OTA BENGA AND THE BARNUM PERPLEX

Ota Benga and the Barnum Perplex

I want to let Barnum and Barnumism lead into a discussion of the nineteenth century's twin fixations-authenticity and showmanship, realism and display-elements that when joined together take on paradoxical potency. I will continue by presenting one of many possible visions of Ota Benga, an African Pygmy, when he was, indeed, the Pygmy in the Zoo, and end with some thoughts about how Ota might be received today, and where we might find several strands of contemporary Barnumism.

Let me start by claiming P. T. Barnum for postmodernism, for the meltdown of form, the erosion of convention, the pervasive blurring of genre we now see on every side. Among the hybrids threatening to push out the more traditional forms, Clifford Ceertz notes:

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For all the attention P. T. Barnum has received from biographers and others, his effect on culture, especially the culture of human display, is in many ways uncharted.

True, Barnum's varied contributions to science have been enumerated.

We know, for example, that Henry Thoreau thought Barnum's American Museum worth repeated visits and that he particularly valued the sea anemones on view in the fresh water aquarium (Betts 355). (Thoreau's opinions of Barnum's unicorns and mermaids, are, regrettably, not on record.) We know, too, that Barnum fielded a worldwide network of agents in constant search of fresh material; that he cultivated ties with the leading naturalists of his day, Albert S. Bickmore and Louis Agassiz among them (Saxon); and that in his later years, he donated items regularly to the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Tufts College Museum, which he founded.

But if Barnum's efforts to slake the curatorial hungers of nineteenth-century science have been documented, the contribution science made to Barnumism is less understood. Had there been no P. T. Barnum, science would lack for some of its more enticing displays, such as the bones of Jumbo the giant elephant, on view once more at the American Museum of Natural History. Naturalists would have found themselves less often in the public eye to credit, discredit, or be boggled by one of Barnum's exhibits. And when the time came for scientists to mount their own ethnographic spectacles, as they did at world's fairs, they might have been clumsier were it not for the Barnumesque dress rehearsals. But all in all, science would have developed much as it did without Tom Thumb, Jumbo, or the Feejee Mermaid. Barnum, on the other hand, is a wraith without natural history and ethnography. He is a trapeze artist with no trapeze, a bareback rider minus a mount, a subversive with no government to agitate against.

philosophicalinquiries looking like literary criticism, .. documentaries that read [ike true confessions ... parables posing as ethnographies ... theoretical treatises set out as travelogues ... epistemological studies constructed like political tracts ... methodological polemics got up as personal memoirs ....

"One waits only," muses Geertz, "for quantum theory in verse or biography in algebra" (19).

Geertz's essay on genre blurring was written in 1980. That was before Art Spiegleman's Maus confronted bookstore workers with an insoluble problem of classification (just where exactly should autobiographical comic books about genocide be shelved?); before historian Simon Schama's Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations split the New York Times Book Review editorial board neatly down the middle on whether the book was fiction or nonfiction; before Oliver Stone's JFK created uproar not least of all because it seamlessly spliced together documentary and fictional footage; and before Pico Iyer learned he could never tell whether, in any given bookstore, his travel books would be billed as history, anthropology, or works of fiction.

It is safe to say the process Geertz described has speeded up. The digital engine has kicked it into overdrive, adding a vast potential for do-it-yourself genre fusion (graphics, text, video, and sound in a single Web site), and confusion (extending from the validity of photographic evidence to issues of gender and identity) (see, e.g., Turkle).

We may as well accept the mutability of form as a fundamental law of contemporary culture. This does not, as is often feared, obviate questions of truth and falsity. If anything, they emerge more starkly when no longer camouflaged by, spoken for, or identified with specific delivery systems. Still, no matter how well adjusted you are to the general drift, there can be shock when anomalies crop up in your own neighborhood. Historians, for example, voiced few concerns about the nonfiction novel-so long as it remained a novel

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and its leading practitioners (Truman Capote, Norman Mailer) were clearly marked as novelists. But when Simon Schama imported the novel's techniques wholesale into works of supposed nonfiction, alarms rang out in history departrnents.'

