited at circuses in Europe as well as in many parts of the United States.13 A century-old magazine article on the Barnum originals of the early sideshow identifies the Nova Scotia Giantess as one “Annie Bates,” a misappropriation of Anna Shannon Swan’s married name (she married Kentucky giant Martin van Buren Bates). Her “figure looms up big in the memory of all survivors of the circus and museum audiences of half a century ago, for obvious reasons.” The young Anna was seven feet and eight inches in height with a large, motherly figure and a wholesome, easygoing nature. She probably had a then inoperable childhood pituitary tumor. The Brady photograph suggests a matron at the head of a large family on a midwestern farm, rather than a great American Museum attraction. She died in 1883, after traveling for ten years with Barnum’s midget attraction Admiral Dot or the El Dorado Elf. The latter, born in San Francisco, was of German parentage, with the real name Leopold Kahn. In 1869, when only six years old, the “valuable nugget” began his career with Barnum. Dot journeyed throughout the United States and Canada, first with Barnum, then from 1877 with the American Lilliputian company. He finally toured, in the 1890s, with Adam Forepaugh’s Circus.14 The famous Chang and Eng, unlike the “Siamese twins” who followed them, actually were Siamese, joined together by a ligature or connecting

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band growing from their breastbones. They made a fortune as dime museum exhibits long before meeting Barnum, took the name Bunker, settled down as gentlemen farmers in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, in 1843 married two sisters named Adelaide and Sarah Yates, and had 21 children between them. In 1860 they briefly came out of retirement and from October of that year were exhibited for a six-week engagement at Barnum’s American Museum, chiefly to raise money for the college tuitions of their now large brood of children. Barnum resented the independent-minded pair, perhaps because he had not discovered them himself, while the twins found Barnum too stingy and manipulative; they were not the only ones to accuse him of such traits. One of Eng’s sons, Patrick Bunker, interviewed many years later, remarked “they never liked Barnum. He was too much of a Yankee and wanted too much for his share of the money, and my father and uncle were close figurers themselves.” They continued to work together, nonetheless, because each side saw that it could make a profit from the other. No matter how much the Siamese Twins despised Barnum, in 1868 the legendary showman arranged for them an extensive tour of Great Britain. Sixty-two-year-old Chang died on January 17, 1874 and Eng a few hours later.15 Barnum first exhibited the “What Is It?” or “missing link” only a few months after the original English publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. Looking back on his first and only visit to the American Museum two years later, a prospective journalist, then a young man, was evidently hoodwinked into believing this much-publicized but highly suspect exhibit to be a missing link, though he greatly enjoyed the aviary: First [to be seen], and still the greatest to my mind, was the “What Is It?” A very highly developed chimpanzee, I suppose it was, but by skilful dressing and assiduous training it was made so very human that I never doubted that I saw the “missing link.” Then the monster turtles, the transparent snake, the “angel fish of Amboyna,” and teeth of shark and swordfish; and then, oh, then, the long, long cages of birds of every clime! Such brilliant red and yellow and green parrots and cockatoos! Such beautifully white doves, and such wonderfully variegated fowls from all lands! To a country lad it was a liberal education. The fat woman and the dwarfs rather repelled me—they do yet—but the giants, I almost worshipped them. . . .

At the end of four hours of gazing at the exhibits, this sightseer suddenly discovered that he was himself “almost as much of a show to some of the visitors as the museum was to me, for as ‘Gawky Bill from Arcadia’ I acted the character to perfection.” Incidentally, Barnum’s “What Is It?” was not a chimpanzee and nor was it the “missing link” but most likely William Henry “Zip” Johnson, a young African American probably afflicted with

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microcephaly. This pathological condition causes small brain size and is often associated with a diminutive, sloping head and undersized overall stature.16 In a much-reproduced declamatory poster designed to exploit the deceptive ambiguity of the “What Is It?” Barnum made full use of the evolutionary possibility of a “missing link” between man and beast: “Is it a lower order of Man? Or is it a higher development of the Monkey? Or is it both in combination? Nothing of the kind HAS EVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE! IT IS ALIVE! and it is certainly the MOST MARVELLOUS CREATURE LIVING!” The exhibit was supposedly captured by gorilla hunters near the mouth of the river Gambia in Africa, the survivor of a strange naked race. Staring at Barnum’s “What Is It?” was at the time considered solid family entertainment for the socially respectable of all classes, women and children as well as men. At any rate, the boundary-blurring hybridity or “nondescript” nature of this exhibit provided Barnum with “a flexible promotional tool,” argues James W. Cook. It was an exhibit embodying “virtually all of the disparate strands of white racialist thinking common in the North during the 1860s.”17 “General” Tom Thumb Almost certainly the most celebrated of the American Museum’s genuine or “natural freak” exhibits was the gifted Charles S. Stratton from Barnum’s adopted town of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Born on January 4, 1838, Stratton was first exhibited by the showman nearly five years later as the unbelievably successful Tom Thumb. Barnum told the public that his newly acquired prodigy was 11 years old instead of slightly less than five, fearing some would think Stratton an unusually short child, rather than a less than two feet tall, perfectly proportioned ateliotic midget with growth-hormone failure. By endowing Stratton with “status-enhancing characteristics,” changing his birthplace from Bridgeport to London, and rechristening him “General” Tom Thumb, Barnum exhibited his discovery to the public in the “aggrandized status mode,” thereby projecting the “moral aesthetics of sentimentality” into the display of human curiosities. The showman first put him on display at the American Museum on December 8, 1842 and then sent him on tour in the northeastern states. The diminutive Stratton was genuinely talented and worth all the expense. His stage repertoire eventually included several “Negro songs”; a specially adapted version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”; dances such as the polka and a kilted “highland jig”; and in addition, celebrated impersonations of Napoleon Bonaparte and Frederick the Great.18 The “General” at first toured in the able care of “Parson” Fordyce Hitchcock, an ordained Universalist minister who for many years had been

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in Barnum’s employ. Both parents accompanied their talented son, with the father acting as ticket seller. They subsequently gave Barnum vexation because of what he saw as the couple’s extortionate financial demands. Barnum explained to fellow promoter Moses Kimball on January 30, 1843, in arranging a preliminary booking for Tom Thumb in his close friend’s Boston Museum: “Now more about the General. I pay him and his father $7 per week and board and traveling expenses for all three—father, mother, & son—and I have engaged my good friend Parson Hitchcock at $12 per week, board and traveling expenses, to go with him and shew him off.” Kimball and Barnum frequently shared exhibits and performers, as well as entered into joint speculations such as the notorious Feejee Mermaid. This shrunken amalgam of monkey and fishtail belonged to a tradition of mermaid exhibitions that long preceded Barnum’s time-share agreement for the exhibit with Kimball in 1842. In their lengthy correspondence, “the two showmen boast of their weekly receipts, celebrate or commiserate with each other over the success or failure of their respective enterprises, and brag over their plans to humbug the public.”19 Deservedly called “one of the nineteenth century’s first international celebrities,” the famous midget also performed, accompanied by Barnum, for appreciative audiences in Great Britain and Europe, including a delighted 25-year-old Queen Victoria. If continental European monarchs stopped short of bestowing royal favors on full-grown authors, philosophers, and artists, commented English satirical journal Punch, “The enthusiasm of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, not content with showering all sorts of favours and rewards upon the literary and artistic spirits of her own country and age, lavishes with prodigal hand most delicate honours upon an American TOM THUMB, whose astounding genius it is to measure in his boots five-and-twenty inches!” On the evening of March 23, 1844, backing out from the Queen’s presence in the long picture gallery at Buckingham Palace, as was customary, Tom Thumb bowed respectfully and backed a few steps but could not keep pace with the retreating party. To the amusement of the assembled royals and aristocrats, the midget scampered down the hall after Barnum, famously continuing to bow, back up, and then run, whenever he found himself left behind.20 Writing to the American ambassador, Edward Everett, who had helped secure the royal command to appear, an obsequious Barnum appeared ecstatic: The Queen was delighted with the General, asked him many questions, presented him with her own hands confectionary &c., and was highly pleased with his answers, his songs, imitations of Napoleon, &c. &c. Prince Albert, the Duchess of Kent, and the Royal Household expressed themselves

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much pleased with the General, and on our departure the Queen desired the lord-in-waiting to request that I would be careful and never allow the General to be fatigued. . . . I have now attained my highest desires and hasten to thank you to whom I am entirely indebted for this great gratification. Rest assured that your goodness will never be forgotten.21

On a third return visit to London with the General in April 1846, Barnum booked a large room at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, not far from an exhibition of extravagant historical paintings by the oncerenowned 60-year old Benjamin Robert Haydon. “Day after day peers and commoners, duchesses and coal-heavers, the young and the old in their hundreds and thousands pushed and fought and jostled, in at the door, up the stairs, and past the room where [Haydon’s paintings] hung, unvisited and unwanted,” according to the artist’s biographer. Tom Thumb received 12,000 visitors in the first week who paid about £600, while Haydon made only £7 13s from a hundred or so visitors. This was the last straw for the neglected but egocentric artist who, on June 22, 1846, committed suicide by cutting his own throat with a razor.22 Many years later, with Tom Thumb still a great draw, Barnum made the most of the General’s marriage to a pretty 21-year-old midget named Lavinia Warren by carefully exhibiting the engaged couple beforehand in the American Museum. The wedding ceremony on February 10, 1863 at Grace Church, New York, in the presence of 2,000 distinguished spectators, filled the front pages of the major American newspapers and for a time eclipsed even the Civil War news. Within a month, Barnum arranged a tour for the General and Lavinia, and fellow midgets Commodore Nutt and Minnie Warren, through New England, Canada, and the Midwest. After that, the quartet sailed for England on October 29, 1864, remaining in Europe for three more years. Still profitable, the Tom Thumb company made a worldwide tour from 1869 to 1872 that included Australia and India. As late as 1881, the combined Barnum & Bailey circus exhibited General Thumb and his wife with a tiny orphaned baby passed off as their own. Locally recruited babies were hired to perform wherever the circus happened to be that season. Charles Sherwood Stratton, the most famous midget of all time, died unexpectedly on July 15, 1883, at age 45.23

Dime Museum, Circus, and Carnival Freaks The freak show clearly remained the main attraction of most dime museums after 1870, when for nearly 40 years they had been at the height of their popularity (see chapter 1). Few exhibits had an appeal as that of Jo-Jo, “The Dog-Faced Boy,” whose great excess of hair on all parts of his face and

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body enabled a Bowery museum manager to crowd 23 shows into each New York day. Novelty acts, exotic non-Western performers, self-made freaks, and “gaffed freaks” filled in for the shortage of “natural freaks,” and the stage barker or “talker” outside the tent or temporary storefront quarters did his best to lure in the credulous. “Never out, never over, on all the time . . . No waiting. Strangest people on earth. Never out, never over, on all the time.”24 Ehrich Weiss or Weisz (1874–1926), who later on became the famous escapologist Harry Houdini, spent his early show business career in small circuses, beer halls, dime museums, and medicine shows. So as a young man, he grew up with freak performers and felt at home with them. When Ehrich worked in the dime museums, he appeared on what was known as the “curio stage,” where the freaks were put on display, keeping the public amused with magic tricks until the chief exhibits appeared. Since his act was himself on display as much as any bearded lady, one biographer maintains Houdini signified a “freak” in all senses of the word. Starting out at the bottom of the entertainment ladder as a traveling entertainer, it took many circuitous and hardworking years before the slightly bow-legged Ehrich pulled his way up into the big-time vaudeville circuits. A detailed itinerary of the strenuous but colorful apprenticeship years of the performer, sometimes classed as a freak, who reinvented himself as “Harry Houdini,” provides useful insight into what it was like for a late-nineteenth-century American entertainer to travel on the road (see Appendix II).25 Bearded ladies, snake charmers, and giants of both sexes had long been a feature of the circus sideshow. The Fat Lady commonly married her co-worker the Skeleton Man in circuses throughout the country; thus the oversized Hannah was married to Jonathan “Living Skeleton” Battersby, her fellow Barnum & Bailey performer. In 1884 Barnum first presented a “Grand Ethnological Congress of Nations,” made up of the world’s “savage” peoples, to accompany the Barnum & Bailey circus. Located inside the menagerie tent, this promoted non-Western peoples as freaks or exotic curiosities and was nine years ahead of a similar exhibition on the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago World’s Fair (see below). Barnum had already shown his commitment to the principle of comprehensiveness with his natural history and freak collections, so a wide-ranging collection of the races of man represented but a logical extension of his operations.26 Such ethnological but implicitly racist displays were clearly designed to demonstrate the ultimate competitive triumph of Western urban-industrial civilization, with nonwhite “primitive races” ranged according to their lower places in a racial hierarchy of human achievement. The flavor of this extraordinary assemblage can still be glimpsed, more than 20 years after its first appearance, from a circus promotional booklet. The 1905 Barnum & Bailey

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Route Book advertised a “Grand Ethnological Congress of Savage People” containing “STRANGE MALE AND FEMALE BROWN AND BLACK-SKINNED PEOPLE” or the “GRANDEST COLLECTION OF STRANGE HEATHENS, IDOLATERS, BUDDHISTS, MOHAMMEDANS, CANNIBALS, CONFUCIANS, WILD AND SAVAGE RACES AND BARBARIANS ever seen assembled together since the creation.” Exhibited were American Indians, Arabs, Cossacks, Turks, Armenians, Japanese, Singhalese, Algerians, Numidians, and Polynesians. Through the center of the circus was arranged a sort of midway avenue, both sides of which were occupied by the different huts and “other crude dwellings of these people, and the scene presented is one of wild, weird and strange picturesqueness, the bright colors of the dresses of some contrasting with the brown naked skins of their neighbors.”27 Eventually, circuses, street fairs, world’s fairs, carnivals, and urban amusement parks, all of which exhibited freaks, began to draw customers away from the dime museums that had once enjoyed an almost exclusive claim to exhibit “human curiosities.” Some museums evolved into sideshows, others became vaudeville houses or small theaters, but they mostly retained their initial popularity until at least 1910. The term “sideshow” began to replace dime museum, and the display of “human oddities” for profit started to become a rather sleazy part of the outdoor amusement industry. So those museums that survived into the 1920s operated in diminished quarters in storefronts or could be found as sideshows at carnivals, world’s fairs, amusement parks, and seaside resorts. Those in New York that relocated to Coney Island became exclusively freak shows, thereby removing the traditional dime museum’s wider cultural appeal with its diorama, camera obscura, and even stage shows. By the 1930s the old-style museums became strictly moveable and temporary, with a few exceptions such as the noted revival of Huber’s Museum in New York’s Times Square and later on nearby at West 42nd Street (closing around 1965). The owners of nomadic dime museums, with names such as the Odditorium, Cavalcade of Wonders, and Oddities on Parade that partially disguised their origins, would rent vacant stores in small cities, stay for a week or sometimes a few months, and then move on when business slackened. Even into the 1940s there were probably half a dozen traveling freak shows with the word “museum” in their titles. These were the dying remnants of a breed that, in the previous century, had given abundant residence to “human marvels and monstrosities.”28 As dime museums declined in popularity, freak shows shifted their venues once more, becoming part of traveling town or state carnivals. The carnival idea was born out of the highly popular exhibits on the route to the entrance at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Midway Plaisance, as it became known, was a mile-long amusement strip

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that preceded the more formal White City exhibition center, with its own restaurants, rides, ethnic villages, variety stage shows, and novelty performers such as strong men, freaks, and belly dancers. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show sold over three million tickets right outside the White City gates. Most of those present on the midway made their living on museum, vaudeville, or musical comedy stages during the winter months. Subsequent carnivals offered a traveling group of sideshows, games of chance, shooting galleries, and mechanical rides, providing for small-town and rural America what large amusement parks provided for the urban masses. At least 300 carnival units or “carnies” were touring various states by 1937 in each of which the sideshow or small circus was an important attraction.29 So the exhibition of human oddities, combined with variety acts, found a new home between the two world wars in carnivals or as the main attraction of the circus midway sideshow before entry into the big tent. As a reminder of the past, some circuses continued to use the term “museum” on their freak or sideshow banners throughout the 1930s. With an extension of the sideshow in this period, the display of natural, self-made and “gaffed” freaks for profit became an increasingly seedy part of the open-air amusement business. Often called “ten-in-ones” by fairground people as they typically contained ten acts for the price of one admission, they continued as a standard American circus fixture into the mid-twentieth century. The Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus, for instance, journeyed with a sideshow until 1956 when it ceased to put on a tent show.30 The Freak Show in Context In its many guises, the freak show has been a dependable element of the people’s amusements throughout the ages, diminishing only during the late twentieth century. Notwithstanding the wondrous appeal of the freak show to previous generations, modern-day appreciation of human multiplicity tends to fast evaporate when diversity shades into “monstrosities” or deformity. According to a specialist in evolutionary developmental biology writing about mutant human forms, To seek out, look at, much less speak about deformity brings us uncomfortably close to naïve, gaping wonder (or, to put it less charitably, prurience), callous derision, or at best a taste for thoughtless acquisition. It suggests the menageries of princes, the circuses of P. T. Barnum, Tod Browning’s film Freaks (1932), or simply the basements of museums in which exhibits designed for our forebears’ apparently coarser sensibilities now languish.31

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As a later chapter shows, Barnum did indeed insist on a “museum” containing so-called freaks and other exhibits being housed in a large separate tent on the circus midway (see chapter 4). Freaks, puppet shows, and jugglers were a common feature of English carnivals and fairs as early as the thirteenth century. The insatiable demand for three-legged men, bearded women, giants, and conjoined twins, was just as evident in seventeenth-century London, even if somewhat neglected in Ben Jonson’s cluttered, anti-Puritan play [Saint] Bartholomew Fair (1614). Nearly two centuries later, Lake poet William Wordsworth was more expansive in his autobiographical The Prelude, composed in 1805, about the freakish exhibits he saw at the same Smithfield “phantasma” as a young man in the 1790s: All moveables of wonder, from all parts,/ Are here—Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,/ The Horse of knowledge, and the learned Pig,/ The Stone-eater, the man that swallows fire,/ Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,/ The Bust that speaks and moves its goggling eyes,/ The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft/ Of modern Merlins, Wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,/ All out-o’-the-way, far-fetched, perverted things,/ All freaks of nature, all Promethean thoughts/ Of man, his dullness, madness, and their feats/ All jumbled up together, to compose/ A Parliament of Monsters. Tents and Booths/ Meanwhile, as if the whole were one vast mill,/ Are vomiting, receiving on all sides,/ Men, Women, three-years’ Children, Babes in arms.

Further, a young Charles Dickens claimed that at Greenwich Fair in the mid-1830s, for the small charge, over Easter, of a penny, a dwarf, a giantess, a living skeleton, a wild Indian, a young albino lady, and two or three other “natural curiosities,” were usually exhibited together. Once conveyed across the Atlantic, the hugely popular appeal of the freak or sideshow to audiences across America is evident until at least the middle of the twentieth century, after which their already marginal appeal began to fade away.32 From the perspective of a supposedly more humane and tolerant present day, a major concern is how best to understand the popular or crowd appeal of the freak show for audiences across America and elsewhere, without projecting our modern morality backward onto a society that endorsed commercial amusement forms now considered exploitative, tawdry, and retrograde. Significantly, the exhibition of freaks had both a voyeuristic and a spuriously educational appeal in the nineteenth century that, based upon prevailing assumptions about physical and ethnic normality, showmen were able to exploit for commercial gain. Thus with Barnum temporarily insolvent in 1857, the new owners of the American Museum, that “place of intellectual entertainment worthy of the general approbation,” put out a

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self-congratulatory handbill in gratitude for the over half a million visitors they claimed for the previous year. The museum was praised for its unequalled popular achievement “as well for its spirit of public enterprise as for the novelty and amusement characteristic of its peculiar performances.” Freak exhibits were, of course, a museum staple, even assuming “peculiar” only meant “unusual” to contemporaries.33 As one of thousands of fairground or museum customers entering a freak show, you would have been taken to the edge, able to explore the limits of the normal, the what-might-have-been, the “there but for the Grace of God go I” syndrome. Watching freak performers could similarly build self-esteem in their variegated audiences; most customers probably left sideshows feeling more at ease with their own mundane and predictable lives. Not everyone could be a famous artist or a talented singer, but at least the spectator could be relieved that he or she was not a bearded lady or a Siamese twin. Then again, not all freaks were acceptable to all the people all the time. Early in 1898 a British magazine writer could tolerate the tattooed man, “skeleton dude,” giants, and dwarfs in the sideshow of a visiting American circus at London’s Olympia, but drew the line at the dog-faced boy, India rubber or elastic-skinned man, and double-bodied performers. The reporter was complaining that visitors to an adjoining menagerie found such “repulsive” exhibits difficult to avoid, especially since no extra charge was made to view them. One should also bear in mind that such freaks were then entirely absent as a mainstream circus element in Britain.34 The sideshow’s contemporary apologists were often those who profited most from its exhibition. Hence entrepreneur Dick Best, who supplied the talent for freak shows in circuses, carnivals, and fairs into the late 1950s, rationalized his strange occupation thus: The only place a person of this [freakish] kind can spend a normal life is among others with the same misfortune. An alligator girl can’t be a waitress, or a receptionist, a nurse, or a baby sitter. How many job opportunities are open to Siamese twins? How many personnel managers are looking for monkey-faced boys? Would you climb into a taxi driven by a dwarf with a pointed head, or a guy nine feet tall? And who’s going to support these people, if they can’t support themselves? For the past 30 years I have been able to give employment to scores of them, give them financial independence, and companionship.

Show people down the centuries no doubt adopted a similar self-serving rationale. “The thing to remember about freaks,” Best further explained, “is that they think and feel just like the rest of us. It is only their bodies that are different. Among freaks I have developed many fine and trusted friends.”35

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By the same token, many freak show performers developed extraordinary talents to overcome the sense of inadequacy that their physical disabilities created, and used these talents to make a success of themselves, both financially and in terms of self-esteem, in a society that was not particularly positive toward them. Often marginalized disabled people, “natural freaks” such as the physically challenged suffering from gigantism (acromegaly) or its reverse, were offered the chance to perform first in dime museums and subsequently in sideshows. They and their families had little option but to take the showman’s dollar and go on the road. Highly successful freak performers in the 1890s could command the equivalent of today’s up to $2,000 a week and many were able to afford real estate and to retire quite comfortably. William Henry “Zip” Johnson or the “What Is It?” owned property in New Jersey and lived in an elegant house in Connecticut, a gift from Barnum. Chang and Eng, the first Siamese twins, owned a farm, a business, and several slaves in North Carolina. On his retirement, Leopold Kahn, otherwise known as the midget Admiral Dot, owned and operated a hotel in White Plains, New York.36 Eventually freak exhibits such as the “What Is It?” (the last of whom died in 1926) left the declining dime museums for circus midway sideshows outside the entrance to the big tent. Barnum first insisted on a “museum” containing such performers being housed in a separate tent on the midway. Freak shows such as the “pit shows” (one freak per ticket) at the 1933–34 Chicago Exposition were also a main feature of the world’s fair midways throughout the interwar years. Probably no single place in the world had more “human oddities” on exhibit during the 1920s and 1930s than the fabled New York pleasure ground at the end of the Brooklyn subway line at Coney Island. The first true amusement or entertainment park was erected here in 1897 when promoter George Tilyou enclosed a number of unrelated rides and shows in what he called Steeplechase Park and charged admission at the gate. The anonymous young couple in King Vidor’s silent movie The Crowd (1928) are shown taking a trolleybus from Manhattan and then enjoying the rides at Coney Island. Various amusement parks in cities across America soon had many of the freak shows, roller-coasters, rides, and games of chance found in traveling carnivals and at world’s fairs.37 By the 1940s, the discontent of medical community and educated people with the practice of exhibiting individuals with physical and mental abnormalities for profit and amusement, and in addition, the civilizing influence of an urban lifestyle, had led to declining audiences for Coney Island’s midway sideshows. Hence an article by Murray Robinson in the New York World-Telegram of July 29, 1947 headlined: “Freaks Still Attract Curious Stragglers on Coney’s Midway: But the Mule Face Boy and the Turtle Girl are Losing their Popularity.” Only the Palace of Wonders on

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Surf Avenue remained, according to Robinson, as “the last feeble descendant of the gaudy, brassy freak shows that were high on the list of Coney Island attractions for generations.” Thus the freak show noticeably declined even on Coney Island, despite continuous attempts at a revival. Over the course of the twentieth century, “freak shows would disperse to the cultural margins, becoming a disreputable but stubbornly persistent form of entertainment.”38 What explains the gradual waning of its centuries-old appeal as a form of popular amusement? The middle class had already begun to desert the dime museums where the young Houdini started out, constantly exposed as they were to newspaper accounts of fraudulent practices behind the wild claims made by museum proprietors. The revelation of fake or “gaffed freaks,” together with the increasing availability of new electronic forms of entertainment, now made the sideshow more and more marginal. Meanwhile, as human disability became the province of specialized medical pathology over the course of the twentieth century, bodies previously described as “extraordinary living wonders of nature” were now seen in terms of disease or often treatable thyroid and glandular conditions. One only has to recall the earlier journey of the Elephant Man from lateVictorian freak exhibit to medical school teaching aid, however incurable his severe deformity. Equally, as anthropologists developed more scientific methods and the notion of cultural relativism became more widespread, the exhibition of non-Western people as strange ethnographic freaks was made much less tolerable. Accordingly, freakish spectacles were seen by the well educated, by the 1920s if not before, as sleazy arenas of exploitation and bad taste, “relegated to small towns and bad neighborhoods where they could be patronized by audiences only slightly less marginal than the carnies themselves.” The “respectable” of all social classes increasingly turned their backs on the now seedy freak shows as mere titillating spectacle, a morally dubious form of popular culture that could no longer be tolerated even as vulgar entertainment for the uneducated masses. Sideshows did not entirely fade out toward the middle of the last century, however, because oral and other evidence confirms that they could still be found years later at carnivals or at county and state fairs in the rural South.39 Curiously, an illuminating study of freaks and the American cultural imagination points to an apparent resurgence of sideshow-inspired performances in New York during the 1990s. This subcultural renaissance embraced the Broadway musical Sideshow (1997), loosely based on the conjoined lives of San Antonio’s “Siamese Twins” Daisy and Violet Hilton who once, aged 18, appeared as headliners on a 1926 vaudeville tour, dancing with Bob (then Lester) Hope and playing saxophone-clarinet

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duets. Reference is also made to Dick Zigun’s Coney Island Circus Side Show, the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, and the work of performance artist Jennifer Miller. So as actual freak shows began to be expelled from popular culture from the middle of the twentieth century, their “representational currency” apparently multiplied in the more elite forms of literature, art photography, and scholarly inquiry, “granting them symbolic importance in inverse proportion to their declining status as a profitable mode of live entertainment.”40 Promising candidates for the “freak show” label in the present century, setting aside columnist Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not drawings and exhibits, are television reality shows. Prominent psychologists and media commentators are eager to remind us that shows such as Big Brother take advantage of their briefly renowned contestants in a damaging way. According to one newspaper article, “these people have been stereotyped. They have been turned into freaks.” A British spokesman for the Royal College of Psychiatrists added: “It’s a penny freak show for the modern era. Our society is so obsessed with psychology that we no longer want to look at physical deformity; now we look for psychological freakery. [A named contestant] is a modern-day Elephant Man.”41 Indicatively, among the British extroverts entering Channel 4’s seventh Big Brother house in 2006 were: Shahbaz, an unemployed 37-year-old from Glasgow describing himself as “a wacky Paki poof”; George, a 19-year-old student from Chelsea, west London, who despised “ignorant socialists and people who mock the monarchy”; Lea, a 35-year-old model who claimed to have the largest breast implants in the United Kingdom; Pete, a 24-yearold cross-dressing singer with Tourette’s syndrome (the eventual winner), and in addition ten other contestants for the 13-week run. In a final Barnumesque touch, they were to be joined by one of the 100 winners who found a “golden ticket” in KitKat candy bars.42 Endnote Barnum was the first to successfully transform the freak show into a business proposition through his indisputable marketing skills. The American Museum did much to make attendance at “human curiosity” shows more palatable for the “respectable” of all social classes, especially in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Even if the middle class eventually began to stay away from dime museums and freak shows, their cross-cultural and cross-gender appeal made them a successful model for subsequent popular amusements. Historians of the seaside playgrounds of the industrial working class, specifically Coney Island, Brooklyn, and Blackpool, Lancashire, have recently underlined the mixed social and family appeal of human and

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animal “curiosities,” at least until high and low culture began markedly to diverge. “Despite modern disgust with the freak shows, few in 1900 distinguished them from the scientific exhibition, or simply other spectacles of the dime museums and circuses of the era.”43 Minstrelsy became another ingredient of the American circus at this time, albeit individual blackface performers had been employed under the big top early on in the nineteenth century. With its white and sometimes even black troupes wearing burnt-cork facial makeup, perhaps minstrelsy became yet another mode of freakish performance? Chapter 3 sets out to demonstrate how blackface minstrelsy and its predecessors became culturally and historically significant as among the first genuinely American popular and commercial entertainments. The Lecture Room/theater of Barnum’s American Museum was prominent, needless to say, among those New York stages that early on exhibited and thereby gave exposure to the new minstrelsy phenomenon.

Wm. H. West’s Big Minstrel Jubilee. Billy Van the Monologue Comedian. Lithograph, the Strobridge Co., 1900 Courtesy of Paul McWhorter (www.sonofthesouth.net/slavery/african-american-art).

CHAPTER 3 BLACKFACE MINSTRELSY: THE FIRST ALL-AMERICAN SHOW

he minstrel show, a blend of popular music, dance, and comedy, largely performed by white men wearing burnt-cork facial makeup (blackface), a mixture of burned, crushed champagne corks and water or petroleum jelly, and speaking and singing in mock black dialects, was the first distinctively American and highly successful form of publicly staged commercial entertainment. In an age when the American stage was still derivative from its British and European predecessors, the wholly indigenous nature of this form of popular amusement merits scholarly attention, despite minstrelsy’s racist inference and practice. Blackface became a vehicle for the creation of an entirely “American” style of commercialized popular culture, according to one authority, while minstrel music became the first popular American musical product exported to the rest of the developed world. Also, minstrel shows, not always acknowledged as such, were the most successful of all American entertainment formula from the early 1840s until at least 40 years later, being then widely dispersed through a variety of show business forms.1 “The history of black-faced minstrelsy has one clear date, an interesting set of precursors, and a long trail of development and interpretation,” claims a leading theatrical historian. This chapter investigates both the antecedents of and the aftermath to what is actually a somewhat disputed date early in 1843 when what appears to be the first white minstrel troupe performed to huge acclaim in the burgeoning metropolis of New York City. Unreliable nineteenth-century claims about the plantation origins of minstrelsy in the Deep South had less to do with the authenticity of the new musical and dance forms than the need to present something as distinctively American during a time when the country was exposed to overwhelming foreign influences in popular musical culture. There was

T

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undoubtedly a need for new cultural forms of identity in the antebellum era that reflected the average American’s nationalism and egalitarianism, that glorified “plain people,” were aggressively antiaristocratic and anti-European, and could replace rural folk culture with unifying symbols for white “common men” in the newly mushrooming cities.2 Forerunners of Minstrelsy As to antecedents, white men in blackface had portrayed African American characters in popular song and dance as either comic buffoons or as noble savages since well before the American Revolution. During the 1820s, alleged “Negro songs and dances” were being performed by whites at circuses and in variety “olios” or intervals between play acts, in Northern cities. In line with the preconceptions of the age, actor Charles Mathews play-mocked a black performer he had observed butchering the role of Hamlet. Traveling blackface song-and-dance performers or “Ethiopian delineators” grew in popularity at this time (see below). Yet the melodies for many of the subsequent blackface songs (“Zip Coon,” “Jim Crow,” “Coal Black Rose”), like so much in early nineteenth-century American popular culture, were either British or Irish in origin. Whites putting on burnt cork or blackface, meanwhile, long had a place on the legitimate American stage. In addition to Shakespeare’s Othello, by far the most performed blackface production, late-eighteenth-century theatergoers knew plays such as Oroonoko, The Padlock, and Inkle and Yarico, all of which featured white actors in blackface. Typically, John Murdock’s The Triumph of Love; or, Happy Reconciliation (1795) explored contemporary social customs by using a comic black servant with a West Indian dialect who dances and sings. “Sambo” seeks equality with whites but is unable to cope once released from bondage and proceeds to get hopelessly drunk. In the early nineteenth century, audiences continued to watch such plays, and theaters added a few newer ones featuring blackface, such as The Aethiop and The Africans. Significantly, of more than five thousand documented performances involving blackface on American stages from 1751 until 1843, about half were of a minstrel type, mostly songs, some dancing, and perhaps playacting. The rest were plays that featured exaggerated caricatures in blackface, albeit half of them were English in origin, such as The Irishman in London or The One-Hundred Pound Note. The other half were “Yankee” plays or stage vehicles for impersonators of back-country “down-easters” such as The Green Mountain Boy, The Yankee Pedlar and The Kentuckian.3 The precursors of early blackface minstrelsy as performed by whites may also have been deeply rooted in a long line of folk theatricals, as the

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audience for and performers of minstrelsy were largely immigrants, only recently removed from residence in a conservative, probably rural, often semifeudal, European culture. Hence aspects of English and Irish folk culture brought to the New World, such as mumming plays, morris dancing, and transported slave “John Canoe” Christmas ceremonies, as well as working-class New York charivari rituals, such as New Year’s callithumpian bands, may well have fed into a multiracial popular culture that influenced “Jump Jim Crow” and early blackface minstrelsy. The hard evidence for this is not easy to produce, however, given the slippery oral and collective memories of nonracial blackface masking. Further, since the audience for minstrelsy in its first 15 years or so was generally male and drawn from the urban working class, the use of blackface on the stage proper often signaled parody of the legitimate “official” stage, such as burlesques of Italian opera. Similarly, blackface “fantasticals” and making fun of black soldiers could be interpreted as ridiculing the American military.4 At the beginning of the turbulent era of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, blackface performers such as the celebrated Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice (1808–60) continually added to their repertoires, acts such as his first dancing and singing “Jump Jim Crow” on the stage in Louisville, Cincinnati, or Pittsburgh (depending on the telling) in mid-1830: “Weel about and turn about an’ do jus so;/ Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” This new blackface portrayal was based on an odd-looking hopping, disjointed dance Rice claimed to have seen an old disabled black stable-hand perform on some occasion two years earlier, possibly in Louisville. After performing in a score of provincial theaters from Pensacola to Pittsburgh, in 1832 “Daddy” Rice arrived at New York’s popular and raucous Bowery Theatre with his caricatured singing and dancing routine and was met with great enthusiasm. Young and middle-aged working-class men primarily made up Rice’s urban audience, with women in attendance mostly in the notorious third tier set aside for sexual commerce. Rice’s New York appearance created a public sensation and it took him on a triumphant tour of major centers, embracing even the London stage in 1836. Rice’s signature song “Jump Jim Crow” typically professed to come out of the Southwestern “roaring” or “whooping” tradition, personified by the exaggerated exploits of legendary riverboatman Mike Fink and frontiersman Davy Crockett. Yet it basically remained an individual variety turn, albeit Rice’s brand of blackface theater performance gained in status and popularity throughout the 1830s. “Daddy” Rice himself, coming from the legitimate theater, never became a member of a minstrel show but in 1848 appeared on the same bill as that of Christy’s Minstrels. Overall, he remains an important blackface “precursor” to the development of

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minstrelsy and, needless to say, his song’s refrain added a new invidious term (Jim Crow) to the American language.5 Rival white performers, such as Micah Hawkins, Thomas Blakeley, and above all George Washington Dixon (1801–61), were blacking up in the interim and singing songs in northeastern theaters, about for example, the struggle between two caricatured black men for “Coal Black Rose.” Like the subsequent and huge success of blackface minstrelsy, such performers satisfied the quest for a distinctly American form of entertainment that was markedly different from European high culture and its imitative postcolonial forms. Dixon, known as the American Melodist or the great Buffo (burlesque) Singer, was most often linked to “Zip Coon,” the famous blackface jig song about a Northern “dandy” or dapper, posturing, freed slave. Zip the “larned scholar” commented at length on Andrew Jackson’s presidency, such as the 1832 reelection issue of whether to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States: “I tell you what will happin den, now bery soon/ De Nited States Bank will be blone to de moon/ Dare General Jackson, will him lampoon/ An de bery nex’ President will be Zip Coon.” Dixon continued to sing “Zip Coon” with relevant verses during New York’s July 1834 antiabolitionist riot. The song and the riot have both been seen as about who would control public discourse and community values, with social class, at base, the issue.6 Some years later, P. T. Barnum exhibited yet another precursor to minstrelsy when from 1840 to 1841 he discovered, contracted, and toured with the blackface or white “Negro-dancer” John Diamond (1823–57). This Irish American dance prodigy specialized in Ethiopian “break-downs,” during which he “twisted his feet and legs into fantastic forms.” Barnum waxed lyrical on January 21, 1840, in trying to secure a theatrical booking for the teenage Diamond in Philadelphia: He is beyond all doubt the best Negro dancer in America; his singing is quite middling, but his dancing is absolutely beyond all calculation astonishing. At the National Theatre, Boston, he obtained the largest benefit 2 months ago of any performer this season, although he had been playing there over three weeks. Besides this kind of dancing, he is good in the highland fling and sailor’s hornpipe, for both of which he has the proper costumes. Last night (his first appearance at the Broadway Amphitheatre) he was called out five times by an audience so crowded that no more could get in, and many having tickets were obliged to go away. So much for the boy, all of which is warranted correct.

Although Barnum appeared convinced that Diamond’s “masterly and unequalled dancing” could “draw crowded houses for a week or more,” a tour of some six months met with only indifferent success. Barnum was subsequently compelled on February 27, 1841 to send out a circular letter

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to various fellow showmen warning them that, while still under contract, young Diamond had “absconded” from his employ and cautioning that legal action would be taken against anyone who should exhibit the dancer. Moreover, “said Diamond has overdrawn the money due him to the amount of $95 and has during the last week expended a hundred dollars in brothels and other haunts of dissipation & vice.”7 Barnum’s erring employee was soon after reclaimed and in March 1841 went with him to New Orleans where Diamond’s renowned dance services were offered to the New American Theatre. The following year he went on to perform at Barnum’s newly acquired American Museum in New York (see chapter 1). Diamond was advertised on a handbill as “The celebrated and unapproachable [sic] Professor of Negro Dancing and Virginia Breakdowns, who has been absent from the city for two years, and whose renown has induced others to assume his name, having just arrived from New Orleans, has been re-engaged at an enormous expense positively for one week only, and will appear in all of his original Negro Dances and Breakdowns!” Diamond, who died in his thirties, was subsequently described in Barnum’s first autobiography (1855) as “the prototype of the numerous performers of the sort who have surprised and amused the public these many years.” The showman appears to be taking credit here for an early form of minstrelsy but Diamond was actually much closer to the traveling song and dance performers or “Ethiopian delineators,” epitomized by George W. “Zip Coon” Dixon and Thomas D. “Daddy” Rice, who had grown in popularity from the late 1820s onward.8 Two and even three minstrel performers sometimes banded together as song-and-dance acts by the century’s third decade, but blackface still remained only a contribution to other entertainment forms such as variety and the circus. Then suddenly, in 1843, New York City found itself in the grip of “minstrel mania” as numerous concert halls and theaters along Broadway featured performances by white minstrel troupes of four and more in blackface that added together represent a strange new white fantasy of stereotyped blackness. The First Minstrel Shows The initial minstrel craze was triggered at the Bowery Amphitheatre on February 6, 1843 by a “surprisingly melodious Ethiopian Band,” when the first formulaic minstrel show was staged before an audience by four young white men: Billy Whitlock, Dick Pelham, Daniel Emmett, and Frank Brower. Whitlock played banjo and, coincidentally, had danced with John Diamond under Barnum’s management and at the American Museum; Pelham was a blackface dancer on the New York stage; Ohio-born

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Emmett had worked in the summers as a drummer, fiddler, banjo player, and blackface singer in traveling circuses; and Brower was again a dancer who occasionally toured with Emmett but also the first blackface “bones” player, using horse ribs like castanets. Their Bowery appearance had been preceded by the four putting on a benefit performance at the depressed Chatham Theatre in New York on January 31, 1843 that has misled some to believe it to be the first “minstrel show,” but on this occasion nothing unusual took place, such as a quartet of blackface performers appearing together on stage at the same time.9 Most sources credit Irish American Dan Emmett for amalgamating the talents of the original four but in 1911, a printed assemblage of noteworthy minstrel performers cited Billy Whitlock’s claim that the ground-breaking idea actually belonged to him: One day I asked Dan Emmett who was in New York at the time, to practice the fiddle and the banjo with me at his boarding house in Catherine Street. We went down there, and when we had practiced, Frank Brower called in by accident. He listened to our music, charmed to his soul! I told him to join with the bones, which he did. Presently Dick Pelham came in, also by accident, and looked amazed. I asked him to procure a tambourine and make one of the party, and he went out and got one. After practicing for a while we went to the old resort of the circus crowd—the “Branch” [hotel], in the Bowery—with our instruments, and in Bartlett’s billiard-room performed for the first time [but not to a paying audience] as the Virginia Minstrels.10

Whoever initiated the scheme, together, the four created the instrumental lineup of what soon became the typical minstrel band, combining banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, and tambourine. The four whites apparently called themselves “minstrels” because of the great success of the Tyrolese Minstrel Family, a nonblackface Swiss singing group that had recently toured America. They also blacked their white faces with burnt cork and called themselves the “Virginia Minstrels” to enhance claims of Southern authenticity, claiming to reproduce “the songs, refrains, and ditties as sung by the southern slaves at all their merry meetings such as the gathering in of the cotton and sugar crops, corn huskings, slave weddings and junketing.” Some of them had performed individually as blackface entertainers with circuses in the South where, not being trained in English theatrical conventions, they were known as “Ethiopian delineators.” The four presumably hoped, by pooling their talents, to become more attractive at the box office.11 The possibility for the performance of circus acts in theatrical spaces had overseas precedents, so even the form taken by the 1840s minstrel show was, in part, a variant of British imperial practice. Yet minstrelsy as a mode

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of American popular entertainment was primarily indebted to the solo blackface forerunners who had toured in the 1820s and 1830s. Drawn from this milieu, the Virginia Minstrels were undoubtedly a big hit with audiences at New York’s Bowery Amphitheatre and there were soon a host of Broadway imitators. Yet the original four performed their raucous act together for less than six months and then disbanded during a celebratory tour of England, apparently playing for the last time together on July 14, 1843. Presumably, each minstrel still thought of himself as a single blackface performer and so must have chafed at submerging his personality into that of a collective minstrel troupe.12 When the Virginia Minstrels left for England, supreme opportunist P. T. Barnum made sure that another early blackface troupe, the Boston Minstrels, was hastily booked for his American Museum Lecture Room stage. These six “Ethiopian Serenaders” were listed in their song sheet music as C. J. Quinn, A. F. Winnemore, J. Baker, M. C. Stanwood, F. G. Germon, and G. Wilson. Only Germon had any lasting reputation as an early blackface comedian and tambourine player. Significantly, the illustrated cover of the sheet music for the Boston Minstrels’ celebrated “Ethiopian melodies” adapted for the piano forte (“In de wild Racoon track,” “Git along my yaler girl,” “De ole Grey Goose,” “Dandy Jim from Caroline”) showed them in the stereotypical forms of both the “dandyism of the Northern states” and also, contrastingly, as “the Ethiopians of the Southern states.” One of the most popular Zip Coon-like “dandy” songs performed by the Boston Minstrels was “De New York Gals” whose first verse ran as follows: I’ve come from the state of Arkansas to see the sights dat can be seen, but no/thing makes my bosom swell like a peep at dese here New York gals. New York gals, pretty faces bran’ new frocks trimm’d with laces [repeat]. Anckles [sic] small waist so slender ah! ah! ah! And a good bye John [repeat].

Women living in or passing through public spaces were commonly referred to as “gals,” especially if they behaved in such a way as to encourage more open male contact. Anyhow, the Boston Minstrels also soon dispersed but Barnum had by now latched on to the new minstrelsy craze for commercial gain, as he did with other successful entertainment modes. In response to a seemingly insatiable public demand, Barnum was once again promoting a preexisting and now hugely popular entertainment.13 To digress a little, a potential and legally contested alternative to the above version of minstrelsy’s emergence in New York City is that the first minstrel show was put on further north and west in the canal region’s

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provincial Buffalo, near Niagara Falls on eastern Lake Erie. Here Edwin Pearce Christy (1815–62), Philadelphia-born former traveling shoe salesman and circus performer, formed a three-piece band, also confusingly called the Virginia Minstrels who, apparently, gave their first concert in June 1842, at least seven months before the four-man Whitlock or Emmett group in New York did. Other accounts merely confirm that E. P. Christy was singing that year with two assistants at a tavern in Buffalo and, correctly or not, date the actual formation of Edwin and stepson George Christy’s first genuine blackface minstrel groups to 1844–45.14 Central to a recent claim that Christy’s version of minstrelsy initiated the first Atlantic mass culture is a populist emphasis on the vernacular “rough” culture of the Irish, immigrant, and slave laborers who built the early canals in North America, including the Erie (1817–25). Historian of blackface performance W. T. Lhamon Jr. therefore identifies the origins of minstrelsy with the formation of a new working-class culture along the Great Lakes. The activity that became known as minstrelsy is interpreted as largely the cultural symbolism of mutual labor, as expressed in the “fetishized gestures” of a popular subculture or “blackface lore cycle” that became formulaic or commercial minstrelsy only near the middle of the nineteenth century. Once minstrelsy had become popular among groups beyond the Lake Erie workers who initially energized it, so the argument goes, entrepreneurs were eager to tame it and to bring blackface into alignment with the divisive political allegiances of the 1850s, already rehearsing “strategies” for the impending war between the states. Hence “what had begun as a way of registering cross-racial charisma and union then became also a way of registering racial separation and disdain.”15 Whatever be the merits of the above interpretation, a running feud quickly developed between Christy and Emmett, both of whom laid claim to the name of the Virginia Minstrels and obdurately held that they alone were responsible for the creation of the very first minstrel troupe and format. E. P. Christy eventually sued Emmett, declaring that he had preceded the New York minstrel troupe by several months. Because his group was “organized in 1842,” he claimed to be “the first to harmonize Negro melodies, the originator of the present style of ETHIOPIAN ENTERTAINMENTS, the creator of the semicircular arrangement of five to six blackface entertainers at least as early as the 1846 season,” and also that he alone designed the first “dandy” costumes. This is close to the otherwise speculative and populist reading that Lhamon champions above. Whether or not Christy indeed had a genuine case, he did win his claim in the New York State Supreme Court. We need not concern ourselves unduly with these disputed claims and rivalries. Suffice it to say that prior to this legal episode, Christy came together in 1844 with three other players, including stepson

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“George Christy” (George N. Harrington, his mother being the Erie Canal tavern barmaid), and changed the name of his troupe to the enduring Christy’s Minstrels.16 In any case, the expansion of minstrelsy was initially northern and urban. New York was, if not its birthplace, then soon to be its significant commercial hub—a total of ten minstrel companies competed here in the 1850s, three of them on the same Broadway block. Hooley’s Minstrels were predominant in Brooklyn; Christy’s Minstrels settled into the Mechanics Hall on Broadway for a long run. At the same time, the Chatham, the Bowery, the Old Park, Barnum’s American Museum theater, churches, synagogues, even a showboat on the Hudson, filled their seats with minstrel shows. They eventually had a widespread appeal in cities, small towns, and settlements throughout the American continent. Performers such as the Buckley Serenaders toured the South; San Francisco claimed five professional minstrel troupes; Boston had Ordway’s Aeolians. Cairncross and Dixey’s Minstrels also ran for nine straight years in Philadelphia and Sanford’s Minstrels for seven.17 Yet why is the minstrel show proper usually said to begin with either of those called Virginia Minstrels, given that George Dixon, Tom Rice, and many other performers imitating them had been delineating “Ethiopians” in musical performance for at least a quarter of a century? First, these forebears did not call themselves “minstrels,” whereas the troupes in the early 1840s certainly did; nor did they perform as a quartet. Second, and more important, there was a significant difference between creating an entr’acte character, inserting a blackface performer into a circus or melodrama, or even writing a farce as a vehicle for specialties—as Dixon did in the late 1820s and Rice more elaborately in the 1830s—and aiming to organize a whole evening’s entertainment, as minstrel troupes tried to do in the 1840s, around songs, dances, and patter purporting to be the behavior of Southern plantation field hands.18 Antebellum Minstrelsy In Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, a work of formidable scholarship, William J. Mahar divides the history of antebellum minstrelsy into three phases, each supported with contextual evidence drawn from playbills, usefully appended as one way to find out what was typical of the different venues that employed blackface performers. The first phase, 1843–48, is characterized as shapeless, consisting as much of comic parodies of Italian opera arias or popular stage burlesques as of Southern plantation caricatures (“Ethiopians”) or mimicry of African Americans living in Northern urban centers (“dandyism”). With the second phase, 1849–54, Mahar sets out

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how blackface minstrel shows incorporated longer burlesques of Italian and French opera, choral parodies, Ethiopian sketches, and afterpieces. Minstrel shows at this time were often “popular culture samplers of other more complex entertainment forms reduced to a few characteristic numbers.” The third phase, 1855–60, reveals a division in the minstrel show concept as managers sought to satisfy either the nostalgia for early minstrelsy or to provide a series of variety acts similar to vaudeville 25 years later. The minstrel show arguably became “the gathering place for a variety of entertainment forms, only some of which imitated aspects of African-American culture.”19 At mid-nineteenth century, minstrelsy was certainly by far the most popular form of American staged entertainment, with not just big city theaters but numerous small-town concert halls across the continent featuring blackface. Slavery, the plantation system, and the proper place of the Negro were, of course, disruptive public issues in American society at this time (see below). The leading minstrel troupe fast became the reformed Christy’s Minstrels who appeared at New York’s Mechanics Hall from 1847 for a seven-year run on Broadway. Christy, a shrewd businessman, who set out to appeal to women as well as young men, produced shows characterized as “well patronized by ‘good families’ and ‘nice people,’ who were glad to get a hearty laugh and an hour’s enjoyment of the pretty music.” The minstrel show in New York also drew audiences from the neighborhoods of Lower Manhattan and from among unsophisticated rural visitors, “who in the late 1840s were as likely to spend an evening listening to E. P. Christy’s Minstrels sing Stephen Foster as they were to gawk at Barnum’s [American Museum] oddities.” Big city minstrelsy attracted audiences of Bowery b’hoys and g’hals as well as the “respectable” upper working and lower middle classes first brought to the theater or Lecture Room by Barnum in New York and Moses Kimball in Boston.20 Supposedly, Tony Pastor, the Brooklyn-born “father of vaudeville” (see chapter 6), obtained his first job as an entertainer at the American Museum late in 1846, when only 12 years old. Billed by Barnum as an “infant prodigy,” he was engaged to appear in blackface, joking and singing on the Lecture Room stage. Pastor claimed much later in a press interview that he was a minstrel troupe Brudder Tambo or end man, playing the tambourine. Disappointingly, his name does not appear on any of the extant American Museum posters seen by the present author, albeit a band of unspecified “Ethiopian minstrels” were billed as appearing at Barnum’s museum during January 6–9, 1847, with Jim Carter on banjo, Harry Mestayer on violin, William B. Donaldson on tambourine, and Jerry Bryant on bone castanets and as a dancer.21

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When the minstrel craze was at its height in the 1840s, “new Negro songs” were sent out almost daily from the publishers’ presses and were sung all over the newly settled land. Prosperous households that had previously amused themselves by singing English operatic and part songs around the drawing-room piano now turned to the new American melodies and minstrel travesties of popular airs. Once stage minstrel shows became larger and more professional by the 1850s, they increasingly pursued a middle-class family audience by adopting more sentimental music and wholesome humor but with the racist tone more prominent than before. These new blackface shows normally ran in a three-section format. In the first part, the ensemble or company sat in a semicircle, with a whiteface “interlocutor” or master of ceremonies (as perfected by E. P. Christy) in the middle and two weirdly dressed and made-up blackface comedians (end men) at either end, their customary names, Brudder Tambo and Brudder Bones, referring to the instruments (tambourine and bones) they played. This classic setup allowed the interlocutor to pose questions and riddles for the end men or sometimes in reverse. Minstrelsy stands accused of being a male-dominated or misogynistic construct that constricted women’s rights, while giving expression to masculine values through its vocal and choral repertories. Hence the following traditional and unashamedly sexist routine: Interlocutor: Say Mr. Bones, who was that lady I saw you walking with today? Bones: That was no lady, that was my wife. Interlocutor: There was one thing I noticed about her and that was the lovely diamond ear-rings she wore. Bones: Yes, I gave her those. (Pause). Did you notice that swell sealskin sack and that $25,000 hat she wore? Interlocutor: Yes. Bones: Well I gave her those. Interlocutor: And another thing I noticed, she had lovely black eyes. Bones: Yes, I gave her those (Pause), and say, did you notice that little baby she had in her arms? Interlocutor: Why yes. Bones: Well that belongs to her sister.

