Transcript

8.7.26 · History Hour

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Speaker 1: Hello and welcome. This is a Radio wise history show
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Speaker 1: and I'm your host and reader today, Joseph Bolt, so
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Speaker 1: glad to be with you. Need to remind you that
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Speaker 1: intended for people who are a blinder of other disabilities
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Speaker 1: that make it difficult to read printed material. I'll cite
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Speaker 1: the sources as we go along today, So let's get started.
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Speaker 1: When Barnum and Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth rolled into
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Speaker 1: American Town in the eighteen eighties, daily life abruptly stopped.
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Speaker 1: Months before the show arrived, an advanced teams saturated the
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Speaker 1: surrounding region with brilliantly colored lithographs of the extraordinary elephants,
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Speaker 1: bearded ladies, clowns, tigers, acrobats, and trick riders. On circus day,
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Speaker 1: huge crowds gathered to observe the pre downed arrival of
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Speaker 1: herds and droves of camels. Zebras and other exotic animals,
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Speaker 1: the spoils of European colonialism. Families witnessed the raising of
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Speaker 1: a tinted city across nine acres and a morning parade
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Speaker 1: that made its way down Main Street, advertising the circus
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Speaker 1: as a wondrous array of captivating performers and beasts from
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Speaker 1: around the world for isolated American audiences. The sprawling circus
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Speaker 1: collapsed the entire globe into a pungent, thrilling, educational sensorium
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Speaker 1: of sound, smell, and color right outside their doorsteps. What
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Speaker 1: townspeople couldn't have recognized, however, was that their beloved big
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Speaker 1: Top was also fast becoming a projection of American culture
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Speaker 1: and power. The American three ring circus came of age
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Speaker 1: at precisely the same historical moment as the US itself.
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Speaker 1: Three ring circuses, like Barnum and Bailey's, were a product
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Speaker 1: of the same Gilded Age historical forces that transformed a
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Speaker 1: fledgling new Republic into a modern industrial society and rising
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Speaker 1: world power. The extraordinary success of the giant three ring
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Speaker 1: circus gave rise to other forms of exportable American giantism,
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Speaker 1: such as amusement parks, department stores, and shopping malls. The
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Speaker 1: first circuses in America were European and small. Although circus
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Speaker 1: arts are ancient and transnational in origin, the modern circus
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Speaker 1: was born in England during the seventeen seventies when Philip Astley,
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Speaker 1: a cavalryman and veteran of the Seven Years' War, brought
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Speaker 1: circus elements, which were acrobatics, riding, and clowning, together in
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Speaker 1: a ring at his riding school near Westminster Bridge in London.
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Speaker 1: One of Astley's students trained a young Scotsman named John
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Speaker 1: Bill Ricketts, who brought the circus to America. In April
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Speaker 1: of seventeen ninety three, some eight hundred spectators crowded inside
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Speaker 1: a walled, open air wooden ring in Philadelphia to watch
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Speaker 1: the nation's first circus performance. Ricketts, a trick writer, and
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Speaker 1: his multi cultural troop of a clown, acrobat, rope walker
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Speaker 1: and a boy equestrian dazzled President George Washington and other
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Speaker 1: audience members with athletic feats and verbal jousting. Individual performers
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Speaker 1: had toured North America for decades, but this event marked
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Speaker 1: the first coordinative performance in a ring encircled by an audience.
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Speaker 1: Circuses in Europe appeared to establish urban theatre buildings, but
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Speaker 1: Rickets had been forced to build his own wooden arenas
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Speaker 1: because American cities along the Eastern Seaboard had no entertainment infrastructure.
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Speaker 1: Roads were so rough that Rickett's troops often traveled by boat.
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Speaker 1: They performed for weeks at a single city to recoup
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Speaker 1: the cost of construction. Fire was a constant threat due
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Speaker 1: to careless smokers and wooden footstoves. Soon facing fierce competition
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Speaker 1: from other European circuses. Hoping to supplant his success in America,
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Speaker 1: Ricketts sailed for the Caribbean in eighteen hundred. While returning
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Speaker 1: to England at the end of the season, he was
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Speaker 1: lost at sea. After the War of eighteen twelve, American
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Speaker 1: born impressionists began to dominate the business. In eighteen twenty five,
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Speaker 1: Joshua Purdy Brown, a showman born in Summers, New York,
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Speaker 1: put a distinctly American stamp on the circus. In the
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Speaker 1: midst of the Evangelical Second Great Awakening from seventeen ninety
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Speaker 1: to eighteen forty, an era of religious revivalism and social reform.
