Circus

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Circus

Long before the advent of film, television, or the Internet, the circus delivered the world to people's doorsteps across America. Arriving in the United States shortly after the birth of the American republic, the growth of the circus chronicled the expansion of the new nation, from an agrarian backwater to an industrial and overseas empire. The number of circuses in America peaked at the turn of the twentieth century, but the circus has cast a long shadow on twentieth century American popular culture. The circus served as subject matter for other popular forms like motion pictures and television, and its celebration of American military might and racial hierarchy percolated into these new forms. From its zenith around 1900, to its decline and subsequent rebirth during the late twentieth century, the circus has been inextricably tied to larger social issues in American culture concerning race, physical disability, and animal rights.

In 1793, English horseman John Bill Ricketts established the first circus in the United States. He brought together a host of familiar European circus elements into a circular arena in Philadelphia: acrobats, clowns, jugglers, trick riders, rope walkers, and horses. By the turn of the twentieth century, the circus had become a huge, tented amusement that traveled across the country by railroad. In an age of monopoly capitalism, American circuses merged together to form giant shows; for example, the Ringling Brothers circus bought Barnum and Bailey's Greatest Show on Earth in 1907. The biggest shows employed over 1,000 people and animals from around the world. These circuses contained a free morning parade, a menagerie and a sideshow. Their canvas big tops could seat 10,000 spectators and treated audiences to three rings and two stages of constant entertainment. Contemporary critics claimed that the circus was "too big to see all at once." In the early 1900s, nearly 100 circuses, the biggest number in American history, rambled across the country.

In 1900, "circus day" was a community celebration. Before dawn, hundreds of spectators from throughout a county gathered to watch the circus train rumble into town. The early morning crowd witnessed scores of disciplined muscular men, horses, and elephants transform an empty field into a temporary tented city. In mid-morning, thousands more lined the streets to experience, up close, the circus parade of marching bands, calliopes, gilded wagons, exotic animals, and people winding noisily through the center of town. In the United States, the circus reached its apex during the rise of American expansion overseas. Circus proprietors successfully marketed their exotic performances (even those featuring seminude women) as "respectable" and "educational," because they showcased people and animals from countries where the United States was consolidating its political and economic authority. With its displays of exotic animals, pageants of racial hierarchy (from least to most "evolved"), and dramatizations of American combat overseas, the circus gave its isolated, small-town audiences an immediate look at faraway cultures. This vision of the world celebrated American military might and white racial supremacy. The tightly-knit community of circus employees, however, also provided a safe haven for people ostracized from society on the basis of race, gender, or physical disability.

In the early twentieth century, the circus overlapped considerably with other popular amusements. Many circus performers worked in vaudeville or at amusement parks during the winter once the circus finished its show season. Vaudeville companies also incorporated circus acts such as juggling, wire-walking, and animal stunts into their programs. In addition, the Wild West Show was closely tied to the circus. Many circuses contained Wild West acts, and several Wild West Shows had circus sideshows. Both also shared the same investors. Circuses occasionally borrowed their subject matter from other contemporary amusements. At the dawning of the American empire, international expositions like the Columbia Exposition in Chicago (1893) profitably displayed ethnological villages; thus, circuses were quick to hire "strange and savage tribes" for sprawling new ethnological congresses of their own. The new film industry also used circus subjects. Thomas Edison's Manufacturing Company produced many circus motion pictures of human acrobatics, trick elephants, and dancing horses, among others. Circuses such as the Ringling Brothers Circus featured early film as part of their novel displays. During the early twentieth century, the circus remained a popular film subject in movies like Charlie Chaplin's Circus (1928) and Tod Browning's Freaks (1932). Several film stars, such as Burt Lancaster, began their show business careers with the circus. Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth won an Oscar for Best Picture in 1952. These popular forms capitalized on the circus' celebration of bodily feats and exotic racial differences.