The other members of the minstrel troupe went on to perform in songs and dances, supported on occasion by the full company in chorus. The second part of the show, called the “olio,” involved a succession of variety acts with members of the company performing their individual specialties, such as banjo solos, comedy, or eccentric dances. The third section of the minstrel performance concluded with a one-act “afterpiece,” a skit or

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burlesque, such as a comic travesty of a popular piece of literature, drama, or Italian opera, sometimes set on “the old plantation,” but always reliant on familiar blackface dialect humor.22 Thus a whole evening’s entertainment in the 1840s and 1850s revolved around the versatility of the all-male white minstrel troupe in blackface. Undoubtedly racist in their portrayal of caricatured African Americans but embodying charivari forms of misrule to make fun of gender stereotypes and aristocratic pretension, minstrel routines could also elaborate Southern themes in an acceptable Northern disguise and vice versa. Blackface minstrels contributed to sometimes contradictory American beliefs and attitudes about race, gender, and class. Evidence drawn from minstrel songs, playbills, and typical shows has allowed historians to explore gender issues relating to minstrelsy’s songs and sketches that endorse male dominance and sentimentality. In general, in songs and sketches, minstrels as performers in a “primarily masculine entertainment preserve,” tended to marginalize women.23 Minstrelsy has been depicted as “a derivative performance practice” that parodied foreign opera, sent up plays and political speeches, or made fun of issues of class, gender, and European cultural elitism with burlesques adapted to suit the changing demands of its diverse nineteenth-century audience. Blackface entertainers took on elements from African American and Anglo-American musical and cultural practices and re-presented them, initially to primarily urban audiences. Early minstrelsy also contained a strain of social and political criticism that reflected and articulated, however obliquely, the fears and anxieties of the emerging working class. Yet minstrel shows equally helped evolve a distinctive “national folklore” that provided a nonthreatening way for large numbers of white Americans to work out their ambivalence about race when the debate for and against slaveholding was of supreme importance in American history. Overall, says one authority, the minstrel format eventually “appealed to more than just working-class audiences and confirms that minstrelsy was the first commercially successful synthesis of the disparate cultural elements in the history of ‘American’ popular culture.”24 The Politics of Minstrelsy Recent interpretations of burnt cork entertainment such as the above, with an emphasis on burlesque operas, comic dialogues, and parodies, seek to show how early minstrelsy was more than simply “a racist playground for whites.” This methodology has consequently invited the criticism that current scholarship “seeks to displace racial context in the service of creating a less threatening, less ostensibly racist account of blackface.”

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A more diverse approach, argues one critic, “must not obscure the reality that race and racism, evinced by the minstrel’s gesture of blacking up and his subsequent parodic performance of blackness, are the central and undeniable components of minstrelsy.” Undeniably, minstrelsy’s unique depiction of Southern plantation life to audiences in the North was of a timeless rural Arcadia with domesticated and contented slaves, and not of a repressive society based on forced commercial agriculture and feudal class relations.25 Before looking at the actual political allegiances of those involved, we must ask what interests minstrelsy served in terms of its cultural politics. For most commentators, minstrelsy created and repeatedly portrayed contrasting but, for white Americans, comforting and reassuring caricatures of inept, ludicrous Northern blacks and contented, fulfilled Southern darkies on the plantation. Blackface performers also gave their white audiences an implicitly flattering self-image by portraying African Americans as all that they themselves were not and thereby helped justify coercive labor practices in the South to white Northern audiences. Minstrel song-sheet imagery, in which slaves were portrayed as parasitic, indolent, and intemperate, has been called “a representation of the natural self at odds with the normative self of industrial culture.”26 Northern working-class whites hence constructed an image of carefree Southern blacks through minstrelsy that represented all that they themselves had left behind as they became increasingly subject to harsh new regimes of industrial discipline and time management in the urban workplace—regimes that punished them for failing to adhere to strict standards of punctuality, productivity, and sobriety. Jim Crow’s liability to dance at the drop of a hat and Zip Coon’s abhorrence of manual labor have been portrayed as part of this ideological construction of black laziness, “a construction that bespoke both disgust and longing on the part of white readers and minstrel-goers.”27 In party political terms, the Northern minstrelsy vision of plantation slavery corresponded with images of the “peculiar institution” advanced by its Southern apologists and a Democratic Party anxious to maintain its long-standing North-South alliance in the face of a Republican Party formed in 1854 chiefly to resist the westward expansion of Southern slavery. The majority of minstrel showmen in the 1840s had known alliances with the Democratic Party and their shows in effect campaigned for an alliance between white workers in the North and plantation interests in the South. Significantly, the song featured in Dan Emmett’s famous “Dixie’s Land” walk-around finale from the Virginia Minstrels sellout shows of 1843 eventually became the unofficial Confederate national anthem.

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More precisely, Edwin P. Christy was the personal favorite in the mid1850s of many Democratic politicians in New York City, in part because of his partnership with Henry Wood, reformist Mayor Fernando Wood’s brother. Christy, the great minstrelsy pioneer, retired not long after, and eventually died after throwing himself out of a window during the Civil War. Stephen Collins Foster (1826–64), who wrote the popular songs “Camptown Races,” “Swanee River,” and “My Old Kentucky Home” for Christy’s Minstrels in the early 1850s, was heavily involved in the Buchanan antiabolitionist wing of the Democratic Party and also composed songs about the unifying ethos of the South. Throughout the 1840s, on the other hand, Northern Whig Party rhetoric stressed the benefits of temperance, self-regulation, and piety, while also adopting a hostile stance toward recent Irish immigration. Such policies were hardly likely to endear the Whigs to Barnum-like promoters of popular amusements, such as minstrelsy, whose profits relied upon alcohol consumption and mass ticket sales.28 Popular drama also served to exemplify political divisions and minstrel allegiances. Hence blackface minstrelsy was mixed with melodrama and “moral” or reform drama in the theatrical versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin popular in the 1850s and loosely based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, like the essentially pro-Southern or temporizing H. J. Conway play put on hesitantly at Barnum’s American Museum in 1853 (see chapter 1). Nearly all the Tom plays turned the novel’s slave auction scene into a kind of minstrel olio, or variety act, with each “slave” required to show off his musical and comic talents to the buyers. Minstrel songs were also readily slotted into theatrical Uncle Tom’s, such as Topsy singing “My Old Kentucky Home” or Uncle Tom himself singing the “Old Folks at Home” on slave-master Legree’s plantation. Paradoxically, much of the stereotypical racial politics in the Barnum-approved Conway play, first performed in November 1852 at the Boston Museum, was derived from minstrelsy and equated with any Southern setting in the 1850s containing African American characters.29 African American Minstrelsy Most white Americans at mid-century were unwilling to tolerate blacks as creators and performers of classical music, with the exception of isolated recitalists such as singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, the “African Nightingale.” She made her debut in 1851 as a soprano in Buffalo, New York, while a more famous soprano, “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, was touring America managed by Barnum. Greenfield’s career climaxed only three years later in England. Although isolated troupes of genuinely

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black minstrels appeared as early as 1855, it was another decade before African Americans established themselves in minstrelsy, their first large-scale entrance into the show business. Other than singer and dancer William Henry “Juba” Lane, who starred with white minstrel troupes in 1845 and 1848, and who thereafter migrated to England, the only African American to perform with a white minstrel company was the talented midget Thomas Dilward. Because of his size, “Japanese Tommy” was thought of as a freak or “curious attraction,” despite his violin playing, singing, and dancing, and only this label sanctioned his performance with whites. Dilward began his minstrel career with George Christy in 1853, perhaps as a competitor to Barnum’s General Tom Thumb; subsequently he played with several well-known white troupes, as well as with a few black minstrel troupes. Even so, minstrelsy was not opened generally to African Americans until the advent of all-black touring companies in the 1860s.30 When black minstrel troupes first began to appear in mid-century, they stressed their authenticity as genuine Negro slaves and concentrated on Southern plantation material. None survived for long until Brooker and Clayton’s Georgia Minstrels billed themselves as “The Only Simon Pure Negro Troupe in the World” and in 1865–66 toured successfully throughout the Northeast. “Georgia Minstrels” thereafter became synonymous with black or “Colored Minstrels,” whereas white performers in blackface usually called themselves “Negro” or “Nigger Minstrels.” The first African American minstrels did not use burnt cork, except for the end men who used it as a symbolic but nonetheless demeaning comic mask. Beginning in the early 1870s, white managers increasingly took over the most successful black troupes, benefiting from the successful 1866 tour of Sam Hague’s Slave Troupe in England that helped black minstrels establish themselves as bona fide entertainers back home. Clearly, the transatlantic crossing could add cultural status and respectability. Once African Americans became marketable as entertainers, it was generally white managers who reaped the profits, as with black professional footballers a century later. Thus white tavern owner Charles Callender took over Sam Hague’s troupe in 1872 and began turning black minstrelsy into big business through extensive newspaper advertising and Barnum-style sales promotion.31 In 1878, following poor attendances, Callender sold the original Georgia Minstrels to J. H. Haverly who promoted his black minstrels by increasing the troupe’s size, adding new features, advertising flamboyantly, and completely focusing his shows on plantation material. After years of success, the high point for the Haverly Colored Minstrels came in the summer of 1881, when they followed his refined white Mastodon

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Minstrels to England for a triumphal year’s tour. Black managers of minstrel troupes such as Lew Johnson could only compete by playing one-niters in marginal western states such as Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and Montana, where there was little white capital or competition. Charles Hicks was more prominent as an African American manager but his troupes toured successfully only in commercially marginal British Dominions such as Australia and New Zealand that American whites either did not covet or control. Fittingly, perhaps, Hicks died in Surabaya, East Java, in the Dutch East Indies, whilst touring in 1902 with a black minstrel company.32 Black minstrels were promoted post–Civil War, in what remained a deeply racist society, as natural, spontaneous people on exhibit to whites, rather than as professional entertainers. Hence Brooker and Clayton’s troupe was sold in the press as “genuine plantation darkies from the South” who provided “peculiar music and characteristics of plantation life.” The presence of African Americans as minstrels undoubtedly served to legitimize their racist caricature as “plantation darkies.” Although they performed within such a heavily stereotyped framework, black minstrels clearly demonstrated their multiple singing and dancing talents. Elements of African American culture clearly surfaced in black minstrelsy, even if only a small part of it showed through. To survive as entertainers, argues Robert C. Toll, blacks had to develop masks and façades that allowed whites to indulge their racial fantasies, while creating their own performance art whose words and actions could be differently interpreted by audiences composed of either aspiring whites, and the black bourgeoisie, or ordinary working people. Lampoons of ungainly black soldiers in uniformed marching units, for example, had been occasional minstrel features since the Civil War and from the mid1870s they became the standard finale for the first part of the black minstrel show. From an act whose primary function was to make fun of black soldiers, black minstrels evolved a popular show feature combining the American public’s taste for brass bands, marching units, and the idea that black Americans were harmless high-stepping “strutters.” In this, as in so many other ways, black minstrelsy was a microcosm of African American history.33 During 1875–76, “jubilee” or Southern Negro religious music also made its first great impact on the black minstrel show and subsequently helped to revitalize both black and white minstrelsy. Church music or spirituals (“Let My People Go,” “Angels, Meet Me at the Cross-roads,” “Oh, Rock o’ My Soul”) did not seriously challenge minstrelsy’s plantation mythology, however, but allowed whites to retain their negative caricatures of blacks by focusing on and exaggerating as alien African American styles of worship that differed greatly from more straitlaced white norms. In

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direct correlation to the emphasis on religious or gospel music, the amount of plantation material in the black minstrel show increased until the term “jubilee” became synonymous with “plantation.” Staged black religious meetings thereby became little other than plantation parties that exaggerated the more exuberant black forms of religious worship to suit white preconceptions.34 Black performer Billy Kersands (1842?–1915), famous for songs with Callender’s Georgia Minstrels in the 1870s such as “Old Aunt Jemima” and “Mary’s Gone with a Coon,” was renowned for playing a slow-witted, big-mouthed, black caricature. He thereby reinforced negative images, such as an emphasis on large lips and mouth, by acting them out as entertainment. Yet Kersands became equally popular, despite this stereotyping, with Southern audiences, black and white. For a later generation of New York theatregoers before and during the First World War, light-skinned West Indian headliner Bert Williams (1874–1922), an accomplished blackface performer, carried on the basic Kersands minstrelsy tradition of “playing the coon,” minus the gaping mouth, by dancing the high-kicking, strutting cakewalk. Yet the burnt cork face mask began to overwhelm Williams who felt increasingly degraded by his situation and sank into bouts of melancholia and heavy drinking. After his more flamboyant stage partner George Walker died in 1911, the continued personal humiliations that accompanied Williams’ professional success became difficult to bear. Although trapped in blackface, his slouching “Jonah Man,” or careless, unlucky black, allowed well-to-do white audiences at the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway to laugh at the familiar in exaggerated form. Williams’ characters were usually worse off, or more ignorant and stupid, than the ticket holders. As the twentieth century drew to a close, movie audiences may have drawn similar consolation by laughing at big-grin Eddie Murphy in one prolonged scene from The Nutty Professor (1996) playing all three generations of a caricatured, overweight black family sitting at the same dinner table. Conversely, with African Americans no longer restricted to playing subservient roles in Hollywood movies—a development toward which Murphy made his own contribution in the 1980s—the performance choices open to black entertainers are now infinitely greater than those presented to Bert Williams.35 Equally, when black performers became minstrel showmen after the Civil War, they brought a transfusion of their own popular culture with them, despite acting out well-established minstrel stereotypes of “darkies.” Within these cultural limits, black minstrels began to modify plantation caricatures with “jubilee” religious music and for the first time attracted large numbers of both black and white people to commercial amusements.

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This was to have a long-term impact, through the cultural interaction of blacks and whites, upon the entire amusement industry. “Besides confirming the folk origins of American popular entertainment, minstrelsy’s borrowing of Afro-American culture is of great significance,” asserts Toll, “because it was the first indication of the powerful influence Afro-American culture would have on the performing arts in America.”36 Minstrelsy Diversifies The real heyday of American commercial minstrelsy was over in the Reconstruction years after the Civil War as “plantation life” had lost its credibility with the departure of slavery and blackface or white minstrelsy had to adjust to new and unfavorable economic conditions. Yet minstrelsy’s continued popularity was undoubtedly reflected by its ability to accommodate and also to be absorbed by other forms of entertainment. For example, elements of minstrelsy now found their way into the succession of varied stage turns dubbed “variety.” This came about because the original minstrel show format referred to above sandwiched an “olio” of comedians, dancers, singers, and other individual acts between the main blackface segments and the “afterpiece” (a practice that could be traced back to earlier theatrical performances and the intervals between play acts). Subsequently, the olio alone became converted into the main attraction of many stage shows preceding and especially during the Civil War period. Manager R. W. Williams, credited with opening the first recognizable New York variety theater, The Santa Claus in 1857, claimed he had “struck out into a new line, and added white performances to his burntcork celebrities.” Another veteran theatrical producer, M. B. Leavitt, confirmed variety theater was “an offshoot of early minstrelsy” and wrote further that, in the 1860s, “the main features in what was then called a good variety program [were] ballads, minstrel acts, comic songs, gymnastics, jugglery, fancy dancing and short sketches in black[face].” The short and diverse routines of the variety theater bill then went on to form the main components of what in the late nineteenth-century became known as “vaudeville” (see chapter 6), the most popular form of entertainment in America until the advent of the moving picture show.37 Minstrel shows faced increasing competition from the new-style variety that gradually severed its connections with concert saloon “waiter girls” and as “vaudeville” shifted its low-cost mixed entertainment toward the family minstrel audience. Minstrelsy was also transformed by the explosive growth of “feminine spectacle” or females as sex objects that occurred in

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the wake of Lydia Thompson’s British Blondes landmark American tour of 1868. This saw the emergence of a raunchier, also transgressive, burlesque format that embraced even the satirizing of gender roles by scantily clad women. Dozens of female minstrel troupes started to appear at the beginning of the 1870–71 theatrical season as a result of a transfer in the audience for burlesque from the pious middle to the more rowdy working classes in the wake of the previous year’s antiburlesque hysteria. Minstrel companies hence tried to broaden their appeal by traveling more widely into Middle America, advertising their shows with massive parades and huge pictorial billboards, adding more performers and specialty acts to the olio, and replacing white male minstrels in blackface with attractive female burlesque performers.38 Reasoning that if audiences had responded with enthusiasm to a dozen minstrels in the 1850s, a doubling or quadrupling of the cast would revive that enthusiasm 20 years later, companies often numbering 40 or more, such as J. H. Haverly’s Mastodon Minstrels, complete with brass band, periodically toured America’s entertainment centers. Traditional blackface minstrelsy also found new life from the mid-1880s onward with elaborate stage settings and a more “modern” context. White minstrels prolonged the life of the form by shifting to more lavish productions, greater variety, urban topics, and even an abandonment of blackface itself. They could not compete as all-male troupes, however, with new forms of entertainment such as the revue featuring music, comedy, a tenuous plot, and beautiful chorus girls. The versatility of vaudeville, revue, and musical shows also meant that white minstrelsy’s attempts to adapt only made it easier for the former to absorb the blackface act as one of many. Yet if minstrel show revenues declined steadily for professional troupes, the form remained a mainstay of amateur groups into the midtwentieth century. In the summer of 1909, the Cohan and Harris Minstrels, really the last traditional minstrel show, opened on Broadway but closed after only two disappointing weeks. This is often taken to represent the end of stand-alone minstrelsy as a popular form of entertainment in New York, even if still common in the American hinterlands and in parts of Britain. Whites masquerading as blacks eventually became incorporated first into variety, then into vaudeville, musical comedy, and the cinema. Most Americans growing up in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, would have been familiar with performances or movies featuring burnt-cork performers such as New York’s energetic Al Jolson (1886–1950), the Russian-born son of a rabbi, who first toured with circus and minstrel shows. His semaphored blackface performance of “My Mammy” in that famous early talkie The Jazz Singer

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(1927) has been aptly called “an inadvertent Jewish parody of almost every plantation song from the late 1840s onward.” Even the young Sophie Tucker (see chapter 6) started out as a “coon shouter” by offering a bastardized version of what were thought to be “authentic” African American folk songs.39 In his teens, musical comedy star Eddie Cantor (1892–1964), like Jolson, another Jewish show business recruit from New York’s Lower East Side, played the four-theater People’s Vaudeville Company circuit as a “Dutch” or German dialect comic, then as a “Hebrew” or “Jew” comic. Finally, running out of ethnic options, he came on stage in the blackface makeup with which he was long associated. In contrast to the Southern plantation stereotypes that dominated nineteenth-century blackface comedy, Cantor’s stage character was an effete near coward who wore big, white-rimmed glasses over large “banjo eyes,” a straw hat, and clothes a size too small, to increase the impression of slightness. Exuding vitality and charisma, from 1911 to 1918 Cantor used blackface almost exclusively on the Broadway stage in sellout shows such as the Ziegfeld Follies. Eddie also blacked up on occasion for his subsequent and highly popular musical comedy films, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, the most inappropriate being Roman Scandals (1933), a sort of blackface in toga, followed by Kid Millions (1934). Interviewed in 1964, toward the end of his life, when a reaction had set in against ethnic stereotyping and burnt-cork makeup, Cantor stated that the colorful and enjoyable days of the vaudeville era were now long gone. He regretted that the public, of various ethnic groups, was no longer allowed to laugh at “Dutch” comedians or German-Jewish dialect and slapstick acts such as Weber and Fields. Also lost, Cantor claimed, was the traditional blackface comedy show of James McIntyre and Thomas K. Heath called “The Georgia Minstrels” and the laughs created by Italian, Jewish, Irish, and other comedians who could deliver jokes without being “hamstrung” by ethnicity and political correctness (see chapter 6). “When this kind of harmless humor was banned,” said the elderly Cantor to the editor of The Hollywood Reporter, “it took half the fun out of show business.” Ethnic or stereotypical comedy that seemed “harmless” to entertainers of Cantor’s generation would nowadays be perceived as both offensive and demeaning toward various national identities and also nonwhite audiences.40 Yet whites who performed in blackface on the vaudeville stage, in parades, and at carnivals were not condemned as racist for the entire first half of the twentieth century and beyond. During the depression years of the 1930s, the federal government Works Progress Administration (WPA) even sponsored minstrel shows to cheer people up. The left-leaning

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Federal Theatre Project not only produced such shows around America, but it also distributed minstrel arrangements such as “The Darktown Follies,” “The Coon-Town Thirteen Club,” “Watermelon Minstrel,” and “Plantation Days with the Snowflake Family” for community youth groups. The stage minstrel show was later resurrected in a clichéd movie version of the life of minstrel Daniel Emmett, composer of Dixie (1943), played by Bing Crosby in blackface, with “Sambo” comedy routines supplied by Willie Best. Versions of minstrelsy played right through the war years as, “undeterred by democratic ideology, the blackface minstrel pranced and sang for both the military and civilian populations.” Minstrelsy’s huge continuing appeal was later demonstrated in movies such as The Jolson Story (1946) and its sequel Jolson Sings Again (1949). Both featured actor Larry Parks, soon to be “black-listed” in McCarthy-era Hollywood, miming the inimitable black-faced Al.41 The British continued the live tradition of minstrelsy well into the 1950s, when few English seaside holiday resorts were complete without their minstrel show performed on the pier or jetty projecting into the sea. Despite its inherent racism, The Black and White Minstrel Show on BBC Television with Leslie Crowther as host was remarkably popular peak-time viewing from 1958 to 1978. This Saturday night sing-along variety show featured “blacked-up” whites, the George Mitchell Minstrel Singers, in the style of Kentucky minstrels. It was the first ever recipient in 1961 of the Golden Rose of Montreux Award and had audiences of 16.5 million by the mid-1960s. The long-running show was increasingly felt to be racially offensive by the mid-1970s, however, and so was eventually dropped from the BBC schedules in 1978, when it still pulled in five million viewers. Even then, a stage version ran at the Victoria Palace in London for ten more years, followed by tours of Australia and New Zealand.42 As minstrelsy lost its dominance of the American entertainment business from the 1880s onward with the development of vaudeville and burlesque, the opportunities for black Americans to participate in mainstream American popular entertainment except in stereotypical form declined. African American ragtime, blues, and jazz artists were limited to performing largely for fellow black audiences (except in some white-patronized Harlem clubs), at least until the 1930s and the advent on radio and disc of popular jazz swing bands as those of Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington. Only with the wider cultural recognition by white society, after World War II, of modern jazz, rhythm and blues, and later rock music, would the virtual exclusion of nonwhites from American forms of mass entertainment radically change, although perennial in blackface Amos ’n’ Andy-style format.43

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In America’s popular musical culture, African American creativity was highly evident over the course of the twentieth century. Early rock ’n’ roll music is now seen by musicologists as essentially black music played and marketed for larger white audiences. So although a record of Bill Haley and the Comets had a cover of black artist Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” in 1951, the latter’s original version is widely credited as the first rock ’n’ roll record ever released. The influence of black rhythm and blues on early rock releases such as the dumpy, middle-aged Bill Haley’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll” (1954) and “Rock Around the Clock” (1955) is also undeniable. Elvis Presley’s subsequent 1956 hit record “Hound Dog” was a reworking of Big Mamma Thornton’s less demure 1953 version. White artists such as Presley, Johnnie Ray, and bands such as the Rolling Stones, were taken on by record companies in the 1950s and early 1960s to front and, in some cases, sanitize the often sexually evocative lyrics of black performers such as Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry, for young white audiences. Since the advent of hip hop or rap music, born in the mid-1970s as a soundtrack to block parties in the south Bronx, the ascendancy of African American musicians and performers in the popular music scene has become more assured.44 Endnote The success of new entertainment forms such as minstrelsy was linked to the sprawling cities that sustained them. It is noteworthy that, for example, the first white minstrel troupe performed to huge acclaim early in 1843 in the rapidly expanding metropolis of New York City and not in the Deep South. Since so much in both high and low American culture was still derivative of British and European antecedents, the wholly homegrown nature of minstrelsy as a form of popular amusement merits recognition, however unpalatable its undeniably racist agenda is to modern values. Blackface contained multiple meanings, borrowing from English, French, and Italian musical, dramatic, and literary sources as part of a drive to establish some kind of cultural parity with Europe. Minstrelsy was thereby “a commercial enterprise created for a mass market at a time when the United States lacked a definable national culture.”45 Many of the blackface entertainers who went on to form the earliest minstrel troupes in the 1840s, such as the Virginia Minstrels themselves, had started out as individual performers or clowns at the circus. Minstrelsy returned to its roots in the following century and was often an additional ingredient of the American circus. Hence a sideshow at the HagenbeckWallace circus of 1923 offered, several times a day, “a splendid colored minstrel production.”46 Starting out as a self-enclosed theatrical or variety

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form, the minstrel show had long become widely disseminated by the time of this particular circus. As well as being recorded on the new electronic mass media of radio and the phonograph, blackface performers could now be found in vaudeville and revue, at carnivals, and in circus sideshows. Chapter 4 is devoted to the history of the circus in all its varied Americanized forms and asks, in particular, how such shows came to be distinguished from their British and continental European counterparts.

The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth. Poster, the Strobridge Co., 1897 Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZC4-921).

CHAPTER 4 THE AMERICANIZED CIRCUS: BARNUM & BAILEY IN EXCELSIS

f the traditional circus, with its acrobats, clowns, lions and tigers, trapeze artists, and ringmaster in top hat and tails, has now almost faded away as a cultural phenomenon, commentators agree that the sawdust ring was at its most vibrant during the so-called Golden Age from 1870 to 1914. While other show business forms dealt with here were concentrated in towns and cities, the circus toured more widely, reaching into remote settlements and becoming rural America’s major commercial leisure experience. Yet mergers and combinations meant that by the early 1920s, there were fewer than 50 tent circuses traveling around the country. By the midtwentieth-century the fast declining American circus had become a glowing if vulgar representation of lost glamour and romance, reaching a cinematic apogee in Cecil B. DeMille’s big-top spectacle The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), a “Jumbo-sized package” of all the circus narrative clichés that Hollywood money could then buy.1 This chapter starts with the beginnings of the circus in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century America, followed by the emergence of the railroad-transported circus. It then goes on to look at three-ring circuses and parades, followed by a look at both Barnum’s circuses before he met up with James A. Bailey and their formation of the famous Barnum & Bailey Circus. Finally, the fortunes of the American circus in the twentieth century will be briefly narrated. P. T. Barnum’s role as a circus showman during the 1870s and 1880s signified, above all, the adaptation of what was perceived by many as a morally disreputable form of male amusement—associated with roughs, con artists, “rascally” clowns, and “indecently-clad” female acrobats—into one geared far more toward a domesticated and mass family audience. From a Christian and commercial standpoint, both of which Barnum claimed to represent, this timely reformation made sound moral and economic sense.

I

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The American Circus under Canvas How did the circus originally get transported from the Old World to the New? The first acknowledged circus proprietor in America was trick or stunt rider John Bill Ricketts (17?–1801), an Englishman who had served a horse-riding apprenticeship in the 1780s under retired cavalry officer, horse tamer, and circus pioneer Philip Astley (1742–1814) at his circus “amphitheatre” near London’s Westminster Bridge. Astley had come up with the idea of charging admission to the crowds who came to watch students at his riding school, hence trick horsemanship formed the basis of nearly every program in the early years of the British circus. Besides equestrianism, Astley and his wife soon presented a wide variety of other acts, such as feats of strength, gymnasts forming a human pyramid, or clowns tumbling and leaping on a trampoline. On Ricketts’ arrival across the Atlantic in 1792, with his brother, Astley’s apprentice opened a riding school at the corner of 12th and Market Streets in Philadelphia, then the young republic’s largest city, where he put on circus acts. The brothers had to recruit American performers, since apparently Ricketts brought no regular company of his own. Over the next eight years, in cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York, the brothers put on a mixture of drama, equestrianism, acrobatics, rope dancing, and clowning, in various purpose-built and circular wooden arenas. In 1795 the two were performing riding and acrobatic acts with others at the Greenwich Theatre, near the Battery in New York. Because constructions costs were high, early circuses generally limited their tours to large urban areas where they could be guaranteed an audience big enough to cover building expenses. Fire was a constant liability that drove many circus owners out of business. Ricketts’ eventual departure from Philadelphia in 1801 was precipitated by a fire, which completely destroyed his amphitheater there. After a short but eventful stay in Guadeloupe, searching for more profitable entertainment sites in the West Indies, he attempted to sail back to England but was lost at sea when his ship went down. The American taste for circus entertainment had been whetted, however, and large numbers of European performers, mainly French and English, made their way to the New World to continue where Ricketts had left off.2 So up to the mid-1820s most circuses in Britain and America were presented in large wooden arenas especially made for them. The famous new Astley’s Ampitheatre, for example, built in 1798 in London, held incredible hippodramas, equestrian melodramas, and acrobatic pantomimes on horseback. The majority of shows saw celebrated riders such as Andrew Ducrow and their mounts engaged in combat, while rescuing

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infants and heroines, all the while galloping across the arena. Americanborn rivals to Ricketts soon began to appear, meanwhile, including Rufus Welch who in 1818 managed a wagon show. Other early circus proprietors were “Old” John Robinson, James W. Bancker, and Dick Sands. The Mount Pitt Circus on Broome Street, New York, seating 3,500 on its opening in 1826, was at the time the largest place of amusement in America. Yet most circus historians concede that, a year earlier, Joshua Purdy Brown (1802?–34) had begun performing in a canvas tent in Wilmington, Delaware, and thereby completely transformed the nature of this form of popular entertainment. For, now the whole circus enterprise could move at once to even a remote community, after a onenight stand elsewhere, without the necessity for a permanent wooden amphitheater.3 Proprietors were no longer dependent on large urban population centers but could now reach into previously isolated rural areas because they no longer had to invest significant capital into building an arena. As the circus started to travel by wagon and exhibit under canvas, it united forces with another popular form of public entertainment, the animal menagerie business. American circus owners found this sort of combination attractive, partly because many New England clergy otherwise denounced the circus for its seminude athletes and the practice of gambling on the show grounds. Purdy Brown, for example, combined the two in 1828, while the Wright and Brown Menagerie and Circus exhibited a zebra, camels, and monkeys on ponies, as well as horsemanship, vaulting, and clowns. The lion tamer first emerged as a circus star when dashing Isaac van Amburgh entered the lion cages in the 1820s, cracking a whip, and “tamed” the crowd-drawing big cats. His circus, like that of his “lion king” rival James “Yankee” Carter, toured extensively in Britain between 1838 and 1845. When no longer agile, van Amburgh entered into a partnership with P. T. Barnum during the mid-1860s to open a museum and menagerie in New York City (see chapter 1).4 The constant movement of the American circus was henceforth unique in comparison to its relatively settled European counterparts. Where possible, a number of small circuses also used water transport, as did the young Barnum in 1838, loading their equipment onto boats that sailed along America’s wide rivers and canals, and setting up tents near the banks. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), the representative figure of his time, vividly recalled such a riverside circus in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), drawing on boyhood memories of life along the Mississippi 40 years earlier. Evading the watchmen, young Huck dives in under the tent of a “real bully circus” to see “the splendidest sight that ever was.” Twenty or so riders are circling round the ring, with no shoes or stirrups, in their

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drawers and undershirts. Then they ride standing: The men looking ever so tall and airy and straight, with their heads bobbing and skimming along, away up there under the tent-roof, and every lady’s rose-leafy dress flapping soft and silky around her hips, and she looking like the most loveliest parasol. And then faster and faster they went, all of them dancing, first one foot stuck out in the air and then the other, the horses leaning more and more, and the ring-master going round and round the center-pole, cracking his whip and shouting “hi!-hi!” and the clown cracking jokes behind him. . . .5

Clowns had been a feature of American circuses since the early equestrian shows. In the mid-1840s America’s first truly famous and highly paid clown Dan Rice (1823–1901), born Daniel McClaren in New York, traveled the Mississippi river route along with the leading steamship circuses of the day. As was then fashionable, he often sang in blackface in the inevitable “Ethiopian entertainment.” In time, as an accomplished animal trainer, circus clown, composer, museum owner, and latterly political campaigner, he became a figure of national prominence. Dan’s rise to fame was launched on the steamboat river palaces. Although as a young clown in circuses he was managed by “Old” John Robinson, Gilbert R. Spaulding, Seth B. Howes, and Rufus Welch, he found greatest renown with his own tent circus show of the 1850s and 1860s. Labeling himself the “Great American Humorist,” the egregious Dan subsequently performed parodies of Shakespeare, ran for Democratic office, toured the country and, swept up in the new cult of celebrity, spoke out on issues of the day before large crowds. He is often cited erroneously as a potential model for political cartoonist Thomas Nast’s “Uncle Sam” (1869), given that, it was only long after the first appearance of the cartoons that Dan routinely dressed in a red, white, and blue star-spangled costume, top hat, and chin whiskers. Dan’s eventful but now largely forgotten career spanned the mid-century period in which the clown was the preeminent performer. The big top regular’s demotion, however, came in the late nineteenth-century, the era of the three-ring circus.6 As circuses increased in popularity, so did more and more proprietors or traveling showmen venture into this enthralling but financially hazardous form of performance entertainment, with their skills and their capital. Consequently, the story of the American circus, according to the late George Speaight, “is a bewildering jungle of continually changing names and ownerships. It is further confused by the large number of different people all called Bailey.”7 Two major tendencies soon became apparent in America, nonetheless: one was the aggressive competition between rival

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circus shows and the other was the continuous attempt to minimize these circus rivalries by forming partnerships and all-embracing combinations. The latter tendency eventually gave rise to the lengthy double- or triplebarreled titles major circuses often adopted, such as “The Great Adam Forepaugh Show Combined with Sells Brothers Big Show of the World,” “Barnum’s The Greatest Show on Earth, Howe’s Great London Circus and Sanger’s Royal British Menagerie,” or later the “Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows.” One of the most famous combines became known as the Flatfoots and went on acquiring new circuses and menageries by purchase or partnership until the appearance of Barnum & Bailey in the early 1880s. Emergence of the Railroad Circus The railroad-driven and long-distance circus was largely an American phenomenon because the spaces to be covered were more immense than in the emerging nation states of Western Europe. From the 1870s onward the circus reached out into the massive American heartland as railroads made possible both long distance travel and the movement of huge multiringed circus spectacles that would otherwise have been difficult to move both cheaply and quickly. For, westward population shift and the growth of national rail travel led to a remarkably efficient system of loading and transporting circuses into the trains that crisscrossed the vast American continent. In June 1869 former acrobat, clown, and animal trainer Dan Castello or Costello (1832?–1909)—about whom reliable information is sparse—made the first coast to coast circus and menagerie tour in American history, much of it by train using eight railway cars. The same number of circuses were traveling by rail just four years later. Castello’s original journey, in part overland, was undertaken just weeks after the world’s first transcontinental railroad was completed. The last golden spike had been tapped in by the California railroad magnate Leland Stanford on May 10, 1869, when the Central Pacific famously met the Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah.8 Relatively fast travel from one coast of America to another at last became possible. Ten years after the two Pacific railroads first converged in Utah, Scottish novelist and essayist Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850–94), the impending author of Treasure Island (1881), traveled across the continent to reach his prospective wife, the vivacious Fanny Osbourne, then living in seclusion with her daughter in Monterey, California. Disembarking at New York, he boarded a train for Pittsburgh, then went on to Chicago, and reached Council Bluffs, Iowa, by the end of the first week. Next the future novelist transferred to the Union Pacific railroad to

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cross Nebraska, Wyoming, and part of Utah on a crowded emigrant train. At Ogden, Utah, he changed to the Central Pacific to undertake the last phase of his journey, with the train crossing the Sierras and then making its way down toward sea level and San Francisco Bay, Stevenson’s last stop before going on further south to Monterey. The subsequent transcontinental railroad linked the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe line with the Southern Pacific at Needles in southern California and by 1884 the Santa Fe had completed its line to San Diego.9 So the enormous railroad network, completed after the Civil War, eventually helped transform the circus into “a frenetic three-ring, two-stage, cross-country extravaganza.” Henceforth able to travel on a network of uniform railroad gauge, the circus’s rising prominence during the 1870s and 1880s became a highly visible symbol of national expansion and consolidation. Clearly, the process of democratizing and nationalizing culture in this huge, diverse, and still only loosely connected “union” owed much to the impact of the transcontinental railroad. In terms of adapting the circus to rail travel, self-effacing showman William Cameron Coup (1836–95) who, in partnership with Castello, coaxed Barnum out of semiretirement in 1870 to “front” his circus combination the following year (see below), was a more significant innovator than the better-known impresario.10 Circus history is complex and tortuous and has been obscured by numerous conflicting claims of “firsts” but it seems Coup most probably invented the end-loading method of placing circus wagons onto trains, pioneered the first privately owned circus train with its own specially designed railroad cars, and also introduced half-rate circus day railroad excursions. The last planned to bypass the smaller towns, where daily receipts were limited, and make the audience, rather than the circus troupe, do the traveling. Rail transport also made carrying heavier loads far more convenient than horse-drawn wagons. As will become evident, Barnum, Coup, and Castello’s rail-transported Great Traveling World’s Fair, complete with a parade, menagerie, and sideshow, easily surpassed the biggest overland wagon shows.11 Because this inaugural railroad season was such a financial success for the three partners in 1872, the blueprint for gigantic circus exhibitions at the turn of the nineteenth century, the railway quickly became the standard method of transport for large shows. Rail travel was, on the whole, better for circus workers, as it allowed them to rest more easily between locations than a bumpy, jarring, overland wagon. Eventually, railroad showmen referred contemptuously to overland wagon circuses as “mud shows.” The size of a circus could be measured by the number of railway cars it needed: the first Barnum, Coup, and Castello railroad show used 65; by 1903 Barnum & Bailey had increased their requirement to 92; Barnum & Bailey

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and the Ringling Bros. circus each used 84 by 1910; and at the height of its operations in 1947, the Ringling-Barnum show used 109 cars. Some small circuses traveled on only 2 or 3 cars, but an average show needed about 30 to 40. Yet by 1950 Ringling-Barnum were moving 1,400 people with all their animals and equipment on one-day stands with only five railroad cars. Nonetheless, during the Golden Age before 1914, the railroad circus “consolidated an image of American wealth, ambition and systematic organization on a grand scale.”12 Three-Ring Circuses and Parades In 1873 Andrew Haight’s Great Eastern Circus and Menagerie announced that it would present its show in two rings. That same year “P. T. Barnum’s Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, Hippodrome and Circus,” managed by W. C. Coup, had two rings with a large hippodrome track running round them, and this was announced as a “three ring circus.” The term “ring” was clearly given a rather loose interpretation that has misled some circus historians. In 1881 the then recently formed Barnum & Bailey combine actually did have three sawdust rings. By 1886, when they were briefly in combination with rival Adam Forepaugh, their expanded circus could boast four rings and in addition, two elevated stages placed between them for acrobats, together with a separate race track.13 Typical of circus owners’ preoccupation with who first authored some new innovation, British showman “Lord” George Sanger (1827–1911) disputed Barnum’s pioneering the three-ring novelty, insisting that his 1856 show was presented in three rings and on two platforms. By the 1890s, in any case, the use of three rings was standard practice with all the major American circuses. Consequently, the tents had become huge—by 1898 the Barnum & Bailey big top tent could take an incredible 14,000 customers twice daily. Even so, this outsize tent could be taken down, loaded on wagons, and taken off the ground in less than one hour after the end of the last show.14 The ostentatious three-ring circus of this end-of-the-century era paralleled the enormous urban growth of the United States of America under the impact of mass migration. Hence putting three rings side by side in one long tent, where different performances were given simultaneously, became a popular way to maximize growing circus audiences. In Barnum & Bailey’s large outer ring, or racing track, a “Roman hippodrome” involving chariot races was also often exhibited. Evident here is the American show business proclivity to go one better than supposedly more effete and constrained European rivals. Three-ring circuses had been tried occasionally in Europe but they never caught on to the extent that they did in America where spectacle, opulence, and size were all important.

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Circus publicity did not tell patrons much about the skill of the acrobats, the grace of the equestrians, or the wit of the clowns but a great deal about the number of elephants, the size of the tent, the enormous menagerie, and the amount of money the show grossed. Also, whereas men made up the great majority of the circus audience in antebellum America, by the 1890s advertising posters portrayed well-dressed white women and families promenading as part of the show crowd. More relaxed fin de siècle moral attitudes also meant that acrobatic female acts became increasingly visible and socially acceptable. Reputable and well-publicized circuses, like that of Barnum & Bailey, could only benefit from the growing number of families, as well as young, unmarried working-class men and women, who regularly visited the circus. “More than anyone . . . Barnum transformed the circus from an unsavory source of cheap adult entertainment into a purified setting for children, young and old.”15 As the number of circuses grew and competition intensified, there began a great rivalry along the show routes between the various combinations. One traveling circus would often paste its marketing posters (“hang paper”) on top of those of its rivals. Gangs of advance men or billing crews guarding their respective circus posters to prevent another show covering them up sometimes fought pitched battles. Splendidly illustrated posters, then always lithographed in color and many from the celebrated Strobridge Lithographing Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, played an increasingly important part in publicizing the circus, and grew larger and larger—amply signifying the rise of national promotional advertising. In 1893 Sells Brothers Circus promised, all on one poster, a Moorish Caravan and spectacular Pilgrimage to Mecca, a Roman Hippodrome, a three-ring circus, a fivecontinent menagerie, and an Imperial Japanese Troupe. The American principle of planned excess here typified the nation’s then favorite outdoor amusement.16 Circus parades along Main Street to advertise the day’s tent show became another central feature of American circus publicity, more so than in Western Europe (although there were some English precedents). The intention of the parade was to draw an inquisitive crowd after it to the site of the circus itself. It originated in the circus band driving round town from the 1830s in a special carriage to advertise the performance. Soon special, decorated wagons, often drawn by camels and elephants as well as horses, were being made to house the band on these occasions. The circus parade and calliope wagon developed into superb examples of American popular art, but the seeds of the tradition came by way of England from where magnificent decorated carriages were first obtained by visiting American showmen such as Seth B. Howes and Richard Sands. The triumphal cars of Renaissance royal processions may have inspired their highly opulent and

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elaborate design. Although there were excellent American carvers of elaborate parade carriages, such as John Stephenson, the English influence continued with Seth bringing four parade wagons back after the Howes and Cushing tour of England in the early 1860s, and larger ones again in 1870.17 Coup, Castello, and Barnum had a revolving Temple of Juno pulled by 20 camels in 1872, while the Car of Neptune, with its splendid mirrors and wood carvings, towered over 28 feet. Barnum also had some “telescopic golden chariots” made that year in London, with elaborate figures that telescoped mechanically in and out of the top of them. Forepaugh’s massive circus parade took five hours to wind its way through the streets of New York in the 1880s. Barnum & Bailey’s free street parade of 1912, by which time both the principals had been long dead, promised “the most magnificent, largest, greatest processional spectacle ever seen, given absolutely free at 10 o’clock a.m. preceding the initial exhibition of the Greatest Show on Earth.” The combination gave up these costly street parades not long after, in part because without levying a charge, they decreased, rather than aroused, box-office business. The overall impact of the circus on American society by the end of the nineteenth century clearly represented, nonetheless, a remarkable exercise in advertising and public relations.18 Barnum’s Circuses before Bailey From 1851 to 1855 Barnum’s “Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie” used elephants to good effect, but this was largely to display his freak exhibits in a modified traveling version of his famous American Museum in New York. Not until he was in semiretirement at age 60 was a reluctant Barnum persuaded by the versatile W. C. Coup and equestrian director Dan Castello to become a bona fide circus proprietor. “I thought I had finished [with] the show business,” Barnum wrote to his old friend Moses Kimball, “but just for a flyer I go it once more.” Enterprising showman Coup had actually started his show business career at age 14 by signing on with Barnum’s Asiatic Caravan, until he found work as a circus roustabout, before becoming assistant manager of the Yankee Robinson Show. He eventually teamed up with former clown Castello’s circus and “Egyptian Caravan” in 1869 and toured the Great Lakes region, and later Wisconsin. On October 8, 1870, Barnum agreed to accept 3 per cent of the new Coup and Castello show’s gross receipts in return for the use of his famous name and loan of his museum expertise, in addition to any profits due to him as a financial investor. Barnum’s principal interest at this time remained the “human curiosities” and other museum exhibits that should, he insisted, have their own tents before entry to the big-top circus.19

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Opening under canvas in Brooklyn, New York, on April 10, 1871, “P. T. Barnum’s Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome, combined with the Grand International Zoological Garden, Polytechnic Institute and Dan Castello’s Mammoth Circus” was expertly organized, managed, and advertised by Coup, using the drawing power of the self-advertising Barnum name. “The hero of the old Broadway American Museum appears again in New York,” announced that fall’s handbills, advertising his reappearance at the Empire Rink on Manhattan’s Third Avenue. Claiming to be America’s largest circus company, the first Barnum, Coup, and Castello circus gave a street parade and two daily performances to capacity crowds throughout the northeastern states. Significantly, the “museum” aspect was quite prominent, with 20 vans of waxworks, dioramas, mechanical figures, and such “human curiosities” as the much promoted “What Is It?”; Admiral Dot, a midget; Ann Leak, an armless wonder, and; Baby Esau, a bearded girl.20 Others had tried the rails, including showman Gilbert R. “Doc” Spalding, but Coup now conceived the idea of transporting the entire combined circus by rail, whereas the more conservative Barnum seemingly favored short trips with wagons. The subsequent season, on the trio’s first 65-rail-car tour in 1872, “Barnum’s Great Traveling Exposition” grossed almost a million dollars in six months and the museum section was again housed in a large separate tent (the Great Annex) on the midway. On the road, Coup invented mechanical appliances to get the first big circus tents into the air and to tear them down when the night show was over. The success of these early circuses was almost certainly due to Coup’s innovations in advertising, transport, and mechanization, whereas Barnum was initially aghast at his partner’s novel use of the expensive lithographic process for gaudily colored, circus-advertising posters. Together the triumvirate set out to recast the circus in a less morally objectionable form, while also making bold advances in circus showmanship, management, and use of the railroads. In effect, they aimed to elevate the lowbrow image of the still vastly popular circus by transforming it into a more middle-class family entertainment.21 In the summer of 1872, Barnum had rashly purchased the Hippotheatron buildings on New York’s East 14th Street, above what later became Greenwich Village, to open there a “Museum, Menagerie, Hippodrome, and Circus.” This was brashly advertised as a multifarious show promising Day and evening, the most costly Zoological Collection on the Continent! Dan Castello’s Chaste and Refined Circus! Visited by thousands day and night. The Gorgeous Amphitheatre! Resplendent with the beauty & fashion

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of the metropolis. Mons. D’Atalie, the man with the iron jaw! Mlle. Angela, the female Sampson, [and] the infant athletes appear at each exhibition!! Wild animals, 4 living giraffes, one hundred rare wild beasts! Group of marine monsters! Life sized automatons! Interesting works of mechanism, Admiral Dot, the wonderful California dwarf, Madagascar Family of Albinos, etc.22

Unfortunately, the extensive buildings and the entirety of Barnum’s collections burned to the ground just before Christmas Day, albeit the performers, man, woman, and beast, survived. The great showman, undeterred, set about mobilizing his agents around the world for a new circus show. The 1873 season of what had become “P. T. Barnum’s Great Traveling World’s Fair” promised all the regular attractions, and in addition, “living Fiji cannibals from the South Sea Islands,” elaborate chariots, a “marvelous talking machine,” a school of genuine sea lions, a “full-grown living Asiatic rhinoceros,” elephants, and the “only living giraffes” in America. With his customary marketing acumen, Barnum offered a $200,000 challenge to rival circus managers if they could produce but one-fifth of “the numerous, unique and marvelous combination of startling wonders” contained in his own traveling show: The reason for offering this challenge (which, in fact, I do not heartily approve of), is founded on the fact that certain unscrupulous showmen have copied my advertisements, Courier [promotional newspaper], programs, and advertised 20 times more than ever they had or expected to have. In justice to myself and the public, I make this apology for adopting the only means of getting at the facts.

