P. T. Barnum’s museum (later Barnum and Bailey, then even later Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey) and other circuses from 1900 to 1919 demonstrated a microcosm of how America’s melting pot actually worked. The museum was separated by class, but each class was treated to the same caliber of entertainment regardless of who they were. It was a place where immigrants, native borns, working and middle class, men and women could come together to be entertained. The idea of the melting pot is a metaphor used commonly to describe immigrants to the United States. It is usually defined as different elements melting together into a harmonious nation with a culture of acceptance towards people’s traditions and ethnicities.
However, in the 1910s, America was definitely not on it’s way towards a utopia of multiculturalism. This makes the relationship that immigrants have with circuses of that time a complicated one. Both the Ringling Bros. and P. T. Barnum’s families had only been in America for a couple of generations. The Ringling Bros. grandparents had immigrated from Germany and Barnum’s grandfather had lived in several European countries, going by several different names, before landing in the United States. Even James A. Bailey, born James Anthony McGinnis, was the son of Irish and German immigrants in Detroit. The most notable circus owner who was not the child or grandchild of an immigrant was Samuel W. Gumpertz, a Missouri showman who ran an amusement park on Coney Island called Dreamland that burned down in 1909. He would later become the director of the Ringling Bros., Barnum, and Bailey Circus. Still, leaders under him were, such as the famous barker, Omar Sami, who was notable for his relaxing Indian accent. Also, the circus’ partial owner and lion tamer Col. Joseph Gincomo Ferari and his lion tamer brother Francis, both of whom were born in England. The other notable non-immigrant was William Leonard Hunt, who, despite having been born in New York, spent most of his life going by “The Great Signor Guillermo Antonio Farini”.
So, not only were most of the circuses’ attended by a great number of immigrants, but their owners and significant leaders were mostly immigrants as well. One would think, based on this, that other cultures would only be treated with the greatest respect when under the proverbial big top. This, however, was unsurprisingly not the case. This is the part where the circus is more like the American melting pot, but also less like it. For instance, there was plenty of opportunities for immigrants to get jobs and move up to powerful positions within the circus confines. There was also absolutely no pressure to change the way that you lived your life to become more American. Still, that did not mean that your customs, or appearance would be treated with respect.
Some instances of this became an opportunity, like with Samuel Gumpertz’ Bantoc Tribe. He decided one day in 1905 that Dreamland needed an exhibit of natives, like the Zulus that The Great Farini had in his traveling show in the 1880s. So, he went about finding a friendly tribe and settled on the non headhunting Bantoc tribe from the Phillipines. He became the ticket to America for 212 Bantocs, and later, 18 Algerian horsemen. During the entire course of his career, he would import around 3,800 people into America from places around the world with no charge for them. Still, while this did give them a free pass into the United States and a job once they landed, one could still say that they were exploited for their exoticism. The Bantocs became an exhibit, so that anyone who paid the quarter or so could see them making crafts out of brass and wires, or blowing poisonous darts through reeds in between the 15th century style Lilliputian town and the scale model Parthenon. These exhibits were often called Ethnic Shows, People Shows, or Human Zoos. The Bantocs were kept in a mock village of Hipa huts so that people could watch them live in their “natural habitat”. Besides living expenses, they were paid $1.50 a week. The average wage around then was about $8 a week. It is very difficult to find out what became of them after Dreamland burned down. Some people that Gumpertz immigrated were only here temporarily, for example, he once rented 19 Boreno “wild men” from their tribe in return for 200 bags of salt. The idea that Africans could be bought and sold or even rented was an idea that had not entirely evaporated, apparently.
Still, there are some who flourished in the U. S. circus industry. The original “Siamese Twins”, Chang and Eng found fame and fortune by separating their stage identities as so-called freaks and their personal lives. Through this, they were not only able to gain wealth beyond what they would have in Siam, but they married sisters and had 21 children between them. In fact, it could be said that they were as much marketing men as Barnum himself, investing in their own acts by adding tricks like flips and somersaults to draw larger crowds and increase their cuts.
Not all immigrant performers were even part of the freak shows. For instance, the flying Wallendas were from Germany, and John Ringling had discovered them in Cuba. They were a physically normal family who happened to all be daredevil stunt performers, best known for performing high wire acts without a net. Their family received so much comfort and acclaim that there are still Wallendas today that are descended from the original Wallendas that still perform stunts with Ringling Bros., Barnum, and Bailey.
Also, not all immigrant circus performers were forced under the big top because of their lack of other options. The Glamorous Strongwoman, Katie Sandwina, born Katarina Brumbach in Vienna, Austria, came from a family of circus performers. Both of her parents had been circus performers their whole lives, so she and her 14 siblings started performing at a very early age. The only reason that they immigrated to the United States was to widen their audience, which they did. Katie was accepted into even high society with the most open of arms and her foreignness was seen as charming, rather than freakish.
Thus, the sideshow circuit demonstrated the way that the melting pot actually worked at the time, rather than the way that it was supposed to work. In the 1918 Americanization Bulletin, the idea is to “give immigrants better opportunities and… bring native and foreign born Americans together in more friendly relations [and]... to give native born Americans a better understanding of foreign born Americans” (Lane et. al. 1918). This bulletin implies that americanization and, by extension, the melting pot, means that immigrants to the United States are supposed to receive both opportunities and a certain amount of understanding. Some sort of cultural exchange is supposed to take place.
In this way, the circus has both succeeded and failed. The idea that remains blurry is whether or not these people were ever actually accepted as Americans or not. Chang and Eng may have married American girls, but that did not mean that their father was happy about his daughters marrying men that he still saw as Siamese. (I find it odd that his problem was with their race instead of their condition.) The Boreno wild men were not even allowed to stay in the United States longer than a few months. When one of Farini’s “Friendly Zulus”, a warrior that had been renamed Charlie, married a Florentine immigrant girl, there was an uproar, and she was not even a “native born” American. The melting pot had allowed all of them jobs, mobility, higher wages, and opportunity, but it had done nothing to offer them equality or respect.
"Sequence 7 (Page 1): Americanization Bulletin. New York City : Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Education, [1918]-. Harvard University Library PDS." Sequence 7 (Page 1): Americanization Bulletin. New York City : Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Education, [1918]-. Harvard University Library PDS. September 15, 1918. Accessed November 15, 2015.
PBS. 1999. Accessed November 15, 2015. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/coney/peopleevents/pande02.html.
Introduction (Introduction). 2006. Patrick Barnum. Accessed November 15, 2015 http://www.barnum.org/intro.html
"Detroit: The History and Future of the Motor City." Detroit: The History and Future of the Motor City. January 26, 2014. Accessed November 15, 2015. http://detroit1701.org/Detroit_Homepage.html#.Vk3cQ9xdHIU.
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