by Michael Daly
In that regard, the inventor could not have been more different than the showman Forepaugh, who continued to keep an eagle-eyed watch on his proceeds and who even in good times was known to fire employees so he could immediately hire them back at lower wages. Forepaugh had not minded expending huge sums in an effort to best Barnum, but he had begun to discern a constant amid all the historic growth and transformation as the nation entered the Gilded Age. He was coming to accept that he would never eclipse Barnum and that realization must have made the onerous expense of the competition as painful as if he were buying unnecessary butter by the ton.
On his part, Barnum seemed to understand that Forepaugh was just not going to let himself be eclipsed. Both Barnum and Forepaugh appeared ready to accept that in this booming land there was room for more than one great show just as there was room for both Ivory and Colgate soaps.
The Forepaugh and Barnum shows reached a mutual agreement that their rivalry made no business sense, whatever the emotional impetus. Each had to pay unprecedented salaries to performers and agents for fear the other show would lure them away. They also had to waste fortunes on the advertising battle, the hundreds of thousands of posters and handbills seeking to sway customers in the same cities while other cities were not visited at all.
As the 1882 season arrived, the shows signed a truce, establishing distinct territories and agreeing to tour different cities over the next two years. They seemed, for the moment anyway, as much at peace as the creatures of the Happy Family.
TWELVE
The White
Elephant War
Barnum was still Barnum and he continued to search for a new sensation in his perpetual effort to top the last one, his primary rival in fact being not Forepaugh but Barnum.
“Barnum is the only man who can out-Barnum himself,” the New York Times declared.
The question was what could be bigger, show-wise, than the elephant Jumbo? Barnum had to seek a measure other than physical size. Otherwise, he would be undercutting an attraction that by one estimate was drawing in more than $300,000 a year. He instead ventured into a realm he knew well from his museum days. The rare and exotic were, if anything, gaining more of a premium with the advent of mass production. And Barnum furthered the appeal with the assistance of a new press agent, Richard “Tody” Hamilton, who had, as the New York Times put it, “never been known to tell a lie when the truth would do as well.” Hamilton made a point of never actually seeing the show he promoted.
“He would not allow his conception of it to be distorted by contact with the details,” the Times noted.
With a press agent thus unfettered by fact, Barnum perpetuated a yearlong saga in the newspapers that was likely true save for when a lie served better, which it no doubt often did. The epic began in June of 1883, with a declaration from Barnum of a singular goal before he left this mortal life and passed on into eternity.
“Let thy servant depart in peace, but before I go—and I hope to remain a long time yet—I want a white elephant,” the showman said.
Barnum meant a creature such as was held sacred in parts of Asia where it was believed that a white elephant had visited Buddha’s mother the night before his birth, entering her side prior to arriving into the world. Barnum hoped the tallest of tales would now generate even more excitement than the biggest of elephants.
“For years Barnum’s agents have been running fearful risks in Indian jungles and Siamese Courts in order to obtain one of these sacred beasts; and the tale of their adventures—as told by themselves—is as wonderful as any of Verne’s romances,” the New York Times reported.
The Times said that Barnum’s chief agent, J. B. Gaylord, “went into the very presence of royalty itself, and actually had the audacity to offer the King of Siam, in person, seated upon his imperial throne with his regal crown upon his sovereign head, $100,000 for one of the white elephants that his Court and people worshipped.”
The king was the very one who had offered America elephants with which to overcome its woeful lack of a native population. A white elephant was supposedly an entirely different matter. The king’s uncles were said by the Times to have “implored Mr. Gaylord to flee from Bangkok, lest the vengeance of the Court and the Siamese people overtake him for his blasphemous presumption.”
Word of the supposed offer supposedly reached a “Siamese nobleman,” who supposedly provided Gaylord with a white elephant only for it to be poisoned by “Buddhist fanatics.” Gaylord was said to have continued on to Burma and purchased a white elephant for $200,000 from “bloody King Theebau . . . the gentleman who recently murdered his wives.”
In an added twist, Theebau was said to have reconsidered two days later and dispatched men to reclaim the elephant. Gaylord reportedly managed to spirit the elephant away in the night on a steamer bound for England.
“At last the great and only Barnum has secured the prize he has coveted for half a century in the shape of a sacred white elephant, and it is expected that Jumbo will turn pale with envy,” the New York Times announced on December 6, 1883.
An update was carried in various newspapers three weeks later.
“Bridgeport, Dec. 29—Mr. P. T. Barnum received a cable message this morning from J. H. Davis, his agent in London, stating that today’s London Telegraph contained a column and a half announcing the arrival of the white sacred elephant in Suez in good condition.”
That same day, the newspapers carried another dispatch from someone who must have felt that in trying to top himself Barnum was also trying to top everyone else, thereby breaking the truce.
“Philadelphia, Dec. 29—Adam Forepaugh, the circus proprietor, to-day received a cablegram from his agent in Algiers stating that he has been offered a white elephant for £10,000. Forepaugh, in reply, directed the agent to obtain the animal at the price mentioned.”
