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OUILOinG An ~nT~RTAinm~nT InDUSTRY IN THE EARLY r88os,AUDIENCES FROMNEwENGLANDTOTHEMIDWEST and the Great Plains took turns packing themselves into a massive traveling canvas tent to watch "the Greatest Show on Earth"-the circus extravaganza of P. T. Barnum and his new partner, James A. Bailey. In town after town, excitement would build for weeks about the show's impending arrival : "circus day," when performers, trainers, and animals, in sixty or more special cars, rolled into the local railroad station. Communities came to a standstill for the unloading of the cars, parades down main streets, and the performances themselves, which featured acrobats, clowns, sideshow exhibitions, and a vast menagerie that included Jumbo, reputedly the largest elephant in captivity. Several decades later, circuses continued to be the most-awaited entertainment event in towns across the nation. As the writer Hamlin Garland remembered about growing up in rural Iowa, the circus "brought to our ears the latest band pieces and taught us the most popular songs. It furnished us with jokes. It relieved our dullness. It gave us something to talk about."1 Popular amusements such as the circus indeed provided much to talk about in the late nineteenth century. As the Greatest Show on Earth traversed the nation, a U.S. entertainment industry emerged. This development reflected trends in the larger economy, where sprawling corporations such as John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil fought to bring order, predictability , and control to entire business sectors. Just as burgeoning companies like Standard Oil tried to rationalize their businesses through cutthroat practices and tighter organization, popular culture forms-the circus, Wild West shows, enlarged minstrel shows, and sports, for example-offered instructive , although smaller, models of organization. Barnum's circus represented , according to advertisements, "Centralization of All That Is Great in the Amusement Realm." And, like the sprawling industrial combinations, 74 WITH AMUSEMENT FOR ALL the circus and its amusement counterparts utilized superbly the ongoing revolution in transportation and communications, involving especially electricity, railroads, and print. Similarly, in an era that celebrated the likes of Rockefeller and the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie as "self-made men," the entertainment world featured its own "captains of industry"-Barnum, for instance, by then in the last stages of his phenomenal career, or his circus partner James A. Bailey, or Wild West star Buffalo Bill Cody, or professional baseball organizer Albert Spalding.2 The prizefighter John L. Sullivan provided another variation of the selfmade success story. Although Sullivan was never adept at business, he symbolized a new kind of hero in American life: the celebrity, someone who was famous not for winning elections or battles or leading reform causes, but for holding a prominent place in the spreading domain of mass amusements . Sullivan's fame, like that of a Cody or a Barnum, revealed an important and continuing paradox: even as the emerging popular culture industry reflected the move toward efficiency, organization, incorporation, discipline , and punctuality in the larger society, at the same time it persistently went against the cultural grain, pitting excess and escapism against discipline , fun against work, titillation against traditional morality, muscular individualism against organization, playful informality against restrictive etiquette, pleasureful abandon against restraint, and unfamiliar, alternative worlds against the traditional and the respectable.3 The circus pointed the way, with none other than the remarkable Barnum playing a pivotal role. In 1868, after his American Museum burned down for the second time in less than four years, he had briefly retired. But, in 1870, Dan Castello and William Coup, who, in frontier regions such as California and Missouri, had operated small sideshows and wagon circuses -"mud" shows because of the roads they often had to maneuver-convinced Barnum to join them, bringing with him his famous name, his genius for marketing, and his money. Circuses were far from new, certainly. But Barnum, in his inimitable way, would alter their organization, their scale, and their reputation, helping launch their golden age from roughly 1870 to 1914.4 Organizationally, Barnum's circus epitomized the new industrial rhythms and system of the rising corporate America. After 1872, when Barnum put his circus on rails, he tied the circus more tightly than ever to schedules and organization. It was a prisoner of the calendar, following strict timetables from place to place; the performances themselves moved like clockwork, with a ringmaster and musical scripts coordinating the procession of acts-an even more impressive accomplishment when the Greatest Show on Earth spread from two to three rings. Here, indeed...

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