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“Killing the Elephant”: Murderous Beasts and the Thrill of Retribution, 1885–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2012

Amy Louise Wood
Amy Louise Wood*
Affiliation:
Illinois State University
*
alwood@ilstu.edu
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Abstract

At the turn of the last century, circus elephants who had, in fits of distemper, killed circus trainers, workers, or spectators were regularly put to death. That alone is not extraordinary. What is fascinating is that the killings of these animals were not infrequently staged as public executions, with the elephant playing the role of the menacing criminal facing his just rewards before a crowd of eager witnesses. News accounts in turn reported these events as they would criminal executions, framing them as stories of murder, remorse, and retribution. This article treats these remarkable events as complex rituals through which larger tensions and conflicts surrounding crime and punishment in this period became manifest. These executions, performed as extensions of the modern circus, were commercial spectacles in and of the industrial age. Still, like circuses, they were also events full of ambivalence about this new age, as they acted out popular controversies over the nature of criminality, the meaning of justice, and the role of vengeance in modern life.

Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , July 2012 , pp. 405 - 444
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2012

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References

1 New York World, Jan. 5, 1903, 1–2; New York Times, Jan. 5, 1903, 1; New York Herald, Jan. 5, 1903, 6.

2 New York World, Jan. 5, 1903, 1; New York Times, Jan. 5, 1903, 1; New York Herald, Jan. 5, 1903, 6. The New York Times downplayed the number of people at the event, reporting that the only witnesses were the people directly involved and reporters, a sign of how much sensationalistic papers like the Herald and the World were responsible for rendering these events into spectacles.

3 The film was a popular catalog item for the Edison Film Company and would have been exhibited along with other “cinema of attraction” in local opera houses and theaters or at fairs and carnivals. It was first advertised in the New York Clipper, Jan 17, 1903, 1052, and appeared in Edison catalogs for several years afterward; see Edison Film Catalog (1904) and Edison Film Catalog (1907).

4 I have been able to document thirty-six elephant executions or attempted executions in this period, fourteen of which were staged as public executions. Five others were killed publicly but more spontaneously, and the rest were killed privately, though their deaths were often covered in great detail in the press as if they were criminal executions. Circus expert, Robert Cline, has listed forty-six elephant executions between 1855 and 1973, although I have not been able to verify some of these cases. See “Elephants that Were Executed,” Bob Cline's Elephant Files, obtained through the Circus World Museum, Parkinson Library and Research Center, Baraboo, Wisconsin (hereafter Parkinson Library). Other circus or zoo animals, such as lions and tigers, were killed if they became too dangerous, but their deaths were rarely publicized or recorded, either privately by circuses or by newspapers. I have not found evidence that other animals were ever executed publicly.

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7 Cohen, “Law, Folklore, and Animal Lore,” 21, 15–17, 36–37.

8 Nicholas Humphrey, foreword to Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, xxv–xxvi.

9 Geertz, “Deep Play,” 263.

10 On the turn-of-the-century circus as a big business, see Davis, Janet M., The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill, 2002), 37–81Google Scholar.

11 Saturday Evening Post, June 11, 1921, 38.

12 “Elephant Attacks on Human Rare, Unexplained, and Unpredictable,” unidentified clipping, Nov. 11, 2002, Vertical File Folder, “Elephant Attacks,” Parkinson Library. This 2002 account notes that there had been thirty non-fatal elephant attacks since 1990, when some 236 African elephants, which tend to be more violent than their Asiatic cousins, lived in captivity in North America. These elephants were not put to death for these attacks; rather their training was readjusted, reflecting newer ideas about animal behavior and treatment. As one spokesperson noted after Flora the Elephant critically injured her keeper at the Miami Zoo in 2002, “The elephant was simply being an elephant. This is not something that should reflect badly on her.” Miami Herald, Dec. 17, 2002, Vertical File Folder, “Elephant Attacks,” Parkinson Library.

13 Murray, Marian, Circus! From Rome to Ringling (New York, 1956), 260–64Google Scholar; Mosier, Jennifer, “The Big Attraction: The Circus Elephant and American Culture,” Journal of American Culture 22 (Summer 1999): 11Google Scholar. There were several noted killings of circus elephants in both Europe and in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. In these cases, soldiers were called to shoot the rampaging beasts. Instances occurred at Geneva (1820), London (1826), and Baton Rouge, LA (1845). See “Famous Elephants of the Show” (1930), folder 2, Circus Collection, Special Collections, Milner Library, Illinois State University, Normal, IL (hereafter Milner Circus Collection); London Magazine, Apr. 1826, 450–55; Farley's Magazine, Jan. 1843, 144; The Youth's Companion, Apr. 3, 1845, 191; Christian Observer, Mar. 28, 1845, 52.

