INTRODUCTION
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.[1] 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.”[2] 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. Golden Age of Circus is deeply embedded in the cultural history of the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹ The circus had nearly unimaginable levels of dazzle and excitement, coupled with a tremendous geographic reach. Many businesses and schools closed down when the circus arrived in town, making “Circus Day” the nearly singular focus of attention. The arrival of a traveling show brought out local residents, but also people from the surrounding area as circus excursion trains encouraged spectators to travel to the centralized venue. In fact, the size of the crowds that flocked to the circus lot were often a focus of attention, with newspapers reporting on the totals as a part of the larger picture of the incredible scale of operations.² It is through that reach that the large circus shows also had a platform to shout ideas, many of which positioned the circus as a form of mass culture that “had tremendous power to help shape audiences’ ideas about the expanding nation-state and its changing position in world affairs.