At any rate, despite the competition, 35,000 paying customers visited the Barnum World’s Fair when it reached Troy, above Albany, New York, in October 1873. The local newspaper was piously convinced that “Barnum has shown us what can be done in the moral line even with a circus. This show goes about the country more as a missionary than as a mountebank and sets a good example of sobriety and industry to everybody.”23 On Barnum’s return from a purchasing trip abroad in April 1874, his partner Coup and son-in-law Samuel H. Hurd, the World’s Fair treasurer, opened “P. T. Barnum’s Great Roman Hippodrome and the Congress of Nations” in New York, to the applause of 10,000 people occupying a massive indoor coliseum built on the old New Haven railroad station at Madison Avenue and East 27th Street. This circus’s elaborate Cecil B. DeMille-style Roman entertainment, with its impressive chariot races and gladiatorial combats, preceded by some years the Hungarian émigré Kiralfy brothers’ spectacular indoor pageants over the following two decades. For

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their 1889–90 London circus, for example, Barnum & Bailey enlisted the 44-year-old Imre Kiralfy to create a truly remarkable Roman Empire display (see below). Conversely, 15 years earlier, Barnum had become alarmed at the risks Coup was taking on the Roman Hippodrome extravaganza and the money he was spending, threatening more than once to bail out of their now querulous partnership.24 In September 1874, not long after the death of his first wife, the 64year-old Barnum married Nancy Fish, 40 years his junior, the youngest daughter of an admiring English friend. The new father-in-law declared that reading the showman’s autobiography had helped transform his life from lowly cotton mill hand to prosperous Lancashire mill owner. The marriage seemed to reinvigorate Barnum, for, the uncharacteristic conservatism he had shown during his partnership with Coup now left him. Their business relationship was finally dissolved when Barnum started to lease out his name for use by other and competing traveling circus tours. An angered Coup sold his interests in the World’s Fair show, Castello having already departed. All the animals and costumes owned by the combined traveling show were auctioned off in Barnum’s adopted hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in December 1875. Local people long retained fond memories of unaccompanied elephants parading on their wide streets.25 Some credit Barnum for the World’s Fair success; others give recognition to the more experienced Coup who managed the show on the road. The two eventually disagreed about which one had been the major force and parted acrimoniously, their dispute still being adjudicated among circus historians. Certainly without Coup’s invitation to a hesitant Barnum to join a circus partnership, the latter’s present-day showman image would be much diminished. After the end of his four-year Barnum association, Coup opened the New York Aquarium with a German backer, Charles Reiche, and also a tent show advertised as “A College of Trained Animals and Cephalodian Monsters of the Deep from the New York Aquarium.” Splitting from Reiche in 1879, Coup founded the “New United Monster Shows,” supposedly the largest combined circus and menagerie on rails, but unfortunately a tragic train wreck soon closed the show. On a smaller scale, the once innovative W. C. Coup attempted various unsuccessful one-car circus and dime museum comebacks and then retired to Florida, where he died in near poverty on March 4, 1895.26 Meanwhile, with the end of his term as mayor of Bridgeport in sight, Barnum announced early in 1876 his intention to organize a new circus more colossal than ever before, and to this end purchased various European shows and menageries. Barnum’s stupendous American centennial show, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” then continued under various circus names. It was in effect leased to various managerial partners, including

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George F. Bailey (son-in-law of Barnum’s circus mentor Aaron Turner) and John J. Nathans (a member of the Flatfoots’ syndicate), who until 1880 handled the day-to-day business side. Barnum now returned to the more public and satisfying role of seeker of new and provocative acts, such as Colonel Goschen, the Palestine giant; Ella Richter or Madame Zazell, the original “human cannon ball,” and; Captain George Costenteus, the tattooed Greek nobleman. In the late 1870s, while Barnum’s circus was still taking in receipts close to half a million dollars annually, his greatest professional rivals were the Cooper & Bailey Circus, whose tents were soon to be illuminated by electric light.27 Reliable information about James Anthony Bailey (1847–1906), the greatest circus man of his generation, is fairly meager. Born in Detroit, Michigan, on July 4, 1847, as James A. McGinniss of northern Irish stock, at age 11 Barnum’s future partner ran away from the abusive home of his eldest sister and guardian, having been orphaned when he was approximately 8 years old. A year later, while working at the Pontiac Hotel in Detroit, “Jimmy” met promoter Frederick Harrison Bailey who was on the advance for the Robinson & Lake circus. F. H. Bailey, who claimed to be a descendant of circus businessman Hachaliah Bailey (1775–1845), owner of the famous female elephant “Old Bet,” gave the young boy a job posting handbills and never again did James return home. Lending credibility to the ubiquity of the name Bailey in circus history, the ambitious circus boy adopted his protector’s non-Ulster-inflected name, emerging in the late 1860s as James A. Bailey and working his way up to become general manager of small-time concert companies and wagon circuses. The unassuming but enterprising Jimmy Bailey in 1873 became a half partner in James Ebenezer Cooper’s International Circus. Three years later the Cooper & Bailey circus, including rhinos and elephants, was loaded aboard a steamer, to entertain patrons in Australia, New Zealand, and South America. It returned triumphantly to New York toward the end of 1878. Along with Cooper (1832–92) and a new partner, James L. Hutchinson, Bailey then purchased a bankrupt show (The Great London Circus) formerly owned by Seth B. Howes and merged it with Cooper & Bailey. The new combined and revitalized show that the hard-headed Bailey organized in due course became a serious competitor to the traveling circus run by old-time showman P. T. Barnum.28 The Barnum & Bailey Circus Apparently a baby elephant brought Bailey into partnership with Barnum, because when Cooper & Bailey’s “Hebe” gave birth to a small pachyderm, Barnum immediately telegraphed to Bailey offering $100,000 for the

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animal. Bailey now cleverly reproduced the telegram in his extensive advertising with the comment: “This is what Barnum thinks of Cooper & Bailey’s baby elephant.” Outsmarted by this advertising coup, Barnum settled for peace having “at last met showmen ‘worthy of my steel’” and Bailey’s friend Hutchinson acted as a go-between until the two shows combined. After the Barnum & Bailey amalgamation in the summer of 1880, Cooper opted out and Hutchinson, a former press agent who had been running the concessions for Cooper & Bailey, became the third partner. The then septuagenarian Barnum agreed to contribute half the capital and take half the profits, so Hutchinson and Bailey were allocated one-quarter interest each. Barnum’s publicity-shy partners were primarily shrewd businessmen who knew that the great showman’s name guaranteed strong box office, for which such a high percentage of the gross receipts was a worthwhile price. The combined “Barnum’s The Greatest Show on Earth, Howe’s Great London Circus and Sanger’s Royal British Menagerie” opened in New York on March 18, 1881 in Madison Square Garden, near Penn Station, preceded by a huge torchlight parade that attracted at least 500,000 spectators.29 The following year saw the Barnum, Bailey, and Hutchinson circus partnership pull off one of its greatest coups with Barnum’s £2,000 (now equal to $10,000) purchase of Jumbo, the largest elephant (approximately 12 feet high and 14 feet long) in captivity, from the London Zoo. The astute Barnum gained massive publicity from the apparently strenuous objections of Londoners to the elephant’s departure. In receipt of a telegraph from the editor of the London Daily Telegraph, asking Barnum to name the price for which he would cancel the sale, on February 23, 1882 he cabled a bragging reply: “My compliments to editor Daily Telegraph and British nation. Fifty-one millions of American citizens anxiously awaiting Jumbo’s arrival. My forty years’ invariable practice of exhibiting the best that money could procure makes Jumbo’s presence here imperative. Hundred thousand pounds would be no inducement to cancel purchase.” This cable, given a wider circulation by the Barnum publicity machine, irrelevantly added that their largest circus tent seated 20,000 twice daily and contained three rings, together with a big outer ring or racing track, and in addition, “massive” connecting tents for the zoological and museum collections. According to Barnum, later on, “it never cost me a cent to advertise Jumbo. It was the greatest advertising I ever heard of.”30 Barnum’s promotional skills were shown to their best effect when he arrived in New York by ocean liner on April 8, 1882 with the increasingly unmanageable and elderly pachyderm. The lifting of Jumbo with shoulderbrace straps from the ship was carefully stage-managed, followed by transport in a large container from the Battery up Broadway to his new home

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in Madison Square Garden. This Manhattan journey required 16 circus horses pulling, and several elephants pushing Jumbo’s crate, surrounded by huge crowds. The oversized elephant became one of the Barnum & Bailey circus’s greatest profit-making attractions, regularly giving rides to children in a large howdah strapped to its back. Sadly, over three years later, on September 15, 1885, came Jumbo’s unexpected and much-publicized death in a railroad accident at St. Thomas, Ontario, while on tour. Even so, the stuffed skin and a mounted skeleton of Jumbo on exhibit continued to make money for the circus for a further two years. In due course, Barnum donated its hide to Tufts College in Medford, Connecticut, where he was a trustee, and the skeleton to the Museum of Natural History in New York.31 Even before Jumbo’s demise, newspapers fed by Barnum’s publicists reported late in 1883 that King Theebaw (Thibaw) of Burma—forcibly deposed two years later by the British—had been induced by circus agents to sell a sacred white elephant. On arrival in New York some months later, Barnum’s new acquisition turned out to be more of a dark slate gray color. “With his usual shrewdness P. T. Barnum has succeeded in involving nearly the whole scientific and curiosity-seeking world over the ‘white elephant.’ Is he white? Is he sacred? And are his pale, reddish brown trunk and ears, and the spots on his throat and chest, the result of disease, are the points at issue,” according to one press report. Unforgivably, the great American public seemed equally attracted to another white elephant, “Light of Asia,” belonging to rival circus manager Adam Forepaugh. If it was white, this pachyderm was also demonstrably whitewashed and so Barnum was “placed in the unprecedented position of having the real article but combating a fake that met public expectations better.”32 Hutchinson soon withdrew from oversight of “The Greatest Show on Earth” and Bailey retired, temporarily, either because of some kind of nervous breakdown or possibly because he just could not get along with the self-centered Barnum. During the period 1885–87 “Chilly Billy” Cole and Bailey’s old partner James E. Cooper replaced Bailey as managers. At some stage in the season of 1886, when they were for a time together with former competitor Forepaugh, the Barnum & Bailey circus issued their first “route book,” The Barnum Budget, or Tent Topics. Intended chiefly for circus patrons and priced at 50 cents, route books or performance diaries provide significant insights into the circus itinerary, together with information on accidents en route, attendance levels, daily weather, and local events. The skeleton of elephant Jumbo (see above) was a feature of this particular tour as was Orrin Hollis, champion bareback somersault rider, and the Stirk family of trick and fancy bicycle riders.

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That the threat of violence was ever present on circus day is made clear by some succinct entries in the 1886 route book for small midwestern towns visited: Thursday, June 24 [1886]. Ashtabula, Ohio. L S & M S R R 54 miles. Population 8,000 A sudden shower frightens away the amusement seekers in the afternoon, but they rally as the clouds roll by at night. Average business up to the standards of towns of this size. Friday, June 25. Youngstown, Ohio. F W & C R R 60 miles. Population 15,431 Rain in the afternoon and an “adventure” [fight] with roughs in the evening prove that our canvas-men [hired workers] are not afraid of “work.” Saturday, June 26. Wooster, Ohio. F W & C R R 88 miles. Population 5,933 Clear weather and the show attracts the largest crowd ever assembled in this city. Business good day and night. Monday, June 28. Mansfield, Ohio. F W & C R R 4 miles. Population 9,992. Subscriptions amounting to $125 raised by canvas-men for a youth who was injured in the Youngstown “adventure.” Reported death of a man alleged to have been in the same. Subsequent investigation by coroner and detectives exonerate our boys from all blame. Detective Cooper adds five more crooks to his long list of “circus followers” [itinerant petty criminals]. Charles Forker joins the “Duster Brigade” [front of house staff] as show ground ticket seller.33

After the evening program was over, local drunks and “roughs” often picked fights with circus workers or even fellow spectators. The ubiquitous “canvas-men” were hired workers who erected and dismantled the canvas tents. Turnover rates among them were high, as the work was grueling and occasionally hazardous. Circus nonconformity, graft, pickpockets, and short-change artists inspired a great deal of anticircus violence, particularly in rural areas where local men and boys regularly battled circus workers in public brawls. Frequent “adventures” on the show grounds could also expose the presence of deep racial tensions. In Cuero, Texas, the Ringling Brothers 1892 route book noted: “During a street brawl here today among the natives, one Mexican was stabbed to the heart, another all cut up and a white man had his ears bitten off.” The potential for violence on circus day speaks, however, both to the show’s overwhelming presence at this time and also to its markedly diverse audience base.34 When the famous but now more equal Barnum & Bailey circus partnership was eventually revived the following season, the slight, nervous,

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much younger (by 37 years) and full-bearded Bailey became the dominant figure in its management and direction. The details of coordinating more than 60 rail cars filled with men, animals, and equipment, keeping them on time, and supervising their loading and unloading, as well as the construction of the great circus tents, required considerable logistical dexterity. The complex schedule included a morning procession through town, a midday rehearsal, an afternoon performance, dinner, and then an evening performance, after which the artists packed up their things while “properties” were dismantled and loaded onto rail cars and taken to the next town where the whole process began again. Circus management has often, in this context, been likened to military mobilization. Even Barnum had to admit that Bailey’s hard work, energy, and supervision of the smallest details on site, were as great assets to the show as his own notoriety. The showman usually liked to take the complete credit for everything he was involved with, but in reality he had little to do with the day-to-day operations of the big top, having lost interest as he grew older in the daily routine of running such a large and synchronized operation.35 Barnum’s old age during the 1880s saw him engaged in a variety of ventures, from lectures and touring to a “Grand Ethnological Congress of Nations” made up of the world’s “savage” peoples (see chapter 2). The world-renowned Barnum & Bailey circus paid a three-month visit across the Atlantic by ocean liner to London’s Olympia in 1889–90, presenting to thousands “a combination of [three-ring] circus, wild beast show and curiosity museum.” Barnum, aged almost 80 years, and famed for his Shetland ponies ridden by monkeys in jockey colors, was treated like visiting royalty. The following recipe from the London Evening News for making a circus of the kind that Barnum presented to the British public is suggestive of the show’s sheer magnitude: Take five common or garden circuses, with bareback riders, manège [trained] horses, performing ponies, acrobats, contortionists, trapeze gymnasts, and all complete; throw in a zoological garden, a music-hall or two, the choir of a Leeds festival, half-a-dozen Alhambras and Empires, two Drury Lane pantomimes, and an Aldershot review; flavour with a race meeting, some Roman history, an American trotting-match, and twenty or thirty Tottenham Court-road penny shows; add half a mile of scenery, the “supers” of all the London pantomimes, and sufficient lime-light to illuminate Oxford-street from Shaftesbury-avenue to the Marble Arch; mix well together, multiply Augustus Harris [the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, impresario] by six, and get him to stage manage. When you have done all this, and supplemented it with any odds and ends of spectacular effect that occur to you, you will have got pretty near the “Greatest Show on Earth.”

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The “stupendous” historical spectacular or dramatic reenactment part of the show, Imre Kiralfy’s “Nero, or the Destruction of Rome,” previously displayed in New York, also impressed with its scenic effects, gladiatorial combats, processions, and the “rippling” movements of hundreds of ballet performers: “what is most striking in the picture is the barbaric lavishness with which the spectacular ingredients are flung on the big canvas of the [250 foot] stage of Olympia.”36 Barnum at this point in his life gained most satisfaction from being “the showman par excellence, the master of self-publicity, of flash and notoriety.” His fame as the public face of Barnum & Bailey was such that the grand old man regularly appeared in person at the head of the cavalcade that marking the formal opening of the annual New York circus, went around Madison Square Garden. “I personally saw Jumbo at the circus in Boston and I saw Barnum several times,” recalled an elderly reverend (Barnum usually gave free passes to the clergy), looking back well over 50 years. “The circus used to open in those one or two ring days with the formal entry of Barnum seated in the rear seat of a barouche [carriage] drawn by handsome horses and ‘driven’ by an ape. Barnum bowed and smiled to the assembled crowds.” According to Henry Collins Brown in Valentine’s Manual of Old New York, Barnum, who knew the value of publicity as well as any man, made his twoa-day appearance the same as any of the other attractions. He said, and it was true, that he was as much of a “card” as any of his performers. At all events his regular appearance on these [Madison Square Garden] occasions was greatly enjoyed by his immense audience, and there is no doubt that a “close up” of the greatest circus man the world has ever known, was one of the greatest satisfactions his patrons knew.37

The account well suggests, despite its hyperbole, the extent of Barnum’s celebrity as a showman and self-publicist during his own lifetime. Yet if he is remembered only as a circus proprietor, the largest portion of his show business career (see chapter 1) will thereby be excluded. Although the relationship between Barnum and Bailey was often difficult, the Barnum & Bailey partnership lasted until the great man’s death at age 80 on the evening of April 7, 1891. The night before Barnum died, allegedly his last request was to know what the day’s circus receipts were. Arguably, Barnum made only a marginal contribution to the physical and cultural development of the American circus, apart from ensuring it massive and extensive publicity with his acquisition of performers and animals such as Jumbo. As this chapter has indicated, circus people used Barnum primarily for the value of his famous name. Rather than a hands-on

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circus proprietor, he remained a master of publicity and advertising, who resorted to every marketing device then available—posters, bills, press squibs, pamphlets, free handouts—for stimulating the endless curiosity of the public and converting it into dollars. “Yes, without printer’s ink,” Barnum declared at a banquet honoring him in 1874, “I should have been no bigger than Tom Thumb.” He also took a special interest in the museum or sideshow tents along the midway that preceded entry into the big top, engaging the performers himself. Despite or even because of the prominence Barnum gave to “human curiosities,” his major contribution to the Golden Age of the American circus was the emphasis he placed on advertising propriety and wholesome family entertainment.38 The American Circus after Barnum Five years after his famous partner’s death, in 1896 James A. Bailey took the “Greatest Show on Earth” on what turned out to be a prolonged but extensive European tour. Visiting London again, he was aptly described as “a rather small, wiry, well-made man of about 45 years of age, looking younger, with fair hair tinged with gray and a beard the same color cut to a point. His whole appearance is that of a dapper, smart and skilful businessman.” This overseas visit left the recently merged Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Circus that Bailey now also controlled to maintain the lucrative American eastern market and also the Barnum & Bailey national circuit in opposition to the fast-expanding Ringling Brothers’ show and other competitors.39 From 1894–95, an overextended Bailey also supplied the capital, equipment, and managerial expertise for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to travel by rail (see chapter 5). Meanwhile, Bailey’s major circus rivals, the ambitious Ringling Brothers of German descent (their father August Rüngeling, an immigrant and a harness maker in Wisconsin) quickly moved into the eastern states and prospered even in the “Barnum towns” of Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport, Connecticut. So when an exhausted Bailey, after six years in Europe, returned to America at the end of the 1902 season, he found that the new upstarts had effectively captured the domestic circus market, as proprietors of a modernized, highly mobile circus that could exploit changes in market conditions better than Bailey’s slower, now somewhat outmoded show.40 By 1904 the two managements, Bailey and the Ringlings, agreed to stop competing with each other for audiences and to amicably divide the vast American territory for their shows. Bailey also handed a great victory to the brothers by selling to them the Forepaugh & Sells circus to seal the bargain. After James A. Bailey’s sudden death on April 11, 1906, the Ringling

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Brothers bought out the Barnum & Bailey name in 1907 and a prosperous American circus era virtually closed. Rival showmen now adopted Progressive era rhetoric to complain of the Ringling Brothers “trust” using monopolistic practices. The Ringlings were accused of paying railroad contractors for advance knowledge of their competitors’ routes; of receiving preferential reduced haulage rates from the railroads, while their rivals were forced to pay the regular rate, and; of showering the routes of smaller circus outfits with posters for their own upcoming shows. Al Ringling justified such practices by stating that his family’s circus operation was “nothing more than the survival of the fittest,” like earlier Gilded Age monopolists and “robber barons” (Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller) using unregulated free market, Darwinist language to explain commercial success.41 The two circuses continued to travel separately in their own territories until 1919 when the Ringling family successfully merged them into the big business conglomerate of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows. Mergers and combinations meant that by 1923 there were fewer than 50 circuses but over 150 carnivals moving around the country. One remaining large circus was the Carl Hagenbeck-Great Wallace Circus (named after two smaller circuses) run by Irish American Jerry Mugiven and his partners, Ballard and Bowers, who had brought many of the smaller shows, with the exception of Yankee Robinson and Forepaugh, and forged them into a large, well-run syndicate under the title of the American Circus Corporation, based at Peru, Indiana. The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus usually gave performances of two hours each at 2 and 8 p.m. during the season and had its winter quarters at West Baden and French Lick, Indiana. The reams of their publicity material surviving in various circus archives gives some insight into their mode of operation. Large numbers were employed by Hagenbeck-Wallace during the touring season as poster billing crews, candy “butchers” [vendors], grifters [merchandize boosters], fixers [legal adjusters], animal trainers, clowns, trapeze artists, specialty acts, and ticket sellers. This combination’s route book for 1923 also mentions the scores of blacksmiths, carpenters, artisans of all kinds, decorators, harness makers, and seamstresses employed during the long winter months, some of whom were no longer able to endure the hardships of touring. Interestingly, the lot superintendent with this circus, William H. Curtis, was given credit for inventing a huge “spool” that used gasoline engine power to wind up large strips of canvas so as to squeeze out any rainwater. It was also able to raise the center poles of the big top.42 The Hangenbeck-Wallace Circus sideshows “were filled to overflowing with wonderful and strange monstrosities and in addition there is given several times a day a splendid colored minstrel production.” Racial

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segregation had a long history at the circus in the Southern states with separate points of entry and segregated seating areas in the pit or gallery for black circus audiences. In certain states, stands or market tables were always operated by “colored folks,” for in places such as Corsicana, Texas, on Circus Day in 1923 “they must have a place to do their visiting and [where] they can combine business and pleasure.” In the South, black circusgoers rode in separate “Jim Crow” railroad cars to visit the circus and, once under the big top, generally sat segregated from other spectators in the gallery. Outside the tents, black and white audiences bought their concessions at separate snack stands, while African Americans were also supposed to attend the circus at specified dates and times. Segregationist practices at such places of amusement, strictly enforced in the South and de facto in the rest of the country, were, if anything, more comprehensive from the turn of the century onward than in the nineteenth century. Regrettably, one should note the Americanness of this particular cultural phenomenon, as opposed to European commercial practice, although racial and ethnic discrimination seems to have played little part in the hiring of circus hands.43 The traditional circus and sideshow was to find a new home between the two world wars on the midway of traveling fairground carnivals. In 1929 John Ringling, the last surviving brother, bought out the American Circus Corporation, a stock corporation composed of five middling circuses; the buyout, unfortunately, forced Ringling into debt, made even worse by the New York stock market crash of that same year. By 1932 the ailing Ringling was forced to relinquish control of the huge combined Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus to unscrupulous creditors, remaining as the show’s president only in name. A former Wild West rider, acrobat, Coney Island manager, and real estate magnate, Samuel Gumpertz, served as general circus manager from 1932 until 1937, and held close financial ties to the New York Investors firm that controlled John Ringling’s assets. Other members of the Ringling family eventually ousted the crafty manager, after having regained control of the famous circus following John’s death in 1936. During the Great Depression, faced with wage cuts, unionized circus workers took part in a bitter, protracted strike in 1938. Another setback was the tragic Ringling Bros. big-top fire at Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1944 that killed 167 people, mostly women and children, made worse by the tent canvas having been waterproofed with gasoline and paraffin that “rained down like napalm” on the necks and shoulders of the fleeing crowd. Because of increased freight charges, a Teamsters’ Union recruitment drive, and other rising costs, the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus performed for the last time under the canvas top in 1956. The famous combination still continues to perform indoors to large crowds on

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an annual basis over the Christmas season at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Small circuses carry on touring under canvas, visibly in rural areas of Ireland, north and south, but the Golden Age of the massive three- and even four-ring circus in the last quarter of the nineteenth century has long since departed.44 New public entertainment licensing laws, the collapse of family dynasties, rising transport costs, and competition from other forms of entertainment, have made the traditional circus less ubiquitous than in the past. Using animals to perform or display has also, under pressure from animal rights activists, become subject to the most rigorous policing, control, and inspection. Legislation to control the welfare, husbandry, and transport of animals has not only increased costs but also intensified public scrutiny. This is not the place to debate the case either for or against the inclusion of animals as circus performers, both of which have been extensively argued elsewhere. The complete banning of circuses with animals by some local and state authorities has led to a widespread conversion to human-only shows. Circuses that still perform today, however welcome, are but mere shadows of their colossal three-ring equivalents in the four decades before World War I.45 Endnote The above account has highlighted those characteristics that made the continental American circus markedly different from its less elaborate European equivalents. As indicated above, nineteenth-century America saw the earliest canvas-tented circus; the successful three-ring circus format; the railroad-driven and long-distance circus, and; the grand circus parade along Main Street. All these contributory features, together with a Barnum-style emphasis on size and spectacle, helped to make the circus first imported from England into a more prodigal American phenomenon. “Perhaps nothing is more typical of America,” pondered Robert C. Toll a touch unkindly, “than that the principle of overabundance, of planned waste, characterized even its amusements.”46 The omnipresent late nineteenth-century American circus most probably had some influence on the concept of the Wild West show, for it was also arena-based if held in the open air. We know, for example, that Buffalo Bill Cody went to see the first circus to make use of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, when Dan Castello’s company visited the Great Scout’s hometown of North Platte, Nebraska. Also, the famous cowboy most probably attended Barnum’s New York “Congress of Nations” circus in 1874, in which an American contingent of cowboys and Indians were part of an international parade. The presence of the latter in this circus, as

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later in the Barnum & Bailey circus, may have acted as a stimulus to Cody when, some years later, he started to rehearse his Wild West show. Yet he was reluctant to use the term “show” because of its association with the still somewhat morally dubious circus. Finally, as previously mentioned, James A. Bailey became a managing partner of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1894, owing to its general manager’s failing health. Barnum’s old partner provided transportation, a travel schedule, and also acted as the local manager in return for a share of the profits. Chapter 5 looks at Buffalo Bill’s career and tries to disentangle actuality from the myths created by the Wild West show’s publicity machine.

Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody) on Horseback in Later Life Poses against a Wild West Show Backdrop Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

CHAPTER 5 BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST: AMERICAN CULTURE CROSSES THE ATLANTIC

illiam Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody (1845–1917) is recognized as probably the world’s most legendary Indian fighter, scout, and Western hero. During and since World War II cinematic representations of this remarkable figure have served to define shifting perceptions of heroism, showmanship, and the mythology of the Wild West. Director William Wellman’s romanticized or celebratory wartime portrait of “Buffalo Bill” in the eponymous movie Buffalo Bill (1944), to take but one example, features Western star Joel McCrea as Cody and Thomas Mitchell as Ned Buntline. In an invented scene, the unassuming Cody, denounced as a fraud in the New York press after his stage appearances, is reduced to performing as a sharpshooter on a wooden horse in the Wonderland [Dime] Museum, until being rescued by his estranged eastern wife (Maureen O’Hara). Promoted as an “action-packed movie” that, during wartime, “celebrates the rugged individualism of the man who represents the frontier spirit,” Buffalo Bill is visually splendid in Technicolor but otherwise quite commonplace.1 The real William Cody, in playing the role of Buffalo Bill, almost single-handedly invented the Wild West that later generations have come to know through the mass media, particularly film and television. As well as playing a version of himself in the famous touring Wild West show, Cody became a silent-film maker in late career, acting as producer and appearing in The Indian Wars (1913–14), alas not a great box-office success. He also became a familiar heroic figure as “Buffalo Bill” in cheap fiction periodicals and serials or “dime novels” (see introduction) that flooded newsagents with tens of thousands of copies recounting his imaginary adventures. So Cody was a true multimedia and transatlantic phenomenon even in his own lifetime, before featuring posthumously as

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the brand-name hero of comic books, paperback novels, radio and television shows, and talking pictures. During the 1950s, for example, British children might read of Buffalo Bill’s heroic adventures in the weekly comics Comet and Sun or be given a Buffalo Bill Wild West Annual as a Christmas present, while their American counterparts watched Buffalo Bill Jr. on television. Buffalo Bill as a Transatlantic Phenomenon Buffalo Bill has been called the most famous American civilian of his age, rivaled only by his show business predecessor P. T. Barnum and his Wild West show the best-known representation of America. Posters featuring Cody’s long-haired and bearded portrait (“I Am Coming”) were alone sufficient to advertise the imminent arrival of Buffalo Bill’s famous arena show in towns and cities across Europe. Like Barnum before him, Cody revealed a showman’s flair for advertising strategies, particularly gigantic and colorful posters that pitched his show as exciting but acceptable entertainment. On August 31, 1898 at Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition, one of Bill Cody’s early employers and a lifelong friend, Alexander Majors, partner in a freighting firm that had launched the Pony Express decades before and supposed author of Seventy Years on the Frontier (1893), claimed that America had produced many great men: “We had a Barnum in the show business. Next and even greater and higher, we have a Cody (tremendous applause). He, gentlemen, stands not at the head of the showmen of the United States of America, but of the world (great applause).”2 Cody’s reputation has outlived debunkers and revisionist critics and, like Barnum—another showman who constructed his own illusory public persona—he has become a key figure for those interested in the history of American popular culture. Interestingly, the two showmen were often linked together by contemporary journalists: “It is to be hoped that the triumph of Buffalo Bill, his Indians and his cowboys, and his immense stock of ‘bronco’ (not ‘broncho’) horses, will not make Barnum ‘feel bad,’ nor cause that patriarch of showmen to take a back seat,” opined The Illustrated London News on May 14, 1887 when the Wild West show first visited England, two years before the Barnum & Bailey circus made the same crossing. Buffalo Bill’s exhibition ultimately “Out-Barnumed Barnum,” one journalist reported excitedly. Strangely enough, Barnum himself had experimented with a “harmless humbug” form of the Wild West in 1843 when he staged a mock “Grand Buffalo Hunt,” including

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Indian dancers, in Hoboken, New Jersey, and had attracted 24,000 people. Much later, while playing guide to some visiting English friends, Barnum had arrived at Fort Hays in Kansas for a genuine buffalo hunt in September 1870 with Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer as their celebrity host.3 Bill Cody was destined to become one of the most successful mass entertainers of the late nineteenth century. General William Tecumseh Sherman, in charge of vanquishing the Plains Indians, was so impressed by the Wild West show that he saw it perhaps 20 times. Mark Twain was also taken with Buffalo Bill’s parade, despite his knowledge of the real West, and went to the extent of writing a short story from the point of view of Cody’s horse. Queen Victoria virtually came out of long-term mourning and, at short notice, required two command performances when the traveling exhibition first visited London in 1887 (see below). Former British prime minister William Gladstone came to see the show, as did the celebrated actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. On Cody’s reaching Rome, Pope Leo XIII gave a blessing on Buffalo Bill at the Vatican. The celebrated and elderly French artist Rosa Bonheur painted Cody on horseback in elaborate fringed costume when he was in Paris. Touring the continent again in the years 1889–90, Bill performed for the emperor of Austria and various Russian princes and counts. In Germany the future Kaiser Wilhelm challenged Wild West show sharpshooter Annie Oakley to shoot a cigarette out of his mouth and she apparently obliged. At his first London show, Cody supposedly packed the kings of Belgium, Denmark, Greece, and Saxony into the Deadwood stagecoach and joked, using poker repartee familiar to the future King Edward VII, about holding “four kings and the Prince of Wales makes a royal flush, such as no man ever held before.” Significantly, the show’s assets included Major “Arizona John” Burke, a first-rate press agent, for witnesses agree that only one reigning monarch, the King of Denmark, along with three Princes (two of them his own sons), had climbed into the famous stagecoach.4 An authentic frontiersman but also an opportunist seeking to make a fast buck, Cody early on realized the commercial possibilities of the Western legend. Serving his theatrical apprenticeship before patenting the Wild West show, this extraordinary individual appeared as his alter ego Buffalo Bill in several creaky but profitable stage plays for nearly a decade, taking time off to act as an army scout. The Wild West, as mythologized in the East and after the fact, was also self-mythologizing. Frontier towns, as soon as they were settled, printed newspapers keen on lurid copy, showing how eagerly the West told tales of itself. Yet the Buffalo Bill persona was not

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entirely a creation of the feverish imaginings of tabloid journalists and dime novel authors. Not only did Cody, the most photographed man of his age, become a showman-entrepreneur like Barnum, he was also a strapping, handsome man, popular with the ladies, who really could shoot and ride with the best of them, “a hard-living, free-spending, action-seeking adventurer.”5 Bill Cody’s Early Life William Frederick Cody came originally from Iowa, where he was born at Leclaire, Scott County, on February 26, 1846, the second son and third child of Isaac and Mary Ann Cody. After the elder brother, Samuel, suffered a fatal fall from a horse in 1853, the grief-stricken family became one of the first to settle in Kansas, building a house at Salt Creek Valley approximately three miles west of Fort Leavenworth, not long before conflict between pro- and antislavery factions in the new state reached boiling point. Isaac, a staunch Free Soil Democrat in a largely proslavery community reinforced from the neighboring slave state of Missouri, quixotically joined the local squatters association. At a meeting held on September 18, 1854, his unpopular Free State (against slavery in Kansas) if not abolitionist views incited an employee of his brother, the nefarious H. Charles Dunn, to stab him in the chest with a large Bowie knife. Not surprisingly, this incident made a lasting impression on the eight-year-old Billy Cody. His much-persecuted father recovered, went on to petition at Topeka for admission to the Union as a nonslave state, but never again enjoyed good health. Isaac Cody died on April 21, 1857 from a severe chill, in his son’s eyes a martyr to the antislavery cause. As the new man of the family, 11-year-old Billy had to find employment and was briefly put to work as a messenger.6 Yet in his mostly ghostwritten 1879 autobiography, Cody claimed it was as a 13-year-old, on his way back to Kansas after failing to find gold at Pikes Peak, Colorado, that he talked his way into being hired in Julesburg as a Pony Express rider for a couple of months—on a short route of 45 miles, with the stations 15 miles apart, and 3 changes of horses. Cody apparently returned to Pony Express riding the following summer, in 1860, when he was 14, and had various adventures, including outrunning an Indian attack by making a 24-mile run on one horse. This supposed teenage association with one of the great all-American adventure stories— the lone rider galloping with the mail across hostile Indian territory— certainly did Buffalo Bill’s subsequent reputation no harm. The Pony Express scenario became a great favorite with the public who watched the Wild West show reenact it from the show’s debut in 1883 until it ended in

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1916. Equally, Buffalo Bill’s life story made him into a genuine Western figure and also, like a hard-working Horatio Alger hero, into a respectable, self-made icon for the urban middle classes who were the book’s intended audience.7 What truth was there to Buffalo Bill’s claim that he played a key part in the Pony Express slice of Americana? The freighting firm of Russell, Majors, and Waddell created the Pony Express in April 1860 to carry mail between Saint Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, but it lasted only 18 months because the Civil War then broke out. Subsequently, the records of the freight firm disappeared, leaving Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to become the widely accepted version of the Pony Express legend. Every successive account (with only a few doubters) has felt obliged to refer to Buffalo Bill’s horseback adventures, leaving unchallenged his standing as the most famous Pony Express rider of them all. Yet Bill Cody’s Pony Express exploits are revealed as pure fiction on further investigation, accepted only because of constant repetition by various authors using his autobiography as their main source. Cody claimed to have ridden for the Pony Express over two separate periods, the first in late 1859, out of Julesburg, Colorado, but none of the stations he lists as stops correspond to stations on that section of the trail and, in any case, nobody was a Pony Express rider that early (the line not beginning till some months later). The men, who he says took him on, actually did work for the Pony Express but they could not have hired him, because they either ranked too low on the corporate hierarchy or were not on that particular section of the famous line early on. Cody’s second period as a pony rider, from 1860 to 1861, was allegedly along the Sweetwater Division, where Indian attacks forced a temporary closure of the line. Hence he claims to have gone with “Wild Bill” Hickok’s raiding party to reclaim horses from the Sioux on Powder River. Events such as this as described in Cody’s life story actually happened but not to him, neither before nor long after the Pony Express was actually running. A recent historian of “the lasting legend but twisted truth” of the overland mail riders suggests that Buffalo Bill probably invented his association with the Pony Express, later a permanent and revered fixture in the Wild West show, on the bais of his brief experience as a messenger. Extensive research on his Kansas boyhood shows that for two months in the summer of 1857, the 11-year-old Cody rode as a messenger boy for Russell, Majors, and Waddell within a 3-mile radius of Leavenworth. Everything else in the life of Buffalo Bill about his Pony Express exploits is pure fabrication.8 After most probably spending some time with an unsavory KansasMissouri border anti-slavery militia (“Red Legs” or jayhawkers) that stole

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horses and took lives without much regard for political allegiance, in February 1864, Bill Cody enlisted at age 18 in the Seventh Kansas Cavalry of the Union Army to fight the Confederacy. After a year and a half spent scouting and fighting in the South, he mustered out as still a private. The young Cody now married, tried running a hotel, then signed on as a civilian scout for the army, and at one time worked with George Armstrong Custer. After the birth of his daughter in 1866, Cody again tried to settle down, but the following year, after a misguided speculation in real estate, he joined the Kansas Pacific Railroad company, which hired him to provide meat for its construction workers. He was contracted to kill 12 buffaloes a day, for which he was paid $500 a month, and it is his efficient killing of thousands that gave him his famous nickname. When this work ended, Cody rejoined the army, scouting under Generals Philip H. Sheridan and Eugene A. Carr. Cody was present during a 1869 military raid known as the Battle of Summit Springs, an attack on a party of Cheyenne accused of stealing horses and raiding settlements that later featured in the Wild West show. An Indian village was captured, possibly 140 braves were killed, and a captive Swedish woman was rescued, while a second died in the attack. As a reward, Sheridan arranged for Cody to guide hunting expeditions during 1871–72 for important visitors to the West, such as the Grand Duke Alexis, third son of the Russian Tsar Alexander II. As will be made evident, many of the real-life frontier experiences narrated above were to give shape, in much embroidered form, to the Buffalo Bill legend.9 Buffalo Bill’s Theatrical Career Not long after Summit Springs, a buckskin-clad Cody was introduced at Fort McPherson in Nebraska to the extraordinary Ned Buntline (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), prolific dime novel writer, “Know-Nothings” party organizer, temperance lecturer, long-barreled six-gun inventor, and fivetimes-married bigamist. Subsequently, in December 1869, Buntline (1823–86) published the first of his highly romanticized fictional versions of Cody’s adventures, entitled “Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men,” in Street & Smith’s New York Weekly, but to little discernible effect. Cody continued working as an army scout and a hunting party guide until, in February 1872, a rudimentary play loosely based on Buntline’s serialized dime story and starring actor John B. Studley as Buffalo Bill opened at the working men’s Bowery Theatre in New York. The exuberant if rough opening night coincided with Cody’s first visit to the city and like a modern Hollywood celebrity he attended the opening to rapturous

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applause, despite giving an embarrassing speech. A month later Buntline rushed a second Buffalo Bill story into print, by which time Cody had been involved in another border skirmish for which he received the congressional medal.10 Such favorable publicity encouraged Buntline to write Cody numerous letters urging him to go east to represent himself on the stage: “‘There’s money in it,’ he wrote, ‘and you will prove a big card, as your character is a novelty on the stage.’ ” Taking up this advice, in December 1872 Cody made his stage debut in Chicago, along with fellow scout John B. “Texas Jack” Omohundro, and with Ned playing a fictitious scout, in the typically chauvinist Buntline drama The Scouts of the Prairie; or, Red Deviltry As It Is. This rapidly assembled and poorly rehearsed production featured a Bowie knife fight, a prairie fire, marauding Indians, evil white traders, and rescue from a tribal Indian camp. According to the Chicago Times, “such a combination of incongruous drama, execrable acting, renowned performers, mixed audience, intolerable stench, scalping, blood and thunder, is not likely to be vouchsafed to a city a second time, even Chicago.” Cody claimed that a bad attack of stage fright at the melodrama’s first performance meant he was unable to speak a word as written and so launched instead into a series of improvised anecdotes that eventually became a routine element of the play. Despite terrible acting, Buffalo Bill and Texas Jack are seen to triumph over the forces of evil as represented by the play’s incorrigible “red devils.”11 After touring all over in March 1873, the play moved to New York filling its Niblo’s Garden theater with spectators anxious to catch a glimpse of a real Western hero. By now Buntline was using the play to declaim not only on the evils of drink but also on the federal government’s policy on Indian affairs, concluding that extermination was the only acceptable course of action. One Boston newspaper critic thought his death at the end of the second act was therefore welcome relief. Even so, given Ned’s vast output of dime novels, the Wild West show’s future manager thought Cody “would never have been a showman at all if Ned Buntline had not made him notorious and he had [not] dripped from the point of Buntline’s pen as a hero.” When The Scouts of the Prairie closed in June, Cody was rather disappointed in that, despite full houses, his share of the profits left him only $6,000 ahead. Yet the acting, producing, and managerial experience gained by the future showman would be well worth his time spent on the boards.12 Cody returned to play acting the following 1873–74 season, organizing his own troupe as the Buffalo Bill Combination. Texas Jack rejoined the company and Bill’s mentor James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok replaced a now redundant Buntline in the starry cast of The Scouts of the Plains,

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written by Fred G. Maeder and virtually identical to the play with Studley as Buffalo Bill. As recounted by Cody, Wild Bill was an acting liability, frequently drunk on stage and also with a disturbing habit of abusing “supers,” or the low-paid extras who found employment as “Sioux warriors.” Apparently Hickok, “putting his pistol close to their legs, would fire at them and burn them with the powder, instead of shooting over their heads. This would make them dance and jump, so that it was difficult to make them fall and die.” Wild Bill, whose eyesight was poor, caused so much trouble for Cody that, on being told he must either stop singeing the “supers” or leave the company, he walked off the production and left for the West the next day. Bill Cody continued his theatrical career with at least one new play every year between 1875 and 1882, including dime novelist Prentiss Ingraham’s The Knight of the Plains; or, Buffalo Bill’s Best Trail (1878–79). Between theatrical seasons Bill returned to the West either as a military scout or as a guide for hunting parties.13 Conveniently, while performing in these stage plays, Cody claimed to have taken “the first scalp for Custer,” or revenge for the Little Big Horn, by killing subchief Yellow Hair (mistranslated in The Life as “Yellow Hand”) during the 1876–77 Sioux war resulting from the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of Dakota. There can be little doubt that Cody actually killed Yellow Hair, although exactly how, has been a source of continuing debate. The chapter in Cody’s own life story begins with the massacre on June 25, 1876 of General Custer and “his band of heroes” on the Little Big Horn in today’s Wyoming, as reported by a scout at Fort Laramie. Soon after a message arrives that 800 Northern Cheyenne warriors have left the Red Cloud agency at Fort Robinson, Nebraska, to join Sitting Bull’s hostile forces in the Big Horn region. General Wesley Merritt tries to intercept the Cheyenne by taking 500 troops of the Fifth Cavalry on a forced march to War Bonnet Creek, now the border between Wyoming and Nebraska, before the enemy can get there (a strategy credited to Buffalo Bill in the Joel McCrea movie). On arrival the following morning, July 17, 1876, Cody and 15 men, to avoid giving away troop positions, go to the assistance of two messengers in danger of being cut off by their Cheyenne pursuers. When those braves whom they have intercepted and chased suddenly turn upon Cody’s party, one of them, the “handsomely decorated” subchief Yellow Hair, supposedly cries out: “I know you, Pa-he-haska; if you want to fight, come ahead and fight me.” Over 50 years later, Beaver Heart, one of the Cheyenne who had been at War Bonnet Creek and seen his friend Yellow Hair fall commented: “I have heard the story as related by [Cody] regarding the fight, and that fact that Yellow Hair challenged him . . . This is not true.

