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

Social Constructions


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 

 

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