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Agency through Otherness: Portraits of Performers in Circus Route Books, 1875-1925

Childress, Micah. “Life Beyond The Big Top: African American and Female Circusfolk, 1896-1920.”

Micah Childress, “Life Beyond The Big Top: African American and Female Circusfolk, 1896-1920.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (2016): 176-196. https://doi:10.1017/S1537781415000250.

This page is referenced by:

Shattering Gender Roles: Women in the Circus by Elizabeth Harman
As circus goers watched the array of performers, they witnessed various powerful renditions of female beauty, strength, vulnerability, humor, sexuality, and ugliness; each type of performance conveyed its own meaning and offered its own vision of what women were capable of achieving.¹

The Gilded Age brought forth many changes in American society, from the expansion of the railroad system and rapid growth in the west to political issues like the temperance movement and prohibition, immigration laws, and the suffrage movement. Exploration of the world was ever increasing and there were great advances in science, medicine, technology, and media. However, while some areas of American society were taking great steps forward, others were facing great resistance, including how women should be present and involved in society.²

Courageous, daring, strong, and capable. These are words that would not typically be used to describe women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the contrary, societal standards trended towards the exact opposite regarding the view of the ‘ideal woman’. Dress was always supposed to be formal, polite, and conservative, with long skirts and dresses being the standard. Women were not encouraged to join the workforce (with exceptions made for ‘acceptable work’), society believing that their place was within the domestic home.³ Their demeanor should be polite, feminine, and quiet, not showing too much emotion or sharing too many opinions.

Circus women were in direct contrast to this narrative. Despite the barriers placed on them, as the new era was ushered in women began advocating for their right to work. “The expansion in female employment in the circus reflected a national trend as the number of women in the workplace more than doubled from 1870 to 1910.”⁴ Women had existed in the circus prior to this time, but they were much less prevalent and much less accepted by the general public. Certain states even prevented circus women from performing due to state laws. In the face of these laws, the advice of the media, and what society deemed as ‘appropriate work’, the women of the circus were a visible representation and celebration of female power, making their voices heard and their contributions to society known.

This chapter will focus on the women who made their own seat at the table; women who faced exploitation and social rejection daily yet were some of the most celebrated of their time. By making a living for themselves and choosing to be visible, they became advocates for working, successful women and a force for change.

Author’s Statement: Much of the language used in the Circus Route Books collection and other primary sources is outdated, sexist, racist, and offensive to many people groups. The use of these terms within this chapter is in no way meant to harm others, and appropriate terminology is used whenever possible.
Showmen's Rests: The Final Curtain by Elizabeth C. Hartman
June 22, 1918, Ivanhoe, IN
It was 3:55 a.m. and the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train squatted on the main line track of Michigan Central. Circus performers and workers laid in wait within the old wooden cars, faces illuminated by the oil lamps. They had left Michigan City about an hour earlier after wrapping up two days of show business there. Next stop was Hammond, just some 45 miles away.

The train straddled intersections with several other lines – a strange place to sit, unless the flagmen had noticed a blazing hot box on the south side of your train.¹ The first train, bearing the circus animals, was already passing through Hammond on its loop through the South Chicago Union Stockyards to feed and water.
The “military-style circus caste system was fully evident” in the formation of the sleeping cars, which had been detached momentarily from their position behind the flatcars carrying gilded circus wagons for the repairs.² The general manager and his wife slept in their stateroom within the first of the four retrofitted cars; performers slept in the second car; and the last two “berthed many of the male canvas handlers and roustabouts. Of course, it was a warm June night, and the heat in those densely berthed sleeping cars … encouraged a number of the lowly handlers and roustabouts to find sleeping space in the wagons and trucks carried on flatcars ahead of the sleepers” and enjoy the strong south wind blowing off of Lake Michigan.³

While they waited on repairs, the war continued on around them in the form of busy traffic. The intersecting G&W line was constantly lugging troops eastward en route to France, meaning an equal amount of traffic moving west as empty cars made their way back. It was this sort of empty train that Engineer Sargent commanded the throttle of this night. He hadn’t slept. The wind kept him awake and cool, but as it blew stronger with his increasing speed, he closed the window.

About eighty-six showmen died that night.

Train wrecks “were common, and deadly” in this era. And, trains were to circuses as coal was to trains, which meant that circus wrecks were just as frequent and fatal. Perhaps this is part of what prompted Lew Nichols (the “funny old clown of Sig Sautelle fame”⁴ and veteran sideshow manager for Buckskin Bill’s Wild West Show) to spend the fall of 1916 gathering estimates for the purchase of cemetery plots reserved for showmen.