Genre blurring was always Barnum's neighborhood, the base of operations from which he issued oddities and anomalies to entice the culture into maximum perplexity. In this respect, he is our contemporary. The categories he used for the unclassifiable-the "nondescript" and the "what is it?"-are labels many of today's culture makers might proudly claim for their work. Let me suggest we think of Barnum, then, as an epistemologist in impresario's drag, a philosopher entirely in the American grain, unfastening ideas from things, demonstrating that reality is too slippery, continuous, and manifold to be pinned down by names and notions, and accomplishing all this before a mass audience.

No less a historian of ideas than Arthur Lovejoy vouches for Barnum's philosophical credentials, writing, "that if Aristotle had been permitted to return to the sublunary scene in the eighteen-forties, he would have made haste to visit Barnum's Museum" (236). Lovejoy sees the Barnum of those years as operating well within the structure of the Great Chain of Being, the intellectual scaffolding that held sway for nearly a millennium before being supplanted by Darwinism. It flows from the Great Chain of Being that between any two species there will always be an intermediate species, and so on between the next two, until all conceivable gaps in the continuum of Creation are occupied, else Creation would be less complete than it was required to be by definition.

jc A

s Lovejoy notes, Barnum was nothing if not expert in intermediate spe-

cies. Missing links were his specialty, and he kept his museum stocked with them, whether to flesh out the Great Chain of Being, or after 1859, when Darwin's Origin of Species appeared, to buttress the theory of evolution. (Barnum was not choosy about which intellectual framework he simultaneously promoted and subverted.) When his museum burned and Barnum turned his attention to the circus, he continued to work the margins, probing for the unknown (and sometimes unreal) hidden within or just beyond the borders of the seen.

It is inherent in the three-ring circus, a Barnum and Bailey innovation, to tease the viewer with events unfolding at the periphery (Bogdan 288). Animals, clowns, trapeze artists, and strongmen engage in activities that stretch and exceed the range of vision, reminders that no particular point of view is absolute and that no fixed gaze can ever be more than provisional. Barnum carried this teasing emphasis on incompletion and mutability over from museum to circus to text. His autobiography was a hybrid of marketing and conceptual art that

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he modified regularly by "adding and subtracting chapters so that the tome could be sold again as an entirely new version" (Sante 60).

The genres it was most crucial for Barnum to confound were those of fact .... ,. __ ~etiQ!h ~r, more specifically, science and showmanship. In one sense.Barnum .

. functioned as scienc~'s clowl1:after thestrongman poses,' flexes, and finally, arduously, lifts the barbell, the clown emerges to clean up the mess the hero has left onstage. Wiggling his behind, he tosses the weight carelessly over one shoulder, his other hand free for a mop and a pail of water. Similarly, after Darwin published his heroically researched Origin of Species, Barnum lost no time in resolving the outstanding question of evolution, or at least the one with the greatest purchase on the popular imagination. He invited the viewing public to his American Museum to study no less a personage than Mr. Johnson, the Missing Link Between man and ape, just purchased from a band of African explorers, and only now learning how to walk upright. Press and public were thrown into a quandary, suspecting Mr. Johnson was Barnumesque "bosh" but not wanting to rule out the possibility that he was, instead, the "great fact for Darwin" (Saxon 99).

Again, it was not long after the Anthropology Department of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 was organized by Frederick Ward Putnam and Franz Boas to study and display indigenous peoples that the Barnum and Bailey Circus put forth its own version of an anthropological gala: for the next two years a Great Ethnological Congress, including representatives of seventy-four non-Western people, some drawn directly from the fair, was the featured attraction, on view in the menagerie tent. As Mikhail Bakhtin points out, it is in the nature of carnival, or in this case circus, to take things down a notch or two, confronting form with flux, stability with roiling chaos, and high (anthropological) seriousness with the reverse image of spectacle and fun-house grotesquerie.

