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APPENDIX I

P. T. : HUMBUG AND REALITY

s a candidate for the father of American show business, Barnum’s Awider significance is still being quarried by those with an interest in social and cultural history. The preceding chapters have shown how vari- ety, animal exhibits, acts, minstrelsy, and especially freak shows, owe much of their subsequent momentum to his popularization of these amusement forms. For, while Barnum has long been associated in popular memory solely with the circus business, his overall career as an entertainment promoter embraced far more than the celebrated ringmas- ter figure of present-day public estimation. Barnum saw himself as “the museum man” for the better part of his long show business career, following his successful management of the American Museum from the 1840s to the 1860s. To repeat, for all Barnum’s reputation today as a “circus man,” he saw himself first and foremost as a museum proprietor, one who did much to promote and legitimize the display of “human curiosities.”1 While the emergence of an “American” national consciousness has been dated to the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Barnum’s self- presentation was central to the cultural formation of a particular middle- class American sense of identity in the second half of the nineteenth century (see chapter 1), as well as helping to shape the new show business ethos. Over time, he also became an iconic or referential figure in the wider culture, with multiple representations in cinematic, theatrical, and literary form (see below).Yet was Barnum really the cultural pacesetter as he is often presented in popular biographical writing, not to mention his own self-aggrandizing prose. At the 1864 reopening of his American Museum theater, Barnum used verse to shed some light on his then P. T. Barnum, portrait, circa 1855–65. Owner: Brady-Handy Collection Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-cwpbh-02176). APPENDIX I 181 achievements, with claims that he either first exhibited or initiated most of the following exceptional items:

Who as a “General” thing brought out Tom Thumb?/ Who introduced (you can’t say there I sinned)/ The Swedish Nightingale, sweet ?/ Who brought you Living Whales from Labrador?/ . . . The family of Albinos? the Giraffe?/ The famous Baby Show that made you laugh?/ . . . The curious “What Is It?” which you, though spunky,/ Won’t call a man and cannot call a monkey./ These things and many more time forbids to state,/ I first introduced, if I did not originate.2

While Barnum merits an important place in the history of nineteenth- century show business, his contribution as an originator of certain paid-for amusements and as being the first to show various museum exhibits can be overstated. Undoubtedly a seminal figure in the development of commercial entertainment, he is unwisely given credit for being a cultural innovator. “He [Barnum] would introduce to America the modern public museum, the popular concert, and the three-ring circus, all forerunners of , motion pictures, and television,” claimed novelist Irving Wallace () fulsomely in his popular biography The Fabulous Showman (1959). In addition, “he would invent modern advertising and showman- ship.” A recent work confirms the latter and more defensible assertion: “Modern advertising and promotion, marketing, and show business ...all of them . . . began with Barnum.”3 Such definitive statements take Barnum as a cultural pioneer too much at his own inflated estimation for, as will become evident, he did not initi- ate a single one of the innovations Wallace attributes to him above. Taking each in turn,

● “He would introduce to America the modern public museum . . .” The privately-owned museum open to the public, owed its American origins not to Barnum but to Charles Willson Peale and his sons in late eighteenth-century . Before Barnum purchased it in late 1841, the American Museum in New York was little more than a moribund imitator of the Peale family museums. ● “He would introduce to America . . . the popular concert . . .” The Jenny Lind concerts that Barnum promoted at mid-century were not the first popular American musical concerts for “decent folk” but certainly among the most successful. ● “He would introduce to America . . . the three-ring circus . . .” Barnum made no claim to be the first to introduce the three-ring circus format, possibly because he knew English showman “Lord” George Sanger insisted he had experimented with three rings as early 182 APPENDIX I

as in his 1856 circus show, possibly because of a loose interpretation of the word “ring.” ● “He would invent modern advertising . . .” Barnum was only par- tially the inventor of modern American advertising, with his pictorial handbills, lithograph posters, squibs, and newspaper promotions, since “puffing” had been a feature of the American popular press from at least the early 1830s onward (see artist George Catlin). ● “He would invent . . . [modern] showmanship.” While a great show- man, Barnum was part of a long tradition and his exhibits and displays were not particularly innovative. Even the Feejee Mermaid, the property of his friend , had long been displayed by traveling showmen. Barnum merely loaned such exhibits and devised innovative ways of marketing them as incredible crowd-pleasing exhibitions.4

In reality, with the notable exception of Tom Thumb, Barnum was not the first exhibitor of what he offered his patrons, nor the actual “originator” of any single mode of entertainment, although this is not to diminish his wider social and cultural significance. The record shows that Barnum actu- ally took over, publicized, and energized preexisting amusement forms, like those whose multifarious history has been recounted in previous chapters. “The Feejee Mermaid, the American Museum, Jenny Lind, , and the great himself had all been before the public when he arrived on the scene,” points out a more reliable biographer. On the other hand, Barnum most probably created the first reserved seats; the first mati- nee shows for women; the first celebrity marketing campaigns; the first venues with national audiences, and; the first corporate model for commer- cial entertainment. Yet the student needs to maintain a firm historical dimension, given the extensive literature on the showman’s career, to evade the kind of uncritical or exaggerated claims made for Barnum, not least by the man himself in his autobiographical and other writings.5

Representations of Barnum Even in his own lifetime, P. T. Barnum came to represent a larger-than- life personality or cultural phenomenon associated with peculiar northeast American or Yankee qualities (see chapter 1). When he first took “General” Tom Thumb, “the Yankee Dwarf,” to see at Buckingham Palace in 1844, Barnum was listed in the Court Circular as the midget’s “guardian.” The English satirical journal Punch insisted, however, that the appropriate term was “showman.” Such was Barnum’s interna- tional fame 40 years later that Punch now lionized him as “the great APPENDIX I 183

Phineas the First, Emperor of Showmen.” Consequently, the familiar nineteenth-century European caricature of the bragging, overbearing but egalitarian Yankee was, to some extent, indebted to Barnum’s self- promotion during his international tours with Tom Thumb in the 1840s and, now a more portentous figure, with the Barnum & Bailey circus in the 1880s.6 Frequently, as related in his own of P. T. Barnum, assembled crowds cheered the trickster-showman in recognition of his Yankee ingenuity, and showing a fondness for being misled by a clever hoaxer, to the extent of liking to be fooled. Equally, the great showman as emblem- atic of humbug, hucksterism, and trickery is pertinent to the invariable assumption that Yankee entrepreneurs routinely espoused ruthless tactics to secure a profitable business deal. The label “confidence-man,” first attached by a journalist in 1849 to a New York swindler of “genteel appearance” who talked his victims out of their pocket watches, might seem appropri- ate here. Interestingly, Herman Melville of Moby Dick (1851) fame devoted his financially unsuccessful last novel to the concept of The Confidence-Man (1857). This work can be read as a sardonic if mystifying satire on the prevailing Barnum-like manipulation of commercial encounters in which, on a long Mississippi steamboat journey, one trickster after another peddles bogus stocks, patent medicines, and real estate. The disillusioned Melville had long been interested in Barnum and the novel refers indirectly to various of his exhibits. Sixteen years later, a prominent Barnum-like figure in fiction was the great comic character “Colonel” Eschol Sellers, the self- deceiving land speculator in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age (1873), a satire on corrupt Washington lobbying that gave its name to an era.7 A quarter of a century after Barnum’s death, it was widely recognized that he had come to represent an element of the national character. “[Barnum’s] name has taken a permanent place in the language as the synonym of trickery and bombast,” pointed out the theater critic of The New York Herald in 1918 reviewing the new play Mr Barnum. This comedy of circus life at the Criterion on Broadway was penned by Harrison Rhodes and portly actor Thomas A. Wise, who played Barnum. Going beyond the self-evident, the anonymous critic also acknowledged certain defining aspects of a middle-class, provincial American in the intensely ambitious and hardworking Barnum, enduring qualities that were recog- nizably part of a white, Protestant, cultural repertoire: “American brag and American bluff; our love of clever new trickery and our passion for all the old moralities; our remorseless calculation in matters of business and our astounding personal kindliness and generosity—they were all there in Barnum.”8 184 APPENDIX I

Five years later Harvard literary critic Gamaliel Bradford (1863–1932), in reviewing M. R. Werner’s largely uncritical 1923 biography of the great man, endorsed a common view of the period that Barnum was as quintessentially American as he was human:

He [Barnum] had the infinite American resourcefulness: if he could not get his end by one means, he would try another. He had American democracy, believed in the average man, in his intelligence, his uprightness, his good intention. He had American good nature, could make a joke and take one, and face trouble with a smile. The first of typical Americans was Franklin, the second was Lincoln and Barnum was [no poor] third . . . He beat the drum and blew the trumpet at the door of his circus tent, till the whole wide world was driven to look at him.

This tendency to idealize Barnum was familiar enough in the 1920s and is echoed in Werner’s own lengthy portrait of “one of the outstanding figures of our national life, for Barnum was a most typical American without ever becoming an average American.”9 A more critical stereotype of the Yankee persisted across the Atlantic into World War II and its aftermath. For a Mass Observation (MO) survey in 1946, people were asked to recall the wartime allied-American “occu- pation” of Great Britain and —as in the John Schlesinger movie Yanks (1979). The older and more conservative English people who replied to MO questionnaires tended to dislike the “invading” GIs or American army soldiers stationed in their local communities. They cited American boastfulness, immaturity, materialism, and immorality as character traits: what the survey condescendingly called “the less pleasing qualities of adolescence.” Younger respondents, conversely, cited more complimen- tary qualities—equally personified in Barnum—such as energy, enterprise, generosity, and efficiency.10 As already indicated, Barnum wrote approvingly in his first autobiography of how his superior cunning and salesmanship had outsmarted various competitors or business rivals. Liberal Hollywood’s moral censure of this huckster ethos is evident in late twentieth-century movies such as John G. Avildsen’s Save the Tiger (1973), in which Jack Lemmon plays a dress manufacturer, a tragic figure trying to reconcile the hero worship of his childhood with the degradations he submits himself to in the business world. Equally, the desperate real estate salesmen in David Mamet’s acerbic play Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) reaffirm a dutiful willingness to bargain, cajole, or use trickery, to secure a sale. Yet a business primer, evidence of Barnum’s still current notoriety, Joe Vitale’s There’s a Customer Born Every APPENDIX I 185

Minute: P. T. Barnum’s Secrets to Business Success (1998), claims that he genuinely believed in giving the public more than their money’s worth, as well as in the power of the written word and in persistently advertising. Showmen-entrepreneurs such as financial speculator James Fisk (1834–72), the “Barnum of Wall Street,” Broadway producer-lyricist Billy Rose (1895–1966), movie producer Mike Todd (1909–58) and Virgin’s British founder, Sir Richard Branson, are routinely called Barnum’s heirs.11 Barnum not only helped to disseminate nineteenth-century America’s entertainment culture, but he has also became a sort of palimpsest for Americans to reinterpret themselves. Barnum-like self-publicists, salesmen, or small-town boosters are prominent characters in the satirical novels of Minnesota-born Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951). Philistine realtor Babbitt (1922), for example, is “nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.” As a widely recognized huckster stereo- type, Barnum possibly helped shape the character of the American arms dealer in Graham Greene’s left-leaning second novel, The Name of Action (1930), who boasts of his business skills: “Oh, boy, until you’ve seen me hustle you don’t know what hustling is.” With the current fad for real life characters in fiction, Barnum appears as himself in Darin Strauss’ innovative novel about the conjoined twins Chang and Eng (2000). He also plays a major role, together with his American Museum, in the well-researched Edgar Allan Poe-as-detective series by Harold Schechter, in particular The Hum Bug (2001). Equally, the young German migrant hero of Elizabeth Gaffney’s Metropolis (2005) becomes, on arrival in New York, a stableman tending Barnum’s second American Museum , until the final great fire in 1868.12 In theatrical terms, reference has already been made to the Broadway comedy Mr Barnum (1918), but he was also eulogized in the long-running 1980s musical Barnum! as a flamboyant show-business phenomenon, improbably enamored of singing star Jenny Lind, with English entertainers and in the instantly recognizable title role. Tied to the musical, Roderick Thorp’s equally as far-fetched novel Jenny and Barnum (1981) was discreetly advertised as “the greatest love story on earth.” On film, the celebrated showman has been portrayed by a blowsy in (1934), by a bearded Burl Ives in the flaccid comedy Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (1967) and, less promi- nently, by Roger Ashton-Griffiths in director Martin Scorsese’s panoramic but largely mythical historical movie Gangs of New York (2002). In addition, testifying even further to Barnum’s iconic appeal, Burt Lancaster (1988) and Beau Bridges (1999) have impersonated him in movies made for television.13 186 APPENDIX I

Image and Reality At the first appearance of the famous traveling circus combination of Barnum & Bailey’s The Greatest Show on Earth in 1881, the renowned showman was over 70 years of age. Barnum’s name had already been before the American public for over 30 years when he first met with W. C. Coup and entered into promoting the circus business that was to occupy so much of his attention over the remainder of his life. He now became more and more of a figure- head whose flamboyant showmanship tended to conceal the role of numer- ous other entrepreneurs with whom he was in partnership. Barnum lived on to see the advent of an urban-industrial corporate America, yet his formative roots were in another nation of small towns, puritanical New England states, and a fast-growing but still elitist New York. Late in 1889, when the now elderly Barnum’s traveling European cir- cus was visiting , a welcoming banquet chaired by a long-standing British friend was held in his honor. Proposing a toast to “a man of unim- peachable morality and undoubted integrity” journalist and essayist George Augustus Sala (1828–95)—in a speech conspicuously unctuous for a disciple of Charles Dickens—tactfully chose not to recall that Barnum had begun his career by resorting to deceptions such as the Feejee Mermaid and . The veteran showman in response solemnly claimed recogni- tion for his “successful endeavors, extending over more than half a century, to elevate and refine popular amusements and exhibitions (cheers)—to rob them of that poison which had done so much injury in past generations.”14 Ten years earlier, Barnum had claimed to “have conscientiously refused to cater to low or depraved tastes” but to “have striven to cultivate a love and admiration for that which is pure and refined.” Barnum’s presentation of his entertainments as cultured and wholesome was, perhaps, the ultimate humbug, exemplifying the combination of high principles and pecuniary motives that are such a prominent feature of the period. Yet, in his capacity as a major promoter of forms of mass entertainment with a bourgeois sense of moral decorum or respectability, Barnum played a significant role in helping to diversify and improve popular taste, as well as making traditional amusements such as the more attractive to middle-class audiences. It is also worth reminding ourselves that of critical importance to the success of late-Victorian genteel reformers as cultural arbiters, “was their ability to enlist the support of influential shapers of the nascent mass culture [such as Barnum], who echoed their tone and carried their message to a broad audience.”15 Barnum’s contribution as an innovator to various forms of the exhibi- tion or show business may have been overstated by his early biographers, but as a relentless entrepreneurial advocate of the new entertainment APPENDIX I 187 industry, he helped introduce a new level of investment and a new scale of organization into commercial entertainment. Eventually, toward the end of his long career, large-scale corporate management and massive capital investment began to make his personal style of showmanship seem out- dated. Yet, to repeat the striking metaphor with which the concluding chapter opened, Barnum’s American Museum, his hoaxes, his big-top cir- cus, and his sideshows “first shifted the economic engines of modern show business into gear.” He was, in this sense, the nineteenth-century architect of the modern culture industry. A century and more after Barnum’s death, this vigorous entrepreneur and master of the art of self-promotion justifiably retains his self-appointed title as the World’s Greatest Showman.16 Harry Houdini, full-length portrait, standing, in chains, circa 1905 Source: Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division (LC-USZ62-112419). APPENDIX II

