The Circus

"Friday, I tasted life," Emily Dickinson wrote to a friend in May 1866. "It was a vast morsel. A circus passed by the house—I still feel the red in my mind, though the drums are out." Red and drums, the poet's deft shorthand for the indescribable spectacle that rolled through the streets of Amherst, Massachusetts on that long-ago spring morning, capture the essence of the American circus. It is bold and brash, vibrant and percussive, immersive and overwhelming. It is exoticism incarnate, rolling through the countryside on a thousand wheels, capable of turning the heads even of jaded city-dwellers and making even the vibrant greens of the New England countryside in springtime feel as bland as the sepia-toned bookend scenes of The Wizard of Oz. In its golden age, bracketed roughly by the Civil War and World War I, the tent-based roadshow circus brought American face-to-face with the thrilling, the exotic, and the extreme. It immersed them, for a day or two of each year, in a world of topsy-turvy where the unimaginable somehow became real before their eyes.

Written, produced, and directed by Sharon Grimberg for the 30th season of The American Experience—the Public Broadcasting System's indispensable series of historical documentaries—The Circus follows the rail-based, tented roadshows from their meteoric rise in the late 1860s to their final collapse in the mid-1950s. Four hours long, it is split into two equal parts. The first is dominated by P. T. Barnum and, especially, James Bailey, and reaches a climax as they merge their separate, competing operations to form the self-proclaimed "Greatest Show on Earth." The five Ringling Brothers of Baraboo, Wisconsin make a brief appearance late in Part One: upstart competitors who, even the most casually circus-aware viewer knows, are destined for greatness. Part Two, though it begins with Bailey's triumphant European tour in the years bracketing 1900, is really the story of the Ringlings' absorbing the Barnum & Bailey show after Bailey's death and merging it with their own. The Circus, in other words, is not a cinematic history of "the circus" as an enterprise, but of "the circus"—the greatest of them all, that set the terms of the game, and that every lesser show of the era aspired, in some way, to emulate.

The central argument of The Circus, eloquently and forcefully presented even though it is never explicitly framed as such by Grimberg or articulated by narrator Sam Waterston, is that Barnum and Bailey (and the Ringling Brothers after them) transformed the circus business into the circus industry. Backed by circus historians whose talking-head commentary lends scholarly ballast to the film, Grimberg argues that Barnum did for the entertainment industry what Vanderbilt did for railroads, Carnegie for steel, and Rockefeller for petroleum. He was a natural showman, but also a savvy empirebuilder who exploited economies of scale and the power of horizontal and vertical integration. Like the other business empires of the Gilded Age, Barnum's was built on rapidly advancing technology. The amount of railroad track in the United States had doubled over the 1860s, and the Central Pacific and Union Pacific had met in Utah in 1869, forming the first of what would soon be several transcontinental lines. Barnum looked at a burgeoning rail network and saw opportunity.

American circuses had traditionally traveled on horse-drawn wagons, which severely limited the distance they could cover in a day. Time spent in transit meant expenses but not income, and their itineraries were therefore filled with one-night stands in one-horse towns, playing to relatively small crowds. America's railroad network, Barnum realized in the early 1870s, was expansive and robust enough that a circus designed for rail travel could cover hundreds of miles in a night, bypassing the smaller towns and playing only in the larger (and thus more lucrative ones). His partner, William Cameron Coup, acquired 60 custom-built rail cars...