 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Terry, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Les Standerford about his new book, Battle for the Big Top, which tells the story of the men who created the American Circus. Pennsylvania Avenue is famous for its parades and marches, but for years one parade was especially notable. In spring, the circus came to town, and the costume performers and elephants marched down the avenue to announce their arrival. People from office buildings, including the National Archives building, would come out to watch and perhaps relive childhood memories. Within the National Archives holdings are documentary connections to circuses over many decades of our history. Circus owners and performers appear in census records, business disputes are recorded in court case files, photographs show presidents and their families attending the circus or greeting performers. At one time the federal government even ran a circus. The New Deal's Federal Theater Project had a circus unit, and so we have photographs and administrative files with the project. In Battle of the Big Top, Les Standerford spins out the tale of the three circus kings, James Bailey, P. T. Barnum and John Ringling, who vied for control of the American Circus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Les Standerford is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including The Man Who Invented Christmas, which was the New York Times editor's choice, and later became a feature film. He is a Professor of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University and holds MA and PhD degrees in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah. He attended the U.S. Air Force Academy and Columbia School of Law and is a former screen writing fellow and graduate of the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Our moderator for today's conversation is James W. Hall. Hall is a critic, a poet, and the author of 21 critically acclaimed novels. For many years he taught alongside Standerford in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University. Now let's hear from Les Standerford and James Hall. Thank you for joining us. Well, thank you for that excellent introduction, Les and me. Let me, I'm the James Hall that he mentioned. I wanted to start by saying Les and I go back 48 years. I did the math the other day and in that 48 years he has never, I've read everything he's written from the very beginning, almost everything he's written, some things he's probably hidden from me but I've never been, I've never ceased to be surprised by the latest project and where it came from and how he became fascinated with it and how he managed to find the central storyline in each one of the projects that he's worked on in the past. That's the thing that I'd like to start with today is just asking my old friend Les, how in the world did you wind up, you, this boy from Ohio who's been living in Florida for all these years, how did you wind up writing about the circus of all things? Well, first let me say thanks to the National Archives for allowing this program to go forward and how delighted I am to be talking with you, Jim. We do go back so far and I can remember the days in school when we were both desperate to get something published and read and all the trials and tribulations that have gone on over those last 48 years, really something and I also remember being at the National Archives combing through the materials trying my best to decipher the handwriting of Pierre Charles Winfont as it's preserved in the records and micro fish and that was probably the hardest thing about writing Washington burning story of how George Washington and Winfont collaborated to build Washington DC but I remember those days being wonderful walking into that grand building down to the basement all the help I got it was fabulous and so to be back here talking about another book is a real pleasure. In the case of Battle for the Big Top, I had given a talk about when one of the books might have been Water to the Angels, the story of Mulholland and the bringing of water made by Santa's Festival at a gathering of insurance executives at the Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Sarasota, Florida and after it was over I walked out and my wife Kimberly was waiting for me in the lobby she heard me a hundred times if not a thousand she wouldn't gonna subject herself to yet another dose of that and I greeted her and she said how'd it go and I said fine let's go and she said no no no there's something you got to see and I said but the the cards coming up no no there's something you've got to see and she dragged me out onto the spacious beautiful grounds of that hotel and there was a pillar and a plaque on top of it that said here nearby nearly a hundred years ago John Ringling attempted to build a Ritz-Carleton Hotel but factors including the Great Depression intervened etc etc and it was almost the be it was it took to the beginning of the new 21st century for it to to take shape and here it is and Kimberly said you know I think this is there's something in this mature you might be interested I was interested immediately because every thing that John Ringling had done that I was aware of took place beneath a big top and one of the three rings of the circus had no idea that he'd gotten into hotel development or land development I pulled on that thread of history sweater and found out that in essence he was responsible for the creation of Sarasota, Florida there was nothing but a hamlet at the time he bought a house and and became interested in it and then I found out that he'd been involved and he had oil fields in Oklahoma and railroads across the west and towns named after him and I thought I thought he was just a circus man and that intrigued me and I began to dig and dig and found out about how big a business circus was how Ringling had rested control of the