Nearly thirty years have passed since Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey Circus was last under canvas. Amusement parks are no longer at the end of basic transportation routes. The Freaks have mostly been medicalized. In retrospect, these three forms become confused in the popular imagination, blending into a half remembered dream. Yet each has its own history, though those histories do intersect and intertwine at various points. Their stories span more than a single country, yet there is a particular complex which is ultimately American.
The circus developed out of a number of elements that had been around separately for hundreds of years. Feats of balance, foolery, trained animals, and juggling had all been featured at medieval banquets and fairs. Yet it is considered that the circus begins with certain exhibitions of horsemanship in the mid-eighteenth century, recognizably a circus by 1773.1 In America, the date is set at 1793, with John Bill Ricketts doing the honors.2 He had worked with one of the two English founders of the circus, setting up his own riding school in Philadelphia. While the circus is technically considered separate from Odditoriums, this first displayed Jack, George Washington's old war mount.
Contrary to popular perceptions, the big top is not an early feature of circuses, rather coming from the use of canvas walls to obscure menagerie animals from non-paying persons. Circus buildings were often of a temporary nature, at times even being actually portable. As might be expected, this could be dangerous, with buildings coming down in the wind. The earliest a tent seems to have been used was in 17883, not to be used again for fifty years in Britain. Maybe. There is some doubt, caused by the tent-like shape certain circus buildings possessed, though it is possible this was a simple matter of drawing attention or an attempt to improve the stability of impermanent structures. Regardless, by the mid-1820s tents had been introduced to the American scene, to become the norm in England by the late 1850s.
Circuses had been only able to play large towns, either places already with a suitable structure, or one where the draw justified erecting one. Unlike during the seventy-five year "Golden Period", the circus was not an ephemeral mirage of a single lively day. But the tented circus swept into small towns with a flurry of activity, with nothing left the next day but some straw and memories.
In the beginning they were small tents, round with a single center pole4. Audiences were in the eight hundred range. In 1840 the Philadelphia Circus performed in an oval tent. In this form the tent had two or more center poles, depending on the length added by the straight sections of canvas between the semicircular ends. Quarter poles were also required to hold up the greater expanses of canvas. While some circuses continued to use round tents, bigger shows were to make much use of this new form of tent.
Crossing the countryside on treacherous roads was difficult, with more than one caravan having to hire a farmer's team to drag the wagon's out of the mire. As early as 1828 eight wagons, forty horses and thirty- five people were with one circus; this was to become a rather modest size within only a few years.5 By the 1870's, some circuses started traveling with sleeping wagons, in order to move the whole show during the night to its next town.
Once the circus had gotten its tent, or rather tents6, it was only a matter of time before the bigger shows started using the railroad. This innovation is attributed to W. C. Coup, when he put the Barnum show on the rails in 1872.7 The change made it possible for circuses to travel to the Far West, as distances between shows could be much greater. It also meant that tents could be even larger, the acts more numerous, and the wagons more exuberant. Street parades which had largely been a means of entering town when traveling by wagon, were able to become elaborate productions onto themselves, as a way of drawing the crowd to the site.
Circus horses are trained to a 42 foot ring, which had become the standardized size early on in the history of the circus. Regardless of the size of the tent, the ring must stay at 42 feet, least the show have to give up on horse acts altogether. As the tents grew longer, and the audience at the ends further from the action, there was only one thing to do. Increase the number of rings. Generally, at any given time, similar acts were appearing in each of the rings, allowing everybody to have a good view of one ring of action. By the 1890's the three-ring had become the standard for the major American Circuses, though at various times particular operations would present four or even five rings of excitement.
As the race for size began in earnest, the tents became simply monstrous. The early tents had been around 75 to 90 feet in diameter. In 1878, when more than one ring was starting to be used, the Cooper and Bailey was under a tent 150 foot round with 100 feet of expansion. 1882 found Barnum and Bailey with a 216 foot round and 162 feet of extension. Forepaugh in 1880 had to install two bands in his 180 foot by 360 foot tent. And the crowds got immense. The 1872 Coup Barnum tent could pack a house to 5,000. The 1898 Barnum and Bailey could handle 14,000 spectators. Quite a distance from 800!
Circuses have two very major logistical problems. One is transport and set up. Through the use of rail and the evident planning required to get the main tent down, packed and moving off the site in an hour, Barnum and Bailey had managed that problem well enough that the German army was deeply impressed.8 The second problem is finding enough set-up space close enough to enough patrons. As the tents expanded, because rail permitted increased weight9, it became harder to find the needed space within any reasonable distance to the cities that had sufficient population density to provide the huge audiences. Barnum10 struck upon the idea of rail excursion fares to encourage people to travel out a distance to see the show, and managed to get the railroads to comply with special "circus runs" that gave a special discount to people going to the show.
It must be remembered that the Circus didn't travel alone, but instead carried along various forms of sideshows. These sideshows were not so much a part of a given circus, or even circuses in general, but separate units that might contract with a number of different entertainments, including Odditoriums and Museums, Carnivals, Amusement parks, Fairs and Exhibitions, as well as the Circus. A popular sort of sideshow were freaks, who were often, but not always, physiologically different.