HARRY HOUDINI’S EARLY CAREER

rom an immigrant Hungarian-Jewish family, Ehrich Weiss or Weisz F(1874–1926), the ambitious young man who became the famous escapologist “Harry Houdini,” was born the son of a rabbi in Budapest but brought up from the age of four in Appleton, Wisconsin. According to one biographer, a record of Ehrich’s show activities before he entered into big- time vaudeville at the turn of the century, “survives only in a handful of unidentified clippings, undated programs, unexplained contracts, laconic diary entries, and later misrecollections, revealing little more than that they offered a changeable mélange of subtrunk, handcuffs, and conventional magic, playing an occasional one-week stand in variety shows and dinky dime museums.” Far more is actually known about Houdini’s fascinating early career than this quotation suggests, illuminating what it was like to live on the road as a traveling entertainer for many years before finding lasting fame as an escape artist in the early twentieth century.1 Beginning in the early 1890s, Ehrich, together with his brother Theodore or Dash, scraped up engagements as a magician in dime muse- ums, such as George H. Huber’s Palace Museum on East 14th Street in New York that presented a series of stage acts (freaks, fire-eaters, strong men) of the kind later associated with circus sideshows. Ten miles away at , on the other side of the East River, young Ehrich worked with a strong man in a tent for “throw money,” passing the hat round after the act. The brothers next traveled to , where Ehrich managed to get a booking at Kohl and Middleton’s dime museum on the Midway at the 1893 World’s Fair. He gave 20 shows a day for $12 a week, taking in an “Indian yogi” act, rope-ties of the kind used by spirit mediums, and card tricks. That same year the budding entertainer also introduced a handcuff act, marking the first appearance of “Harry Houdini, Handcuff King and Escape Artist,” whose stage name derived from his then idol Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a renowned nineteenth-century professional magician 190 APPENDIX II whom the mercurial Harry subsequently “unmasked” as a self-promoter. After his marriage to “the petite soubrette” Wilhelminia Beatrice Rahner, known as Bessie or Bess, one of Harry’s very first engagements was back at Huber’s Museum in New York, where Monsieur and Mlle. Houdini performed their “wonderful Metamorphosis” or substitute-trunk act.2 Despite their best efforts, steady work did not come the Houdinis’ way, so husband and wife took what bookings they could get, performing mostly in beer halls and small dime museums. The beer hall program would generally begin with a melodrama performed by the ensemble: there was no time for rehearsal but everyone knew the few stock pieces, such as Ten Nights in a Bar-Room. Next would come various individual turns, such as Bess’s -and-dance act, while Harry escaped from his handcuffs or swallowed needles and then pulled them, threaded, from his mouth. He also did some sleight-of-hand tricks; then together the couple performed the famous Metamorphosis. Dime museums were less rough and boozy than the more plebeian beer halls, but still meant hard, repetitive work alongside the freak exhibits. Much also depended on the barker and the quality of the other acts, the duo sharing the bill with such as “Unthan, the Legless Wonder” and “Blue Eagle,” who broke planks over his head. If all else failed, Harry and Bess could always get an engagement at Kohl and Middleton’s Museum in Chicago, where they were required to be on stage from ten in the morning until ten at night, giving ten and more shows a day. Speaking many years later of “when I was playing Dime Museums, and being classed a ‘freak,’” Houdini said: “I generally kept very quiet, and tried to make a living, not knowing that I was developing my dexterity by working ten to fifteen times daily.”3 Unexpectedly booked to appear in New York at Tony Pastor’s theater on fashionable 14th Street, near Third Avenue and Union Square, the excited Houdinis arrived only to find themselves in small type at the bottom of the bill and playing at the worst times to maximize audience attendance. So the tireless couple next joined the Welsh Brothers’ Circus, “a ten-twent’-thirt’” show or small tent circus without animals that toured the smaller northeastern towns, as in Pennsylvania, during the open season. Now the couple were really hitting the low spots as apprentice entertain- ers. “The first thing you do with this outfit is to work in the sideshow,” said the circus boss. “You do Punch and Judy; the wife mind reading. In the concert, Houdini to do magic, the wife to sing and dance—then your trunk trick, and the handcuff act as the big feature. And of course, you are in the [daily] parade. Twenty-five [dollars] a week and cakes [meals].” Houdini, with his muscular shoulders and impassive expression, also vol- unteered to play a freakish Wild Man who had failed to put in an appearance, supposedly captured in the depths of the Java jungle, according to the APPENDIX II 191 ringmaster. The Wild Man’s cage would be drawn in with Houdini growling and tearing at a bit of raw meat, showered with cigars and cigarettes by males in the audience to hear him growl, which pleased smokers in the circus troupe (Houdini was a nonsmoker). Harry’s later construction of a supremely masculine persona of absolute fearlessness and invincibility perhaps owed something to the Wild Man.4 In 1895 Houdini was also persuaded to take a half-interest in a troupe called The American Gaiety Girls, presumably a variant of once popular burlesque, the main feature of which turned out to be its debts. Despite touring, the show held little appeal and took the Houdini fortunes with it, until things got so bad that couple could scarcely afford meals; so precari- ous was the life on the road. In the spring of 1896 they joined up with a professional church organist from Connecticut called Edward J. Dooley who had put all his money into an elaborate traveling magic show, the Marco Company, into which he incorporated the Houdinis. When Marco disbanded the company in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the married pair took over but were soon adrift again, moving from one precarious engagement to another. In desperation, Harry set up “Professor Harry Houdini’s School of Magic” and sold some magic apparatus on commis- sion for a Chicago manufacturer, and also some tricks of his own. A manager in then swindled them out of some of their meager earnings.5 At the end of 1897 came an offer of $25 a week to join “Dr.” Thomas Hill’s California Concert Company, a midwestern traveling medicine show way down at the bottom of the American entertainment hierarchy, slogging through Kansas and Oklahoma. In the remotest towns, where the vaudeville tours did not venture, intrepid medicine men parked their wagons and put on a show. When “Buster” Keaton’s parents, Joe and Myra, joined Dr. Hill’s company for a while, they did a knockabout Irish comedy routine. (Their six-month-old son Joseph Francis fell down a flight of hotel stairs at this time but was not hurt too badly: “They said, ‘It sure was a buster,’ and the old man said, ‘That’s a good name for him.’ I never lost the name”). With the advent of vaudeville, acts such as these began to dominate medicine show content, albeit without the big-city emphasis on elaborate costuming. Meanwhile, Hill had heard of a spirit medium in the Midwest drawing big crowds and approached Houdini about doing a similar routine. Harry, who had watched several spiritualists in New York, was convinced that they were all frauds whose acts could be easily duplicated. So successful were the Houdinis as fake mind readers and séance mediums that, when Dr. Hill’s medicine show collapsed in the spring of 1898, the couple set up as mediums on their own account for a short while.6 192 APPENDIX II

“Houdini’s unique performances . . . grew out of the unlikely fusion of the worlds of Spiritualism, conjuring, physical culture, and professional crime, combining features of the séance, the magic act, the muscle show, and the burglary,” claims a modern biographer. After the medium routine followed a brief spell with a traveling repertory theater troupe specializing in melodramas, in which the Houdinis both played roles and did turns between the acts. They then spent another six months on a return engage- ment from April 1898 with the Welsh Brothers’ Circus, where Harry toyed with the idea of becoming an acrobat. He even went so far as to buy “pink tights and uppers” in early September, but acrobatics was not what Houdini really wanted to do and just over a month later the circus shut down. Then, at the end of 1898, while again at Kohl and Middleton’s Museum, Houdini did his famous “escape from the Chicago city gaol” stunt and got his picture in the newspapers. On the strength of this, husband and wife were booked for a couple of weeks into the Hopkins Theatre, Chicago’s top vaudeville house, but then they returned once more to the lowly dime museums.7 Yet the police cell publicity was still working and during 1899 Houdini persisted with his prison-breaking stunts, adding to his column inches. One evening, Harry was fulfilling a contract at a St. Paul, Minnesota, beer hall, when Martin Beck, the booker for the Orpheum Circuit, then the largest vaudeville theater chain, approached him after the show. Beck offered a tryout at $60 a week, provided Houdini and his wife focused their performance on the handcuffs and substitution trunk routines. These two big stunts would at long last make Houdini famous on the vaudeville circuit as an escapologist, only months before he first set sail across the Atlantic for London with Bess at the end of May 1900. During the next quarter of a century, until his untimely and accidental death at age 52, Harry Houdini became a living legend who not only performed straitjacket escape routines on stage but also acted in movies, and exposed fake mediums, all to the acclaim of the new mass audience for entertainment.8 So Harry’s demeaning experiences as a dime museum entertainer were left far behind in the early twentieth century. What set “the handcuff king & prison breaker” Houdini apart from the other escape artists of his day was not simply his skill and strength but also the remarkable intensity he created in every performance. At a time when individual male freedom appeared to be threatened on many fronts, the Great Houdini’s performance dramas were intimately concerned with issues of masculinity and the American male body, together with “nightmares of entrapment and dreams of triumphant release.” Recorded on film, his open-air stunts such as his leaping off a bridge, handcuffed and manacled, into the icy waters APPENDIX II 193 of the Charles River were attended by enormous crowds. The new and incredibly popular Houdini’s operational aesthetic also “appealed to the amateur’s desire to understand technical processes in a secularized corporate age,” argues John F. Kasson, historian of the white male body and the challenge of modernity. “He invited viewers to look inside the works of his escapes and to match wits with him, all the better to astound them.”9 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

first looked into this broad topic, to which I was alerted by Robert Lewis I(American Studies) of the University of , while renting an apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for six weeks following the calamity of 9/11. A period of study leave and financial help from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ulster made an extended stay in New York possible, enabling me to do research at the splendid , the New-York Historical Society (where I saw vaudeville acts revived for Halloween), and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, the last a great show business resource. Alan Brinkley kindly secured my appointment as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, enabling me to use the library’s Oral History Research Project. I was assisted with access to the Seymour B. Durst Old York Library and in many other ways by Joshua Brown and Ellen Noonan of the American Social History Project at the City University of New York (CUNY). Attendance at the First Gotham History Festival held at the CUNY Graduate School was also a rewarding experience—memorable for hearing Martin Scorsese talk about Gangs of New York—as was living in such a resilient city. Not surprisingly, in the absence of research assistants and external grants, the book in your hands has a bias toward New York- based evidential sources. On taking early retirement, a self-financed return trip to New York followed in October 2004 to revisit the Lincoln Center and also the Public Library at Bridgeport, Connecticut, center of Barnum studies. A year later I stayed for several weeks in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work on the extensive body of entertainment-related material held in the Theatre Collection at Harvard University, as well as Jumbo records at nearby . I am grateful to helpful library staff at both universities and also to archivist Brian Browne for access to the Earls Court and records held in London. Some of my ideas about Barnum in this book have been tried out in papers presented at Popular Culture Association confer- ences held in , Cambridge, and Philadelphia. My great friends from Washington, Barbara and Lewis Moore, helped make these conferences 196 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS even more hospitable. My old friend Richard Price of the University of Maryland was, as ever, a useful sounding board, as was my hospitable former colleague Steve Ickringill. Also Lester Lamon, then at Indiana University, South Bend, kindly agreed to read chapter 4 and made useful comments. Gary Cross of the University of Pennsylvania gave encouragement just when it was needed. The irrepressible John Jones freely gave of his time to help me with the illustrations. Christopher Chappell, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, together with the team at Newgen, patiently saw me through the publica- tion process. My immediate family, mother and brother Chris, have been as supportive as ever. Susan Bryson helped me by just being there. Members of the Gastronomico-Philosophical Society were wonderful hosts in London. None of the foregoing can take any responsibility for what is written here. Finally, I am obliged to the librarians and archivists of all the institutions I have visited for making my research trips to the United States so pleasurable, however surprised they may have been by an Englishman showing an interest in such recondite aspects of the American past as are embraced by “the show business.”

JOHN SPRINGHALL Portstewart Northern Ireland NOTES

In citing works in the notes, usually short titles have been used. Full citations may be found in the bibliography. Archival sources cited frequently are identified by the following abbreviations: BRT Billy Rose Theater Collection, NYLPA ECO Earls Court and Olympia records, London HL Houghton Library, University of Harvard, Cambridge, MA. LWC Leonidas Westervelt Circus Collection, NYHS NYHS New York Historical Society Library NYLPA The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center NYPL New York Public Library, Special Collections OHROC Oral History Research Office Collection, Columbia University, New York OYL Seymour B. Durst Old York Library, City University of New York Graduate Center PLB Public Library at Bridgeport, CT, Barnum Collection TCH Theatre Collection at University of Harvard, Cambridge, MA. TUJ Tufts University, Medford, MA, Jumbo Archive TWC Townsend Walsh Circus Collection, NYLPA

Introduction 1. Craigie and Hulbert, A Dictionary of American English, 2111, citing: Northall, Before and behind the Curtain, 167; “Tom Thumb and the Queen,” Punch or the London Charivari, 144 (April 13, 1844): 157. See also Appendix I. 2. Logan, Before the Footlights, 20, cited in: Lewis, ed., From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, 2; Bordieu, Distinction. 3. Rydell and Kroes, in Bologna, 174, 7. British journalist W. T. Stead (1849–1912), editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, who went down with the Titanic in 1912, wrote The Americanization of the World (1902). 4. Fiske, “Manifest Destiny,” 588; Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 312–16; Cashman, America in the Gilded Age, 36–72; Lewis, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 10. 198 NOTES

5. Powers, Mark Twain, 46–47; Denning, Mechanic Accents, 27–46. 6. Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics, 73, 169–72. 7. Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 149–63. 8. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination; Arato and Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. 9. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd; Wagner, Parade of Pleasure, 72; Rosenberg and White, eds., Mass Culture; Anon., “A Horrible Trade,” , November 12, 1954, 6; Springhall, Youth, Popular Culture and Moral Panics, 143. 10. Thompson, Discrimination and Popular Culture, 206; Hall and Whannel, The Popular Arts, 15. 11. Hall and Whannel, The Popular Arts, 143–49, 155–63; Turner, British Cultural Studies, 70–74; Amis, New Maps of Hell; Orwell, “Boys’ Weeklies”; Warshow, The Immediate Experience. Warshow died aged only 37 in 1955. 12. Allen, ed., To Be Continued; Bogdan, Freak Show; John Kasson, Amusing the Million; Allen, Horrible Prettiness; Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West; John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man.