circus from his predecessors P.T. Barnum and and and James Bailey I thought that was a great business story and these things go in stages you know and still I wasn't sure I had my story Jim until finally the personal connection kicked in and that was when I when it really began to dawn on me why these very able man a famous man the accomplishment and particularly in the case of P.T. Barnum before the circus ever came calling to him had been successful in other ways what it was about the circus that attracted them centrally and above all when they could have done so many other things with their energies and finally I realized it was the same thing that had always attracted me as a child to the circus a kid growing up in a in a little small town in southeastern mining and manufacturing town in southeastern Ohio called Cambridge about 11,000 people and when the circus came to town the place just stopped everybody went to even in the 19 early 1950s everybody went down to main street to watch the circus parade to watch the animals and the equipment go toward the the grounds where it was going to set up school was let out banks closed businesses closed and this course had been repeated across the country for a hundred years and it was like a fourth holiday the day the circus came to town as important as the 4th of July and Thanksgiving and Christmas and the reason for that was the amazing things that we all saw when we gathered inside the 10 things that were impossible human beings doing things impossible animals that we had never seen before pageantry and costumes that we've never seen before drama worked out every bit as affecting as on a Broadway stage I would so exotic to people from the hustings as we were and all of it added up to what it all added up to is possibility there is something grander bigger more exciting than just getting by which most of us fifty two weeks out of the year were concerned with making a living and and getting through the day and supporting a family and the circus was a respite for that Hamlin Garland as well called Boys Live Boys Life on the Prairie published in 1899 and his description of what it meant to walk inside that tent see all these splendors pouring in he said it was like being literally visiting heaven and and and as I began to read more and more of what Bailey and Barnum and Ringley had written and said to others about their dedication to the circus I realized that they were truly committed to that concept a lot more fun and interesting than pumping oil out of the ground or making steel you know other enterprises that people were making good gobs of money at the time but they had found a way to make a lot of a thriving industry out of something that amazed and delighted people and I realized that I've been held in that same thrall when I grew up running away to the circus join the circus was still a viable part of mythology so this is a pretty long winded answer to your question but it is when I got to that point I said you know what I have to tell the story because people have fond memories of the circus sentimental memories of the circus but I don't know how many people have ever really sat down and thought to themselves what was it about the circus that made it the principal form of popular entertainment in this country for about a hundred years and when I got to that point I said I'm going to write this for you and I can see I can see how that would be that because as we have discussed over the years a whole lot of different kinds of projects novels and recently your historical work the stories that you find and tell in these historical books that it has to have some sort of biographical connection for you to motivate you to do all this incredible challenging work to do the research to put it all together to do it in a to figure out what the chronological order is and it's just the structuring of your books is has always impressed me that you found all this the scattered kinds of bits of research and found the central core storyline. I have to say though as a as a kid who grew up in a small town to your circus was a lot better than my service. We didn't really have exotic animals unless you account the politicians who came to give talks as exotic I guess they wanted that but you know mainly it was what what I recall as a small town boy was the delight of seeing this cow pasture that was just a cow pasture most of the year become this charmed magical place for a week or two in the summer in the very hot time of the year and have all these people gather and you sort of touched on this and your your remarks just that one of the things that happens with circuses is that all these people gather from different levels of society in the same place which is really remarkable in a little town like ours were. One of the things that we really hadn't discussed to talk about today but I was I have to say one of the things that you just brought up in your comment was that I was struck in reading this manuscript is how many challenges there were in bringing those circuses alive for burning Bailey and like things burned down. You know animals died the stars of the show. You know there were some incredible challenges and difficulties that in a that for a lesser human being they would have given up this. Well you know I think in the early days of this of the circus. The difficulties that the circus face really mirrored the difficulties that a an emerging country face. This was a raw bone place. There were lousy roads. It was hard to get around. It was difficult to get things built. It was hard to find skilled labor and on and on. You know there was a promise that we're going to open the frontier and the United States is going to be the land of plenty and all the as it's proven to be but it's not like that happened without a lot of struggling and hard work and in the early days of the circus they were struggling right along with the they were two steps