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Buffalo Bill, whoever he was, could not talk Cheyenne, and Yellow Hair could not talk English or Sioux, and I do not know how these two people could talk to each other.”14 According to his own account, Cody accepted the challenge, galloped toward the subchief, raised his rifle, and killed his opponent’s horse. At the same time his own mount stepped into a prairie dog hole and fell down. Both warriors now on foot, fired at each other simultaneously. The survivor, Buffalo Bill, went on: My usual luck did not desert me on this occasion, for his bullet missed me, while mine struck him in the breast. He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to its hilt in his heart. Jerking his war-bonnet off, I scientifically scalped him in about five seconds. . . . As the soldiers came up I swung the Indian chieftain’s top-knot and bonnet in the air, and shouted: “The first scalp for Custer.”15

The above “duel to the death” version is reminiscent of a Ned Buntline dime story and so the more skeptical have raised some doubts as to its authenticity. Two cavalry signalmen present at War Bonnet Creek confirmed that Cody and Yellow Hair had met quite suddenly, by accident, while Cody was on his way to warn the unsuspecting couriers about a potential ambush. The two rivals did indeed fire their rifles simultaneously but there was no conversation or challenge to fight. In 1878–79, when Cody drafted his own account of the battle for his autobiography, he was careful to make it correspond to the ritualized contest narrated above, perhaps to endorse a stage play based on the event, he had already commissioned, former actor J. V. Arlington’s The Red Right Hand; or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer (1877–78). Eventually, the Death of Red Hand [sic] at the hands of Buffalo Bill was to become one of the long-surviving set pieces of his Wild West show. In reality, the Northern Cheyenne had never faced Cody on a battlefield and probably would not have know him if they had. Nobody at War Bonnet Creek ever saw more than 30 Indian warriors on July 17, 1876, all of whom fled when the main force of the Fifth Cavalry reached the valley on the heels of Cody and his small detachment.16 The Wild West as Show Interest in the “raw materials of America” or the Wild West had first been fostered by individuals such as George Catlin (1796–1872), the preeminent

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Western showman of his age, a painter, author and traveler who specialized in portraits of Native Americans. After a brief career as a lawyer in Philadelphia, where he must have visited Charles Willson Peale’s museum, Catlin’s interest in America’s “vanishing race” was supposedly triggered by a visiting Native American delegation on their way to Washington. From 1830, when he accompanied General William Clark on a diplomatic mission up the Mississippi River, he set out to record the appearance, customs, and activities of the indigenous peoples. Catlin’s career as a public entertainer began in Pittsburgh in 1833 when he began to display his paintings and talk about life among the Native Americans. He repeated this in various cities, after inundating them with handbills, broadsides, and newspaper notices, and undertook in the 1840s various European tours, usually beginning in London. From 1840 Catlin’s North American Indian Collection, housed in the great room of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, was a popular feature of the London scene, and was made even more interesting by nine Ojibbeway warriors performing war dances. Coincidentally, P. T. Barnum arrived with Tom Thumb at the Egyptian Hall in the spring of 1844, not long after Catlin’s warriors had defected to another manager and left him without an attraction. The famous miniature exhibit proved so successful that Catlin agreed to sublet to Barnum the large and now empty room he was renting, for the remainder of his tenancy. The Indian Collection remained in position, as a backdrop to Tom Thumb’s performance, until a relieved Catlin was ready to vacate. Toward the end of his stay in London, the painter-showman also presented open-air demonstrations of horse-riding, sharp-shooting and war-making in Vauxhall Gardens by genuine Iowa tribesmen. By taking this show or his “Tableaux Vivants of Red Indians” abroad, Catlin had brought Native Americans before the British public almost 47 years before Buffalo Bill, and “in these ways he pioneered the direction of future Wild West shows.” In the 1850s Catlin traveled through South and Central America and then returned for further exploration in the Rocky Mountains. In books such as Life amongst the Indians (1861), addressed to young people, he attacked white Americans for their continued encroachment on Native American lands. Catlin died in the same year that Buffalo Bill began his stage career but he had already pioneered a show business approach to the West by hiring either the genuine article or actors wearing Native American costumes from his collection, to add dramatic appeal to his exhibitions of paintings and displays of artifacts.17 The Americanized circus must also have had some influence on the concept of the Wild West show because when, in 1869, Dan Castello’s

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Circus and Menagerie—the first circus to go across America mostly on the new transcontinental railroad—appeared in Cody’s hometown of North Platte, Nebraska, we know that he went to see it. Then in 1871, the year before Cody appeared on stage as “Buffalo Bill” in Chicago, Barnum joined with Castello and W. C. Coup to jointly reshape the popular image of the circus (see chapter 4). A few years later, in New York, the three circus partners leased an old railroad station on the future site of Madison Square Garden and built upon it the Great Roman Hippodrome arena. There, in 1874, they put on “The Congress of Nations,” which Cody undoubtedly saw, and in which an American contingent of “cowboys and Indians” was part of an international parade led into the big top as the opening act of a spectacle that included elephant and chariot races, and in addition, a show called “Indian Life on the Plains.” The presence of cowboys and Native Americans in this circus, as later in the Barnum & Bailey circus extravaganza, may have acted as a stimulus to Cody when, some years later, on July 4, 1882, he organized an outdoor Independence Day celebration in North Platte. Known as the “Old Glory Blow-Out,” this had cowboys, Native Americans, equestrian showmanship, and all the spectacles soon to be associated with his Wild West show. By this time, Cody had watched Barnum play the circus impresario for over a decade, even before the latter’s alliance with James A. Bailey.18 Buffalo Bill then went one better than Barnum, creating a distinctively American spectacle, a circus entertainment in an open arena without clowns or elephants. “The papers say I am the coming Barnum,” wrote Cody to his sister only a year later. For in the spring of 1883, Cody had joined forces with sharpshooter and trained dentist William Frank “Doc” Carver to form a Wild West “exhibition” intended for outdoor arenas in the summer, when regular theatrical companies were no longer touring. Cody’s publicity agents called it the “Wild West” and avoided the use of “show” because they liked to claim the performance was authentic and not like circuses, at a time when the public enthusiasm for such outdoor amusements was at its height. Opening on May 17, 1883 at the fairgrounds in Omaha, Nebraska, and then moving eastwards to cities such as New York, Chicago, and Boston, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West went on to become a show business phenomenon. The partnership with “Doc” Carver was dissolved rather acrimoniously at the end of the 1883 season. So Cody renewed a tacit agreement with former musical comedy troubadour and now successful theatrical manager Nathan (“Nate”) Salsbury (1845–1903), who brought commercial expertise and financial support to a show business enterprise that would make them both rich and famous, at least until the century’s close.19

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Ten years later, what paying customers saw at various arenas across the United States and in Europe, once Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of the Rough Riders of the World was up and running, was a spectacle of thundering horses, buffalo, cowboys, sometimes Russian Cossacks and South American vaqueros and Arabian horsemen, stagecoach robberies, sharpshooters, and a hundred or more real Native Americans hired from the reservations. The new show dramatized frontier incidents such as the Pony Express, Custer’s Last Stand, the Deadwood Stage, the Death of Red Hand, and the Attack on the Settler’s Cabin, some supposedly from Cody’s own career, in a series of disorderly and noisy scenes. The Wild West was a fast, exciting, and allegedly “authentic” entertainment that competed with the big three-ring circuses such as Barnum & Bailey that had emerged at about the same time in the United States and a little later in Europe as well. Buffalo Bill was taking on the morally questionable (to American clergy) European cultural form of the circus and naturalizing it on American soil.20 Since prominent set-pieces in the Wild West show depicted Native Americans as hostile savages attacking either the Deadwood Stage or the Settler’s Cabin, how can their participation in Buffalo Bill’s extravaganza be justified? A pragmatic view is that Wild West shows (Cody’s was the most popular of several) provided a regular income, travel opportunities, and cultural experiences for those eager to leave the oppressive conditions of, in this case, the Pine Ridge and nearby Sioux reservations for the adventurous life of a performing “Red Indian.” Later on the idea of Lakota and Oglalas joining the Wild West show, particularly during the Ghost Dance troubles (1889–90), was not popular with Indian Affairs bureaucrats in Washington who did their best to deny their services, even trying to enforce an official ban on travel with Cody’s show. At the end of 1899, writing to North Dakota rancher and long-time friend Mike Russell, the Wild West impresario complained about a new commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington once again seeking to deny Native American performers for the Wild West show: This same man came near bringing on an Indian war last fall by takeing [sic] the beef hides away from the Indians. Now he wants to keep the Indians prisoner on their reservations and not allow them to earn an honest dollar. The Indians are becoming restless cooped up on their reservations. And if they are not allowed some liberty they will sooner or later give our frontier people trouble.

Although paid less than white or Mexican cowboys in the Wild West show (the standard wage for low-ranking Native Americans was $25 per

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month), indigenous performers had better incomes than those compelled to farm restricted and unproductive reservation lands. Up to a hundred traveled with their families each season, and were provided with food, clothing, lodging, and an interpreter.21 A persuasive case has been made that Cody did at least as much for assimilation of native peoples and mutual understanding between whites and Native Americans as any Indian Affairs Bureau program. As part of the Wild West contingent, natives were allowed to be “Indian”—to keep their long hair and dress in traditional clothes—in a way that was being denied them on their own reservations. Accordingly, Cody became a “cultural broker,” allowing whites and Native Americans to experience each other as spectators and performers or in the showground’s tented encampments. Above all, Sioux or Lakota with no experience of the modern workplace, and who faced fierce racial discrimination or were not allowed to leave the reservation to find work, had little hope of alternative employment. A revisionist view is that Native Americans performed in the Wild West show because, in its day, it was a good place to work, even if there were so few other places.22 Second, what explains why white American audiences, in particular, embraced Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show with such enthusiasm? There were, of course, many talented performers it was a treat to watch, such as sharpshooter Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill himself, as he rode his white horse and blasted glass balls from the sky. The show was at its most commercial in the 1880s, marking the emergence of “frontier anxiety,” feelings aroused in those who believed that the frontier was closing or had already closed—as the Census Bureau officially had declared in 1890. Associated with historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s seminal 1893 essay on “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” was a growing perception that free land that symbolized the stages of social evolution on a frontier line continually moving westward, had hitherto determined the course of American history. Usage of the word “frontier” rather obscured similarities between the conquest of the American West and the global processes of European expansion elsewhere. In any case, the area where white domination or settlement had not yet been consummated was nearly gone and there was a growing belief that its disappearance would somehow change society.23 Belief that the frontier had now gone may also have created a nostalgic mood that encouraged many Americans to wonder what they had missed by not making the journey West when the opportunity was still there. At the same time, displaying Native Americans in the Wild West show as vanquished foes demonstrated to audiences that the fight for the Plains was over and had ended in victory for their civilized white invaders. Why else

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would reservation Native Americans agree to appear in the Wild West arena in “inverted conquest narratives” of Indian aggression and white defense? Further, because white American racial strengths were seen as frontier virtues (the bronzed, manly cowboy), historians have argued that the Wild West show gave expression to communal anxieties over the decay of white masculinity, together with fears of the new immigration from mainly Catholic southern and eastern Europe undermining the AngloSaxon, Protestant republic. These anxieties could also be seen as part of a gathering cultural reaction against the cult of domesticity, or the virtues of home and woman, in contemporary American society. Displays of horseriding, fast-shooting Western cowboys (several of Mexican and mixedblood stock) reassured white male audiences that assertive frontier virtues had not entirely been extinguished. Of course, Buffalo Bill’s employment of fellow superstars Annie Oakley and “Young California” Lillian Smith as sharpshooters in the Wild West show created an entirely different set of anxieties for the white male audience.24 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in London “It brought vividly back the breezy wild life of the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountains, and stirred me like a war cry.” So said America’s best-loved author, Mark Twain, who had seen the Wild West show two days in succession during its sold-out Madison Square Garden engagement in the winter of 1886. He enjoyed it thoroughly and was convinced of its authenticity. “It is often said on the other side of the water that none of the exhibitions we send to England are purely and distinctively American,” Twain claimed in a personal letter to Cody, strangely forgetting minstrelsy. “If you will take the Wild West show over there, you can remove that reproach.” P. T. Barnum also added his encouragement. In the event, Buffalo Bill was a huge success on his first visit to London in 1887 and stories about his reception by Queen Victoria and other British notables have formed a major component of the Wild West show’s enduring legend with the American public ever since.25 According to a New York Times reporter who witnessed Buffalo Bill’s contingent sailing to England on the steamship State of Nebraska on March 31, 1887, the purpose of the trip was “to show effete Europeans just what life in America is like.” Bill Cody himself considered grandiosely that “all of us [were] combined in an expedition to prove to the center of old world civilization that the vast region of the United States was finally and effectively settled by the English-speaking race.” Seemingly, the Great Scout, having swallowed the myth of Manifest Destiny whole, was taking his show to Britain and continental Europe to convince the Old World

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that the American frontier was closed and that the Wild West was fast becoming history.26 An interesting letter was sent to his parents on April 22, 1887 by Bill Cody’s young nephew, while working on the Wild West site in southwest London as a program seller for a few shillings a week. Ed Goodman nicely conveys Yankee feelings of superiority over the old-fashioned, class-ridden, and poorly-dressed English people he ostensibly encountered: London is so much different from N.Y. and the people are so much different. . . . They are all alike to me. I can not see any difference in them. The working class of people are the slowest people I ever saw. I believe one good American man can do as much work as 4 English men. No wonder they do not get a good salary. They do not earn what they get. . . . There must be 3000 people working on the grounds preparing to open, which is May 9, Monday. Everything is so old & out of style. The ladies at the Theatre ware [sic] low neck and short sleeve dresses and part there [sic] hair in the middle and comb it strait [sic] back. You would almost kill yourself a laughing to see some things here. . . . There clothing is not as good as ours I think. They have things here for cheapness and do not look at the quality. Tobacco is about 4 times as much as in America. That is where I will save money as I do not use it. Everyone here drinks! But I don’t have to if they do.27

After cataloguing the logistics of the show, abstemious young Ed went on to discuss Buffalo Bill, or Uncle Will, with some candor, including a reference to his notoriously short temper when provoked: Uncle Will is looking good & getting fat I think. . . . We have some terrible fogs here you cannot see across the street at times and they last 3 or 4 days. We also have terrible rains so they say. . . . Uncle Will is all right and looking good only when he is on the war path about something that goes [w]rong and then everyone has to watch out and me too if I happen to be about at the time. Lord Mayor was out to see him yesterday and they gave him a little of the proformance [sic], and [he] thot [sic] it was great. He [Uncle Will] is bound to make big money the opening day is $5 or 1 pound admission and they expect 20,000 people and if they come that will be $100,000. How is that? Wait and see if they come.28

The young program seller need not have worried about attendance figures because the Wild West show was a huge popular success during its London run from May to October, to the extent that it was more of a crowd draw than the staid American Exhibition it was meant to accompany.

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A large covered bridge across the West London Railway’s tracks led from the main American Exhibition shedlike building eastwards to the grounds nearest Earls Court station, where the Wild West show arena was located, surrounded by railway lines and about a third of a mile in circumference. The showground was flanked by a covered grandstand that could seat 20,000 with standing room, under shelter, for another 10,000 and open terraces for 10,000 more, providing a good view of the entertainment to at least 40,000 spectators. A painted backcloth showing the Rocky Mountains encircled the other half of the arena and the performers’ access points were cleverly disguised as dark clefts in the gorges. Behind the canvas-painted foothills towered a minimountain peak that had been thrown up by hauling 17,000 loads of earth and rocks, among which was a grove of newly planted trees, with the encampment for the cowboys and Indians on the West Brompton corner of the triangle, fronting the modern entrance. At the other side of the grounds were the stables for bronco horses, mules, and a corral for buffaloes, antelopes, and so on.29 A contemporary account in Railway News was convinced that the Wild West show was not “an imitation or an example of acting” but was the “exact reproduction of daily scenes of frontier life enacted by real people.” The show’s program was summarized thus: It comprises Indian life, cowboy life, Indian fighting, burning Indian villages [my italics], hunting buffalo, lassoing and breaking in wild horses, shooting, feats of strength, and border athletic games, etc. Over 200 Indians and cowboys are engaged in this pictorial representation of a romantic phase of life and their arrival and installation at Kensington has at once awakened public interest in the [American] Exhibition, giving promise of forming a permanent attraction to visitors.

This is the only reference to the “burning of Indian villages” as part of the Wild West show encountered by the present author. There is no evidence of this ominous scenario actually being performed, however, since the article cited relied on extensive publicity handouts and was printed before the show’s London opening.30 On the eve of the Jubilee, a Royal Command Performance of the Wild West show before Queen Victoria and a handful of invited guests replaced the May 11, 1887 afternoon performance before thousands, with a consequent loss of ticket sales. As usual, Frank Richmond, master of ceremonies, ringmaster, or as he preferred “orator,” announced to open the show: “Ladies and gentlemen, Buffalo Bill and Nate Salsbury proudly present America’s National Entertainment, the one and only, genuine and authentic, unique and original . . . Wild West!!” The court circular printed a

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crammed program, cut down at first to one hour, including an introductory parade; a race between cowboys, Native Americans and Mexicans; a Pony Express rider; rifle shooting by Lillian Smith; wing shooting by Annie Oakley; cowboys’ fun; a ladies race; fancy riding; the Deadwood Stage Coach; an Native American race; a war dance; horseback shooting by Buffalo Bill; a buffalo hunt, and; the famous Attack on the Settlers’ Cabin. After the show, Bill Cody, Lillian Smith and Annie Oakley, Nate Salsbury, Chief Red Shirt, and two Native American squaws with tiny papooses, were presented to the Queen.31 What did Her Gracious Majesty make of all this? Back at Windsor Castle that same evening Queen Victoria confided some vivid impressions of the Wild West show to her private journal that are worth citing in full: All the different people, wild, painted Red Indians from America, on their wild bare horses, of different tribes,—cow boys, Mexicans, &c., all came tearing round at full speed, shrieking and screaming, which had the weirdest effect. An attack on a coach & on a ranch, with an immense deal of firing, was most exciting, so was the buffalo hunt, & the bucking ponies, that were almost impossible to sit. The cow boys, are fine looking people, but the painted Indians, with their feathers, & wild dress (very little of it) were rather alarming looking, & they have cruel faces. A young girl [Emma Hickok], who went through the “haute ecole,” certainly sat the most marvelous plunges beautifully, sitting quite erect, & being master of her horse. There were 2 other girls [Smith and Oakley], who shot with unvarying aim at glass balls. Col. Cody “Buffalo Bill,” as he is called, from having killed 3000 buffaloes, with his own hand, is a splendid man, handsome, & gentlemanlike in manner. He has had many encounters & hand to hand fights with the Red Indians. Their War Dances, to a wild drum and pipe, was quite fearful, with all their contorsions [sic] & shrieks, & they come so close.32

If in places personal (the Queen was once a regular horsewoman), Her Majesty’s responses were also perhaps typical of elderly English ladies who came to watch the charismatic Buffalo Bill perform at Earls Court, along with his colorful and boisterous version of the Wild West. Conversely, asks an expert on the British Wild West shows, what did the “Red Indians” make of Queen Victoria? According to Black Elk, a Sioux from a reservation in South Dakota, We stood right in front of Grandmother England. She was little but fat and we liked her, because she was good to us. After we danced, she spoke to us. She said, “I am sixty-seven years old and I have seen all kinds of people, but today I have seen the best-looking people I know.” She shook hands with all

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of us. Her hand was very little and soft. We gave a big cheer for her, and then the shining wagons came in and she got into one of them, and they all went away.

That night Chief Red Shirt’s braves sat up all through the night, apparently, talking about the “Great White Mother.” They next went on to perform for nearly five months at a newly built auditorium on Manchester Racecourse, near Salford. Intriguingly, long after the Wild West show had left Great Britain on May 6, 1888, over a year after its arrival, “three of the persons calling themselves cowboys who belonged to the American Exhibition” and who had stayed behind in London were interviewed by the police. They were traced because of the Metropolitan Police receiving a tip-off that October about suspicious foreigners, in connection with their Jack the Ripper enquiries in the East End. The stay-behind cowboys, fortunately, “satisfactorily accounted for themselves.”33 The Wild West show went on to visit Great Britain three more times, in 1892, 1902–03, and again in 1904—“Positively The Last and Final Farewell Tour”—traveling by rail to large cities but also remote small towns throughout England, Scotland, and Wales. The last trip served to distract absentee husband Cody from a public relations disaster, his application for a divorce from Louisa Maude Frederici, his aggrieved wife of 38 years, who chose to fight it out in court rather than give her consent for a divorce. This meant exposing to the press both Bill’s career as a sexual philanderer and his wife’s alleged attempts to poison him. Ruling for Louisa, the judge refused Cody his divorce. A few years earlier, in 1901, an ailing Nate Salsbury, eager to support potential legal claims by his heirs, had insisted that he was the primary driving force behind Buffalo Bill’s worldwide fame. To back up this inflated claim, Salsbury wrote a resentful document entitled Sixteen Years in Hell with Buffalo Bill, unpublished in Cody’s lifetime, that dwelt heavily on his partner’s apparent megalomania and hard drinking, self-justified in “that he is so great a man that all the world excuses him because he is a hero and an ‘Old Timer’ who saved America from going back to the wilderness [as] Columbus found it.”34 Whatever the truth of these allegations, the great scout’s declining years were less than prosperous and he was compelled to continue performing until his death, despite illness, the need to wear a wig, and family troubles. “I never was so disappointed in my life,” claimed Major Gordon William Lillie, on meeting Buffalo Bill and discovering that his boyhood hero had feet of clay: “He had been sleeping on the floor of a tent in some hay, his

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fur coat was missing, his hair was all matted and he was drunk.” A rival Wild West showman without Cody’s genuine frontier experience, Lillie, otherwise known as Pawnee Bill, combined shows with Buffalo Bill from 1908 to 1913 but inevitably their “Two Bills” partnership went sour, partly owing to Cody’s throwing money away on poor investments. By controlling the purse strings Lillie, despite an outward show of camaraderie, relished his ability to condescend to the world’s most famous showman. Pawnee Bill complained that Cody, now in his early sixties, spent money “like a drunken sailor” and took pains to puncture the irresponsible Buffalo Bill’s heroic public image.35 An impecunious Cody was next reduced to touring with the Sells-Floto Circus from 1914 to 1915 to repay a debt to Henry Tammen, its shady impresario. Then the latter reneged and told Cody he still owed $20,000 and would have to pay it back with his weekly salary. Tammen eventually relented on repayment but refused to cancel the loan and, meanwhile, claimed ownership of the name “Buffalo Bill’s Original Wild West.” So Cody then combined with the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma to create the “Buffalo Bill (Himself) Pageant of Military Preparedness and 101 Ranch Wild West.” Preparedness was the slogan of those who favored American intervention in World War I on the side of Britain and France, thereby potentially alienating German American audiences. The show closed in November 1916 with Cody feeling unwell, “played out from the long, hard season,” according to his nephew. The one and only Buffalo Bill died, surrounded by his long-suffering wife and extended family, the following January 10, 1917.36 The Wild West and American Identity The aura of international acclamation for Buffalo Bill’s presentation of America’s fast-fading Wild West past meant that the show was ideally suited for American audiences eager to celebrate their national identity. At a time of imperial expansion overseas, evidenced by the acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rica, Guam, and the Philippines after the SpanishAmerican War (1898), together with rising economic growth, the Wild West show gave rural and urban, native-born and immigrant audiences the chance to applaud themselves and their homeland. “By cheering the show,” argues one expert, “Americans applauded their nation and the gladiatorial approach to Manifest Destiny. The Wild West show reduced the Western saga to a morality play in which Cody, along with scouts and cowboys, represented the forces of good and civilization and Indians and a few errant white road agents symbolized evil and barbarism.” On

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the surface, this Manichean struggle became even clearer at the end of the 1886 season when Cody and his manager Nate Salsbury took over New York’s Madison Square Garden for the winter to transform their outdoor show into an indoor one, “The Drama of Civilization,” hiring Steel Mackaye, actor, playwright, and producer, to make the conversion.37 Now the Wild West show had a grand narrative spelling out the process of transforming wilderness into nation; it was no longer a series of detached scenarios, as earlier, but instead “a great historical, educational, pictorial, and dramatic spectacle.” “The Drama of Civilization” was also championing westward expansion, thereby projecting a carefully articulated theme of American progress that would become increasingly prominent in the show. Yet Buffalo Bill’s most recent biographer contests the above “gladiatorial contest” interpretation as oversimplified by arguing that this revived show represented more than an American success story portraying the triumph of Anglo-Saxon white civilization over Native American savagery. The show’s imperial progress thesis could instead be measured in the stages of racial evolution that went from “savage Indian” through Mexican and “half-civilized” cowboy to the “representative man” William Frederick Cody, who had been through every stage of frontier development. Equally, under the great frontiersman’s guiding hand, Native Americans were not just playing in a drama of civilization; they were passing from savagery into civilization. The middle-class white or “family entertainment” public had to be persuaded that such performers were becoming more like themselves, ultimately resulting in the “vanishing” of Native Americans, and of the show itself.38 Buffalo Bill’s legacy, argues cultural historian Joy Kasson, lies in his Wild West show’s dramatization of cultural issues basic to American national identity: the use of conquest and violence in the formation of the continental United States; Americans’ ambivalent relationship with unspoiled nature and native peoples; gender and the meaning of heroism, and; the role of the individual in an increasingly urban, industrial, and corporate society. The show’s importance, like that of the Hollywood Western, also lies in its very form: “a mass medium that blurs the lines between fact and fiction, history and melodrama, truth and entertainment. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West only became the truth about America when it was believed as the truth by Americans and others round the world.” Furthermore, a study of the Americanization of the world up to the early 1920s bears the title Buffalo Bill in Bologna (2005), referring to the Wild West show’s extensive 1906 tour of middle Italy. With their cultural omnipresence in an age of developing mass entertainment, Bill Cody and his show symbolize for the authors an imperial pageant of

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white supremacy that assisted the spread of American gun culture and advanced technology overseas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.39 Less apocalyptic, parallels between the career of Buffalo Bill and preceding showman P. T. Barnum are not difficult to itemize, for they shared a similar life trajectory. Both were self-made men (Cody from “prairie to palace”) who attained a great celebrity and, at the pinnacle of their careers, were presented to the crowned heads of Europe, among whom was Queen Victoria. Both in due course saw themselves as smart businessmen or middle-class entrepreneurs, despite their humble beginnings, and both made unwise investments outside of show business that brought them near to insolvency: Barnum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Cody in the Wyoming town named after him. Buffalo Bill, like Barnum, has also been seen as partly a boundary-crossing or trickster figure who destroys or violates old institutions and codes to erect new ones, “because of the ways he loosened the grip of elite knowledge and encouraged Americans to enjoy their own powers of discernment.” Equally, the concept of the “artful deceiver”—as applied originally to Barnum’s working practice—is used of William Cody’s reinvention of himself as Buffalo Bill by his most scrupulous biographer. Finally, while Barnum tried to make previously despised commercial forms of entertainment, such as the circus, acceptable to middle-class notions of gentility, Cody “did much to destroy older notions of art and performance, and to usher in a new national mythology for the coming American century.”40 “Oh but I am enjoying this trip—more than I ever did before,” Cody wrote to a rancher friend on a visit to Nebraska early in 1901, “[W]hy— because I am not drinking. Everything looks bright and prosperous.” Bill Cody certainly drank heavily and became virtually alcoholic but was said never to have missed a performance, despite the fact that he had to ride and shoot in all his performances. He also managed extensive business dealings, and lived till the age of 73. On the other hand, despite the Wild West show’s great success and Cody’s large income, “he managed to get and keep himself in debt, by investing in every foolhardy scheme he ever heard of, by giving money to anyone with a hard-luck story, and by drinking up what was left.” Yet Buffalo Bill signified far more, as this chapter has shown, than the crude caricature his late-twentiethcentury detractors presented of “an egotistical drunk on horseback touring with a bing-bang-shoot-’em-up, the only-good-Indian-is-a-deadIndian show.”41 Thus acclaimed movie director Robert Altman’s iconoclastic but rather dull Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), a moralistic parable loosely based on Arthur Lee Kopit’s play

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Indians (1969), was the product of a cynical post-Vietnam and Watergate age whose movies sought to debunk the legendary heroes of the Wild West. Bill Cody (Paul Newman) is presented as a confidence man, a selfpromoting drunk who exploits Indians, especially Sitting Bull, to boost his own reputation and make profits for the Wild West show. In reality, Cody did his best to negotiate the surrender to the military of his friend Sitting Bull who had willingly spent the 1885–86 season on the road with the traveling exhibition. Above all, on horseback and dressed in full buckskin regalia, Bill Cody was a “magnificent showman” whose representation of the Wild West helped to shape one of the most popular of fictional and cinematic genres. “He had critics while he lived and more in death. He has been debunked a hundred times. Still, he remains Buffalo Bill.”42 Endnote Despite the above American taste for debunking its heroes and caveats about Buffalo Bill’s riding for the Pony Express or his duel-to-the-death with Yellow Hand, he was far more than a flamboyant fraud. For, Cody was an authentic frontiersman, friendly with Wild Bill Hickok, Texas Jack, and Kit Carson, Jr., who had spent some years on the Great Plains scouting extensively for the army, where he met General Philip H. Sheridan to whom his life story is dedicated. Caught up in a vortex of change on the Western frontier, Buffalo Bill had undeniably seen plenty of action, fought Indians in minor skirmishes, been in the Civil War on the side of the Union, and hunted buffalo to feed hungry railroad workers. He was also awarded the Medal of Honor by Congress for fighting Indians, later revoked on a technicality and then reinstated, and was elected to the Nebraska state legislature in 1872 but appears not to have taken his seat. Running parallel with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and the circus at its Golden Age peak was the new American entertainment form of staged variety known as “vaudeville,” a precursor of so much in presentday mass culture. Vaudeville moved from the margins of the entertainment industry and, like most other American amusements dealt with in this study, “toward economic consolidation, [it] catered to the expanding middle class, and negotiated the treacherous but intriguing path between traditional decorum and ‘sinful’ distractions.”43 The big top became an essential part of vaudeville theater with acrobats, tumblers, clowns, jugglers, and animal acts, taken out of the sawdust ring to become a passing component of the new urban stage show. Many circus

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performers migrated to the vaudeville stage from economic necessity during the off season. Chapter 6 looks at the emergence of vaudeville from among other nineteenth-century stage shows and its gradual decline as a form of communal entertainment with the advent of a new technology with the ability to project moving pictures onto a screen for a mass audience.

New York’s Palace Theatre at 1568 Broadway, 1915 Courtesy of the Theatre Historical Society of America, Elmhurst, Illinois.

CHAPTER 6 VAUDEVILLE I: RISE AND DECLINE OF AN EMERGENT MASS CULTURE

nder its high-class French-sounding name, “vaudeville” became America’s premier mode of live entertainment from the mid-1880s until at least the early 1920s (although lasting for much longer) and was equivalent to the British music hall and the Parisian café-concert of roughly the same period. The vaudeville program in its heyday in cities such as Boston, New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, usually consisted of from ten to fifteen individual stage variety acts, featuring magicians, acrobats, comedians, trained animals, jugglers, singers, dancers, and even the stars of grand opera and theater. The genteel-sounding term “vaudeville” itself may well have originated as a corruption of vaux-de-Vire, or the French satirical songs in couplets practiced in sixteenth-century Normandy’s valley of the Vire River, renowned for its popular music and fairs. Vaudeville’s American usage has been ascribed to the proprietor of Koster & Bial’s Music Hall, whose theater on West 23rd Street was prominent among New York’s prolific amusements.1 Improvements in rail travel and other communication networks, as well as innovations in printing, manufacture, and corporate marketing, transformed Gilded Age leisure patterns and also saw the emergence of a new managerial class that, as will be revealed, tried hard to control the moral content of entertainment. Thus, from a scattered assortment of commercial amusements, “clean” variety or vaudeville helped build the first syndicated or national system of American entertainment. The history of vaudeville as the new national leisure pursuit is also bound up with the development of inexpensive forms of public transport in expanding urban areas, the availability of gas and later electric light, and especially the invention of cheaper color printing and lithography for advertising, poster, and song sheet illustrations. The peak period for vaudeville as the most popular form

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of urban amusement similarly coincided with a massive surge of overseas immigration to the cities of the Atlantic seaboard, notably Boston and New York. Consequently, humor based on crude ethnic characterizations was a major component of many vaudeville routines.2 The Cleanup of Variety A case has already been made for early attempts at assuring show business respectability by promoters such as P. T. Barnum in New York and his friend Moses Kimball in Boston, who from the 1840s onward offered safely decent Lecture Room or variety theater performances as an extension of their “museums.” Thus slapstick comedy skits, tightrope displays, acrobatics, juggling, conjuring, burlesques, pantomimes, ballets, as well as moralistic but popular melodramas, were performed in Barnum’s Lecture Room or large theater adjoining the American Museum in New York (see chapter 1). The two allied showmen maintained the norms of Americanized “Victorian” behavior and sensibilities by censoring plays to please even the most fastidious, initiating matinee performances, excluding prostitutes, prohibiting the sale of alcohol, and meanwhile advertising their adjacent museum exhibits as educational and morally uplifting.3 The performance of brief entertainment acts or “variety” as found from the 1840s on the dime museum Lecture Room stage was to be reconstituted as a part of concert saloon entertainment in the late 1850s and early 1860s; not to be confused with the more middle-class concert hall presenting classical music to both sexes that was prominent before mid-century. Barnum himself acquired respectability as a cultural impresario by managing Swedish soprano Jenny Lind’s concert appearances. The concert or tenderloin saloons common in the Bowery and along Broadway in New York, on the other hand, were little more than smoke-filled beer halls with enticing “waiter girls” and often risqué variety acts intended to please an all-male, albeit socially mixed, audience. Such places offered something for every masculine taste: drink and joviality at the bar, gambling in the back rooms, even prostitutes in the boxes. However, the major source of entertainment was the rough-and-tumble, sometimes bawdy, song-and-danceact stage show.4 Possibly based upon the English “singing saloon,” the forerunner of the British music hall, the smallest American concert saloons of the 1860s had a makeshift platform for performers at one end of the barroom; the largest had more elaborate and brightly lit auditoriums. According to James McCabe’s jaundiced account in Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1872) of one concert saloon, possibly Harry Hill’s, the male audience was drawn from “all classes of society,” the music was inferior, and the “waiter girls”

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worked on commission for overpriced drinks. They were not only in the business of selling drink, but also not as pretty as advertised. They were . . . a collection of poor wretches, beastly, foul-mouthed, brutal wretches, half dead with consumption and disease . . . The girls are, without exception, the nastiest, most besotted drabs that ever walked the streets . . . The saloons are full of male 17 or 18 year olds “seeing life” who won’t talk with the cook and the chambermaid but come here and talk with other Irish girls every whit as ignorant as the servants at home—only the latter are virtuous and these are infamous.

Earlier, owners of “legitimate” Broadway theaters annoyed by the cutrate saloon competition made common cause with temperance advocates and Republican reformers to lobby for the 1862 Concert Saloon Bill, a state law designed to suppress “flagrant displays of public immorality” or the combination of stage acts, liquor sales, and waiter girls. The concert saloons proved hard to suppress, as they avoided prosecution by abolishing either “waitresses” and/or the performances, and a few years later there were still 223 of them in the city employing nearly 1,200 waitresses. The campaign against them did, however, accelerate the shift toward a broader audience for variety theater that meant owner-managers now had to make their profits from the box office rather than the bar.5 Deriving from the rowdy, alcohol-based, and male-dominated concert saloon entertainment, entrepreneurs eventually created a respectable form of variety that also catered to the female consumer. For, “variety” was associated with beer gardens, loose morals, and the Bowery working class, while its successor “vaudeville” had snobbish uptown French associations that suggested refinement and good taste. Refined vaudeville developed by a shift in its primary market and image away from its “rowdy” workingclass origins in beer halls and saloons toward a more feminine and pacified audience that would in time guarantee middle-class respectability. “Vaudeville . . . was a key institution in the transition from a marginalized sphere of popular entertainment, largely associated with vice and masculinity, to a consolidated network of commercial leisure, in which the female consumer was not only welcomed but also pampered,” declares a historian of American audiences.6 The transformation of the sometimes dubious variety acts found in New York’s honky-tonks, beer gardens, free-and-easies, and concert saloons, into the new and “respectable” vaudeville owed much to energetic performer and theatrical manager Antonio “Tony” Pastor (1834–1908), even if he continued to call his entertainment “variety” rather than its sissy and Frenchified successor “vaudeville” in a desire not to alienate those customers

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accustomed to the more liberated style of the former. The so-called father of [refined] vaudeville began his much-advertised cleanup campaign even before the watershed years of the early 1880s. For, the Brooklyn-born, Italian American Pastor had also performed in and managed variety theaters on the Bowery and on Broadway having, in the 1860s and 1870s, outgrown the Lecture Rooms of dime museums. Known for his waxed moustache, many rings, and shiny opera hat, Pastor became a distinct power in the entertainment business on moving in 1881 to his final and most acclaimed theatrical destination on New York’s East 14th Street.7 We have already met with Tony Pastor when in 1846, aged only 12 years, he was apparently hired by Barnum to appear in blackface with a minstrel troupe on the American Museum’s Lecture Room stage (see chapter 3). He soon left the famous showman to perform under the big top for approximately 14 years, touring the country as a circus acrobat, ringmaster, and singing clown. Beginning to tire of the circus business, Pastor transferred aged 26 to the variety stage as a comic, ballad, and minstrel singer. He opened a four-year run in a saloon at 444 Broadway between Howard and Grand Streets in 1861 where he established himself as a writer and singer of popular songs. A number of Pastor’s pro-Union songbooks or “songsters” such as Tony Pastor’s Union Songster (1862) and Tony Pastor’s Complete Budget of Comic Songs (1864),8 published during the Civil War period have survived. The postwar period from 1865 saw Pastor became the proud ownermanager for ten years of the Grand Opera House on 201 Bowery Street near lower Broadway in which he also performed. Here Tony continued making tentative efforts to attract a socially more inclusive and more female audience by cleaning up his acts somewhat, so that the show would appeal as “a great family resort” to more than the traditional Bowery male saloon crowds. Equally, Pastor’s hands-on experience as a singer and writer of popular and topical songs greatly assisted his efforts to broaden his Opera House audience. Rising immigration levels in multiethnic cities such as New York also made variety into a more commercial proposition. A jampacked Opera House program for the week ending May 18, 1872 advertised the usual assortment of comic songs, an operatic sketch, Irish selections, banjo “eccentricities,” comic sketches, song-and-dance medlies, “original statues” or stationary seminudes and, for the finale or afterpiece, a topical neighborhood drama called City Life whose large cast featured stock New York types, such as pugnacious firemen, swaggering Bowery b’hoys, and self-important Irish American policemen.9 To remain part of the city’s main theater district that had progressed northward along with the center of Manhattan, in 1875 Pastor moved uptown to 585–587 Broadway, opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, in the

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more respectable Union Square area—the theatrical equivalent of Times Square after 1900. Much of the comedy performed here, as subsequently in vaudeville, was either Irish- or German-based and it made fun of ethnic stereotypes. In 1879 Pastor introduced burlesques of legitimate Broadway theater successes and light opera, such as Gilbert and Sullivan, which were wildly popular and immediately copied by other managers. The short and stocky Pastor, now sporting a dashing handlebar moustache, sang at almost every Union Square performance for most of his managerial career. Two years later, on October 24, 1881, he opened his new and significantly drink-free variety revue in a little theater on fashionable 14th Street, near Third Avenue and Union Square, situated on the ground floor of the notorious Tammany Hall building, most of which had been an amusement complex for two seasons.10 Each “headliner” performance on the 14th Street theater program was supported by from 12 to 15 first-class, well-rehearsed specialty acts and the bill of fare was characterized by its speed and diversity. Songs, dances, acrobatics, mimicry, and dramatic and burlesque sketches succeeded each other without pause, keeping audiences entertained and eager to see the next act. Playing to a mixed audience of men, women, and children from both the “respectable” working and lower middle classes, the 47-year old Pastor was the first show businessman to ban liquor entirely from his theater, though he conveniently kept a refreshment stand next door. Disreputable concert saloons serving drink still continued, however, in low-class entertainment areas such as the downtown Bowery. The reopened Tammany Hall theater was perceived, on the other hand, as far safer and more attractive to the ladies. Here Tony cemented his reputation for “clean” variety with the kind of show to which “a child could take his parents.” Yet many of his gimmicks to attract a family audience, such as the absence of sexually suggestive material, were a common practice while he was still located on the Bowery.11 The Keith-Albee Vaudeville Circuit Despite Pastor’s innovations in the primary theatrical location of what was then uptown Manhattan, a case has been made that “vaudeville” really emerged as a form of mass entertainment only from 1883 out of B. F. Keith’s Gaiety Museum in Washington Street, Boston, with its second-floor lecture theater showing variety performances to prop up a faltering museum business. Benjamin Franklin Keith (1846–1910), born in Hillsboro Bridge, New Hampshire, worked until he was 18 on a farm in western Massachusetts. He first entered show business in the 1870s through employment in George Bunnell’s New York dime museum on the Bowery (see chapter 1), then

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worked as a “grifter” or salesperson at the two-bit candy concession of a Barnum and then Forepaugh circus. Keith began his famous association with Edward Franklin Albee (1860–1930)—comparable to Barnum going into business with Bailey—within two years of starting his Boston dime museum. The son of a Boston police official, E. F. Albee had started out with a Barnum circus in 1876, traveling with various shows as an “outside” ticket man and legal “fixer.”12 From the summer of 1885, the enterprising pair ran “continuous” variety programs in the Gaiety Museum’s theater, rather than several shows a day of eight to ten acts, allowing audiences to come and go at their own convenience. This made the shows attractive to women who were out shopping nearby and it also lured many regular theater patrons who might have passed by, had not Boston’s legitimate and variety theaters closed for the summer. The two also moved away from the rather sleazy freak show atmosphere of the museum by staging an abridged one-hour version of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, a current success in a major Boston theater. In 1887 Keith transferred his activities to the Bijou Theater in Boston and, in the years following, Albee acted as general manager of Keith theaters acquired in Providence, Rhode Island (1888), and in Philadelphia (1889). Together Keith-Albee also purpose built Boston’s opulent Colonial Theater, opened in 1893, mostly with money borrowed from the city’s wealthy Catholic Diocese.13 B. F. Keith did not just pay lip service to the rhetoric of refinement favored by Pastor but was insistent that his audience behave strictly as ladies and gentlemen. He had learnt from businessmen in the new American corporate bureaucracies, such as retailing, mail order, banking, and manufacturing. These men were achieving success with a national marketing approach to branded goods based on a rhetoric of cleanliness, purity, and healthfulness. When in 1889 Keith opened his first Philadelphia house, the Chestnut Street Theater, he actually stood in the gallery during the intermission and personally lectured the audience on its behavior, something unimaginable in preceding decades. Moving into New York’s Union Square Theater in 1893 and with Keith’s Colonial in Boston and theaters elsewhere, otherwise known as the “Sunday School circuit,” the KeithAlbee management banned smoking, hat wearing, whistling, stamping, spitting on the floor, and crunching peanuts. Like Barnum before him, “Keith mastered and exploited a rhetoric of cultural refinement and moral elevation to legitimate a new kind of theater.”14 Even so, Pastor’s 14th Street theater, opened two years before Keith’s dime museum in Boston, was of equal importance with the Keith-Albee circuit for its move away from bawdy and male-orientated variety toward the new vaudeville-style family show entertainment. Other impresarios

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followed Pastor and Keith’s lead to attract women and children, thereby making vaudeville safe for the respectable of all classes to attend, by restricting drinking to intermissions, or removing bars from the premises entirely. The afternoon shows or matinees, in particular, attracted a diverse audience of men, women, and children who were invited to steal time away from work or family responsibilities to take in the show. Vaudeville managers, like their British music hall counterparts, succeeded in attracting large numbers of women to their shows because they kept their prices low, installed fixed seating and, by denying alcohol, made women feel comfortable inside. Ladies who would not have imagined accompanying their male friends or husbands to the downtown concert saloon, now volunteered to go with them to the local or midtown vaudeville hall. Such venues were also a godsend to the English-speaking children of immigrant communities who could afford no other form of commercial entertainment.15 Eventually, the empire-building Keith-Albee combine set up a circuit embracing 34 “big-time” (two shows a day) vaudeville theaters and a systematic booking system to match performers and theaters, the United Booking Office of America (UBO), incorporated in 1906, sole entry to the country’s most prestigious vaudeville circuit in the East. When this circuit scheme squeezed entertainers through the use of a commission system to match artistes and theaters, the White Rats Vaudeville Union of America fought back with a strike from 1916 to 1917 that collapsed under pressure of a management counterattack, the formation of a company union, and a blacklist. Performers could be bought and sold just like other commodities, noted Joseph M. Schenk, general manager for a rival vaudeville chain, “the same as merchandize, steel rails, wheat or grain.” Keith-Albee went on to become the largest and most influential of around 22 vaudeville circuits by the 1920s, including the Shuberts, F. F. Proctor, Percy Williams, Marcus Loew, Martin Beck, and William Morris.16 Some of these were successful, some collapsed, and some were absorbed by Keith-Albee who, working with Beck’s generally cooperative Orpheum circuit west of Chicago, virtually controlled big-time vaudeville through their nationwide booking system. According to one estimate, there were approximately 20,000 vaudevillians in America in 1919, but there was work for only 8,000 to 9,000. The UBO and other syndicates operating in unison linked managers and performers for a fee and eventually directed acts around the circuits, thereby creating a recognizable national brand that purported to be “clean” and “pure.” This new syndicated but still developing mass culture was to dominate popular forms of theater across big-city and smalltown America for decades to come.17

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Vaudeville Circuit Programs As one authority put it rather grandly in 1915, vaudeville “brought the best thought of the world condensed to fit the flying hour.” To attract an audience large enough to keep vaudeville theaters filled all day, managers had to include Barnum’s “something for everybody” on their programs: blackface, sketches, sentimental ballads, soft-shoe dances, and banjo players from the minstrel show; acrobats, tumblers, jugglers, and animal acts from the circus; skits, satires, and full-costume “flash” acts from musical comedy; one-act versions of comedy or melodrama from the legitimate theater; magicians, mind readers, and human curiosities or “freaks” from the dime museums; monologists from the medicine show; sports stars from the boxing rings and baseball stadiums, and; classical musicians from the symphony hall and opera singers from the opera hall. Stars from European stages, the opera, the classical concert hall, and the ballet were only too pleased, for the right price, to condense their art into 15-minute vaudeville turns.18 There were more than 5,000 theaters on the nation’s vaudeville circuit in their heyday, so that if a performer had 15 good minutes he could work for 6 years without changing a word or playing the same theater twice. The new electronic mass media were to change all this by the speed of their simultaneous communication to nationwide audiences; long-serving vaudeville routines, once they were recorded on radio, film, or gramophone, instantly became superfluous. The Keith-Albee houses set the pattern for most vaudeville shows with a bill of fare consisting of from eight to ten variety acts, sequenced to give each act maximum impact and the show a general cohesion. Iron jaw acts, minstrels, trick cyclists, hoofers, comedians, and long-legged girls from burlesque, passed without a hitch before the paying spectator. The Keith-Albee circuit regularly searched out routine acts in Europe, especially “dumb acts” where language was not an impediment, such as jugglers, acrobats, magicians, and animal acts. European, or at least European-seeming acts, provided big-time vaudeville with both an exotic foreign edge and the added attraction of a high-cultural cachet. How was the vaudeville bill of fare determined by a theater manager? George A. Gottlieb, who during World War I booked the acts for Keith’s famous Palace Theater in New York, explained that the audience was to be woken up with the number three position on the bill, since “from now on it [the show] must build right up to the finish.” The first “big punch” of the vaudeville show, or “name” performers, should appear fourth and fifth in order of precedence, just before the intermission, followed by a strong specialty act, such as performing seals, to get the audience back in their seats and to build up the second half of the program. The chief attraction or “headliner,” often a single comedy or singing star, usually came next to

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closing on a nine-act bill, with a final “showy” act such as trained animals, trapeze artists, or a Japanese troupe, to close the performance as the audience started to leave their seats and make for the exits. In any case, a mastery over of the art of balancing a vaudeville program was part of the genius of a skilful manager, for the correct structure produced a pace, rhythm, and unity that greatly enhanced the appeal of each performance and of the overall show.19 For a dime in the cheap seats, vaudeville audiences received hours of amusement from up to a dozen theatrical acts, including at least one “headliner,” in theaters open six days a week, from noon until near midnight. “In rapid succession, female impersonators, song and dance men, operatic sopranos, jugglers, dancing bears, storytellers, pantomimists, masters of prestidigitation, strongmen, whistlers, puppeteers, banjo players, acrobats, and comedy teams tumbled on and off the [vaudeville] stage,” itemizes one commentator. Opening acts were paid the least, and next to closing paid the most, but “small-time” vaudeville or “continuous” performance circuits had a lower pay scale anyway, despite requiring as many as six shows a day. Many of the small-time performers came from an immigrant, ethnic, and working-class background, as did the Marx brothers, since no educational qualifications were required to appear on stage. In this sense, vaudeville, like the show business in general, proclaimed itself typically American: a career open to the talented and ambitious, whatever be their ethnic origins and social or educational background.20 Booking agents were essential to fill a host of small-time vaudeville theaters that required chorus girls, comedians, specialty acts, and singers. Those who found regular bookings represented only a successful handful among “the vast and largely threadbare host” of small-timers who sustained their internal migrations from the 1880s until the vaudeville circuits began petering out in the late 1920s. Unsentimentally, Harpo Marx recalled, before fame beckoned, “the days of one-night stands . . . the days of stale bread pudding, bug-ridden hotels, crooked managers, and trudging from town to town like unwanted gypsies.” The correspondence of “Colonel” J. F. Milliken, a New York theatrical agent active from the late 1880s, is characteristic of small-time vaudeville’s economic concerns, such as managers “flying the coup” without paying their performers; artists failing to pay their agent’s fees after a booking had been secured; requests for employment by impecunious performers, and; complaints from vaudevillians about being booked into hick towns with small stages and uncomprehending audiences. The demand from business managers for “leading sopranos, young and attractive, and a few good singing and dancing soubrettes, extra good looking and dash” was fairly continuous. “Keep your eye open for good looking chorus [girls], don’t give a damn if they can’t sing but they

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must look to beat h[ell].” On the other hand, Colonel Williams or “Keystone Bill,” the rifle dead shot, complained of receiving few worthwhile engagements from the harassed Milliken.21 Further up the vaudeville, operetta, and musical comedy hierarchy, a letter addressed on November 11, 1911 to Charles Dillingham, manager of the Hippodrome Theater in New York, and later a leading musicalcomedy producer, struck a sad cautionary note: Will you kindly answer this letter and let me know if you sent Irving Friedman age 13 living at 2 West 101 St. on the road with a company Sat. 4 Nov. He left without his mother’s knowledge and she is ill worrying about him. If you did not place him and if he or his sister Martha age 15 should ever [make contact] with you to place them will you please remember that their mother does not wish them to go on the stage. Trusting you will kindly answer this letter.

