The Submission of the Ruling Passion

The Sublimation of Our Ruling Passion If you would see the most typical product of American dramatic art as well as the American spirit, go see the circus. There you will find the supreme expression of America's delight in size and speed, in superlatives and hyperbole. Barnum and Bailey's "Greatest Show on Earth" makes no claim to subtlety, to artistic discrimination, to any of the refinements of effete European culture; it simply exults with three rings and a side show in being bigger, faster, more dangerous and more defiant of natural law than any entertainment ever before presented to the human eye. Its tent is "the greatest stretch of canvas ever raised," its acrobats are "the greatest aggregation of mid-aerial gymnasts in the world," its tigers are "the greatest and most thrilling wild animals ever offered in this or any other country" and its elephants are"the biggest brutes that breathe." Miss Bertha Beeson is "positively and obviously the most sensational high wire artist of all time," Mile. Leitzel " breaks every law of gravity," and the circus advertises its clowns as being so funny that they "would even make a prude smile." It seems never to have occurred to the press agents, barkers and ballyhoo men of Barnum and Bailey's that anybody might ask "Well, what of it?" or "Who cares?" With an unerring understanding of popular psychology, they realize that what the American wants is quantity-- all the measurements of time, space, and movement in the nth degree. We have the fastest locomotives, the biggest hotels, the longest railroads, and the largest crops in the world, and 'these measurements are their chief justification. Not how fine but how much is our motto, and the circus has made of this article of American faith a dazzling reductio ad absurdum. The influence of Barnum, the father of Buncombe, on American culture is incalculable. The whole paraphernalia of circus terminology has been lifted bodily from the circus by the moving picture people, who measure their productions, not in dramatic values, but in thrills, shocks and statistics. The same thing is true of the newspaper syndicate features, the popular novels, and the evangelistic campaigns. The editors, writers and Billy Sundays do not care so much for quality; their cry is for more circulation, more editions more Main Street homes reached, more agate lines, more souls saved. The phrase "Barnum was right" does not apply exclusively to his dictum that a sucker is born every minute. It applies to his whole conception of America's ruling passion.