Traveling Carnivals

In American culture, the traveling carnival evokes all things seamy, dubious, and lurid. In their heyday, some three hundred different traveling carnivals roamed the United States offering a glimpse of mystery and excitement, and sometimes danger. It was the rare child who did not think of joining a traveling carnival or circus to escape a stultifying small-town environment. The carnival was the poor man's entertainment. An egalitarian institution, carnivals practiced equal-opportunity speculation, and thus acquired a reputation for trickery and deceit, if not outright fraud, and as a consequence of America's developing network of train lines and highways, these carnivals were able to penetrate the most remote backwaters of the country. The carnival remains one of America's most enduring cultural institutions.

The United States, being a young country, has long had fairly primitive tastes in entertainment. For the better part of the nineteenth century, entertainment in rural America consisted of traveling circuses and burlesque troops, vaudeville and magic-lantern shows, all traversing the country by train or horse-and-buggy, offering temporary relief from the boredom of country life. The showmen were both exalted and disdained; occupants of an insular class, they were much maligned but envied for their carefree lifestyle. Cities contained a richer palette of diversions, but actors and showmen were no less scorned there. Going to dime museums exhibiting freaks of nature, magic acts, or flea circuses was a popular pastime with the people, and in the latter half of the century, resort towns located near urban centers sprang up to accommodate a growing middle class. Resort entertainment choices mirrored those of the city, with freak shows, burlesque, and primitive amusement parks relocating for the summer season. From these disparate entertainments, the traveling carnival emerged. It was an ad-hoc gathering of shows and concessions that traveled under the casual imprimatur of a manager or showman who handled the business end of things, and was responsible for hiring and firing acts.

Traveling Carnivals

Most histories credit the 1893 Chicago World's Fair—which brought together the largest agglomeration of showmen ever assembled up to that point—with the traveling carnival's origination. Along the Midway Plaisance, an avenue at the fair's periphery, the freak shows, games of chance, burlesque, wild west shows, and other more unsavory diversions assembled, and their close proximity led many of the showmen to compare notes on their business. "The showmen working the Midway Plaisance," writes Robert Bogdan, "not only shared the same grounds and experiences but even met to discuss common problems … it was in the area around Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, that the idea for a collective amusement company was first discussed."

Otto Schmidt, a participant in these meetings, organized the Chicago Midway Plaisance Amusement Company, and he and his acts set out on a tour of the Northeast. The show featured thirteen attractions, some direct form the Midway Plaisance, but failed to make its final booking in New Orleans, folding due to poor organization and business practices. Nevertheless, it provided the model for a new type of traveling amusement—part circus, part amusement park—and several showmen from Schmidt's troupe revamped the idea with success, going on to operate some of the first traveling carnivals.

From spring to fall of 1902, seventeen carnivals toured the United States. They pitched their tents in empty fields or vacant lots, or were booked in conjunction with state and county fairs, these having become a welcome diversion for the small towns that served as the center of isolated farm communities. By 1905, there were forty-six traveling carnivals plying their trade. By 1937, an estimated three hundred different shows traversed the country.

The average carnival consisted of a circular avenue, the midway (the name derived from that of the avenue leading to the big top in a circus), ringed by the different attractions and circumscribing the rides and food vendors within a circular enclosure of colorful tents. Among the different attractions, a pre-World War II carnival would invariably include a model show, where naked (if the police could be sufficiently bribed) or scantily clad young women were exhibited behind a see-through fabric; a sex exhibit in which grift was especially common (anything even loosely associated with sex—fetuses preserved in formaldehyde, anatomical aids, or caged guinea pigs—could suffice); a palm reader; a dance pavilion; games of chance; food concessions; and, of course, the rides.

The rides were usually owned and operated by the carnivals manager, and they provided a constant draw, an insurance against the vagaries of local jurisprudence, which often prohibited many acts from performing, or made grift a difficult and hazardous endeavor. Most carnivals would also include a free act, usually some spectacular dare-devil stunt, for instance, plunging off a tower into a small pool of water. This act was performed at the peak hour of carnival business, providing a climax and focal point to the day's events. If the rides were the bread-and-butter of a carnival, games of chance were the jam. Extremely lucrative for the concessionaire, when the police would allow them, games of chance were in great part to blame for the carnival's dubious reputation, and a frequent source of animosity between the townies and the carnies. The games were almost always rigged, and the "marks" duped out of a considerable amount of cash. Where the police were vigilant, vendors laid off the "grift." Where gambling was illegal or heavily frowned upon, the games paid off in "slum," or trinkets.