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Speaker 1: City leaders in Wilmington, Delaware banned public museums from the city.
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Speaker 1: Brown stumbled upon the prohibition during his tour and had
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Speaker 1: to think fast to outwit local authorities, so he erected
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Speaker 1: a canvas pavilion circus just outside the city limits. Brown's
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Speaker 1: adoption of the canvas tent revolutionized the American circus, cementing
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Speaker 1: its identity as an itinerant form of entertainment. Capital expenses
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Speaker 1: for tinting, equipment and labor forced constant movement, which gave
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Speaker 1: rise to the uniquely American one day stand on the
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Speaker 1: frontier edges of society. Entertainment. Stard residents flocked to the
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Speaker 1: tinted circus, which plodded by horse, wagon and boat, pushing
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Speaker 1: westward and southward as the nation's borders expanded. The railroad
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Speaker 1: was the single most catalyst, or rather important catalysts for
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Speaker 1: making the circus truly American. Just weeks after the completion
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Speaker 1: of the Transcontinental Railroad in May of eighteen sixty nine,
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Speaker 1: Wisconsin showman Dan Costello took his circus, including two elephants
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Speaker 1: and two camels, from Omaha to California on the new railroad,
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Speaker 1: traveling seams on newly standardized track engage. His season was
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Speaker 1: immensely profitable. P. T. Barnum, already a veteran amusement proprietor,
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Speaker 1: recognized the opportunity when he saw it. He had set
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Speaker 1: a bar for giantism when he entered the circus business
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Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy one, staging a one hundred wagon grand
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Speaker 1: Traveling Museum Nagerie caravan and circus. The very next year,
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Speaker 1: Barnum's sprawling circus took to the rails. His partner, William
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Speaker 1: Cameron Coop, designed a new flatcar and wagon system which
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Speaker 1: allowed laborers to roll fully loaded wagons on and off
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Speaker 1: the train. Barnum and Coop were outrageously successful, and their
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Speaker 1: innovations pushed the American circus firmly into the combative squa
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Speaker 1: grum of Gilded Age capitalism. Before long, size and novelty
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Speaker 1: determined the show's saleability. Rival showmen quickly copied Barnum's methods.
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Speaker 1: Competition was fierce, advanced teams posting lithographs for competing shows
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Speaker 1: occasionally erupted in brawls when their paths crossed. In eighteen
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Speaker 1: seventy nine, James A. Bailey, whose circus was fresh off
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Speaker 1: a two year tour of Australia, New Zealand and South
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Speaker 1: America scooped Barnum when one of his elephants became the
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Speaker 1: first to give birth in captivity at his show's winter
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Speaker 1: quarters in Philadelphia. Barnum was reguggingly being grudgingly excuse me impressed,
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Speaker 1: and the rivals merged their operations at the end of
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Speaker 1: eighteen eighty. Like other big businesses during the Gilded Age,
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Speaker 1: the largest railroad shows were always prowling to purchase other circuses.
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Speaker 1: Railroad showmen embraced popular Horatio alger ragged to riches mythologies
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Speaker 1: of American upward mobility. They used their own spectacular ascent
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Speaker 1: to advertise the moral character of their shows. Bailey had
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Speaker 1: been orphaned at eight and had run away with a
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Speaker 1: circus in eighteen sixty at the age of thirteen to
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Speaker 1: escape his abusive older sister. The five Ringling Brothers, whose
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Speaker 1: circus skyrocketed from a puny weather or rather winter concert
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Speaker 1: hall in the early eighteen hundreds to the world's largest
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Speaker 1: railroad circus in nineteen o seven, were born poor to
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Speaker 1: an itinerant harnessmaker and spent their childhood eking out a
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Speaker 1: living throughout the Upper Midwest. These self made American impressive
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Speaker 1: impressionists built an American cultural institution that became the nation's
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Speaker 1: most popular family amusement. Barnaman Bailey's Big Top grew to
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Speaker 1: accommodate three rings, two stages, an outer hippodrome track for
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Speaker 1: chariot races, and an audience of ten thousand. Afternoon and
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Speaker 1: evening performances showcased new technologies such as electricity, safety, bicycles, automobiles,
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Speaker 1: and film. They included re enactments of current events such
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Speaker 1: as the building of the Panama Canal. By the end
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Speaker 1: of the century, circuses had entertained and educated millions of
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Speaker 1: consumers about the wider world and employed over a thousand people.