behind the pioneers that opened the the frontier after all. Tracking along the same other. They were called mud shows because they they traveled in wagons pulled by horse teams along dirt not paved roads. No such a thing as a paved road which turned and the roads themselves turned to quagmires with every rainstorm. And in fact one of the first uses for the practical uses for the an elephant who might be part of a traveling show would be to help pull the wagons out of ditches where they've gotten bogged down. But the things that they had to go through and overcome to get the show to overnight to the next venue set up in the morning have that parade get down to the stage to the grounds and set up not for an matinee and then for an evening show and then pack it all up and go on to the next whistle stop. Yeah, what they became cracker jacks at moving material to the point where once the river be or once the circus began to travel by rail. They got so good at it that the German army sent emissaries over to talk to circus men to interview them about how they were able to transfer so efficiently large amounts of men and material in a short period of time. That's a great detail. I love that. That's one of these wonderful serendipitous things you discover in your research along the way. You know, back to the origins of the circus. One of the things that I found incredibly fascinating in your book was the evolution of the early days before it became an American when it was still the circus was still you know, germinating in Europe. Talk a little bit about that the sort of historical background of the circus because that that to me is a fascinating and really vividly created part of this book. Well, the long history of the circus is part of the proof of the fact that it was not just some nutty thing that that grew up briefly in American flourished. But in fact, who's had a hold on people across the world over pretty much all civilized time that roots the circus go back to Greek and Roman times and we all know about the circus Maximus where oh, there were gladiatorial exhibitions but also more circus like exhibitions. There were parades of menagerie exotic animals from Asia that were brought there to Rome. They were re and they sometimes would flood a coliseum and and then stage put three or four feet of water in there and then stage reenactments of famous naval battles. And at times emperors would a false forest would be created on the floor this thing and from a bird's eye view up in the seats you could watch the emperor stalking lions and tigers hunting now and before your very eyes with whatever the the weapon of the day was and nothing would happen in a contemporary circus but anyway went all the way back and there was a period in the Dark Ages when the circus sort of disappeared but reappeared in most notably in Constantinople in Turkey in the the Middle Ages where they would dock ships next to one another sailing ships string a ring a rope from the tallest mass to one to the other and then acrobats would walk that rope and perform acrobatics up on you know you know 50 or 75 feet above the water at the harbor and feed themselves tickets to people who come down and watch and in the that sort of thing continued act touring acrobats and jugglers and the like in the circus really began to take its modern shape in in England in the late 1800s when cavalrymen who were mustered out of the core began to give displays of equestrian horsemanship outdoors and people were fascinated by things that people were able to do and a man named Philip Astley is credited as the father of the modern circus he formalized that bought some land near the the west end the south end of Westminster bridge erected some grandstands around a ring and began on a daily basis to give these shows that he while he rested for a moment then maybe a juggler a clown would come out and do something and then he'd come back for the next act and one of the things he discovered was that there is an optimum size for a surface ramp 42 feet in diameter and the reason for that was that he finally figured out after much trial and some error was that a horse galloping at a horse's maximum speed in that tight in that specific uh a ring sized ring that maximized the centrifugal force that was placed that the circling placed upon the rider and almost glued him to the top of that mount making it a lot easier for him to stand let's say on a horse's back and also would allow an acrobat to jump up off the horse's back do a two or three somersaults in the air and when he came down would come down in the same spot he was when he left the horse's back even though the horse had galloped you know 15 or 20 feet in that speed of time that was one of the coolest things that i about that section of the book was all those different things that they were trying to outdo in the competing circus venues they were trying to compete against each other from these incredibly complex daring horsemanship displays it was it was can you do you remember some of those other than just the acrobat's jumping well the uh uh that everybody uh was that was the thing about the circus that everybody and and was mastered later by Bailey and Barnum and then and then Ringling Ringling everybody that was the competition that developed everybody always trying to top last week's uh act or the act on the other side of town or last year's act and one of the things that Astley uh did was to bring a woman in to the show and uh is white of course and one of the things that you find out in circus life you marry someone who's a part of the circus you will become part of the circus too you will learn something you will figure out some way to become part of the show at least it was in the in the early days and so many and sometimes some of the very best circus performers got into the act that way through through marriage anyway Astley's wife became the first equestrian performer and