by Beth Macy
But George and Willie never made it to the carnival’s Hot Springs, Arkansas, winter quarters. By the late fall of 1914, their co-manager Robert Stokes had broken off from the Great American Shows and was exhibiting them as a solo act (or single-O) in store shows and dime museums, according to Harriett’s Billboard notice. George and Willie were now being exhibited as the Ethiopian Monkey Men—very much in the vein of Zip, only full-sized and albino, and not yet so famous.
Where Stokes took them next is unclear. In one showman’s account, George and Willie performed during that period in a Boston dime museum called Austin and Stone’s, a block away from Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. An offshoot of Barnum’s American Museum, the venue exhibited carnival freaks and curiosities, both real and phony, with a stage next door for vaudeville acts. Presiding over the spectacle was a barker named Professor William S. Hutchings, a former Barnum and Bailey Circus lecturer whose spiels were so loquacious that Harvard forensics professors liked to dispatch their students to observe him and take notes.
“The Professor was loath to use one word if eight or nine would do,” one showman wrote of Hutchings, who ended every story by mumbling “Marvelous, marvelous!”
Austin and Stone’s was so cutting-edge in its day that it even had its own air-conditioning system: large blocks of ice were placed in a trough and covered by a grate running along the center aisle. As one advertisement ballyhooed, “Our Lecture Hall always maintains the leading curiosities of the day from all parts of the world, and lectures on the same are delivered hourly, by PROF. HUTCHINGS, the most eloquent descriptive orator in America or Europe.”
The details about the Boston museum were all true. But George and Willie could not have performed there, I realized, after discovering the museum had been torn down in 1912, shortly after the professor’s death. The demolition paved the way for the new vaudeville theater, Scollay’s Olympia, where comedian Milton Berle would get his start, sometimes performing in blackface.
For the Muse brothers’ earliest career, then, my timeline relies only on Harriett’s anxious plea for more information and the Tibbals picture: George and Willie standing there in their too-small suits, looking not very marvelous.
The man who printed the picture, in fact, turned out to be so much better documented than his teenaged subjects: Albert R. Bawden lived in Davenport, Iowa, where he ran a novelty postcard-making service and print shop with his brothers in the 1910s and ’20s, and also worked as treasurer of a local bank. His wife held society luncheons while Albert ran the local merchants’ bowling league, his average a respectable 170.
The novelty-postcard business was thriving, judging from the hundreds of weekly Billboard classifieds. In fact, in every nook and cranny of the country, any number of enterprises seemed to be eager to sell goods to traveling showmen—or to join their tribe. From a sampling of one of the six-page classified spreads:
Porcupines perfect for “a good pit show attraction” could be purchased by writing to “FLINT” in North Waterford, Maine. One could find a fellow in Kansas who promised to display his own brand of “DARE-DEVIL DEED-DEFYING DANGER and death in an entirely new and unequaled motorcycle act.”
With this molasses-slow version of eBay, a buyer could locate such hard-to-find items as shooting galleries, popcorn wagons, and a rebuilt Edison moving-picture machine.
And people, too, according to the messages and ads:
“The thinnest man alive”—or in Chattanooga, anyway—was keen to join a store show or carnival. An aging but still employable “good freak born with feet and no legs” could be leased by contacting Eli Bowen in Thayer, Indiana. (Bowen had supposedly been discovered by Barnum at an Ohio country fair and already had a long career as the Legless Acrobat—but, now seventy-four, he seemed to be hearing the call of the road.)
The father of Fred Pettit wanted to hear from his wanderlust-filled son, who’d presumably run away with the circus, “before too long.”
An elderly couple sought a house-sitting job for traveling show people.
The so-called Kid Albino from Stamford, Connecticut, who doubled as a famous hypnotist, offered himself for hire to any “high-class vaudeville act.”