1 The American Museum: Barnum’s Great Leap Forward 1. Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 2. 2. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 107. 3. “Obituary of P. T. Barnum,” The Times, April 7, 1891, 6; Barnum, Funny Stories, 361. 4. Harris, Humbug, 57; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 334–37. 5. Wallace, The Fabulous Showman, 52; Macdonald, ed., Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, 436; Barnum, Art of Money Getting, 10; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 201–2. 6. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum; Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man; Decker, Made in America, 138. 7. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 20, 23. Barnum claimed sales of 500,000 for his autobiography in America alone by 1879. 8. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 157–59; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 318–19. 9. Toll, On with the Show, 26; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum; Cook, The Arts of Deception; Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader; Reiss, The Showman and the Slave; Goodall, Performance and Evolution; Harding, Story. 10. Croft-Cooke and Cotes, Circus, 57–58; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 30–35, 218–19. Despite Barnum’s boast, two other parcels of land in Bethel appraised at $2,000 were also pledged as security, along with Ivy Island: Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 31–32. 11. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 16–17, 318–19; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 43–44. In 1849 Universalist Minister Edwin H. Chapin, later a close friend, persuaded regular champagne drinker Barnum to become a teetotaler. NOTES 199

12. Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, 5, 67, 224; Ironside, “Literary Barnumism.” 13. Croft-Cooke and Cotes, Circus, 53–54; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 39–46; Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, 18. 14. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 77–80; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 24–27; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 177, 189; Sutcliffe, Steam. 15. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 207. 16. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 87–89. 17. Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic; Alderson, ed., Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons, 32–35. 18. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 12–14, 24–26. 19. Toll, On with the Show, 29; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 31, 89; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 25–26; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 113. 20. Dickens, American Notes, 324; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 221. 21. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 27; Schechter, The Hum Bug, 22. See the “virtual reconstruction” of the American Museum at www.lostmuseum. cuny.edu/home.html (last accessed on July 12, 2007). 22. Twitchell, Carnival Culture, 63; Anon., Sights and Wonders in New York (1849), 6, in Barnum’s Enterprises, VIII, NYHS. 23. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 225. 24. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 32–34; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 138–41; Eric Fretz, “P. T. Barnum’s Theatrical Selfhood,” 97–107; Altick, The Shows of London. 25. Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 43. 26. Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 128, citing Barnum’s American Museum, Illustrated (1850); undated handbill, American Museum Box 1850–55, TCH. 27. McConachie, “Pacifying American Theatrical Audiences,” 47–70; Harris, Humbug, 242. 28. Fergus Linehan, program note, Tom Murphy (after W. H. Smith and a gentleman), The Drunkard, Beckett Theatre, Trinity College, Dublin, August 2003; undated handbill, American Museum Box 1850–55, TCH. 29. Saxon ed., Selected Letters, 43; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 121–25; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 62–65. 30. Cited: Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 106–7. 31. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 131; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 141–42; Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 114. Barnum mounted the Aiken version of Uncle Tom, with Caroline Howard as Topsy, in 1866 and also in 1868. 32. “Thrilling Success of the New American Comedy!” poster for October 25, 1859, American Museum Box 1858–59, TCH. 33. Interview with “a Grave Newspaperman of Today” in “Showman Barnum,” The Rockville [Mass.] Journal, April 16, 1891, 3, Barnum’s Enterprises, Vol. 5, NYHS. 34. Barnum to Messrs. R. Griffin & Co., January 27, 1860: Saxon ed., Selected Letters, 102–3. 200 NOTES

35. “Destruction of Barnum’s Museum,” The New York Herald, July 14, 1865, front page: Barnum’s Enterprises, Vol. 5, NYHS. 36. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 37–38; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 194–97; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 108–9: 37. Sante, Low Life, 99. 38. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 109; Frick, New York’s First Theatrical Center, 93–96. 39. Bogdan, Freak Show, 35, 37; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 41–42. 40. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 41; Cook, The Arts of Deception; Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture. 41. Ware and Lockard, Jr., P. T. Barnum Presents Jenny Lind, 1–13; Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 165. 42. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 82, 180; Saxon ed., Selected Letters, 54. 43. Montgomery ed., P. T. Barnum Presents, 1–12; Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, 7–8. 44. Mandler, “The Problem with Cultural History,” 111, warns of dangers in a simplistic approach to culture and national identity; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 180; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility. 45. Cited: Werner, Barnum, 251. 46. Anon., “The Two Hundred Thousand and First Curiosity in Congress,” Nation, March 7, 1867, 191–92; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 201. 47. Werner, Barnum, 289–99; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 201; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 223–34. Dana (1815–82) was a Republican free-soiler, Massachusetts maritime lawyer, and author of Two Years before the Mast (1840). Prince Talleyrand (1754–1838) was a resourceful French statesman who served both Napoleon and, subsequently, the Bourbon restoration. 48. Pond, Eccentricities of Genius, 353–54; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 52, defends Barnum, in spite of Pond, as sensitive toward others and their needs. 49. Huntington, Who Are We? 69–71; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 180; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, 24–25, 2. 50. Goodall, Performance and Evolution; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 258; Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, xi.

2 The Freak Show Business: “Step Right Up, Folks” 1. Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” 23. 2. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 12. “Proustian” is a reference to the introspective French novelist Marcel Proust (1871–1922), author of the 13-volume mas- terpiece À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. 3. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 66. 4. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 113, 270; Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” 27–31; “Extraordinary Living Wonders,” American Museum poster, March 26, 1866, TCH. NOTES 201

5. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 6; Bogdan, Freak Show, 187; Fahy, “Exotic Fantasies, Shameful Realities,” 69–70. 6. Bogdan, “The Social Construction of Freaks,” 23–37; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 150, 209. 7. Leroi, Mutants, 13–14. 8. Bogdan, Freak Show, 32; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 120. 9. McConachie, “Museum Theatre,” 72–73. 10. Bogdan, Freak Show, 10, 30–31; McConachie, “Museum Theatre,” 73; Anon., “Circus Sideshow ‘Freaks,’” New York Daily Mirror, April 30, 1937, 12. The source for all American twentieth-century newspaper and magazine references is the freak show cuttings file MWEZϩn.c. 25,978 in the NYLPA. 11. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 98–103; Bogdan, Freak Show, 111–12, 134–42; Leroi, Mutants, 255–61; Lewis, ed. From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, 48–65. The photographic visiting card, or carte de visite, was devised by André Adolphe- Eugène Disdéri in 1854. 12. Harris, Humbug, 57; “Filmmaker Accused of Faking One Man’s Unforgettable Story,” The [London] Guardian, February 20, 2006, 6; Ironside, “Literary Barnumism.” 13. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 175, 208, 185; Paul Humphries, “Mixed Fortunes,” Guardian Society, September 11, 2002, 2–3; Kunhardt, “Barnum and Brady,” 64–66. 14. Rosenfeld, “Barnum’s First Freaks,” 10–12; Wilson, “Freaks,” 25–31. 15. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 144–47; Wallace and Wallace, The Two, 257–58, 296–97. 16. Interview with “A Grave Newspaperman of Today” in Anon., “Showman Barnum,” The Rockville [Mass.] Journal, April 16, 1891, 3, Barnum’s Enterprises, Vol. 5, NYHS; Cook, Jr., “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts,” 139–57. 17. Barnum’s American Museum poster, circa 1861, TCH; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 134, 148. The bizarre pamphlet, Anon., Life of Zip, written for George Bunnell’s New York [Dime] Museum, locates the capture of “Zip” deep in the Australian bush. 18. Leroi, Mutants, 169–75; McConachie, “Museum Theater,” 72; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 124–26, 142–45. Much Barnum-Kimball correspondence can be found in the NYPL. 19. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 125; Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 12–14. 20. Anon., “Tom Thumb and the Queen,” 157; Desmond, Barnum Presents, 88. 21. Bogdan, Freak Show, 97; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 131–34; Saxon ed., Selected Letters, 24–25. 22. George, The Life and Death of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 282; Fitzsimons, Barnum in London, 108–50; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 149. 23. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 164–70; Desmond, Barnum Presents, 196–216. 24. Nasaw, Going Out, 18–24. 25. Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, 13–16, 53–54. 202 NOTES

26. Davis, The Circus Age, 120; Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, 97. An ethnological congress was first organized by a German circus owner, Carl Hagenbeck, in 1874: Davis, The Circus Age, 118. 27. Goodall, Performance and Evolution, 100; Andress, Route Book of Barnum & Bailey (1905), endpapers, Barnum Collection, PLB. For the British imperial equivalent: Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society. 28. Cross and Walton, The Playful Crowd, 125; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 85, 129–31. 29. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 129–31; Nasaw, Going Out, 67–68; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 418–20; McKenna, A Pictorial History of the American Carnival, 78. 30. Keefer et. al., Shocked and Amazed, 38–39. 31. Leroi, Mutants, 12–13. 32. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book Seventh, lines 706–21, 828; Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 117. 33. Museum handbill, April 1857, Barnum’s American Museum files, 1840–57, TCH. Retaining the building’s lease in his wife’s name, Barnum sold the museum’s collection to employees from 1855, buying it back in 1860 when he became solvent. 34. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 76; Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, vol. 15, 455; Anon., “Accessories at Barnum’s,” 67, ECO. 35. Wallace, “Circus Freaks Measure Up to Normal Life,” Feature Magazine [New York] World Telegraph and Sun, April 11, 1959, n. p. NYLPA. 36. Humphries, “Mixed Fortunes,” 2–3; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 69. 37. Anon., “Broadway of Freaks,” The [New York] Sun, January 25, 1920, refers to an 81-year-old “Zip” or the “What Is It?” as the dean of all freaks, exhibited at a dime museum on Broadway; Kasson, Amusing the Million, 57–86; Cross and Walton, The Playful Crowd, 123–27. 38. Robinson, “Freaks Still Attract Curious Stragglers on Coney’s Midway,” New York World-Telegram, July 29, 1947, n. p. NYLPA; Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., 57. 39. Howell and Ford, The True History; Adams, Sideshow U.S.A, 57. 40. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A, 2, 210–28; “Bob Hope and American Variety,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/exhibits/ bobhope/vaude.html (last accessed on June 16, 2007); “Sideshows by the Seashore” in the heart of Coney Island Amusement Park, on the corner of Surf Avenue and West 12th Street, keeps the American sideshow tradition alive. 41. Matt Wells, “ Could Lead to Fatal Copycats, Rivals Claim,” The [London] Guardian, August 29, 2000, 6; Alice O’Keeffe, “Psychiatrists Fear for Celebrities’ Sanity in a Modern-Day Freak Show,” The [London] Observer, January 15, 2006, 8. England’s Blackpool, like Niagara Falls, has a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Odditorium. 42. “Reality Check: Extroverts Enter Seventh Big Brother,” , May 19, 2006, 15. 43. Adams, Sideshow U.S.A, 11; Cross and Walton, The Playful Crowd, 34–36. NOTES 203

3 Blackface Minstrelsy: The First All-American Show 1. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 1, 6. For a neo-Marxist cultural studies interpretation of minstrelsy see Lott, Love and Theft. 2. Buckley, “Paratheatricals and Popular Stage Entertainment,” 462, 464; Toll, Blacking Up, 4–5. 3. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 220–24; Boskin, Sambo, 72. 4. Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 16, 20. Burlesque was also a common early ingredient of the bizarre British Christmas format. 5. Ibid., 62–91, 71. 6. Ibid., 63, 68; Toll, Blacking Up, 27. 7. Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 9–11. Black rapper M. C. Hammer performed the same “market step” in the pop music video Hammer Time (1990) that can be seen in the New York folk drawing “Dancing for Eels 1820 Catherine Street Market.” 8. Saxon, Selected Letters, 11–12; American Museum handbill, commencing May 30, 1842, HTC; Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, 210. 9. Nathan, Dan Emmett, 146; Emerson, Doo-dah! 90. 10. Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy, 11; Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 57, 239. 11. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 58; Emerson, Doo-dah! 96. 12. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 18. 13. Anon., Boston Minstrels Song Sheet, 1843, Brownings’ file of sheet music, TCH; Matlaw, “Tony the Trouper,” 85–87. See Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 273–76, for other versions of “De New York Gals.” 14. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 59–60; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 357–58. Lhamon’s citation for the earlier date is given as H. P. Grattan, “The Origin of the Christy Minstrels,” The Theatre (London), March 5, 1882, taken from details that Christy first published on January 30, 1848 in the New York Age. 15. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 75–76. 16. Knowles, Tap Roots, 100–101; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 18–19, 372, note 29; Chase, America’s Music, 237. 17. Cockrell, Demons of Disorder, 100–101. 18. Davis, Scandals and Follies, 32. 19. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 9–41, 11. 20. Emerson, Doo-dah!, 96; Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 166. 21. Matlaw, “Tony the Trouper,” 75; “Ethiopian Minstrels!!” American Museum poster, January 1847, TCH. 22. “Heard at the Minstrel Show,” John Robinson Circus, 1917, NYLPA; Pickering, “White Skin, Black Masks,” 75–76. 23. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 2, 5, 268–69. 24. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 20–21; Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 41. 25. Gibson, “Rethinking Race,” 1–3, argues that these works attempt to revise minstrelsy’s history by decentering race. 204 NOTES

26. Reiss, The Showman and the Slave, 174. 27. Ibid. 28. Emerson, Doo-dah!; Buckley, “Paratheatricals,” 465–66. 29. Meer, Uncle Tom Mania, 105–7. 30. Toll, Blacking Up, 197–98. 31. Ibid., 199–203. 32. Ibid., 201, 205–15. 33. Ibid., 262, 249–51. 34. Ibid, 237–38, 242–44. 35. Ibid, 254–58; Toll, On with the Show, 121–33; Phillips, Dancing in the Dark, is a persuasive novel about Williams’ incongruous and ultimately sad life. 36. Toll, Blacking Up, 51. 37. Meade, “Kitty O’Neill,” citing: “Variety Shows: Their Origins and History,” New York Times, March 28, 1874, and Leavitt, Fifty Years in Theatrical Management. 38. Allen, Horrible Prettiness, 168–73; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 113–15. 39. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain, 103–4; Davis, Scandals and Follies, 94. 40. Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 306–7. 41. Boskin, Sambo, 87–91, cites the WPA (Works Progress Administration) publication 56 Minstrels (1938). 42. Philip Purser, “Obituary: George Mitchell,” The [London] Guardian, August 30, 2002, 15; Patrick Barkham, “About Face: The History of Blacking Up,” The [G2] Guardian, September 22, 2006, 9. 43. Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine. Two white men acted out the comic exploits of two black men in the hugely popular series Amos ‘n’ Andy on radio in the 1930s, and then from the early 1950s on television: Toll, The Entertainment Machine, 54–55, 235. 44. Alexis Petridis, “Johnny Grande,” The [London] Guardian, June 7, 2006, 33; Phinney, Souled American; Ogg with Upshal, The Hip Hop Years. 45. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask, 1–8, 9. 46. Anon., Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, TWC/NYLPA.

