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The White Fraud: White Elephants, Siam, and Comparative Racialization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 February 2024
Abstract
In this paper I examine P. T. Barnum's attempt to bring the first “sacred white elephant” to America, and his subsequent “white elephant war” with rival showman Adam Forepaugh, through the lens of Afro-Asian comparative racialization. I look at several accounts of white elephants that describe their skin color in terms of the US's Black/white race dichotomy and ask why this animal was a popular figure for examining the US's shifting attitude toward race and transpacific imperialism in the late nineteenth century. By reading the “white elephant war” through a comparative framework, I argue that the heterogeneous histories of both African American and Asian racialization inhered and intersected in this specific instance of racial comparison, while tracking the overlaps and oversights that this analysis reveals.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies
References
1 For an overview of Toung Taloung's stay in London see Sarah Amato's chapter “The White Elephant in London: On Trickery, Racism, and Advertising” in Amato, Beastly Possessions: Animals in Victorian Consumer Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 139–81. For Barnum's interest in acquiring a white elephant, and his subsequent “white elephant war” with Adam Forepaugh, see Saxon, A. H., P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 303–7Google Scholar; and Harris, Neil, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, and Company, 1973), 266–71Google Scholar. For Barnum's own version of these events see Barnum, P. T., Struggles and Triumphs; or, Sixty Years Recollections (Buffalo, NY: The Courier Company, 1889), 335–43Google Scholar.
2 “The Sacred Beast Here,” New York Times (hereafter NYT), 29 March 1884, 1.
3 I borrow the phrase “white elephant war” from Dexter W. Fellows's memoir of circus life, This Way to the Big Show (New York: The Viking Press, 1936), 272.
4 Lye, Colleen, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” PMLA, 123, 5 (Oct. 2008), 1732–36Google Scholar, 1733, 1734
5 In addition to “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” see Lye's, Colleen America's Asia (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Hsu, Hsuan L., Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain's Asia and Comparative Racialization (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; and Wong, Edlie, “Comparative Racialization, Immigration Law, and James Williams’ Life and Adventures,” American Literature, 84, 4 (Dec. 2012), 797–826CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Frank Vincent, “White Elephants,” The Manhattan, 4, 1 (July 1884), 89–96, 93.
7 Ibid., 94.
8 “The Sacred Beast Here,” 1.
9 Vincent, Frank, The Land of the White Elephant: Sights and Scenes in South-Eastern Asia (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1874), 160Google Scholar.
10 Amato, Beastly Possessions, 155.
11 William Ruschenberger, Narrative of a Voyage round the World during the Years 1835, 36, and 37; Including a Narrative of an Embassy to the Sultan of Muscat and the King of Siam, Volume II (London: Richard Bentley, 1838), 87. Ruschenberger was the surgeon for the US expedition to ratify the first treaty between the United States and Siam, which had been negotiated by Edmund Roberts in 1833.
12 Ibid., 91.
13 Peterson, Carla L., “Capitalism, Black (Under)Development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s,” American Literary History, 4, 4 (Winter 1992), 559–83, 568CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Ringis, Rita, Elephants of Thailand in Myth, Art, and Reality (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1996), 94Google Scholar.
15 For example, just before he describes the color of a white elephant as being like that of a “mulatto,” Vincent writes, “Is the white elephant white, or only so by a figure of speech? To this question it is impossible to answer yes or no. The Siamese never speak of a white elephant but of a chang pouk [sic], or strange-colored elephant.” Vincent, “White Elephants,” 93.
16 See George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review, 106, 8 (1993), 1707–91; and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, revised edn (New York: Verso, 2007).
17 For more on whiteness as a racial category that was gradually extended to different European American groups see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For racial passing and the malleability of whiteness for African Americans see Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
18 “Elephant,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, at www.oed.com/dictionary/white-elephant_n?tab=meaning_and_use#14365918 (accessed 20 July 2020).
19 There is no recorded instance of this practice in Thai history. As Ringis, 96, notes, “no Siamese monarch ever considered white elephants ‘burdensome’ nor gave them away, for according to ancient tradition, possession of one or many of these symbolized a king's virtue or barami.” For my analysis of the white elephant as fatal gift see Ross Bullen, “‘This Alarming Generosity’: White Elephants and the Logic of the Gift,” American Literature, 83, 4 (Dec. 2011), 747–73.
20 George B. Bacon, Siam, the Land of the White Elephant, as It Was and Is (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1873), 103–4.
21 For recent and critical accounts of Chang and Eng Bunker's influence in the United States see Cynthia Wu, Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012); Yunte Huang, Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (New York: Liveright, 2018); and Hsu, Sitting in Darkness.