This parent seems to have heeded the advice of British entertainer Nöel Coward a quarter of a century later: “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington. Don’t put your daughter on the stage.” Equally, Dillingham’s correspondence files contain several poignant letters from musical comedy singers and understudies seeking work that invariably began: “I have made several repeated attempts to see you in regard to an engagement for next season.” Without an appointment these supplicants could only list their recent bookings and end: “I will be glad to sing for you should you desire it.”22 Vaudeville’s Ethnic Diversity New Yorkers wanted their stage entertainment as energetic and brash as their own emergent multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural urban character. Coinciding with vaudeville’s zenith as the most popular form of American live entertainment, from 1880 until 1920, roughly a million and a half immigrants, mostly poor Russian Jews and southern Italians, arrived in New York City via the renowned Ellis Island processing center. The city’s immigrant population increased by well over 400,000 in each of the last two decades of the nineteenth century, swelling by an extra 942,000 in the first decade of the twentieth century and roughly 400,000 more by 1920. The vast majority remained in the city, until, by 1910, 41 percent of all New Yorkers and a majority of adults both in Manhattan and Brooklyn were foreign-born. Adult migrants were invariably poor and minimally educated, few spoke English, and so the attendance of middle-aged and elderly migrants at vaudeville theaters was probably not very high. Their

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children, second-generation Italian, German, East European, Jewish, and Irish immigrants, were more likely to be found in New York’s audience for vaudeville before World War I.23 In 1896 there were just seven vaudeville theaters throughout New York City but by 1910 the figure had expanded to 31 with comparable figures for Chicago (6/22) and Philadelphia (12/30). Vaudeville has been lauded by its foremost historian as the voice of the city, “the creation of a commercial, ethnic culture” that tested “the boundaries of propriety” before an urban, mass immigrant audience. Regular vaudeville patrons were the burgeoning number of white-collar workers or the most affluent wage earners but admission prices, particularly the ten cent charge for gallery seats, would not have prevented unskilled, blue-collar workers from attending. Segregation along racial lines was, however, intrinsic to vaudeville because of the chauvinistic, historical and cultural ethos of social Darwinism, racial hierarchy, and overseas imperialism of the period during which this form of stage entertainment flourished. The Keith-Albee circuit popular in the urban northeast took part in the increasing segregation of the early twentieth century, despite Northern civil rights laws prohibiting such discrimination. Theater managers were instructed to create a racially divided balcony, with the rear section reserved for African Americans, and to provide “a separate ticket window and stairs for the negro patrons.” By the 1920s there was a black vaudeville circuit in the South, the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA or “tough on black artists/asses”) and various theaters such as Chicago’s Royal and New York’s Apollo catering especially to black customers.24 Vaudeville flourished in New York and hence, like the city itself, was culturally, socially, and ethnically diverse: From Times Square to South Beach, vaudeville entrepreneurs recognized that New Yorkers were not one people who could be easily entertained under one roof. New Yorkers were too divided by class, race, ethnicity, and gender to find satisfaction in one standardized vaudeville theater. Vaudeville, like the people of New York, spoke in many dialects. The entrepreneurs who sold vaudeville to New York City had to tailor their appeal to a diverse constituency. No other approach was possible, especially in an industry that grew so closely with the city.

Respectable women out shopping could patronize a refined KeithAlbee theater; poor Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side favored vaudeville at Loews’ theaters on Delancey Street or Avenue B. Middleclass patrons attended the Olympia at South Beach resort, Staten Island, while the Casino attracted the “Bowery beer crowd.” Small-time theaters in the Bronx and Brooklyn, unlike theaters in Times Square or downtown

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borough centers, catered to immigrant and working-class New Yorkers in their own neighborhoods, “smoothing their entry into a heterogeneous cultural network.”25 Vaudeville humor at the expense of ethnic caricatures, a stereotyped response to massive immigration from the 1880s onward, was extremely popular. Though comic Irish acts were predominant, Italian, Jewish, and German caricatures were also common on stage. Vaudeville comedians felt compelled to emphasize each ethnic group’s unusual traits and to exaggerate their dialects, thereby making various migrant identities seem more alien or “foreign” than in reality. On the other hand, some “dialect acts” provided a means of assimilation for migrant audiences by enabling them to laugh at other ethnic groups as “outsiders.” Hence vaudeville has been justifiably labeled an “equal opportunity insulter.” Whites in blackface also set off the African American in what would now be seen as a self-evident racist stereotype. Novelist Caryl Phillips has a famous black performer complain: “Everything in goddamn vaudeville is always rush, rush, rush, with the Jews playing the Germans, and the Germans playing the Irish, and the Irish playing the Chinese, and everybody thinking they can play colored because what’s a poor colored man going to do to stop them?”26 Thus a typical comic Italian in vaudeville, sounding like Chico Marx, has difficulty trying to communicate effectively: “ ‘Waita one minoots’ he calls out to a companion. ‘I no can walka fast. My uncle isa sick’.” His friend cannot understand why a sick uncle should slow anyone down, until the frustrated migrant finally screams: “ ‘my uncle! my uncle!’” and points to his ankle. The same confused Italian figure believes that the city mayor (mare) was a horse, that a diploma was the plumber, and that a funeral pallbearer was a polar bear. This kind of ethnic humor may not be very sophisticated and only partially accurate but a hundred years ago it perhaps made migrant Italian Americans seem more understandable to the general public and even to each other. For “despite the exaggerated dialects, the twisted language, the strange costumes and the odd behavior, vaudeville’s ethnic humor often contained strong doses of humanity that reminded audiences that immigrants were people.”27 The only ethnic stereotypes popular in vaudeville that there is space to consider in some detail here are those of the omnipresent stage Irish persona and the exaggerated Jewish or “Hebe” representation. Both were pronounced caricatures of their respective communities that would not be permissible today as entertainment, and they serve to remind us that “the past is a foreign country” where respect for others’ national, racial, or ethnic identities cannot be assumed. By 1860 New York was the largest Irish city in the world, with an estimated quarter of its citizens born in the revered Emerald Isle. Even so, the denigrating if comic Irish act, often

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featuring a hod-carrying Mick, was long associated with the stage convention of a pronounced brogue, green side-whiskers, slapstick, and the bladder. During the week ending September 28, 1878, for example, Tony Pastor’s Grand Opera House featured, among a dozen other acts: “The only and original Bards of Tara, Kelly and Ryan, in their marvelous and original Irish sensation changes, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Malone,’ ‘Pat and Judy,’ and ‘The Hod Carriers.’ To conclude with the laughable sketch entitled ‘Germany vs. Ireland.’ ” Perhaps members of the audience enjoyed recognizing and laughing at performances based on their own ethnic identities, however insensitive or demeaning. Yet such stereotypical representations also no doubt allowed native-born Americans to reaffirm feelings of superiority over new migrants by laughing at the latter’s onstage caricatures.28 One of Pastor’s most popular performers in the 1870s was petite Irish singer, clog and minstrel-style “jig” dancer Kitty O’Neil (1852?–93), a dependable crowd-pleaser and idol of the newsboys in the gallery, as well as the first woman to do the difficult “sand jig” dance specialty. Around 1870 she married the versatile Philadelphia-born comic performer Harry Kernell (18??–93) who first came to audition for Tony Pastor as “a negro comedian,” with his friend Ned Harrigan (1844–1911) as “a Dutchman”— otherwise German or “Deutsch” (hence Dutch) dialect comedian. “It was at my suggestion, after I had studied their work for a while, that they got up a little Irish sketch, playing the fathers of two boys who have a scrap,” claimed Pastor. Their impromptu act became such a hit in the Union Square area that they immediately gave up their other roles and transformed themselves into Irish comedians. In 1878 Harry, together with his younger brother John, performed for Pastor’s audience “in their own peculiar North of Ireland dialect entertainment,” perhaps a rendering of Belfast’s colloquial but guttural accent. Harry Kernell subsequently became famous on Broadway for his “sidewalk conversations” with John, while prolific playwright Ned Harrigan, together with his partner Tony Hart (1855–91) went on to excel in sending up Irish immigrant follies (“The Mulligan Guard”) in a popular comic song-and-dance act.29 By the 1890s the term “lace-curtain” was already in use to describe the more upwardly aspiring Irish families, signifying a self-conscious, anxious attempt to create and maintain a certain level of gentility. Thus the stereotyped definition of Irish American cultural identity starts to change, because the expanding Irish middle class was desperate to live down the “shanty Irish” image of earlier immigrant generations. Vaudeville, with its own pretensions to status and respectability, projected a kinder, less boisterous Irish humor in the early twentieth century. Overfamiliar acts that portrayed the Irish as crude or drunken roughnecks, on occasion met with audience protests of catcalls, hisses, and boos, indicating a shift in what

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students of the ongoing process of Americanization have called “the narrative of assimilation.” This gradual transition affected, in particular, John and James Russell, “the best delineators of eccentric Irish females on the boards,” with their famed and much-imitated “Irish Servant Girls” act (“Maggie! Maggie! Put the horse in the kitchen, an’ give him a bushel o’ coal!”). The Ancient Order of Hibernians took off on the Russell brothers and when they performed their famous spoof in the New York area in 1907, admittedly some 30 years after the Russells’ debut, they went on stage every night to boos, hisses, and rotten vegetables, on some nights not even managing to begin their act, and thus ending their career in big-time vaudeville.30 Irish comedy team Mark Murphy and his wife, on the other hand, were singled out in reviews for having discarded the traditional stage-Irish whiskers. Early in 1906 Variety claimed that, “the two principals have within themselves the essence of real Irish humor which is a thing apart from the spurious imitations of the ordinary witticisms of knockabouts wearing green whiskers and talking with an insistently rolling ‘R.’” The only ethnic feature in such new-style sketches was the Irishman himself, and with the traditional exaggerated makeup disappearing, the only noticeably Irish characteristic was the brogue, a convincing version of which was increasingly becoming rare in vaudeville. Only the muted ethnicity of the popular Irish sketches put on by Thomas J. Ryan and Mary Richfield after 1900, several of which dealt with a social-climbing Irish couple, gave this vaudeville tradition new life with audiences from different ethnic and social backgrounds. Yet Ryan had begun his stage career as a caricatured Irishman dressed in ragged clothes, wearing a red wig and whiskers, always ready to drink and fight.31 Reinforcing these cultural trends, Irish integration into American society continued apace, assisted by the silent cinema projecting more flattering stereotypes of the feisty Irish colleen, the Catholic priest as social mediator, and the sentimentalized Irish mother, assorted clichés later transmuted into popular art by John Ford movies such as The Quiet Man (1952). Meanwhile, Jewish or “stage Hebrew” comedy acts were also a striking presence on the New York vaudeville stage from the 1880s to the 1910s, acted out either by the genuine article or by those pretending to be Jewish; as the former, Julian Rose succeeded with his comic dialogues, such as “Levinsky at the Wedding,” about a Jewish immigrant’s mishaps, “Stooge: On the invitation it says ‘your presence is requested.’ Levinsky: ‘Right away presents they ask for.’ ” Conversely, Italian American Tony Pastor, in his role as a comic vocalist, blithely sang “Dot Beautiful Hebrew Girl” in the early 1880s with apparent success: “I fell in love mit a Hebrew girl,/ Ku-bitz-ky vas her name;/ She served in an Irish

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family,/ Dot shick-sa, what a shame/ Her hair was red, her nose was large,/ Her eyes were black as night,/ I almost got me-shug-ga/ Vhen of her I first caught sight.”32 For nearly 50 years the acknowledged masters of the German-JewishEnglish dialect comedy and knockabout act were tall, skinny Lew Fields and short, portly Joe Weber, with his bulging, padded belly. They had emerged like other show business greats out of the Jewish enclave in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Yet in 1887, as Mike and Meyer, they were best known for a “Crazy Dutchmen” or German routine: “Mike: ‘I am delightfulness to meet you’. Meyer: ‘Der disgust is all mine.’” From 1895 they were successful enough as ethnic and slapstick comedians to open their own Weber and Fields Music Hall, where for nine years they combined the socially acceptable side of “burlesque.” This meant offering smart parodies of shows running in other Broadway houses, along with variety acts, and their own distinctive German Jewish comedy routine. The resilient duo continued performing their by now familiar routine into the 1930s, by which time they must have seemed like survivors from a vaudeville era long past.33 Weber and Fields flourished in part because the number of Jewish immigrants increased from 5,000 annually in 1880 to 81,000 by 1892; five years later there were almost a million Jews in America. First generation Eastern European Jews initially made little attempt to integrate themselves into American social norms. Orthodox Jews, with their unkempt beards and long black coats, were easily caricatured as the stage “Hebes” who, according to the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1903, were “close copies of the types seen every day on the East Side.” Yet contemporary Jewish migrants were four times more likely than Italians to have had some skilled work experience on arrival at Staten Island. By 1905, close to 45 percent of Jewish New Yorkers claimed white-collar positions and so a large lowermiddle-class Jewish vaudeville audience had emerged. Two years later, if not before, Jewish organizations were angrily protesting against the stage depictions of Jews as offensive, comparable to second-generation Irish migrants with a “lace-curtain” hostility to the traditional drunken Mick stereotype. Hence groups such as the Associated Rabbis of America and the Chicago Anti-Stage Jew Ridicule Committee encouraged audiences to boycott theaters where objectionable and anti-Semitic acts appeared. The rising class of white-collar workers continued to make up the largest segment of the audience, but even in the cheapest vaudeville and moving picture shows on New York’s Lower East Side, audiences were classified generously by investigators in 1910 as “middle class” or “mixed” rather than “poor,” or described as “fairly well dressed,” “fairly prosperous” and, above all, as “respectable.”34

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In areas such as the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a Jewish boycott could ruin a theater manager. Preceding America’s entry into World War I, Rabbi George Fox had repeatedly “to register a protest with the management of theaters because of the vile caricature of the Jew. We have had behind-the-stage arguments with Jewish boys who sold their souls for the clang of silver.” This continued until Christmas 1915, that is, when he met with and heartily approved of the performance of actor James B. Carson, who played the sympathetic Jewish immigrant role of a New Jersey factory owner in The Red Heads at B. F. Keith’s theater on Broadway. Today the sort of “Hebe” comedy act that so offended the Rabbi and that ran counter to the Americanization of Jewish immigrants is unreservedly labeled as prejudicial or racist, alongside blackface or minstrelsy. According to late nineteenth and early twentieth century theatrical and cultural conventions, on the other hand, the exaggerated impersonation of different ethnic groups was quite acceptable.35 “From a theater audience divided along the lines of class, ethnicity, race, and gender, vaudeville forged a heterogeneous audience,” writes a historian of the form’s gender and cultural hierarchy. For, a century ago New Yorkers had remained too separated by the preceding categories to be entertained by one standardized mass culture, as shown above by vaudeville’s ethnic diversity or segmented markets. Nonetheless, the form helped shape how immigrant audiences came to see both themselves and others from different ethnic communities. Staged variety ultimately gave a new multiethnic, multicultural and multifaith meaning to the average New Yorkers’ sense of identity, albeit not by reducing them to a completely uniform mass. Equally, while vaudeville, like the city itself, was culturally, socially, and ethnically diverse, the outlines of corporate forms of organization and a new assimilated mass culture were slowly beginning to emerge. In vaudeville, Snyder reminds us, immigrant ethnic groups such as Jews, Irish, Germans, and Italians, by exploring “the route from ethnic neighborhood to cultural mainstream . . . would come to create new American identities out of popular culture.”36 Vaudeville’s Star Female Performers There is room here to examine only a handful of vaudeville artistes in any detail; often the more successful among them graduated to other performance venues. A big draw was the great escapologist Harry Houdini who had started out in dime museums, medicine shows, circus sideshows, and public stunts (see Appendix II). He eventually became the most richly rewarded and famous male “headline” act in vaudeville, on stage repeatedly plunging headfirst, shackled and chained, into the Chinese Water-Torture

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Cell (a tiny water-filled, glass-fronted tank). Others have drawn attention to female headliner Nora Bayes, the “Singing Comedienne,” whose reputation grew over the years, and the great American vaudeville comedians, Joe Cook, Joe Welch, and Frank Tinney, the last of whom apparently convulsed audiences by his tragic attempts to play the Misère on bagpipes.37 And then there were the great international acts, in particular imports from Britain (see chapter 7) such as “coster singer” and comedian Albert Chevalier; irrepressible performer Marie Lloyd from London’s East End; large-shoe dancer and “eccentric grotesque” Little Tich; Scotland personified in comedian and vocalist Harry Lauder; popular male impersonator Vesta Tilley, and; moonlighting in vaudeville, the great tragedienne Sarah Bernhardt. Characteristically, when legendary British singer Lillie Langtry (1853–1929), mistress of the Prince of Wales, first appeared at Tony Pastor’s 14th Street theater in 1887, the “Jersey Lily” so beloved of Wild West lawman Judge Roy Bean was advertised as “Another new star from Europe: the young, beautiful and gifted English character singer Miss Lillie Langtree [sic] from the Alhambra and Oxford [theaters], England, where she is called ‘the pearl of the music halls.’ ”38 At the “big time” end of vaudeville, there were individual American star acts such as the onstage temptress Eva Tanguay (1878–1947), “the Girl Who Made Vaudeville Famous,” largely through her energetic dancing and sexual allure or “ginger.” Beginning her tempestuous career in anodyne musical comedies, in the years 1909 to 1914 “the Cyclonic One” became the biggest and best-paid female star in vaudeville; among men, only Houdini was comparable to her. Tanguay ostensibly broke B. F. Keith’s strictly moral house rules by singing—long before intrepid movie star Mae West—such racy songs as “I Want Someone to Go Wild With Me,” “I Don’t Care, I Don’t Care, What People Think of Me,” and “It’s All Been Done But Not the Way I Do It,” for which she received $3,000 a week. A diligent recent study suggests that the thricemarried Tanguay was a challenge to certain then prevailing and dominant notions of womanhood, a living symbol of an independent female who had freed herself from the traditional cultural bonds of matrimony and motherhood. Yet if Eva Tanguay’s brazen lyrics and energetic, sexually charged stage persona were considered subversive of public morals in New York, so were cockney Marie Lloyd’s suggestive lyrics sung on the London music hall stage. Both performers were part of what has been called “an increasing mass market for commoditized female sexual showmanship.”39 Vaudeville clothed itself in a rhetoric of purity that permitted stage acts to get away with various offences against dominant moral values.

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According to a detailed study of “blue vaudeville,” if Eva Tanguay on stage raised eyebrows, “she did so with the implicit authorization of patriarchal powers seeking to develop a new kind of sexualized entertainment product— one based on the female body.” To see half-naked Biblical Salome dancers or semiburlesque “posing” and “classical statue” acts as constantly at odds with a repressive and puritanical vaudeville management is to misinterpret what may actually have been taking place. Keith-Albee evidently built an entertainment empire by advertising cleanliness and wholesomeness, but quite often and intentionally they delivered otherwise to satisfy their less refined male audiences.40 Vaudeville’s often exuberant, irreverent, sensual style of music, drama, and comedy, was far from puritanical. Consequently, risqué Jewish singer and comedienne Sophie Tucker (1884–1966), “the last of the red-hot Mamas,” knowingly pushed the boundaries of the acceptable. Her lengthy career ranged from vaudeville and burlesque during the Progressive era to television and club appearances in the 1960s. Testifying to her popularity, Sophie’s best-selling and informative autobiography, Some of These Days (1948), saw four impressions in its first year alone. Her brassy and flamboyant singing style, set off by her warm and ample Jewish presence, was well suited both to sentimental ballads and suggestive songs, and Sophie Tucker became a great favorite of ordinary American and later British audiences. Brought up Sonia Kalish (or Abuza) in Boston and then in Hartford, Connecticut, where her immigrant mother ran a restaurant, from her childhood onward she wanted to be an entertainer. Rather than enter the Yiddish theater, Sophie began by singing in the family restaurant, in part to escape waiting on tables and dishwashing. Changing her name to Sophie Tucker, she started work in 1906 as a semiprofessional singer in New York’s German Village rathskeller, near Times Square. Seen by stage managers as too large and unattractive to perform as a chorus girl, Sophie became a “World Renowned Coon Shouter” playing blackface on small club circuits, then at the long-standing Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York and on the New England vaudeville circuit.41 Sophie also went over well at Tony Pastor’s variety theater on 14th Street and was subsequently booked by impresario Gus Hill on a burlesque “wheel” or circuit, playing in the “olio” or variety interval put on by all the members of the company. Before long Sophie dropped the much-resented blackface and at 25, although far from being a beautiful “Follies girl,” became a big hit in the 1909 Ziegfeld Follies, the most prestigious Broadway showcase for rising performers (see chapter 7). Her first appearance as “a sentimental and dramatic singer” at the Palace Theater in New York, considered the summit of success in vaudeville, came in

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August 1914, on the outbreak of war in Europe. Sophie was profitably engaged as a headline performer during the 1920s in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York on the prestigious William Morris and KeithAlbee vaudeville circuits, where she became renowned for her “hot” or double entendre songs. Sophie made her first of many London appearances as “the great American comedienne” at the Hippodrome in 1922 along with popular British music hall comedian George Robey. In the early 1930s, as vaudeville was fast becoming outmoded, Sophie turned to performing in cabarets and night clubs. She was also in six Broadway musicals before 1941. The veteran performer even made occasional television appearances in the 1950s and early 1960s, mainly on The Ed Sullivan Show. With her death in 1966, the fading memory of a now past era of vaudeville also departed.42 Decline of Vaudeville In effect, the closing years of Tony Pastor’s management of his 14th Street theater in New York signify the beginnings of vaudeville’s prolonged decline that extended from the advent of early moving film projection, clinging on tenaciously until movies were shown on wide screen and in color at mid-twentieth-century “presentation houses.” By 1890 Pastor’s golden period as the presenter of “refined” New York variety shows had ended; his showcase theater in the old Tammany Hall building was now considered downtown and many of his once faithful customers began deserting him to patronize uptown vaudeville houses such as Koster & Bial’s at 34th Street and Herald Square. For a short period, relying on old performing friends and British stars such as “Little Tich” (Harry Relph) as headliners, Pastor fended off the challenge. The famous theatrical impresario’s long-running two-a-day shows and his title as “The King of 14th Street” were more seriously put at risk after the Keith-Albee circuit took over and refurbished the nearby Union Square Theater in 1893, dressed its ushers and doormen like operetta soldiers, and gave continuous performances daily for only 10 to 30 cents admission. Three years later, Pastor and his long-time house manager, Harry Sanderson, announced that their traditional matinees, first instituted in the late 1870s at their Broadway theater, would be abolished. Instead, three continuous shows would be given daily and, at great sacrifice, their ticket prices would be reduced. Then, on April 23, 1896, Koster & Bial’s became the first New York vaudeville theater to use Thomas Alva Edison’s new Vitascope projector to show one-reel films between the stage acts, to a crowd of eager viewers. This new moving picture technology would

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transform beyond all recognition the way in which the American people were entertained.43 Albert Chevalier, the London-based “coster singer,” was the headliner in the week commencing May 18, 1896 at Koster & Bial’s, alongside the newly invented film projector, advertised as “the only place on exhibition in the world, Thomas Alva Edison’s latest marvel.” Film projection represented a further advance on previous Edison marvels such as the phonograph and the kinetoscope. A few weeks later, on June 29, audiences were treated to the first screening of the French cinématographe at KeithAlbee’s uptown vaudeville theater. Ultimately, as Pastor’s New York rivals started to include the new one-reel movies in their stage bills on a regular basis, in 1899 he was forced to follow suit. Soon after, future silent film comedian Joseph Francis “Buster” Keaton (1895–1966), who had started out at the age of three as “the human broom” performing a knockabout act with his parents (“The Three Keatons”) in small-time vaudeville, made his first New York appearance at Pastor’s theater: I can remember Tony Pastor’s. It was supposed to be the theater of the United States at the time. It was on 14th Street, near Third Avenue. Right up the block was the Academy of Music, and the Keithspur theater, the 14th Street theater. That was when I was five years old. I played there about three times for Pastor. He died around 1902 [sic]. Then of course the theater went into burlesque after that, and dropped out.

The Keaton family had a dispute with the UBO run by Keith-Albee that forced them to go with the Pantages circuit, which meant three shows a day. They tried it for a few weeks but the effort required proved too much, given the physically demanding nature of their act: “We’d get bruised or strain something, and you couldn’t heal up. That odd show just seemed to cripple you. We had been doing two. So we quit.” Buster sent his parents off to their summer home in Michigan and came down to New York alone, eventually finding work in the movies with Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and everlasting fame.44 A few years later, coin-in-the-slot peep show machines found in penny arcades, such as that owned by fur business partners Adolph Zukor and Morris Kohn on 14th Street at Union Square, arguably became the first, purpose-built picture shows open to the general public. Further, by 1908 there were several “nickelodeons” or five-cent projected movingpicture storefront venues and even grander “picture palaces” within sight of Tony Pastor’s 14th Street theater. Then, with the advent of a full show of live acts and moving pictures for 25 cents, small-time theaters were also starting to do a better business downtown. These “combination”

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vaudeville and picture shows for a quarter lacked the social opprobrium clinging to the nickelodeon. In the new machine age even Pastor felt obliged to sign a contract with Edison’s American Vitagraph for converting his building into a movie house during the summer but they suddenly withdrew from it because of the tough neighborhood competition. So at the end of the 1907–08 season, Pastor retired from the show business, evidently frightened by the Edison company’s inability to compete with the local movie houses and his own resistance to moving further uptown to Times Square. Not long after a New York Times reporter found a worn-out Pastor in his barely furnished office above the theater where he came in to check his mail and read the newspapers. Aged 74, “the father of vaudeville” died shortly thereafter, on August 15, 1908, leaving an estate worth only $6,000. The disappearance of Pastor’s style of theatrical management might be seen either as an early casualty of competition with the new cinematic medium or of his inability to change with the fast-moving times. Scholars have properly attributed vaudeville’s progressive decline to multiple historical causes but clearly the competition from moving pictures that confronted Pastor was symptomatic. The 14th Street theater continued to operate, as Buster Keaton recalled, by becoming a burlesque house. It was demolished in 1928 to provide room for an addition to the new Consolidated Gas Building skyscraper.45 Endnote Vaudeville was an entertainment industry that helped recast the social and cultural landscape of the United States toward the end of the nineteenth century. “The vaudeville show was a kind of theatrical laboratory for experimenting with the new culture that clashed with Victorianism,” claims one authority. Though vaudeville’s comics, dancers, music, and sketches sometimes indirectly challenged prevailing standards of American moral purity and restraint, this was all done surreptitiously, “never publicly acknowledged by the corporate entrepreneurs who presented the acts or the immigrant audiences who cheered them on.” The outline of vaudeville’s rise and then gradual decline presented here suggests that we cannot fully comprehend uncertainties about censorship of the new electronic media such as moving pictures without first placing them in a long perspective of the multifarious forms of variety theater that went before.46 Chapter 7 offers a case study of significant cross-fertilization in the realm of Anglo-American popular culture, through an investigation of the transatlantic cultural interchange between American vaudeville acts and

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their British music hall counterparts. This is followed not only by a brief account of vaudeville’s eventual disappearance as a mass entertainment form, but also by the case for it as an invaluable training ground for the personnel, particularly in comedy roles, so urgently needed by the new mass media that came to dominate American entertainment in the course of the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 7 VAUDEVILLE II: CULTURAL EXCHANGE, DEPARTURE, AND TRANSMUTATION

ot enough attention has been paid by scholars to the important cross-cultural traffic, despite different cultural styles, attitudes, and identities, between Britain and the United States in the period covered by this study. Much has been written about the “special relationship” on the level of high politics and diplomacy, rather less about the presumed existence of a shared, common culture actively cultivated and promoted since the American Civil War as a way of cementing that relationship. Still less, perhaps, has been written about the equally significant cross-fertilization that has taken place in the realm of the popular culture of the two nations. So the continuous transatlantic traffic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between British music hall acts (Little Tich, Albert Chevalier, Harry Lauder) in one direction and American vaudeville performers (W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, the Marx brothers) in the other is underlined in what follows, as is the occasional audience incomprehension owing to national and cultural variations in language and styles of comedy.1 The disappearance of vaudeville is also documented here, making it virtually alone among American popular entertainment forms of the late nineteenth century to be on the verge of extinction well before the midtwentieth century. The final section looks at certain vaudeville performers as a major source of recruitment for the new mass media that ultimately led to the demise of so many live show performances. For vaudeville’s style, content, and ethos helped shape the twentieth-century’s mass media culture. The careers of former vaudeville performers such as the Marx brothers merit particular consideration here in regard to the movies. Personas, jokes, and comedy routines finely crafted on the vaudeville circuits also provided much of the comedy personnel and material for the new

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medium of radio and then television, with the latter eventually overtaking the audiences for every other form of mass communication. Music Hall Stars Journey to America Early in the nineteenth century, British stage performers who supposedly insulted American egalitarian values or morality ran the risk of inciting public demonstrations, such as those directed by an angry mob against selfconfessed adulterer Edmund Kean on his 1825 appearance at New York’s fashionable Park Theatre. When English actors refused to perform or were reported to have made demeaning comments about American audiences, the consequences ranged from being pelted with rotten vegetables to mob displeasure. The bloody Astor Place Riot in Lower Manhattan on May 10, 1849 was triggered by the envious theatrical rivalry between English actor-manager William Charles Macready (1793–1873) and star American performer Edwin Forrest (1806–72). Trouble arose when Macready, a talented actor with strong aristocratic sympathies, and Forrest, a hero of the Jacksonian urban working classes, scheduled performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth on the same day in rival New York theaters. The actors’ rivalry flared out of control but crowd disorder was also an expression of urban class conflict. Hence Forrest’s Irish immigrant and nativist Bowery followers mobilized against the staging of Macready’s performance at the Astor Place Opera House, identified with snobbish English and American “aristocrats.” Crowd violence led to poorly trained state militia opening fire, killing at least 23 people and wounding scores more.2 By the 1880s the cultural interchange between America and Britain was much more commonplace than during the first half of the century; vaudeville and music hall performers were regularly crossing the pond in both directions by steam-driven ocean liners. Chapter 6 has outlined the origins of vaudeville and so to put it briefly, “music halls,” or popular variety shows in purpose-built theaters, evolved during the 1850s in London and many other British cities out of public-house “free and easies” or workingclass “singing saloons.” As stand-alone theaters, the halls, having progressed from amateur sing-songs to a professional and highly organized form of entertainment, were further commercialized by the 1862 Limited Liability Act. From the 1880s onward, alongside vaudeville, music halls entered a period of consolidation, wider social appeal, and palatial expansion. Variety entertainment was also fast becoming a global phenomenon with British and American acts traveling throughout Europe and the British Empire, especially the white dominions of Canada, South Africa, and Australia.3 That the transatlantic traffic in entertainers had become routine in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is shown by the regular appearance in

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New York’s top vaudeville theaters such as Koster & Bial’s of well-paid British music hall performers, such as Albert Chevalier (1862–1923). The son of a French teacher, he had started out as an actor but, by the time of his first New York visit in 1896, had specialized in writing, composing, and singing London “coster” or street barrow-boy songs (“My Old Dutch,” “Coster’s Serenade,” “Knocked ’Em in the Old Kent Road”) performed in costume. As his music hall career had faded, Chevalier left Britain to tour the American vaudeville circuits, including a second visit to New York in 1906. The response of American audiences to “coster songs” performed with a Cockney accent sadly goes unrecorded in Variety or the early Billboard. “The inimitable Scottish comedian” and songster Harry Lauder (“Keep Right on to the End of the Road,” “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’”) with his parsimony, curly stick, and tartan kilt, “the man who made King Edward VII laugh,” was another frequent visitor to New York but his Caledonian equivalent of blacking up may have puzzled some American spectators. Lauder, who was knighted in 1919, regularly toured America by a special train that stopped for concerts at obscure towns in the Midwest as well as at the coastal cities. “The most remarkable entertainer on the stage today” claimed the American Music Hall at 52nd Street and Broadway referring to Lauder on his fourth big week beginning December 7, 1908. The famous Scot’s American appearances were under the direction of this vaudeville theater’s manager, William Morris, founder of the famous talent agency, who at the same time brought “direct from the London Pavilion, the Davis-Glendhill trio, world famous roller cyclists in their wonderful motor and cycle race on their own patented roller track.”4 Another British success in America was the four-feet tall Harry Relph, or Little Tich the “unique song and dance star and big shoe dancer.” An influence on the young Charlie Chaplin, the tiny comedian had started out in blackface but was best known on the British halls circuit for dance and comedy routines that ended with his wearing his trademark long-toed boots. Little Tich can be seen in surviving silent film clips, rising up “on point” at the end of a dance to balance on the big shoes, while still continuing with the patter of his stage act. If unconventional, the diminutive star performer was also surprisingly popular on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1888 he was a headliner at Tony Pastor’s 14th Street theater in the old Tammany Hall building, near Union Square, promoted as “a prince among eccentrics, on his return to America, [who performs] eccentric grotesque burlesque.” On the very same variety bill was Annie Oakley or the Buffalo Bill show’s “little sure shot.”5 New Yorkers also seemed to be particularly fond of British female stars who performed their song-and-dance acts dressed as men. Pastor, the

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“father of vaudeville,” claimed to have first brought over boyish Vesta Tilley, “the greatest of [British] male impersonators.” She certainly appeared in New York during the week beginning February 14, 1898 at Gilmore’s Auditorium, under the direction of Weber and Fields, the famous knockabout German-Jewish comedians, “in her world renowned impersonation of male characters.” Five years later Tilley appeared at the Keith-Albee showplace Palace Theatre on Broadway at 47th Street, then considered the summit of New York vaudeville. Among popular British male impersonators on Broadway was Millie Hylton, supposedly “London’s greatest girl headliner,” while, later on, a “dainty male impersonator and singing comedienne” called Ella Shields visited Washington in 1924.6 Two years earlier, Clay Smith, an American variety performer living in London, felt that postwar American vaudeville was on the decline and British variety on the rise. Visiting the United States for the first time in 1922 after being away for ten years, he felt that British shows were of a “higher moral tone,” perhaps because of stricter censorship that removed the double entendre. The recent “enormous influx” of European emigrants had markedly changed American public taste until “words that were forbidden on the American vaudeville stage—damn, hell, etc. grim mother-inlaw jokes and parodies, references to ‘cock’ eyes, wooden legs, and so forth—are now countenanced.” The puritanical Smith claimed to believe that this vulgarization of comedy routines was to satisfy recent migrants unable to appreciate genuine American homespun humor.7 On the other hand, British variety or music halls were facing a slump in the early 1920s owing to a combination of postwar unemployment decimating audiences; the government’s retention of the wartime Entertainment Tax; competition from musical comedies and revues; and in addition, a general loss of audience interest in increasingly routine two-shows-a-night variety entertainment. Grumpy acrobat George Carney, about to embark on a prolonged Australian tour in 1922, also thought that British artists were being crowded out by overseas visitors: “The main reason why I am leaving England is that I feel a growing number of foreign artists, principally Americans, are being introduced here at enormous salaries, and are squeezing home-born artists out.”8 Vaudeville Stars Journey to Britain Various items of music hall gossip do indeed indicate a significant cultural traffic across the Atlantic from “the other side of the ditch.” Thus another acrobat, Fritz Young, told British music hall bible The Era how, together with female contortionist Emily Sells, he had been engaged to cross the Atlantic late in 1889 to take part in Barnum & Bailey’s circus on its

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transatlantic visit to London’s Olympia. “He [Barnum] wanted us to return with him but we declined and have since been working successfully throughout the United Kingdom.” A further item reported on November 14, 1891 that Tom Holmes, the British theatrical impresario, was sailing by the White Star line’s steamer Majestic to make a tour through some of the principal towns in America with the object of securing variety talent for the London music halls. Several of the principal metropolitan theatrical proprietors had entrusted him with commissions, leaving it to his judgment what talent to book. Clearly, the home nation alone could not fully supply the insatiable demand of variety theater for new and entertaining acts.9 Philadelphia-born comedian, juggler, and sexagenarian film star, the incomparable William Claude Dukenfield or W. C. Fields (1880–1946) became a regular visitor to Great Britain and Europe during his protracted vaudeville years, as is seen from his itinerary at the beginning of the twentieth century. His first foreign appearance as a “tramp juggler” was at the Berlin Wintergarten early in 1901; Fields then opened on the night of February 23, at the Palace Theatre of Varieties in London’s Cambridge Circus. He would play in England’s capital whenever possible and then branch out to tour the provinces, such as Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, or Liverpool, playing the same English music hall circuits as escapologist Harry Houdini a year earlier. Fields opened in Paris in May 1902 at the Folies Bergère, then had to return to the United States in August of the same year to fulfill engagements on the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit. That same busy year he revisited Europe to perform in Vienna and Prague, then in November opened at London’s newest music hall, the massive Hippodrome in Leicester Square. Fields next fulfilled a couple of provincial bookings, headlining at Leeds and Birmingham in January 1903. He also toured from 1903 to 1904 in countries as far away as Australia and South Africa, for, like minstrelsy earlier, variety entertainment was truly global in its appeal, at least within the white self-governing dominions of the British Empire. Leaving Cape Town behind, Fields returned to the London Hippodrome and in December 1904 contracted to appear in a supporting comic role in that peculiarly British institution, the Christmas pantomime. This was Cinderella at the Prince’s Theatre, Manchester, but with Fields in a nonspeaking role, quite possibly because of his American accent or delivery. His juggling specialty act was actually written into the printed text of the play. Of Fields’ part, The Era noted: “Mr W. C. Fields, the well-known eccentric juggler . . . does some wonderfully clever business in the style familiar to patrons of the halls. Mr. Fields’ performance is, in fact, a memorable feature of the show.” Fields continued to tour Europe annually with his juggling act over the following decade before graduating to the Ziegfeld Follies and then, as dealt with below, came his late-career success in the movies.10

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Even variety theaters in the British-governed north of Ireland, such as those of industrial Belfast, show plentiful evidence of American visitors on the periphery. In 1898 Sam Hague’s Negro minstrels performed at the Royal Opera House and Miss Nelly Christie, “the Plantation Comedy Star,” sang a number of “negro ditties” at the Empire. A few years later, in January 1904, those “colored coons” the Jetneys were on display at the Imperial Hippodrome, along with “negro comedian” Jim Hegarty at the Alhambra and “favorite American comedy artists” Delmore and Wilson who “met with a very cordial reception” at the Empire. Showmanentrepreneur Fred Karno’s company (with whom Chaplin later enlisted) or Troupe of Famous Comedians appeared at the Empire in February of the same year and Olivia the American soprano at the Palace Theatre of Varieties. American comedy artists, Collins and Rice, “gave a clever turn” at the Belfast Empire in March 1904, along with Lily Pender in her pertinent entertainment “A Vaudeville Show in Ten Minutes.” These visiting Americans appeared in local halls alongside a parade of second-string British variety performers: a one-legged horizontal bar act, a lady clog dancer, comic jugglers, acrobatic acts, trick cyclists, contortionists, a facial mimic, ventriloquists, a whistling comedian, a revolving ladder act, and a musical dog comedian. By 1923 American influence was such that the “enjoyable” musical revue extravaganza Hullo, America at the Grand Opera House in Belfast featured the Hudson Trio, vocalists, and eccentric dancers, in a syncopated and “jazzy” performance.11 A pronounced failure by visiting American nonmimetic performers to adapt their up-to-date vaudeville acts to suit unfamiliar foreign audiences sometimes occurred. The temporary partnership of Jewish Lower East Side New Yorker Eddie Cantor with the unknown Sammy Kessler was such a disaster on their bottom-of-the-bill debut on June 22, 1914 at the Oxford Music Hall in London’s Oxford Street that the rest of their English bookings were abruptly cancelled. The Era passed over the duo’s performance in silence. Recently married Eddie, then a blackface comedian, subsequently blamed his patter or scripted material, the topicality of which was lost on English ears. Their act was badly written and, it seems, naively planned; Eddie had imitated American vaudeville stars that their English audience had neither seen nor heard of before. Cantor and Kessler played out the week at the Oxford but then Eddie wired his agent in New York asking for help. Max Hart acted quickly and Eddie was added to the cast of a music hall revue at the Alhambra Theatre for two weeks and wisely did not try any more imitations. Cantor then returned to America and found lasting fame, like W. C. Fields, with the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway and, eventually, in big box office musical comedy movies (see chapter 3).12

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Another marked failure by American stage performers to adapt their vaudeville style to suit foreign audiences occurred some years later with the now legendary Marx brothers, although this was well before their cinema debut had turned them into household names. The collective but still neophyte team first sailed for England on June 4, 1922, opening at the London Coliseum in St. Martin’s Lane on June 19. They shared a mixed bill with future British radio comedian Tommy Handley, a company of Russian dancers, a trick cyclist, sister act Dollie and Billie, and impressionist Cecilia Lotna. The anarchic brothers, credited with receiving a “fabulous salary,” performed in London their vaudeville routine “On the Mezzanine,” a transitional comedy vehicle renamed “On the Balcony” to suit British tastes and taking place in the lobby of a fashionable hotel. A theatrical manager supposedly engaged the Marx brothers to perform “a social sort of play” for the hotel guests, which proved, through their manic interpretation, to be the wildest travesty. Yet the audience at the Coliseum, unfamiliar with the Marx brothers, their quick-fire routine or their American pedigree, booed, whistled, and threw copper pennies on the stage. As Julius (Groucho) made his first exit he allegedly muttered: “They must know some language, but what the hell is it?” While coins continued to fall, Julius braved the storm and walked forward to the footlights to inform the audience that, since the brothers had crossed the Atlantic at great expense, the least they could do was throw some silver shillings.13 Those responsible for this unfriendly reception may have been a claque (hired applauders) organized by Russian dancer Lydia Lopova and her acolytes, enraged at the premiere danseuse being denied “headliner” status by the Marx brothers. “We opened at the Coliseum, London, in fifth position, and were such a big hit we were switched that night to closing the show, switching positions with the Russian dancers,” explained Julius in a letter to Variety. “Ardent admirers of the Russian dancers, sometimes known as a claque, took exception to the switching of their favorites, and were responsible for the pennies that were thrown.” Despite this exculpatory attempt, commentators on the Marx brothers agree that the brothers were initially unpopular with London audiences. Subsequently, the brothers Anglicized the jokes, dropped two scenes from “On the Balcony,” and then replaced it with another old vaudeville standard “Home Again,” a clear indication that all had not gone well, but this sketch also met only with mixed success. British trade paper The Era was as usual anodyne in its praise of the act’s “racy dialogue and mercurial comedy business” and singled out the antics of Julius (Groucho) Marx who “continually convulsed the audience,” while either Leonard (Harpo) or Herbert (Chico) Marx “played exquisitely on the harp—a superb instrument that must have cost hundreds of pounds.”14

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The brothers’ comedy skits transferred early in July 1922 to the smaller Alhambra Theatre (as Eddie Cantor did eight years earlier), where Harpo in his autobiography claims they were a “smash,” and then toured in Manchester and Liverpool until the show wrapped. On the other hand, Sandy Powell, then a young Yorkshire comedian on the same variety bill in Manchester, recalled that the boys “did not do very well. The audience simply did not understand their style of humor. I suppose they were really ahead of their time . . . Of course, they were all very worried, and tried to alter the act as the week went on, but they couldn’t alter their style.” The Marx brothers soon sailed back home to America, disembarking on July 29, 1922, and did not return to England again for ten more years, by which time their successful Hollywood movie career and celebrity status had immunized them from any repeated indignities.15 In the same month as the Marx brothers’ first London appearance, “Chuckles of 1922” with comedian Bobby Clark, a new Charles B. Cochran production (see below) in the style of American burlesque at the New Oxford, received a disdainful review from The Times newspaper: “The production is a little noisy for English ears, and is so full of what its originators would call ‘pep’ that it is sometimes rather bewildering.” Perhaps applying the old saw that a common language or cultural style divided conservative 1920s Britain from a more dynamic America makes sense after all? Even before the advent of sound film, argues Groucho Marx’s most recent biographer, British music hall and American vaudeville represented entirely different forms of entertainment, with idioms, slang, and gestures peculiar to their country of origin. Music hall entertainment is broadly caricatured as reliant on trusty old songs, lampoons of regional accents, toilet humor, alcoholism, and cross-dressing; occasionally it is “given fresh turns and new interpretations by entertainers of genius like Harry Lauder, who traveled well, and [comedian] Dan Leno, who did not.” American vaudeville was apparently more versatile, composed of “individual talents and a cacophony of musical styles and comic approaches.”16 The two popular cultures were not as widely separated or divided by a common language as Groucho’s biographer infers, as British and American entertainers had been engaged in a transatlantic cross-fertilization since the advent of minstrelsy in the 1840s and even earlier in terms of the legitimate theater. Vaudeville mimes, singers, and buck dancers or silent performers with a gimmick, such as “tramp juggler” W. C. Fields might have had a better chance overseas. Yet the evidence does suggest that vaudeville performers such as Eddie Cantor and especially the Marx brothers “who spoke urban American with the rapidity of a Gatling [machine] gun bewildered the [English] ticket holders.” Harpo Marx’s mimed comedy might have

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come across well but Chico’s Italian accent and Groucho’s staccato delivery were unfamiliar to British audiences at the time. The Times even complained in 1922 that their act “seems to be a little too trans-Atlantic for English audiences,” adding more generously that the Marx brothers “so obviously enjoy their own performance that it cannot be long before they persuade their audiences to do the same.”17 Revue: The Ziegfeld Follies The proof that a vaudeville entertainer had finally reached the apex of his or her profession, after years of dragging their acts around booking circuits such as Keith-Albee and performing before less than appreciative audiences, was an appearance in the Ziegfeld Follies. This exceptional revue became the most prestigious Broadway showcase for rising performers almost every year from 1907 until 1931. Florenz or “Flo” Ziegfeld Jr. (1867–1932), master showman, theatrical producer, obsessive gambler, and compulsive womanizer, had a business card printed that read “Impresario Extraordinaire” and with sound reason, for, he was compelled by the dream of “demolishing all the current methods of staging shows.” As a showman cut from the Barnum mold, Ziegfeld strove to replace the popular multiethnic but often crude appeal of vaudeville with a sophisticated, romantic entertainment. Revue would consist also of sketches, songs, and comedians but, unlike vaudeville, might run for a significant period and have a “conceptual continuity” to its various acts. In addition, Ziegfeld would flaunt a changing lineup of glamorous chorus girls yet somehow maintain a spurious air of respectability. His conscious project was, accordingly, to elevate the “lowly” Broadway chorus into the realm of upper-class gentility. Ziegfeld’s German Jewish immigrant father presided over the Chicago Musical College for 40 years from 1876, so “Flo” grew up in an atmosphere of relative comfort, austere Lutheran morals, and classical music, even if he was always more interested in earthier popular entertainment. He later claimed to have run away for a few weeks in 1883 with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show when it came to town and without a doubt the teenager participated in various small-time vaudeville enterprises. Aged 26, the budding impresario used his promotional skills in lavishly advertising muscular strongman “the Great [Eugen] Sandow” who, in August 1893, during the Chicago World’s Fair or Columbian Exposition, opened at the Ziegfeld family-owned Trocadero nightclub and became an immediate sensation, particularly with the ladies. After an extended two-year vaudeville tour with Sandow, the ambitious young showman moved to Broadway and produced a highly successful revival of the