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Speaker 1: Their moment had come. In late eighteen ninety seven, Bailey
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Speaker 1: took his giant Americanized circus to Europe for a five
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Speaker 1: year tour, just as the US was coming into its
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Speaker 1: own as a mature industrial powerhouse and mass cultural exporter.
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Speaker 1: Bailey transported the entire three ring behemoth to England by ship.
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Speaker 1: The parade alone dazzled European audiences so thoroughly that many
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Speaker 1: went home afterwards mistakenly think thinking that they had seen
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Speaker 1: the entire show. In Germany, the Kaiser's army followed the
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Speaker 1: circus to learn its efficient methods for moving thousands of people, animals,
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Speaker 1: and supplies. Bailey included patriotic spectacles re enacting key battle
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Speaker 1: scenes from the Spaanish American War in an advertisement of
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Speaker 1: America's rising global status. Bailey's European tour was a spectacular success,
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Speaker 1: but his personal triumph was fleeting. He returned to the
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Speaker 1: United States in nineteen o two, only to discover that
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Speaker 1: the upstart Ringling Brothers now controlled the American circus market.
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Speaker 1: When Bailey died unexpectedly in nineteen o six in the
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Speaker 1: Panic of nineteen oh seven sent financial markets crashing. Shortly thereafter,
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Speaker 1: the Ringlings were able to buy his entire circus for
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Speaker 1: less than five hundred thousand dollars. They ran two circuses
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Speaker 1: separately until federal restrictions during World War II rather World
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Speaker 1: War One, limited the number of railroad engine they could use.
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Speaker 1: Thinking the war would continue for many years, the Ringlings
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Speaker 1: decided to consolidate the circuses temporarily for the nineteen nineteen
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Speaker 1: season to meet federal wartime regulations. The combined show made
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Speaker 1: so much money that the Ringling Brothers and Barnuman Bailey
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Speaker 1: Circus became permanent known as the greatest show on Earth
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Speaker 1: until earlier this year. That is, in twenty seventeen, when
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Speaker 1: this article was written, when after one hundred and forty
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Speaker 1: six years, it announced it would close. That story came
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Speaker 1: from the website History Collection dot com. No, I'm sorry,
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Speaker 1: Smithsonian Magazine dot com. America's Big Circus Spectacular has a
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Speaker 1: long and cherished history, and it was written by Janet
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Speaker 1: Davis in March of twenty seventeen. Now let's read another
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Speaker 1: article again from smithsonianmag dot com entitled P. T. Barnum
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Speaker 1: Isn't the hero the greatest Showman wants you to think?
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Speaker 1: And it was written by Jackie Mansky in December of
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Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. Some five decades into his life, Phineas Taylor
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Speaker 1: Barnum from Bethel, Connecticut had remade himself from his humble
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Speaker 1: beginnings as an impoverished country boy into a showman, indeed
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Speaker 1: the greatest showman of his generation. Thanks to a combination
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Speaker 1: of brilliant marketing tactics in less than upstanding business practices,
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Speaker 1: Barnum had truly arrived, and with his book Humbugs of
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Speaker 1: the World in eighteen sixty five, Barnum wanted to inform
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Speaker 1: you his audience that he hadn't achieved his ragged richest
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Speaker 1: success story by scamming the public. Barnum's career trafficked in curiosities,
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Speaker 1: which he served up to the public hungary for such entertainment,
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Speaker 1: regardless of how factual or ethical such displays were. His
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Speaker 1: legacy and show business stretched from the American Museum to
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Speaker 1: the p T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum and Menagerie, Caravan
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Speaker 1: and Hippodrome. Each were full of bigger than life ideas
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Speaker 1: marketed to an audience interested in mass and often crash entertainment,
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Speaker 1: and Barnum wanted to make it clear such a practice
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Speaker 1: was justified. There are various trades and occupations which need
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Speaker 1: only notoriety to ensure success, he wrote once, including no harm,
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Speaker 1: no foul, so long as at the end of the
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Speaker 1: day customers felt like they got their money's worth. Growing
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Speaker 1: up in the Antebellum North, Barnum took his first real
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Speaker 1: dip into showmanship at age twenty five when he purchased
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Speaker 1: the right to rent an aged black woman by the
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Speaker 1: name of Joyce Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around
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Speaker 1: Philadelphia as a one hundred and sixty one year old
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Speaker 1: former nurse of George Washington Well. By this time, Barnum
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Speaker 1: had tried working as a lottery manager, a shopkeeper, and
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Speaker 1: newspaper editor. He was living in New York City, employed
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Speaker 1: at a boarding home and in a grocery store, and
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Speaker 1: was hungry for a money making gimmick. I long fancied
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Speaker 1: that I could succeed if I could only get a
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Speaker 1: hold of a public exit ambition. He reflected about his
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Speaker 1: life at the time in his eighteen fifty five autobiography
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Speaker 1: entitled The Life of P. T. Barnum, written by himself
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Speaker 1: with heth he saw an opportunity to strike it rich.
