The Big Tent: The Traveling Circus in Georgia, 1820-1930 (review)

In this fine cultural study, Renoff explores the interaction between southern communities and the circus during the heyday of the traveling big top. Those with a general interest in popular culture or a specific interest in circus history will doubtlessly find much to appreciate in Renoff's recounting of the traveling show's theatrical evolution throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yet this work delivers much more, constructing an innovative social, cultural, and economic analysis of a broad spectrum of Georgia's diverse population. It accomplishes this feat by paying as much attention to the individuals who made up the communities that hosted the traveling circus as it does to the show itself.

Renoff's work builds around the notion of "circus day" as a kind of secular holiday during which a collective representation of community values collided with the foreign and modernistic amusements offered by the traveling show. As the author notes, "circuses in Georgia communities gave the state's residents the chance to challenge the New South's strictures of race, class, and religious belief and helped spur the social, cultural, and economic transformations that the state underwent between 1865 and 1930" (7). Although Renoff begins his narrative by examining the small, wagon-based shows of the antebellum South, the majority of this book focuses on the postbellum era when Georgians had to cope with the onslaught of social, cultural, and economic modernity. He traces the manner in which the traveling circus overcame considerable resistance from evangelical leaders and plantation bosses ultimately to find common cause with town merchants and civic boosters, who saw in the show an opportunity to promote commerce. The narrative concludes with the end of the circus' golden age during the 1920s, which saw many of the shows fade in grandeur or succumb to new forms of popular entertainment. By the mid-1920s, notes Renoff, the circus had also become so nonthreatening to the prevailing customs in Georgia that it could be safely sponsored by a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Unlike Joy S. Kasson's Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York, 2001), which deals almost exclusively with the content of the show and the intentions of its producers, Renoff tackles the arguably more difficult task of gauging the reaction of the circus's audience. His analysis includes black sharecroppers, evangelical family men, backwoods rustics, children, single women, aspiring merchants, and town drunks. The resulting portrait of Georgia communities on circus day is a remarkable feat of social history.

Quibbles with this work are few. By arranging his material thematically and employing broadly overlapping chronologies, Renoff makes the narrative slightly repetitious. Furthermore, although he offers ample evidence of racial mixing in various aspects of circus day, he acknowledges that segregation remained a guiding force in the show's more organized elements. Hence, the circus seems not to have challenged Georgia's racial strictures so much as it accommodated them in a manner suitable for the occasion. To wit, the possibility of having "racial mixing" without transgressing important boundaries of social deference may well reveal much about the organic and cultural nature of segregation. Nevertheless, The Big Tent should find wide readership among students of popular culture and provide useful insights to those who seek innovative scholarship on the postbellum South.