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comedy, A Parlor Match, with vaudeville comedians Charles Evans and William Hoey.18 Earlier in 1896, seeking a female lead for the play, Florenz had traveled to London where he auditioned a sensational new music hall singer from Paris, the 23-year-old Polish French Anna Held (1873–1918). Besotted, he wooed the petite brunette away from both her Folies Bergère contract and her Spanish gambler husband with promises of Broadway wealth and fame. Ziegfeld’s new client and common-law wife was unveiled in A Parlor Match in New York and, like Barnum at mid-century with the more sedate Jenny Lind, he successfully marketed Held to an adoring public. He invented, for example, her custom of bathing in milk every day at the Savoy Hotel and produced a run of musical comedies in which she appeared. In 1906 the financially reckless Ziegfeld lost 2.5 million francs in one gambling session at the Casino in Biarritz but a new contract with theater owner Lee Shubert soon came to his rescue. Ziegfeld made a further deal in 1907 with prominent “Syndicate” theatrical bookers Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger to produce a revue-style Follies, based on the Folies Bergère of Anna Held fame but set on the not very attractive roof top, renamed Jardin de Paris, of the New York Theatre. This show, which featured “The Anna Held Girls” both as drummer boys and in a bathing-pool act, was not an instant success with sophisticated Broadway audiences, despite its numerous satirical sketches featuring prominent New Yorkers. W. C. Fields, still relatively unknown outside vaudeville, also performed his juggling act for about two weeks in late May. On tour the new Follies picked up more appreciative reviews and, back in Manhattan, Ziegfeld engaged star vaudeville singer Nora Bayes to provide additional support. More successful was a contemporary Broadway “review” (American producers still avoiding French spelling) The Gay White Way, featuring variety and burlesque sketches and in addition, songs by a young Jerome Kern. For the subsequent Follies of 1908 a new beauty, Lillian Lorraine, was engaged and massively promoted; recognizing that she had become superfluous, Anna Held departed temporarily for Europe. For close to 25 years, the self-indulgent, promiscuous, and rich Ziegfeld (who married film star Billie Burke in 1914) had a series of affairs with beautiful and, presumably, susceptible Follies showgirls.19 Ziegfeld may not have rated comedians such as W. C. Fields, Eddie Cantor, and Will Rogers too highly as a producer but by the outbreak of World War I in Europe he realized that comedy interludes were essential between the parades of extravagantly beautiful women for his kind of lavish, racy, and escapist “revue” entertainment to work properly. Ziegfeld had taken the most appealing features of other show business forms and shaped them into a sophisticated new entertainment package: the romantic

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melodies, lively songs, and ably choreographed dances of musical comedies; the blackface performers abstracted from the minstrel show format; the ethnic comedy and rapid-fire pace of vaudeville; and in addition, the sensual, elegant Ziegfeld Girl (“A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody”). In her many dance scene guises—fashion model, showgirl, Glorified American Girl—she was not just an embodiment of male voyeuristic fantasy, but also worked as a powerful icon of early twentieth-century consumerist desires, linked to commodification, race, sexual identity, and celebrity, with resonances persisting into the present day.20 The famous “Ziegfeld Look” of the Follies now installed at the New Amsterdam Theater in Times Square, on the corner of 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, was exemplified from 1915 onward by the brilliant Viennese designer Joseph Urban and the haute couture costumier Lady Lucile Duff Gordon. The label “produced under the personal direction of Florenz Ziegfeld” was to define not only an era of once popular revues and musical comedies but also of the Broadway and hence American stage. Ziegfeld continued to produce full-length musical comedies and innovative popular musicals such as Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat (1927) on Broadway, but he lost his entire fortune in the 1929 Wall Street Crash and, after a string of losing shows, died three years later on the verge of bankruptcy. “His triumph was in negotiating the fine line between the risqué and the respectable, using female sexuality to tantalize without offending upscale audiences.”21 Intriguingly, by way of a postscript, Ziegfeld’s British counterpart, impresario Charles B. Cochran (1872–1951), had moved from staging revue before 1914 to cabaret in the 1920s, yet he was also a boxing promoter and a show (Cavalcade) partner with Noël Coward, while his chorus line of “Mr. Cochran’s Young Ladies” also launched several illustrious careers. The most Barnumesque and flamboyant of Ziegfeld’s American successors was Billy Rose (1895–1966), another ladies’ man and in the 1930s and 1940s a highly successful producer and song-writer of expensive Broadway musicals and aquatic showcases. He is portrayed as such by an animated James Caan in Funny Lady (1975), the Barbara Streisand-asFanny Brice movie sequel.22 The Disappearance of Vaudeville By the early 1920s with other stage forms such as revues and musical comedy becoming equally popular, vaudeville had to respond with one act of either in a bill; even burlesque was used as a source of material, further vulgarizing the variety format. Opulent, stylish Broadway shows such as the Ziegfeld Follies were also beginning to draw more affluent New York

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audiences away from vaudeville. Comedian George Burns, who began at the lower end of the entertainment hierarchy in “small-time” vaudeville, recalled the kind of routine stage acts, put on in the 1920s, subject to diminishing box office returns: Anything could be the basis of an act. Mind reading, mental telepathy and hypnotism were popular. Posing acts pretended to be statues—maybe they did nothing, but they did it beautifully. One performer ate paper, wood, flowers, light bulbs and matches, while another man bit railroad spikes in half . . . .There was even “The Wrestling Cheese,” a slab of cheese that could not be lifted off the stage, and a Chinese act that put chopsticks through their noses.23

By the mid-1920s, even big-time vaudeville houses were presenting stage show and film combinations previously associated only with smalltime theaters that charged much less than Keith-Albee for their seats. Small-town playhouses outside large urban areas, now supplanted by the picture show, no longer needed the one-night stands of touring repertory companies presenting live theater. Simultaneously, vaudeville lost its intimacy with the coming of huge cavernous theaters, represented in the New York area by the opulent Loew “Wonder theaters” or the palatial Brooklyn Albee (1925) and the Fox Academy with its 3,600 seats. Smalltime vaudeville acts, already losing popular appeal, looked ridiculous and puny amid the splendor of such vast stages. Six-act bills were cut to four and the big-time two-a-day shows around New York disappeared from the Palace, Riverside, and Albee theaters. The coming of talkies in the late 1920s provided an occasion for many theater managers to reduce their overheads by replacing the costs of vaudeville performers, stagehands, front-of-house staff, technicians, musicians, and scenery with just a film screen, projector, ticket sellers, and ushers. By 1928 only four theaters in the entire United States, one of them the Palace in New York, were offering vaudeville shows without movies. Tony Pastor had shown prescience 20 years earlier when he pointed out that America had grown larger, its wealth greater, and wages higher, “consequently we [managers] have larger theaters, more costly appointments, increasingly strenuous effort and more competition.”24 By the early 1930s, vaudeville had become little more than an adjunct to moving pictures, with live performances on stage (“8 Acts Vaudeville”) preceding the main feature film in so-called presentation houses. Sophie Tucker noted that by 1931 “the movies had a death grip on vaudeville” and theaters were now full of children: “At the first two shows in the

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afternoon the house would be full of boys and girls, slumped down in their seats, obviously bored with the acts and only waiting for the picture to come on.” The remaining New York vaudeville houses, supplanted by the mass media of talking pictures, radio, and recorded dance music, were fast converted into moving-picture theaters. By November 1932 even the Palace Theatre, the only surviving New York all-vaudeville showplace, succumbed to the movies. Ironically, the Palace’s first feature was The Kid from Spain (1932), starring vaudeville veteran Eddie Cantor. Although this occasion has been seen as a turning point for big-time vaudeville’s history, surprisingly the Palace lingered on as a “presentation house” into the mid-1950s, with live stage acts appearing between screenings of the main feature film.25 “ ‘Well, here’s the good old Golden Gate. Ah, there’s nothing like vaudeville. You know vaudeville’s real life people—that’s why I like it. A lot of acts have played this place. I guess this is one of the few vaudeville houses left,’ ” exclaims Lieutenant Barney Runson (William Bendix) to successful bookie Dan Gannin (George Raft) in Race Street (1948), a forgettable film noir set in San Francisco. The police detective’s impassioned soliloquy owed much to the movie’s production company, RKO, running the city’s Golden Gate Theater at the time. Yet, judging by posters inside a shot of the foyer, the venue was currently showing a teenage Shirley Temple vehicle, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), so was most probably a “combination” or presentation house. Seven years later, in 1954, the Golden Gate would discontinue its stage shows altogether, and become like many other former variety theaters, a full-time movie palace.26 Elsewhere, vaudeville virtually disappeared after World War II or degenerated into cheap strip-show burlesque. A few vaudeville theaters managed to hold out: New York’s State Theater located at Broadway and 45th Street continued to present four-a-day bills until the end of 1947. Most vaudevillians either attempted the movies, television, and radio or slid into oblivion, like playwright Neil Simon’s cantankerous pair of old vaudeville stagers, The Sunshine Boys, who are persuaded to revive their legendary but now antiquated stage act for one last television hurrah. Radio City Music Hall was the last echo of live vaudeville, keeping the presentation house format alive until driven to become a concert venue in 1979. Yet wherever there are live performances of sword-swallowing, fireeating, juggling, and rope-twirling, the vaudeville legacy lives on. On the other side of the Atlantic, British music halls survived as “palaces of variety” but only in isolated outposts—over 100 halls closed down between 1945 and 1958 and by the early 1960s they too had virtually disappeared.27

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Vaudeville as Training for the Mass Media This section looks at vaudeville’s enduring survival, if only through its most versatile performers becoming consumed avidly by the new electronic media of radio, the gramophone, television, and the movies. At the outset of the novelized version of recent full-blown giant-ape movie King Kong (2005), set in the Depression years of the early 1930s, ambitious entertainer Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) with the stage in her blood, feels herself part of the grand tradition of live vaudeville: “Vaudeville was her family. The theater people. The troupe. All the way back to Tony Pastor and Ben Keith, and through every performer from the Barrison Sisters and Ching Ling Foo to the greats, the ones who’d made it big. Benny and Brice, Cohan and Fields, Burns and Allen, and dozens of others. Distant cousins all.”28 Unhappily, the New York vaudeville theater where Ann performs closes its doors and leaves the assorted show people jobless. Our heroine now has to choose between either seedy off-Broadway burlesque or, for the chance to star in a movie. She signs up with showman-filmmaker Carl Denham (Jack Black) for a long and ill-fated sea voyage to the mysterious Skull Island. As the screenplay correctly implies, with opportunities to do live stage work shrinking in the 1930s and 1940s, there was now an excess of vaudeville talent finding its way into the new mass recording industries. The truth of the dictum “you can take the girl out of vaudeville but can’t take the vaudeville out of the girl” is also realized in the movie when a captive Ann performs somersaults to pacify King Kong. If vaudeville’s finest entertainers now had to make a living divorced from the audiences and milieu that had created them, they at least brought into these new entertainment venues the rewards of a long tradition of stage performance: The patter and crooning heard on the [movie] set, the mugging and comedy falls seen on the screen, indeed, every nuance of the uprooted vaudevillian’s stage style, was limned with the hard-earned lore accumulated by generations of troupers working in tandem with their fans just across the footlights. The gifts of vaudeville lived on in the [media] performances of George Burns and Gracie Allen, of Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, George Jessel, Bert Lahr, Pat Rooney II, John Bubbles, and many others.

What the above stars brought to the cinema, radio, and later television, was a particular style of performance, in particular of comedy, strongly characteristic of the live vaudeville stage.29 Silent American cinema, for instance, took over the basic vocabulary of performance techniques assembled throughout decades of vaudeville practice and quickly accommodated them to the slapstick or pratfall comedy

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narratives of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, Chester Conklin, Charlie Chaplin, and “Buster” Keaton, even if these practices reflected an aesthetic tradition that largely valued performer virtuosity over character and story line consistency. A study of early sound comedy films and the vaudeville aesthetic exemplifies how stage routines were incorporated into both short Mack Sennett-produced fillers, such as W. C. Fields made in the early 1930s, and also into the main feature presentation. The popularity of the gramophone and the advent of sound cinema in the Hollywood of the late 1920s also made it easier for vocal Lower East Side acts such as those of the Marxes, Al Jolson, and Eddie Cantor, to travel overseas should they choose and find a preconditioned audience. The New York Jewish accents and wisecrack delivery that had seemed so incomprehensible to British audiences only a few years earlier were now made increasingly familiar through the new electronic mass media.30 As previously indicated, many of the American cinema’s top musical and comedy stars of the 1930s such as W. C. Fields, Will Rogers, the Marx brothers, and Eddie Cantor, had developed their performance skills in vaudeville before moving on to Broadway and from there to radio and then the Hollywood studios on the West coast. Hence as the New York Herald Tribune queried early in 1936, where would Hollywood get its comedians from, once the present limited supply from vaudeville ran out? The present offers no problems with Hollywood packed with headliners of the old vaudeville days, but five years from now the hunt for comics will begin in earnest. Vaudeville, as a source of comic talent, is nearly finished. Virtually every prominent figure of the variety theater has been captured by the motion picture producers. The present decline of the “five-a-day” indicates that little fresh talent will develop in that direction. Vaudeville gave the motion pictures Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, George Jessel, the Marx brothers, [George] Burns and [Gracie] Allen, Jimmy Savo, W. C. Fields, Wheeler and Woolsey. They are no longer youngsters—and eventually the producers must find new stars. The dearth already is being felt.

Movie producer Samuel Goldwyn, who believed few comedians of note got their start through radio, remained dependent on vaudeville stars, via the radio or musical comedies, for above-the-title movie comics. “The trouble is that every young actor wants to be a Joel McCrea or a Gary Cooper—he simply is not interested in becoming a comedian.”31 Lugubrious comedian W. C. Fields spent nearly 30 years many of which as a comic “tramp juggler,” in burlesque, vaudeville, and variety, before he abandoned the stage completely for the screen by which time he was already in his mid-forties. As previously evidenced by Fields touring England, Germany, France, Denmark, Australia, and South Africa before

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1914, top vaudeville entertainers traveled around the world endlessly performing. Fields at last achieved celebrity status on Broadway in the Ziegfeld Follies during and after World War I, appearing alongside illustrious comedy and singing performers such as Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, and Will Rogers, whose combined talents ultimately transported them from the stage to the talking pictures. Following his lengthy vaudeville and Ziegfeld apprenticeship, for example, the bulbous-nosed Fields became a movie star almost overnight through his performance in veteran D. W. Griffiths’ Sally of the Sawdust (1925). This lachrymose silent movie saw Fields repeat on film his Dickensian stage role of the loveable Professor Eustace McGargle, a roguish carnival grifter, huckster, and card sharp. After performing in the 1925 Follies, Fields moved to Hollywood permanently and one of America’s funniest comedians was launched on a movie career that, lasting for almost 20 years, would carry his fame around the English-speaking world. Thus, continuing into the sound era, Fields made comedy shorts and frequent guest appearances in Paramount films. Yet he is now best remembered for the grouchy, irascible, and complaining but endearing characters he played for Universal in such late career successes as the comedy movies, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939), My Little Chickadee (1940), The Bank Dick (1940), and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). Several of these movies gave Fields an opportunity, curiously enough, to show off the juggling and pool skills he had long before exercised in vaudeville. “The vaudeville sketches are the very heart of the art of W. C. Fields,” his biographer claims, “and were the base material which he was constantly laboring, in later years, to transform into motion-picture gold.”32 The Marx brothers’ equally famous personae evolved in a hit-or-miss fashion through nearly 20 years of endless vaudeville bookings across the American continent, initially as the Three Nightingales or the Six Mascots, with or without their mother Minnie or their aunt Hannah, and with father sometimes planted in the audience to encourage laughter. The brothers had to traverse most of the United States in the lower, small-time ranks of vaudeville before fighting their way up to the opening night of their first Broadway show. Around 1912 the brothers might play three days in Burlington, Iowa, catch the overnight train, and play the following four days in Waterloo—four-a-day vaudeville for five days, five-a-day for two days, for a total of 30 shows per week. The touring process went on unvaryingly, in the cities around the Great Lakes, in Ohio and Illinois, also in Texas and Alabama. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the Marx brothers were not inclined to glamorize their lengthy vaudeville traveling period. In his 1961 memoirs, Harpo (Adolph) dolefully recalled a montage of “railroad-station waiting rooms,

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boarding house dining rooms, one-dollar hotel rooms, dressing rooms, pool rooms and men’s rooms—all of which look pretty much alike in any city or town in any part of the country,” not to mention being required to perform in small-town theaters that were often school houses or ball parks, and also in air-domes or shedlike outdoor theaters, mostly with confused or unresponsive mid-Western audiences.33 The anarchic comedy that the brothers had perfected for vaudeville performance in kid comedy sketches such as “Fun in Hi Skool” was to find its new home in the cinema. Yet Julius “Groucho” Marx, after his long vaudeville apprenticeship, was fast approaching 40, and Chico was already 42, when the brothers’ first screen talkie but stage-bound credit, The Cocoanuts (1929), was released. Their now celebrated Paramount features made in the early 1930s costarred their younger brother Zeppo: Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), Duck Soup (1933), and let us not forget MGM’s A Night at the Opera (1935). With a further eight movies after that with various studios, their career culminated in the below par Love Happy (1950). Chico and Harpo Marx found few worthwhile performance opportunities after the movies dried up. Only Groucho, in his sixties, went on to a new radio and live-television career as an acerbic, ad-libbing quizmaster in the long-running You Bet Your Life (1947–61). The Marx brothers’ now revered movies of the early 1930s were a clear extension of their vaudeville routines, for both they and their audiences had already “sat through years of stock comedy set-ups, tearjerking ballads, rote melodrama, incompetent jugglery and acrobatics.”34 Post-1945 expansion of the new medium of live television clearly inherited and depended, in particular, on vaudeville performers and formats. Brash television host Milton Berle (1908–2002) or “Uncle Miltie,” who dressed in weird burlesque costumes, was “clearly an uninhibited throwback to the vaudeville stage.” A child actor in silent movies, Berle moved on to big-time vaudeville in Philadelphia and New York as part of a successful child act, until by 1924 he grew too tall and was booked into a small-time solo routine, signing with the Morris office. His big break came in 1932 as part of a Jew-Irishman combination in the next-to-closing slot at the Palace Theatre. After a 30-year career in vaudeville, nightclubs, the 1943 Ziegfeld Follies and radio, Berle became the first memorable American star (“Mr. Television”) of the new television medium with his one-hour Texaco Star Theater (1948–53), then Buick-Berle Show (1953–55). These were mass audience television-variety shows with roots in vaudeville that for the wartime generation virtually defined their domestic experience of mass culture. Berle himself confessed that his broad and raucous humor had been honed by vaudeville, “a training ground, school, and college all in one.”35

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Finally, English-born comedian Bob Hope (1903–2003), friend of presidents and famous American success story, celebrated for the Road films with Bing Crosby, also began his multimedia career in vaudeville. One of seven children born to an emigrant stonemason, whose large family struggled to stay afloat in Cleveland, Ohio, Bob left school at 16, held various jobs, then took dancing lessons to seek work as a variety stage entertainer, appearing in a local show headed by comedian “Fatty” Arbuckle. In the early 1920s, Bob dreamed that he and his Cleveland girlfriend would achieve the success of earlier dancing sensations Vernon and Irene Castle, before teaming up from 1925 to 1927 with another touring performer, George Byrne, for a small-time dance, comedy, and blackface act. Making slow progress now touring alone and as a master of ceremonies on the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit, Hope eventually appeared as a chorus boy in the lavish but troubled Ziegfeld musical Smiles (1930), with Fred and Adele Astaire. From 1931–32 he was finally playing big-time comedy at the Palace Theatre (like Milton Berle) and in revue, prior to making film shorts in New York and moving at last to Hollywood. Bob’s theatrical apprenticeship is often evoked in movies where he plays an overweening amateur or ham in small-time shows, such as his fast-patter vaudevillian in My Favorite Blonde (1942) who is upstaged by Percy the Performing Penguin. When the cowardly Hope is asked in the hauntedhouse comedy The Cat and the Canary (1939) whether big, empty houses scare him, he promptly ripostes: “Not me. I was in vaudeville.”36 Endnote So the routines, jokes and characters finely crafted on the vaudeville circuits helped make the mature W. C. Fields, Bob Hope, and the Marx brothers into the incomparable comedians they were to become on the cinema screen. A significant number of American television comedians of the 1950s and early 1960s, such as Jack Benny, George Jessel, Milton Berle, Phil Silvers, Red Buttons, George Burns, and Gracie Allen, also transferred their personae and routines from interwar vaudeville, radio, and the movies. Together these deadpan, wisecracking, vaudeville-trained comedians helped to shape the comic awareness of an entire generation brought up for the first time on television. The situation comedies popular on television today are also built from the same stock situations and verbal interchanges that shaped medicine and minstrel shows, as well as later revue and vaudeville. Yet talented comedy performers such as the aforementioned who graduated to the new media, to progressively overtake stage acts, represent only a successful handful among the thousands who were unable to make the transition from vaudeville to screen and sound.

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To end, the final chapter tries to reach some conclusions about P. T. Barnum’s role in the taming or transformation of popular amusements and also reflects on the overall contribution made by the various forms of show business outlined here to the advent of our modern-day mass culture. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”37

P. T. Barnum with Tom Thumb, Daguerreotype, circa 1850. Owner: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-44525).

CONCLUSION

wo key components of the preceding chapters are the main focus here. First an assessment is made of P. T. Barnum’s contribution as a new breed of promoter and entrepreneurial showman to the transformation of popular amusements. A systematic effort to equate Barnum’s circuses with biblical spectacle (his hippopotamus became “the great Behemoth of the Scriptures”) and his avoidance of outright fraud, earned him a reputation in late career as a “moral” entertainer. Thus, the beginnings of a shift in show business toward the respectable middle ground, in terms of promotional advertising with an emphasis on moral propriety, were largely Barnum’s creation. This marketing adjustment is now seen by historians of popular culture as necessary for commercial forms of entertainment that wanted to broaden their appeal to reach women and the all-important family audience.1 Second, how far did more commercial forms of organization and the new show business ethos associated with Barnum and others help shape what, in the twentieth century, came to be called “mass culture” (see introduction)? That culture’s reliance on corporate chains, national markets, and synchronized distribution remained only emergent features of the entertainment industry, admittedly, until the attainment of either (and here historians disagree) monopolistic vaudeville circuits, commercial radio stations, or studio-tied networks of film distribution. Cultural historians have begun to recognize, nonetheless, that “the basic components of ‘massification’ were beginning to take shape even during Barnum’s lifetime.”2

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Barnum’s Place in Show Business History In a nifty polemic about “the trashing of taste in America,” cultural historian James B. Twitchell once claimed that Barnum was “every bit as important as [Charles] Dickens, [Victor] Hugo, [Mark] Twain, and [Edgar Allan] Poe in understanding how the demands of a mass audience created the mass media” and, implicitly, the profit-driven vulgarization of American popular culture. Further, “his New York museum, his hoaxes, his big top, his sideshow, these

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first shifted the economic engines of modern show business into gear. Barnum understood what the publishing, film, and television industries had to realize to survive. He knew how to market wonder; how to carnivalize curiosity.” If true mass entertainment would not appear until the simultaneous electronic transmission to large audiences of radio, film, and television programs, Barnum and his fellow showmen are credited with concocting the basic recipe for it in the course of the nineteenth century.3 P. T. Barnum’s significant role in show business history should have become progressively more evident as successive chapters of this book provide an account of his personal involvement in or promotion of diverse amusement forms from museums to circuses, even if to associate him with the actual creation of such forms was a later misconception. The man’s brilliant entrepreneurial flair lay, ultimately, in his extraordinary promotional energies, especially his ability to advertise and orchestrate existing elements within the popular amusement culture, to find profitable new ways to cater to the public’s thirst for novelty and sensation. For, if Barnum remained rooted in a premodern, carnivalesque sensibility with his enthusiasm for traditional amusements such as the freak show, his museums, exhibits, and circuses also anticipated a modernizing and urban-industrial America of mass advertising, mass culture, and mass consumption. American Studies scholarship, according to one prominent Barnum scholar, needs “to acknowledge [his] exhibitions, institutions, and celebrity as market-driven, publicly-consumed commodities, each one carefully managed by the showman, but also continually subject to the economic pressures and diverse tastes of America’s very first mass audience.”4 So what made the famous museum and circus owner so successful at taking over or harnessing already present cultural trends? Significantly, most commentators agree that Barnum was able to expand his American Museum commercially because, from the 1850s onward, he stayed carefully within the pale of middle-class respectability and thereby guaranteed a large family attendance at his various exhibits and theatrical performances. What has been called “the feminized cast of middle-class culture” also led Barnum to seek patrons among the ladies by means of his emphasis on upholding propriety and moral values. Family-style entertainment in all the showman’s venues ultimately proved acceptable both to conservative Christians and to respectable middle-class women who could watch safely in the knowledge that no indecencies would affront them. Through its manager promoting both the decent and informative nature of the entertainment on offer, Barnum’s American Museum, extending from the Lecture Room theatre to “living curiosities” such as the “What Is It?” became worthy of visits by the urban elite as well as respectable artisans, women and children as well as men.5

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Why was a cross-section of the American public so fascinated with Barnum’s various shows, exhibits, and museums? Displays of “human curiosities,” or freaks of nature, to take just one instance, had been among the most popular exhibits of traveling carnival shows or fairs for centuries in both America and Europe, although the “golden age” did not begin until the 1840s, when the opening of Barnum’s American Museum ushered the freak show into the era of mass culture (see chapter 2). Barnum’s gaudy museum advertising of “the greatest living human phenomena,” presenting the thinnest, smallest or largest in the world, or “the most singular freaks of nature,” refurbished the traveling showman’s customary rhetoric. Under Barnum’s management, the American Museum’s pervasive influence was certainly felt in the northeast of the United States and helped legitimize the exhibition of “natural freaks,” or those with some conspicuous but genuine physical or mental deformity. Such grotesque or freakish exhibits were, until at least the 1870s, considered solid family entertainment for all social classes. Barnum merits recognition, accordingly, for having brought what became the sideshow to prominence as a central part of what would soon constitute the show business in America.6 Why, given Barnum’s many cultural borrowings, is his reputation for showmanship so enduring? For, while he was a significant figure in the staging of large-scale commercial entertainments, he could hardly claim any credit for their actual creation (see Appendix I). On the other hand, without the benefit of Barnum’s various promotional schemes and his emphasis on reaching a wider social audience beyond plebeian males, much of commercialized leisure in the second half of the nineteenth century would have remained small-scale, alcohol-fueled, and resolutely local. Starting out as Barnum the “artful deceiver,” or some kind of hoaxer and exhibit manager, he successfully reinvented himself as a respected international celebrity, a flamboyant entertainer, and then circus promoter who would pay almost any price for an attraction. Barnum himself became as much of an attraction to the viewing public as his own museums, exhibits, or circuses. Less remarked upon was that he was a significant intermediary figure in the history of American commercial entertainment as it moved away from limited entrepreneurial finance to large-scale corporate investment, because when Barnum started out, the term “show business” generally meant small-scale exhibition by itinerant showmen. By the end of his life and owing much to Barnum’s own efforts in partnership with others, show business had become synonymous with large audiences, massive investment, and commercial organization. From his itinerant beginnings in the world of small circuses and hoax exhibits, to his successful management of the remarkable American Museum in New York, to the famous circus partnership with James Anthony Bailey, “Barnum’s career thus helps to

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clarify the intricate relationship between culture industry development and capitalist expansion.”7 Forerunners of Mass Culture What historical variables made the emergence of “mass culture” take place first in the New World? This section will attempt to draw together the contribution of the various amusement forms discussed in previous chapters to the arrival of our modern media-based culture. Although the democratization of entertainment prolonged a taste for the sensational and grotesque evident in the freak show, our concern here is less with this persistent cultural survival than with other live forms of the show business as harbingers of future mass culture. Vaudeville hence merits special recognition not only as the onstage launching pad for so many famous American entertainers in the twentieth-century mass media, but also for its corporate capitalist modes of organization. The Barnum & Bailey Circus and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, with their logistical planning, poster marketing, large-scale investment, and mass ticket sales, can also be seen as the latenineteenth-century predecessors of the stadium or arena rock concerts and sporting fixtures of more recent American decades. The rise of commercialized popular amusements from Barnum’s first museum endeavor in antebellum New York onward was a by-product of the enormous expansion of American cities. Population expansion, a general relocation to urban areas, and the huge increase in immigration from southern Europe and Russia, all changed the scale and nature of the audience for entertainment. Vaudeville, minstrel, and circus reputations that had initially flourished in a daily interaction with audiences increasingly depended upon what would today be called marketing, more evident since the advent of Barnum’s ceaseless publicity machine. The parallel rise of impersonal and monopolistic corporations, assisted by the creation of a nationwide and globalizing mass market for American products, linked to an extensive web of railroad and telegraph networks, had profound consequences for America’s commercial amusements. Characteristic modes of industrially produced and increasingly standardized forms of amusement such as sheet music, the newspaper comic strip, dime novels, and massproduced color lithographs were coming into being to capture national and sometimes international markets. The same forces that were generating the incorporation of the American economy, argue the authors of a recent study, were also generating the incorporation of American culture. Even before Barnum’s death in 1891, what was popular in American culture “was increasingly the product of culture industries that, like the new American corporations, required a

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great deal of capitalization and increasingly sophisticated strategies for controlling resources and markets.” Hence the massive World’s Fair held in 1893 on the outskirts of Chicago, or the World’s Columbian Exposition, saw the international launch of America, its industry, its culture, and its self-perception as building a modern way of life to rival old Europe. The sparkling Beaux-Arts architecture of the monumental White City, coordinated by Chicago’s own Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912), and in addition, the less edifying commercial attractions outside the fair proper, “affirmed that the American genius was in showmanship, spectacle, accumulation, and the instant realization of pleasure.” An imaginary walk up the Midway leading to the White City entrance has taught historians much about the rise of American mass culture.8 Equally, in terms of “massification,” we need to consider the emergence of a more restrained show business geared toward the moral mainstream in urban society. In Lower Manhattan, new forms of amusement associated with Barnum and others eventually bridged the divide between the elegant Broadway culture of upper-class gentility to the west and, a few blocks away, the broad avenue of the Bowery that was fast becoming the symbolic center of a more boisterous working-class culture. The Astor Place Riot of 1849 brought this combined social and cultural rivalry to a climax (see chapter 7). Mass cultural forms therefore emerged as essential for manufacturing a new post–Civil War national identity based on a combined ideology of white ethnicity, domestic consumerism, and middle-class respectability. Barnum himself came to signify these general traits and the Jenny Lind tour that he managed also did much to create a more middle-class audience base for his future amusements, the beginnings of a mid-century shift toward the profitable middle ground. The changing format and content of minstrelsy are versatile examples of this process of embourgeoisement. Yet Barnum’s own political and cultural value as a representative middle-class American who had come from humble origins was dogged by an unfortunate reputation for hucksterism and trickery (see chapter 1). Only the lucrative projection of his more benevolent circus persona from the 1870s onward saw this hostile appraisal diluted if not entirely removed.9 As the first American show to be electrically illuminated, the circus, more than any other late nineteenth-century show business form, paralleled the enormous growth of Gilded Age America, “ceaselessly struggling to become more grandiose and inventive, to capture for itself all segments of the expanding population, to out-boast and crush lesser rivals with an imperial disdain that was worthy [of] any robber baron or unrestrained monopolist.” Circuses had been widespread in America throughout the nineteenth century, despite or even because of their European cultural origins, but railroad expansion, the rise of corporate investment, and a

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revolution in print advertising (especially poster production) made for a conspicuous circus renaissance after the Civil War. Circuses had been often avoided by “respectable” people until then because the clergy denounced them from pulpits as “the devil’s own playhouse.” Nonetheless, with the development of a truly national rail network that connected otherwise distant metropolitan centers, the circus’s rising prominence during the last quarter of the century became a symbol of national expansion and consolidation. Panoramic spectacle, self-containment, and organizational efficiency on an enormous scale marked the Golden Age of the circus up to World War I.10 Equally important was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show for the historical emergence of mass culture because, as has been recently pointed out, “operating on a military-industrial scale, the Wild West became a mobile dream factory capable of producing narratives of heroic conquest for mass audiences numbering in the millions.” Bill Cody and his manager Nate Salisbury promoted a mythical version of the Wild West story as the triumph of white civilization over Native American savagery. This nationbuilding myth went on to become an essential component for much of the twentieth-century Western, one of mass media’s most popular and quintessentially American formulaic genres. Running parallel to the peak attendance for circuses and the Wild West show but unlike them confined more to urban areas, vaudeville was supremely popular on stage as a light entertainment form for almost 50 years and then lingered on for longer.11 Vaudeville represents the arrival of a new syndicated or nationwide system of entertainment, for, circuit-run stage shows spoke to and with a highly varied and diverse American public. The Keith-Albee circuit, working with the Orpheum circuit west of Chicago, virtually controlled big-time vaudeville through their systematic booking system. Yet recent work also suggests that, within narrow limits, vaudeville was participative, building upon the interaction between performer and audience. Nevertheless, vaudeville could only expand commercially by shifting its primary market and its image away from the rowdy and interactive working-class audience to one of middleclass respectability. As Barnum had discovered long before, reaching the growing middle-class and family box office was dependent on first attracting a nonparticipative, or at least more docile and sober, female audience. The initial vaudeville entrepreneurs such as Pastor, Albee, and Keith, had to tailor the appeal of vaudeville to a diverse gender- , age- , and classbased constituency that was far more segmented by race and ethnicity than it was in Britain and could not easily be made homogeneous. So the creation of a diverse, even mass audience by the big business syndicates or booking offices was a long drawn-out process that also came up against some performer resistance. When the Keith-Albee circuit scheme, the

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United Booking Office of America, pressurized entertainers through the commission system by linking them only with theatre managers for a fee, there followed a short-lived strike during World War I (see chapter 6). Rival vaudeville chain manager Joseph M. Schenk was an equally firm believer in the commodification of performers and the mass marketing of entertainment: “What iron and steel are to the industrial market, so vaudeville is to the amusement seeking public of the united forty-nine states.”12 By developing a standardized and sanitized popular formula, vaudeville helped pave the way for the crafted mass entertainment offered by Hollywood that, in due course, made staged variety redundant. Once the studio system was consolidated in California with the advent of sound films in the late 1920s and eight big corporate organizations—MGM, Paramount, Twentieth Century-Fox, Columbia, RKO, Universal, United Artists, and Warner Brothers—controlled what was made and by whom, the days of independent cinematic production were virtually over. Oligopoly control through ownership of production, distribution, and exhibition represented the full-grown Hollywood system and for the subsequent 30 to 40 years, the big studios dominated the movie industry in Los Angeles. As with Keith-Albee a generation earlier and their monopolistic chain of vaudeville theatres, the studio moguls tried hard to exercise commercial supervision over an emerging popular art form. Yet, as their predecessors who ran the vaudeville circuits had discovered, total management control over idiosyncratic, self-willed, but highly creative personnel ultimately proved unattainable.13 Endnote Along with the moving pictures with which vaudeville overlapped, for decades, theatrical shows, dime museums, carnivals, and circuses, were able to persuade ordinary urban Americans to leave home, or delay returning home and pay a ticket seller to be amused. Almost 60 years after the virtual collapse of live vaudeville, we now live in an age of privatized, home-based, and electronic amusements. Being entertained before and even for some years after World War II often meant “going out,” whereas for today’s adult audience for amusement, this has been largely rendered superfluous by the modern technology that has created the Internet, large-screen plasma televisions, game playing, and the digitial-tv-dvd-stereo entertainment center. Audiences that had once so intensely interacted with live performers, have increasingly become consumers of electronic sounds and images in the privacy of their own media-saturated homes. Broadly speaking, a great many married adults over the age of 30 in America hardly ever leave their place of residence now to attend a theatrical or publicly staged live performance.14

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Downtown has also been displaced from the urban scene and its once familiar public entertainment sites of run-down movie theatres, hostess clubs, burlesque or strip joints, and seedy freak shows, have all but disappeared. The recent cleanup of both Times Square in New York and downtown Philadelphia are noteworthy in this regard. Today’s suburban American families need no longer go outside their homes to be amused or entertained, with the exception of those 14 to 24-year-olds who feel obliged, as part of their mating rituals, to congregate in movie theaters, rock concerts, shopping malls, and other public arenas. The closest most present-day family audiences come to the live experience of vaudeville is through channel surfing by using the “variety” of their multichannel digital, high-definition, large-screen, television sets. Barnum-like show business promoters have now, with few exceptions, been transformed into corporate marketing experts, Hollywood producers, and talent agency executives. The parade has passed. Outside of musical concerts, musicals, and the odd street performer, and with stricter licensing of clubs and bars, the business of the live show is almost over.

APPENDIX I P. T. BARNUM: HUMBUG AND REALITY

s a candidate for the father of American show business, Barnum’s wider significance is still being quarried by those with an interest in social and cultural history. The preceding chapters have shown how variety, animal exhibits, circus acts, minstrelsy, and especially freak shows, owe much of their subsequent momentum to his popularization of these amusement forms. For, while Barnum has long been associated in popular memory solely with the circus business, his overall career as an entertainment promoter embraced far more than the celebrated ringmaster figure of present-day public estimation. Barnum saw himself as “the museum man” for the better part of his long show business career, following his successful management of the American Museum from the 1840s to the 1860s. To repeat, for all Barnum’s reputation today as a “circus man,” he saw himself first and foremost as a museum proprietor, one who did much to promote and legitimize the display of “human curiosities.”1 While the emergence of an “American” national consciousness has been dated to the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Barnum’s selfpresentation was central to the cultural formation of a particular middleclass American sense of identity in the second half of the nineteenth century (see chapter 1), as well as helping to shape the new show business ethos. Over time, he also became an iconic or referential figure in the wider culture, with multiple representations in cinematic, theatrical, and literary form (see below).Yet was Barnum really the cultural pacesetter as he is often presented in popular biographical writing, not to mention his own self-aggrandizing prose. At the 1864 reopening of his American Museum theater, Barnum used verse to shed some light on his then

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P. T. Barnum, portrait, circa 1855–65. Owner: Brady-Handy Collection Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-cwpbh-02176).

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achievements, with claims that he either first exhibited or initiated most of the following exceptional items: Who as a “General” thing brought out Tom Thumb?/ Who introduced (you can’t say there I sinned)/ The Swedish Nightingale, sweet Jenny Lind?/ Who brought you Living Whales from Labrador?/ . . . The family of Albinos? the Giraffe?/ The famous Baby Show that made you laugh?/ . . . The curious “What Is It?” which you, though spunky,/ Won’t call a man and cannot call a monkey./ These things and many more time forbids to state,/ I first introduced, if I did not originate.2

While Barnum merits an important place in the history of nineteenthcentury show business, his contribution as an originator of certain paid-for amusements and as being the first to show various museum exhibits can be overstated. Undoubtedly a seminal figure in the development of commercial entertainment, he is unwisely given credit for being a cultural innovator. “He [Barnum] would introduce to America the modern public museum, the popular concert, and the three-ring circus, all forerunners of vaudeville, motion pictures, and television,” claimed novelist Irving Wallace (The Chapman Report) fulsomely in his popular biography The Fabulous Showman (1959). In addition, “he would invent modern advertising and showmanship.” A recent work confirms the latter and more defensible assertion: “Modern advertising and promotion, marketing, and show business . . . all of them . . . began with Barnum.”3 Such definitive statements take Barnum as a cultural pioneer too much at his own inflated estimation for, as will become evident, he did not initiate a single one of the innovations Wallace attributes to him above. Taking each in turn, ●

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“He would introduce to America the modern public museum . . .” The privately-owned museum open to the public, owed its American origins not to Barnum but to Charles Willson Peale and his sons in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Before Barnum purchased it in late 1841, the American Museum in New York was little more than a moribund imitator of the Peale family museums. “He would introduce to America . . . the popular concert . . .” The Jenny Lind concerts that Barnum promoted at mid-century were not the first popular American musical concerts for “decent folk” but certainly among the most successful. “He would introduce to America . . . the three-ring circus . . .” Barnum made no claim to be the first to introduce the three-ring circus format, possibly because he knew English showman “Lord” George Sanger insisted he had experimented with three rings as early

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as in his 1856 circus show, possibly because of a loose interpretation of the word “ring.” “He would invent modern advertising . . .” Barnum was only partially the inventor of modern American advertising, with his pictorial handbills, lithograph posters, squibs, and newspaper promotions, since “puffing” had been a feature of the American popular press from at least the early 1830s onward (see artist George Catlin). “He would invent . . . [modern] showmanship.” While a great showman, Barnum was part of a long tradition and his exhibits and displays were not particularly innovative. Even the Feejee Mermaid, the property of his friend Moses Kimball, had long been displayed by traveling showmen. Barnum merely loaned such exhibits and devised innovative ways of marketing them as incredible crowd-pleasing exhibitions.4

In reality, with the notable exception of Tom Thumb, Barnum was not the first exhibitor of what he offered his patrons, nor the actual “originator” of any single mode of entertainment, although this is not to diminish his wider social and cultural significance. The record shows that Barnum actually took over, publicized, and energized preexisting amusement forms, like those whose multifarious history has been recounted in previous chapters. “The Feejee Mermaid, the American Museum, Jenny Lind, Commodore Nutt, and the great Jumbo himself had all been before the public when he arrived on the scene,” points out a more reliable biographer. On the other hand, Barnum most probably created the first reserved seats; the first matinee shows for women; the first celebrity marketing campaigns; the first venues with national audiences, and; the first corporate model for commercial entertainment. Yet the student needs to maintain a firm historical dimension, given the extensive literature on the showman’s career, to evade the kind of uncritical or exaggerated claims made for Barnum, not least by the man himself in his autobiographical and other writings.5 Representations of Barnum Even in his own lifetime, P. T. Barnum came to represent a larger-thanlife personality or cultural phenomenon associated with peculiar northeast American or Yankee qualities (see chapter 1). When he first took “General” Tom Thumb, “the Yankee Dwarf,” to see Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace in 1844, Barnum was listed in the Court Circular as the midget’s “guardian.” The English satirical journal Punch insisted, however, that the appropriate term was “showman.” Such was Barnum’s international fame 40 years later that Punch now lionized him as “the great

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Phineas the First, Emperor of Showmen.” Consequently, the familiar nineteenth-century European caricature of the bragging, overbearing but egalitarian Yankee was, to some extent, indebted to Barnum’s selfpromotion during his international tours with Tom Thumb in the 1840s and, now a more portentous figure, with the Barnum & Bailey circus in the 1880s.6 Frequently, as related in his own The Life of P. T. Barnum, assembled crowds cheered the trickster-showman in recognition of his Yankee ingenuity, and showing a fondness for being misled by a clever hoaxer, to the extent of liking to be fooled. Equally, the great showman as emblematic of humbug, hucksterism, and trickery is pertinent to the invariable assumption that Yankee entrepreneurs routinely espoused ruthless tactics to secure a profitable business deal. The label “confidence-man,” first attached by a journalist in 1849 to a New York swindler of “genteel appearance” who talked his victims out of their pocket watches, might seem appropriate here. Interestingly, Herman Melville of Moby Dick (1851) fame devoted his financially unsuccessful last novel to the concept of The Confidence-Man (1857). This work can be read as a sardonic if mystifying satire on the prevailing Barnum-like manipulation of commercial encounters in which, on a long Mississippi steamboat journey, one trickster after another peddles bogus stocks, patent medicines, and real estate. The disillusioned Melville had long been interested in Barnum and the novel refers indirectly to various of his exhibits. Sixteen years later, a prominent Barnum-like figure in fiction was the great comic character “Colonel” Eschol Sellers, the selfdeceiving land speculator in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age (1873), a satire on corrupt Washington lobbying that gave its name to an era.7 A quarter of a century after Barnum’s death, it was widely recognized that he had come to represent an element of the national character. “[Barnum’s] name has taken a permanent place in the language as the synonym of trickery and bombast,” pointed out the theater critic of The New York Herald in 1918 reviewing the new play Mr Barnum. This comedy of circus life at the Criterion on Broadway was penned by Harrison Rhodes and portly actor Thomas A. Wise, who played Barnum. Going beyond the self-evident, the anonymous critic also acknowledged certain defining aspects of a middle-class, provincial American in the intensely ambitious and hardworking Barnum, enduring qualities that were recognizably part of a white, Protestant, cultural repertoire: “American brag and American bluff; our love of clever new trickery and our passion for all the old moralities; our remorseless calculation in matters of business and our astounding personal kindliness and generosity—they were all there in Barnum.”8

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Five years later Harvard literary critic Gamaliel Bradford (1863–1932), in reviewing M. R. Werner’s largely uncritical 1923 biography of the great man, endorsed a common view of the period that Barnum was as quintessentially American as he was human: He [Barnum] had the infinite American resourcefulness: if he could not get his end by one means, he would try another. He had American democracy, believed in the average man, in his intelligence, his uprightness, his good intention. He had American good nature, could make a joke and take one, and face trouble with a smile. The first of typical Americans was Franklin, the second was Lincoln and Barnum was [no poor] third . . . He beat the drum and blew the trumpet at the door of his circus tent, till the whole wide world was driven to look at him.

This tendency to idealize Barnum was familiar enough in the 1920s and is echoed in Werner’s own lengthy portrait of “one of the outstanding figures of our national life, for Barnum was a most typical American without ever becoming an average American.”9 A more critical stereotype of the Yankee persisted across the Atlantic into World War II and its aftermath. For a Mass Observation (MO) survey in 1946, people were asked to recall the wartime allied-American “occupation” of Great Britain and Northern Ireland—as in the John Schlesinger movie Yanks (1979). The older and more conservative English people who replied to MO questionnaires tended to dislike the “invading” GIs or American army soldiers stationed in their local communities. They cited American boastfulness, immaturity, materialism, and immorality as character traits: what the survey condescendingly called “the less pleasing qualities of adolescence.” Younger respondents, conversely, cited more complimentary qualities—equally personified in Barnum—such as energy, enterprise, generosity, and efficiency.10 As already indicated, Barnum wrote approvingly in his first autobiography of how his superior cunning and salesmanship had outsmarted various competitors or business rivals. Liberal Hollywood’s moral censure of this huckster ethos is evident in late twentieth-century movies such as John G. Avildsen’s Save the Tiger (1973), in which Jack Lemmon plays a dress manufacturer, a tragic figure trying to reconcile the hero worship of his childhood with the degradations he submits himself to in the business world. Equally, the desperate real estate salesmen in David Mamet’s acerbic play Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) reaffirm a dutiful willingness to bargain, cajole, or use trickery, to secure a sale. Yet a business primer, evidence of Barnum’s still current notoriety, Joe Vitale’s There’s a Customer Born Every

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Minute: P. T. Barnum’s Secrets to Business Success (1998), claims that he genuinely believed in giving the public more than their money’s worth, as well as in the power of the written word and in persistently advertising. Showmen-entrepreneurs such as financial speculator James Fisk (1834–72), the “Barnum of Wall Street,” Broadway producer-lyricist Billy Rose (1895–1966), movie producer Mike Todd (1909–58) and Virgin’s British founder, Sir Richard Branson, are routinely called Barnum’s heirs.11 Barnum not only helped to disseminate nineteenth-century America’s entertainment culture, but he has also became a sort of palimpsest for Americans to reinterpret themselves. Barnum-like self-publicists, salesmen, or small-town boosters are prominent characters in the satirical novels of Minnesota-born Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951). Philistine realtor Babbitt (1922), for example, is “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” As a widely recognized huckster stereotype, Barnum possibly helped shape the character of the American arms dealer in Graham Greene’s left-leaning second novel, The Name of Action (1930), who boasts of his business skills: “Oh, boy, until you’ve seen me hustle you don’t know what hustling is.” With the current fad for real life characters in fiction, Barnum appears as himself in Darin Strauss’ innovative novel about the conjoined twins Chang and Eng (2000). He also plays a major role, together with his American Museum, in the well-researched Edgar Allan Poe-as-detective series by Harold Schechter, in particular The Hum Bug (2001). Equally, the young German migrant hero of Elizabeth Gaffney’s Metropolis (2005) becomes, on arrival in New York, a stableman tending Barnum’s second American Museum menagerie, until the final great fire in 1868.12 In theatrical terms, reference has already been made to the Broadway comedy Mr Barnum (1918), but he was also eulogized in the long-running 1980s musical Barnum! as a flamboyant show-business phenomenon, improbably enamored of singing star Jenny Lind, with English entertainers Jim Dale and Michael Crawford in the instantly recognizable title role. Tied to the musical, Roderick Thorp’s equally as far-fetched novel Jenny and Barnum (1981) was discreetly advertised as “the greatest love story on earth.” On film, the celebrated showman has been portrayed by a blowsy Wallace Beery in The Mighty Barnum (1934), by a bearded Burl Ives in the flaccid comedy Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (1967) and, less prominently, by Roger Ashton-Griffiths in director Martin Scorsese’s panoramic but largely mythical historical movie Gangs of New York (2002). In addition, testifying even further to Barnum’s iconic appeal, Burt Lancaster (1988) and Beau Bridges (1999) have impersonated him in movies made for television.13

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Image and Reality At the first appearance of the famous traveling circus combination of Barnum & Bailey’s The Greatest Show on Earth in 1881, the renowned showman was over 70 years of age. Barnum’s name had already been before the American public for over 30 years when he first met with W. C. Coup and entered into promoting the circus business that was to occupy so much of his attention over the remainder of his life. He now became more and more of a figurehead whose flamboyant showmanship tended to conceal the role of numerous other entrepreneurs with whom he was in partnership. Barnum lived on to see the advent of an urban-industrial corporate America, yet his formative roots were in another nation of small towns, puritanical New England states, and a fast-growing but still elitist New York. Late in 1889, when the now elderly Barnum’s traveling European circus was visiting London, a welcoming banquet chaired by a long-standing British friend was held in his honor. Proposing a toast to “a man of unimpeachable morality and undoubted integrity” journalist and essayist George Augustus Sala (1828–95)—in a speech conspicuously unctuous for a disciple of Charles Dickens—tactfully chose not to recall that Barnum had begun his career by resorting to deceptions such as the Feejee Mermaid and Joice Heth. The veteran showman in response solemnly claimed recognition for his “successful endeavors, extending over more than half a century, to elevate and refine popular amusements and exhibitions (cheers)—to rob them of that poison which had done so much injury in past generations.”14 Ten years earlier, Barnum had claimed to “have conscientiously refused to cater to low or depraved tastes” but to “have striven to cultivate a love and admiration for that which is pure and refined.” Barnum’s presentation of his entertainments as cultured and wholesome was, perhaps, the ultimate humbug, exemplifying the combination of high principles and pecuniary motives that are such a prominent feature of the period. Yet, in his capacity as a major promoter of forms of mass entertainment with a bourgeois sense of moral decorum or respectability, Barnum played a significant role in helping to diversify and improve popular taste, as well as making traditional amusements such as the freak show more attractive to middle-class audiences. It is also worth reminding ourselves that of critical importance to the success of late-Victorian genteel reformers as cultural arbiters, “was their ability to enlist the support of influential shapers of the nascent mass culture [such as Barnum], who echoed their tone and carried their message to a broad audience.”15 Barnum’s contribution as an innovator to various forms of the exhibition or show business may have been overstated by his early biographers, but as a relentless entrepreneurial advocate of the new entertainment

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industry, he helped introduce a new level of investment and a new scale of organization into commercial entertainment. Eventually, toward the end of his long career, large-scale corporate management and massive capital investment began to make his personal style of showmanship seem outdated. Yet, to repeat the striking metaphor with which the concluding chapter opened, Barnum’s American Museum, his hoaxes, his big-top circus, and his sideshows “first shifted the economic engines of modern show business into gear.” He was, in this sense, the nineteenth-century architect of the modern culture industry. A century and more after Barnum’s death, this vigorous entrepreneur and master of the art of self-promotion justifiably retains his self-appointed title as the World’s Greatest Showman.16

Harry Houdini, full-length portrait, standing, in chains, circa 1905 Source: Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division (LC-USZ62-112419).