4 The Americanized Circus: Barnum & Bailey In Excelsis 1. Various, Radio Times Guide to Films, 591. Other American “circus movies” include Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in Trapeze (1956), Victor Mature as owner of The Big Circus (1959), and John Wayne as The Magnificent Showman (1964). 2. Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 104–110; Saxon, Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow, 20–29; Croft-Cooke & Cotes, Circus, 52–53. 3. Saxon, Life and Art, 17–20; Speaight, A History of the Circus, 111–15. 4. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 115–18. 5. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 210–11; Powers, Mark Twain, 471–78. NOTES 205

6. Croft-Cooke and Cotes, Circus, 54; Carlyon, Dan Rice, 411. Since Rice did not begin clowning until the mid-1840s and “Uncle Sam” cartoons first appeared in the 1830s, it seems unlikely that he was Nash’s much later inspiration. “Uncle” Samuel Wilson (1766–1854), meat supplier to the U.S. Army during the War of 1812, is a stronger candidate. 7. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 128. 8. Davis, The Circus Age, 7, 16; Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 21. 9. Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson, 174–77; Mackay, The Violent Friend, 60–64; Tindall and Shi, America, 891–92. 10. Davis, The Circus Age, 22; Coup, Sawdust and Spangles. 11. Harris, Humbug, 238–39. 12. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 134; Davis, The Circus Age, 20–21; Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 24; Mills, Bertram Mills Circus; Williamson, On the Road with Bertram Mills. Bertram Mills Circus, between 1933 and 1955, was one of very few European to move by rail. The author recalls being taken in 1953 to its winter quarters at the Olympia Stadium, London, where he obtained the autograph of Coco the Clown. 13. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 287; Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society, 6. 14. Sanger, Seventy Years a Showman, 190; Davis, The Circus Age, 21–25. 15. Davis, The Circus Age, 87–88; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 76. 16. Fox, ed., American Circus Posters, 12–13. 17. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 123–24; Clarke, Circus Parade. 18. Fox and Kelley, The Great Circus Street Parade; Speaight, A History of the Circus, 139. 19. Carlyon, Dan Rice, 368; Ogden, Two Hundred Years, 116–17. 20. “P. T. Barnum’s Great Traveling Museum & Menagerie,” November 1871, TCH; Coup, Sawdust and Spangles, 87. 21. Harding, Elephant Story, 86–88; Chindahl, History of the Circus in America, 93; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 231–34. 22. “P. T. Barnum’s Great Museum, Menagerie and Circus!” Poster-bill 1872, Circus Bills and Broadsheets, [A] Barnum, TCH. 23. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 243; World’s Fair poster-bill for 1873 campaign, Circus Bills and Broadsheets, [A] Barnum, TCH; World’s Fair poster and Troy Budget, October 3, 1873, LWC. 24. Malamud, “The Greatest Show on Earth,” 43–58. For an alternative view of Barnum as freer spending than Coup see Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 238–44. 25. May, The Circus, 110–18. 26. Carlyon, Dan Rice, 369; Ogden, Two Hundred Years, 116–17. 27. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 242, 282. 28. Ogden, Two Hundred Years, 21–22; Davis, The Circus Age, 54–55; May, The Circus, 119–27; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 282–84; Toll, On with the Show, 62. 29. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 272; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 283; May, The Circus, 151; unpublished Mss. “Love of the Circus,” Box 6, TWC. 30. Clarke, Circus Parade, 108; Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 222–23; Pond, Eccentricities of Genius, 354. 206 NOTES

31. Harding, Elephant Story, 1–11, 81–92; Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 278–81; Carpenter, “P. T. Barnum’s Jumbo,” 6–11, TUJ. Jumbo’s mounted skin on display became the Tufts College football mascot until 1975 when it was destroyed by fire. 32. Harris, Humbug, 270. For further details of the “white elephant” contest, see LWC. 33. Warner, The Barnum Budget, 22, PLB. 34. Davis, The Circus Age, 31–32. 35. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 308–9; Assael, The Circus, 37; Harding, Elephant Story, 85. 36. “Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth,” London 1889 poster, Circus Box Z, Bills and Broadsides, TCH; “Opening of Barnum’s Show,” The Times, November 12, 1889, “Barnum,” The Evening News and Post, November 12, 1889, clippings in P. T. Barnum in London, 1889–90 Scrapbook, TUJ. 37. Harding, Elephant Story, 85; Rev. Harry Adams Hersey to Prof. Russell Carpenter, March 27, 1940, Barnum file, TUJ; Henry Collins Brown, “Barnum: American Self-publicist,” Brown ed., Valentine’s Manual, 310, copy in OYL. 38. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 76, 220; Assael, The Circus and Victorian Society, 87. 39. “The ‘Freaks’ at Olympia,” Pall Mall Budget, October 31, 1898, 1403, ECO. 40. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 150–51; Toll, On with the Show, 79. 41. Plowden, Those Amazing Ringlings; Toll, On with the Show, 79; Davis, The Circus Age, 41. 42. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 142–43; Anon., Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, TWC/NYLPA. Curtis was also given credit for patented audience seats erected without the use of toe pins. 43. Anon., Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, TWC; Davis, The Circus Age, 32–34. 44. Speaight, A History of the Circus, 151; O’Nan, The Circus Fire; Davis, The Circus Age, 40–41. 45. “Circuses Face Curb on Use of Wild Animals,” The [London] Guardian, March 9, 2006, 18; “The end of the greatest show on Earth,” The Daily Telegraph, March 11, 2006, 11; Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 74–76; Hill, Freaks and Fire. Britain’s Animal Welfare Act (2006) banned wild animals from performing in traveling circuses. 46. Toll, On with the Show, 62.

5 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: American Culture Crosses the Atlantic 1. Sleeve text on “Buffalo Bill” Twentieth-Century-Fox Studio Classics DVD. Buffalo Bill was also played by Charlton Heston in Pony Express (1957), Richard Mulligan in Little Big Man (1970), Paul Newman in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), Stephen Baldwin in TV’s The Young Riders (1989), and Christopher Lloyd in Hidalgo (2004). NOTES 207

2. Rennert, 100 Posters of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West; Anon., Buffalo Bill’s Wild West program, 1902–03, 53, Box 1501, ECO, London. 3. Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill and His Wild West, 116; Reddin, , 60; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 117, 227. 4. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 284–86. 5. Toll, On with the Show, 167. 6. Cody, The Life of Buffalo Bill, 17–52; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 8–14, 30–39; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill, 2–5. 7. Cody, The Life, 91–92, 104–6; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 5. The most likely candidate for “ghost-writer” of The Life is dime novelist Prentiss Ingraham (1843–1904). 8. Cody, The Life, 107–8; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill, vii-viii; Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 158–59. 9. Cody, The Life, 254–62; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 34–35, 111–13; Hall, Performing the , 50–51. 10. Wilson with Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 21–23; Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 147–49; Cox, “Ned Buntline’s Buffalo Bill Stories,” 76–87. 11. Cody, The Life, 320, 326–27; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 156. 12. Cody, The Life, 327–28; Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 50–58. 13. Cody, The Life, 330; McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie, 92; Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 59–64. For Combination playbills see Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill, 51–54. 14. Cody, The Life, 340–47; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 119. 15. Cody, The Life, 344. 16. McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie, 93–100; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 118. 17. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 38, 52, see also chapters 1–2. Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, P. T. Barnum, 61; Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 135–36; Fitzsimons, Barnum in London, 88–89. 18. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 210, 229; Saxon ed., Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 190–91. 19. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 206–7, 231; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 61. 20. Rennert, 100 Posters; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 116. 21. Blackstone, The Business of Being Buffalo Bill, 15–16, 6–8. 22. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 75–78; Moses, Wild West Shows, 147; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 389. 23. Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 148; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 51; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 60; Stokes, ed., The State of U.S. History, 289, 296. 24. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 529, note 19; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 213–16. 25. Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 162. 26. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 85; Rosa and May, Buffalo Bill, 102. 27. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 63–64. 28. Ibid., 64. See also Foote, Letters from Buffalo Bill. 29. Glanfield, Earls Court and Olympia, 10; Anon., “The American Exhibition,” Railways News, April 23, 1887, Box 1501, ECO. 208 NOTES

30. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 81–93; Glanfield, Earls Court and Olympia, 15–16; Anon., “The American Exhibition.” 31. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 81; Court Circular, May 12, 1889, Program of Exhibition before the Queen, Box 1501, ECO, London. 32. Gallop, Buffalo Bill’s British Wild West, 101. 33. Ibid., 101–2, 136; Begg, Jack the Ripper, 223. 34. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 494–519; Baker, “The Entertainer,” 10–14. 35. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 152–54; Wilson with Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 189–213, reprints Pawnee Bill’s 1938 memoir of the Two Bills partnership. 36. Wilson with Martin, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 215–17; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 532–41. 37. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 8, 93; Reddin, Wild West Shows, 76. 38. Reddin, Wild West Shows, 82–84; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 256–81, 356, 370. 39. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, 269; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 32, 111–17. 40. Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 154–55; Cook, The Arts of Deception; Harris, Humbug, 230–31; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 544. 41. Blackstone, The Business of Being Buffalo Bill, 16–17; Toll, On with the Show, 167–68. See also Blackstone, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business. 42. Corbett, Orphans Preferred, 151. 43. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 119–20.

6 Vaudeville I: Rise and Decline of an Emergent Mass Culture 1. Page, Writing for Vaudeville, 4–5. Leavitt, Fifty Years, also claimed to have been the first to use the term “vaudeville.” Despite its British origins, “” seems to have been used interchangeably with “vaudeville.” 2. Outside urban areas, in the American Southwest and Midwest, tent show variety or repertoire theaters (“rag opries”) became popular, enjoying their heyday in the 1920s: Ashby and May, Trouping through Texas; Martin, Henry L. Brunk and Brunk’s Comedians. 3. Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, 71. 4. Zellers, “The Cradle of Variety,” 578–85; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 8; Nasaw, Going Out, 13–14. 5. McCabe Jr., Lights and Shadows of New York Life, 595–96; Meade, “Kitty O’Neil,” 11–12; Slout, ed., Broadway below the Sidewalk. 6. Butsch, The Making, 115; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 5. 7. Matlaw, “Tony the Trouper,” 70–90. 8. Ibid., 86–88. See Pastor songbooks in Box 1, “Songsters,” TCH. 9. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 15; House 1872 program, Tony Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/NYLPA. 10. Kattwinkel, Tony Pastor Presents, 5; Frick, New York’s First Theatrical Center, 50–56. NOTES 209

11. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 20; Butsch, The Making, 105–6; Anon., Tony Pastor’s New 14th Street Theater Songster, Box 1, “Songsters,” HTC. 12. Allen, “B. F. Keith,” 105–15; Anon. “A Giant in the Vaudeville Field,” 10. 13. Kibler, Rank Ladies, 15; Laurie, Jr., Vaudeville, 343. 14. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 51–52, 63–67; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 30. 15. Butsch, The Making, 6, 9; Nasaw, Going Out, 18, 26. 16. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 73–78. 17. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 53–57, 52; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 17; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 36–37, 65–66. 18. Page, Writing for Vaudeville, 5; Nasaw, Going Out, 23. 19. Toll, On with the Show, 277; Page, Writing for Vaudeville, 20. 20. Nasaw, Going Out, 24; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 46. 21. Marx, Harpo Speaks, 151–52; J. F. Milliken Papers, Box I Correspondence 1887–93, Special Collections, NYLPA. 22. S. Friedman to C. B. Dillingham, November 11, 1911; Zo Fulton to Latham, July 26, 1910, Charles B. Dillingham Papers, Box 6, 1910–12, Special Collections, NYLPA. 23. Kasson, Amusing the Million, 39; Roediger, Working towards Whiteness, 3–35; Foner, From Ellis Island to JFK, see review by Vincent Crapanzano in the Times Literary Supplement, June 15, 2001, 11. 24. Toll, On with the Show, 272; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 160; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 26–27, 34; “The Palace of Laughter Stateside: Memphis’s Vaudeville Tradition,” BBC Radio 4 broadcast, March 14, 2006; Tindall and David Shi, vol. 1, America, 1035–71. 25. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 103, 84, 95, 102–3. 26. Phillips, Dancing in the Dark, 92. 27. Toll, On with the Show, 289–90. See also Allen, The Best Burlesque Sketches. 28. Grand Opera House 1878 program in Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/ NYLPA; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 124. 29. Meade, “Kitty O’Neil”; Anon., “Tony Pastor Looks Back,” Sun, March 27, 1908; Grand Opera House 1878 program, Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/ NYLPA; Louvish, Monkey Business, 25; Dormon, “Ethnic Cultures of the Mind,” 21–41. 30. Tony Pastor’s 14th Street theater, “John and James Russell, the Irish Lillies,” program for the week of April 7, 1890, Box 136, TCH; “The Irish Servant Girls,” Vaudeville Stage, June 6, 1896: Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/NYLPA; Snyder, The Voice of the City, 110. John Russell first appeared on the vaudeville stage in Dutch, Irish, and Yankee characteriza- tions, and also as eccentric old men, while James had a talent for the mimicry of theatrical stars such as Sarah Bernhardt and Clara Morris. 31. Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams, 85–89, cites Variety, January 13, 1906. 32. McLoone, Irish Film, 48–59; Kibler, Rank Ladies, 56; Anon., Tony Pastor’s New 14th Street Theater Songster, Box 1 “Songsters,” TCH. “Chorus: Dot beautiful Hebrew girl,/ Her hair vas done up in curls,/ Her name it vas Lulu, she went to the schula,/ She could dance, she could sing, she could paint,/ She could play the piano so nice and so fine,/ Shust like 210 NOTES