The ship bearing Barnum’s elephant arrived at Liverpool on January 15. The British press noted that the elephant was in fact largely gray save for pink splotches where pigmentation was absent. The Times of London reported, “It seems to be a stretch of language to call it ‘white’” and suggested Barnum’s latest trophy instead be called “a piebald elephant.”
The British newspaper published a letter from O. P. Sanderson, official superintendent of Elephant Catching Operations in Bengal. He happened to be in London and he had inspected the creature now temporarily lodged in what was described as “Jumbo’s vacant stall,” attended by two supposed “Buddhist priests” who regularly performed what were supposedly religious rituals.
Sanderson said that he had seen “many thousands of elephants, wild and tame” and declared that “Mr. Barnum’s so-called white and sacred elephant . . . neither in the general color of his body, in the flesh-colored blotchings on his face, ears and chest, nor in the smallest particular whatsoever, does he differ one whit from the hundreds of elephants of the Commissariat and Forest Departments which may be seen any day in India and Burmah carrying the baggage of troops, or dragging timber down to the banks of rivers.”
Sanderson indicated that Barnum had himself been humbugged if he had indeed paid £40,000, when “the value of such an elephant in Burmah or India is from £150 to £200.” Sanderson concluded, “We must not, however, be too hard on Mr. Barnum for not obtaining a white elephant, for the sufficient reason that such an animal does not exit.”
Any suggestion that there was no such thing as a white elephant did not deter Forepaugh, who was seemingly determined not to be outdone again, as he had been with Jumbo, or to be cowed, as he had been when he tried to pass Topsy off as American born. Barnum’s white elephant was still more than a week out at sea when a ship bearing what Forepaugh agents described as “a genuine white elephant from Siam” arrived in New York.
The headline in a clearly skeptical New York Times described Forepaugh’s creature as “A Very Sea-Sick Elephant,” the
subhead adding, “A Beast with Brown Eyes and Gray Skin.” The Times reported that one of the “circus men” on the pier said the elephant was in fact “a common Indian elephant from Bengal” that had been traded for three American buffalos in Calcutta and then shipped to Liverpool, where it awaited a purchaser for several months. That presented the question of how the elephant had been made paler. It was suggested that perhaps the poor creature had been rubbed with pumice stone during the voyage.
Forepaugh could only have been exasperated when the Times welcomed Barnum’s white elephant eight days later with an article headlined “The Sacred Beast Here,” the subhead reading, “From Burmah to the Great Moral Show.” The reporter described how a messenger “rushed breathless” up to Barnum at Madison Square Garden with a telegram reporting that the ship bearing the “sacred white elephant” had been spotted approaching New York. Barnum set aside for the moment his continuing planning with William Vanderbilt to build a showman’s ultimate venue.
“Get me my hat! Call me a cab! Notify the president!” Barnum reportedly exclaimed.
The reporter accompanied Barnum and an entourage aboard a tugboat that met the ship. A Barnum man aboard waved a white handkerchief to signal the elephant was in good condition. The two supposed Buddhist priests appeared and Barnum called up to them through cupped hands.
“How do ye do? No talkee English? Elephant! Elephant!”
The Barnum party boarded, and the elephant was described as slate-gray, with pink around the trunk and ears and chest. A purported expert inspected the creature closely.
“That’s one of the finest specimens of the sacred white elephant I have seen in my life,” the expert declared.
Barnum said that the elephant was named Toung Taloung, which he translated as Gem of the Sky. Barnum then intoned, “Of course we have all learned by this time that there is no such thing as a really pure white elephant. This is a sacred animal, a technical white elephant, and as white as God makes ’em. A man can paint them white but this is not one of that kind.”
In response, Forepaugh retranslated his own new addition’s name to mean not Tiger Killer but the Light of Asia. He somehow convinced a noted Philadelphia zoologist to confirm publicly that this was a genuine white elephant. A group of reporters took him up on an invitation for a “private viewing” at his show’s winter headquarters in Philadelphia.
“We found standing in a darkened sort of stable, into which light was admitted by a very small and dirty window, the animal in question, the Light of Asia,” reporter Alex Kenealy later wrote. “It struck me immediately that the elephant was a swindle.”
Even in the dimness, Kenealy could make out dark spots around the elephant’s watering eyes and where the elephant would place the end of his trunk into his mouth. He rubbed the skin, but no white came away on his hand. He wet his fingertips and tried again.
“I confess that I was somewhat astonished to find that a lot of white stuff . . . had come off in my hand.”
That evening, Kenealy and a fellow reporter went to Forepaugh’s house, threatening to report their suspicions in a Philadelphia newspaper unless the elephant were given a “thorough scrubbing” in their presence and examined by a team of experts.
“Mr. Forepaugh professed to be considerably astounded,” Kenealy would later write.
Forepaugh sought for an hour to convince the reporters of “the impossibility of making a black elephant white.” He finally agreed to let the reporters inspect the elephant again the following day.
“I will let you wash it with soap and water or scrub it or put ammonia on it. You can do anything you like with it,” Forepaugh told them.
Kenealy returned as arranged and encountered Forepaugh’s son.
“Young Forepaugh said the elephant was sick and it was doubtful if I could see it,” Kenealy recalled.