And a multitalented family consisting of man, wife, and child posted a notice about its “BIG NOVELTY ACT,” promising to deliver “real fancy shooting; we also use whips, violin, cornet, piano and sing.”
Despite such a wide range of documented human spectacle, for two years the Ethiopian Monkey Men were curiously absent from both the media and the marketplace. If Stokes was exhibiting them in stores, as Harriett believed, he was being quiet about it.
Back home in Virginia in late 1914, it had just become illegal for any child to be employed in factories, shops, mines, mercantile establishments, laundries, bakeries, and brickyards. The groundbreaking labor activist Lewis Hine was in the process of photographing several small children from Roanoke, including twelve-year-old Mamie Witt, who was helping support “an able-bodied, dependent father,” and a seven-year-old, Frank Robinson, who swept the floors of the Roanoke Cotton Mill in bare feet. Across the nation, Hine’s muckraking photographs began to change the way Americans thought about children’s rights. (“I counted seven apparently under fourteen and three under twelve years old,” he wrote of one Roanoke factory.)
Teenagers working in the sideshow may well have thought, “These people are going to stare at me anyway, so why shouldn’t I get something for it—and help my family out at the same time?” pointed out historian Jane Nicholas. That had been the case with the legless, teenaged Bowen when he hired himself out to a traveling showman, shortly after his father’s death, to help support his mother and seven siblings.
Besides, it was easier than sorting rock at the Fenwick Mines.
“One of the hardest things for modern audiences to understand is, parents sometimes did this, and yet they still loved their children. It’s that combination of love and financial need that can be so hard to tease out,” Nicholas told me. “People will say, ‘If they really loved their children, they wouldn’t have done that,’ but people do all sorts of things for their children.”
During the time the Muse brothers began performing, Nicholas pointed out, adults could legally and literally mail children—by affixing stamps to their shirts and putting them on a train.
I wondered if the Muse brothers felt like the dislocated and orphaned Eskimo Minik, who had been brought to the United States in 1897 at the age of six or seven with his father and four other villagers from Greenland at the request of exhibit-hungry explorers and museum directors. They’d been displayed to paying customers aboard the ship Hope, then housed and exhibited at the American Museum of Natural History. They were ostensibly there to be interviewed, examined, and measured, but all except Minik and his father died soon afterward from diseases their immune systems were not equipped to handle.
From a patronizing New York Times account written in October 1897: “The unfortunate little savages have caught cold or warmth, they do not know which, but assuming it was the latter their sole endeavor yesterday was to keep cool. Their efforts in this direction are a source of amusement to several scores of visitors.”
When Minik’s father died the following February, the museum faked a funeral for him to deceive Minik about the body’s whereabouts, wrapping a corpse-length log and covering it with fur. It was nine more years before Minik discovered that his father’s body was actually inside a glass case at the museum. His impassioned quest to retrieve his father’s remains and give him a proper Inuit burial—the subject of a remarkable 1986 book by Kenn Harper called Give Me My Father’s Body—was not successful during his lifetime.
“You’re a race of scientific animals,” Minik said in 1909, railing against the museum. “I know I’ll never get my father’s bones out of the American Museum of Natural History. I am glad enough to get away before they grab my brains and stuff them into a jar.” (It wasn’t until 1993, many decades after Minik’s death, that his father�
�s remains were repatriated for burial in the family’s home village. Four years later, a commemorative plaque was installed at the Greenland gravesite, with a phrase that translated to They have come home.)
Uprooted and orphaned, Minik lived what Harper described as a “tortured and lonely life,” unable to entirely adapt to either country. “It would have been better for me had I never been brought to civilization and educated,” Minik told a reporter after he’d journeyed back to Greenland, only to find himself missing America and then returning to New York. “It leaves me between two extremes, where it would seem that I can get nowhere.”
