Word: circusing
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...Sublimation of Our Ruling Passion If you would see the most typical product of American dramatic art as well as the American spirit, go see the circus. There you will find the supreme expression of America's delight in size and speed, in superlatives and hyperbole. Barnum and Bailey's "Greatest Show on Earth" makes no claim to subtlety, to artistic discrimination, to any of the refinements of effete European culture; it simply exults with three rings and a side show in being bigger, faster, more dangerous and more defiant of natural law than any entertainment ever before...
...museum was the embryo of the circus " side show." " Curiosities natural and unnatural ": the Feegee Mermaid, the diorama of Napoleon's funeral, the negro who had cured his skin of " color" and who predicted the fading out of slavery, cannibals and grotesque sea monsters, beauty shows and the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself were only some of the sensations propagated by the " master of monstrosities...
...made the circus. Later, when a baby elephant, the first born in captivity, arrived in Bailey's rival camp, Barnum offered $100,000 for the infant, a fact which Bailey so blatantly advertised that Barnum was forced to merge with his rival in self-defense...
...Jumbo" was the greatest and most sentimentalized of circus animals. Barnum succeeded in bribing away from England this "largest known" elephant. Jumbo's first six weeks at Madison Square Garden attracted $336,000. After he was killed by a train accident, he was stuffed and given to Tufts College, which still has Jumbo's head as its emblem...
Barnum's patriotism, loud and strong, served him as a financial asset. His personal piety befriended church and circus. Clergymen not only used free tickets, which Barnum sent them for " The Greatest Moral Show on Earth," but they brought Barnum's name into the pulpit...