[DEBORAH WALK, CURATOR:] America was an agrarian society.
And it was a hard life that you had.
You woke up early, and you worked through the day.
And then all of a sudden,
If you were so lucky,
For one magical day,
You were transported from your work-a-day world,
into the spangles,
into the spectacle that crisscrossed the country:
the circus.
[DOMINIQUE JANDO, CIRCUS HISTORIAN:] You saw extraordinary animals
that you sometimes had never seen.
Whether you were a child or an adult, seeing a giraffe was totally unheard of
And seeing wild cats and zebras,
African animals, Asian animals.
[JANET M. DAVIS, HISTORIAN:] It looked like an invasion
Because there would elephants,
There would be cages of wild animals,
There would be teams of horses,
There would be a band,
And there would be hundreds of people lining the streets.
[NARRATOR:] For generations, the story was familiar.
The circus crashed in on everyday life,
Loud and brash,
Then vanished like an illusion,
Leaving some child dreaming of a different life.
[ROGER SMITH, WILD ANIMAL TRAINER:] I was four years old.
And my mother said,
“Look back there, Roger."
"That’s Clyde Beatty.”
He came running toward us,
And began to crack the whip
And in came these animals that I had never seen.
And the excitement was something that got into me.
I knew I would do that work some day.
It was my epiphany.
[RICHARD REYNOLDS, CIRCUS HISTORIAN:] I first remember the circus
When my father would take me to bed,
And he would hum the elephant entry song from Hagenbeck-Wallace in 1932,
And it went, [mimics the song]
[mimics the song]
And I've never forgotten that.
My father inspired me to the circus.
He loved it himself,
And I took it from him.
[NARRATOR:] The circus had arrived in America in the nation’s earliest days,
Small and insignificant.
But as the country grew, the circus would evolve with it
Into a gargantuan, industrialized entertainment,
Appealing to both the humble and the illustrious.
It would stitch into one nation a patchwork of disconnected communities,
And dazzle not just Americans
But the entire world.
[JANET M. DAVIS:] A 19th-century writer called the circus, “our season of imaginative play.”
What the circus offered is this ability, in a way, to dissolve oneself,
To have an out-of-body experience.
The act of dancing on a horse's back,
The act of performing on a trapeze,
On a rope,
Or doing a strength act,
All of these forms of circus arts,
They push the boundaries of human strength,
Of the limited nature of our humanness
In ways that allow us to transcend it.
For me, that is the essence of circus.
[NARRATOR:] A swell of humanity flocked to Brooklyn on April 10, 1871
To see the most elaborate entertainment ever mounted in the United States
—a dizzying array of human oddities and acrobats,
Museum exhibits and wildlife,
Jugglers, trapeze artists, and strongmen.
Its largest tent, or big top, featuring sixty performers, could seat five thousand people.
The museum tent boasted a slew of sideshow attractions
Including a so-called midget known as Admiral Dot.
A third pavilion housed a zoo, or what was called a menagerie.
It displayed thirty cages of animals,
Including twelve camels, four lions,
Two elephants, and a rhinoceros.
Some thirty-five other circuses toured the country that summer.
None was as spectacular.
[MATTHEW WITTMANN, HISTORIAN:] It’s this incredible combination of entertainment.
It’s a circus.
It’s a menagerie.
It’s a museum.
It was a truly massive show.
[ROBERT THOMPSON, HISTORIAN:] This is a village,
A village of entertainment,
A place that Peter Pan goes,
The land of the Lost Boys.
This looks like a place that a bad boy running away from home
would love to go to
Because everywhere you turned there was a smell
Or a sight or a sound that was delectable.
[NARRATOR:] Though the attractions were without rival,
Many came hoping simply to catch a glimpse of the owner.
Over the past three decades, Phineas Taylor Barnum
Had become one of the most famous men in America.
[JAMES W. COOK, HISTORIAN:] Barnum was the most widely visible
And widely known American of the 19th century.
It’s not an American president.
It’s not a great scientist
Or someone who actually had achieved,
You know, a breakthrough to improve humankind.
It was a showman.
[NARRATOR:] Like many circus impresarios,
P.T. Barnum came from humble beginnings.
His father, a Connecticut innkeeper and tailor, died when Barnum was fifteen,
Leaving the family destitute.
Young Phineas tried just about everything to avoid a life of manual labor.
He was a shop clerk,
He sold lottery tickets,
And he hawked bibles.
In the spring of 1835,
Barnum bought the rights to exhibit a frail enslaved African American woman
Named Joice Heth.
He plastered New York with posters
Advertising the old woman as George Washington’s 161-year-old nursemaid.
Though Heth had little choice in the matter, she played the part
And the ruse worked.
Barnum hoodwinked the press and thousands of others
Who paid twenty-five cents to see her.
Then he took Heth on tour through New England.
In Boston, when his hoax finally stopped attracting paying customers,
Barnum came up with another one.
[JAMES W. COOK:] He does something remarkable.
He decides to accuse himself of fraud
By taking out anonymous notices and advertisements in the paper
Saying that in fact, Joice Heth is not a 161-year-old African American woman
who raised George Washington.
In fact, she is an automaton
Made of India rubber and mechanical springs.
She’s a robot.
This is a trademark Barnum strategy,
To draw attention to the possibility of criminal fraud
And to invite viewers to make up their own minds.
[NARRATOR:] With Heth, Barnum had made himself famous for humbuggery.