APPENDIX II HARRY HOUDINI’S EARLY CAREER

rom an immigrant Hungarian-Jewish family, Ehrich Weiss or Weisz (1874–1926), the ambitious young man who became the famous escapologist “Harry Houdini,” was born the son of a rabbi in Budapest but brought up from the age of four in Appleton, Wisconsin. According to one biographer, a record of Ehrich’s show activities before he entered into bigtime vaudeville at the turn of the century, “survives only in a handful of unidentified clippings, undated programs, unexplained contracts, laconic diary entries, and later misrecollections, revealing little more than that they offered a changeable mélange of subtrunk, handcuffs, and conventional magic, playing an occasional one-week stand in variety shows and dinky dime museums.” Far more is actually known about Houdini’s fascinating early career than this quotation suggests, illuminating what it was like to live on the road as a traveling entertainer for many years before finding lasting fame as an escape artist in the early twentieth century.1 Beginning in the early 1890s, Ehrich, together with his brother Theodore or Dash, scraped up engagements as a magician in dime museums, such as George H. Huber’s Palace Museum on East 14th Street in New York that presented a series of stage acts (freaks, fire-eaters, strong men) of the kind later associated with circus sideshows. Ten miles away at Coney Island, on the other side of the East River, young Ehrich worked with a strong man in a tent for “throw money,” passing the hat round after the act. The brothers next traveled to Chicago, where Ehrich managed to get a booking at Kohl and Middleton’s dime museum on the Midway at the 1893 World’s Fair. He gave 20 shows a day for $12 a week, taking in an “Indian yogi” act, rope-ties of the kind used by spirit mediums, and card tricks. That same year the budding entertainer also introduced a handcuff act, marking the first appearance of “Harry Houdini, Handcuff King and Escape Artist,” whose stage name derived from his then idol Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a renowned nineteenth-century professional magician

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whom the mercurial Harry subsequently “unmasked” as a self-promoter. After his marriage to “the petite soubrette” Wilhelminia Beatrice Rahner, known as Bessie or Bess, one of Harry’s very first engagements was back at Huber’s Museum in New York, where Monsieur and Mlle. Houdini performed their “wonderful Metamorphosis” or substitute-trunk act.2 Despite their best efforts, steady work did not come the Houdinis’ way, so husband and wife took what bookings they could get, performing mostly in beer halls and small dime museums. The beer hall program would generally begin with a melodrama performed by the ensemble: there was no time for rehearsal but everyone knew the few stock pieces, such as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Next would come various individual turns, such as Bess’s song-and-dance act, while Harry escaped from his handcuffs or swallowed needles and then pulled them, threaded, from his mouth. He also did some sleight-of-hand tricks; then together the couple performed the famous Metamorphosis. Dime museums were less rough and boozy than the more plebeian beer halls, but still meant hard, repetitive work alongside the freak exhibits. Much also depended on the barker and the quality of the other acts, the duo sharing the bill with such as “Unthan, the Legless Wonder” and “Blue Eagle,” who broke planks over his head. If all else failed, Harry and Bess could always get an engagement at Kohl and Middleton’s Museum in Chicago, where they were required to be on stage from ten in the morning until ten at night, giving ten and more shows a day. Speaking many years later of “when I was playing Dime Museums, and being classed a ‘freak,’ ” Houdini said: “I generally kept very quiet, and tried to make a living, not knowing that I was developing my dexterity by working ten to fifteen times daily.”3 Unexpectedly booked to appear in New York at Tony Pastor’s theater on fashionable 14th Street, near Third Avenue and Union Square, the excited Houdinis arrived only to find themselves in small type at the bottom of the bill and playing at the worst times to maximize audience attendance. So the tireless couple next joined the Welsh Brothers’ Circus, “a ten-twent’-thirt’ ” show or small tent circus without animals that toured the smaller northeastern towns, as in Pennsylvania, during the open season. Now the couple were really hitting the low spots as apprentice entertainers. “The first thing you do with this outfit is to work in the sideshow,” said the circus boss. “You do Punch and Judy; the wife mind reading. In the concert, Houdini to do magic, the wife to sing and dance—then your trunk trick, and the handcuff act as the big feature. And of course, you are in the [daily] parade. Twenty-five [dollars] a week and cakes [meals].” Houdini, with his muscular shoulders and impassive expression, also volunteered to play a freakish Wild Man who had failed to put in an appearance, supposedly captured in the depths of the Java jungle, according to the

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ringmaster. The Wild Man’s cage would be drawn in with Houdini growling and tearing at a bit of raw meat, showered with cigars and cigarettes by males in the audience to hear him growl, which pleased smokers in the circus troupe (Houdini was a nonsmoker). Harry’s later construction of a supremely masculine persona of absolute fearlessness and invincibility perhaps owed something to the Wild Man.4 In 1895 Houdini was also persuaded to take a half-interest in a troupe called The American Gaiety Girls, presumably a variant of once popular burlesque, the main feature of which turned out to be its debts. Despite touring, the show held little appeal and took the Houdini fortunes with it, until things got so bad that couple could scarcely afford meals; so precarious was the life on the road. In the spring of 1896 they joined up with a professional church organist from Connecticut called Edward J. Dooley who had put all his money into an elaborate traveling magic show, the Marco Company, into which he incorporated the Houdinis. When Marco disbanded the company in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the married pair took over but were soon adrift again, moving from one precarious engagement to another. In desperation, Harry set up “Professor Harry Houdini’s School of Magic” and sold some magic apparatus on commission for a Chicago manufacturer, and also some tricks of his own. A manager in Milwaukee then swindled them out of some of their meager earnings.5 At the end of 1897 came an offer of $25 a week to join “Dr.” Thomas Hill’s California Concert Company, a midwestern traveling medicine show way down at the bottom of the American entertainment hierarchy, slogging through Kansas and Oklahoma. In the remotest towns, where the vaudeville tours did not venture, intrepid medicine men parked their wagons and put on a show. When “Buster” Keaton’s parents, Joe and Myra, joined Dr. Hill’s company for a while, they did a knockabout Irish comedy routine. (Their six-month-old son Joseph Francis fell down a flight of hotel stairs at this time but was not hurt too badly: “They said, ‘It sure was a buster,’ and the old man said, ‘That’s a good name for him.’ I never lost the name”). With the advent of vaudeville, acts such as these began to dominate medicine show content, albeit without the big-city emphasis on elaborate costuming. Meanwhile, Hill had heard of a spirit medium in the Midwest drawing big crowds and approached Houdini about doing a similar routine. Harry, who had watched several spiritualists in New York, was convinced that they were all frauds whose acts could be easily duplicated. So successful were the Houdinis as fake mind readers and séance mediums that, when Dr. Hill’s medicine show collapsed in the spring of 1898, the couple set up as mediums on their own account for a short while.6

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“Houdini’s unique performances . . . grew out of the unlikely fusion of the worlds of Spiritualism, conjuring, physical culture, and professional crime, combining features of the séance, the magic act, the muscle show, and the burglary,” claims a modern biographer. After the medium routine followed a brief spell with a traveling repertory theater troupe specializing in melodramas, in which the Houdinis both played roles and did turns between the acts. They then spent another six months on a return engagement from April 1898 with the Welsh Brothers’ Circus, where Harry toyed with the idea of becoming an acrobat. He even went so far as to buy “pink tights and uppers” in early September, but acrobatics was not what Houdini really wanted to do and just over a month later the circus shut down. Then, at the end of 1898, while again at Kohl and Middleton’s Museum, Houdini did his famous “escape from the Chicago city gaol” stunt and got his picture in the newspapers. On the strength of this, husband and wife were booked for a couple of weeks into the Hopkins Theatre, Chicago’s top vaudeville house, but then they returned once more to the lowly dime museums.7 Yet the police cell publicity was still working and during 1899 Houdini persisted with his prison-breaking stunts, adding to his column inches. One evening, Harry was fulfilling a contract at a St. Paul, Minnesota, beer hall, when Martin Beck, the booker for the Orpheum Circuit, then the largest western United States vaudeville theater chain, approached him after the show. Beck offered a tryout at $60 a week, provided Houdini and his wife focused their performance on the handcuffs and substitution trunk routines. These two big stunts would at long last make Houdini famous on the vaudeville circuit as an escapologist, only months before he first set sail across the Atlantic for London with Bess at the end of May 1900. During the next quarter of a century, until his untimely and accidental death at age 52, Harry Houdini became a living legend who not only performed straitjacket escape routines on stage but also acted in movies, and exposed fake mediums, all to the acclaim of the new mass audience for entertainment.8 So Harry’s demeaning experiences as a dime museum entertainer were left far behind in the early twentieth century. What set “the handcuff king & prison breaker” Houdini apart from the other escape artists of his day was not simply his skill and strength but also the remarkable intensity he created in every performance. At a time when individual male freedom appeared to be threatened on many fronts, the Great Houdini’s performance dramas were intimately concerned with issues of masculinity and the American male body, together with “nightmares of entrapment and dreams of triumphant release.” Recorded on film, his open-air stunts such as his leaping off a Boston bridge, handcuffed and manacled, into the icy waters

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of the Charles River were attended by enormous crowds. The new and incredibly popular Houdini’s operational aesthetic also “appealed to the amateur’s desire to understand technical processes in a secularized corporate age,” argues John F. Kasson, historian of the white male body and the challenge of modernity. “He invited viewers to look inside the works of his escapes and to match wits with him, all the better to astound them.”9

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

first looked into this broad topic, to which I was alerted by Robert Lewis (American Studies) of the University of Birmingham, while renting an apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for six weeks following the calamity of 9/11. A period of study leave and financial help from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster made an extended stay in New York possible, enabling me to do research at the splendid New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society (where I saw vaudeville acts revived for Halloween), and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the last a great show business resource. Alan Brinkley kindly secured my appointment as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, enabling me to use the library’s Oral History Research Project. I was assisted with access to the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library and in many other ways by Joshua Brown and Ellen Noonan of the American Social History Project at the City University of New York (CUNY). Attendance at the First Gotham History Festival held at the CUNY Graduate School was also a rewarding experience—memorable for hearing Martin Scorsese talk about Gangs of New York—as was living in such a resilient city. Not surprisingly, in the absence of research assistants and external grants, the book in your hands has a bias toward New Yorkbased evidential sources. On taking early retirement, a self-financed return trip to New York followed in October 2004 to revisit the Lincoln Center and also the Public Library at Bridgeport, Connecticut, center of Barnum studies. A year later I stayed for several weeks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work on the extensive body of entertainment-related material held in the Theatre Collection at Harvard University, as well as Jumbo records at nearby Tufts University. I am grateful to helpful library staff at both universities and also to archivist Brian Browne for access to the Earls Court and Olympia records held in London. Some of my ideas about Barnum in this book have been tried out in papers presented at Popular Culture Association conferences held in Dublin, Cambridge, and Philadelphia. My great friends from Washington, Barbara and Lewis Moore, helped make these conferences

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even more hospitable. My old friend Richard Price of the University of Maryland was, as ever, a useful sounding board, as was my hospitable former colleague Steve Ickringill. Also Lester Lamon, then at Indiana University, South Bend, kindly agreed to read chapter 4 and made useful comments. Gary Cross of the University of Pennsylvania gave encouragement just when it was needed. The irrepressible John Jones freely gave of his time to help me with the illustrations. Christopher Chappell, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, together with the team at Newgen, patiently saw me through the publication process. My immediate family, mother and brother Chris, have been as supportive as ever. Susan Bryson helped me by just being there. Members of the Gastronomico-Philosophical Society were wonderful hosts in London. None of the foregoing can take any responsibility for what is written here. Finally, I am obliged to the librarians and archivists of all the institutions I have visited for making my research trips to the United States so pleasurable, however surprised they may have been by an Englishman showing an interest in such recondite aspects of the American past as are embraced by “the show business.” JOHN SPRINGHALL Portstewart Northern Ireland

NOTES

In citing works in the notes, usually short titles have been used. Full citations may be found in the bibliography. Archival sources cited frequently are identified by the following abbreviations: BRT ECO HL LWC NYHS NYLPA NYPL OHROC OYL PLB TCH TUJ TWC

Billy Rose Theater Collection, NYLPA Earls Court and Olympia records, London Houghton Library, University of Harvard, Cambridge, MA. Leonidas Westervelt Circus Collection, NYHS New York Historical Society Library The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center New York Public Library, Special Collections Oral History Research Office Collection, Columbia University, New York Seymour B. Durst Old York Library, City University of New York Graduate Center Public Library at Bridgeport, CT, Barnum Collection Theatre Collection at University of Harvard, Cambridge, MA. Tufts University, Medford, MA, Jumbo Archive Townsend Walsh Circus Collection, NYLPA

Introduction 1. Craigie and Hulbert, A Dictionary of American English, 2111, citing: Northall, Before and behind the Curtain, 167; “Tom Thumb and the Queen,” Punch or the London Charivari, 144 (April 13, 1844): 157. See also Appendix I. 2. Logan, Before the Footlights, 20, cited in: Lewis, ed., From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, 2; Bordieu, Distinction. 3. Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 174, 7. British journalist W. T. Stead (1849–1912), editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, wrote The Americanization of the World (1902). 4. Fiske, “Manifest Destiny,” 588; Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 312–16; Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 36–72; Lewis, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 10.

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

Powers, Mark Twain, 46–47; Denning, Mechanic Accents, 27–46. Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics, 73, 169–72. Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 149–63. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination; Arato and Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd; Wagner, Parade of Pleasure, 72; Rosenberg and White, eds., Mass Culture; Anon., “A Horrible Trade,” The Times, November 12, 1954, 6; Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics, 143. Thompson, Discrimination and Popular Culture, 206; Hall and Whannel, The Popular Arts, 15. Hall and Whannel, The Popular Arts, 143–49, 155–63; Turner, British Cultural Studies, 70–74; Amis, New Maps of Hell; Orwell, “Boys’ Weeklies”; Warshow, The Immediate Experience. Warshow died aged only 37 in 1955. Allen, ed., To Be Continued; Bogdan, Freak Show; John Kasson, Amusing the Million; Allen, Horrible Prettiness; Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West; John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man.

1

The American Museum: Barnum’s Great Leap Forward

1. Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 2. 2. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 107. 3. “Obituary of P. T. Barnum,” The Times, April 7, 1891, 6; Barnum, Funny Stories, 361. 4. Harris, Humbug, 57; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 334–37. 5. Wallace, The Fabulous Showman, 52; Macdonald, ed., Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, 436; Barnum, Art of Money Getting, 10; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 201–2. 6. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum; Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man; Decker, Made in America, 138. 7. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 20, 23. Barnum claimed sales of 500,000 for his autobiography in America alone by 1879. 8. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 157–59; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 318–19. 9. Toll, On with the Show, 26; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum; Cook, The Arts of Deception; Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader; Reiss, The Showman and the Slave; Goodall, Performance and Evolution; Harding, Elephant Story. 10. Croft-Cooke and Cotes, Circus, 57–58; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 30–35, 218–19. Despite Barnum’s boast, two other parcels of land in Bethel appraised at $2,000 were also pledged as security, along with Ivy Island: Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 31–32. 11. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 16–17, 318–19; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 43–44. In 1849 Universalist Minister Edwin H. Chapin, later a close friend, persuaded regular champagne drinker Barnum to become a teetotaler.

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12. Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, 5, 67, 224; Ironside, “Literary Barnumism.” 13. Croft-Cooke and Cotes, Circus, 53–54; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 39–46; Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, 18. 14. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 77–80; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 24–27; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 177, 189; Sutcliffe, Steam. 15. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 207. 16. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 87–89. 17. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic; Alderson, ed., Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons, 32–35. 18. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 12–14, 24–26. 19. Toll, On with the Show, 29; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 31, 89; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 25–26; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 113. 20. Dickens, American Notes, 324; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 221. 21. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 27; Schechter, The Hum Bug, 22. See the “virtual reconstruction” of the American Museum at www.lostmuseum. cuny.edu/home.html (last accessed on July 12, 2007). 22. Twitchell, Carnival Culture, 63; Anon., Sights and Wonders in New York (1849), 6, in Barnum’s Enterprises, VIII, NYHS. 23. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 225. 24. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 32–34; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 138–41; Eric Fretz, “P. T. Barnum’s Theatrical Selfhood,” 97–107; Altick, The Shows of London. 25. Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 43. 26. Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 128, citing Barnum’s American Museum, Illustrated (1850); undated handbill, American Museum Box 1850–55, TCH. 27. McConachie, “Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences,” 47–70; Harris, Humbug, 242. 28. Fergus Linehan, program note, Tom Murphy (after W. H. Smith and a gentleman), The Drunkard, Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin, August 2003; undated handbill, American Museum Box 1850–55, TCH. 29. Saxon ed., Selected Letters, 43; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 121–25; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 62–65. 30. Cited: Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 106–7. 31. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 131; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 141–42; Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 114. Barnum mounted the Aiken version of Uncle Tom, with Caroline Howard as Topsy, in 1866 and also in 1868. 32. “Thrilling Success of the New American Comedy!” poster for October 25, 1859, American Museum Box 1858–59, TCH. 33. Interview with “a Grave Newspaperman of Today” in “Showman Barnum,” The Rockville [Mass.] Journal, April 16, 1891, 3, Barnum’s Enterprises, Vol. 5, NYHS. 34. Barnum to Messrs. R. Griffin & Co., January 27, 1860: Saxon ed., Selected Letters, 102–3.

200

NOTES

35. “Destruction of Barnum’s Museum,” The New York Herald, July 14, 1865, front page: Barnum’s Enterprises, Vol. 5, NYHS. 36. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 37–38; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 194–97; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 108–9: 37. Sante, Low Life, 99. 38. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 109; Frick, New York’s First Theatrical Center, 93–96. 39. Bogdan, Freak Show, 35, 37; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 41–42. 40. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 41; Cook, The Arts of Deception; Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture. 41. Ware and Lockard, Jr., P. T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind, 1–13; Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 165. 42. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 82, 180; Saxon ed., Selected Letters, 54. 43. Montgomery ed., P. T. Barnum Presents, 1–12; Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 7–8. 44. Mandler, “The Problem with Cultural History,” 111, warns of dangers in a simplistic approach to culture and national identity; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 180; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility. 45. Cited: Werner, Barnum, 251. 46. Anon., “The Two Hundred Thousand and First Curiosity in Congress,” Nation, March 7, 1867, 191–92; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 201. 47. Werner, Barnum, 289–99; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 201; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 223–34. Dana (1815–82) was a Republican free-soiler, Massachusetts maritime lawyer, and author of Two Years before the Mast (1840). Prince Talleyrand (1754–1838) was a resourceful French statesman who served both Napoleon and, subsequently, the Bourbon restoration. 48. Pond, Eccentricities of Genius, 353–54; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 52, defends Barnum, in spite of Pond, as sensitive toward others and their needs. 49. Huntington, Who Are We? 69–71; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 180; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 24–25, 2. 50. Goodall, Performance and Evolution; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 258; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, xi.

2

The Freak Show Business: “Step Right Up, Folks”

1. Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” 23. 2. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 12. “Proustian” is a reference to the introspective French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), author of the 13-volume masterpiece À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. 3. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 66. 4. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 113, 270; Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” 27–31; “Extraordinary Living Wonders,” American Museum poster, March 26, 1866, TCH.

NOTES

201

5. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 6; Bogdan, Freak Show, 187; Fahy, “Exotic Fantasies, Shameful Realities,” 69–70. 6. Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” 23–37; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 150, 209. 7. Leroi, Mutants, 13–14. 8. Bogdan, Freak Show, 32; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 120. 9. McConachie, “Museum Theatre,” 72–73. 10. Bogdan, Freak Show, 10, 30–31; McConachie, “Museum Theatre,” 73; Anon., “Circus Sideshow ‘Freaks,’” New York Daily Mirror, April 30, 1937, 12. The source for all American twentieth-century newspaper and magazine references is the freak show cuttings file MWEZ⫹n.c. 25,978 in the NYLPA. 11. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 98–103; Bogdan, Freak Show, 111–12, 134–42; Leroi, Mutants, 255–61; Lewis, ed. From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, 48–65. The photographic visiting card, or carte de visite, was devised by André AdolpheEugène Disdéri in 1854. 12. Harris, Humbug, 57; “Filmmaker Accused of Faking One Man’s Unforgettable Story,” The [London] Guardian, February 20, 2006, 6; Ironside, “Literary Barnumism.” 13. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 175, 208, 185; Paul Humphries, “Mixed Fortunes,” Guardian Society, September 11, 2002, 2–3; Kunhardt, “Barnum and Brady,” 64–66. 14. Rosenfeld, “Barnum’s First Freaks,” 10–12; Wilson, “Freaks,” 25–31. 15. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 144–47; Wallace and Wallace, The Two, 257–58, 296–97. 16. Interview with “A Grave Newspaperman of Today” in Anon., “Showman Barnum,” The Rockville [Mass.] Journal, April 16, 1891, 3, Barnum’s Enterprises, Vol. 5, NYHS; Cook, Jr., “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts,” 139–57. 17. Barnum’s American Museum poster, circa 1861, TCH; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 134, 148. The bizarre pamphlet, Anon., Life of Zip, written for George Bunnell’s New York [Dime] Museum, locates the capture of “Zip” deep in the Australian bush. 18. Leroi, Mutants, 169–75; McConachie, “Museum Theater,” 72; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 124–26, 142–45. Much Barnum-Kimball correspondence can be found in the NYPL. 19. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 125; Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 12–14. 20. Anon., “Tom Thumb and the Queen,” 157; Desmond, Barnum Presents, 88. 21. Bogdan, Freak Show, 97; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 131–34; Saxon ed., Selected Letters, 24–25. 22. George, The Life and Death of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 282; Fitzsimons, Barnum in London, 108–50; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 149. 23. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 164–70; Desmond, Barnum Presents, 196–216. 24. Nasaw, Going Out, 18–24. 25. Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, 13–16, 53–54.

202

NOTES

26. Davis, The Circus Age, 120; Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 97. An ethnological congress was first organized by a German circus owner, Carl Hagenbeck, in 1874: Davis, The Circus Age, 118. 27. Goodall, Performance and Evolution, 100; Andress, Route Book of Barnum & Bailey (1905), endpapers, Barnum Collection, PLB. For the British imperial equivalent: Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society. 28. Cross and Walton, The Playful Crowd, 125; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 85, 129–31. 29. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 129–31; Nasaw, Going Out, 67–68; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 418–20; McKenna, A Pictorial History of the American Carnival, 78. 30. Keefer et. al., Shocked and Amazed, 38–39. 31. Leroi, Mutants, 12–13. 32. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Seventh, lines 706–21, 828; Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 117. 33. Museum handbill, April 1857, Barnum’s American Museum files, 1840–57, TCH. Retaining the building’s lease in his wife’s name, Barnum sold the museum’s collection to employees from 1855, buying it back in 1860 when he became solvent. 34. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 76; Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 15, 455; Anon., “Accessories at Barnum’s,” 67, ECO. 35. Wallace, “Circus Freaks Measure Up to Normal Life,” Feature Magazine [New York] World Telegraph and Sun, April 11, 1959, n. p. NYLPA. 36. Humphries, “Mixed Fortunes,” 2–3; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 69. 37. Anon., “Broadway Barnum Museum of Freaks,” The [New York] Sun, January 25, 1920, refers to an 81-year-old “Zip” or the “What Is It?” as the dean of all freaks, exhibited at a dime museum on Broadway; Kasson, Amusing the Million, 57–86; Cross and Walton, The Playful Crowd, 123–27. 38. Robinson, “Freaks Still Attract Curious Stragglers on Coney’s Midway,” New York World-Telegram, July 29, 1947, n. p. NYLPA; Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 57. 39. Howell and Ford, The True History; Adams, Sideshow U.S.A, 57. 40. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A, 2, 210–28; “Bob Hope and American Variety,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/exhibits/ bobhope/vaude.html (last accessed on June 16, 2007); “Sideshows by the Seashore” in the heart of Coney Island Amusement Park, on the corner of Surf Avenue and West 12th Street, keeps the American sideshow tradition alive. 41. Matt Wells, “Big Brother Could Lead to Fatal Copycats, Rivals Claim,” The [London] Guardian, August 29, 2000, 6; Alice O’Keeffe, “Psychiatrists Fear for Celebrities’ Sanity in a Modern-Day Freak Show,” The [London] Observer, January 15, 2006, 8. England’s Blackpool, like Niagara Falls, has a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Odditorium. 42. “Reality Check: Extroverts Enter Seventh Big Brother,” The Guardian, May 19, 2006, 15. 43. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A, 11; Cross and Walton, The Playful Crowd, 34–36.

NOTES

3

203

Blackface Minstrelsy: The First All-American Show

1. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 1, 6. For a neo-Marxist cultural studies interpretation of minstrelsy see Lott, Love and Theft. 2. Buckley, “Paratheatricals and Popular Stage Entertainment,” 462, 464; Toll, Blacking Up, 4–5. 3. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 220–24; Boskin, Sambo, 72. 4. Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 16, 20. Burlesque was also a common early ingredient of the bizarre British Christmas pantomime format. 5. Ibid., 62–91, 71. 6. Ibid., 63, 68; Toll, Blacking Up, 27. 7. Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 9–11. Black rapper M. C. Hammer performed the same “market step” in the pop music video Hammer Time (1990) that can be seen in the New York folk drawing “Dancing for Eels 1820 Catherine Street Market.” 8. Saxon, Selected Letters, 11–12; American Museum handbill, commencing May 30, 1842, HTC; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 210. 9. Nathan, Dan Emmett, 146; Emerson, Doo-dah! 90. 10. Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy, 11; Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 57, 239. 11. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 58; Emerson, Doo-dah! 96. 12. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 18. 13. Anon., Boston Minstrels Song Sheet, 1843, Brownings’ file of sheet music, TCH; Matlaw, “Tony the Trouper,” 85–87. See Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 273–76, for other versions of “De New York Gals.” 14. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 59–60; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 357–58. Lhamon’s citation for the earlier date is given as H. P. Grattan, “The Origin of the Christy Minstrels,” The Theatre (London), March 5, 1882, taken from details that Christy first published on January 30, 1848 in the New York Age. 15. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 75–76. 16. Knowles, Tap Roots, 100–101; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 18–19, 372, note 29; Chase, America’s Music, 237. 17. Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 100–101. 18. Davis, Scandals and Follies, 32. 19. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 9–41, 11. 20. Emerson, Doo-dah!, 96; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 166. 21. Matlaw, “Tony the Trouper,” 75; “Ethiopian Minstrels!!” American Museum poster, January 1847, TCH. 22. “Heard at the Minstrel Show,” John Robinson Circus, 1917, NYLPA; Pickering, “White Skin, Black Masks,” 75–76. 23. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 2, 5, 268–69. 24. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 20–21; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 41. 25. Gibson, “Rethinking Race,” 1–3, argues that these works attempt to revise minstrelsy’s history by decentering race.

204

NOTES

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, 174. Ibid. Emerson, Doo-dah!; Buckley, “Paratheatricals,” 465–66. Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 105–7. Toll, Blacking Up, 197–98. Ibid., 199–203. Ibid., 201, 205–15. Ibid., 262, 249–51. Ibid, 237–38, 242–44. Ibid, 254–58; Toll, On with the Show, 121–33; Phillips, Dancing in the Dark, is a persuasive novel about Williams’ incongruous and ultimately sad life. Toll, Blacking Up, 51. Meade, “Kitty O’Neill,” citing: “Variety Shows: Their Origins and History,” New York Times, March 28, 1874, and Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 168–73; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 113–15. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 103–4; Davis, Scandals and Follies, 94. Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 306–7. Boskin, Sambo, 87–91, cites the WPA (Works Progress Administration) publication 56 Minstrels (1938). Philip Purser, “Obituary: George Mitchell,” The [London] Guardian, August 30, 2002, 15; Patrick Barkham, “About Face: The History of Blacking Up,” The [G2] Guardian, September 22, 2006, 9. Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine. Two white men acted out the comic exploits of two black men in the hugely popular series Amos ‘n’ Andy on radio in the 1930s, and then from the early 1950s on television: Toll, The Entertainment Machine, 54–55, 235. Alexis Petridis, “Johnny Grande,” The [London] Guardian, June 7, 2006, 33; Phinney, Souled American; Ogg with Upshal, The Hip Hop Years. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 1–8, 9. Anon., Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, TWC/NYLPA.

4 The Americanized Circus: Barnum & Bailey In Excelsis 1. Various, Radio Times Guide to Films, 591. Other American “circus movies” include Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Trapeze (1956), Victor Mature as owner of The Big Circus (1959), and John Wayne as The Magnificent Showman (1964). 2. Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 104–110; Saxon, Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow, 20–29; Croft-Cooke & Cotes, Circus, 52–53. 3. Saxon, Life and Art, 17–20; Speaight, A History of the Circus, 111–15. 4. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 115–18. 5. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 210–11; Powers, Mark Twain, 471–78.

NOTES

205

6. Croft-Cooke and Cotes, Circus, 54; Carlyon, Dan Rice, 411. Since Rice did not begin clowning until the mid-1840s and “Uncle Sam” cartoons first appeared in the 1830s, it seems unlikely that he was Nash’s much later inspiration. “Uncle” Samuel Wilson (1766–1854), meat supplier to the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, is a stronger candidate. 7. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 128. 8. Davis, The Circus Age, 7, 16; Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 21. 9. Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson, 174–77; Mackay, The Violent Friend, 60–64; Tindall and Shi, America, 891–92. 10. Davis, The Circus Age, 22; Coup, Sawdust and Spangles. 11. Harris, Humbug, 238–39. 12. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 134; Davis, The Circus Age, 20–21; Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 24; Mills, Bertram Mills Circus; Williamson, On the Road with Bertram Mills. Bertram Mills Circus, between 1933 and 1955, was one of very few European circuses to move by rail. The author recalls being taken in 1953 to its winter quarters at the Olympia Stadium, London, where he obtained the autograph of Coco the Clown. 13. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 287; Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society, 6. 14. Sanger, Seventy Years a Showman, 190; Davis, The Circus Age, 21–25. 15. Davis, The Circus Age, 87–88; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 76. 16. Fox, ed., American Circus Posters, 12–13. 17. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 123–24; Clarke, Circus Parade. 18. Fox and Kelley, The Great Circus Street Parade; Speaight, A History of the Circus, 139. 19. Carlyon, Dan Rice, 368; Ogden, Two Hundred Years, 116–17. 20. “P. T. Barnum’s Great Traveling Museum & Menagerie,” November 1871, TCH; Coup, Sawdust and Spangles, 87. 21. Harding, Elephant Story, 86–88; Chindahl, History of the Circus in America, 93; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 231–34. 22. “P. T. Barnum’s Great Museum, Menagerie and Circus!” Poster-bill 1872, Circus Bills and Broadsheets, [A] Barnum, TCH. 23. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 243; World’s Fair poster-bill for 1873 campaign, Circus Bills and Broadsheets, [A] Barnum, TCH; World’s Fair poster and Troy Budget, October 3, 1873, LWC. 24. Malamud, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” 43–58. For an alternative view of Barnum as freer spending than Coup see Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 238–44. 25. May, The Circus, 110–18. 26. Carlyon, Dan Rice, 369; Ogden, Two Hundred Years, 116–17. 27. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 242, 282. 28. Ogden, Two Hundred Years, 21–22; Davis, The Circus Age, 54–55; May, The Circus, 119–27; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 282–84; Toll, On with the Show, 62. 29. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 272; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 283; May, The Circus, 151; unpublished Mss. “Love of the Circus,” Box 6, TWC. 30. Clarke, Circus Parade, 108; Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 222–23; Pond, Eccentricities of Genius, 354.

206

NOTES

31. Harding, Elephant Story, 1–11, 81–92; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 278–81; Carpenter, “P. T. Barnum’s Jumbo,” 6–11, TUJ. Jumbo’s mounted skin on display became the Tufts College football mascot until 1975 when it was destroyed by fire. 32. Harris, Humbug, 270. For further details of the “white elephant” contest, see LWC. 33. Warner, The Barnum Budget, 22, PLB. 34. Davis, The Circus Age, 31–32. 35. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 308–9; Assael, The Circus, 37; Harding, Elephant Story, 85. 36. “Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth,” London 1889 poster, Circus Box Z, Bills and Broadsides, TCH; “Opening of Barnum’s Show,” The Times, November 12, 1889, “Barnum,” The Evening News and Post, November 12, 1889, clippings in P. T. Barnum in London, 1889–90 Scrapbook, TUJ. 37. Harding, Elephant Story, 85; Rev. Harry Adams Hersey to Prof. Russell Carpenter, March 27, 1940, Barnum file, TUJ; Henry Collins Brown, “Barnum: American Self-publicist,” Brown ed., Valentine’s Manual, 310, copy in OYL. 38. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 76, 220; Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society, 87. 39. “The ‘Freaks’ at Olympia,” Pall Mall Budget, October 31, 1898, 1403, ECO. 40. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 150–51; Toll, On with the Show, 79. 41. Plowden, Those Amazing Ringlings; Toll, On with the Show, 79; Davis, The Circus Age, 41. 42. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 142–43; Anon., Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, TWC/NYLPA. Curtis was also given credit for patented audience seats erected without the use of toe pins. 43. Anon., Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, TWC; Davis, The Circus Age, 32–34. 44. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 151; O’Nan, The Circus Fire; Davis, The Circus Age, 40–41. 45. “Circuses Face Curb on Use of Wild Animals,” The [London] Guardian, March 9, 2006, 18; “The end of the greatest show on Earth,” The Daily Telegraph, March 11, 2006, 11; Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 74–76; Hill, Freaks and Fire. Britain’s Animal Welfare Act (2006) banned wild animals from performing in traveling circuses. 46. Toll, On with the Show, 62.

5

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: American Culture Crosses the Atlantic

1. Sleeve text on “Buffalo Bill” Twentieth-Century-Fox Studio Classics DVD. Buffalo Bill was also played by Charlton Heston in Pony Express (1957), Richard Mulligan in Little Big Man (1970), Paul Newman in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), Stephen Baldwin in TV’s The Young Riders (1989), and Christopher Lloyd in Hidalgo (2004).

NOTES

207

2. Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West; Anon., Buffalo Bill’s Wild West program, 1902–03, 53, Box 1501, ECO, London. 3. Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 116; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 60; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 117, 227. 4. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 284–86. 5. Toll, On with the Show, 167. 6. Cody, The Life of Buffalo Bill, 17–52; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 8–14, 30–39; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill, 2–5. 7. Cody, The Life, 91–92, 104–6; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 5. The most likely candidate for “ghost-writer” of The Life is dime novelist Prentiss Ingraham (1843–1904). 8. Cody, The Life, 107–8; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill, vii-viii; Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 158–59. 9. Cody, The Life, 254–62; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 34–35, 111–13; Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 50–51. 10. Wilson with Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 21–23; Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 147–49; Cox, “Ned Buntline’s Buffalo Bill Stories,” 76–87. 11. Cody, The Life, 320, 326–27; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 156. 12. Cody, The Life, 327–28; Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 50–58. 13. Cody, The Life, 330; McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie, 92; Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 59–64. For Combination playbills see Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill, 51–54. 14. Cody, The Life, 340–47; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 119. 15. Cody, The Life, 344. 16. McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie, 93–100; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 118. 17. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 38, 52, see also chapters 1–2. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 61; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 135–36; Fitzsimons, Barnum in London, 88–89. 18. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 210, 229; Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 190–91. 19. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 206–7, 231; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 61. 20. Rennert, 100 Posters; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 116. 21. Blackstone, The Business of Being Buffalo Bill, 15–16, 6–8. 22. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 75–78; Moses, Wild West Shows, 147; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 389. 23. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 148; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 51; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 60; Stokes, ed., The State of U.S. History, 289, 296. 24. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 529, note 19; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 213–16. 25. Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 162. 26. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 85; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill, 102. 27. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 63–64. 28. Ibid., 64. See also Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill. 29. Glanfield, Earls Court and Olympia, 10; Anon., “The American Exhibition,” Railways News, April 23, 1887, Box 1501, ECO.

208

NOTES

30. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 81–93; Glanfield, Earls Court and Olympia, 15–16; Anon., “The American Exhibition.” 31. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 81; Court Circular, May 12, 1889, Program of Exhibition before the Queen, Box 1501, ECO, London. 32. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 101. 33. Ibid., 101–2, 136; Begg, Jack the Ripper, 223. 34. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 494–519; Baker, “The Entertainer,” 10–14. 35. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 152–54; Wilson with Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 189–213, reprints Pawnee Bill’s 1938 memoir of the Two Bills partnership. 36. Wilson with Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 215–17; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 532–41. 37. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 8, 93; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 76. 38. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 82–84; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 256–81, 356, 370. 39. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 269; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 32, 111–17. 40. Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 154–55; Cook, The Arts of Deception; Harris, Humbug, 230–31; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 544. 41. Blackstone, The Business of Being Buffalo Bill, 16–17; Toll, On with the Show, 167–68. See also Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business. 42. Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 151. 43. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 119–20.

6

Vaudeville I: Rise and Decline of an Emergent Mass Culture

1. Page, Writing for Vaudeville, 4–5. Leavitt, Fifty Years, also claimed to have been the first to use the term “vaudeville.” Despite its British origins, “music hall” seems to have been used interchangeably with “vaudeville.” 2. Outside urban areas, in the American Southwest and Midwest, tent show variety or repertoire theaters (“rag opries”) became popular, enjoying their heyday in the 1920s: Ashby and May, Trouping through Texas; Martin, Henry L. Brunk and Brunk’s Comedians. 3. Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, 71. 4. Zellers, “The Cradle of Variety,” 578–85; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 8; Nasaw, Going Out, 13–14. 5. McCabe Jr., Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 595–96; Meade, “Kitty O’Neil,” 11–12; Slout, ed., Broadway below the Sidewalk. 6. Butsch, The Making, 115; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 5. 7. Matlaw, “Tony the Trouper,” 70–90. 8. Ibid., 86–88. See Pastor songbooks in Box 1, “Songsters,” TCH. 9. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 15; Opera House 1872 program, Tony Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/NYLPA. 10. Kattwinkel, Tony Pastor Presents, 5; Frick, New York’s First Theatrical Center, 50–56.

NOTES

209

11. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 20; Butsch, The Making, 105–6; Anon., Tony Pastor’s New 14th Street Theater Songster, Box 1, “Songsters,” HTC. 12. Allen, “B. F. Keith,” 105–15; Anon. “A Giant in the Vaudeville Field,” 10. 13. Kibler, Rank Ladies, 15; Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville, 343. 14. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 51–52, 63–67; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 30. 15. Butsch, The Making, 6, 9; Nasaw, Going Out, 18, 26. 16. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 73–78. 17. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 53–57, 52; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 17; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 36–37, 65–66. 18. Page, Writing for Vaudeville, 5; Nasaw, Going Out, 23. 19. Toll, On with the Show, 277; Page, Writing for Vaudeville, 20. 20. Nasaw, Going Out, 24; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 46. 21. Marx, Harpo Speaks, 151–52; J. F. Milliken Papers, Box I Correspondence 1887–93, Special Collections, NYLPA. 22. S. Friedman to C. B. Dillingham, November 11, 1911; Zo Fulton to Latham, July 26, 1910, Charles B. Dillingham Papers, Box 6, 1910–12, Special Collections, NYLPA. 23. Kasson, Amusing the Million, 39; Roediger, Working towards Whiteness, 3–35; Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, see review by Vincent Crapanzano in the Times Literary Supplement, June 15, 2001, 11. 24. Toll, On with the Show, 272; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 160; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 26–27, 34; “The Palace of Laughter Stateside: Memphis’s Vaudeville Tradition,” BBC Radio 4 broadcast, March 14, 2006; Tindall and David Shi, vol. 1, America, 1035–71. 25. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 103, 84, 95, 102–3. 26. Phillips, Dancing in the Dark, 92. 27. Toll, On with the Show, 289–90. See also Allen, The Best Burlesque Sketches. 28. Grand Opera House 1878 program in Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/ NYLPA; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 124. 29. Meade, “Kitty O’Neil”; Anon., “Tony Pastor Looks Back,” Sun, March 27, 1908; Grand Opera House 1878 program, Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/ NYLPA; Louvish, Monkey Business, 25; Dormon, “Ethnic Cultures of the Mind,” 21–41. 30. Tony Pastor’s 14th Street theater, “John and James Russell, the Irish Lillies,” program for the week of April 7, 1890, Box 136, TCH; “The Irish Servant Girls,” Vaudeville Stage, June 6, 1896: Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/NYLPA; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 110. John Russell first appeared on the vaudeville stage in Dutch, Irish, and Yankee characterizations, and also as eccentric old men, while James had a talent for the mimicry of theatrical stars such as Sarah Bernhardt and Clara Morris. 31. Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams, 85–89, cites Variety, January 13, 1906. 32. McLoone, Irish Film, 48–59; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 56; Anon., Tony Pastor’s New 14th Street Theater Songster, Box 1 “Songsters,” TCH. “Chorus: Dot beautiful Hebrew girl,/ Her hair vas done up in curls,/ Her name it vas Lulu, she went to the schula,/ She could dance, she could sing, she could paint,/ She could play the piano so nice and so fine,/ Shust like

210

NOTES

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

Mr Rubenstein,/ I’d have you to know, sir, you bet she was ko-sher/ Dot beautiful girl of mine.” Toll, On with the Show, 290–92; Louvish, Monkey Business, 26. Kessner, The Golden Door, 154, 168, 173; Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams, 89–91; Nasaw, Going Out, 31. “Amusements,” December 20, 1915, nonattributed press cutting: Robinson Locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks, BRT/NYLPA. Kibler, Rank Ladies, 5; Snyder, The Voice of the City, xxi, 63. Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, 156–57; Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 75. Tony Pastor’s 14th Street theater, Next Week’s Bill, November 27, 1887, Box 136, TCH. Anon., “Americans: Eva Tanguay,” 26; Toll, On with the Show, 278–81; Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 139, 157, 136. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 110. Tucker, Some of These Days, 7–66. Ibid., 67–241; Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 314. Frick, New York’s First Theatrical Center, 56–57. Koster & Bial’s Music Hall program week of May 18, 1896, “Ephemera,” Tony Pastor Press Clippings, NYPLA; Toulet, Cinema Is 100 Years Old, 19–22; Reminiscences of “Buster” Keaton, November 1958, 5–6, Series 1, No. 322, OHROC. Davis, Scandals and Follies, 71; Nasaw, Going Out, 154–73, 186–92; Anon., “Tony Pastor Looks Back,” Sun, March 27, 1908; Anon., “Farewell to Tony Pastor’s,” The New York Times, May 13, 1928, Special Features, 128. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 132; Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 134–35.

7

Vaudeville II: Cultural Exchange, Departure, and Transmutation

1. Leventhal and Quinault, eds., Anglo-American Attitudes. The next two sections are based on a conference paper for Hamilton, et al. “Crosstown Traffic.” 2. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 761–66; Toll, On with the Show, 20–23; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 48–49; Documentary Theater Piece on the Astor Place Riot. Among the Astor Place rioters was ringleader Edward Judson who 20 years later as “Ned Buntline” promoted Buffalo Bill. 3. Bailey ed., Music Hall; Bratton, ed., Music Hall; Kift, The Victorian Music Hall; Bailey, Performance in the Victorian City, chapters 5 and 6. Further research is needed on the globalization of commercial entertainment in this period. 4. Koster & Bial’s Music Hall program week of May 18, 1896; American Music Hall program week of December 7, 1908: “Ephemera,” Tony Pastor Press Clippings, NYLPA; Chevalier, Before I Forget; Lauder, Roamin’ in the Gloamin’. 5. Tich and Findlater, Little Tich; McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie, 150; see “Ephemera,” Pastor Press Clippings, NYLPA. 6. Various, “Ephemera,” Pastor Press Clippings, NYLPA.

NOTES

211

7. Smith, “Variety on the Upgrade,” The Era, March 22, 1922, 11. Microfilm, University of Cambridge Library. 8. Evans, “What Is Wrong with the Variety Stage?” The Era, February 1, 1922, 11; “Miscellaneous,” The Era, March 15, 1922, 12. 9. Anon., “Music Hall Gossip,” The Era, October 31, 1891, 17; November 14, 1891, 16. 10. Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 82–137, 135. This source provides a detailed schedule of W. C. Fields’ overseas tours. 11. “Amusements,” The Belfast News-Letter, May 24, July 5, August 16, 1898; January 5, 12, 19, 1904; February 2, March 15, May 3, 1904; and May 15, 1923. Microfilm, University of Ulster Library. 12. Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 42; “London Syndicate Halls [rehearsal calls],” The Era, June 17, 1914, 23. 13. Marx, Harpo Speaks, 151. 14. Kanfer, Groucho, 67; “The Coliseum,” The Era, June 21, 1922, 13. 15. Kanfer, Groucho, 67; Marx, Harpo Speaks, 151. 16. Review of “Chuckles of 1922,” The Times, June 21, 1922, 14; Kanfer, Groucho, 66. 17. Kanfer, Groucho, 66; The Era, June 21, 1922, 14; Louvish, Monkey Business, 135–36. 18. Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 12, 18, 23–24. 19. Toll, On with the Show, 299–303; Davis, Scandals and Follies, 82–83; Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 29–40. 20. Toll, On with the Show, 295–96; Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl, 3, 35. 21. Davis, Scandals and Follies, 75–87; Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 144–69; Knapp, The American Musical; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 117. 22. Cochran, The Secrets of a Showman; Harding, Cochran; Conrad, Billy Rose; Gottlieb, The Nine Lives of Billy Rose. 23. Smith, The Vaudevillians, 83–87; Burns, All My Best Friends, 23. 24. “The Decline of ‘The Road,’” Billboard, December 26, 1925; Robinson, “A Glance Backwards,” 3–4; “Tony Pastor Looks Back,” Sun, March 27, 1908, Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/NYLPA. 25. Tucker, Some of These Days, 250; John Kenrick, “A History of the Musical: Vaudeville Pt. IV,” www.musicals101.com (last accessed on May 16, 2006). 26. Rich, San Francisco Noir, 41. 27. Weight, Patriots, 253; “End of the pier show feared as Blackpool punters say no to variety,” The Guardian, April 10, 2006, 9. The Sunshine Boys was first performed on Broadway in 1972, then as a movie with Walter Matthau and George Burns in 1982. 28. Golden, King Kong, 3. 29. Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams, 205. 30. Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? 277–78; Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood. 31. Anon., “Vaudeville Gave Its All to Films; Now What Next?” New York Herald Tribune, January 12, 1936, 6, clipping in Vaudeville Box 3, TCH.