To understand the freak show, it is necessary to understand that museums developed out of Cabinets of Curiosities, which were room(s) of interesting bricabrac that the extremely wealthy collected, and Arks and "Museums" that scholars and others kept reference objects in. It was not unusual (though perhaps surreal) for mounted skeletons, gemstones, ancient coins, paintings, feathered-headdresses, rocks with "portraits", and other wonderful things to all be higgle-piggled in a few small rooms. Imagine an explorer's attic on display.
At times, some of the specimens were both human and alive. While the museums were trying to be educational, the dependence on ticket sales as well the state of science at the time, tended to produce a very different enterprise than the typical modern university museum. Often, these establishments had a virtual monopoly on entertainment, as "educational diversions" weren't under the taint of "amusement", regardless of how many sing-alongs were in the program. It is to be noted that while museums eventually divided into "legitimate", scientific institutions, and into the "Odditorium" school, the separation was never total.11
During the Victorian period, which was the flower of the freak show12, the ten-in-one, was a completely respectable family entertainment. P. T. Barnum's American Museum was opposite New York's most prestigious hotel13, near City Hall; Brady photographed the human curiosities, Currier and Ives made posters advertising the freaks. Science had not yet congealed into the "rationalistic" mode of "scientism" with which most of us are familiar; the practice of "armchair" science was a popular endeavor.
It is important to understand that freak shows displayed "exotic natives", self-made freaks, and the now "medicalized" freaks together, with a fair amount of blurring the distinctions. Many times "exotics" were simply Americans that could be presented as such. Circassian Beauties were simply young attractive women with beer stiffened hair, who recounted "Life In a Turkish Harem!", and the number of African-Americans presented as tribes people from anywhere in the news including Fiji is probably without number. Additionally, various kinds of "medical" freaks were presented in exotic modes, such as "Aztecs" who generally were pinheads (microcephalics).
Freaks, even ones that aren't gaffs14, are made, not born. Height, or lack thereof, doesn't make a giant or a midget. Presentation is what makes a freak; good freaks are themselves showmen. Two basic modes exist for exhibits; the exotic and the aggrandized. In the exotic mode, the exhibit is from a distant and often savage land.15 Stories of their life there is depicted with Gothic intensity. The aggrandized mode has two forms, the high aggrandized and the "respectable freak". The first presents the freaks as being larger than life, much as Silver Screen Idols were. Midgets were generally presented in this way, gentlemen either in formal wear or uniform, always with cigars, and ladies in gowns with fabulous jewelry. The second, more and more typical as medicine tried to define freaks as "patients", presented as amazing the adaptations of armless and legless exhibits, and often played up piety and similar virtues.
As mentioned above, certain kinds of difference were more often presented in one mode than another. Yet many factors went into "building a freak", including market trends. If we consider just Siamese twins, there were several pairs of sisters billed in the high aggrandized mode, as accomplished singers and/or instrumentalists, and Chang and Eng started as Exotic Orientals and finished as respectable freaks shown in the company of their wives and children. Additionally, there were mixed presentations, such as that of a Chinese Giant, ballied as a great intellectual and dressed as a mandarin.
Another facet of the freak show was sexual in nature. Leaving for another time the "peeping tom" issue, certain kinds of exhibits were of a patently titillating manner. Circassian Beauties, already mentioned, were dressed in garments rather like Victorian underwear with an Orientalism flavor. Exotic, yet portrayed as being from the purest Caucasian stock16, and supposedly recently escaped from some depraved Turkish harem, they had everything that could be wanted in a fantasy girl. But in the end the large availability of potential Circassians ruined them as freak attractions.
Tattooed women were also sexualized, as to show their tattoos they had to bare a lot of flesh. At first their stories were one of either being tattooed by lustful savages, or to avoid lustful savages. Later, the pictures themselves were the story, with patriotic or religious subjects as well as popular images of the day being made writ on flesh. Fat Ladies, monikered with such names as Dolly Dimples or Baby Ruth, were painted showing some thigh, or at least a knee, often in something baring a good amount of cleavage.
Neither the Circus nor the Freak show is what it once was. The Victorian notion of progress did them both in, in different ways. The circus worked to become the biggest, grandest, and greatest entertainment and it achieved that dream at the cost of nearly destroying itself. Logistics have locked the American Circus to the same arenas that concert tours play. The first mass entertainment has returned to being a phenomena only of cities and major towns.
The Freak show succumbed not to size but to knowledge. As the natural world was explored, dissected and catalogued, human oddities ceased to be prodigies of nature and became diseased patients. As the eugenics movement sought to purify the gene pool, the sideshow was "cleansed" out of existence. Stripped down to self-made freaks, novelty acts17, and galooming geeks, with the occasional frog-man or other physiological abnormality, the freak show holds on as a sordid shell of its former self.