While Minik’s narrative varies greatly from the Muse brothers’—especially the ending—the two arcs share parallel threads of cultural, familial, and geographical displacement. When the literate Minik eloquently describes what it was like to be dislocated, ripped from his family, and exhibited at the dawn of the twentieth century, I can picture Willie and George feeling exactly the same way:
“Aside from hopeless loneliness, do you know what it is to be sad—and to feel a terrible longing to go home, and to know that you are absolutely without hope?” Minik wrote about the period following his father’s death. Even after being “adopted” by a kindly family, he still cried most of the time and fretted constantly about the possibility of being returned to the museum.
When he enrolled in college, Minik felt like a “freak to those about me,” he wrote. Only after being taken in by a farm family in New Hampshire, where he labored in obscurity as a lumberjack, did he describe being content. But he died soon after, of the Spanish flu, in 1918. He was believed to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
Unlike in Minik’s case, there was relatively little media discussion of the ethics of exhibiting black sideshow performers, most of whom were unschooled and unable to leave a written record of their own experiences. The New York Times noted in 1914 that Zip was the oldest freak still performing with the Barnum and Bailey Circus. The reporter gushed as he recollected Barnum’s 1864 Cooper Union lecture, “How to Get Money,” with Zip and the Wild Men of Borneo flanking him onstage. “Zip is almost entirely devoid of mentality, but a peculiar look comes over his face whenever there is shown to him a photograph of his first protector and for that matter, owner, the late Phineas T. Barnum,” the reporter wrote.
The so-called Wild Men were forty-pound dwarves named Hiram and Barney Davis who lived on a farm outside Mount Vernon, Ohio, when their family was first approached by a showman in 1852. Their parents initially declined to part with them, but the mother reportedly changed her mind when the showman returned with an irresistible pile of cash.
When Barney Davis died at eighty-five, in 1912, his niece held his funeral at her home, pointing out that her uncle was a real person and not a freak. While Barnum had pitched them as being monkeylike and having paws, she pointed out Barney’s perfectly formed hands and told mourners that the brothers conversed easily, though they’d been instructed to speak gibberish in their act.
“I wanted people to see that they were not freaks,” she told an interviewer. “Wouldn’t you have done that for them?”
The Davis brothers’ specialty—which they displayed while decked out in short pants and leotards—was performing feats of strength, routinely lifting the heaviest volunteers in the audience as one of several featured stunts. Dressed elaborately in an effort to aggrandize their appearance and inflate their status, they were like the Muse brothers in that their looks deviated from that of the general population, but they were otherwise able-bodied and capable of demonstrating talents.
As with the Muse family, the Davises had lost track of the brothers by the time they had become regulars in the circus world. In 1880, they even instituted a lawsuit to have them declared legally dead—at the same time Hiram and Barney were about to be hired on with the Barnum and London Circus.
A century before the Internet, it was harder for an isolated family in rural America to keep tabs on far-flung relatives—even those who appeared on the front pages of the New York Times. It was not so hard, then, to whisk a person’s loved ones away and never return them, leaving their families to lie awake at night, wondering if they were dead or alive.
The Muses’ special skill? Nothing the showmen recognized right off the bat.
But it wasn’t long before someone heard them singing a popular song, an Irish ballad recorded by tenor John McCormack in 1914 that soon became a World War I anthem, sung by soldiers on their way to the Western Front. The brothers began a lifelong obsession with “A Long Way to Tipperary,” a ballad about longing for home:
It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,
But my heart’s right there.
Christmas 1914, their first of many away from their mother, people were talking about the unexpected Christmas Day truce along the Western Front. Snatches of “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” had been heard drifting across a frigid Belgium battlefield, littered with fallen soldiers. Silent night, holy night. Men who’d been shooting to kill put their weapons down for the day, allowing corpses to be recovered and buried.
Back in Virginia, Harriett followed news of the war, and she sang along with the radio at work.
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
It’s a long way to go.
It was quiet in the tiny Boys Home quarters she shared with her three youngest children. Harriett waited for a response to her Billboard notice, but every day after the mailman had come and gone, Anna Clark sighed and shook her head.