Mr Rubenstein,/ I’d have you to know, sir, you bet she was ko-sher/ Dot beautiful girl of mine.” 33. Toll, On with the Show, 290–92; Louvish, Monkey Business, 26. 34. Kessner, The Golden Door, 154, 168, 173; Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams, 89–91; Nasaw, Going Out, 31. 35. “Amusements,” December 20, 1915, nonattributed press cutting: Robinson Locke Collection of Dramatic Scrapbooks, BRT/NYLPA. 36. Kibler, Rank Ladies, 5; Snyder, The Voice of the City, xxi, 63. 37. Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, 156–57; Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 75. 38. Tony Pastor’s 14th Street theater, Next Week’s Bill, November 27, 1887, Box 136, TCH. 39. Anon., “Americans: Eva Tanguay,” 26; Toll, On with the Show, 278–81; Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 139, 157, 136. 40. Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 110. 41. Tucker, Some of These Days, 7–66. 42. Ibid., 67–241; Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 314. 43. Frick, New York’s First Theatrical Center, 56–57. 44. Koster & Bial’s Music Hall program week of May 18, 1896, “Ephemera,” Tony Pastor Press Clippings, NYPLA; Toulet, Cinema Is 100 Years Old, 19–22; Reminiscences of “Buster” Keaton, November 1958, 5–6, Series 1, No. 322, OHROC. 45. Davis, Scandals and Follies, 71; Nasaw, Going Out, 154–73, 186–92; Anon., “Tony Pastor Looks Back,” Sun, March 27, 1908; Anon., “Farewell to Tony Pastor’s,” , May 13, 1928, Special Features, 128. 46. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 132; Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 134–35.

7 Vaudeville II: Cultural Exchange, Departure, and Transmutation 1. Leventhal and Quinault, eds., Anglo-American Attitudes. The next two sections are based on a conference paper for Hamilton, et al. “Crosstown Traffic.” 2. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 761–66; Toll, On with the Show, 20–23; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 48–49; Documentary Theater Piece on the Astor Place Riot. Among the Astor Place rioters was ringleader Edward Judson who 20 years later as “Ned Buntline” promoted Buffalo Bill. 3. Bailey ed., Music Hall; Bratton, ed., Music Hall; Kift, The Victorian Music Hall; Bailey, Performance in the Victorian City, chapters 5 and 6. Further research is needed on the globalization of commercial entertainment in this period. 4. Koster & Bial’s Music Hall program week of May 18, 1896; American Music Hall program week of December 7, 1908: “Ephemera,” Tony Pastor Press Clippings, NYLPA; Chevalier, Before I Forget; Lauder, Roamin’ in the Gloamin’. 5. Tich and Findlater, Little Tich; McMurtry, The Colonel and Little Missie, 150; see “Ephemera,” Pastor Press Clippings, NYLPA. 6. Various, “Ephemera,” Pastor Press Clippings, NYLPA. NOTES 211

7. Smith, “Variety on the Upgrade,” The Era, March 22, 1922, 11. Microfilm, University of Cambridge Library. 8. Evans, “What Is Wrong with the Variety Stage?” The Era, February 1, 1922, 11; “Miscellaneous,” The Era, March 15, 1922, 12. 9. Anon., “Music Hall Gossip,” The Era, October 31, 1891, 17; November 14, 1891, 16. 10. Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 82–137, 135. This source provides a detailed schedule of W. C. Fields’ overseas tours. 11. “Amusements,” The News-Letter, May 24, July 5, August 16, 1898; January 5, 12, 19, 1904; February 2, March 15, May 3, 1904; and May 15, 1923. Microfilm, University of Ulster Library. 12. Goldman, Banjo Eyes, 42; “London Syndicate Halls [rehearsal calls],” The Era, June 17, 1914, 23. 13. Marx, Harpo Speaks, 151. 14. Kanfer, Groucho, 67; “The Coliseum,” The Era, June 21, 1922, 13. 15. Kanfer, Groucho, 67; Marx, Harpo Speaks, 151. 16. Review of “Chuckles of 1922,” The Times, June 21, 1922, 14; Kanfer, Groucho, 66. 17. Kanfer, Groucho, 66; The Era, June 21, 1922, 14; Louvish, Monkey Business, 135–36. 18. Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 12, 18, 23–24. 19. Toll, On with the Show, 299–303; Davis, Scandals and Follies, 82–83; Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 29–40. 20. Toll, On with the Show, 295–96; Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl, 3, 35. 21. Davis, Scandals and Follies, 75–87; Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 144–69; Knapp, The American Musical; Ashby, With Amusement for All, 117. 22. Cochran, The Secrets of a Showman; Harding, Cochran; Conrad, Billy Rose; Gottlieb, The Nine Lives of Billy Rose. 23. Smith, The Vaudevillians, 83–87; Burns, All My Best Friends, 23. 24. “The Decline of ‘The Road,’” Billboard, December 26, 1925; Robinson, “A Glance Backwards,” 3–4; “Tony Pastor Looks Back,” Sun, March 27, 1908, Pastor Press Clippings, BRT/NYLPA. 25. Tucker, Some of These Days, 250; John Kenrick, “A History of the Musical: Vaudeville Pt. IV,” www.musicals101.com (last accessed on May 16, 2006). 26. Rich, San Francisco Noir, 41. 27. Weight, Patriots, 253; “End of the pier show feared as Blackpool punters say no to variety,” The Guardian, April 10, 2006, 9. The Sunshine Boys was first performed on Broadway in 1972, then as a movie with Walter Matthau and George Burns in 1982. 28. Golden, King Kong, 3. 29. Staples, Male-Female Comedy Teams, 205. 30. Jenkins, What Made Pistachio Nuts? 277–78; Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood. 31. Anon., “Vaudeville Gave Its All to Films; Now What Next?” New York Herald Tribune, January 12, 1936, 6, clipping in Vaudeville Box 3, TCH. 212 NOTES

32. Louvish, Man on the Flying Trapeze, 208, 260–68, 421–61. All except the first movie listed here were made when Fields was over 60 years of age. 33. Kanfer, Groucho, 41; Marx, Harpo Speaks, 100–101. 34. Louvish, Monkey Business, 365–69, 426–33; O’Brien, “The Triumph of Marxism.” 35. Marschall, History of Television, 28; Smith, The Vaudevillians, 68–73; Milton Berle obituaries: The Guardian, March 29, 2002, 20, The Times, March 29, 2002, 22. 36. “Bob Hope and American Variety,” Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/ exhibits/bobhope/vaude.html (last accessed on 16 June, 2007); Ronald Bergan, “Bob Hope” obituary, The Guardian, July 29, 2003, 23; Faith, Bob Hope; Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch, 172. 37. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 144.

Conclusion 1. Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes; leaflet, Barnum’s Aquarial Gardens, Boston 1860, TCH; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 229. 2. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 176–218; Cook, ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 4. 3. Twitchell, Carnival Culture, 60–61. 4. Cook, “Mass Marketing and Cultural History,” 176. 5. Adams, E Pluribus Barnum, xii; Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, 71. 6. Cook, The Arts of Deception, 140. 7. Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 7; Cook, “Mass Marketing and Cultural History,” 176. 8. Carlyon, Dan Rice, 370; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 15–16; Lewis, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow; Savage, Teenage, 50, 54; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 419. 9. Ashby, With Amusement for All, 20, 52; Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 22; Stratton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 325–26. 10. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 242; Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America, 206–7; Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 23. 11. Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 31; Kitses, Horizons West. 12. Snyder, The Voice of the City, 73–78; Naidis, “Gilded Age Leisure and Recreation,” 398; Schenk cited: Erdman, Blue Vaudeville, 52. 13. Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System, 2–3; Schatz, The Genius of the System; French, “Mammon vs. Movies,” 21. 14. Nasaw, Going Out; Butsch, The Making of American Audiences, 66–80; Snyder, The Voice of the City, xv.

Appendix I: P. T. Barnum: Humbug and Reality 1. Toll, On with the Show, 26; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 17. 2. Cited: Werner, Barnum, 251. NOTES 213

3. Wallace, The Fabulous Showman, 9; Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones, 19. 4. Alderson, ed., Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons, 32–35; Ware and Lockard, Jr., P. T. Barnum Presents, 1–13; Speaight, A History of the Circus, 140–41; Cook, The Arts of Deception, 83–84; Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 27–28. 5. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 74; Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 1. 6. “Tom Thumb and the Queen,” Punch or the London Charivari, 144 (April 13, 1844): 157; “Barnumerous Rumour,” Punch, 683 (December 29, 1884): 263. 7. Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 694; Melville, The Confidence-Man, xviii-xx; Cook, Satirical Apocalypse, 23–27; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women; Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age. 8. Huntington, Who Are We? 59–80, 108–39; Anon., “Gospel of Humbuggery,” 8. 9. Bradford Mss., draft review in “Editorials and Reviews, 1921–23,” HL; Werner, Barnum, vii. 10. Reynolds, Rich Relations, 434–35. 11. Vitale, There’s a Customer Born Every Minute; Fuller, Jubilee Jim; Conrad, Billy Rose; Branson, Losing My Virginity. 12. Greene, The Name of Action, 212; Strauss, Chan and Eng; Schechter, The Hum Bug; Gaffney, Metropolis. 13. Crawford, Parcel Arrived Safely, 286–301; Thorp, Jenny and Barnum; Scorsese, The Gangs of New York. 14. “Banquet to Mr. Barnum,” The [London] Times, November 9, 1889, 6. 15. Barnum cited: Cook ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 142; Kasson, Amusing the Million, 4, 6. 16. Cook, ed., The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader, 1; Twitchell, Carnival Culture, 6.

Appendix II: Harry Houdini’s Early Career 1. Silverman, Houdini!!!, 16. 2. Dennett, Weird and Wonderful, 57–59; Brandon, The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, 34–35; Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant, 10–11; Houdini, The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin. 3. Stashower, The Dime Museum Murders, 7–14; Norfolk, “Harry Houdini Remains a Slippery Figure,” 36; Brandon, The Life, 57–58. 4. Brandon, The Life, 57–60; Houdini, The Adventurous Life. 5. Brandon, The Life, 60–62; Silverman, Houdini!!!,15–16. 6. Anderson, Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones, 88–90; Brandon, The Life, 63–65; Silverman, Houdini!!!, 18–19; Reminiscences of “Buster” Keaton, November 1958, 2–3, Series 1, No. 322, OHROC. On Houdini and spiritualism: Kalush and Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini. 7. Silverman, Houdini!!!, 44; Brandon, The Life, 66. 214 NOTES

8. Brandon, The Life, 68–69, 280–82; Silverman, Houdini!!!, 22–35. Houdini’s premature death came from a ruptured appendix, on October 31, 1926, after being overzealously pummeled in the stomach by a McGill University student taking up a backstage challenge. 9. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, 123, 154. BIBLIOGRAPHY

For ease of reference, this contains primary sources (programs, newspaper and magazine articles, novels, memoirs, and autobiographies) together with more recent academic and other secondary books and articles also cited in the notes. Adams, Bluford. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman & The Making of U.S. Popular Culture. , MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Adams, Rachel. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Alderson, William T., ed. Mermaids, Mummies, and Mastodons: The Emergence of the American Museum. Washington DC: American Association of Museums, 1992. Allen, Ralph. The Best Burlesque Sketches. New York: Applause Books, 1995. Allen, Robert. “B. F. Keith and the Origins of American Vaudeville,” Theatre Survey 21:2 (1980): 105–15. ———. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992. ———, ed. To Be Continued: Soap around the World. New York: Routledge, 1995. Altick, Richard D. The Shows of London. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978. Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. New York: Ballantine Books, 1960. Anderson, Ann. Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2000. Andress, Charles. Route Book of Barnum & Bailey [Circus], 1905. New York: Andress, 1905. Anon. “Accessories at Barnum’s,” The [London] Graphic, January 22, 1898, 67. Anon. “Americans: Eva Tanguay,” American History 36:5 (2001): 26. Anon. Boston Minstrels Song Sheet. New York: C. G. Christman, 1843. Anon. “Broadway Barnum Museum of Freaks,” The [New York] Sun, January 25, 1920. Anon. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World program, 1902–03. Anon. “A Giant in the Vaudeville Field,” New York Dramatic News, July 21, 1906, 10. Anon. “Gospel of Humbuggery,” review of play “Mr. Barnum,” The New York Herald, September 15, 1918, 8. 216 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anon. Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, Route Book, Season of 1923, New York, 1923. Anon. Life of Zip, The Original What Is It? New York: Popular Publishing Co., circa 1883. Anon. “Showman Barnum: Comprehensive Record of the Amusement King’s Life,” The Rockville [Mass.] Journal, April 16, 1891, 3–4. Anon. “Tom Thumb and the Queen,” Punch or the London Charivari, 144, April 13, 1844, 157. Anon. Tony Pastor’s New 14th Street Theatre Songster. , PA: American Publishing Company, circa 1881. Arato, Andrew, and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum International, 1982. Ashby, Clifford, and Suzanne DePauw May. Trouping through Texas: Harley Sadler and His Tent Show. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1982. Ashby, LeRoy. With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830. Lexington, KY: University Press of , 2006. Assael, Brenda. The Circus and Victorian Society. Charlottesville, VA: Press, 2005. Bailey, Peter, ed. Music Hall: The Business of Pleasure. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986. ———. Performance in the Victorian City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Baker, Russell. “The Entertainer,” The New York Review of Books 52:17, (November 3, 2005): 10–14. Barnum, P. T. Art of Money Getting or, Golden Rules for Making Money. Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1999, first edition 1880. ———. Funny Stories Told by Phineas T. Barnum. New York: Routledge & Sons, 1890. ———. The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Intro. Terence Whalen. Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000 edition. ———. Struggles and Triumphs or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, ed. Carl Bode. New York: Penguin Books, 1982 edition. Begg, Paul. Jack the Ripper: The Facts. London: Robson Books, 2006. Blackstone, Sarah J. Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986. ———. The Business of Being Buffalo Bill: Selected Letters of William F. Cody, 1879–1917. New York: Praeger, 1988. Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. ———. “The Social Construction of Freaks.” Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: Press, 1997, 23–37. Bordieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Boskin, Joseph. Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. BIBLIOGRAPHY 217