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32. Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 208, 260–68, 421–61. All except the first movie listed here were made when Fields was over 60 years of age. 33. Kanfer, Groucho, 41; Marx, Harpo Speaks, 100–101. 34. Louvish, Monkey Business, 365–69, 426–33; O’Brien, “The Triumph of Marxism.” 35. Marschall, History of Television, 28; Smith, The Vaudevillians, 68–73; Milton Berle obituaries: The Guardian, March 29, 2002, 20, The Times, March 29, 2002, 22. 36. “Bob Hope and American Variety,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/ exhibits/bobhope/vaude.html (last accessed on 16 June, 2007); Ronald Bergan, “Bob Hope” obituary, The Guardian, July 29, 2003, 23; Faith, Bob Hope; Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 172. 37. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 144.

Conclusion 1. Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes; leaflet, Barnum’s Aquarial Gardens, Boston 1860, TCH; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 229. 2. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 176–218; Cook, ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 4. 3. Twitchell, Carnival Culture, 60–61. 4. Cook, “Mass Marketing and Cultural History,” 176. 5. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, xii; Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, 71. 6. Cook, The Arts of Deception, 140. 7. Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 7; Cook, “Mass Marketing and Cultural History,” 176. 8. Carlyon, Dan Rice, 370; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 15–16; Lewis, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow; Savage, Teenage, 50, 54; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 419. 9. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 20, 52; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 22; Stratton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 325–26. 10. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 242; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 206–7; Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 23. 11. Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 31; Kitses, Horizons West. 12. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 73–78; Naidis, “Gilded Age Leisure and Recreation,” 398; Schenk cited: Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 52. 13. Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System, 2–3; Schatz, The Genius of the System; French, “Mammon vs. Movies,” 21. 14. Nasaw, Going Out; Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, 66–80; Snyder, The Voice of the City, xv.

Appendix I: P. T. Barnum: Humbug and Reality 1. Toll, On with the Show, 26; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 17. 2. Cited: Werner, Barnum, 251.

NOTES

213

3. Wallace, The Fabulous Showman, 9; Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones, 19. 4. Alderson, ed., Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons, 32–35; Ware and Lockard, Jr., P. T. Barnum Presents, 1–13; Speaight, A History of the Circus, 140–41; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 83–84; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 27–28. 5. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 74; Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 1. 6. “Tom Thumb and the Queen,” Punch or the London Charivari, 144 (April 13, 1844): 157; “Barnumerous Rumour,” Punch, 683 (December 29, 1884): 263. 7. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 694; Melville, The Confidence-Man, xviii-xx; Cook, Satirical Apocalypse, 23–27; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women; Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age. 8. Huntington, Who Are We? 59–80, 108–39; Anon., “Gospel of Humbuggery,” 8. 9. Bradford Mss., draft review in “Editorials and Reviews, 1921–23,” HL; Werner, Barnum, vii. 10. Reynolds, Rich Relations, 434–35. 11. Vitale, There’s a Customer Born Every Minute; Fuller, Jubilee Jim; Conrad, Billy Rose; Branson, Losing My Virginity. 12. Greene, The Name of Action, 212; Strauss, Chan and Eng; Schechter, The Hum Bug; Gaffney, Metropolis. 13. Crawford, Parcel Arrived Safely, 286–301; Thorp, Jenny and Barnum; Scorsese, The Gangs of New York. 14. “Banquet to Mr. Barnum,” The [London] Times, November 9, 1889, 6. 15. Barnum cited: Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 142; Kasson, Amusing the Million, 4, 6. 16. Cook, ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 1; Twitchell, Carnival Culture, 6.

Appendix II: Harry Houdini’s Early Career 1. Silverman, Houdini!!!, 16. 2. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 57–59; Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, 34–35; Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant, 10–11; Houdini, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin. 3. Stashower, The Dime Museum Murders, 7–14; Norfolk, “Harry Houdini Remains a Slippery Figure,” 36; Brandon, The Life, 57–58. 4. Brandon, The Life, 57–60; Houdini, The Adventurous Life. 5. Brandon, The Life, 60–62; Silverman, Houdini!!!,15–16. 6. Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones, 88–90; Brandon, The Life, 63–65; Silverman, Houdini!!!, 18–19; Reminiscences of “Buster” Keaton, November 1958, 2–3, Series 1, No. 322, OHROC. On Houdini and spiritualism: Kalush and Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini. 7. Silverman, Houdini!!!, 44; Brandon, The Life, 66.

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8. Brandon, The Life, 68–69, 280–82; Silverman, Houdini!!!, 22–35. Houdini’s premature death came from a ruptured appendix, on October 31, 1926, after being overzealously pummeled in the stomach by a McGill University student taking up a backstage challenge. 9. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, 123, 154.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For ease of reference, this contains primary sources (programs, newspaper and magazine articles, novels, memoirs, and autobiographies) together with more recent academic and other secondary books and articles also cited in the notes. Adams, Bluford. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman & The Making of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Alderson, William T., ed. Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons: The Emergence of the American Museum. Washington DC: American Association of Museums, 1992. Allen, Ralph. The Best Burlesque Sketches. New York: Applause Books, 1995. Allen, Robert. “B. F. Keith and the Origins of American Vaudeville,” Theatre Survey 21:2 (1980): 105–15. ———. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992. ———, ed. To Be Continued: Soap Operas around the World. New York: Routledge, 1995. Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. New York: Ballantine Books, 1960. Anderson, Ann. Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2000. Andress, Charles. Route Book of Barnum & Bailey [Circus], 1905. New York: Andress, 1905. Anon. “Accessories at Barnum’s,” The [London] Graphic, January 22, 1898, 67. Anon. “Americans: Eva Tanguay,” American History 36:5 (2001): 26. Anon. Boston Minstrels Song Sheet. New York: C. G. Christman, 1843. Anon. “Broadway Barnum Museum of Freaks,” The [New York] Sun, January 25, 1920. Anon. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World program, 1902–03. Anon. “A Giant in the Vaudeville Field,” New York Dramatic News, July 21, 1906, 10. Anon. “Gospel of Humbuggery,” review of play “Mr. Barnum,” The New York Herald, September 15, 1918, 8.

216

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Anon. Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, Route Book, Season of 1923, New York, 1923. Anon. Life of Zip, The Original What Is It? New York: Popular Publishing Co., circa 1883. Anon. “Showman Barnum: Comprehensive Record of the Amusement King’s Life,” The Rockville [Mass.] Journal, April 16, 1891, 3–4. Anon. “Tom Thumb and the Queen,” Punch or the London Charivari, 144, April 13, 1844, 157. Anon. Tony Pastor’s New 14th Street Theatre Songster. Pittsburgh, PA: American Publishing Company, circa 1881. Arato, Andrew, and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum International, 1982. Ashby, Clifford, and Suzanne DePauw May. Trouping through Texas: Harley Sadler and His Tent Show. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982. Ashby, LeRoy. With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2006. Assael, Brenda. The Circus and Victorian Society. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Bailey, Peter, ed. Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986. ———. Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Baker, Russell. “The Entertainer,” The New York Review of Books 52:17, (November 3, 2005): 10–14. Barnum, P. T. Art of Money Getting or, Golden Rules for Making Money. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1999, first edition 1880. ———. Funny Stories Told by Phineas T. Barnum. New York: Routledge & Sons, 1890. ———. The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Intro. Terence Whalen. Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000 edition. ———. Struggles and Triumphs or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, ed. Carl Bode. New York: Penguin Books, 1982 edition. Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Facts. London: Robson Books, 2006. Blackstone, Sarah J. Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. ———. The Business of Being Buffalo Bill: Selected Letters of William F. Cody, 1879–1917. New York: Praeger, 1988. Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ———. “The Social Construction of Freaks.” Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1997, 23–37. Bordieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Brandon, Ruth. The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini. London: Pan Books, 2001. Branson, Richard. Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way. London: Virgin, 1998. Bratton, J. S., ed. Music Hall: Performance and Style. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986. Brigham, David R. Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Brown, H. C., ed. Valentine’s Manual of Old New York. New York: Valentine, 1926. Buckley, Peter G. “Paratheatricals and Popular Stage Entertainment.” Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 424–81. Buhle, Paul. From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. New York: Verso, 2004. Burns, George, with David Fisher. All My Best Friends. London: Muller, 1990. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Butsch, Richard. The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Carlyon, David. Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. Carpenter, Russell L. “P. T. Barnum’s Jumbo,” The Tuftonian (January 1941): 6–11. Cashman, Sean Dennis. America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Chase, Gilbert. America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: Being the Autobiography of a Chevalier D’Industrie. London: Unwin, 1901. Chindahl, George L. History of the Circus in America. Caldwell, OH: Caxton Printers, 1959. Clarke, John S. Circus Parade. London: Batsford, 1936. Cochran, Charles B. The Secrets of a Showman. London: Heinemann, 1925. Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cody, William F. The Life of Buffalo Bill. London: Senate, 1994 edition. Conrad, Earl. Billy Rose: Manhattan Primitive. New York: World Publishing, 1968. Cook, James W. Jr. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. ———, ed. The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else like It in the Universe. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. ———. “Mass Marketing and Cultural History: The Case of P. T. Barnum,” American Quarterly 51:1 (1999): 175–86.

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Cook, James W. Jr. “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P. T. Barnum’s ‘What Is It?’ Exhibition.” Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1997, 139–57. Cook, Jonathan A. Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s the Confidence Man. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. Corbett, Christopher. Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. Coup, W. C. Sawdust and Spangles: Stories & Secrets of the Circus. Washington, DC: Paul A. Ruddell, 1966 edition. Cox, J. Randolph. “Ned Buntline’s Buffalo Bill Stories,” Dime Novel Round-Up, 76:3 (2007): 76–87. Craigie, Sir William A., and James R. Hulbert. A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. Crawford, Michael. Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied with String. London: Century, 1999. Croft-Cooke, Rupert, and Peter Cotes. Circus: A World History. London: Elek, 1976. Cross, Gary S., and John K. Walton. The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Palaces in the 20th Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Davis, Lee. Scandals and Follies: The Rise and Fall of the Great Broadway Revue. New York: Limelight Editions, 2000. Decker, Jeffrey Louis. Made in America: Self-styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Dennett, Andrea Stulman. Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London: Verso Books, 1987. Desmond, Alice Curtis. Barnum Presents: General Tom Thumb. New York: Macmillan, 1954. Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. eds. John S. Whitley and Arnold Goldman. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972 edition. ———. Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. London: Oxford University Press, 1957 edition. Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology and African-American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Documentary Theater Piece on the Astor Place Riot, Riot at the Opera House! First Gotham History Festival, City University of New York, Graduate Center, October 7, 2001. Dormon, James. “Ethnic Cultures of the Mind: The Harrigan and Hart Mosaic,” American Studies 33:2 (1992): 21–41. Emerson, Ken. Doo-dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Erdman, Andrew L. Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2004.

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INDEX

A Night at the Opera (1935), 167 A Parlor Match (play), 160 Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Circus, 99 Adams, Rachel, 37 Admiral Dot, 42, 90. see also Kahn, Leopold Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 83, 84 African Nightingale (Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield), 70 Agra, Zalumna (“Circassian Girl”), 41. see also freak shows Albee, Edward Franklin, 134 Alhambra Theatre (London), 156, 158 Allen, Gracie, 164, 165, 168 Altman, Robert, Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976 film), 125 Amburgh, Isaac van, 29, 83 American Circus Corporation, 100, 101 American Gaiety Girls, 191 American Melodist (G.W. Dixon), 60, 61, 65 American Museum. see also Barnum, P.T. as dime museum prototype, 40. see also dime museums domestic dramas and plays in the, 24–27, 70, 130 exhibition rooms at the, 22, 40 freak shows and the, 40–46, 54, 173. see also freaks; freak shows

and minstrel shows, 65, 66. see also minstrelsy modified traveling version of the, 89 as pivotal in development of popular culture, 13 renovation of the, 20–21, 23 variety shows in the, 130 American Music Hall (New York), 153 American national identity, 117, 123–126 American Notes (Dickens), 22 American Vitagraph, 149 Amis, Kingsley, New Maps of Hell, 7 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 142 Animal Crackers (1930 film), 167 Anna Held Girls (act), 160 Annie Get Your Gun (Berlin) musical, 2 antiabolitionist riot (New York, 1834), 60 Arbuckle, Roscoe (“Fatty”), 148, 165, 168 Arlington, J.V., The Red Right Hand; or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer (play), 113 artful deceiver, concept of, 125 assimilation, narrative of, 141–142 Associated Rabbis of America, 143 Astaire, Fred and Adele, 168 Astley, Philip, 82 Astley’s Amphitheater (London), 82 Astor Place Riot (1849), 152, 175, 210n2 Avildson, John G., Save the Tiger (1973 film), 184

228

INDEX

Babbitt (Lewis), 185 Bailey, Frederick Harrison, 93 Bailey, George F., 93. see also circus Bailey, Hachaliah, 93 Bailey, James A., 93, 99–100, 103 Barnum & Bailey and the Ringling Brothers Circus, 86–87, 101 Barnum & Bailey Circus, 46–47, 93, 96–97, 106, 174 Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth (poster), 80 Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum and Menagerie, 29. see also Boston Museum Barnum! (1980’s musical), 185 Barnum, Coup, and Castello Circus, 86, 90 Barnum, P.T. (Phineas Taylor). see also circuses; freaks; freak shows on achievements, 181 acquisition of American Museum by, 20–22. see also dime museums blackface minstrelsy and, 60–61, 63 and Buffalo Bill Cody, 106–107, 118, 125 challenge to rival circus managers by, 91 early career of, 16–19 Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie, 89 Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, Hippodrome and Circus, 87, 90 Great Traveling World’s Fair, 91, 92 hoaxes and showmanship, 2, 14–15, 33, 34, 40, 187 incarceration of, 17 Jumbo, 94, 96 portrait of, 180 promotion of respectable variety theater, 130 publications of, 15–17, 33, 185, 198n5

as publicist, 98, 173, 174, 182 representations of, 183–185 as Republican Congressional candidate, 32–33 as riverboat showman, 19 role of in developing popular culture, 13, 171, 179 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Aiken), 26, 199n31 Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical Theatre, 19 Barnum’s Great Traveling Exposition, 90 Barnum’s Museum See American Museum Bates, Anne See Swan, Anna Shannon Bayes, Nora, 145, 160 Bean, Judge Roy, 145 Bearded Ladies, 41, 42, 90 Beaver Heart, 112 Beck, Martin, 192 Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (Mahar), 65–66 Belfast Empire Theatre, 156 Believe It or Not (Ripley), 54 Berkeley, Busby, 76 Berle, Milton, 167 Bernhardt, Sara, 145 Best, Dick, on freak shows, 51 Big Brother (British TV Channel 4), 54 big-top fire (1944), Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, 101 Bijou Theater (Boston), 134 Billy Van the Monologue Comedian (lithograph), 56 Black Elk, on Queen Victoria, 121–122 blackface minstrelsy, 57–59, 60–61, 63–68, 70–73. see also minstrelsy Blakeley, Thomas, 60 Bonheur, Rosa, 107 Boston Minstrels, 63. see also minstrelsy Boston Museum, 26, 45, 70

INDEX

Bowery Amphitheater (New York), 61 Bowery Amphitheatre (New York), 63 Bowery dime museums, 29 Brady, Mathew, 41 Branson, Sir Richard, 185 Brice, Fanny, 166 British Blondes (minstrels), 75 British music halls American vaudeville, contrasted with, 129, 158 cultural exchange with America in the, 151–154 Hippodrome Music Hall (London), 147, 155 as “palaces of variety”, 163 and the singing saloon, 130 Brooker and Clayton Georgia Minstrels, 71. see also blackface minstrelsy Brooklyn Albee Theater (New York), 162 Brown, Henry Collins, Valentine’s Manual of Old New York, 98 Brown, Joshua Purdy, 83 Brudders Tambo and Bones, 66, 67. see also blackface minstrelsy Buffalo Bill See Cody, William Frederick Buffalo Bill (Himself) Pageant of Military Preparedness and 101 Ranch Wild West (show), 123 Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody) on Horseback in Later Life (photograph), 104 Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (Altman), 125 Buffalo Bill in Bologna (Rydell and Kroes), 124 Buffalo Bill King of the Border Men (Buntline), 110 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Annual, 106 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. see also Cody, William Frederick American national identity and the, 117, 123–126

229

Bailey as backer and manager for the, 99 Drama of Civilization (show), 124 elements of the, 116 European Tours of, 118–123 Native Americans as performers in the, 116–117 popular Wild West mythology and the, 124 role of in developing popular culture, 174, 176 Buffo Singer (G.W. Dixon), 60, 61, 65 Buick-Berle Show (1953–55), 167 Bunker, Patricia, 43 Bunnell, George B., 29, 30, 133, 134 Buntline, Ned (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), 105, 110, 111, 113, 210n2 Burke, Billie, 160 burlesque, 143 Burns, George, 162, 164, 165 Byrne, George, 168 California Concert Company, 191 Callender, Charles, 71, 73. see also blackface minstrelsy Cantor, Eddie, 76, 156, 163, 166 Carney, George, 154 Carr, Eugene A., 110 Carson, James B., 144 carte de visite, 41 Carter, James (“Yankee”), 83 Carver, William Frank (“Doc”), 115. see also Cody, William Frederick Castello, Dan, 85, 92 Catlin, George, Life amongst the Indians, 114 Chang and Eng (Straus), 185 Chang and Eng, 41, 53. see also freak shows charivari, 68 Chestnut Street Theater (Philadelphia), 134 Chevalier, Albert, 145, 148, 153

230

INDEX

Chicago Anti-Stage Jew Ridicule Committee, 143 Chicago Times, 111 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act (England, 1955), 6 Chinese Water-Torture Cell act, 144 Christie, Nelly, (“the Plantation Comedy Star”), 156 Christy, Edwin Pearce, 64, 67, 70. see also minstrelsy Christy’s Minstrels, 65, 66. see also minstrelsy Chuckles of 1922 (London performance), 158 Cinderella (play), 155 Circassian Girl (Zalumna Agra), 41. see also freak shows circuits, vaudeville, 134, 135, 136–138, 151, 171 circus acrobatic female acts, 88 first traveling circus, 83 parades, 88, 89, 90, 94, 102, 115 and partnerships and combinations of the, 85 segregation practices and laws regarding the, 100–101 sideshows and the, 48–49 as symbol of national expansion, 176 transition to rail transport for the, 86–87 violence and the, 96 circus workers strike (1938), Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, 101 circuses Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers Circus, 99 Barnum, Coup, and Castello circus, 86, 90 Barnum & Bailey and the Ringling Brothers Circus, 86–87, 101 Barnum & Bailey Circus, 46–47, 93, 96–97, 106, 174

Barnum’s Great Traveling Exposition, 90 Cooper & Bailey Circus, 93 Flatfoots Circus, 85 Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie, 89 Great Eastern Circus and Menagerie, 87 Greatest Show on Earth, 80, 89, 92, 94, 97 Great London Circus, 85, 93, 94 Hagenbeck-Great Wallace Circus, 78, 100 International Circus, 93 Mammoth Circus, 90 Mount Pitt Circus, 83 New United Monster Shows, 92 Old Columbian Circus, 18 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, 101 Ringling Brother’s Show, 99, 100 Sells Brothers Circus, 88 Sells-Floto Circus, 123 Welsh Brothers’ Circus, 190, 192 Wright and Brown Menagerie and Circus, 83 Clark, William, 114 Clemens, Samuel See Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) Clofullia, Madame Fortune (“Swiss Bearded Lady”), 41 clowns, 81, 82, 84 Coal Black Rose (blackface song), 58 Cochran, Charles, B., 158, 161 Cody, William Frederick (“Buffalo Bill”). see also Buntline, Ned comparison with P.T. Barnum, 106–107, 118, 125 creation of popular Wild West mythology and, 107, 112–113, 176 development of mass entertainment and, 124–125 early life and the Pony Express, 108–110

INDEX

European Tours of, 107, 118–122 movies on, 125 Native Americans as performers for, 116–117 photograph of, 104 theatrical career of, 111–113 Cohen and Harris Minstrels, 75 Cole, William Washington (“Chilly Billy), 95 Coliseum Theatre (London), 157 Colonial Theater (Boston), 134 Columbian Exposition, World Fair (1893), 4, 47, 48, 159, 175, 189. see also Ziegfeld Follies Comet (British comic), 106 Commentary, 7 Companies Act (1862, Limited Liabilities Act), 152 Comstock, Anthony, 5 Concert Saloon Bill (1862), 131 Coney Island, 48, 52, 53, 189. see also freak shows Congress of Nations, 91, 102, 115 Congress of the Rough Riders of the World, 116 Congress of Wonders, 23, 37. see also American Museum Conway, Henry J., 26–27 Cook, Joe, 145 Cooper, James E., 95 Cooper & Bailey Circus, 93 Costenteus, George, 93 Coup, William Cameron, 86, 92. see also Barnum, Coup, and Castello circus Coward, Noël, 161 Crazy Dutchmen (vaudeville routine), 143 Crowd (1928 silent movie), 52 cultural consumption, hierarchy of, 6 cultural exchange, Britain-America, 152 cultural politics, minstrelsy as part of, 69 curio hall, 21. see also dime museums curiosities, cabinet of, 20, 40

231

curiosities, living, 21. see also freak shows curiosities, exotic (exhibits), 38. see also freak shows Curtis, William H., 100 Custer, George Armstrong, 107, 110, 112, 113 Darwin, Charles, 43 Davis-Glendhill trio, 153 Delmore and Wilson, 156 DeMille, Cecil, B. Greatest Show on Earth (1952), 81 Democratic Party, 70 Diamond, John, 60–61. see also American Museum Dickens, Charles, 22, 50 Dillingham, Charles, 138 Dilward, Thomas, 71 dime museums. see also freaks; freak shows Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum and Menagerie, 29 Boston Museum, 26, 45, 70 as cabinet of curiosities, 20, 40 development of the, 20–21 family entertainment and, 24–27 Gaiety Museum (Boston), 134 The Hub (New York), 29–30 Mammoth Museum (Boston), 30 Miracle Museum (Pittsburg), 30 Ninth and Arch Museum (New York), 30 overview of, 19–22 Palace Museum (New York), 30 replacement by sideshows, 48–49 Scudder American Museum, 20 dime novels, 5, 105 Discrimination and Popular Culture (Thompson), 7 Dixie’s Land (Emmett), 69 Dixon, George Washington, 60, 61, 65 domestic dramas, 24, 25. see also American Museum; moral reform dramas

232

INDEX

Dooley, Edward J., 191 Drama of Civilization (show), 124. see also Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show Drunkard; or Fallen Saved (Smith), 25 Duck Soup (1933 film), 167 Duff Gordon, Lady Lucile, 161 Dukenfield, William Claude See Fields, W.C. Dunn, H. Charles, 108 Eclectic Readers (McGuffey), 4 Edison, Thomas Alva, 148 Egyptian Caravan (Castello), 89 Ehrich Weiss See Houdini, Harry (Ehrich Weiss) El Dorado Elf (Leopold Kahn), 42 Emmett, Dan, 62, 69 Empire Theatre (Belfast), 156 Entertainment Tax (Britain), 154 Ethiopian delineators, 61, 62, 84. see also blackface minstrelsy Ethiopian Seranaders (blackface troupe), 63 ethnic humor, 140, 141. see also vaudeville European tours of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 118–123 Evening News (London), 97 Everett, Edward, 45 exotic curiosities (exhibits), 38. see also freak shows Fabulous Showman (Wallace), 181 family entertainment and dime museums, 24–27 Federal Theatre Project, 77 Feejee Mermaid, 28. see also freak shows; hoaxes female acrobats, 88 Fields, Lew, 142. see also vaudeville Fields, W.C. (William Claude Dukenfield) international tours of, 155 transition from stage to film, 165–166

Ziegfeld Follies, 160, 166 film industry See movie industry film studios, Hollywood, 177 films See individual films Fish, Nancy, 92 Fisk, James (“Barnum of Wall Street”), 185 Fiske, John, 4 Flatfoots Circus, 85 Folies Bergère (Music Hall), 155, 160 Ford, John, The Quiet Man, 142 Forepaugh, Adam, 87, 95 Forrest, Edwin, 152 Foster, Stephen Collins, 70 Fox Academy Theater (New York), 162 Fox, George Rabbi, 144 Frankfurt intellectuals, 6 freak shows the American Museum and, 40–46, 54, 173 Coney Island, 48 decline of, 52–53 exhibits as commercial entertainment, 37, 40–44 Living Skeleton exhibits, 42 presentation modes of, 38–40 reality television as modern, 54 as supportive of the racial status quo, 39, 44, 47 freaks gaffed, 38, 41, 47, 49, 53 natural, 29, 38, 41, 44, 90, 173 as performance identity, 38 self-made, 38, 42, 51, 93 types of, 38–39 Frederici, Louisa Maude, 122. see also Cody, William Frederick frontier anxiety, 117 gaffed freaks, 38, 41, 47, 49, 53. see also freaks; freak shows Gaffney, Elizabeth, Metropolis, 185

INDEX

Gaiety Museum (New York), 134. see also Keith, B.F. Gangs of New York (2002 film), 185 George Mitchell Minstrel Singers, 77 Georgia Minstrels, 71. see also blackface minstrelsy Gladstone, William, 107 Glengarry Glen Ross (Mamet), 184 Golden Gate Theater (San Francisco), 163 Golden Rose of Montreux Award (Britain), 77 Goldwyn, Samuel, 165 Goodman, Ed, 119 Gordon, Lady Lucille Duff, 161 Goschen, Colonel, 93 Gottlieb, George A., 136, 137 gramophone, popularity of, 165 Grand Buffalo Hunt (1843), 107. see also Barnum, P.T. Grand Ethnological Congress of Nations, 47, 97. see also Barnum & Bailey Circus Grand Opera House (Belfast), 156 Great American Humorist (Daniel McLaren), 84 Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Menagerie, 89 Great Eastern Circus and Menagerie, 87 Great London Circus, 85, 93, 94 Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, Hippodrome and Circus, 87 Great Traveling World’s Fair, 91, 92 Greatest Show on Earth (DeMille, 1952), 81 Greatest Show on Earth, 80 Greatest Show on Earth, 89, 92, 94, 97, 186 Greene, Graham, The Name of Action, 185 Greenfield, Elizabeth Taylor (African Nightingale), 70 Greenwich Theatre (New York), 82 Gumpertz, Samuel, 101

233

Hagenbeck-Great Wallace Circus, 78, 100 Hague, Sam, 71, 156 Haight, Andrew, 87 Hall of Curiosities, 40. see also American Museum Hall, Stuart, 7 Hallett, Charity, 17 Handley, Tommy, 157 hang paper (marketing posters), 88 Harpers Weekly, 4, 36 Harrigan, Ned, 141 Harris, Neil, 14, 41 Harry Houdini, Handcuff King and Escape Artist (show act), 189 Hart, Max, 156 Hart, Tony, 141 Haverly Colored Minstrels, 72. see also blackface minstrelsy; minstrelsy Haverly, J.H., 71, 75 Hawkins, Micah, 60 Hawley, Joseph Roswell, 33 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 46 Hegarty, Jim, 156 Held, Anna, 160. see also Zeigfeld, Florenz Jr. Herald of Freedom and Gospel Witness (Barnum), 17 Heth, Joice, 18, 21, 27, 28. see also freak shows; hoaxes Hickok, James Butler (“Wild Bill”), 111, 112, 126 Hicks, Charles, 72. see also blackface minstrelsy Hill, Gus, 146 Hippodrome Music Hall (London), 155 Hippodrome Theater (New York), 138 Hitchcock, Fordyce (“Parson”), 45 hoaxes Feejee Mermaid, 28, 45 Joice Heth, 18, 21, 27, 28 “Light of Asia” (elephant), 95 Hollywood movie studios, 177

234

INDEX

Holmes, Tom, 155 Hope, Bob, select films of, 168 Hopkins Theatre (Chicago), 192 Horse Feathers (1932 film), 167 Houdini, Harry (Ehrich Weiss) Chinese Water-Torture Cell act, 144 early career of, 47, 53, 189–190, 192 photograph of, 188 prison breaking stunts and, 192 as Wild Man, 190 Howes, Seth B., 93 Hurd, Samuel H., 91 Hutchinson, James L., 93. see also circus Hylton, Millie, 154 Illustrated London News, 106 immigration and entertainment, 4, 70, 118, 130, 132, 140–144, 174 Imperial Hippodrome (Belfast), 156 India Rubber Men, 42. see also self-made freaks Indians (1969 play), 126 Ingrahm Prentiss, Knight of the Plains; or, Buffalo Bill’s Best Trail, 112 International Circus, 93 Irving, Henry, 107 Japanese Tommy (Thomas Dilward), 71 Jardin de Paris (New York Theater), 160 Jersey Lilly (Lillie Langtree), 145 Jetneys, 156 John Paul II, Pope, 107 Johnson, Lew, 72. see also blackface minstrelsy Johnson, William Henry (“Zip”), 44, 52 Jo-Jo (“The Dog-Faced Boy”), 46–47 Jolson, Al, 165 Jolson Sings Again (1949), 77 Jonah Man (Bert Williams), 73 Juba (William Henry Lane), 71 Judson, Edward Zane Carroll, 110, 111

Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (1967 film), 185 Jumbo, 94, 96 Jump Jim Crow (song and dance routine), 59. see also blackface minstrelsy Kahn, Leopold (“El Dorado Elf” and “Admiral Dot”), 42, 52, 90 Karno, Fred, 156 Kasson, John F., 192 Kasson, Joy, 124 Kean, Edmund, 152 Keaton, Joseph Francis (“Buster”), 148, 149 Keith, B.F., 134. see also Gaiety Museum Keith-Albee houses as pattern for vaudeville shows, 136. see also vaudeville Kern, Jerome, 160 Kernell, Harry, 141 Kersands, Billy, 73 Kessler, Sammy, 156 Keystone Bill (Colonel Williams), 138 Kid from Spain (1963 film), 163 Kimball, Moses, 26, 45, 66, 130 King Kong (2005), 164 Kiralfy, Imre, 91, 92, 98 Klaw, Marc, 160 Knight of the Plains; or, Buffalo Bill’s Best Trail (Ingraham), 112 Know-Nothings (political party), 110 Kohl and Middleton’s Museum (Chicago), 190 Kohn, Morris, 148 Kopit, Arthur Lee, Indians (1969 play), 126 Koster & Bials Music Hall (New York), 129, 146, 147 Lakota as Wild West cast, 117 Lane, William Henry (“Juba”), 71 Langtry, Lillie, 145 Lauder, Harry, 145, 153

INDEX

Leak, Ann, 90 Leavitt, M.B., 74 legislation Concert Saloon Bill (1862, New York), 131 Limited Liability Act (1862, Britain), 152 Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt, 185 Lhamon, W.T., 64. see also minstrelsy Life amongst the Indians (Catlin), 114 Life of P.T. Barnum,Written by Himself (Barnum), 15, 183 Light of Asia (elephant), 95. see also hoaxes Lights and Shadows of New York Life (McCabe), 131 Lillie, Gordon (“Pawnee Bill”), 122. see also Cody, William Frederick Limited Liability Act (1862 Companies Act), 152 Lind, Jenny, 16, 28, 31, 130 Little Tich (Harry Relph), 145, 147, 151, 153 Living Curiosities at Barnum’s Museum (illustration), 36, 42 Living Skeleton (exhibit), 42. see also American Museum Lloyd, Marie, 145 Loew “Wonder theaters”, 162 Logan, Olive, 2 London Coliseum Theatre, 157 Lopova, Lydia, 157 Lorraine, Lillian, 160 Lotna, Cecilia, 157 Love Happy (1950 film), 167 Lucasue, Rudolphe, 41 Macdonald, Dwight, 6 Mackaye, Steel, 124 Macready, William Charles, 152 Majors, Alexander, Seventy Years on the Frontier, 106 male impersonators, 154 Mamet, David, Glengarry Glen Ross (1983 play), 184

235

Mammoth Circus, 90 Mammoth Museum (Keith and Batchelder), 30 Manifest Destiny (Fiske), 4 Manifest Destiny, 118, 123 Marco Company, 191 Marhar, William J., Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 65–66 Marx Brothers on the Alhambra Theater, 158 background of the, 137, 165, 166 keynote films of the, 167 in London, 157–158 on their early career, 137, 166 vaudeville as training for the movies, 151, 165, 168 mass amusements, perception of, 5–6 mass cultural forms, 175 mass culture, definition of, 3 mass media, and vaudeville, 164–168 Mass Observation survey (1946), 184 Mastodon Minstrels, 71, 75. see also minstrelsy Mathews, Charles, 58 McCabe, James, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1872), 131 McClaren, Daniel (“Dan Rice”), 84 McGinniss, James A., 93 McGuffey, William Holmes, Eclectic Readers, 4 Mechanics Hall (New York), 66 Merritt, Wesley (General), 112 Metropolis (Gaffney), 185 midgets, 44. see also freaks; freak shows Midway Plaisance See Columbian Exposition, World Fair (1893) Mighty Barnum (1934 film), 185 Millie-Christine, 39. see also freak shows Milliken, J.F. (“Colonel”), 137 minstrel music, as first popular American music export, 57 Minstrel Singers (Mitchell), 77

236

INDEX

minstrelsy beginning of, 63–64, 67, 78 blackface as parody, 59. see also blackface minstrelsy black minstrel troupes, 70–74 charivari and, 68 as a commercial enterprise, 78 cultural and racial politics of, 69–70 decline of, 76–78 as derivative performance practice, 68 elements adopted into variety shows from, 74 Ethiopian delinators, 61, 62, 84 expansion of, 64–65 female minstrel troupes, 75 as first American musical culture export, 9 as popular culture samplers, 66 racial and gender stereotyping and, 67 racial and gender stereotyping and, 69 typical audience for and performers of, 59–60 Miracle Museum (Pittsburg), 30 Monkey Business (1931 film), 167 moral reform dramas, 24, 25, 27, 70 Morris, William, 153 Mount Pitt Circus, 83 movie industry. see also individual movies advent of the, 148 blackface performers in the, 75 cross-over from stage to screen, 142, 151, 155, 166, 167–168, 192 Hollywood studio system, 177 transition from stage to screen, 147, 162, 163 vaudeville and the, 162 movies, silent, 164, 165 Mr. Barnum (1918 Broadway play), 183, 185 Mr. Barnum (musical), 185 Mugiven, Jerry, 100 Murdock, John, 58

museums, dime See dime museums music halls American Music Hall (New York), 153 Folies Bergère (Paris), 155, 160 Hippodrome Music Hall (London), 155 Koster & Bials Music Hall (New York), 129, 146, 147 Radio City Music Hall (New York), 163 Weber and Fields Music Hall (New York), 143 music halls, British See British music halls mythology of the Wild West, 124 narrative of assimilation, 142 Nast, Tom, 84 Nathans, John J., 93 national folklore, minstrelsy as part of, 68 Native Americans as Wild West performers, 116–117 natural freaks, 29, 38, 41, 44, 90, 173. see also freaks; freak shows New Amsterdam Theater (New York), 161 New Maps of Hell (Amis), 7 New Oxford Theatre (London), 158 New United Monster Shows, 92 New York Aquarium, 92 New York dime museum, 134 New York Dramatic Mirror, 143 New York Herald, 183 New York Museum, 20 New York pleasure ground (Coney Island), 52 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 5 New York World-Telegram, 52 New York, antiabolitionist riot (1834), 60 nickelodeons, 148

INDEX

Ninth and Arch Museum (Brandenburgh), 30 non-Western peoples as exhibits, 38, 39, 47–48, 53. see also freaks; freak shows North American Indian Collection (Clark), 114 Northern Whig Party, 70 Nova Scotia Giantess (Anna Shannon Swan), 29 novelty act artists See freaks; freak shows O’Neil, Kitty, 141 Oakley, Annie, 107, 117, 118 Old Columbian Circus, 18 Olmsted, Francis W., 21. see also American Museum Olympia Stadium (London), 51, 97, 98, 155 Omohundro, John B. (“Texas Jack”), 111 operational aesthetic, 41 Origin of Species (Darwin), 43 Orpheum vaudeville circuit, 135. see also vaudeville Out of the Depths or Story of a Woman’s Love and Life (Conway), 27 Oxford Music Hall (London), 156 P.T. Barnum and Tom Thumb (1850 daguerreotype), 170 Palace Museum (Huber), 30 Palace of Wonders (Coney Island), 52 Palace Theatre (New York), 128, 162 Fred and Adele Astaire at the, 168 Harry Houdini and the, 136, 189 Milton Berle and the, 167 Sophie Tucker and the, 146 transition away from vaudeville, 162, 163 Vesta Tilley and the, 154 Palace Theatre of Varieties (Belfast), 156 Palace Theatre of Varieties (London), 155

237

parades, circus, 88, 89, 90, 94, 102, 115 Parks, Larry, 77 Parson (Fordyce Hitchcock), 45 Pastor, Antonio (“Tony”) clean up of variety by, 131 as comic vocalist, 142 death of, 149 decline of vaudeville and, 147–148 and drink-free variety review shows, 133 early career of, 66 “father of vaudeville”, 154 Grand Opera House and, 132, 141 on greater competition for vaudeville, 162 introduction of burlesques by, 133 pro-Union songbooks of, 132 and the Tammany Hall theatre, 133 Patriots of [Fort] Sumter, 27 Pawnee Bill (Lillie, Gordon), 122. see also Cody, William Frederick Peal Museum Company, 20, 21 Peale, Charles Wilson, 20 Peale, Rubens, 20 peep show machines, 148 Pender, Lily, A Vaudeville Show in Ten Minutes, 156 Plantation Comedy Star (Nelly Christie), 156 Pond, J.B. Major, 33 Pony Express, 108–109 Powell, Sandy, on the Marx Brothers, 158 Prince’s Theatre (Manchester), 155 Professor Harry Houdini’s School of Magic, 191 Quiet Man (1952 film), 142 Race Street (1948 film), 163 racial stereotypes in vaudeville, 138–142 Radio City Music Hall (New York), 163

238

INDEX

Rahner, Wilhelmina Beatrice (“Bessie”), 190 reality television as modern freak show, 54 Red Legs (anti-slavery militia), 109–110 Red Right Hand; or Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer (Arlington), 113 Reiche, Charles, 92 Relph, Harry (“Little Tich”), 145, 147, 151, 153 revue See Ziegfeld Follies Rhodes, Harrison, Mr Barnum (1918 play), 183 Rice, Dan (McClaren, Daniel), 84 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”), 59 Richfield, Mary, 142 Richter, Ella (“Madame Zazell”), 93 Ricketts, John Bill, 82 Riesman, David, 6 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, 101 Ringling Brother’s Show, 99, 100 Ringling, Al, 100 Ringling, John, 101 Ripley’s Believe It or Not, 54 Robey, George, 147 Robinson, Murray, 52 Rogers, Will, 160, 166 Rose, Billy, 161 Royal Opera House (Belfast), 156 Rules for Success in Business (Barnum), 15 Rüngeling, August, 99 Russel, Mike, 116 Ryan, Thomas J., 142. see also vaudeville Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 124 Sala, Augustus, 186 Sally of the Sawdust (1925 film), 166 Salsbury, Nathan (“Nate”), 115, 122, 124, 176. see also Cody, William Frederick

Sandow, Eugen (“The Great”) See Ziegfeld Follies Sanger, George (“Lord”), 87 Santa Claus Theater (New York), 74 Save the Tiger (Avildson film), 184 Schecter, Harold, The Hum Bug (2001), 185 Schenk, Joseph M., 135, 177 Schlesinger, John, Yanks, 184 Scouts of the Prairie; or, Red Deviltry As It Is (Buntline), 111 Scudder American Museum, 20 Scudder, John Jr., 20 segregation practices and laws, 100–101 self-made freaks, 38, 42, 51, 93. see also freaks; freak shows Sells Brothers Circus, 88 Sells-Floto Circus, 123. see also Cody, William Frederick Seventy Years on the Frontier (Majors), 106 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 107, 110 Shields, Ella, 154 Show Boat (1927 musical), 161 Siamese Twins (Daisy and Violet Hilton), 53 Sideshow (1997 musical), 53 sideshows, 48 silent movies, 164, 165 singing saloon, 131 Sioux as Wild West cast, 116, 117, 122 Sioux War, 112 Six Mascots See Marx Brothers Sixteen Years in Hell with Buffalo Bill (Salsbury), 122 Sleighing in New York (Nagel and Lewis lithograph), 12 Smith, Clay, 154 Smith, Lillian (“Young California”), 118 Smith, William H., The Drunkard; or Fallen Saved, 25

INDEX

Society for the Suppression of Vice (New York), 5 Spalding, Gilbert R. (“Doc”), 90, 148 Speaight, George, 84 Sprague, Isaac, 42 Stanford, Leland, 85 State Theater (New York), 163 Steeplechase Park (New York), 52 Stephenson, John, 88 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 85, 86 Stratton, Charles Sherwood (Tom Thumb), 28, 39, 44–46, 114, 170, 182 Street & Smith’s New York Weekly, 110 Strobridge Lithographing Company, 88 Struggles and Triumphs or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P.T. Barnum (Barnum), 16 Summit Springs, Battle of, 110 Sun (weekly comic), 106 Sunshine Boys, 163 Swan, Anna Shannon (“Nova Scotia Giantess”), 29 Swedish Nightingale ( Jenny Lind), 16, 28, 31, 130 Swiss Bearded Lady, 41. see also Bearded Ladies; freak shows Tableaux Vivants of Red Indians (show), 114 Tammen, Henry, 123 Tanguay, Eva (“The Cyclonic One”), 145, 146 television comedians, 168 temperance melodrama, 25–26. see also American Museum Terry, Ellen, 107 Texas Jack ( John B. Omhundro), 111 Texas Star Theater (1948–53), 167 The Barnum Budget, or Tent Topics (Barnum and Bailey Circus), 95–96 The Black and White Minstrel Show (BBC Television), 77. see also minstrelsy

239

The Cocoanuts (1929 film), 167 The Cyclonic One (Eva Tanguay), 145, 146 The Dog-Faced Boy ( Jo-Jo), 46–47 The Era, 155 The Gay White Way (review), 160 The Gilded Age (Twain and Warner), 183 The Green Mountain Boy (play), 58 The Hub (New York Dime Museum), 29–30 The Hum Bug (2001 film), 185 The Irishman in London (play), 58 The Jolson Story (1946), 77 The Kentuckian (play), 58 The Name of Action (Greene), 185 The One-Hundred Pound Note (play), 58 The Palestine Giant (Colonel Goschen), 93 The Popular Arts (Hall), 7 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 50 The Red Heads (play), 144 The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Turner), 117 The Times (London), 158, 159 The Yankee Pedlar (play), 58 Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), 139. see also vaudeville theaters (United States) Bijou Theater (Boston), 134 Bowery Amphitheatre (New York), 61, 63 Brooklyn Albee Theater (New York), 162 Chatham (New York), 62 Chestnut Street Theater (Philadelphia), 134 Colonial Theater (Boston), 134 Fox Academy Theater (New York), 162 Golden Gate Theater (San Francisco), 163 Grand Opera House (New York), 132, 141

240

INDEX

Hippodrome Theater (New York), 138 Hopkins Theatre (Chicago), 192 Mechanics Hall (New York), 66 Palace Theatre (New York), 128, 136, 146, 154, 162–163, 167–168, 189 State Theater (New York), 163 theatres (United Kingdom) Alhambra Theatre (London), 156, 158 Astley’s Ampitheatre (London), 82 Coliseum Theatre (London), 157 Empire Theatre (Belfast), 82, 156 Grand Opera House (Belfast), 156 Imperial Hippodrome (Belfast), 156 London Coliseum Theatre, 157 New Oxford Theatre (London), 128, 158 Palace Theatre of Varieties (London), 148 Palace Theatre of Varieties (Belfast), 156 Prince’s Theatre (Manchester), 155 Theebaw, King (Thibaw), 95 There’s a Customer Born Every Minute: P.T. Barnum’s Secrets to Business Success (Vitale), 185 Thompson, Denys, 7 Thompson, Lydia, 75 Three Nightingales See Marx Brothers Tilley, Vesta, 145, 154 Tilyou, George, 52 Tinney, Frank, 145 TOBA (Theater Owners Booking Association), 139. see also vaudeville Todd, Mike, 185 Toll, Robert C., 72, 102 Tom Thumb See Stratton, Charles Sherwood tramp juggler See Fields, W.C. Trans-Mississippi Exposition (Omaha, 1893), 106

transportation and the circus, 86–87 Triumph of Love (Murdock), 58 Troupe of Famous Comedians (Fred Karno), 156 Tucker, Sophie (Sonia Kalish), 76, 146, 147 Turner, Aaron, 18. see also Barnum, P.T. Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, 117 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 83, 84, 107, 118, 183 Twitchell, James B., 171, 172 Tyrolese Minstrel Family, 62. see also minstrelsy UBO (United Booking Office of America), 135, 177 Uncle Sam (1869 cartoon), 84 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (Conway), 26, 36 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (Aiken), 70, 199n31 Union Square Theater (New York), 147 United Booking Office of America (UBO), 135, 177 Urban, Joseph, 161 Valentine’s Manual of Old New York (Brown), 98 variety shows, 126, 130, 131. see also dime museums; minstrelsy; vaudeville Variety, 142, 153, 157 vaudeville. see also Pastor, Antonio beginning of, 126 circuits, 134, 135, 136–138, 151, 159, 171 contrasted with British music hall style, 158, 168 contrasted with variety shows, 131 cultural exchange with Britain in, 151, 154–156

INDEX

decline of, 147–149, 162–164 ethnic diversity and stereotypes in, 138–144 as family show entertainment, 129, 134 segregation in, 139 star female performers in, 144–146 as training for the movie industry, 164–168 vaux-de-Vire, 129 Victoria, Queen, 45, 107, 118, 120–121, 182 violence and the and the circus, 96 Virginia Minstrels, 62, 65. see also minstrelsy Vitale, Joe, There’s a Customer Born Every Minute: P.T. Barnum’s Secrets to Business Success (1998), 184 Vivalla, Antonio, 19 “What Is It?” (exhibit), 43, 44, 52, 90, 172 Wagner, Geoffrey, 6 Wallace, Irving, on P.T. Barnum, 181 War Bonnett Creek, 112–113 Warner, Charles Dudley, with Mark Twain, The Gilded Age, 183 Warren, Lavinia, 46. see also Stratton, Charles Sherwood Warshow, Robert, 7 Weber and Fields Music Hall (New York), 143 Weber and Fields, 154 Weber, Joe, 142. see also vaudeville Weiss, Ehrich (“Harry Houdini”) See Houdini, Harry Welch, Joe, 145 Wellman, William, Buffalo Bill (1944 film), 105 Welsh Brothers’ Circus, 190, 192 westward expansion See Manifest Destiny White City exhibition center, Columbian Exposition, 49

241

White Rats Vaudeville Union of America, 135 Whitlock, Billy, 62 Wild Australian Children (exhibit), 38. see also American Museum; freaks; freak shows Wild Bill (James Butler Hickok), 111, 112, 126 Wild Man (Houdini), 190. see also American Museum; freak shows Wild Men of Borneo (exhibit), 38. see also American Museum; freaks; freak shows Wild West as myth, 176 Wild West Show See Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show Will and Ways: To Make and Break (1859 play), 27 Williams, Bert, 73 Williams, Colonel (“Keystone Bill”), 138 Williams, R.W., 74 Wintergarten Theatre (Berlin), 155 Wise, Thomas A., Mr Barnum (1918 play), 183 Wood, Anne, 42. see also American Museum Wood, Henry, 70 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 50 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 76 World’s Fair (Chicago, 1893) See Columbian Exposition, World Fair (1893) World’s Fair, Saint Louis (1904), 38 Wright and Brown Menagerie and Circus, 83 Yanks (1979 Schlesinger film), 184 Yellow Hair (Sioux sub-chief), 112–113 You Bet Your Life (1947–61), 167 Young California (Lillian Smith), 118 Young, Fritz, 154, 155

242

INDEX

Zazell, Madame (Ella Richter), 93 Zeigfeld, Florenz Jr. (“Flo”), 159 Ziegfeld Follies, 73, 146, 159–161, 166 Zip (William Henry Johnson), 72

Zip Coon (blackface song), 58, 201n17. see also Dixon, George Washington; minstrelsy Zukor, Adolph, 148