14 New York Times, Apr. 6, 1883, 5; New York Evangelist, Apr. 12, 1883, 12; Chicago Tribune, Apr. 6, 1883, 5. Pilot's body was dissected and its various parts rendered into glue, buttons, and billiard balls. Although the bodies of later elephants were at times stuffed and placed on display, they were treated with a kind of reverence not apparent in the 1880s. If they were cut up and sold, newspapers did not report it to the public.

15 Davis, The Circus Age, 162; Boston Globe, July 21, 1885, 1. The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Atlanta Constitution also carried the story, and it probably made the pages of smaller papers as well.

16 Davis, The Circus Age, 154–55; 161–63; see also Mosier, “The Big Attraction,” 17.

17 New York Times, May 10, 1894, 8; New York Tribune, May 12, 1894, 1.

18 Davis, David Brion, “The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment” in Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (New York, 1986), 17–18Google Scholar. Spierenburg, Pieter, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge, 1984), 3–45Google Scholar; Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979), 32–69Google Scholar.

19 Halttunen, Karen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 8–14Google Scholar; Cohen, Daniel A., Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674–1860 (New York 1993)Google Scholar; Sharpe, J.A., “‘Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology, and Public Executions in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 107 (May 1985): 144–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Bennett, Christopher, The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment (New York, 2008), 26–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Davis, “The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment,” 18; Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 3, similarly argues that nineteenth-century crime stories, which in their gothic detail came to replace the public execution ritual, “represented a significant strategy for confronting the crime of murder,” a means to find meaning in the face of the “utter incomprehensibility” of crime.

22 Davis, “The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment,” 19–40; Masur, Louis P., Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the Transformation of American Culture, 1776–1865 (New York, 1989), 50–92Google Scholar. Although in this period, most legislation to abolish capital punishment was defeated, three states did put an end to the practice: Michigan (1847), Rhode Island (1852), and Wisconsin (1853).

23 Laqueur, Thomas, “Crowds, Carnivals and the State in English Executions, 1604–1868” in First Modern Society: Essays in History in Honor of Lawrence Stone, eds. Beier, A.L., Cannadine, David, and Rosenheim, James (New York, 1989), 308Google Scholar; Masur, Rites of Execution, 93–116.

24 Banner, Stuart, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 144–50Google Scholar; Linders, Annulla, “The Execution Spectacle and State Legitimacy: The Changing Nature of the American Execution Audience, 1833–1937,” Law & Society Review 36:3 (2002): 607–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 I explain this public resistance to private executions in Wood, Amy Louise, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, 2009), 20–21, 33, 41–42Google Scholar; see also Largey, Gale, “The Hanging,” Society 18:6 (1981): 73–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Friedman, Lawrence, Crime and Punishment in American History (New York, 1993), 168–71Google Scholar; Banner, The Death Penalty, 157–61.

26 Seth Kotch, “Unduly Harsh and Unworkably Rigid: The Death Penalty in North Carolina, 1910–1961” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 2008), 36; for other southern examples, see Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 30–33.

27 In response, some states began instituting laws at the turn of the century to impose further order on the execution process. In these “midnight assassination laws,” states such as New York and Minnesota stipulated that executions must take place in the dead of night so as to discourage crowds. Other laws targeted the press, banning journalists from the execution site and prohibiting them from reporting salacious details of the execution, laws that newspapers protested on First Amendment grounds or often just ignored; Masur, Rites of Execution, 114; Linders, “The Execution Spectacle and State Legitimacy,” 637–42; Madow, Michael, “Forbidden Spectacle: Executions, The Public and the Press in Nineteenth-Century New York,” Buffalo Law Review 43 (Fall 1995): 519–23Google Scholar; Bessler, John D., Legacy of Violence: Lynch Mobs and Executions in Minnesota (Minneapolis, 2003), 113–40Google Scholar.

