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

5. Herd Management in the Gilded Age

c h a p t e r f i v e Herd Management in the Gilded Age George Wilbur Peck once recorded an improbable story told by the young son of a circus manager, a man identified only as “pa.” As the story went, one year the animals at the circus went on strike. Trouble began at Pittsburgh, where the Teamsters, who loaded and unloaded the show’s wagons and equipment from the circus train, walked off the job over small wages and long hours. Pa soon negotiated a settlement with the strikers, and the company moved on to Germantown . But, the boy explained, the creatures in the menagerie had been emboldened by the Teamsters’ success and proceeded to ruin the next performance: They acted as though they had lost all interest in the success of the show, and wouldn’t do any of their stunts worth a cent. The elephants went through their act carelessly, and when they were scolded or prodded with the iron hook, they got mad and wanted to fight, and when they got back from the ring to the animal tent they wouldn’t eat the baled hay, but threw it all over the tent and acted riotous. The kangaroos would not do their boxing act, the horses kicked at their hay . . . the camels growled at their food, and scared the people who passed by where they were tied to stakes, . . . the giraffes laid down and curled their necks so they were no attraction to the show, ’cause a giraffe is no curiosity unless he stretches himself away up towards the top of the tent. The zebras rolled in mud and spoiled their stripes. Staff at the circus were baffled until pa explained the source of the animals’ discontent . While allowing that they did not “understand enough of the ways of human beings to be posted on labor unions, and all that,” he said that they had “lost respect for the employer.” Led by the company’s grizzly bear and lion, they had struck. As the boy told it, pa settled that strike, too. He showed everyone how to manage the animals better simply by giving them decent food. The circus staff lazily cut corners by feeding the lion and bear spoiled horse meat when they preferred fresh, while giving the jackals fresh meat when they preferred it rotten. The elephants , giraffes, camels, and others similarly suffered with “musty baled hay, brought from contractors that may have had it on hand for five years.” Pa asked the circus men, “How would you like it if you were served with breakfast food that Herd Management in the Gilded Age 139 had been stored in a warehouse until it was mildewed? A horse or elephant has feelings.” As the boy told it, thereafter the animals each got their preferred food, including the elephants, who received “timothy hay, such as mother used to make.” The menagerie animals went back to work, and the circus owner was so relieved that he gave pa a promotion.1 Of course, this story was fiction. It appeared in Peck’s book with an illustration that depicted Bolivar the elephant assaulting pa with a watermelon while a startled African American man and the boy storyteller look on. Bolivar’s juxtaposition with a black man, possibly his keeper, in the illustration made his act of resistance comprehensible because it resembled a satirical blackface performance roasting white economic power by likening it to human power over animals. Peck was a newspaper publisher, the Democratic seventeenth governor of WisElephant and African American man equated as subjects of profit-minded circus managers and owners by an elephant that assaults a company manager with a watermelon. C. Frink, illustrator. From George Wilbur Peck, Peck’s Bad Boy with the Circus (Chicago, 19065). 140 Entertaining Elephants consin, and author of a satirical book series known as Peck’s Bad Boy. His tales of the Bad Boy and his pa with the circus were products of his own imagination but also of the broad colloquial culture around the trials of traveling circuses in the nation. Many Americans knew elephants had agency but suspected they had no real power, being unable to understand the human cultures that required their captivity in a traveling, for-profit show. Thus, Peck’s tale of circus animals on strike was funny because it built on this knowledge to satirize public anxiety over the...