The American circus began to scale back its sprawling features in the 1920s, owing to the rise of the automobile and the movies. Most circuses stopped holding a parade because streets became too congested with cars. As motion pictures became increasingly sophisticated—and thus a more realistic mirror of the world than the circus—circuses also stopped producing enormous spectacles of contemporary foreign relations. Yet, despite its diminishing physical presence, the circus was still popular. On September 13, 1924, 16,702 people, the largest tented audience in American history, gathered at Concordia, Kansas, for the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus. In the milieu of the rising movie star culture of the 1920s, the circus had its share of "stars," from bareback rider May Wirth to aerialist Lillian Leitzel and her dashing trapeze artist husband, Alfredo Codona. Like their movie star counterparts in the burgeoning consumer culture, circus stars began to advertise a wealth of products in the 1920s—from soap to sheet music. Leitzel became so famous that newspapers around the world mourned her death in 1931, after she fell when a piece of faulty equipment snapped during a performance in Copenhagen, Denmark.

During the Great Depression, the colorful traveling circus provided a respite from bleak times. When nearly a quarter of the United States workforce was periodically unemployed, clown Emmett Kelly became a national star as "Willie," a tramp character dressed in rags, a disheveled wig, hat, and smudged face, who pined for lost love and better circumstances. The circus continued to profit during World War II, when railroad shows traveled under the auspices of the Office of the Defense Transportation. Circuses exhorted Americans to support the war effort. Yet Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey's "Greatest Show On Earth" nearly disintegrated after 168 audience members died in a big top fire (sparked by a spectator who dropped a lit cigarette) during a performance in Hartford, Connecticut, on July 6, 1944.

By the early 1950s, circus audience numbers were in decline, in part because the circus no longer had a monopoly on novelty or current events. Television, like movies and radio, provided audiences with compelling and immediate images that displaced the circus as an important source of information about the world. Yet, as a way to link itself to familiar, well-established popular forms, early television often featured live circus and vaudeville acts; circus performers were also featured on Howdy Doody as well as game shows like What's My Line? Ultimately, however, television offered Americans complete entertainment in the privacy of the home—which dovetailed nicely with the sheltered, domestic ethos of suburban America during the early Cold War. In this milieu, public amusements like movies and the circus attracted fewer customers. In 1956, just 13 circuses existed in America. As audiences shrank, showmen scaled back even further on their labor-intensive operations. Moreover, the rise of a unionized workforce (during the industrial union movement during the 1930s) meant that circus owners could no longer depend on a vast, cheap labor pool. Thus, John Ringling North cut his workforce drastically in 1956 when he abandoned the canvas tent for indoor arenas and stadiums. Circus employees and fans alike mourned the "death" of the familiar tented circus—a fixture of the circus business since 1825.

American social movements also transformed the circus. Circus performances of racial difference became increasingly controversial during the 1950s. Civil rights leaders had long objected to racist performances in American popular entertainment, but in the context of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, officials in the United States also protested because they feared that racist performances would legitimize Soviet claims that American racism was a product of American capitalism. Consequently, officials no longer aided circus agents' efforts to hire foreign performers slated to work as "missing links," "savages," or "vanishing tribes," and performances of "exotic" racial difference, particularly at the sideshow, slowly disappeared from the 1950s onward. In addition, disabled rights activists effectively shut down the circus sideshow and its spectacles of human abnormality by the early 1980s.

Lastly, the spread of the animal rights movement in the 1970s transformed the circus. Fearful of picketers and ensuing bad publicity, several circuses in the 1990s arrive silently at each destination and stop at night to avoid protesters. Cirque du Soleil, an extraordinarily successful French Canadian circus from Montreal (with a permanent show in Las Vegas), uses no animals in its performances. Instead, troupe members wear tight lycra body suits, wigs, and face paint to imitate animals as they perform incredible aerial acrobatics to the beat of a slick, synthesized pop musical score and pulsating laser lights. Yet, arguably, Cirque du Soleil (among others) is actually not a circus because of its absence of animals: throughout its long history, the circus has been defined by its interplay of humans and animals in a circular arena.

Despite the transformation of its content, the American circus endures at the turn of the twenty first century. Certainly, towns no longer shut down on "circus day," yet a growing number of small one-ring circuses have proliferated across America. Shows like the Big Apple Circus, Circus Flora, and Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey's show, "Barnum's Kaleidoscope," have successfully recreated the intimate, community atmosphere of the nineteenth century one-ring circus, without the exploitation of physical and racial difference that characterized the older shows. Ultimately, in the 1990s, a decade of increasingly distant, fragmented, mass-mediated, "virtual" entertainment, the circus thrives because it represents one of the few intimate, live (and hence unpredictable) community experiences left in American popular culture.

—Janet Davis