Brandon, Ruth. The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini. London: Pan Books, 2001. Branson, Richard. Losing My Virginity: How I’ve Survived, Had Fun and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way. London: Virgin, 1998. Bratton, J. S., ed. Music Hall: Performance and Style. Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1986. Brigham, David R. Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. Brown, H. C., ed. Valentine’s Manual of Old New York. New York: Valentine, 1926. Buckley, Peter G. “Paratheatricals and Popular Stage Entertainment.” Don B. Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds. The Cambridge History of American Theatre, Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 424–81. Buhle, Paul. From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture. New York: Verso, 2004. Burns, George, with David Fisher. All My Best Friends. London: Muller, 1990. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Butsch, Richard. The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television, 1750–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Carlyon, David. Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of. New York: Public Affairs, 2001. Carpenter, Russell L. “P. T. Barnum’s Jumbo,” The Tuftonian (January 1941): 6–11. Cashman, Sean Dennis. America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-made Man: Changing Concepts of Success in America. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Chase, Gilbert. America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Chevalier, Albert. Before I Forget: Being the Autobiography of a Chevalier D’Industrie. London: Unwin, 1901. Chindahl, George L. History of the Circus in America. Caldwell, OH: Caxton Printers, 1959. Clarke, John S. Circus Parade. London: Batsford, 1936. Cochran, Charles B. The Secrets of a Showman. London: Heinemann, 1925. Cockrell, Dale. Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cody, William F. The Life of Buffalo Bill. London: Senate, 1994 edition. Conrad, Earl. Billy Rose: Manhattan Primitive. New York: World Publishing, 1968. Cook, James W. Jr. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. ———, ed. The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else like It in the Universe. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005. ———. “Mass Marketing and Cultural History: The Case of P. T. Barnum,” American Quarterly 51:1 (1999): 175–86. 218 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cook, James W. Jr. “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P. T. Barnum’s ‘What Is It?’ Exhibition.” Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press, 1997, 139–57. Cook, Jonathan A. Satirical Apocalypse: An Anatomy of Melville’s the Confidence Man. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. Corbett, Christopher. Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of the Pony Express. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. Coup, W. C. Sawdust and Spangles: Stories & Secrets of the Circus. Washington, DC: Paul A. Ruddell, 1966 edition. Cox, J. Randolph. “Ned Buntline’s Buffalo Bill Stories,” Dime Novel Round-Up, 76:3 (2007): 76–87. Craigie, Sir William A., and James R. Hulbert. A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles. London: Oxford University Press, 1944. Crawford, Michael. Parcel Arrived Safely: Tied with String. London: Century, 1999. Croft-Cooke, Rupert, and Peter Cotes. Circus: A World History. London: Elek, 1976. Cross, Gary S., and John K. Walton. The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Palaces in the 20th Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Davis, Janet M. The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Davis, Lee. Scandals and Follies: The Rise and Fall of the Great Broadway Revue. New York: Limelight Editions, 2000. Decker, Jeffrey Louis. Made in America: Self-styled Success from Horatio Alger to Oprah Winfrey. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Dennett, Andrea Stulman. Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Denning, Michael. Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America. London: Verso Books, 1987. Desmond, Alice Curtis. Barnum Presents: . New York: Macmillan, 1954. Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. eds. John S. Whitley and Arnold Goldman. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972 edition. ———. Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People. London: Oxford University Press, 1957 edition. Dinerstein, Joel. Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology and African-American Culture between the World Wars. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Documentary Theater Piece on the Astor Place Riot, Riot at the Opera House! First Gotham History Festival, City University of New York, Graduate Center, October 7, 2001. Dormon, James. “Ethnic Cultures of the Mind: The Harrigan and Hart Mosaic,” American Studies 33:2 (1992): 21–41. Emerson, Ken. Doo-dah! Stephen Foster and the Rise of American Popular Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Erdman, Andrew L. Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895–1915. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Inc., 2004. BIBLIOGRAPHY 219

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A Night at the Opera (1935), 167 and minstrel shows, 65, 66. see also A Parlor Match (play), 160 minstrelsy Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers modified traveling version of the, 89 Circus, 99 as pivotal in development of popular Adams, Rachel, 37 culture, 13 , 42, 90. see also Kahn, renovation of the, 20–21, 23 Leopold variety shows in the, 130 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), American Music Hall (New York), 153 83, 84 American national identity, 117, African Nightingale (Elizabeth Taylor 123–126 Greenfield), 70 American Notes (Dickens), 22 Agra, Zalumna (“Circassian Girl”), 41. American Vitagraph, 149 see also freak shows Amis, Kingsley, New Maps of Hell, 7 Albee, Edward Franklin, 134 Ancient Order of Hibernians, 142 Alhambra Theatre (London), 156, 158 Animal Crackers (1930 film), 167 Allen, Gracie, 164, 165, 168 Anna Held Girls (act), 160 Altman, Robert, Buffalo Bill and the Annie Get Your Gun () musical, 2 Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History antiabolitionist riot (New York, Lesson (1976 film), 125 1834), 60 Amburgh, Isaac van, 29, 83 Arbuckle, Roscoe (“Fatty”), 148, 165, American Circus Corporation, 100, 168 101 Arlington, J.V., The Red Right Hand; or American Gaiety Girls, 191 Buffalo Bill’s First Scalp for Custer American Melodist (G.W. Dixon), 60, (play), 113 61, 65 artful deceiver, concept of, 125 American Museum. see also assimilation, narrative of, 141–142 Barnum, P.T. Associated Rabbis of America, 143 as dime museum prototype, 40. Astaire, Fred and Adele, 168 see also dime museums Astley, Philip, 82 domestic dramas and plays in the, Astley’s Amphitheater (London), 82 24–27, 70, 130 Astor Place Riot (1849), 152, 175, exhibition rooms at the, 22, 40 210n2 freak shows and the, 40–46, 54, 173. Avildson, John G., Save the Tiger (1973 see also freaks; freak shows film), 184 228 INDEX

Babbitt (Lewis), 185 as publicist, 98, 173, 174, 182 Bailey, Frederick Harrison, 93 representations of, 183–185 Bailey, George F., 93. see also circus as Republican Congressional Bailey, Hachaliah, 93 candidate, 32–33 Bailey, James A., 93, 99–100, 103 as riverboat showman, 19 Barnum & Bailey and the Ringling role of in developing popular Brothers Circus, 86–87, 101 culture, 13, 171, 179 Barnum & Bailey Circus, 46–47, 93, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Aiken), 26, 96–97, 106, 174 199n31 Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical (poster), 80 Theatre, 19 Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum Barnum’s Great Traveling Exposition, and Menagerie, 29. see also Boston 90 Museum Barnum’s Museum Barnum! (1980’s musical), 185 See American Museum Barnum, Coup, and Castello Circus, Bates, Anne 86, 90 See Swan, Anna Shannon Barnum, P.T. (Phineas Taylor). see also Bayes, Nora, 145, 160 circuses; freaks; freak shows Bean, Judge Roy, 145 on achievements, 181 Bearded Ladies, 41, 42, 90 acquisition of American Museum Beaver Heart, 112 by, 20–22. see also dime Beck, Martin, 192 museums Behind the Burnt Cork Mask (Mahar), blackface minstrelsy and, 60–61, 63 65–66 and Buffalo Bill Cody, 106–107, Belfast Empire Theatre, 156 118, 125 Believe It or Not (Ripley), 54 challenge to rival circus managers Berkeley, Busby, 76 by, 91 Berle, Milton, 167 early career of, 16–19 Bernhardt, Sara, 145 Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Best, Dick, on freak shows, 51 Menagerie, 89 Big Brother (British TV Channel 4), 54 Great Traveling Museum, big-top fire (1944), Ringling Bros. and Menagerie, Caravan, Barnum & Bailey Combined Hippodrome and Circus, Shows, 101 87, 90 Bijou Theater (Boston), 134 Great Traveling World’s Fair, 91, 92 Billy Van the Monologue Comedian hoaxes and showmanship, 2, 14–15, (lithograph), 56 33, 34, 40, 187 Black Elk, on Queen Victoria, incarceration of, 17 121–122 Jumbo, 94, 96 blackface minstrelsy, 57–59, 60–61, portrait of, 180 63–68, 70–73. see also minstrelsy promotion of respectable variety Blakeley, Thomas, 60 theater, 130 Bonheur, Rosa, 107 publications of, 15–17, 33, 185, Boston Minstrels, 63. see also minstrelsy 198n5 , 26, 45, 70 INDEX 229

Bowery Amphitheater (New York), 61 Bailey as backer and manager for Bowery Amphitheatre (New York), 63 the, 99 Bowery dime museums, 29 Drama of Civilization (show), 124 Brady, Mathew, 41 elements of the, 116 Branson, Sir Richard, 185 European Tours of, 118–123 Brice, Fanny, 166 Native Americans as performers in British Blondes (minstrels), 75 the, 116–117 British music halls popular Wild West mythology and American vaudeville, contrasted the, 124 with, 129, 158 role of in developing popular cultural exchange with America in culture, 174, 176 the, 151–154 Buffo Singer (G.W. Dixon), 60, Hippodrome Music Hall (London), 61, 65 147, 155 Buick-Berle Show (1953–55), 167 as “palaces of variety”, 163 Bunker, Patricia, 43 and the singing saloon, 130 Bunnell, George B., 29, 30, 133, 134 Brooker and Clayton Georgia Buntline, Ned (Edward Zane Carroll Minstrels, 71. see also blackface Judson), 105, 110, 111, 113, minstrelsy 210n2 Brooklyn Albee Theater (New York), Burke, Billie, 160 162 burlesque, 143 Brown, Henry Collins, Valentine’s Burns, George, 162, 164, 165 Manual of Old New York, 98 Byrne, George, 168 Brown, Joshua Purdy, 83 Brudders Tambo and Bones, 66, 67. California Concert Company, 191 see also blackface minstrelsy Callender, Charles, 71, 73. see also Buffalo Bill blackface minstrelsy See Cody, William Frederick Cantor, Eddie, 76, 156, 163, 166 Buffalo Bill (Himself) Pageant of Carney, George, 154 Military Preparedness and 101 Carr, Eugene A., 110 Ranch Wild West (show), 123 Carson, James B., 144 Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody) on carte de visite, 41 Horseback in Later Life Carter, James (“Yankee”), 83 (photograph), 104 Carver, William Frank (“Doc”), 115. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting see also Cody, William Frederick Bull’s History Lesson (Altman), 125 Castello, Dan, 85, 92 Buffalo Bill in Bologna (Rydell and Catlin, George, Life amongst the Indians, Kroes), 124 114 Buffalo Bill King of the Border Men Chang and Eng (Straus), 185 (Buntline), 110 Chang and Eng, 41, 53. see also freak Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Annual, 106 shows Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. see also charivari, 68 Cody, William Frederick Chestnut Street Theater (Philadelphia), American national identity and the, 134 117, 123–126 Chevalier, Albert, 145, 148, 153 230 INDEX

Chicago Anti-Stage Jew Ridicule Barnum’s Great Traveling Committee, 143 Exposition, 90 Chicago Times, 111 Cooper & Bailey Circus, 93 Children and Young Persons (Harmful Flatfoots Circus, 85 Publications) Act (England, Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and 1955), 6 Menagerie, 89 Chinese Water-Torture Cell act, 144 Great Eastern Circus and Menagerie, Christie, Nelly, (“the Plantation 87 Comedy Star”), 156 Greatest Show on Earth, 80, 89, 92, Christy, Edwin Pearce, 64, 67, 70. 94, 97 see also minstrelsy Great London Circus, 85, 93, 94 Christy’s Minstrels, 65, 66. see also Hagenbeck-Great Wallace Circus, minstrelsy 78, 100 Chuckles of 1922 (London International Circus, 93 performance), 158 Mammoth Circus, 90 (play), 155 Mount Pitt Circus, 83 Circassian Girl (Zalumna Agra), 41. New United Monster Shows, 92 see also freak shows Old Columbian Circus, 18 circuits, vaudeville, 134, 135, 136–138, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & 151, 171 Bailey Combined Shows, 101 circus Ringling Brother’s Show, 99, 100 acrobatic female acts, 88 Sells Brothers Circus, 88 first traveling circus, 83 Sells-Floto Circus, 123 parades, 88, 89, 90, 94, 102, 115 Welsh Brothers’ Circus, 190, 192 and partnerships and combinations Wright and Brown Menagerie and of the, 85 Circus, 83 segregation practices and laws Clark, William, 114 regarding the, 100–101 Clemens, Samuel sideshows and the, 48–49 See Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) as symbol of national expansion, 176 Clofullia, Madame Fortune (“Swiss transition to rail transport for the, Bearded Lady”), 41 86–87 clowns, 81, 82, 84 violence and the, 96 Coal Black Rose (blackface song), 58 circus workers strike (1938), Ringling Cochran, Charles, B., 158, 161 Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Cody, William Frederick (“Buffalo Combined Shows, 101 Bill”). see also Buntline, Ned circuses comparison with P.T. Barnum, Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers 106–107, 118, 125 Circus, 99 creation of popular Wild West Barnum, Coup, and Castello circus, mythology and, 107, 112–113, 86, 90 176 Barnum & Bailey and the Ringling development of mass entertainment Brothers Circus, 86–87, 101 and, 124–125 Barnum & Bailey Circus, 46–47, 93, early life and the Pony Express, 96–97, 106, 174 108–110 INDEX 231

