“We are the only show that uses what we call House Flags,” he said as he stepped his way down the line. “A company called Betsy Ross in New Jersey makes them. It’s a nostalgia thing for us. They used to cost twenty-five dollars apiece, now they’re a hundred twenty-five dollars. At the end of the year we will pick out someone special and give them this season’s flags. Ironically, I’m the only one who doesn’t have a set. I want a new set, and I want to be buried with them.”

With the flags in place and the poles lifted into the air, the tent was ready to be raised. The outer poles were forced into place, creating a giant fishbowl, the outer lip high in the air and the middle hanging limply to the ground. Next the bail rings were slowly winched up the poles, carrying the center of the tent. With this penultimate stage under way, Johnny gave the word for the elephants to be brought in to push up the inner poles. No sooner had he given the order, however, than the first minor crisis of the year arose. Royce, the rookie manager, came rushing to Johnny’s side and informed him that all the outer ropes of the tent were two feet too short. Instantly, the childish thrill went out of Johnny’s eyes. His business demeanor returned in haste. He hiked up his trousers, ducked under the tent, and went to rescue his only child.

Feeling like a child myself, I savored the blush of this inaugural scene, delighted by the openness of the strangers around me and thrilled by the richness of this exotic world. This sense of excitement would often return. Indeed, one of the unexpected joys of joining the circus was the process—both formal, through books, and informal, through conversation—of learning about the central, almost unspoken role that the circus has played in the American imagination. In many ways, America and the circus were made for each other: both have European roots, eclectic ingredients, and the fulfillment of dreams at their central core. Most American writers—from Hawthorne to Hemingway to Emily Dickinson—have written about circuses, and probably the majority of Americans who ever lived have seen at least one in their lives. For sure, all Americans have felt their impact: words such as “jumbo” and “star,” expressions such as “hold your horses” and “get this show on the road,” and icons such as the white elephant and pink lemonade all began in the circus. Perhaps even more importantly, many of the great images in the collective memory of American children were painted in the circus—elephants, clowns, cotton candy, parades, and even if a child never saw one himself, tents.

Big tops have not always been part of the circus. The first American circus, organized by Scottish equestrian John Bill Ricketts, opened on April 3, 1793, at an outdoor amphitheater at Twelfth and Market Streets in Philadelphia. Within three weeks, the show, which presented acrobatics on horseback, clowning, and rope walking in a forty-two-foot circus ring, was seen by President Washington; four years later Washington actually sold the white charger he had ridden in the Revolutionary War to Ricketts. The circus had its first-ever sideshow attraction, not to mention a presidential seal of allure.

Building on Ricketts’s success, other promoters quickly realized the potential of taking their shows on the road. This need for mobility, along with the equally pressing need to cope with fluctuations in the weather, led Joshua Brown to erect the first American circus big top in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 22, 1825. The addition of canvas tents gave American circuses a flexibility their European indoor counterparts did not have, allowed them room to add traveling menageries and freak shows, and prompted them to invent the enduring line “rain or shine.” In no time, traveling circuses became the principal form of popular entertainment in America, with performers becoming more well known than presidents. In 1848, Dan Rice, the era’s most famed clown, persuaded his friend and Whig presidential nominee Zachary Taylor to ride with him in a ceremonial circus parade. When the townspeople saw the two together someone shouted, “Look, Dan Rice is on Zachary Taylor’s bandwagon,” and politics would be likened to a circus ever after.

The second great phase in American circuses began after the Civil War with P. T. Barnum, the Walt Disney of his time. Barnum, the prince of humbug—the art of careful exaggeration—had already wowed the country with a museum full of midgets, mammoths, and alleged African coneheads before opening his first circus in 1871 at age sixty. Ten years later he joined with his rival James Bailey to create the “Greatest Show on Earth.” Together Barnum and Bailey made two momentous changes: first, they stretched their circus to three rings to accommodate more seats; and second, they took their show off the wagon trail and put it on the railroad. The Gilded Age of the American Circus had begun. By the time the five Ringling Brothers bought out Barnum & Bailey in 1907, the new mega-show would span ninety railroad cars, employ 1,500 people, and seat 10,000 patrons. President Wilson visited the show near the end of his first term in 1916, took off his top hat, and tossed it into the center ring. Those in attendance took it as a sign that the as yet unannounced candidate would seek reelection: politicians now mimicked the circus in the business of show.

In 1956, John Ringling North, heir to the family business, heralded what he thought would be the third great phase in the American circus when he took his show out from under canvas and put it into buildings. The tented circus is a “thing of the past,” he declared publicly. BIG TOP BOWS OUT FOREVER, bemoaned Life magazine. THE BIG TOP FOLDS ITS TENTS FOR THE LAST TIME, echoed The New York Times. Mark Twain, who once wrote that he would rather have been a circus clown than a writer, would have loved the irony of this greatly exaggerated death. The circus big top not only wouldn’t die, but it would also live on thanks in large part to the work of people North himself had fired.

The year before closing down his big top because of constant delays in erecting the tent, John Ringling North fired his manager, Frank McClosky, for graft. Undaunted, McClosky and aide Walter Kernan took the money they had skimmed from Ringling and, along with racetrack owner Jerry Collins and attorney Jerome Calhoun, promptly purchased a tented circus from Clyde Beatty. Beatty, the most famous wild-animal trainer in history, had run away from Bainbridge, Ohio, in 1921 to become a cage boy on Howe’s Great London and Van Amburgh’s Trained Wild Animal Show. By the mid-1950s, he had headlined every major circus in America, performed with a record forty lions and tigers at one time, been on the cover of Time magazine, and achieved the status of a matinee film idol. McClosky and company merged Beatty’s show with the dormant title of Cole Bros., derived from the nineteenth century’s first circus millionaire, W. W. Cole, and took the show on the road in 1957 with thirty-five trucks and the reigning “world’s largest big top.”

In 1981 the show was still on the road, though much deteriorated, and surviving owner Jerry Collins decided to “donate” the circus to Florida State University for a $2.5 million tax write-off. No sooner had he signed the transfer than the title to the circus was shuffled around a large conference table in Tallahassee and purchased by Pugh and Holwadel. Burdened by debts, the new owners raised $200,000 to take out the show in 1982, but managed only to break even their first year. That winter the show sold all nonessential equipment—scrap metal, spare parts, even palm trees—to raise enough money to “leave the barn” again. The following year the show made money and the rebirth had begun.

Ironically, the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus thrived in the 1980s and early 1990s by going against prevailing circus custom. For two hundred years circuses had made their reputations by being “modern”: they exhibited the “first evidence” of Darwin’s theory of evolution; they demonstrated the lightbulb before Edison had made it popular; they even presented motion pictures before theaters were widespread. Now, at the end of the twentieth century, when computers and video games held the monopoly on modern, the circus survived by presenting itself as the embodiment of old-fashioned. Come and see the real circus, where the performers are real, where the mud is thick, and where if you come at the crack of dawn you can still see the elephants raise the big top in the part of the circus that promoters proudly call the Greatest Free Show on Earth.