Ordinary People

FREAK SHOW: Presenting Human Oddities for Fun and Profit by Robert Bogdan. University of Chicago Press, $29.95.

LIFE PRESENTS NOT many spectacles for which an appropriate description demands the word Brobdingnagian, but I saw such a thing last fall at the fairgrounds outside the town of Blue Hill, Maine. The Blue Hill Fair had all the usual trappings—the prize heifers, the bad country music, the carnival rides manned by itinerant toughs—and a single unexpected feature. In a forlorn corner of the fairgrounds a big and shabby tent had been erected, and above it was a sign with the words WORLD’S LARGEST PIG. I joined the small line, paid my fifty cents, and went inside.

The pig’s name was Big Red, and she was Brobdingnagian. Her several thousand pounds were arranged on a mat of dank hay on the back of a flathed truck. Fresh tufts of hay had been tucked in all around her, like a garnish, but for all I knew the grass directly underneath the pig had not been changed in years. Big Red seemed incapable of significant movement; only the occasional blinking of an eye, barely detectable through an ammoniacal haze, suggested that the sow and volition had not entirely parted company. As if by tacit agreement, none of the spectators who filed around this behemoth said a word, each of us perhaps feeling that any vocal acknowledgment of our presence would somehow tar us all with an indelible moral stain.

That is the closest I have come to having seen a freak show, and I remember thinking how much more awful the experience would have been had the exhibit been fully sentient. What if, instead of Big Red, I had seen Siamese twins or an armless dwarf. There are surely—obviously—grosser examples of human depravity than the freak show. But few are so immediate, so tawdry, and so unabashed in their exploitation of the unfortunate. I emerged from Big Red’s tent into the sunlight feeling somehow soiled. I felt a distaste for her owner, sitting in an aluminum deck chair at the entrance, with his hairy melon slice of exposed belly and his change purse, and I pitied not only Big Red but also those people for whom she stood as a kind of surrogate.

IDON’T FEEL MUCH different about the matter after reading Robert Bogdan’s Freak Show, but that may be partly because emotion and reason, like sound and light, proceed at different paces. Bogdan, who is a sociologist, has set out in his book to build upon the work of investigators as diverse as Diane Arbus and Leslie Fiedler. His stated goal is an understanding of the role of the freak show during its heyday in America— roughly from the 1840s to the 1940s— and he denies in several places that what the freaks themselves thought about their condition is of much concern to him. But his book belies that claim. We learn from Bogdan that many of the freaks—and they preferred to be called by that name—were adroit businessmen, who, rather than being exploited, saw themselves as the exploiters of a craven public, of people whom they regarded as rubes. The freaks viewed their lot not merely as a condition but as a role— a role amplified by sophisticated presentation and a polished act—and for their performances in this role they received a generous share of the profits. In their private lives they were frequently models of domesticity, who enjoyed love, friendship, and the respect of their neighbors in the towns where they lived. At a time when a deformed body entitled its inhabitant to no public largesse, and when medical intervention was utterly unavailing, being a freak in a freak show was hardly the meanest of fates.

The origins of the freak show, which in this country can be traced to the early 1700s, lie in the medieval English country fair. There, Bogdan writes, “almost all of the forms of human variation that would later adorn our sideshow platforms could be seen for a fee.”The exhibits came to include people with congenital abnormalities—dwarfs, albinos, people with too many arms and legs or too few, joined twins, and people with abnormal amounts of hair—and also exotic human specimens from foreign lands and even self-made freaks, who achieved freak status by, for example, having their entire bodies tattooed.

In America, as in Britain, the professional freak, or lusus naturae, at first traveled alone from fair to fair; over the years, however, the arrangements became more complex. Freaks soon acquired personal managers and then organized themselves (or were organized by showmen) into group exhibits that could be viewed either in the dime museums that sprang up in every major American city, or in the Raree Show or Odditorium at circuses, amusement parks, and world’s fairs. The freaks made money not only from gate receipts but also by

selling “true life” biographical pamphlets, which bore titles like Personal Facts Regarding Percilla the Monkey Girl and Life and History of Alfonso, the Human Ostrich, and by selling autographed photographs of themselves.