European Tours of, 107, 118–122 curiosities, living, 21. see also freak movies on, 125 shows Native Americans as performers for, curiosities, exotic (exhibits), 38. see also 116–117 freak shows photograph of, 104 Curtis, William H., 100 theatrical career of, 111–113 Custer, George Armstrong, 107, 110, Cohen and Harris Minstrels, 75 112, 113 Cole, William Washington (“Chilly Billy), 95 Darwin, Charles, 43 Coliseum Theatre (London), 157 Davis-Glendhill trio, 153 Colonial Theater (Boston), 134 Delmore and Wilson, 156 Columbian Exposition, World Fair DeMille, Cecil, B. Greatest Show on (1893), 4, 47, 48, 159, 175, 189. Earth (1952), 81 see also Ziegfeld Follies Democratic Party, 70 Comet (British comic), 106 Diamond, John, 60–61. see also Commentary, 7 American Museum Companies Act (1862, Limited Dickens, Charles, 22, 50 Liabilities Act), 152 Dillingham, Charles, 138 Comstock, Anthony, 5 Dilward, Thomas, 71 Concert Saloon Bill (1862), 131 dime museums. see also freaks; freak Coney Island, 48, 52, 53, 189. see also shows freak shows Barnum and Van Amburgh Museum Congress of Nations, 91, 102, 115 and Menagerie, 29 Congress of the Rough Riders of the Boston Museum, 26, 45, 70 World, 116 as cabinet of curiosities, 20, 40 Congress of Wonders, 23, 37. see also development of the, 20–21 American Museum family entertainment and, 24–27 Conway, Henry J., 26–27 Gaiety Museum (Boston), 134 Cook, Joe, 145 The Hub (New York), 29–30 Cooper, James E., 95 Mammoth Museum (Boston), 30 Cooper & Bailey Circus, 93 Miracle Museum (Pittsburg), 30 Costenteus, George, 93 Ninth and Arch Museum Coup, William Cameron, 86, 92. (New York), 30 see also Barnum, Coup, and overview of, 19–22 Castello circus Palace Museum (New York), 30 Coward, Noël, 161 replacement by sideshows, 48–49 Crazy Dutchmen (vaudeville routine), Scudder American Museum, 20 143 dime novels, 5, 105 Crowd (1928 silent movie), 52 Discrimination and Popular Culture cultural consumption, hierarchy of, 6 (Thompson), 7 cultural exchange, Britain-America, 152 Dixie’s Land (Emmett), 69 cultural politics, minstrelsy as part Dixon, , 60, 61, 65 of, 69 domestic dramas, 24, 25. see also curio hall, 21. see also dime museums American Museum; moral reform curiosities, cabinet of, 20, 40 dramas 232 INDEX

Dooley, Edward J., 191 Ziegfeld Follies, 160, 166 Drama of Civilization (show), 124. film industry see also Buffalo Bill’s Wild West See movie industry Show film studios, Hollywood, 177 Drunkard; or Fallen Saved (Smith), 25 films Duck Soup (1933 film), 167 See individual films Duff Gordon, Lady Lucile, 161 Fish, Nancy, 92 Dukenfield, William Claude Fisk, James (“Barnum of Wall Street”), See Fields, W.C. 185 Dunn, H. Charles, 108 Fiske, John, 4 Flatfoots Circus, 85 Eclectic Readers (McGuffey), 4 Folies Bergère (Music Hall), 155, Edison, Thomas Alva, 148 160 Egyptian Caravan (Castello), 89 Ford, John, The Quiet Man, 142 Ehrich Weiss Forepaugh, Adam, 87, 95 See Houdini, Harry (Ehrich Weiss) Forrest, Edwin, 152 El Dorado Elf (Leopold Kahn), 42 Foster, Stephen Collins, 70 Emmett, Dan, 62, 69 Fox Academy Theater (New York), Empire Theatre (Belfast), 156 162 Entertainment Tax (Britain), 154 Fox, George Rabbi, 144 Ethiopian delineators, 61, 62, 84. Frankfurt intellectuals, 6 see also blackface minstrelsy freak shows Ethiopian Seranaders (blackface the American Museum and, 40–46, troupe), 63 54, 173 ethnic humor, 140, 141. see also Coney Island, 48 vaudeville decline of, 52–53 European tours of Buffalo Bill’s Wild exhibits as commercial West Show, 118–123 entertainment, 37, 40–44 Evening News (London), 97 Living Skeleton exhibits, 42 Everett, Edward, 45 presentation modes of, 38–40 exotic curiosities (exhibits), 38. see also reality television as modern, 54 freak shows as supportive of the racial status quo, 39, 44, 47 Fabulous Showman (Wallace), 181 freaks family entertainment and dime gaffed, 38, 41, 47, 49, 53 museums, 24–27 natural, 29, 38, 41, 44, 90, 173 Federal Theatre Project, 77 as performance identity, 38 Feejee Mermaid, 28. see also freak self-made, 38, 42, 51, 93 shows; hoaxes types of, 38–39 female acrobats, 88 Frederici, Louisa Maude, 122. see also Fields, Lew, 142. see also vaudeville Cody, William Frederick Fields, W.C. (William Claude frontier anxiety, 117 Dukenfield) international tours of, 155 gaffed freaks, 38, 41, 47, 49, 53. see also transition from stage to film, freaks; freak shows 165–166 Gaffney, Elizabeth, Metropolis, 185 INDEX 233

Gaiety Museum (New York), 134. Hagenbeck-Great Wallace Circus, 78, see also Keith, B.F. 100 Gangs of New York (2002 film), 185 Hague, Sam, 71, 156 George Mitchell Minstrel Singers, 77 Haight, Andrew, 87 Georgia Minstrels, 71. see also blackface Hall of Curiosities, 40. see also minstrelsy American Museum Gladstone, William, 107 Hall, Stuart, 7 Glengarry Glen Ross (Mamet), 184 Hallett, Charity, 17 Golden Gate Theater (San Francisco), Handley, Tommy, 157 163 hang paper (marketing posters), 88 Golden Rose of Montreux Award Harpers Weekly, 4, 36 (Britain), 77 Harrigan, Ned, 141 Goldwyn, Samuel, 165 Harris, Neil, 14, 41 Goodman, Ed, 119 Harry Houdini, Handcuff King Gordon, Lady Lucille Duff, 161 and Escape Artist (show act), Goschen, Colonel, 93 189 Gottlieb, George A., 136, 137 Hart, Max, 156 gramophone, popularity of, 165 Hart, Tony, 141 Grand Buffalo Hunt (1843), 107. Haverly Colored Minstrels, 72. see also see also Barnum, P.T. blackface minstrelsy; minstrelsy Grand Ethnological Congress of Haverly, J.H., 71, 75 Nations, 47, 97. see also Barnum & Hawkins, Micah, 60 Bailey Circus Hawley, Joseph Roswell, 33 Grand Opera House (Belfast), 156 Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 46 Great American Humorist (Daniel Hegarty, Jim, 156 McLaren), 84 Held, Anna, 160. see also Zeigfeld, Great Asiatic Caravan, Museum and Florenz Jr. Menagerie, 89 Herald of Freedom and Gospel Witness Great Eastern Circus and Menagerie, (Barnum), 17 87 Heth, Joice, 18, 21, 27, 28. see also Great London Circus, 85, 93, 94 freak shows; hoaxes Great Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Hickok, James Butler (“Wild Bill”), Caravan, Hippodrome and 111, 112, 126 Circus, 87 Hicks, Charles, 72. see also blackface Great Traveling World’s Fair, 91, 92 minstrelsy Greatest Show on Earth (DeMille, 1952), Hill, Gus, 146 81 Hippodrome Music Hall (London), Greatest Show on Earth, 80 155 Greatest Show on Earth, 89, 92, 94, Hippodrome Theater (New York), 97, 186 138 Greene, Graham, The Name of Action, Hitchcock, Fordyce (“Parson”), 45 185 hoaxes Greenfield, Elizabeth Taylor (African Feejee Mermaid, 28, 45 Nightingale), 70 Joice Heth, 18, 21, 27, 28 Greenwich Theatre (New York), 82 “Light of Asia” (elephant), 95 Gumpertz, Samuel, 101 Hollywood movie studios, 177 234 INDEX

Holmes, Tom, 155 Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (1967 Hope, Bob, select films of, 168 film), 185 Hopkins Theatre (Chicago), 192 Jumbo, 94, 96 Horse Feathers (1932 film), 167 Jump Jim Crow (song and dance Houdini, Harry (Ehrich Weiss) routine), 59. see also blackface Chinese Water-Torture Cell act, 144 minstrelsy early career of, 47, 53, 189–190, 192 photograph of, 188 Kahn, Leopold (“El Dorado Elf” and prison breaking stunts and, 192 “Admiral Dot”), 42, 52, 90 as Wild Man, 190 Karno, Fred, 156 Howes, Seth B., 93 Kasson, John F., 192 Hurd, Samuel H., 91 Kasson, Joy, 124 Hutchinson, James L., 93. see also Kean, Edmund, 152 circus Keaton, Joseph Francis (“Buster”), 148, Hylton, Millie, 154 149 Keith, B.F., 134. see also Gaiety Illustrated London News, 106 Museum immigration and entertainment, 4, 70, Keith-Albee houses as pattern for 118, 130, 132, 140–144, 174 vaudeville shows, 136. see also Imperial Hippodrome (Belfast), 156 vaudeville India Rubber Men, 42. see also Kern, Jerome, 160 self-made freaks Kernell, Harry, 141 Indians (1969 play), 126 Kersands, Billy, 73 Ingrahm Prentiss, Knight of the Plains; Kessler, Sammy, 156 or, Buffalo Bill’s Best Trail, 112 Keystone Bill (Colonel Williams), 138 International Circus, 93 Kid from Spain (1963 film), 163 Irving, Henry, 107 Kimball, Moses, 26, 45, 66, 130 King Kong (2005), 164 Japanese Tommy (Thomas Dilward), Kiralfy, Imre, 91, 92, 98 71 Klaw, Marc, 160 Jardin de (New York Theater), Knight of the Plains; or, Buffalo Bill’s Best 160 Trail (Ingraham), 112 Jersey Lilly (Lillie Langtree), 145 Know-Nothings (political party), 110 Jetneys, 156 Kohl and Middleton’s Museum John Paul II, Pope, 107 (Chicago), 190 Johnson, Lew, 72. see also blackface Kohn, Morris, 148 minstrelsy Kopit, Arthur Lee, Indians (1969 play), Johnson, William Henry (“Zip”), 44, 126 52 Koster & Bials Music Hall (New Jo-Jo (“The Dog-Faced Boy”), 46–47 York), 129, 146, 147 Jolson, Al, 165 Jolson Sings Again (1949), 77 Lakota as Wild West cast, 117 Jonah Man (Bert Williams), 73 Lane, William Henry (“Juba”), 71 Juba (William Henry Lane), 71 Langtry, Lillie, 145 Judson, Edward Zane Carroll, 110, 111 Lauder, Harry, 145, 153 INDEX 235

Leak, Ann, 90 Mammoth Circus, 90 Leavitt, M.B., 74 Mammoth Museum (Keith and legislation Batchelder), 30 Concert Saloon Bill (1862, Manifest Destiny (Fiske), 4 New York), 131 Manifest Destiny, 118, 123 Limited Liability Act (1862, Britain), Marco Company, 191 152 Marhar, William J., Behind the Burnt Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt, 185 Cork Mask, 65–66 Lhamon, W.T., 64. see also minstrelsy Marx Brothers Life amongst the Indians (Catlin), 114 on the Alhambra Theater, 158 Life of P.T. Barnum,Written by Himself background of the, 137, 165, 166 (Barnum), 15, 183 keynote films of the, 167 Light of Asia (elephant), 95. see also in London, 157–158 hoaxes on their early career, 137, 166 Lights and Shadows of New York Life vaudeville as training for the movies, (McCabe), 131 151, 165, 168 Lillie, Gordon (“Pawnee Bill”), 122. mass amusements, perception of, 5–6 see also Cody, William Frederick mass cultural forms, 175 Limited Liability Act (1862 Companies mass culture, definition of, 3 Act), 152 mass media, and vaudeville, 164–168 Lind, Jenny, 16, 28, 31, 130 Mass Observation survey (1946), 184 Little Tich (Harry Relph), 145, 147, Mastodon Minstrels, 71, 75. see also 151, 153 minstrelsy Living Curiosities at Barnum’s Museum Mathews, Charles, 58 (illustration), 36, 42 McCabe, James, Lights and Shadows of Living Skeleton (exhibit), 42. see also New York Life (1872), 131 American Museum McClaren, Daniel (“Dan Rice”), 84 Lloyd, Marie, 145 McGinniss, James A., 93 Loew “Wonder theaters”, 162 McGuffey, William Holmes, Eclectic Logan, Olive, 2 Readers, 4 Theatre, 157 Mechanics Hall (New York), 66 Lopova, Lydia, 157 Merritt, Wesley (General), 112 Lorraine, Lillian, 160 Metropolis (Gaffney), 185 Lotna, Cecilia, 157 midgets, 44. see also freaks; freak Love Happy (1950 film), 167 shows Lucasue, Rudolphe, 41 Midway Plaisance See Columbian Exposition, World Macdonald, Dwight, 6 Fair (1893) Mackaye, Steel, 124 Mighty Barnum (1934 film), 185 Macready, William Charles, 152 Millie-Christine, 39. see also freak Majors, Alexander, Seventy Years on the shows Frontier, 106 Milliken, J.F. (“Colonel”), 137 male impersonators, 154 minstrel music, as first popular Mamet, David, Glengarry Glen Ross American music export, 57 (1983 play), 184 Minstrel Singers (Mitchell), 77 236 INDEX minstrelsy museums, dime beginning of, 63–64, 67, 78 See dime museums blackface as parody, 59. see also music halls blackface minstrelsy American Music Hall (New York), black minstrel troupes, 70–74 153 charivari and, 68 Folies Bergère (Paris), 155, 160 as a commercial enterprise, 78 Hippodrome Music Hall (London), cultural and racial politics of, 69–70 155 decline of, 76–78 Koster & Bials Music Hall (New as derivative performance practice, York), 129, 146, 147 68 Radio City Music Hall (New York), elements adopted into variety shows 163 from, 74 Weber and Fields Music Hall (New Ethiopian delinators, 61, 62, 84 York), 143 expansion of, 64–65 music halls, British female minstrel troupes, 75 See British music halls as first American musical culture mythology of the Wild West, 124 export, 9 as popular culture samplers, 66 narrative of assimilation, 142 racial and gender stereotyping and, Nast, Tom, 84 67 Nathans, John J., 93 racial and gender stereotyping and, national folklore, minstrelsy as part of, 69 68 typical audience for and performers Native Americans as Wild West of, 59–60 performers, 116–117 Miracle Museum (Pittsburg), 30 natural freaks, 29, 38, 41, 44, 90, 173. Monkey Business (1931 film), 167 see also freaks; freak shows moral reform dramas, 24, 25, 27, 70 New Theater (New York), Morris, William, 153 161 Mount Pitt Circus, 83 New Maps of Hell (Amis), 7 movie industry. see also individual movies New Oxford Theatre (London), 158 advent of the, 148 New United Monster Shows, 92 blackface performers in the, 75 New York Aquarium, 92 cross-over from stage to screen, 142, New York dime museum, 134 151, 155, 166, 167–168, 192 New York Dramatic Mirror, 143 Hollywood studio system, 177 New York Herald, 183 transition from stage to screen, 147, New York Museum, 20 162, 163 New York pleasure ground (Coney vaudeville and the, 162 Island), 52 movies, silent, 164, 165 New York Society for the Suppression Mr. Barnum (1918 Broadway play), of Vice, 5 183, 185 New York World-Telegram, 52 Mr. Barnum (musical), 185 New York, antiabolitionist riot (1834), Mugiven, Jerry, 100 60 Murdock, John, 58 nickelodeons, 148 INDEX 237

