Under the Big Top: My Season With the Circus Read Online Free PDF Page B

poles were forced into place, creating a giant fishbowl, the outer lip high in the air and the middle hanging limply to the ground. Next the bail rings were slowly winched up the poles, carrying the center of the tent. With this penultimate stage under way, Johnny gave the word for the elephants to be brought in to push up the inner poles. No sooner had he given the order, however, than the first minor crisis of the year arose. Royce, the rookie manager, came rushing to Johnny’s side and informed him that all the outer ropes of the tent were two feet too short. Instantly, the childish thrill went out of Johnny’s eyes. His business demeanor returned in haste. He hiked up his trousers, ducked under the tent, and went to rescue his only child.
     
    Feeling like a child myself, I savored the blush of this inaugural scene, delighted by the openness of the strangers around me and thrilled by the richness of this exotic world. This sense of excitement would often return. Indeed, one of the unexpected joys of joining the circus was the process—both formal, through books, and informal, through conversation—of learning about the central, almost unspoken role that the circus has played in the American imagination. In many ways, America and the circus were made for each other: both have European roots, eclectic ingredients, and the fulfillment of dreams at their central core. Most American writers—from Hawthorne to Hemingway to Emily Dickinson—have written about circuses, and probably the majority of Americans who ever lived have seen at least one in their lives. For sure, all Americans have felt their impact: words such as “jumbo” and “star,” expressions such as “hold your horses” and “get this show on the road,” and icons such as the white elephant and pink lemonade all began in the circus. Perhaps even more importantly, many of the great images in the collective memory of American children were painted in the circus—elephants, clowns, cotton candy, parades, and even if a child never saw one himself, tents.
    Big tops have not always been part of the circus. The first American circus, organized by Scottish equestrian John Bill Ricketts, opened on April 3, 1793, at an outdoor amphitheater at Twelfth and Market Streets in Philadelphia. Within three weeks, the show, which presented acrobatics on horseback, clowning, and rope walking in a forty-two-foot circus ring, was seen by President Washington; four years later Washington actually sold the white charger he had ridden in the Revolutionary War to Ricketts. The circus had its first-ever sideshow attraction, not to mention a presidential seal of allure.
    Building on Ricketts’s success, other promoters quickly realized the potential of taking their shows on the road. This need for mobility, along with the equally pressing need to cope with fluctuations in the weather, led Joshua Brown to erect the first American circus big top in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 22, 1825. The addition of canvas tents gave American circuses a flexibility their European indoor counterparts did not have, allowed them room to add traveling menageries and freak shows, and prompted them to invent the enduring line “rain or shine.” In no time, traveling circuses became the principal form of popular entertainment in America, with performers becoming more well known than presidents. In 1848, Dan Rice, the era’s most famed clown, persuaded his friend and Whig presidential nominee Zachary Taylor to ride with him in a ceremonial circus parade. When the townspeople saw the two together someone shouted, “Look, Dan Rice is on Zachary Taylor’s bandwagon,” and politics would be likened to a circus ever after.
    The second great phase in American circuses began after the Civil War with P. T. Barnum, the Walt Disney of his time. Barnum, the prince of humbug—the art of careful exaggeration—had already wowed the country with a museum full of midgets, mammoths, and alleged African