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Speaker 1: Though slavery was outlawed in Pennsylvania New York at the time,
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Speaker 1: a loophole allowed him to lease her for a year
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Speaker 1: for one thousand dollars, borrowing five hundred to complete the sale.
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Speaker 1: In a research paper on Barnum and his legacy misrepresenting
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Speaker 1: African peoples, Bernth Lidforce, Professor emeritus at the University of
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Speaker 1: Texas and Austin, aptly sums up significance of that dark
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Speaker 1: transaction as the launching point of Barnum the Showman, someone
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Speaker 1: who quote began his career in show business by going
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Speaker 1: into debt to buy a super annuated female slave who
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Speaker 1: turned out to be a fraud. It's a story that
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Speaker 1: The Greatest Showman, which presents Barnum as a smooth talking
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Speaker 1: Harold Hill type lovable Cohn, doesn't address Hugh Jackman's Barnum
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Speaker 1: would never be a person comfortable purchasing an enslaved woman
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Speaker 1: to turn a tidy prophet rewrite the stars, indeed, to
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Speaker 1: quote a song from the new movie as Benjamin Reese,
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Speaker 1: professor and Chair of English at Emory University and the
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Speaker 1: author of The Showman and the Slave of Barnum, explains
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Speaker 1: in an interview that with Bathersmithsonian dot Com that Barnum's
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Speaker 1: legacy has become a sort of cultural touchstone. He says
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Speaker 1: the quote the story of his life that we choose
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Speaker 1: to tell is in part the story that we choose
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Speaker 1: to tell a about American culture, and he goes on
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Speaker 1: to say, we can choose to erase things or dance
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Speaker 1: around touchy subjects and present a kind of feel good story,
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Speaker 1: or we can use it as an opportunity to look
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Speaker 1: at very complex and troubling histories that our culture has
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Speaker 1: been grappling with for centuries. That begins with Heath. Barnum's
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Speaker 1: first big break. It was while on tour with her
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Speaker 1: when he observed a public hunger for spectacle. Human curiosities
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Speaker 1: or lusis natura freaks of nature were among the most
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Speaker 1: popular traveling entertainments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
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Speaker 1: Rees explains in his book, But by the time Barnum
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Speaker 1: went on tour with Heath, there was a shift. By
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Speaker 1: the eighteen thirties, the display of grotesquely embodied human forms
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Speaker 1: was for some populous carnivalesque entertainment and for others an
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Speaker 1: offense to genteel sensibilities. Rhese writes, With Heath, Barnum proved
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Speaker 1: himself capable of being nimble enough to dip and swerve,
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Speaker 1: playing up different stories of her to appeal to different
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Speaker 1: audiences across the Northeast. Heath, of course, was not alive
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Speaker 1: in George Washington's time. Whether Barnum believed the fable frankly
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Speaker 1: doesn't really matter. While he later claimed he did, he
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Speaker 1: wasn't above making up his own myths about Heath to
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Speaker 1: attract people to see her. He once planted a story
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Speaker 1: that claimed the enslaved woman wasn't even a person. He
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Speaker 1: said once, what purports to be a remarkably old woman
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Speaker 1: is simply a curiously constructed automaton. When Heth died in
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Speaker 1: February of eighteen thirty six, rather than let her go
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Speaker 1: in peace, Barnum had one more act up his sleeve.