22 Huang, Hsu, and Wu all discuss Chang and Eng Bunker in great detail, but none of these studies focus on Siam itself. For a critical study of the development of Siam as a modern nation-state, including its relationship with Western nations, see Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: The History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997); and Rachel V. Harrison and Peter A. Jackson, eds., The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010). For an overview of the relations between Siam/Thailand and the United States from a Thai perspective see Vimol Bhongbhibhat, Bruce Reynolds, and Sukhon Polpatpicharn, eds., The Eagle and the Elephant: Thai–American Relations since 1833, trans. Napa Bhongbhibhat (Bangkok: United Production, 1987).
23 David Ker, “Siam and the Elephants,” NYT, 16 March 1884, 5.
24 “Gen. Hale's Views,” Parsons Weekly Blade, 22 Oct. 1898, 2. Versions of this story were also reported in newspapers in Connecticut, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, and Oregon.
25 “How Many Elephants?”, New York World, 19 June 1898, 6.
26 Hsu, 2.
27 There are several book-length studies that examine the relationship between showmanship, authenticity, and race in Barnum's career. See, for example, Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001); James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2001); Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Linda Frost, Never One Nation: Freaks, Savages, and Whiteness in U.S. Popular Culture, 1850–1877 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). Barnum also had a long history of presenting and promoting racially ambiguous figures, perhaps most notably people with vitiligo who were billed as “Leopard Boys” or “Leopard Girls.” The implied joke – can a leopard change its spots? – only served to increase Barnum's audience's concerns about racial transformation. See Charles D. Martin, The White African American Body: A Cultural and Literary Exploration (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
28 For Barnum's claim about the cost of Toung Taloung, see Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 339. There is little reason to believe that Barnum actually paid this much. In his biography of Barnum, A. H. Saxon cites the more believable sum of $6,000. Saxon, P. T. Barnum, 304.
29 Both Barnum and Forepaugh advertised extensively in the Philadelphia Inquirer, while the North American offered coverage of the ongoing conflict that was more sympathetic to Forepaugh than were the New York media.
30 Randall S. Sumpter, “Sensation and the Century: How Four New York Dailies Covered the End of the Nineteenth Century,” American Journalism, 18, 3 (Summer 2001), 81–100, 82.
31 Because the NYT published the most comprehensive and detailed coverage of the white elephant war, and because many of the NYT's articles make reference to one another, for the sake of coherence and clarity I largely limit myself to this one paper. That said, it is important to keep in mind that the NYT's coverage was only one, albeit prominent, iteration of the much broader discourse on white elephants I discussed in the first section of this essay.
32 See “A Very Seasick Elephant,” NYT, 21 March 1884, 5; David Ker, “Holy or Holystoned? Something about the White Elephant from Siam,” NYT, 22 March 1884, 5; “White Elephants,” NYT, 22 March 1884, 4.
33 “A Very Seasick Elephant.” I suspect that the “gentleman” quoted here is Vincent because he also describes the color of white elephants as being like “the palm of a negro's hand.” Ibid., 5. The fact that Vincent would use the same phrase in his article in The Manhattan a few months later suggests that he would have been a likely source.
34 An article published in the NYT on, suspiciously enough, 1 April reports on this white elephant accreditation panel: “All the gentleman who had seen a sacred white elephant before pronounced him genuine. A number of them wrote and signed certificates of his genuineness.” See “Stamped as Genuine,” NYT, 1 April 1884, 8.
35 Ker, “Holy or Holystoned?”; “White Elephants.”
36 “A Whitewashed Elephant: Forepaugh's ‘Light of Asia’ a Fraud on the American People,” NYT, 11 April 1884, 2.
37 Adam Forepaugh, Too White for Barnum? (Buffalo: Press of The Courier Company, 1884), 3, original emphasis. A copy of this pamphlet is held as part of the McCaddon Theater Collection at Princeton University.
38 Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 338, original emphasis.
39 “An Interesting Experiment,” NYT, 21 April 1884, 4.
40 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1724.
41 For similar anxieties about “losing” whiteness in a nineteenth-century US context see Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Brigitte Fielder, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2020); and Hannah Lauren Murray, Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
42 Amato, Beastly Possessions, 179.
43 See, for example, Puck, 30 April 1884, 141; and Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine, 16, 1 (July 1884), 100.
44 Amato, Beastly Possessions, 168.
45 Ibid., 171.
46 See Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret,” in Capital, Volume I, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 163–77.
47 Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 107. For an analysis of animals and biopolitics in American literature see Colleen Glenney Boggs, Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
48 See Amato, Beastly Possessions; Nadine Attewell, Better Britons: Reproduction, Nation, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 97–99; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 207–31; and Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (New York and Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 24–62.
49 See Amato, Beastly Possessions, 171; Attewell, 98.
50 Lye, “The Afro-Asian Analogy,” 1733.
51 For an analysis of Dewey in US visual culture, including the Pears’ Soap advertisement, see David Brody, Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism & Imperialism in the Philippines (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), 113–39.
52 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Norton, 1990), 41.