The elder Forepaugh then appeared and sought to set matters right in his own way.
“I would only be too glad if you would come into my employ, Mr. Kenealy,” Forepaugh said by the reporter’s account.
Kenealy declined and Forepaugh went directly to the paper’s publisher, seeking to stop publication. The publisher agreed to hold off, but only if Kenealy and an editor were permitted to scrub as had been promised.
“I wet the sponge and began to rub heartily on the elephant’s hide,” Kenealy reported. “Every moment, the hide got darker and darker until it was almost black.”
Forepaugh told the newspapermen they had done enough investigating.
“It will dry white,” Forepaugh said.
The authenticity of the white elephant was called further into question by a firsthand witness to the fraud at its inception, a trainer who was presently on a ship from Liverpool, apparently at Barnum’s instigation. A Forepaugh agent boarded the ship the moment it docked and intercepted the trainer, George Gillespie, before he stepped ashore.
“[The Forepaugh agent] tried to induce me to accompany him immediately to Philadelphia and see Mr. Forepaugh, whom he said was a fine fellow and who would pay me treble any amount I could get in any employment in this country,” Gillespie later stated in a sworn affidavit. “I replied that I had been a party to a fraud and was going to take the quickest means of clearing myself.”
As detailed in the affidavit, Gillespie had most recently been employed by Liverpool animal trader William Cross, who had acquired four elephants from Ceylon, one a five-year-old named Tiny, “because he was the smallest.” Tiny was purchased by a Forepaugh agent who was apparently shopping there rather than Hamburg to avoid providing Barnum with an easy refutation, as had happened with Topsy. The Forepaugh agent presented Gillespie with a packet containing “Paris white,” or plaster of Paris and size.
“[The agent] told me to mix it with warm water and rub it on the elephant ‘Tiny’ with a brush resembling a whitewasher’s brush,” Gillespie recalled in the affidavit. “We gave said elephant no less than fifty applications of it, occasionally twice and frequently thrice a day.”
Blisters and sores had appeared on the elephant’s skin. Gillespie had applied a balm called friar’s balsam, but the animal had still been suffering “pain and restlessness” as it was loaded on the steamship City of Chester two days later. Gillespie understood the painting had resumed after the elephant arrived in Philadelphia, with the attendant skin afflictions.
“If persisted, the coloring process will be likely to kill him,” Gillespie stated.
Barnum added a grand finale to his season opener at Madison Square Garden, introducing a new attraction to go with the sacred white elephant. He declared that this other, “profane white elephant” was a fraud superior to that of his rival. The showman invited “scientific experts” to confirm that the elephant had been made actually lighter, not just whitewashed, and was indeed a genuine fake.
Barnum and an associate aptly named Phil De Spotto declined to reveal exactly what lightening agent had been employed, but suggested it could be used on more than elephants.
“There is no limit to the uses to which this solution can be applied,” De Spotto said. “It will as readily and harmlessly change the black color of the Negro to that of a Caucasian or Anglo-Saxon.”
The New York Times called “Barnum’s plan of making an elephant white by artificial means in order to contrast it with the dark and genuine white elephant” an “interesting experiment.”
“The inventor of the process of bleaching elephants claims that it can be applied without the slightest injury to colored people,” the Times noted, satirically imagining a solution to America’s most intractable problem. “Probably a method of straightening Ethiopian hair and repressing the exuberance of Ethiopian lips will soon follow the grand discovery of bleaching Ethiopian skin, and in that case all distinction between the two races will at once disappear, and the Negro question will vanish from our politics, never to reappear.”
In truth, Barnum had used the peroxide that the city’s human hair dealers employed to turn brunette to blond. The elephantine result arrived with the rest of the Barnum show in Philadelphia when Forepaugh still had two more days of his hometown season opener. The profane peroxided elephant was on prominent display as Barnum paraded through the City of Brotherly Love.
“THE WHITE FRAUD,” a banner read.
The “White Elephant War” had begun. A Forepaugh poster read:
TOO WHITE FOR BARNUM
forepaugh’s sacred white elephant
proved by the highest scientific authority to be genuine
and barnum’s “sacred white” elephant a rank fraud
A Barnum poster had a drawing of “Gillespie white-washing Forepaugh’s elephant” and read:
forepaugh has been imitating barnum for years
and for once barnum will imitate forepaugh
barnum has had an elephant artificially colored
and will show in his parade free
In a newspaper interview, Forepaugh quoted Barnum as having once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The phrase was in fact coined by someone else, most likely an infamous con man, Joseph “Paper Collar Joe” Bessimer. But Barnum never denied Forepaugh’s assertion, instead thanking him for the attendant publicity.
Meanwhile, Forepaugh got his own “Buddhist priests” in yellow and red robes to perform purported religious rites while the Light of Asia was on exhibition.
“Some observing visitor once remarked unkindly that the religious act terminated suddenly when the menagerie tent was empty and was resumed with wonderful alacrity when spectators approached,” a Forepaugh aide reported.
Forepaugh said this sacred creature was too precious to include in a street parade. The more likely reason was that rain might wash away the coloring that continued to be applied despite the blisters and sores.