this is a time when uh women did almost nothing in public and certainly not as entertainers one of the things that I might mention is that the very notion of the circus was uh blasphemers uh in puritan influenced religious circles and of which Great Britain was still uh uh greatly affected and so it prohibited shows on Sunday it looked uh the church in general looked down upon such performances as these along with dramatic performances and singing and so forth because it was considered uh a diversion from a pious life that you should be studying spending your time studying the bible uh not going to some licentious thing for a woman might appear on stage improperly entertaining men and so forth that uh sort of incredible to to realize how uh the social uh uh uh approbation that entertainment in general in the circus specifically had to weather to to to perform one of the the first elephant in the united states old bet the first famous elephant was assassinated while parading or walking on a road in what would become main it's 1819 or wasn't a state yet but a guy went out there with a rifle and shot this poor elephant dead because it was traveling on a sundae and luring people away from church to go out and watch it and he didn't think that was right well there's a couple of things that you brought up just then that I might want to circle back to um one is that uh that sort of the puritanical aspect that you were you mentioned the sundae issue that they there's still I mean there was still when we were growing up um and in the early days of the circus this sort of taint of vulgarity associated with the circus that it was a really low brow thing to do and that the people associated the carnies and the people associated that were putting on the circus were considered you know kind of next to criminals that they were in town watch your pockets you know they're going to con you out of your you know your livelihood and you know some of that was of course true but but in general there's there has always been associated I think that low brow vulgar taint to circuses and it maybe it does derive from the earliest days of in Europe before king the states oh it's there's no question that that's that is a holdover from the puritanical view of entertainment in in general there's absolutely uh no question uh about that and of course when I was a kid I bought into a hook line and sinker oh yeah you can go to the circus or the carnival but you better keep your wits about you because there are people ready to snatch you up and take you away right exactly and well and the other thing you mentioned just then too was the the poor elephant that got shot you know elephants and circuses are sort of you know so intertwined why is that where does where does the connection begin why why elephants of all things pt Barnum's great line is uh when attempting to entertain the american public it is best to have an elephant and uh that was you know that was one of his conards but uh he wrote his autobiography uh that the clowns and elephants were the pegs upon which the circuses hung and I I think there wasn't an elephant in the united states before 1796 then uh uh of a fellow named crown she'll begin to exhibit an elephant and then we had old vet uh was the successor to that the next famous uh element prior to jumbo comes along later but the reason I think that the elephant uh the elephant epitomizes the circus in its size when you stand next to a full-grown uh elephant it's a me it's almost impossible to comprehend that there's a living breathing mammal that can be that big that can walk around that's as intelligent uh as it is that can actually do perform things upon you know be trained and perform things as better as well as a dog can uh it it's it is itself a bit impossible and that I keep saying is that is the center of the circus that it's impossibleness that's where you go to see things that you can't believe are really happening before your very eyes unlike movies unlike streaming unlike special effects it all happened it's true there's no tonight we're not talking about magic shows here making elephants disappear we're talking about watching elephants perform ballet and uh they they just epitomize the circus in that way and they're they're lovable people love uh you know they fall in love with elephants they dedicate their lives to the the the care of them and they they became so wrapped up in the welfare of elephants it led to the demise circus or uh in fact uh the the end of the of the elephants uh the show limped along the Barnum and Bailey uh show limped along for 50 years after the Ringlings were out of it uh uh led by a fellow named Feld by the Feld family first everyone and then his son Kenneth but uh and I went to the final performance out in Nassau Coliseum in uh 2017 and Feld came out with his family to talk about the 50 years that there were so many of them children grandchildren great grandchildren look like a small graduating class of people out there that have been involved in the administration uh and the carrying on of the circus uh enterprise and he he uh said talked about the 50 from the day they they took hold back in 1965 it was something of a uh a struggle just like the Harlem Globetrotters after black uh basketball players were allowed to play in the NBA the Harlem Globetrotters still remain but they're a shadow of their former self same thing with the circus but he said it gave us so much pleasure to continue uh but in 2015 when we decided that we would give up the elephants that was the end attendance which was spotty at times just dropped right off the edge of a cliff and uh these last few years he said have been completely untenable and so without I think apparently Barnum was right without an elephant it's pretty hard to have a circus well you know there's I don't know if you're prepared to talk about this but uh there was something in that uh the wondrousness of