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Speaker 1: He drummed up a final public spectacle, hosting a live
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Speaker 1: autopsy in a New York saloon. There, fifteen hundred spectators
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Speaker 1: paid fifty cents to see the dead woman cut up,
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Speaker 1: revealing that she was likely half her purported age. After
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Speaker 1: hath Barnum found several other acts to tour, notably the
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Speaker 1: coup of getting the world famous Jenny Lynn, the Swedish nightingale,
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Speaker 1: to travel across the Atlantic to make her critically and
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Speaker 1: popularly acclaimed American debut with him until he became the
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Speaker 1: proprietor of the American Museum in December of eighteen forty
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Speaker 1: one in New York. At the American Museum, more than
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Speaker 1: four thousand visitors poured per day to browse some eight
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Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand interesting curiosities at the price of
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Speaker 1: twenty five cents a trip. The fake and the real
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Speaker 1: commingled in the space, with imported exotic live animals mixing
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Speaker 1: alongside hoaxes like the so called Fiji Mermaid, a preserved
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Speaker 1: monkey's head sewn onto the preserved tale of a fish
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Speaker 1: most uncommonly and uncomfortably in the museum, Barnum continued to
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Speaker 1: present freakishness in the form of living curiosities. One of
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Speaker 1: the most popular displays featured a man billed as a
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Speaker 1: quote creature found in the wilds of after supposed to
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Speaker 1: be a mixture of the wild native or African and
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Speaker 1: the orangutang, a kind of man monkey end quote. The
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Speaker 1: offensive poster concluded quote for want of a positive name,
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Speaker 1: the creature was called what is it? End quote? In truth,
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Speaker 1: what is It? Was an African American man named William
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Speaker 1: Henry Johnson. Before coming to the show, he served as
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Speaker 1: a cook for another showman in Barnum's Connecticut hometown. Similar
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Speaker 1: racial othering permeated the rest of Barnum's living curiosities, from
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Speaker 1: the Aztec children who were actually from El Salvador, to
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Speaker 1: the real but exoditized Simese twins, Chang and Inga as
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Speaker 1: James W. Cook, professor of History in American Studies at
25:02
Speaker 1: the University of Michigan, argues in the art of Deception,
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Speaker 1: playing with fraud in the age of Barnum, it was
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Speaker 1: because of the bipartisan mass audience he built through such displays,
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Speaker 1: which preyed on ideas of African inferiority and racial othering,
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Speaker 1: that Barnum then decided to throw his hat into the
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Speaker 1: political ring. During his successful run for the Connecticut General
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Speaker 1: Assembly in eighteen sixty five. Something changed, however, suddenly, Cook
25:36
Speaker 1: rights Barnum began to express a novel sympathy and regret
25:42
Speaker 1: about the subjugation of African Americans, or at least to
25:45
Speaker 1: approach civil rights matters at the end of the Civil
25:48
Speaker 1: War with a new, somewhat softer vision of racial paternalism.
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Speaker 1: During a failed run for Congress, he even confessed during
25:57
Speaker 1: the campaign speech that while living in the South, he
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Speaker 1: had owned slaves himself, actions he since regretted. I did more,
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Speaker 1: he said, I whip my slaves. I ought to have
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Speaker 1: been whipped a thousand times for this myself, but by
26:12
Speaker 1: then I was a Democrat, one of those nondescript Democrats
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Speaker 1: who are northern men. With Southern principles. It's a powerful speech,
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Speaker 1: but how much of his remorse was spind is hard
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Speaker 1: to say. Quote with Barnum, you never know if that's
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Speaker 1: part of the act or the contrition was general genuine
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Speaker 1: says rhese people change, and it's possible he really did
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Speaker 1: feel this, although throughout his career as a showman there
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Speaker 1: were many episodes of exhibiting non white people in degrading ways. Well,
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Speaker 1: that about does it for to Day's chapter of Radio
27:04
Speaker 1: Eye History. I hope you enjoyed to Day's program as
27:07
Speaker 1: much as I did researching it and reading it to you.
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Speaker 1: I thank you for your time and attention, and I'll
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Speaker 1: be back next week with another chapter of Radio eye History.
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Speaker 1: I'm your host, Joseph Bolt, and until then, happy trails
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Speaker 1: to you.