28 Others resisted the movement away from public executions on more high-minded principles, protesting that the centralization of state power represented by the private execution infringed on republican traditions of local control and popular sovereignty. This argument included the concern that citizens were now denied their right to witness the state's punishment on their behalf. Others pointed out that if executions were meant to deter crime, then they needed to be seen. The move to shield the public from the execution, in this way, bolstered arguments against capital punishment; if the public could no longer see the execution, what was its purpose? See, Masur, Rites of Execution, 110–13.

29 Despite these concerns, there was little correlation between restrictions on capital punishment and the prevalence of lynching. After all, states with the highest execution rates also experienced the most lynchings. On the relationship between lynching and the demise of public executions, see Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 19–44.

30 Chicago Tribune, Apr. 23, 1900, 2; Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1899, 17.

31 New York Times, Nov. 9, 1907, 1.

32 Circus owners, like Barnum, certainly took advantage of this kind of journalism. News reports of elephant executions, even non-public ones, were probably written in response to press reports sent out by circus owners who wanted to drum up interest in the circus.

33 Trotti, Michael Ayers, The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South (Chapel Hill, 2008), 6–12Google Scholar; Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 3–5.

34 The Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, for example, keeps biographies of circus elephants and records of their deaths. Considerably less attention was paid to the life stories of other animals.

35 Mosier, “The Big Attraction,” 13–14; Colonel F.T. Pollack, “The Intelligence of Elephants,” McClure's Magazine, May 1899, 74–79; New York Times Apr. 28, 1901, 16; “Elephant Stories,” folder 1, Milner Circus Collection.

36 Carson, Gerald, “Seeing the Elephant,” New England Galaxy 18:3 (1977): 8Google Scholar; John and Alice Durant, A Pictorial History of the American Circus (New York, 1957), 24–25Google Scholar.

37 Mosier, “The Big Attraction,” 15; Layton, Thomas N., “Stalking Elephants in Nevada” Western Folklore 35 (Oct. 1976): 250–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rea, J., “Seeing the Elephant,” Western Folklore 28 (Jan. 1969): 21–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kasson, John F., Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1978), 33, 53Google Scholar. On the use of elephant to refer to whiskey, see “Regulating the Elephant,” Christian Index, Apr. 26, 1886, 16, 64; “Regulating the Elephant,” New York Evangelist, July 8, 1886, 27, 57.

38 Davis, The Circus Age, 155–56; Kelly, Bill, “P.T. Barnum's Biggest Star,” American History 32 (Jan./Feb. 1998): 36–44Google Scholar; Unwin, Peter, “Freak Show: Jumbo in the New World,” Beaver 83 (Aug./Sep. 2003): 34–38Google Scholar; James, Theodore Jr., “The World Went Mad when Might Jumbo Came to Town,” Smithsonian, May 1982, 134–52Google Scholar. As noted above, Barnum and Bailey officials sentenced Columbia to death in 1907 after she became too dangerous and unruly. New York Times, Nov. 9, 1907, 1.

39 Mosier, “The Big Attraction,” 16.

40 Davis, The Circus Age, 163; Dr. W. T. Hornaday, Carl E. Akeley, and Charles Mager, “The Elephant in Jungle, Zoo, and Circus,” The Mentor, June 1924, 4, 15; W. Henry Sheak, “The Elephant in Captivity,” undated clipping “Elephant Stories #1,” Milner Circus Collection.

41 Rothfels, Nigel, “Why Look at Elephants?” Worldviews 9:2 (2005): 173–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Orwell, George, “Shooting the Elephant” in Orwell, A Collection of Essays (New York, 1970), 148–56Google Scholar.

42 Frank Braden, “You never can tell about Elephants,” Illustrated World (date unknown), Folder #1, Milner Circus Collection.

43 Ownby, Subduing Satan, 21–37; Proctor, Nicolas W., Bathed in Blood: Hunting and Mastery in the Old South (Charlottesville, 2002)Google Scholar.

44 Atlanta Journal Constitution, Nov. 24, 1902, 1–2; Washington Post, Nov. 24, 1902, 1.

45 Durant, A Pictorial History of the American Circus, 25, and Unwin, “Freak Show,” claim that Old Bet was killed by an irate farmer near Alfred, Maine, in 1816, whereas Murray, Circus, 126–27, writes that Old Bet was felled by a group of moral crusaders in 1820. A statue was then erected in her honor in the town. These accounts may have confused the facts, however. A letter from Alfred, Maine, to the Boston Gazette printed in August, 1816 laments that a man had recently “murdered” an unnamed, beloved elephant passing through a town in Massachusetts for no apparent cause; see The National Register, Aug. 24, 1816, 1, 26. The Youth's Companion, Aug. 16, 1900, 74, contains another account, a tale of a minister who loved Old Bet but objected to other elements of the traveling show. Later, the story implies, Old Bet broke loose during an exhibition and was shot by panicked onlookers despite the protests of her owner.