But it is not really so easy to determine which comes first here, science or circus, or which is truly the other's shadow. The anthropologists putting people on display were adopting to their own uses a motif of exhibition long in evidence at sideshows, dime museums, and fairs. The showman, in turn, would have failed to realize the full potential of a human exhibit if he did not provide it with a learned label of some kind, if he did not argue for its accuracy and frame it so as to satisfy the ever-increasing craving for authenticity. When it came to human display, science and showmanship, like Eng and Chang, were joined at the hip.

The anthropologists of the St. Louis Fair of 1904 proposed to treat their charges with a seriousness that would once and for all sever anthropology from its lowbrow brother. The 1,200 Filipinos, Ainu, Eskimo, Native Americans, Zulus, and Pygmies were brought to St. Louis to be studied, to be dissolved, if

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Fig. 7.1. Pygmy music. St. Louis Exposition, 1904.

possible, into the numerical ordering system provided by anthropometry and psychometry. But the press and the public were only further incited by the overlay of science, the G-string of statistics. The crowds pressed in as if they would not be satisfied with anything less than a piece of Pygmy, stealing from the Kwakiutl, and buying buttons, bows, and arrows from the industrious Geronimo.

The masses resisted inculcation into the higher racism provided by anthropometry, psychometry, and social Darwinism. It was elitist and non-participatory, the real fun restricted to the coterie of anthropologists. It denied the evidence of the senses, all of which were alerted to the presence of spectacle. Barnum, dead for thirteen years by the time of the St. Louis Fair, could never have concocted a more inflammatory piece of showmanship than did the anthropologists with their canny juxtaposition of science and exotica.

Barnumism was no less operative two years later when Ota Benga, one of the Pygmies who survived St. Louis, found himself in the same cage as Dohong the orangutan in the Bronx Zoo. Bronx Zoo director William Temple Hornaday's only initial prop was a sign placed in front of the cage listing Ora's name, height, weight, age, where he came from, who brought him to the United States, and when he would be exhibited, namely, "each afternoon during September." The crowd decoded the bland message precisely as they were meant to: within a few days 40,000 people were jostling each other for a glimpse of the Pygmy in the Zoo.

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Hornaday'S sign juxtaposed realism, factuality, science-in short, authenticity-over against the archaic, the mythological, the disquieting and grotesque. It used knowledge to frame the wild, the unknown and perhaps unknowable. Everything was in place, everything positioned in proper relationship to everything else-sign, cage, man, ape, science, and spectacle-but in this case probably not all of it was necessary. Ota Benga alone would have been sufficient, as became apparent a few days later, when, released from the monkey cage and roaming Bronx Zoo grounds at will, he attained to the peak of unasked-for popularity.

As a Pygmy, he had not only decades and centuries, but millennia of advance billing. His appearance in the flesh, his authenticity vouched for by a zoo director, could not be anything less than a sensation. Homer had written about the defeat of Pygmies by the cranes descending upon them in their annual escape from "winter time and the rains unceasing." Herodotus had called them a "nation of wizards." Pliny had listed them among the monstrous races and bequeathed them to the Middle Ages for further study. A medieval schoolman argued that the Pygmies' humanity was skin deep, a matter of appearance only; it would fail to pass the test of logic. Pygmies, he postulated, could not reason from a premise to its conclusion. They would fail at syllogisms, and therefore, were merely counterfeit humans, monsters in human disguise.

The ability to chop Aristotelian logic was used as the entrance exam into the human race for centuries. When Samuel Phillips Verner, the man who brought Ota Benga to America, met Batwa Pygmies in Africa in the late 1880s, the question asked by the Middle Ages was foremost in his mind: were the schoolmen right? Could the Pygmies reason? Were they capable of navigating from a premise to its conclusion? (Bradford and Blume 82). As it happened, Verner gave the Pygmies a passing grade in logic.

