Freaks Shows

By seeing freak shows as a business and exhibits as presentations, we can begin to understand the manufacture and management of disability images for profit. Well into the twentieth century, such shows were an accepted part of American popular culture. As we have seen, the way exhibits were presented—the exotic mode that exploited the public’s interest in the “races of man,” and the aggrandized mode that capitalized on the public’s status concerns—was not offensive to nineteenth-

and early twentieth-century citizens. There are a few isolated examples of attractions promoted in a way designed to work on the sympathies and compassion of the audience for the plight of the freak, but they are rare. Pity as a mode or even as an element of presentation was nearly absent. If it had pleased audiences, promoters might have developed presentations emphasizing how difficult life was for the “handicapped” exhibits, told the crowds how unhappy they were, how the admission charge would help pay their expenses and relieve their suffering. But pity did not coincide with the world of amusement where people used their leisure time and spent their money to be entertained, not to confront human suffering.6

Pity as a mode of presenting people with physical, mental, and behavioral differences fit better the medicalized conception of human differences. While in the nineteenth century natural scientists, teratologists, and other doctors examined freaks, they were not patients. Professionals had not gained control over human deviation; people with physical and mental anomalies were still in the public domain. Into the twentieth century, the power of professions increased and the eugenics movement grew strong. People with physical and mental anomalies came under the control of professionals and many were secluded from the public. Their conditions were to be contained or treated behind closed doors. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, human differences were thought of as a threat to the “American Race.” People with physical and mental differences became dangerous because they were alleged to have inferior genes that, if not controlled would weaken the breeding stock. They needed to be locked away and in other ways controlled to protect the gene pool. This was accompanied by the professionalization of organized charities and fund raising, the invention of the poster child. Pity combined with the medical model became the dominant mode of presenting human differences for money. It is through this lens that we look back on freak shows and find them distasteful.

This is not to suggest that the earlier imagery of the disabled promoted by the freak show enhanced the well-being of disabled people more than modern renderings. The exotic mode obviously presented people in ways that offend current taste and positive ideas of the capabilities of people with physical and mental differences. Steeped in racism, imperialism, and handicapism, this mode emphasized the inferiority of the “human curiosity.” The negative imagery paralleled the visions of natural science at the time by casting the exhibits as specimens, as inferior and as contemptuous. The

association of various human differences with danger, with subhumans, and with animals, was developed as well as perpetuated by these exhibits (not to mention its impact on images of racial minorities and non-Westerners).

At first glance the aggrandized mode seems positive. Exhibits were lauded for their achievements and for how, except for their particular physical anomaly, they were quite normal, even superior. The audience must have wondered why, if they were so

competent, they made a living having others look at them. With the best circuses, dime museums, and amusement parks, salaries and living conditions were good. Some exhibits chose their careers because of the financial benefits and fame they brought. But for the majority, those who were exhibited in the second-rate establishments, life was marginal and precarious. Here the exhibits chose their way of life not because of what it offered, but because of what they got away from. With an urbanizing country, no social security, discrimination in employment, architectural

barriers, and strained interpersonal relations, persons with anomalies found refuge in a world where there were others similarly situated. If they did not find fortune and fame, they found acceptance and more freedom than either custodial institutions or the mainstream might provide. Although to some extent the imagery of the aggrandized mode was positive, the mere presence of the exhibits as part of the amusement world, which itself was depraved in the public view, suggested that they belonged with their own kind and that they were not competent enough to prosper in the larger world.