Philadelphia has big role in book's tale of circuses, elephants

Topsy

The Startling Story of the Crooked-Tailed Elephant, P.T. Barnum, and the American Wizard, Thomas Edison

By Michael Daly

Atlantic Monthly Press, 345 pp. $27

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Reviewed by Steve Weinberg

Philadelphia is not usually the city that comes to mind when thoughts turn to the circus, circus elephants, circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum, or inventor Thomas Edison.

Yet the city of Philadelphia plays a starring role in author Michael Daly's slice-of-Americana history featuring the name of a now-dead elephant as the book's title, with Barnum and Edison receiving billing in the book's subtitle.

The name of the Philadelphia anchor to Daly's convoluted slice of American folklore is Adam Forepaugh, a Philadelphia businessman whose traveling circus rivaled P.T. Barnum's through several decades of the 19th century.

Forepaugh's name is not in the book's title or subtitle. He is a major character, however, and drags his home base of Philadelphia into the saga again and again until his death during 1890 alters the circus/elephant world.

Daly, a columnist for the New York Daily News, opens the book with the birth of an elephant somewhere in an Asian forest, circa 1875. He explains, admiringly, how elephants mature in the wild. He then explains, with alarm, how rapacious humans entered the wild, justified the capture of the elephants, and found methods, all of them arduous, to transport those intelligent, sensitive, gigantic beasts across oceans to reside in zoos or perform in circuses.

Forepaugh wanted elephants for his circus, so he commissioned mercenaries to find the animals and deliver them to Philadelphia. Although Forepaugh certainly demonstrated business acumen, Daly does not portray him as a nice man: "Forepaugh was a onetime butcher boy turned shady horse dealer who had found his present calling when he took part ownership of a circus that had failed to make good on a debt. He was now in a fierce and protracted struggle with P.T. Barnum for supremacy as the greatest showman in what was surely becoming the greatest of nations."

Elephants that could be trained to perform amazing feats would become instrumental in that battle for circus supremacy. Training elephants is an art, not a science. Throughout the narrative, Daly introduces trainers who use cruelty as an inducement, and a much smaller number who use kindness. The names of those trainers are unfamiliar to most readers in 2013, but during the last few decades of the 1800s and the early years of the 1900s, some trainers achieved celebrity status of sorts.

After all, elephants were relatively new to the United States, and the fascination of the citizenry with how the beasts could be trained seemed boundless. Elephant training included the risk of injury or death; Daly's book is punctuated with gruesome scenes of handlers being snatched by an elephant, crushed in the animal's trunk, thrown to the ground, and stomped upon. His research suggests, however, that elephants rarely become violent unless mistreated repeatedly.

Thomas Edison does not enter the saga in a sustained way until Page 147. Inclusion of the famous inventor might seem puzzling at first. Eventually, Daly connects Edison to circuses and elephants through calls to put down dangerous creatures by electrocuting them. Edison, apparently not well attuned to the subtleties of cruelty to animals, was prone to accept the challenge. Could the electrical currents he was trying to harness and commercialize penetrate the thick skin of elephants effectively enough to kill them?

Daly's book contains interesting tidbits on almost every page, plus embedded biographies of compelling characters. It's worth reading for, at minimum, animal lovers, and anyone curious about circus history.

Unfortunately, all those interesting tidbits on lots of pages do not make for an easy book to read. Daly fails to connect all the threads into a seamless narrative. The trouble is, there are already capable biographies of Barnum and Edison, lots of books about circus history, and volumes praising the magnificence of elephants. No portion of Daly's book is as accomplished as the more complete books on each aspect of Americana he covers.

Philadelphia-area residents not obsessed with seamless nonfiction narrative will quite likely find the book of great interest. The legacy of Forepaugh in Philadelphia is not well known, as far as I can discern. Area readers will recognize portions of the city where elephants marched over bridges and in the middle of streets to reach their circus quarters.