In her mind’s eye, George and Willie were frozen at chin height, their blond curls still short. She prayed George was reminding Willie to stay out of the sun.
She must have known it by now: she had been duped. The boys might have been kidnapped by the circus, or they might have been loaned to it. They might even have seen it, at first, as a kind of adventure. But they were most certainly trapped in it now, wherever they were.
She would never reveal to them—or any of her other relatives—how they came to join the circus.
She would take that serious secret to the grave.
But first, Harriett Muse would right the wrong done to her boys. Their mama was very definitely not dead, not yet, and she wanted them back. One day George and Willie would know that with certainty.
And so would the circus.
6
A Paying Proposition
The brothers’ birthdays came and went, George’s on Christmas Eve and Willie’s in April, celebrated often around Easter—holidays now made all the more poignant for their mother.
D. W. Griffith’s film homage to white supremacy, The Birth of a Nation, based on the novel The Clansman, premiered in 1915, and Franz Kafka published his landmark novella, The Metamorphosis, about the absurdity of existence and the cruelty of power the same year. In 1916, not long after Pancho Villa tried to reclaim New Mexico, President Wilson announced he was running for a second term literally by throwing his hat into the middle of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus center ring—and forever cementing a cliché. (A lifelong circus fan, Wilson had wanted to accept Charlie Ringling’s invitation to ride an elephant, but his advisers nixed the idea of a Democrat riding on the symbol of Republicanism, and so did the Secret Service.)
As Americans shed their Puritanical prudishness, and factory work began to give people in rural areas and small towns money for amusements, the circus became the pinnacle of popular culture. Barnum, who died in 1891, may have been the Walt Disney of his day, but as the market for the circus grew, his successors were reaching more customers than the pioneer showman could have dreamed. In the American West, the Al G. Barnes Circus grabbed headlines with thirty train cars full of its wild-animal menagerie and circus-stunt acts, and had a near-monopoly in the western states. Farmers sold hay and grain so they could afford to take their families to the eye-popping shows.
At the turn of the twentieth century, ninety-eight circuses and menageries traveled across the country, the most in American history. The largest am
ong them were traveling company towns, mammoth three-ring railroad circuses that rattled across the nation, toting more than a thousand employees and hundreds of animals.
In the Midwest and along the East Coast, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey—the two entities combined in 1919—moved its version of a small city on a near-nightly basis, shrewdly timing its course to bring in the most dollars. In the South, that meant fall, after the cotton crop was picked, and right after its tour through the midwestern states, timed to capture the wheat farmers when they were flush with harvest cash. Its “big top,” or main performance tent, seated fifteen thousand people for its daily afternoon and evening performances, which were held at 2:00 and 8:00 p.m.
By contrast, the carnivals George and Willie Muse first traveled with were much smaller affairs. When they stopped in a town, they tended to stay for a week at a time.
But there were dozens of such shows back in the 1910s and ’20s—enough to take up several pages of news in Billboard, which was sold weekly in local pool halls, newsstands, and tobacco shops across the nation. For people who already worked in the industry but dreamed of “hopscotching,” or switching shows, Billboard was typically sold in front of the cookhouse entrance. It was also manna to bored teens who dreamed about ditching it all and joining the carny life. Circus people even had a nickname for Billboard, as they did for a lot of things. They called it the Educator.
Carnivals tended to be somewhat smaller affairs, with five or fewer rides, a Wild West show, maybe some clown and wild-animal acts, and a freak show with five or six exhibits. They were often sponsored by local Elks clubs as a way to attract new members, and Elks organizers would close the Main Street down for a week at a time to make way for the rides, acts, and food stands.
“Circus people thought they were more highbrow than a carnival, but the term wasn’t really applicable to either of them,” the collector and researcher Fred Pfening III said. “Watching a circus was a nonintellectual activity.”