elephants and the um enormity of them and um that and also go back to our vulgarity conversation that we were having earlier that there's this other element and that is associated with circuses not not the traditional uh Barnum Bailey circus necessarily but the freak show the the freakish human uh aspect of it you touch a little bit on that in the book um the the 160 year old woman I think that was what it was or you know but but we all associate in our our kind of the mythic notion of um circuses is back down that alleyway and one of those tents is the bearded lady and the these other human elephants that are you wouldn't believe it except that you're seeing it's right in front of them in the heyday of the circus and toward the end of the 19th century there were three major elements to the circus what one of the big top what went under the big top itself all the acts and the events and the entertainment and then outside the big top there were two other big uh uh tents or exhibition areas and one would be the menagerie or the forerunner to a zoo where all the animals that you might have seen only for a moment in one act or another and the show were uh display or were on display in wagons hyenas and uh elephants lions and tigers and you name it uh they were there and then the third venue was the freak show human oddities uh in more proper parlance of today you know the uh it was interesting in my research to realize that through the 1950s there was no stigma attached to the concept of a so-called freak show no one no one uh no dugener no no one uh decried the existence of the human oddity uh exhibition and you find out that a number of the so-called human oddities let's general tom thumb among them felt so grateful uh to p t Barnum for coming along and create and creating this world tour around here i mean uh general tom thumb meets queen victoria for evan sakes and has a conversation with her he said under what other circumstances would that have ever happened i earned a fortune i built homes for my family and friends i uh was the toast to the crowned heads of europe and if it hadn't been for barnum i would have been nothing stuck in my little shack uh uh back where he discovered me and uh so there there are two sides to that story and most of the performing uh uh human oddities or freaks uh would say the same thing i get to earn a living i don't care this is who i am of course there are always the there's the occasional idiot that will come to the show and and try to make fun or make jokes but uh you know they were that's like a comedian stand-up comedian having to deal with the grots that they were inured to us that was kind of that was kind of fascinating uh to me made me feel a little bit better barnum it was barnum's influence that that really led to the featuring of of the freak show in the circus in the carnival because you know barnum was uh 60 years old before he ever got involved with the circus and before that he his principal occupation was as an exhibitor of oddities uh some of them historical uh and the cardiff giant for instance you know a so-called petrified man from eons ago that was barnum and the 161-year-old lady so called 161-year-old lady Joyce heth and uh and the uh mermaids and the what is it and you name it that's how he made his fortune he had a a kind of Ripley's believe it or not Emporium uh in downtown uh Manhattan that was wildly popular and and provided him with with a uh very comfortable uh living he was retired and had become a politician in Connecticut when a circus came along and said mr barnum you're pretty good at what you do we think if you joined up with the circus uh it would be a marriage made in heaven and barnum came out of retirement in 1871 to you know to become a circus man which he was for 20 years to the end of his day you're you're never too old to have a happy childhood uh so he was basically spending the last part of his life reinventing himself as uh this entrepreneurial circus guy you know you mentioned earlier uh and i think it's important that we deal with elephants and clowns uh you haven't really talked about clowns um i'm i'm interested in both sides of clowns why why they are there historically and and something that i've never understood the scary clown why why is there such a thing as the scary clown never struck me as being scary where's that stuff coming originally i clowns are great uh originally clowns were added to the show in order to uh fill up time while one act was being disassembled the next one being readied and to give the performers a breather as it were just to allow you know while the stage is being uh uh cleared then originally clowns used to do stand up uh because they would come out and have work they do haven't costello like routines and uh as the as the circus grew into a more frenetic presentation the need for them to talk and do uh you know lengthy uh dramatic presentations was obviated so they turned into minds uh over time and they were just you know uh they were costumed and made up so as to to uh and then to emphasize their mime actions and they they you needed only moment much uh uh lesser diversion so the mime thing worked but clowns i think the reason why some people are frightened by uh clowns is that traditionally in the circus they uh for they were subverted they performed subversive actions their actions were subversive if the ring if the act called for them to get into it with the ringmaster creating chaos the ringmaster saying get out of here you're messing up the show and chasing them off they were troublemakers they were like the cats and jammer kids and their their makeup only uh exacerbated uh there was a famous act in the early days of the american circus that mark twain immortalized where a drunk comes down out of the stage during one of the equestrian acts walks out onto the uh you know out into the the ring and almost gets trampled by the horse and and the ringmaster is trying