The taxonomy proposed by antiquity and elaborated by the Middle Ages was built to last. When a schoolman wrote that Pygmies were "deformed and do not build houses but live in mountain caverns and caves," his words were conducted with high fidelity down the ages until they wound up as the learned gloss used by Barnum to frame an exhibition (Friedman 145). According to Barnum, the Earthman (like Bushman, a term used interchangeably with Pygmy in the freak show), is known for

burrowing holes into the ground, and there finding shelter beyond the reach of man or beast. ... A colony of them resembles a gigantic warren of rabbits .... These holes are so numerous and intricate, that in the course of time whole mountains become honey-combed .... (Bogdan 188)

The schoolmen would not have begrudged Barnum his few embellishments; he was faithful to the essence of their teaching. When they declared that the

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Pygmy was without real language-" the cause of his speech is as a shadow resulting from the sunset of reason" (Friedman 192)-Barnum once again concurred, advertising that "Earthmen have no recognized language beyond the simple and almost unintelligible patois which designates their simple wants" (Bogdan 189).

The link between learning and human display was old and intimate. When the crane man-identified by his enormous neck and big beak-began to make public appearances in the sixteenth century, he had with him a pamphlet containing an explanatory text by the learned Lycosthenes (Wittkower 194}.

Display, on the one hand, the claim of authenticity, on the other, are twin pillars of Barnumism, and with them Barnum exemplifies the fixations of his age. The nineteenth century represented a burgeoning of techniques and venues for exhibition. The scramble for new means of appropriating and representing reality was as typical of the time as the scramble for colonial possesSIOns.

Among the display venues that arose or were given modern form were zoos, museums (with art and natural history museums distinguished for the first time), department stores, and world's fairs, which displayed not only objects but human beings. Among the techniques developed were the diorama, cyclorama, panorama, photograph, and, with the introduction of electricity toward the end of the century, a panoply of modern devices, including the phonograph and motion picture camera.

Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre's obsession with discovering the perfect instrument for the reproduction of visual reality is instructive, and as riveting in its way as David Livingstone's less successful search for the sources of the Nile. Daguerre, who began his career as a mediocre naturalist painter, gravitated at first toward set design. His successful" striving for extreme naturalism led him more and more beyond the bounds of art into the field of showmanship" (Gernsheim 10). Experimenting further with the interplay of light and paint, he developed the diorama, which presented changing naturalistic vistas, and presaged the popularity of the cinema (Rice 71).

When Daguerre's Parisian diorama burnt down in 1839, he was ready with the next advance in representational fidelity, the daguerreotype. When exposure time was reduced sufficiently to permit human portraiture, the response to the daguerreotype took on religious overtones. Opponents attacked the device and its inventor with the pious rage evident in this German editorial:

The wish to capture evanescent reflections ... the mere desire alone, the will to do so, is blasphemy. God created man in His own image, and no man-made machine may fix the image of God. (Gernsheim 2)

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The very notion of "mirror pictures made permanent" proved the Frenchman Daguerre to be "the fool of fools." It was one thing to capture space-that was private property-but quite another to trap and preserve time's "evanescent reflections." That was to intrude on a divine prerogative.

The language of Daguerre's supporters was equally fervent, and no less laced with references to the supernaturaL In 1843, shortly after the technique was introduced in England, Elizabeth Barrett wrote,

Think of a man sitting down in the sun and leaving his facsimile in all its full completion of outline and shadow, steadfast on a plate, at the end of a minute and a half! The Mesmeric disernbodiment of spirits strikes one as a degree less marvellous ... the fact of the f.,ery shadow of the person lying there fixed for ever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think. (Gernsheim 149)

The image was like a shadow; capturing it on a photographic plate was like detaining a spirit. Whether you were pro or con, this was magic, the magic that emerges from realism pushed so far to an extreme that it doubles back on itself. As Susan Sontag puts it: "What defines the originality of photography is that, at the very moment in the long, increasingly secular history of painting when secularism is entirely triumphant, it revives-in wholly secular terms-something like the primitive status of images" (156).>

Photography constitutes one node on a nineteenth-century continuum of display space. The world's fair, which maintained indigenous people in supposed simulations of their natural habitats, in authentic dwellings, and in authentic gear, constitutes another. Anthropological fieldwork, in which the native is arrayed beneath the anthropologist's gaze under conditions, by definition, of maximum authenticity, constitutes yet another.

