by Mim E. Rivas
Detractors were aghast. No longer focused on Jim being a hoax, the new line of attack was to say that there were better but less recognized educated horses. In 1903, Albert had been lured to Cooperstown, New York, to the annual county fair—known for raucous trotting and running races that were being overshadowed this year by automobile races—where a new “trained horse” category featured the Maguire Educated Horses. Mascot and Barney, two handsome white stallions, were billed as the “Greatest Pair of Educated Horses in America” who could “do everything but talk.”
Albert saw them perform and thought their abilities were commonplace; he also had objections to the method of training that was used with them. He went away unimpressed.
Coincidentally, the educated horse destined to garner the most lasting international renown was starting to make the news in his native Germany. His name was Clever Hans, and his story had some curious parallels to Jim’s. Kluger Hans, his German name, was five years old in 1900 when he was purchased by a retired schoolteacher named Wilhelm von Osten, who was expressly looking for a horse to educate. Herr von Osten had already tried to teach language and mathematics to a cat and a bear, without success, but he had a bit more luck with another horse, who learned how to distinguish left from right and how to count how many fingers were being held up in front of him. Within two years, Hans had mastered all that and much more. He could understand a decent amount of German, read common words, identify colors, count to thirty, and do simple arithmetic.
Like Dr. Key’s slow, patient, encouraging method with Jim, the elderly von Osten worked with Hans on a constant basis for three years to develop a method of spelling and counting that involved the tapping of his hoof a certain number of times to correlate to each letter of the alphabet. But unlike the experience that Jim had obtained traveling with the Doc and his medicine show, Hans was not a performer in any sense and didn’t come under the same public scrutiny as did the Arabian-Hambletonian. It wasn’t until 1903 or later that witnesses started observing Hans in demonstrations and talking about him. Eventually, however, as word spread about the horse’s developing math and reading talents, plus his knack for remembering birthdays of prominent citizens, Hans and his trainer had piqued so much interest that an intensive study was commissioned. Conducted by a panel of scientists, equine experts, and military officers, the quest was to find out whether Hans could actually reason and think, or if he was just doing tricks.
At first, the findings of the five-week study showed evidence of cognitive learning and thought processes. This horse could answer correctly when asked the square root of numbers by selecting from a list of answers drawn on a chalkboard. When shown a piece of paper for only one second with anywhere from nine to twelve dots, he could answer correctly how many dots had been shown to him. He even performed his various successful feats with blinders on, an attempt to make sure that Professor von Osten wasn’t sending him visual clues. That is, concluded the study, as long as his trainer was standing nearby. The farther away from Hans he stood, the less likely the horse was to answer correctly. But even when von Osten was removed from the room, Hans still answered enough questions correctly that would have required mental processes other than rote memory. Not a genius, but very clever indeed. One of the scientists, Oskar Pfungst, then posited that Clever Hans could answer correctly as long as his questioner knew the right answer, that these answers were based on involuntary messages sent either from his trainer or any questioner. These messages could be as subtle as the tensing or relaxing of muscles, a minuscule change in posture or facial expression, or the quickening of breath and even heartbeat. “Tension signals.” To prove it, Pfungst, his fellow testers, and Herr von Osten stood behind the chalkboard, and a questioner was brought in who did not know the answers to the questions. Hans proceeded to answer almost every question incorrectly.
Though a host of individuals and groups challenged the study, Clever Hans was doomed to become known as one of the most famous hoaxes in history. This was despite the fact that it was scientifically deemed an unintentional hoax. Nor did the recollection of posterity acknowledge that the system of communication through hoof tapping that Clever Hans mastered was itself rather remarkable. That he could read involuntary messages—described as a form of hypnosis—was also a mark of some sort of unusual cleverness. Instead, the equine once branded the most intelligent horse in the world was now branded a fake. The “Clever Hans” effect was a term psychologists later employed in reference to testing methods and the potential for questioners to influence the responses of subjects via subtle and involuntary messaging. Pretty much from then on, the controversial verdict unfortunately painted every other educated horse with the same discredited brush—as a hoax, a psychic, or the victim of skepticism.
Other famous smart horses of future generations were not given the full public hearing they probably deserved in the aftermath of Clever Hans. Earlier accounts of equines with humanlike intelligence were also written off, including the fascinating anecdotes of Morocco, a horse famous in Shakespeare’s England who had some of Jim’s talents for distinguishing different coins and a hat trick whereby he would fetch a hat or glove for any owner whose name was whispered in his ear. When Morocco was exhibited in Rome, he and his owner were suspected of being possessed by the devil and promptly burnt at the stake.
Even the heroic tales of the devotion and military brilliance of equine soldiers throughout the centuries were ascribed to animal instinct and servile fidelity, not to cognitive processes in any way related to human reasoning.
At the turn of the century, a time when there were more practicing clairvoyants than medical doctors advertised in most newspapers, a double standard was being applied in the analysis of trained animals. It was one thing for humans to be telepathic, but quite another for pets to be psychic. If it could be determined that hypnosis or thought transference was employed, then the idea of animal intelligence would be dismissed as a hoax.