to chase him off and the guy saying no i can do this i can do this as well as him and uh all this is you know phony baloney and the ringmaster says oh yeah okay johnny you get out of there and chases off their question yeah let's see get on that horse and the the guy clamors up on the horse and the horse immediately takes off and it looks like he's going to fall off the horse underneath the uh hooves and be trampled to death and he manages to hang on him before you know it he's sitting up upright and the next thing you know he's standing he's got a hold of the horse's mane and he's standing up on two feet then one foot and then he's throwing off articles of his clothing until he's down to his singlet and you realize he's part of the act and he he transforms from a clown doing these clowning things into an able performer and some of the more careful commentators on the circus say that what the clown really does is bridge that gap between the audience who's sitting in there watching people do impossible things things that they could never dream of being able to do and them themselves and the clowns are there to say no we're all in the same boat we're just little guys but there are look at these these people who do wonderful things they're worthy of our applause and and our admiration and a lot of the acts also do do that they so the clowns perform this very important function that goes far beyond you know their apparent action but that the reason why some people are terribly afraid of clowns I think is because they are intentionally for the most part subversive they're not of the norm yes they do funny things but a lot of their a lot of the humor is as I say subversive destructive you know anti-authoritarian and that's also some culture critics feel that that's why a lot of people like some people like to call the circus lowbrow because it threatens established notions of order a a horse can't count but the horse does count the clown worry willy should obey you know get his shovel and do what the ringmaster wants him to do but he figures out a way to fool the ringmaster and evade doing his job all this stuff upsets natural order and some commentators say that's why a lot of people like to dismiss the circus because it threatens them and their idea the the way that things are supposed to be very very interesting thinking if you ask me well kids that's the reason why kids have no problem with it because they distrust authority too yeah no I I can see that's a wonderful explanation it reminds me of something we've talked about in fiction in writing novels and stories to have a third thing to have another thing that is happening in a scene so that your eyes are not just fixed on the obvious thing before you it's a they they fulfill the gesture function they're the subversive function as you say they stand in for the audience in a way you know I I can see see that the things that you say what a crucial role the the clowns play and how static a presentation would be without the clowns you know it would just be that big event that's happening before you I'd like to I mean we're we're gonna run out of time soon so I don't want to conclude this without you're talking about the the disintegration of the circus or the the dev devolution of it how it how it came apart and why what are the what why is it there why is it there in the same way that it was in its heyday well first I think it's important to realize just how big the circus had become as popular entertainment it was before before movies and radio and then finally television it was the principal source of mass of popular entertainment platform for popular entertainment in the united states in 1929 even at during the onset of the great depression john wrangling who was the last of seven wrangling brothers who began uh as a penny sir five penny circus in baribu wisconsin hey let's put on a circus the seven of five of them five of the seven can you imagine that's where it all began and grew into the wrangling brothers barnum and bailey combined shows had rested control of the circus uh from barnum well from bailey's heirs bailey barnum had died in 1891 and then bailey died in 1906 i believe it was and then uh the next year wrangling combined the two grandest shows in all circumdom and ran them uh right up uh you know until the 1930s in the year 1929 he netted what would be 200 million dollars netted 200 million dollars profit in today's dollars uh on the circus business alone this is aside from everything else he was into uh by the by the time so it was big business he owned madison square garden madison square garden started off exit uh as the exhibition grounds to the circus a week or two out of the year he ended up owning uh the garden so uh it was it was it was big stuff and he was at the center of the entertainment uh universe and people he was living in sarasota at the time people came to uh everybody mayor jimmy walker and uh text record and the fight promoter and and celebrities uh came down to everybody wanted to get out and hang out with john wrangling and sarasota and seal on his yacht and in the bay and uh uh he was the bee's knee and then uh things began to fall apart he uh he fell ill he uh through family infighting began to lose control loses grip on the working to the circus and died 1937 pretty much shut out of circus operations that point is nephew uh john wrangling north managed who loved wrangling john wrangling came in and managed to gain control of the circus and run it as a pretty uh profitable operation through the 1950s the last day the big top was raised was in 1956 in in pittsburgh pennsylvania and after that it played only in color in the roofed dumb coliseum it's the wrangling show and as i've said before began uh at that time to live on in a reduced form part of the reason was the immense uh amount of effort it takes to run a circus so you the shows you were really running three or four businesses