The idea of a final resting place for showpeople had been kicked around since the formation of Lew’s fraternal organization in 1913, the Showmen’s League of America. (The League is the oldest of its kind in North America; with over a thousand members it’s still alive today, having absorbed the mid-1900’s explosion of such clubs. The first president was none other than Buffalo Bill.) Circus folk had already been taking care of their own, pitching in for one another’s funerals and burials, not a small amount of them precipitated by circus wrecks.
The purchase of plots for showmen was part of a two-pronged effort by the League to care for their members, the second piece of which was the purchase of a ward in the new American Theatrical Hospital.⁵ The League also buried non-members who were otherwise destined for the abyss of the forgotten.⁶

Showmen’s Rests were a way to stay on stage, even if no one knew who you really were – which wasn’t a new concept to pseudonymic performers. Circus performers “were often known only by nicknames,” and they and stagehands alike would jump train from show to show throughout the season. Circus managements "admitted that they did not know names of workingmen ... [they had no] reason for personal contact with canvasmen in a railroad circus with its factory-like division of labor."⁷ Many killed in the 1918 Hagenbeck-Wallace crash had just joined the show and could be buried only under such names as “Baldy,” “Smiley,” “4 Horse Driver,” and “Unknown Female.”

Don’t we all want to be remembered?

By 1957, 12 clubs, coast to coast, had their own cemetery plots.⁸ A particularly large section, located in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Hugo, Oklahoma, was purchased in 1960 by D. R. Miller in memory of his brother, the circus leader Kelly Miller. But what exactly did Miller buy?

Hugo is located within the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The 1887 Dawes Act forced Native Americans to "assume a capitalist and proprietary relationship" with land, resulting in not only the loss of about two-thirds of traditional lands but also of traditional tribal leadership. The 1947 Stigler Act added insult to injury by imposing "uniquely unfair limitations on the rights of the citizens of each of the Five Tribes of eastern Oklahoma" by removing federal protections on their real estate interests through restrictive identity measures.

Like Forest Park’s Woodlawn Cemetery, the Showmen’s Rest in Hugo (aka Circus Town, USA) is adorned with elephants, trunks lowered in mourning.

My mother collected elephants, bronze, ceramic, silver, large and small urns shaped like elephants, and even a belt with the silver images of marching elephants. After she died in 2003, my brother and I were going through her things and dividing the mementos that we each wanted to keep. I chose her elephant collection. … I had no idea why my mother was drawn to elephants. But it seems that circuses and elephants loomed large in the minds of American Indians in southeastern Oklahoma, and certainly in my mother’s imagination. Small and intermediate-sized circuses began coming to Ada, Indian Territory, as early as the 1890s. … When circuses came to Ada, they always parked in Daggs Prairie about six blocks from my grandmother’s house. My mother and my great aunt Euda and their friends would always sneak in the backside of the circus tents and watch the elephant…
– LeAnne Howe, writer and Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma citizen

In her research with Monique Mojica, Howe uncovered the history of lands underneath the circus trappings of the 19th and early 20th centuries in which her great aunt Euda "played Indian." Circuses would unload from their trains onto indigenous burial mounds and drive tent stakes into ancestral rests. The lands chosen for memorial earthworks were retraced by circus routes, railroads webbing the same river valleys that were home to mound builders for millennia. “Why mound sites is a little unclear, but one guess is because the sites were ready made for the circus tent."

Don’t we all want to be a remembered as part of something?

Howe says that mound builders layered “different kinds of soils one upon the other” to “embody the lands of their origin” in an “earthworks embodied mnemonics aligned with moon and sun,” tying themselves to the cosmos through the earth. Traveling showmen, of all different kinds, tend to rootlessness. With the creation of Showmen’s Rests, they affixed themselves permanently with gravestone anchors. Elephants still haunt these grounds, now with the weight of concrete.
Banished to the Annex: The Catch-22 of Circus Work
At the turn of the twentieth century, most Americans celebrated the arrival of a circus. Circus Day had become a local holiday that brought together ethnicities, races, and classes (of both genders) that did not usually assemble at the same place and time. Within the circus itself, however, race and gender provided boundaries and fostered acrimony. The racism and segregation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries could be found aboard any circus train and throughout every show lot. African Americans were relegated to certain jobs, segregated within those jobs, and usually paid less than their white counterparts. The show’s scheduled route often took them into areas in which they experienced the racial volatility typical of the era. Although the public perception of circus employment often produced thoughts of travel and fun adventures, African American circusfolk endured harsh treatment, low pay, and vile racism.²
Black sideshow bands – first documented in 1881 within Milner Library’s Circus Route Books Digital Collection – were relegated to the circus annex, constrained by compounding layers of liminality. The circus itself was a marginal (albeit culturally significant) stage, literally located at the outskirts of society near the railroads upon which it traveled. Black musicians performed within an additional layer of marginality. Sideshows housed those performers labeled as “exotic,” and musicians were expected to perform as such.
The earliest records of black participation in circuses dates back to Europe in the late 1700’s, where black equestrians performed tricks on horseback. In the mid-1800’s, American circuses employed black performers. However, they were usually presented as oddities. For example, P. T. Barnum … exhibited “Zip-What-Is-It?” “Zip” was a black man billed as the genetic link between man and beast. Blacks in tent shows were commonly given strange names and presented as savage creatures from Africa, “the dark continent.”³