Ninth and Arch Museum parades, circus, 88, 89, 90, 94, 102, (Brandenburgh), 30 115 non-Western peoples as exhibits, 38, Parks, Larry, 77 39, 47–48, 53. see also freaks; Parson (Fordyce Hitchcock), 45 freak shows Pastor, Antonio (“Tony”) North American Indian Collection clean up of variety by, 131 (Clark), 114 as comic vocalist, 142 Northern Whig Party, 70 death of, 149 Nova Scotia Giantess (Anna Shannon decline of vaudeville and, 147–148 Swan), 29 and drink-free variety review shows, novelty act artists 133 See freaks; freak shows early career of, 66 “father of vaudeville”, 154 O’Neil, Kitty, 141 Grand Opera House and, 132, 141 Oakley, Annie, 107, 117, 118 on greater competition for Old Columbian Circus, 18 vaudeville, 162 Olmsted, Francis W., 21. see also introduction of burlesques by, 133 American Museum pro-Union songbooks of, 132 Olympia Stadium (London), 51, 97, and the Tammany Hall theatre, 133 98, 155 Patriots of [Fort] Sumter, 27 Omohundro, John B. (“Texas Jack”), Pawnee Bill (Lillie, Gordon), 122. 111 see also Cody, William Frederick operational aesthetic, 41 Peal Museum Company, 20, 21 Origin of Species (Darwin), 43 Peale, Charles Wilson, 20 Orpheum vaudeville circuit, 135. Peale, Rubens, 20 see also vaudeville peep show machines, 148 Out of the Depths or Story of a Woman’s Pender, Lily, A Vaudeville Show in Ten Love and Life (Conway), 27 Minutes, 156 Oxford Music Hall (London), 156 Plantation Comedy Star (Nelly Christie), 156 P.T. Barnum and Tom Thumb (1850 Pond, J.B. Major, 33 daguerreotype), 170 Pony Express, 108–109 Palace Museum (Huber), 30 Powell, Sandy, on the Marx Brothers, Palace of Wonders (Coney Island), 52 158 Palace Theatre (New York), 128, 162 Prince’s Theatre (Manchester), 155 Fred and Adele Astaire at the, 168 Professor Harry Houdini’s School of Harry Houdini and the, 136, 189 Magic, 191 Milton Berle and the, 167 Sophie Tucker and the, 146 Quiet Man (1952 film), 142 transition away from vaudeville, 162, 163 Race Street (1948 film), 163 Vesta Tilley and the, 154 racial stereotypes in vaudeville, Palace Theatre of Varieties (Belfast), 156 138–142 Palace Theatre of Varieties (London), Radio City Music Hall (New York), 155 163 238 INDEX

Rahner, Wilhelmina Beatrice Sandow, Eugen (“The Great”) (“Bessie”), 190 See Ziegfeld Follies reality television as modern freak show, Sanger, George (“Lord”), 87 54 Santa Claus Theater (New York), 74 Red Legs (anti-slavery militia), Save the Tiger (Avildson film), 109–110 184 Red Right Hand; or Buffalo Bill’s First Schecter, Harold, The Hum Bug Scalp for Custer (Arlington), 113 (2001), 185 Reiche, Charles, 92 Schenk, Joseph M., 135, 177 Relph, Harry (“Little Tich”), 145, Schlesinger, John, Yanks, 184 147, 151, 153 Scouts of the Prairie; or, Red Deviltry As revue It Is (Buntline), 111 See Ziegfeld Follies Scudder American Museum, 20 Rhodes, Harrison, Mr Barnum (1918 Scudder, John Jr., 20 play), 183 segregation practices and laws, Rice, Dan (McClaren, Daniel), 84 100–101 Rice, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”), 59 self-made freaks, 38, 42, 51, 93. see also Richfield, Mary, 142 freaks; freak shows Richter, Ella (“Madame Zazell”), 93 Sells Brothers Circus, 88 Ricketts, John Bill, 82 Sells-Floto Circus, 123. see also Cody, Riesman, David, 6 William Frederick Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Seventy Years on the Frontier (Majors), Combined Shows, 101 106 Ringling Brother’s Show, 99, 100 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 107, 110 Ringling, Al, 100 Shields, Ella, 154 Ringling, John, 101 Show Boat (1927 musical), 161 Ripley’s Believe It or Not, 54 Siamese Twins (Daisy and Violet Robey, George, 147 Hilton), 53 Robinson, Murray, 52 Sideshow (1997 musical), 53 Rogers, Will, 160, 166 sideshows, 48 Rose, Billy, 161 silent movies, 164, 165 Royal Opera House (Belfast), 156 singing saloon, 131 Rules for Success in Business (Barnum), 15 Sioux as Wild West cast, 116, 117, 122 Rüngeling, August, 99 Sioux War, 112 Russel, Mike, 116 Six Mascots Ryan, Thomas J., 142. see also See Marx Brothers vaudeville Sixteen Years in Hell with Buffalo Bill Rydell and Kroes, Buffalo Bill in (Salsbury), 122 Bologna, 124 Sleighing in New York (Nagel and Lewis lithograph), 12 Sala, Augustus, 186 Smith, Clay, 154 Sally of the Sawdust (1925 film), 166 Smith, Lillian (“Young California”), Salsbury, Nathan (“Nate”), 115, 122, 118 124, 176. see also Cody, William Smith, William H., The Drunkard; or Frederick Fallen Saved, 25 INDEX 239

Society for the Suppression of Vice (1929 film), 167 (New York), 5 The Cyclonic One (Eva Tanguay), Spalding, Gilbert R. (“Doc”), 90, 148 145, 146 Speaight, George, 84 The Dog-Faced Boy ( Jo-Jo), 46–47 Sprague, Isaac, 42 The Era, 155 Stanford, Leland, 85 The Gay White Way (review), 160 State Theater (New York), 163 The Gilded Age (Twain and Warner), Steeplechase Park (New York), 52 183 Stephenson, John, 88 The Green Mountain Boy (play), 58 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 85, 86 The Hub (New York Dime Museum), Stratton, Charles Sherwood (Tom 29–30 Thumb), 28, 39, 44–46, 114, The Hum Bug (2001 film), 185 170, 182 The Irishman in London (play), 58 Street & Smith’s New York Weekly, 110 The Jolson Story (1946), 77 Strobridge Lithographing Company, 88 The Kentuckian (play), 58 Struggles and Triumphs or, Forty Years’ The Name of Action (Greene), 185 Recollections of P.T. Barnum The One-Hundred Pound Note (Barnum), 16 (play), 58 Summit Springs, Battle of, 110 The Palestine Giant (Colonel Sun (weekly comic), 106 Goschen), 93 Sunshine Boys, 163 The Popular Arts (Hall), 7 Swan, Anna Shannon (“Nova Scotia The Prelude (Wordsworth), 50 Giantess”), 29 The Red Heads (play), 144 Swedish Nightingale ( Jenny Lind), 16, The Significance of the Frontier in 28, 31, 130 American History (Turner), 117 Swiss Bearded Lady, 41. see also The Times (London), 158, 159 Bearded Ladies; freak shows The Yankee Pedlar (play), 58 Theater Owners Booking Association Tableaux Vivants of Red Indians (TOBA), 139. see also vaudeville (show), 114 theaters (United States) Tammen, Henry, 123 Bijou Theater (Boston), 134 Tanguay, Eva (“The Cyclonic One”), Bowery Amphitheatre (New York), 145, 146 61, 63 television comedians, 168 Brooklyn Albee Theater (New temperance melodrama, 25–26. see also York), 162 American Museum Chatham (New York), 62 Terry, Ellen, 107 Chestnut Street Theater Texas Jack ( John B. Omhundro), 111 (Philadelphia), 134 Texas Star Theater (1948–53), 167 Colonial Theater (Boston), 134 The Barnum Budget, or Tent Topics Fox Academy Theater (New York), (Barnum and Bailey Circus), 162 95–96 Golden Gate Theater (San The Black and White Minstrel Show Francisco), 163 (BBC Television), 77. see also Grand Opera House (New York), minstrelsy 132, 141 240 INDEX

Hippodrome Theater (New York), transportation and the circus, 138 86–87 Hopkins Theatre (Chicago), 192 Triumph of Love (Murdock), 58 Mechanics Hall (New York), 66 Troupe of Famous Comedians (Fred Palace Theatre (New York), 128, Karno), 156 136, 146, 154, 162–163, Tucker, Sophie (Sonia Kalish), 76, 167–168, 189 146, 147 State Theater (New York), 163 Turner, Aaron, 18. see also Barnum, P.T. theatres (United Kingdom) Turner, Frederick Jackson, The Alhambra Theatre (London), 156, 158 Significance of the Frontier in Astley’s Ampitheatre (London), 82 American History, 117 Coliseum Theatre (London), 157 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 83, Empire Theatre (Belfast), 82, 156 84, 107, 118, 183 Grand Opera House (Belfast), 156 Twitchell, James B., 171, 172 Imperial Hippodrome (Belfast), 156 Tyrolese Minstrel Family, 62. see also London Coliseum Theatre, 157 minstrelsy New Oxford Theatre (London), 128, 158 UBO (United Booking Office of Palace Theatre of Varieties America), 135, 177 (London), 148 Uncle Sam (1869 cartoon), 84 Palace Theatre of Varieties (Belfast), Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the 156 Lowly (Conway), 26, 36 Prince’s Theatre (Manchester), 155 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Theebaw, King (Thibaw), 95 Lowly (Aiken), 70, 199n31 There’s a Customer Born Every Minute: Union Square Theater (New York), P.T. Barnum’s Secrets to Business 147 Success (Vitale), 185 United Booking Office of America Thompson, Denys, 7 (UBO), 135, 177 Thompson, Lydia, 75 Urban, Joseph, 161 Three Nightingales See Marx Brothers Valentine’s Manual of Old New York Tilley, Vesta, 145, 154 (Brown), 98 Tilyou, George, 52 variety shows, 126, 130, 131. see also Tinney, Frank, 145 dime museums; minstrelsy; TOBA (Theater Owners Booking vaudeville Association), 139. see also Variety, 142, 153, 157 vaudeville vaudeville. see also Pastor, Antonio Todd, Mike, 185 beginning of, 126 Toll, Robert C., 72, 102 circuits, 134, 135, 136–138, 151, Tom Thumb 159, 171 See Stratton, Charles Sherwood contrasted with British music hall tramp juggler style, 158, 168 See Fields, W.C. contrasted with variety shows, 131 Trans-Mississippi Exposition (Omaha, cultural exchange with Britain in, 1893), 106 151, 154–156 INDEX 241

decline of, 147–149, 162–164 White Rats Vaudeville Union of ethnic diversity and stereotypes in, America, 135 138–144 Whitlock, Billy, 62 as family show entertainment, 129, Wild Australian Children (exhibit), 38. 134 see also American Museum; freaks; segregation in, 139 freak shows star female performers in, 144–146 Wild Bill (James Butler Hickok), 111, as training for the movie industry, 112, 126 164–168 Wild Man (Houdini), 190. see also vaux-de-Vire, 129 American Museum; freak shows Victoria, Queen, 45, 107, 118, (exhibit), 38. see 120–121, 182 also American Museum; freaks; violence and the and the circus, 96 freak shows Virginia Minstrels, 62, 65. see also Wild West as myth, 176 minstrelsy Wild West Show Vitale, Joe, There’s a Customer Born See Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show Every Minute: P.T. Barnum’s Will and Ways: To Make and Break Secrets to Business Success (1998), (1859 play), 27 184 Williams, Bert, 73 Vivalla, Antonio, 19 Williams, Colonel (“Keystone Bill”), 138 “What Is It?” (exhibit), 43, 44, 52, 90, Williams, R.W., 74 172 Wintergarten Theatre (Berlin), 155 Wagner, Geoffrey, 6 Wise, Thomas A., Mr Barnum (1918 Wallace, Irving, on P.T. Barnum, 181 play), 183 War Bonnett Creek, 112–113 Wood, Anne, 42. see also American Warner, Charles Dudley, with Mark Museum Twain, The Gilded Age, 183 Wood, Henry, 70 Warren, Lavinia, 46. see also Stratton, Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 50 Charles Sherwood Works Progress Administration Warshow, Robert, 7 (WPA), 76 Weber and Fields Music Hall World’s Fair (Chicago, 1893) (New York), 143 See Columbian Exposition, World Weber and Fields, 154 Fair (1893) Weber, Joe, 142. see also vaudeville World’s Fair, Saint Louis (1904), 38 Weiss, Ehrich (“Harry Houdini”) Wright and Brown Menagerie and See Houdini, Harry Circus, 83 Welch, Joe, 145 Wellman, William, Buffalo Bill (1944 Yanks (1979 Schlesinger film), 184 film), 105 Yellow Hair (Sioux sub-chief), Welsh Brothers’ Circus, 190, 192 112–113 westward expansion You Bet Your Life (1947–61), 167 See Manifest Destiny Young California (Lillian Smith), White City exhibition center, 118 Columbian Exposition, 49 Young, Fritz, 154, 155 242 INDEX

Zazell, Madame (Ella Richter), 93 Zip Coon (blackface song), 58, 201n17. Zeigfeld, Florenz Jr. (“Flo”), 159 see also Dixon, George Ziegfeld Follies, 73, 146, 159–161, 166 Washington; minstrelsy Zip (William Henry Johnson), 72 Zukor, Adolph, 148