a traveling restaurant it was like a small city you've got a thousand workers needed just to to put the show on aside from the 200 or so performers uh you're you're running a traveling you were running they were running a traveling zoo and then tending to the infrastructure a school there there were teachers that had to be carried along to to tend to all the children not only the performers but the children of of the workers it was a colossally complicated and expensive kind of performance uh to undertake yes movies are too but they only go on for about you know two three months and then that's all over and then then you've got the movie and it can be uh shipped all over today digitally uh there's no more expense involved but uh uh so you were running a construction company and a restaurant company and an entertainment company and uh and trying to maintain a small city and on the move it was and everything between 1930 between the end of the depression and the and the rise of so-called Eisenhower prosperity wages began to increase in the united states from the point of we were might be paying a lay common labor labor or three or four dollars a day to work those wages had risen 20 and 30 times so suddenly the pay everything about the circus becomes 20 or 30 times as expensive as it used to be to put on and you can't raise admissions 20 or 30 times you can raise them somewhat but you know you're constrained and so they had to figure out ways to cut costs and so that meant the spectacle gradually dimmed especially in competition with the special effects of movies and and other forms of of entertainment the ice shows and monster truck jams and all that sort of stuff and then the rise of professional sports and even college sports everybody who was putting on big shows got to be good you know better at it so there were just there was great competition for the american dollar the automobile had a lot to do with it people could drive they they didn't have to stay home they weren't tied to walking downtown to watch the circus parade like they used to be people could drive anywhere to to see some other entertainment venue or you know a wilderness park in dallas was no long 500 miles so what we'll go back in the days in the day you couldn't do that so all these forces that I don't have time to go into mention the book led to the diminuation of the circus of that grand circus as we knew it and and for all that and for all that felt says so long as we had our elephants people were still coming we were still making a go of it so when we let the elephants go that was that was the that was the last thing that marked us as truly different and you want that there's the final one the elephants as the elephants go so goes the circus yeah that's interesting you can't really think of any other entertainment or any other industry that had such that has a parallel universe that had so many moving cards so much logistical logistical challenges you know moving a professional football team from one hotel to another that's no big deal but as you described that in the book and moving having the having to take care of the animals take care of the kids who come with the parents it's it was such an elaborate thing one thing that you didn't mention in that list of things and maybe this is just too abstract and cultural but most of those entertainment things aside from big stadium events but a lot of the entertainment events of the modern era are are singular we're sitting in a movie theater by ourselves watching something or we're seeing it on the computer on television at home as I said when I first started when we first started talking one of the things that I remember most dramatically and vividly about my early experiences with the carnival which was our version of the circus was the community gather that everybody from every walk of life would come and show up there and that seems to be just a phenomena that has changed throughout America in the modern world well it's because I think that's uh everybody came because there was something there for everybody something because of the nature of the circus entertainment was so diverse if you listen to an animal activist you'd think all there was was mistreatment of animals and the rings of circuses first there was very little documented mistreatment I grant you that they didn't have the same life that they might have back in the wilderness but there isn't any wilderness anymore I don't want to get into much into that but let's you when you look at the varied nature of the presentations of the circus you had athleticism you had olympic caliber acrobats and athletes performing the the physical things that go on in the circus you had animal acts you had they brought in people were fired in human canon so you had these sort of life or death the spectacles that are that that compared to special effects in the next version of the fashion the furious you know except in this case it wasn't special effects some four woman got in that canon and was shot clear across the arena and god help her that she'd better land in the net or she would die literally die most of the time she landed in the net but not always so you had that life or death spectacle that you get in the in the in the movies and then there was the exoticism the spectacle the parades and a lot of times dramatic performances the once wrinkling author authorized bot hired a strobenzky to develop an operatic score for for elephants to dance it was choreographed by balanchine and the elephants did it and Marianne Moore the poet was invited to come down to Madison Square Garden to witness it and everybody thought oh she's going to excoriate this and she found herself perfectly charmed by the impossibility of elephants dancing ballet so that was the nature there's nothing remains like the circus that had that tremendous diversity and what one cultural critic said look you've got the distillation of the American