Black sideshow musicians were in the company of other Black circus performers and workers. With the big tent filled with white performers in blackface, there were three roles available to African Americans in United States circuses: ethnic specimen; roustabout; or musician. The circus was a microcosm of its surrounding culture, and Black circusfolk endured "the restrictive conditions that eventually permeated steel mills and automobile factories" in their northward movements to escape Jim Crow throughout the Exoduster Movement (~1879) and the Great Migration (~1916-1970). “After the first Great Migration, in which hundreds of thousands of black southerners made their way to urban centers (usually in the north, often to filling the openings left by whites when the United States entered the First World War), many blacks discovered that they were excluded from certain jobs, and any employment they found was often at a lower wage than their white counterparts."⁴

Many Black sideshow musicians later entered the role of devalued, manual laborer, as evidenced by census records. "A lot of them were retired. That doesn’t mean that they were 65 years old, it means that after they did a run with the Ringling Brothers, there were no more opportunities." Not only were they forced into performing the role of the Other on the stage, they were forced into the role of union busters as management weaponized them to lower wages and job security both under and beyond the big top – much like Chinese railroad construction workers of the era – which didn’t help race relations between circus workers. In response, most circuses segregated their workers, and some even “resisted hiring blacks because he thought his labor force would perceive black laborers as economic threats.”⁵

Black circusfolk thus bore the intersectional brunt of racial and economic inequities, sequestered into a Catch-22. In traveling north to escape racism, they just discovered another type of racism:
I’m beginning to believe that the prejudice of the South is far less dangerous than the so-called tolerance of the North. A Northerner will tell you that he has no prejudice whatsoever and then he will find all sorts of ways to keep you out of employment, using one excuse or another as a pretext. That makes him a hypocrite. With a prejudiced Southerner, you always know what to expect.⁶
-Hortense Collier (Chinese-American Hortense Collier was a dancer in and manager of Silas Green from New Orleans, one of the longest-lasting tent shows in America. Formerly owned by Prof. Eph Williams, the first African American circus owner, it was then run by Charles Collier, who was white.)

Thankfully for musicians, “music was the only performing area into which blacks made consistent headway … Nearly every circus had a black sideshow band. Their presence became so expected, in fact, that no self-proclaimed big show traveled without a black band." Although “show proprietors recognized that black bands had become a part of circusgoers’s expectations, the bands existed as part of the sideshow … circus employment offered an alternative to the rural, Southern, sharecropping life … [but] the trend of exclusion, segregation, and salary discrimination was evident within popular entertainment long before the demographic-altering shift in black population."⁷

The first circus that a Black band played with was Sells Bros in 1881 (A. W. Stencell says 1880 in his book Circus and Carnival Ballyhoo, though no circus or reference is given). We wonder, were the Sells Bros ethical or economical?

Black musicians responded to their forced Otherness and wage discrimination within this confined stage. Through ingenious spectacles, they deployed the marketing of exoticism onto the audience’s desire for the novel and the authentic. Possessing both musical and managerial skills, they utilized their market share to transform themselves from employees to autonomous business owners.
Daring Women As women advocated for themselves and found a place within the circus, many unique acts arose. Women were found in almost every sector of the circus by the mid 1920’s. From aerialists and highflyers to musicians and contortion, women were a part of it all. How they arrived at these positions often involved family. Whether they were born into the circus or married into it, more often than not they were legally a part of the circus family.

This familial aspect was used often by the circuses to promote their shows, proving to the laypeople that they were living in an upstanding community, using ‘stories of marriage and children as a positive avenue to present their female employees in a favorable light to the American public.”²⁴ To an extent, this was true as life within the circus was highly structured and proper. There were also strict rules on behavior and appearance, especially for the women, to make sure that they remained in a good light and stayed safe while on the road.

Though women were less prevalent in the circus, the women that did make it into the show were typically the highlight of the performance, especially within family troupes. Marriages and family connections were constantly made and intertwined in the circus with hopes for a better job placement. The means by which women found work within the circus were varied, but they used these to their advantage to promote themselves and be the biggest success stories under the big top.