With the world's fair, the show takes place in the metropolis. In the case of fieldwork, the show is always on the road. The assumption about the anthropological observer remains the same: his gaze is neutral; it belongs not so much to a human being as to a ghostly instrument that leaves no trace on what it touches. The subject does not yet disturb the object; the knower somehow makes no impression on the known.

It is hard to imagine a better illustration of this stringent naivete than in

. the case of the Zulus exhibited on a London stage in 1853. According to newspaper reports, the Zulus sang, danced, courted each other, and prepared for war as if oblivious of spectators (Lindfors 146). They were human, yes, but with a defining quality of self-consciousness missing. They were like a hive of bees or a glass-plated ant colony that could be taken from place of origin to the laboratory for study. The analogy to insect life, and even to microbes, is strength-

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ened by a remark made by Margaret Mead: "We are just completing a culture of a mountain group here in the lower Torres Chelles" (Clifford 230). A culture, then, could be completed, taken in its entirety, and regenerated without loss of detail in the agar of the anthropologist's mind. Should that culture, for some reason, disappear, it could, in principle, be reconstituted from the field notes.

This naivete-forced, arrogant, and preposterous from our point of viewwas a distinctly non-postmodern element of Barnumism. To the extent that he subscribed to it, Barnum was in accord with his times. All his art was employed to deny the presence of art, to dissolve consciousness into nature. For any of his human anomalies to indicate that they were of normal intelligence, fully aware of the context in which they were, viewed and fully capable of judging those who viewed them, would have blown the secret. On the other hand, in Barnum's case, the secret was sometimes meant to be blown: much of Tom Thumb's appeal lay in the contrast between the small body and the sharp mind. Tiny as he was, he could hold his own in repartee with the Queeri of England or draw a diminutive sword on her poodle when it threatened to bite.

Barnum was interested in toying with perception, not etherizing it on a table. He throve on the very ambiguities the ethnographers of his day wanted to flatten out. For Barnum, objectivity was a collapsing prop; truth, volatile and elusive. And Barnumism was participatory in a way science could not be: when viewers were faced with the irreducible "nondescript," the inscrutable "what is it?" they had to come to their own conclusions. World's fair ethnographers wanted to spare their charges the indignity of humbug. Barnum may have spared his charges the greater indignity of ethnographers with their calipers, tests, and presumptions of certainty.

Barnumism was supple, adaptable, loose-jointed. Realism was rigid by comparison and kept backing into the very magical-mythological material it hoped to expunge. But this material was transformed in the interim. It was camouflaged and defamiliarized. It regained the element of surprise, absorbed new vitality from the close contact with science. The fetish for authenticity attained to efficacy, became a working fetish, evoking, summoning.

For example, Ota Benga at the zoo corresponds with a terrible if welldisguised exactitude to a prototype harbored by the Middle Ages and passed on to modernity-the wild man.! Wild men and women were centers of medie~al concern, regulars of tapestries, woodcuts, engravings, and love caskets. They were stalwarts of carnival, heraldry, dance, poetry, and dream. The wild man was a masterpiece of mixed media, the meeting place of man and demon, man and beast, life and death. He was frequently hairy, commonly cannibalistic; the forest was his home and wild animals his only society. The wild man was to civilization what anti-matter is to matter. When the wild man met a knight, the result was instant combat, cudgel against sword, nature against society.

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Fig. 7.3. Plaster cast of bust of Ota Benga.