46 As Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 89, points out, societies have granted certain animals occult power because of their almost mysterious humanlike qualities, which places them in an “ambiguous ontological position.”

47 Turner, James, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore, 1980)Google Scholar; Beers, Diane L., For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens, OH, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pearson, Susan J., The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 33.

49 Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 67–68.

50 Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 46–59.

51 Rothman, David J., The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (1971; New Brunswick, 2011), 57–78Google Scholar; Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 40–45; Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 193–256. Evans's book, published in 1906, was an elaboration on two articles he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1884, in which he compared modern and medieval forms of justice to critique the ways in which some modern reformers and criminologists expressed sympathy for criminals whom they imagined as animalistic, acting without rationality and consciousness of their wrongdoing. On the other hand, he took issue with the idea that animals lacked knowledge of their wrongdoing, for domestic animals like dogs regularly express shame or attempt to hide their misdeeds.

52 Rothman, David J., Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston, 1980), 43–81Google Scholar; Willrich, Michael, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (New York, 2003), xxi–xxxix; 59–95Google Scholar; Trotti, The Body in the Reservoir, 145–80.

53 Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless, 47.

54 Rosenberg, Charles E., The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago, 1968), 43–74Google Scholar.

55 New York Times, Oct. 30, 1901, 4; Rome (GA) Tribune, Oct. 30, 1901, 1; I recount this story of Czolgosz's execution and popular desires to witness it in Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 132–34.

56 Rauchway, Eric, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York, 2004), 24, 39–53, 60, 114Google Scholar.

57 New York Times, Sep. 28, 1901, 2; Oct. 30, 1901, 4; Rome (GA) Tribune, Oct. 30, 1901, 1; Rauchway, Murdering McKinley, 77.

58 New York Clipper, Nov. 16, 1901, 852; Like “Electrocution of an Elephant,” the film was popular enough that it continued to be listed in Edison's 1904 and 1907 catalogs. Edison Film Catalog (1904); Edison Film Catalog (1907); Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 132–33.

59 Buffalo Express, Nov. 9, 1901, 5; Nov. 10, 1901, 12; New York Herald, Nov. 9, 1901, 4;

60 New York Herald, Nov. 10, 1901, 3.

61 Essig, Mark, Edison and the Electric Chair: A Story of Light and Death (New York, 2004), 253Google Scholar; Martschukat, Jürgen, “‘The Art of Killing by Electricity’: The Sublime and the Electric Chair,” Journal of American History 89 (Dec. 2002): 914–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Essig, 3, also notes that critics claimed that Thomas Edison developed the electric chair in order to gain control of the electric power industry in the face of George Westinghouse's competition. Edison himself maintained that he was against the death penalty but was compelled to find a scientific and humane method of execution.

62 New York Herald, Jan. 5, 1903, 6; New York Times, Jan. 5, 1903, 1.

63 Chicago Tribune, Dec. 11, 1896, 1; Dec. 12, 1896, 2; and Dec. 13, 1896, 5. The furor over Gypsy's demise made national news; see St. Louis Republic, Dec. 12, 1896, 2; New York Times, Dec. 11, 1896, 1; Los Angeles Times, Dec. 12, 1896, 1.

64 Vertical File Folder, Elephants, Parkinson Library.

65 Chicago Tribune, Dec. 27, 1896, 6; Jan. 1, 1897, 3; Jan. 2, 1897, 3; Boston Daily Globe, Jan. 6, 1897, 6.

66 Chicago Tribune, Dec. 13, 1896, 5; Folder 27, box 42, “Elephant ‘Gypsy’ 1896,” Illinois Humane Society Papers, Manuscript Division, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, IL. At the time, the Humane Society exhibited considerable concern with stopping a planned foxhunt in the state, because of the sport's exploitative use of dogs and horses. It was not until the 1910s that animal welfare activists began focusing attention on the treatment of elephants and other animals in circuses and zoos as a cause for their lethal tempers. Illinois Humane Society, 27th Annual Report (May 2, 1896); Illinois Humane Society, 28th Annual Report (May 1, 1897).

