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• 1 media/136480BE-C668-444F-BE4E-FDA0A3DFCD1D.jpeg 2021-03-28T14:56:18-07:00 Social Constructions 66 plain 2021-04-29T17:54:11-07:00
  SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND THE SPREAD OF IDEAS
  The sideshow relied on a presentation of the authentic body—or at least a claim to authenticity—that was in reality a highly staged encounter. While it’s troubling to think about the display of human beings as passive exhibits—or indeed to read earlier language describing them as displays—objectification and commodification of people was a central part of marketing sideshow performances in the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.¹³ Robert Bogdan describes two patterns of presentation that dominated the sideshow industry: “the exotic, which cast the exhibit as a strange creature from a little-known part of the world; and the aggrandized, which endowed the freak with status-enhancing characteristics."¹⁴ The former category included acts such as the “Wild Men of Borneo” and William Henry Johnson’s portrayal of “Zip, the What-Is-It?” while the latter category included performers such as General Tom Thumb—significantly, all of the backstories presented about these performers were complete fabrications. Despite the similar use of exaggeration or outright falsehood employed in constructing the sideshow performers’ identities, this essay is focused on the “exotic” mode because of the way it reflected and informed larger social and cultural constructs, and how it permeated other parts of the circus, such as the grand spectacle shows.
  
  The sideshow acts and spectacles that focused on non-Western cultures were an outgrowth and extension of the curiosity that audiences in Europe and the United States had about unfamiliar cultures,¹⁵ and the particular presentations reinforced a racist hierarchy that was an inevitable effect of imperialism in the wake of British colonization and American expansion. The exotic mode of presentation was in many ways a logical complement to the “patriotic spectacles” that valorized the discovery and militaristic expansion activities of U.S. and European civilizations, such as Barnum & Bailey’s 1892 spectacle Columbus and the Discovery of America.¹⁶ In the decades leading up to this, P.T. Barnum and other showmen were already reflecting an undercurrent of colonial ideologies in their circuses and museum shows. In 1874 Barnum featured a Grand Procession of the Congress of Nations to open the show at his Roman Hippodrome in New York City; this show depicted the imperial courts of the world, but was actually staffed with circus extras filling these roles.
  
  
  In 1879 Barnum’s traveling Greatest Show on Earth featured a group of Zulu Warriors that was so popular as a ring act, showing “barbarous” displays of dancing and spear throwing, that it “paved the way for an increasing number of ethnological acts and exhibitions in the years that followed, most notably the so-called Ethnological Congresses that featured people drawn from around the globe.”¹⁷ These Congresses, exhibited in the menagerie tent with the performers appearing alongside animals from their homelands, were billed as educational events, “illuminating ‘specimens’ of their respective races.”¹⁸
  
  This shift toward large displays that positioned certain performers in terms of their “otherness” and “primitive exoticism”¹⁹ placed them as part of a shorthand for American understandings of non-Western cultures. This shorthand included the use of identifiers such as “Pygmy”, “Bushman”, and “Zulu” (sometimes interchangeably) to describe African performers regardless of their ethnic, national, or cultural affiliation,²⁰ and often extended to identifying any Black performer as African, regardless of their nationality.
  
  The mixture of Western imperialism and exploration, along with newly emerging “popular” understandings of evolution²¹ (and the body of pseudoscientific knowledge that arose around it) fed into a cultural move to project Western understandings and desires onto the people and cultures of previously remote areas of the world.²² This tendency to rationalize objectification by couching it in so-called legitimate study was already deeply embedded in the sideshow world, with Rachel Adams noting that “freak shows had always drawn on ethnographic and medical discourses to grant legitimacy to the fantastic narratives they wove around the bodies on display.”²³ The commentaries of doctors, explorers, and scientists were used to present the sideshow performers’ narratives and to create the printed biographical sketches that often accompanied the acts. These narratives were usually fabrications, but the testimony of “experts” added a sense of authenticity. The increasing cultural fascination with “exotic” cultures meant that sideshows began to “employ more non-white performers” who were billed as “savages, cannibals, and missing links,” and that the authoritative voices of the fake “professors” and “doctors” who presented pseudoethnographic narratives about them lent credibility to the educational claims of most circuses at the time. In fact, “anthropological exhibits at freak shows often provided American audiences with their primary source of information about the non-Western world.”²⁴
  
