Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus

Introduction: Turning the Circus Inside Out

i n t r o d u c t i o n Turning the Circus Inside Out Consider the career of an enduring if controversial icon of American entertainment : the genial circus elephant. A being beautiful and carnivalesque in appearance , she is physically powerful but judicious and kind to humans. In a whimsical costume with trunk raised in a salute to the viewer, she is so glad to entertain her human audience that she even appears to be smiling. Beginning in the early republic, generations of Americans came to know the genial circus elephant as a show business ambassador who cried out: “Look here for fun and novelty!” She was so comprehensible that she inhabited not only the circus ring and street parade but also handbills found at the local tavern, fences coated with circus bills, show programs and trade cards, political cartoons and newspaper advertising, movie backdrops, book plots, toy catalogs, and candy packaging. In 1993 the genial circus elephant even graced a U.S. postage stamp. The philatelic issue was tacit state endorsement for an American tradition then faltering in the face of a changing entertainment industry and assertive animal rights advocates.1 While she has been especially troubled over the last one hundred years, the genial circus elephant exerted considerable influence on American consumers in the nineteenth century. This was the golden age of the circus. Traveling shows were the nation’s preeminent mass entertainment, and they catered to customers from every walk of life and every region. Living elephants provided these ventures with physical and cultural labor that made the sign of the genial circus elephant possible. Initially, the trade began as experimental animal exhibitions in the early republican northeast. Later, antebellum menagerie wagon shows offered caged exotic creatures, trained dogs, horses and monkeys, and perhaps a single elephant. As the nation’s borders moved outward, the genial elephant accompanied the circus into each new territory and state. Following the Civil War, highly capitalized modern circuses merged the antebellum menageries and horse circuses into unified productions. They employed huge workforces of people and animals, modern technologies, and management schemes to serve consumers by wagon trail, riverboat, and railway. In that century, ticket buyers and showmen alike believed that any entertainment called “circus” required elephants. Only living elephants could be trans- A late-twentieth-century iteration of the genial circus elephant. Stamp block celebrating “200 Years of the Circus in America.” United States Postal Service, 1993. Turning the Circus Inside Out 3 formed by the right costuming, patter, advertising, and human performers to produce the icon of the genial circus elephant. Only elephants were strong enough to raise the masts required by the largest circus tents. Only they had the power to shove heavy circus wagons through mud that bogged down exhausted men and horses. Eventually appearing in herds of up to twenty on a single production , the uniquely massive and powerful elephant alone could advertise the ambition of circus impresarios like Adam Forepaugh, P. T. Barnum, or James Bailey. By 1900, the biggest American circuses were branded commercial entities that showed on multiple continents. They were the largest entertainment companies people had ever seen and a rags-to-riches story in the classic American style. In spite of the form’s ancient roots in Europe and Asia, to create such enormous circus shows by the systematic use of captive elephants was a uniquely American innovation. Thus, the long nineteenth century of the American circus was equally the elephant’s long nineteenth century in America. It began with the arrival of the first elephant in 1796 and lasted until the 1907 destruction of the first elephant born in the United States, right at the peak of circus business history. The genial circus elephant, however, carries more significance than this, for she ushered in sophisticated mass markets for consumer experience in the United States before there were comparable markets for products or services. She preceded many American characters taken as a sign of the growth of market life: Zip Coon and the plantation “Darky,” Brother Jonathan and Davy Crockett, Barnum’s “What is it?,” Jenny Lind, and the Feejee Mermaid. In the 135 years after independence, the country underwent vast changes in geographic range, cultural diversification, and Anglo-American power consolidation. Once an unstable rebel state, by 1907 an imperial, if indebted, world power, the nation was traversed by new roads, canals, and railways. That infrastructure...