From then on the debate over animal intelligence continued to be as much of a minefield as the debate over priorities in the area of animal rights. And Beautiful Jim Key deserves credit for stirring up the discussion. As a quote attributed to a turn-of-the-century issue of Time magazine put it, “This wonderful horse has upset all theories that animals have only instinct, and do not think and reason.”
Albert Rogers may not have understood something that Dr. Key would have easily recognized. Scientific skepticism was not the only cause for the need to reject theories that horses and other speechless nonhumans could think and reason. The true cause was fear, the same kind of deeply ingrained fear that made Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution so terrifying to the nineteenth-century American public, and would continue to threaten generations to come. In fact, it was in Tennessee, not so far from Shelbyville, not so many years away, that the big legal fight over the teaching of evolution in the schools, known forever as the “monkey trials,” would pit a schoolteacher against the Holy Bible and the wrath of the nation.
In the antebellum South a similar kind of fear had been used to justify slavery and brutality, as though the wrong of the institution was somehow mitigated by the belief that the black race was intellectually inferior. The terrifying proposition that people of color could have equal or superior intelligence was why black education and literacy posed such a threat long after slavery was abolished. Dr. Key had certainly known this when he and Jim traveled the South selling Keystone Liniment, when the point was to entertain and sell his products, not to promote the fact that he and his horse might just be more literate than most folks in the crowd. For the generations and classes who never learned to read and for those people who could not write their own names, fear more than anything else was the reason to dismiss the sight of a horse who could spell, do math, and draw his name in cursive on a chalkboard. Of course it was a trick, or voodoo, or the same funny stuff that horse in Germany was up to.
Albert Rogers and William Key knew little about Clever Hans, although Herr von
Osten had undoubtedly heard and read about Jim, both through the German newspapers from Pittsburg and the international press coverage of world’s fairs. These sources may have first prompted him to train Hans.
In the meantime, as insurance to distinguish Beautiful Jim Key from his competitors, Rogers continued to stress in his press materials that it was the audience members who asked the questions and that reporters were allowed to interview Jim alone. Just to assure the public that he wasn’t in cahoots with the press, he went further, encouraging well-known, honorable citizens to visit Beautiful Jim Key without his trainer or grooms being present, and then to report their findings, positive or not. It was also at this time that instead of staying at inns and public stables when traveling, Jim and his entourage were typically invited to reside temporarily at the fine estates of some of these prominent types, many of whom were officers of humane societies or politicians, or both. Such stays were good both for publicity and for making sure that Dr. Key and the Davis brothers, if they were along, were not subjected to rude treatment based on color—which could happen in any hotel or stables, in any city.
In Detroit, Michigan, for example, the troupe stayed with Senator T. W. Palmer, president of Detroit’s Humane Society, former president of the board of commissioners of the Chicago World’s Fair, and one of the richest men in the state of Michigan. Senator Palmer reported that he went to see Jim in the stables and asked his human attendants to leave, agreeing to have Monk stand by:
I then asked him how much five times six less four was, and…he hunted out the figure twenty-six. No one knew what I was going to ask, nor I, myself, thirty seconds before I propounded the sum. If this was not done by logical process, how was it done? I am thoroughly convinced that the horse reasons…. Jim Key is doing a great work, not only for the children, but for all those who are not too old to learn.
There were other anecdotes that boggled the mind for any explanation other than that Jim was listening and thinking, like the time he was playing store and a man in the audience asked the horse, “Can you change two bits?”
Beautiful Jim Key shook his head from side to side. He had no idea what that meant.
Doc Key allowed himself to translate. “He means a quarter, Jim.”
A quarter? Oh, that was easy. Jim brought out the correct change without hesitation.
Perhaps if Jim’s only claim to fame had been his intellect, his abilities could have been disputed with the argument of the Clever Hans effect. But Beautiful Jim Key was much more than a horse with or without provable cognitive talents. He was a celebrity, a thespian, a comedian, a standard-bearer, a hero. He was a horse with a rags-to-riches storied past. And he was the prodigy of Dr. William Key, whose own saga of overcoming the odds had caused a ripple effect on contemporary culture.
When the Doc began appearing on the most respectable stages of music halls and opera houses of the nation, he represented an anomaly, a cross between an authority and an entertainer who happened to be African-American. In that context, Dr. William Key, now known to hundreds of thousands, if not already a few million, white Americans, was probably regarded as one of the most famous Negroes of his day. This was in part by accident, not a goal to which he particularly aspired in his later years, but he was also the beneficiary of over a century of struggle by black leaders as orators and authority figures, and by black entertainers breaking down barriers in music, dance, comedy, and drama.