  Sideshows took advantage of the growing interest in scientific inquiry and the language used to describe Western expansion by blending travel narratives—a type of literature that was marketed as a safe and moral way for people to learn about the broader world, conveniently compiled by those adventurous enough to experience it—with current events, scientific writings, and ethnological studies²⁵ to produce the backstories and biographical sketches of performers. This way of presenting the exotic in the context of contemporary social views was further expanded when sideshow performers were billed as “prehistoric” in some way. Ann McKenzie Garascia explains more generally that:

  “Mapping the ancient world onto the British Empire’s little-explored outposts produced a spatialized dimension of time: a phenomenon in which moving further away from the modern center of the empire was represented as moving back further in time. This ratified the practice of taxonomical ranking [of] geographically dispersed populations by banishing them to a ‘permanently anterior time’²⁶ within modernity.”²⁷

  
  The American sideshow capitalized on the idea of presenting non-Western cultures through a temporal lens in part by casting certain individuals into the role of “throwbacks” or “prehistoric” figures. One of the most notable examples of this was Barnum’s characterization, beginning in 1860, of Zip, the What-Is-It, as a “missing link.” The biographical sketch narrative sold at Barnum’s museum places him in a suspended time and place, exemplifying how “freak shows sought to ritualize physical and cultural difference through the “show space,”²⁸ a confluence of time and space that materialized historically specific relationships between colonizers and colonized.”²⁹
  
  The positioning of people as primitive reinforced some of the dominant cultural narratives in both America and Europe, where “colonized people were often read as child-like—in need of the nurturing, civilizing force of the colonizing nation.”^{30 31} In relation to America specifically, Janet Davis points out that the “circus Americanized also reinforced a status quo of exclusion and inequality with its performances of racial hierarchy under the big top and sideshow…”³²
  
  If, as Paul Bouissac noted, the circus has been “a kind of mirror in which culture is reflected, condensed and at the same time transcended,”³³ and considering the advertising claims of edification for all people that were mentioned earlier in this essay, the framing of sideshow performers and those appearing in ethnological congress processions would have both reflected and taught deeply ingrained and troubling ideas about America’s relationship to other people and cultures around the world.
  
  RISE OF THE RAILROAD SHOW
  In America the circus became a form of mass cultural entertainment with few rivals in large part because of national expansion and the use of railroads to travel huge distances. The entertainment was inexpensive and accessible, with widely publicized educational goals “to instruct the minds of all classes”³⁴ aligning with “a cultural imaginary [of] the frontier [that] nurtured exceptionalist myths and symbols regarding the nation’s representative republican government …”³⁵
  
  Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth was traveling exclusively by train in 1872, expanding the show’s reach by increasing the distance the show could travel. Around this time Barnum’s partner William Cameron Coup also pioneered the use of chartered excursion trains that could bring in spectators from surrounding areas.³⁶ The crowds that flocked to the circus came from around town and from the surrounding area, ensuring that large circuses had reach into both the urban and rural communities near where they stopped. Newspapers frequently listed crowd sizes as part of the coverage of the day—it added to the spectacular quality of the already outsized operation. Janet Davis describes a journalist in 1890 writing of Barnum & Bailey’s that “a great sea of faces stretched out in every direction, representing all of the country thirty miles around.”³⁷ The use of excursion trains on the performance day greatly helped with this because they were marketed to bring people to the more centralized site where the circus was appearing. The trains were often advertised to arrive before the free morning parade and depart again after the show, ensuring that people had opportunities to be immersed in the action throughout the day. This use of trains to both transport the vast circus shows and ensure that droves of people showed up on performance day continued well into the twentieth century.
  
