Tennessee State University historian Andrea Ringer neatly situates the twentieth-century decades of the traveling circus within a larger framework of labor and industrial history. A large enterprise comprising as many as one hundred railcars and three hundred horses as it traversed the countryside, the traveling circus, says Ringer, might best be considered a “traveling company town.” Even as a few owners like Barnum and Bailey and the Ringling Brothers had generally consolidated control of the industry by the 1930s, their employees—an interracial and mixed-gender assembly of ordinary laborers and skilled specialists including sideshow workers who fought off their popular label as “freaks”—were organizing around wages and working conditions under various AFL actor and teamster unions. The distinctiveness of the circus workscape, defined by tensions between paternalism and class status and tradeoffs of work and leisure time, ultimately succumbed to a combination of mechanization and modernization, which diminished its exotic appeal....
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Introduction|
September 01 2022
Editor's Introduction
Labor (2022) 19 (3): 1–2.
Citation
Leon Fink; Editor's Introduction. Labor 1 September 2022; 19 (3): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9794914
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