Michael Taussig summarizes the wild man's vocation thus:

In his wrath he creates tempests and hail-the weather he likes most-conditions best suited to the return of the dead. Ignorant of God, he wields power over the forest's animals .... Inferior to humans in the great chain of being, he is also superior to them. (213)

With this portrayal of the wild man in mind, let us revisit Ota Benga at the zoo in 1906. He is a short, dark man, born in Africa's ancient forests, a forest dweller who has somehow exchanged his habitat of trees for the more abstractly linear design of steel bars that ring the monkey cage in which he is displayed. The press and the public seize upon him as a cannibal immediately and understand implicitly why he is to be found in the same locale as Senor Lopez the jaguar, Hannibal the lion, Princeton the tiger, Gunda the elephant, and Mogul the rhino. He is Ota Benga, the wild man, and this, the latter-day environment of beasts, is designated as his proper home.

If we can for a moment imagine the Bronx Zoo as a wilderness, as the

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Zoo founders, with their emphasis on natural habitat, their fetish for realism, often insisted on doing;' then the presence of Ota Benga is neither ornament nor accident. It is essential. It authenticates their project and brings it to its climax. When the wilderness is ready for him, then the wild man comes.

That's how Ota Benga was presented near the start of the twentieth century. How might he be presented near its close? Perhaps, like the Batwa who visited American cities in 1990, he would be a musician, leaving his village in Zaire for the very first time to play for Africa Oye, a troupe of African performers on the first stop of their world tour. The Batwa performers were no less embedded in mythological material than was Ota, but this material accorded them dignity and pride of place.l As the senior inhabitants of the African forests, they opened the show for the other performers in the expectation that their good standing with the spirits of the ancestors would bring favor on the performances to come.

Or perhaps, in the closing decades of the century, Ota would not be a Pygmy at all. He would return as a performance artist, turning himself into a spectacle, generating for himself those very attributes of marginality and monstrosity that had been thrust on him decades ago. Critic Arthur Danto links the metier of the performance artist to the motif of the wild man by calling performance art disturbatory art, art that assumes a "regressive posture, undertaking to recover a stage of art where art itself was almost like magic-like deep magic, making dark possibilities real ... summoning spirits from the vasty deep" (127). Of course, the differences between Ota Benga in a monkey cage and any number of contemporary performers who would gladly take up that post are the element of choice and the validation of art, the very things banished from nineteenth-century ethnography-and zoo keeping.

It would be fair, too, to ask where one would look for Barnumism today, except the search would soon collapse under the sheer weight of answers. Barnumism is everywhere-in politics, media, entertainment, and advertising. Ours is as much, or more, a Barnumesque Republic as it is a Jeffersonian Democracy. If, one day, Barnum's signature turned up on an original copy of the Declaration of Independence so that he could be retroactively pronounced a Founding Father, it would be appropriate-and Barnumesque.

Still, there are levels of Barnumism; not all Barnumism is the same. It is easy to detect the lower forms in those television shows where family members seem as if they were beamed directly from their kitchens to the studio where they go on screaming at each other, no less dysfunctional before a national audience than they were at home. The old paradigm really does live on here; the artifice of realism continues to prevail. (Are these families told prior to air time that they are on no account to behave well just because they are being watched? The more dysfunctional, the better?)

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OTA BENGA AND THE BARNUM PERPLEX

But there is also a higher Barnumism. One might find it in an institution like L.A.'s Museum of Jurassic Technology, as documented by Lawrence Weschler. The MJT's founder and director, David Wilson, often sits outside the storefront playing his accordion. Inside, there is a varying display of natural and manufactured objects: for example, a photograph of an African stink ant, a fungus protruding from its head and spearing it in place; documentation pertaining to the minute bat known as the "piercing devil," which has been caught only by putting a wall of solid lead eight inches thick in its flight path; micro-sculptures (Little Red Riding Hood, Donald Duck, Napoleon) set within the eyes of needles; a graphic description of a potion dating from 1579 in which mice, powdered or taken whole, are used as a cure for bedwetting.

The troublesome thing is that many of the exhibits are separated from being completely valid by no more than a detail-it seems the stink ant is South American rather than African, as advertised. Some displays are completely true (horns have been removed from human heads), and others patently false. Five lead walls each twenty feet high and two hundred feet long, somehow deployed in the rain forest to catch a bat? It's hard to know the percentage of truth in any given exhibit, and when to give up trying to find out.' In the meantime a kind of derangement sets in, a susceptibility to wonder. We schler records that one wanderer in the back rooms emerged only to become spellbound by a pencil sharpener: "a regular pencil sharpener," according to the museum's director, "but he couldn't get enough of it" (52).

