For many people, the circus, with its clowns, exotic beasts, and
other colorful iconography, is lighthearted entertainment. Yet for
Greg Renoff and other scholars, the circus and its social context
also provide a richly suggestive repository of changing attitudes
about race, class, religion, and consumerism. In the South during
the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, traveling circuses
fostered social spaces where people of all classes and colors could
grapple with the region's upheavals.
"The Big Tent" relates the circus experience from the
perspectives of its diverse audiences, telling what locals might
have seen and done while the show was in town. Renoff digs deeper,
too. He points out, for instance, that the performances of these
itinerant outfits in Jim Crow-era Georgia allowed boisterous,
unrestrained interaction between blacks and whites on show lots and
on city streets on Circus Day. Renoff also looks at encounters
between southerners and the largely northern population of circus
owners, promoters, and performers, who were frequently accused of
inciting public disorder and purveying lowbrow prurience, in part
due to residual anger over the Civil War. By recasting itself as a
showcase of athleticism, equestrian skill, and God's wondrous
animal creations, the circus appeased community leaders, many of
whose businesses prospered during circus visits.
Ranging across a changing social, cultural, and economic
landscape, "The Big Tent" tells a new history of what happened when
the circus came to town, from the time it traveled by wagon and
river barge through its heyday during the railroad era and into its
initial decline in the age of the automobile and mass
consumerism.
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