67 New York Herald, Nov. 10, 1901, 3; Buffalo Express, Nov. 10, 1901, 12; Washington Post, Nov. 17, 1901, 31.

68 Buffalo Morning Express, Nov. 10, 1911, 12.

69 Martschukat, “The Art of Killing,” 900–01, 904–09, 912–14; Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair, 123. Martschukat, 913, says that poison, or lethal injection, was dismissed as an execution method when the medical community objected to its use “because of its close association with the practice of medicine.”

70 Collier's Magazine reported in 1920 that an elephant was electrocuted in Little Rock, Arkansas, with 50,000 volts, at some point, although the date is not given, and I have not found further evidence of this incident. According to the magazine, “the city … was dark for ten seconds during the electrocution.” Collier's Magazine clipping, Vertical File Folder, Elephants, Parkinson Library.

71 Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair, 291.

72 Laqueur, “Crowds, Carnival and the State in English Executions.”

73 Scientific American, Jan. 12, 1889, 18; Washington Post, July 22, 1889, 2; Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 23, 1888, 17.

74 New York Tribune, Feb. 4, 1889, 6; Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair, 154.

75 Essig, Edison and the Electric Chair, 67.

76 Davis, The Circus Age, 10, 18–36, 39–52, 148–52, 170–79.

77 Davis, The Circus Age, 25.

78 For instance, killings of elephants took place in Hartsville, SC (1914), Erwin, TN (1916), Salina, KS (1920 and again in 1928), Orange, TX (c. 1927), Corsicana, TX (1929), and Tulsa, OK (late 1920s).

79 Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 29–30; Kotch, “Unduly Harsh and Unworkably Rigid,” 27–138.

80 Lynching was not a wholly southern practice, nor were African Americans the sole victims; lynchings were perpetuated in almost every U.S. state, and mobs persecuted Mexicans, Chinese, Native Americans, and whites in this period. The vast majority of lynchings at the turn of the century took place in the South, however, and African Americans in the Jim Crow era comprised the majority of victims. Moreover, most Americans by the 1890s perceived lynching to be a southern phenomenon.

81 See, for example, Daniel, Pete, Standing at the Crossroads: Southern Life since 1900 (New York, 1986), 52–54Google Scholar; Ownby, Subduing Satan, 61; Davis, The Circus Age, 163.

82 Burton, Thomas G., “The Hanging of Mary, A Circus Elephant,” Tennessee Folklore Society Bulletin 37 (Mar. 1971): 1–8Google Scholar; Price, Charles Edwin, The Day They Hung the Elephant (Johnson City, TN, 1992)Google Scholar. According to Burton, 6, and Price, 35, a local railroad employee recorded the event on camera, but the photo came out blurry and was supposedly doctored. The Associated Press apparently made the curious request to have Mary exhumed and repositioned on the railroad crane so they could get another photograph made, but the railroad company refused.

83 Davis, The Circus Age, 163; Mosier, “The Big Attraction,” 11; Oxford (MS) Eagle, Mar. 5, 1902, 4.

84 NAACP to Governor Tom Rye, telegram, May 24, 1918, reel 1, pt. 7, series A, NAACP Papers, microfilm ed.; Brundage, Fitzhugh, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana, 1993), 35Google Scholar.

85 Burton, “The Hanging of Mary,” 5.

86 Burton, “The Hanging of Mary,” 7.

87 Dallas Morning News, Oct. 13, 1929, 1, 16; Oct. 17, 1929, 1; Al G. Barnes, “Black Diamond—the Love-Crazed Killer” Liberty, Aug. 15, 1931, 29–32; Harry Payne, “I Saw the Execution of Black Diamond!” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 25, 1932, 112.

88 Waldrep, Christopher, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Roy Nash to the Gary (IN) Evening Times, Nov. 1916, reel 1, pt. 7, series A, NAACP Papers; Nash requested a copy of the photograph of “Murderous Mary” that the paper had recently published and kept this request on record in the NAACP lynching files.

90 Columbia (SC) State, Mar. 12, 1914, 1; Mar. 15, 1914, 4; Literary Digest, Mar. 28, 1914, 721; Billboard, Mar. 28, 1914, 22.

91 Columbia (SC) State, Mar. 15, 1914, 4.