  The movement, reach, and appeal of the circus is significant here, and can be traced in part through the route books published at the end of a season. These books include various pieces of information, including listings of circus staff and performers, but they also include detailed accounts of ticket sales and the dates and towns where the circus stopped.³⁸ This information underscores how the late nineteenth and early twentieth century proliferation of ideas about science, medicine, and ethnology, coupled with deeply-embedded colonialist ideas about the non-Western world, were solidified into a narrative that circuses, especially through sideshows and staged spectacles, helped to spread.³⁹ 
  
   
• 1 2021-04-23T10:20:58-07:00 Moy Kee: Chinese Mayor of America 27 plain 2021-05-19T16:43:20-07:00

  A dominant picture of Moy Kee and his wife appears in the circus route book Looking Backward Thirty-Three Weeks With a Circus: a Complete History of the John Robinson's Ten Big Shows for the Season of 1905. The caption reads "Moy Key, Chinese Mayor of America, and His Wife." The 1882 Exclusion Act prevented most Chinese from entering the country and they certainly could not hold mayoral office. The image and description contradict the current anti-Chinese sentiment and laws of the time. Who is Moy Kee? 
  
  

  The photograph represents the couple similarly to ancestor portrait paintings which have a long history in China. These paintings were meant for the family and not the public. Family members commissioned ancestor portraits to commemorate deceased relatives. They depicted parents and grandparents and were honored by the family through rituals, year after year on holidays. Like the photograph, the subjects were usually shown in their best dress, which also revealed the rank of the persons. The couple's robe apparel identifies them of a higher official, social rank. An image of Puyi, China’s emperor at the time sits behind the couple. The portrait promotes an image that the circus commonly favored: the orientalist perception of royalty and revered history of a faraway exotic place.¹²¹

  Moy Kee arrived with his uncle in California from Guangzhou, China during the 1850s. He found work selling newspapers and later at the governor’s house. He returned to marry in China and came back to America to live with his wife. During the 1870s, he spoke out against the strict US laws that no longer favored Chinese immigration in New York City. He converted to Christianity, served as a preacher for the Methodist Chinese missionary, and taught English. After being accused of stealing and jailed, he moved to Chicago and opened a laundry and then a tea house.¹²²

  In 1897 he moved to Indianapolis and became a naturalized citizen. He opened the Moy Kee and Company’s Chinese Restaurant in 1901. Moy Kee exhibited and was a participant at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. At the fair, he met China’s Prince Pu Lun which led to the prince's visit to Indianapolis. The city planned many events for the visit including a luncheon at Moy Kee’s restaurant with Indianapolis Mayor John W. Holzman, civic leader William Fortune, and poet James Whitcomb Riley as guests, a reception in the State House and a visit to May Wright Sewell’s Girls’ Classical School where he spoke and passed out diplomas.¹²³

  Pu Lun granted Moy Kee the rank of  Mandarin of the Fifth Degree after his vist. Moy Kee received an embroidered badge but the title did not offer any real standing or benefit, and most likely seen as a business transaction for China. China commonly courted Chinese merchants outside the country for funds as the government was declining during this period.¹²⁴

  Moy Kee was an active member of the Indianapolis community and it embraced him so much that he was recognized as the Chinese mayor of Indianapolis. Unfortunately, both of Moy Kee's countries later rejected him. The Chinese government rescinded his title and fourteen years after it was granted, the United States government in 1911 stripped him of his citizenship due to his race. Many of his friends offered support in his fight to remain in the country. Mayor Samuel L. Shank wrote a letter to President Taft declaring him one of the city’s upstanding citizens.¹²⁵The Indianapolis Star stated in a portrait column on him:

  Moy always has been regarded as a loyal citizen, and his many friends are expressing regret that he may have to forgo the privileges of citizenship.¹²⁶

  Moy Kee and his wife left for China, but came home to Indianapolis after a year. In 1914, Moy Kee died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 65. He was one of the city’s wealthiest residents at the time, worth $25,000 (over $600,000 today). His wife Chin Fung returned to China with his body for burial.¹²⁷