‘Greatest Show on Earth’ takes a final bow
UNITED STATES: Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus took a final, bittersweet bow yesterday, staging its last three shows here after 146 years of entertaining American audiences with gravitydefying trapeze stunts, comically clumsy clowns and tamed tigers.
‘‘Farewell, from the Greatest Show on Earth!’’ ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson, an 18-year veteran of the show and the first African American to hold the job, told a packed midday audience, offering one of the few signs that the circus was coming to a close. Yet many spectators said they came precisely because yesterday offered the final chance to witness a spectacle that once felt as if it might be around forever - until changing times and mores proved more powerful.
The end of this American institution came six decades after it folded its big-top tent in 1956 and moved indoors, an event that at the time was viewed as a death knell. But while Ringling’s mile-long train of animals and humans continued crisscrossing the country, it ultimately could not weather another major transition: last year’s exit of its most famed performers, the elephants.
Animals had long been a huge draw, but they were also what contributed to the circus’s demise. In 1898, when Ringling’s ‘‘World’s Greatest Show’’ first made its way to the nation’s capital, some 15,000 people packed into a tent to view what The Washington Post then called ‘‘one of the finest zoological exhibits extant.’’ It included tropical birds, a hippo, zebras, 400 horses and 25 elephants.
A century later, Ringling had become the target of animal protection groups that claimed it mistreated its elephants, and the two sides soon locked in a 14-year legal battle so cutthroat that it involved secret informants paid by animal advocacy groups and a former CIA official who was paid to gather intel on activists.
Although the animal activists never prevailed against Ringling in court, they were victorious outside. The allegations of elephant abuse prompted municipalities around the country to ban elephant bullhooks - a sharp metal tool used by the handlers - or to prohibit wild animal performances altogether, as Los Angeles recently moved to do. - Washington Post