Doc Key knew there were only certain roles that black performers were typically allowed to play. Some of the blame for the exploitation of African-Americans onstage could be laid directly at the feet of P. T. Barnum, who had made his first fortune exhibiting sideshow Siamese twins, giants, dwarves, and so on, who were all black. Bill Key might have wondered at the irony that while it was common to ridicule and deride Negroes, more than a few white performers became famous by acting black. He’d seen that from the early days of minstrelsy, when white singers like Dan Emmett became rich by smearing their faces with burnt cork and appropriating black music. One of Emmett’s signature songs, “Jump Jim Crow,” was borrowed from another white minstrel in blackface who’d picked up the tune, lyrics, and dance steps from a slave boy who was singing it while dancing a jig on a street corner. Emmett’s best known song, “Dixie,” which became the anthem of the Confederacy, very ironically, was originally written by the songwriting and singing Snowden family, free Negroes who lived in the North. Even while black minstrel singers and comedians created their own troupes in the later decades of the 1800s, some continuing to use burnt cork and some getting rid of it—like the band that the Doc put together to help him sell Keystone Liniment—white performers continued to portray stock Negro characters either in blackface or without, well into the days of radio and early television.
After the staged version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was debuted in 1853, Negro singers and performers were cast only in chorus roles and sometimes forced to sing behind a scrim, while white actors in blackface were cast in the lead roles. That didn’t change until 1877, when a white traveling Tom show became stranded in Kentucky without the white star and the producer had a brainstorm: why not have a real Negro play Uncle Tom? Black actor and musician Sam Lucas stepped into the role to such success that other productions soon began casting Negroes in the other lead roles too.
Daring African-American theatre companies devoted to the classics had been established in the early 1800s in New York and had inspired the likes of Ira Aldridge, the legendary Negro actor who became a star tragedian in England and throughout Europe, revered for his performances as Othello, as well as King Lear and Macbeth. And finally, at the turn of the century, musical comedies performed by all-black companies, written and composed by African-Americans, were coming into their heyday. Musical and theatrical greats like Bob Cole, Bert Williams, Will Marion Cook, and J. Rosamond Johnson collaborated with poets such as James Weldon Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar to create works that gained enormous popularity with white audiences. Like the self-deprecating songs and skits of black minstrelsy, some of the early black musical comedies, songs, and their stars (billing themselves as “Two Real Coons”) were later accused of continuing to reinforce negative or exaggerated African-American stereotypes. Nonetheless, the productions employed growing numbers of black performers, no longer in blackface, and were responsible for first portraying ladies and gentlemen of color as beautiful and stylish, with all the social graces of their time.
African-American music, above all, had eroded the national resistance to having a good time. The seeded field of black traditions that turned into gospel, blues, jazz, rock and roll, and probably every popular musical form to grow out of the United States, had burst into bloom right at the time of the St. Louis World’s Fair. It was known as ragtime. Though its syncopated rhythm had been imported from Africa, it was germinated in American soil and captured the feeling of the changing era more than any art form. Even before the Louisiana Purchase Exposition opened, everyone was asking whether there would be ragtime at the fair. John Philip Sousa, in a front-page St. Louis Dispatch story, “spoke enthusiastically of the prospects of ragtime programs.” He did say, however, that no “bad ragtime” would be performed, noting, “good ragtime delights the heart and is the characteristic of the American people. There is bad classic music as well as bad ragtime but neither will be heard on the Exposition grounds.”
With ragtime coming into its heyday, along with black entertainers and orators gaining mainstream followings, William Key was better able to attain the rapid acceptance he did in mostly all-white performance halls. On the other hand, he was not an actor, singer, or even a comedian, although he obviously used humor in his shows. Nor was he an authority in the same mold as the African-American leaders, ministers, and professionals who spoke in front of white audiences. He was, as usual, a hybrid, an interloper. Therefore, using common sense, or horse sense—the phrase every newspaper account of Jim had to throw in—Doc Key did his best to use his platform to promote his values o
f kindness and education, to entertain while he was at it, and, in his capacity as an accidental role model, to comport himself with a dignity that would positively reflect on fellow Negroes and himself.
Dr. Key and Jim Key were cultural icons. That’s what Albert Rogers believed. So for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition to snub them was unacceptable. He had to do something. In November 1903, he plied the one connection he had refrained from pursuing all this time, a contact, “HDC,” over at the World, Pulitzer’s newspaper with tentacles that reached to St. Louis. A copy of the telegram HDC sent to St. Louis a few days later reached Rogers back in New York:
Dear Lincoln: This will introduce you to my particular friend, Mr. A. R. Rogers. Please do all you can to put him in touch with everybody he wants to know, that you know. Anything you do for him I will take as a personal favor. He has a big scheme on in connection with the Fair and may want to meet your friend Sexton.
Albert’s scheme resulted first in a new endorsement deal with the National Cash Register Company, the early sponsor that had been replaced by Metropolitan Cash Register. In return for leaving Metropolitan and its nickel-plated cash register that Jim had employed in his shows, Rogers agreed that the Equine Wonder would once again appear in NCR ads to promote its products and would welcome a new thousand-dollar gold-plated National Cash Register to use in his show. And there was something else. Albert Rogers convinced National Cash Register to pay for the construction of Jim’s pavilion at the fair. Corporate sponsorship, why not?