Every carnival featured a freak show, often called a "ten-inone" or "string show," consisting of a number of different acts appearing in a single tent. The freak show provided the mystery to a carnival and, although now moribund as an institution, it remains of abiding interest, with freak show paraphernalia commanding high prices by collectors. Most shows had at least one genuine lusus naturae—a fat woman, a living skeleton, Siamese twins—and a number of "made" acts. These ranged from outright frauds—a wild man of Borneo (or geek) who might have grown up in Brooklyn, or a mind-reader who worked his dazzling clairvoyance by means of an elaborate code—to acts that were semi-legitimate. Tattooed men, torture acts, sword-swallowers, and snake charmers were the most common sort of act, constituting a sort of middle class of the carnival world; they ranked slightly lower than nature's aristocrat, the freak, but far above the lowly geek.

To attract an audience, a "talker," a quick-talking announcer, would gather a crowd, attracted by the talker's "pitch" as well as by the exhibitions, several of whom would appear with him on the "bally platform" giving short demonstrations. This was called "turning the tip." Once the tip had been turned, that is, lured into paying the entrance fee, they would be further induced to buy cheap merchandise—photos, pamphlets, and the like—and then to pay an additional fee to see the "blow-off," a genuine freak—a fat man or woman, a bearded lady, pin-heads, or victims of other birth defects. A good "blow-off" could underwrite the operating expenses of a ten-in-one, therefore, freaks were a highly valued commodity.

Carnival life fostered an us-and-them attitude. You were either "with it" (in the know), or a mark. There was no middle ground, and sometimes pitched battles, deemed "clems" by the carnies, would erupt. Often small-town carnival-goers were simply suspicious, and often the fights started after the games of chance had bled them dry. In small town America of 1930s, it was simply second-nature to distrust the carnies. And yet, the lurid quality of the carnival, the danger of being swindled, appears to have been part of the attraction. Carnival and carny alike were exotic, simultaneously feared and envied. The carnies rejection of the "normal" world, of proper society, was an affront, but it was also an invitation. In the midst of the Great Depression, when the traveling carnivals were at their most popular, customers could still be counted on to spend their hard-earned pennies. Perhaps it was because escape from the hardship of everyday life had assumed a monumental importance for the hard-pressed citizenry.

After World War II, the number of carnivals in operation dropped substantially. No one single reason can account for their precipitous decline. Perhaps it was that small-town audiences had become more sophisticated; perhaps changing social mores diminished the popularity of the freak show; or perhaps it was simply that society had become more regimented, and the escape carnivals represented had become anomalous. In addition, corporatism had invaded the carnival world. The result is today's pallid excuse for a carnival: no freak shows, games of chance that pay off in worthless trinkets, and not even a faint hint of danger or sex. The forbidden, as much a part of the carnival mystique as cotton candy or the smell of sawdust, had been excised from the carnival, and without the danger, the fun and excitement was simply less alluring.

But the image of the carnival remains powerfully alluring. Carnival paraphernalia—banners and promotional materials—are now much sought-after by collectors. In literature, as well, the carnival works its distinctive magic. By cleverly inverting the carnival-goer's presumption of fraud, Charles G. Finney's novel, The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935), wrote of a traveling circus in which all the attractions are fantastically real, yet the townies fail to see past their suspicions. Katherine Dunn's best-selling novel, Geek Love about a family of carnival freaks, purposefully deformed in utero, captured the public imagination in the late 1980s, becoming a best-seller. Since Todd Browning's 1932 masterpiece, Freaks, the carnival has routinely appeared in motion pictures, and its appearance is usually metaphor for subterfuge and betrayal. More recent films such as Carny (1980) treat the wayward carny with more affection, but one need only read David Foster Wallace's essay, "Getting Away from Being Pretty Much Away from It All," to comprehend the slightly sinister quality of the carnival and its workers.

Carnivals conjure up a host of associations in American culture. Heirs to both the showmanship of a Wild Bill Hickock and the entertaining mendacity of the snake-oil salesman, carnivals tap deeply into the American psyche: its restlessness, its love/hate relationship with conformity, its romance with all things criminal. The carnival was a non-judgmental environment where the deformed, the drifter, the loser could find a place that would accept him unconditionally; it was a metaphor for freedom from troubles, from the mundane, and into a magical world where the rule is that things aren't always what they seem.

—Michael Baers