experience itself under the big top in three or four hours what other form of entertainment could possibly do such a thing that's that's true and you know you you really can't think of anything that exists today in our wide selection of entertainment possibilities that that has the conrival what the circus did for all those years it's just amazing let me just end up going back to you as a writer you know i've watched you evolve over the years going from short stories to writing novels and the and watching us both really mount this very difficult and challenging world of creating stories and then i watched you make this transition to being a historian or a storyteller historian do you when you reflect on where you were and where you are now do you miss the the world that i'm still a partner which is oh you can just make things up you could just create the the next dramatic thing you don't have to depend on source material to weave together into an interesting story talk a minute about that because you know this is a a really really impressive creative enterprise people don't see it that way sometimes because they just think oh well these collect a lot of facts and figures and dates and places and names and so on but it's your books are so much more than that because they weave together this story and bring along these characters in the same way that fiction does good fiction does well thank you jim the sometimes i am wistful about the days when i could looking for a way to wind all this up find the moral in my story i can just make it up and you can't do that of course with the this kind of book narrative nonfiction i call it when i first wrote the first of these a book about building a railroad across the ocean from miami to q west called last train to paradise i had this mountain of notes and research material and i began that thing three or four times and i realized in every case i was writing the world's longest encyclopedia article and i was putting myself to something that i was sure would put my readers to sleep and i finally i looked at that mountain of notes and i said what are you going to do less what are you going to do with all this and finally it dawned on me one of the richest men in the world undertakes the engineering project of the century and the worst storm in history blows it all away and i thought that's as good as anything i could make up just tell your storyteller less tell that story and hang on those bubbles uh you know those bulbs and bright lights that you've researched along the way off that very simple storyline and it was i i don't know that i would have had that insight if i hadn't written ten novels before i began to write nonfiction i i don't know if it would occurred to me but that's what i've been trying to do ever since i'm not a historical archaeologist i'm not one of those people that goes out and tries to find some shard of pottery that's never been placed on a shelf in a museum before i'm trying to find the place where the shard of pottery fits in this pattern so you can look at the whole damn vase and say wow somebody did that way back when under those circumstances that's that's that's what i try to do and it's to me it's kind of a great combination of the two things i have a phd i learned how to do uh literary research and i combine those skills with what i picked up learning to write novels and i i come out with stories that i hope are just as dramatic as the ones i used to make up uh using the what is what is given to me and it's a little bit more intellectual for that reason because you have to logic plays you know what am i going to do with that where's that fit uh and that never comes up when you're writing writing fiction you only think of what you need here i've got all this stuff and i don't know why i need it till you know who knows when in the process of the story but i i've come to enjoy it very very much and you're really really good at it too last really good let me let me wind this up with this this one last inevitable question is what's next what's what's the on the horizon here the new insurance guys that you're talking to at the four seasons and ken really leads you to this book that you spend a year or so on and it turns into this wonderful story about wrangling what are you doing now what's what's on the agenda i'm writing a i'm writing a book that's a little bit more of a memoir now it's called seven dogs to enlightenment and it is i'm trying to trace the path of uh how these seven wonderful dogs that i've had over the course of my life have gotten have taught me so many important things uh that's that's what that book is and following that i'm i'm uh i'm going to the next book and along the lines of what we've been talking about today is about pinkerton that you may have heard from the pinkerton detectives this is going to be pinkerton the unknown abolition the story of how pinkerton actually became a investigator soldier and a spy and i and one of the most uh important uh cogs in the underground railroad uh in the years leading up to the civil war sort of unknown side to him that antedates some of the excesses of of the detective agency most of which took place after he was long gone well i hope the they both of those sound fabulous and i i've read a little portion of the dog book and it was as touching as moving as anything i think you've ever written um and i really look forward to that that finished book and i'm sure if the national archives sees fit to invite you back to do another one of these i'd be more than happy to serve this pitiful function i hope they i hope they do i hope they issue that invitation i've had a great time jim i really thank you for agreeing to do it oh well thank you it's been it's been a real pleasure and and thank the national archives for putting this together and send me a link so i can post it and promote it in my little universe that i i control thanks again thank you all