Collecting such photographs (many of which were taken by Mathew Brady, whose Manhattan studio was directly across the street from P. T. Barnum’s American Museum) became a popular hobby in the late nineteenth century, and millions of them were printed and sold. Thousands have survived, preserved in antique albums, and some are reproduced in Bogdan’s generously illustrated book. They are often arresting in their poignanee. All we know of the existence of a girl named Ella Harper is a photograph of her on all fours with this inscription: “I am called the camel girl because my knees turn backward. I can walk best on my hands and feet as you see me in the picture. I have traveled considerably in the show business for the past four years and now, this is 1886, I now intend to quit the show business and go to school and fit myself for another occupation.”

Did she ever fit herself for another occupation? History is silent. But Bogdan is able to paint the lives of many freaks in considerable detail. Some of the stories are familiar. The diminutive General Tom Thumb and his wife, Lavinia, were national celebrities and probably millionaires. They led a happy life. So, too, up to a point, did Chang and Eng, the original Siamese twins, who were brought to the United States in 1829. Chang and Eng earned enough money on the road to buy a plantation in North Carolina. They adopted the surname Bunker, married sisters, and together fathered twenty-three normal children. The handicap that dogged Chang and Eng throughout their lives was not so much physical impairment as the fact that the twins did not get along.

Other stories may be less familiar. William Henry Johnson, a victim of microencephaly, was exhibited under a sign reading WHAT IS IT? for some sixty years. Johnson was mentally retarded and grossly deformed, but he was treated kindly and fairly by his various promoters, including Barnum. At the time of his death, in 1926, Johnson owned properties in New Jersey and Connecticut and was the beneficiary of a trust fund set up in his behalf by his manager. Al Tomaini, a sideshow giant who was popular throughout the 1930s, eventually settled down with “Jeanie the HalfGirl,” a legless wonder. After some years on joint exhibit as “The World’s Strangest Couple”—an act that they themselves skillfully managed — the Tomainis embarked on a career in the motel business in Florida.

Bogdan relates scores of tales like these. They are incidental, perhaps, to a larger issue he seeks to address—the changing notion of abnormality—but they stand out powerfully in a sometimes scholarly narrative. In the end Bogdan concludes that, yes, some freaks were exploited, but most “were accepted as showmen.” He adds, “They were congratulated for parlaying into an occupation what, in another context, might have been a burden.”

THE DECLINE OF the freak show was spurred in large measure and in several ways by the rise of modern medicine. As medical science advanced, new knowledge robbed many exhibits of their mystery. Freaks came increasingly to be seen not as mere curiosities but as people with a medical problem. Physicians soon began to press for the institutionalization of people with certain kinds of disabilities; the supply of potential sideshow exhibits was seriously diminished. At the same time, a transformation in the public’s moral taste, abetted by doctors and others, gradually sapped freak shows of respectability. Finally, in the 1930s, the Depression hit carnivals and circuses hard, forcing many of them to close, never to reopen. As of 1985 there were five traveling freak shows still in existence in the United States, and their situation was precarious. You will not hear from me an argument for artificially prolonging their lives. But I can appreciate the impatience of Otis Jordan, “The Frog Man,” with humanitarian activists who want to shut the last freak shows down. Jordan, who is effectively a quadriplegic—all his limbs are underformed—entertains audiences by rolling and lighting cigarettes using only his lips, and, like the “greats” of the nineteenth century, supplements his income from performances by the sale of photographic portraits (though he is completely unaware, Bogdan notes wistfully, “of the rich history of the freak show”). A few years ago a well-meaning woman sought to bar his appearance at the New York State Fair. Bogdan relates Jordan’s reaction: “How can she say I’m being taken advantage of? Hell, what does she want for me—to be on welfare?”

Freak Show is a valuable book for several reasons. It is, for one thing, a fine example of what has emerged as a major genre in the field of social history: the study of phenomena on the margins of society in order to illuminate developments at the core. The history of the freak show, as Bogdan shows, is intimately bound up with matters as diverse as the scramble for Africa, the theory of evolution, and the invention of massmarket advertising. At a time when the bashing of various groups by other groups seems to have become a prevailing mode of discourse, Bogdan’s book offers a timely reminder that finding something to be distasteful is not the same as finding it to be devoid of good. In the end the story that Freak Show tells is an edifying one—the story of some extraordinary people who, against heavy odds, approached the ordinary. □