One museum director characterized the MJT as "a museum, a critique of museums, and a celebration of museums-all rolled into one" (Weschler 40). Weschler himself situates the MJT within the context of the Wunderkammern, or wonder cabinets, of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Containing "whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things hath produced," they were used to top off a gentleman's education and, by dint of sustaining wonder, to make him permanently educable (76).

Looking back from the perspective of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Barnum emerges as more than the progenitor of screech TV. He was also the impresario of a three-ring Wunderkammer and founder of that midtown wonder cabinet known as the American Museum (something for both Aristotle and Thoreau). In the original wonder cabinets, "you had the wonders of God spread out there cheek-by-jowl with the wonder of man, both presented as aspects of the same thing" (Weschler 61). The higher Barnumism resisted the severance of science from spectacle, just when the zeitgeist was most determined to pull them apart, housing art, as in New York City, on one side of town, science on the other. The higher Barnumism needed both to work with; they were the building blocks of the Barnum Perplex.

NOTES

1. Novelist Paul West gives this situation a nice reverse spin. After researching a novel about one of the plots to kill Hitler, and finding substantial discrepancies among the historical accounts, he told students the best way to learn to write good novels was to study closely the ways of historians (West).

2. Bernheimer notes that "In the case of the wild man, the testimony from the thirteenth century is often identical with that from the nineteenth" (vii).

3. As Bronx Zoo founders Henry Fairfield Osborn and C. Grant La Farge put it: "This new principle will be to place both native and foreign animals of the tropical, temperate and colder regions as far as possible in the ~atural surroundings. Thus the larger wild animals of North America-deer, elk, caribou, moose, bison, antelope, sheep-should be shown not in paddocks but in the free range of large enclosures, in which the forests, rocks, and natural features of the landscape will give the people an impression of the life, habits and native surroundings of these different types. We may also present the tropical and equatorial animals to a certain extent in their natural surroundings" (Bridges 16).

4. As was not the case when Ota Benga and Batwa Pygmies, performing at the St. Louis Fair, were mocked by anthropologists and attacked by spectators (Bradford and Blume 119).

5. Weschler reached his limit with the mouse recipe: "Right then and there I made myself a promise; and I've kept it: I have not gone to the library to track down that ... reference. There has to be an end to all this. No, really" (106).

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"Clicko"

Franz Taalbosch, South African Bushman Entertainer in England, France, Cuba, and-the United States, 1908-1940

NEIL PARSONS

Franz Taaibosch appeared in vaudeville in England and France in 1913 as a "wild dancing Bushman." Attempts to liberate him from his manager resulted in his being taken away, possibly to Ireland, and then subsequently to Cuba. From there he was recruited to the United States, where as "Clicko" he became a standard attraction in circus sideshows until his death in 1940. His story is a study not only in the relationship between imperialism and popular entertainment, but also in individual human endurance.

INTRODUCTION

The intimate relationship between popular imperialism, popular entertainment, and popular education was recognized as long ago as 1901 by J. A. Hobson in his book The Psychology of Jingoism. Hobson saw "the glorification of brute force and an ignorant contempt for foreigners" being spread among "large sections of the middle and labouring classes" by the entertainment and recreation business-"a more potent educator than the church, the school, the political meeting, or even than the press." The very word Jingoism, meaning "Imperialist sentiment," had after all been inspired by an 1878 music-hall (vaudeville) song.

Hobson blamed the spread of "Imperialist sentiment" on modern forms of communication such as the electric telegraph, on the collective "neurotic temperament" generated by increasing urbanization, and on "rich, able and energetic" capitalists in entertainment and the media who exploited the persistent semi-literacy of the masses. His critique applied not only to Britain but