83

t is tempting to take for granted that mature consumer societies are thusly marked by “ark-loads of animal figures—realistic and

fantastic—which parade a veritable carnival of significations” through our commercial culture, as Reuel Denny noted already a half century ago (1989, lv-lxix). Yet they could not function as such if it were not for the crucial training ground an elephant called Jumbo provided advertisers and consumers over a century ago. He was the primordial case, a Gilded Age signpost showing marketers and manufacturers how to use animal figures to tell emotive stories endorsing a modern consumer subjectivity, stories that could be essentialized and associated with any product. Although an individual with a particular history, over time Jumbo’s tale was boiled down until he became “an adjective” in both colloquial and commercial use (Harding 2000, 11). And, he asks us to think about how animal figures have guided consumers through one hundred and thirty years of economic change by persuading them to internalize a central premise of modern capitalism; namely that one can best achieve personal liberty through ever-expanding consumption and the ethic of “more.”

Everybody Needs a Story: Gi lded Age Jumbo In the beginning, there was a modest but enthusiastic consumer culture in North America, inhabited by citizens known to expect timely and fashionable things at the lowest possible price (Breen 2004, 131-32). Prominent among the products and services they patronized were itinerant displays of anonymous exotic or wild animals shown in barns and empty lots for a fee. For consumers, paying to see unusual animals spoke of a desire for worldly novelty and security through trade (Somkin 1967, 11-54; Weeks 1994, 485-95). The handbills and newspaper ads employed by showmen provided the first graphic commercial representations of the animals that most North Americans would see, including the young female pachyderm known famously as “The Elephant,” an educational and exotic visitor. That first elephant’s popularity with audiences inspired showmen to spend the next century working out how to use animals and their representations to sell. Phineas T. Barnum would become a crucial pioneer in this art of communicating to

I

JUMBO: A CAPITALIST CREATION STORY

Today, a profusion of non-human animals inhabit the world of advertising. Consumers see some of them in person and some as brand icons, team mascots, and other more-generic endorsers of consumption (sometimes their own consumption, like pig characters decorating BBQ restaurants or matronly cows on dairy product packaging) embellishing countless products, services and entertainments. This zoological cornucopia provides a naturalizing link to the non-human world, promising us that to absorb advertising messages and spend is to participate in an inevitable and emotionally authentic activity because, as the belief goes, animals don’t lie (Shukin 2009, 3-5). Text by Susan Nance

84

consumers with animals that promised compelling consumer experience. Barnum was a media genius who instructed his agents to embellish fences and newspaper columns with line drawings, steel plate images and textual depictions of real and invented animals, contextualized with intriguing stories that enticed viewers to visit in order to judge those beings for themselves. At the same time, he invited Americans to determine how, as residents of a largely unregulated capitalist economy, one might wisely evaluate advertising to find the frauds and truths they contained. Americans were willing partners with Barnum in valorizing this idea, hoping that each person would be free to form an opinion and exercise it through spending as a patriotic mode of self-improvement (Adams 1997, 147-63; Cook 2001, 73-126; Harris 1981, 74-75). When he got into the circus trade in the 1850’s, Barnum knew that audience fascination with the notion of abundance, as well as competition between companies, had driven show producers to develop a “MAMMOTH SHOW” (as the ads often read) marketing practice whereby companies strove to create “grandness” and “giantism” in their productions, presaging the broader marketing of excess in the late twentieth century. Bull elephants especially articulated the industry’s overall promotional aesthetic. Circuses were the only ventures that held living elephants at that point, since there would be no network of zoos in North America until the end of the century. With their vast bulk and unique shape, elephants on circus bills and in circus day parades functioned “as an advertisement” for the whole performance genre. “Any alert advertiser [knew] that the elephants were the thing to ‘bear down on hard’” in order to stay in the public eye, as circus press agent Charles Day recalled of the industry wisdom at the time (1995, 66, 69). Later that century, when ad men said “Bill it like a circus,” they referred specifically to the dramatic and colorful promotional techniques developed by early showmen to entertain and amaze just so (Laird 1998, 44). More broadly, the dominant advertising theory of the period advocated for liberal spending on messaging that presented consumers with the same information—usually plain-spoken details on what could be bought, where, and for what price—over a period of weeks or months. Barnum and other aggressive marketers in various trades would develop this practice by piquing audience interest with novel ads offering puzzles, observations on current events, compelling

graphics or grandiose claims, and repeating them until no person could possibly ignore them (quoted in Rowell 1870, 83). Circuses were the most prolific employers on the continent of grand, surreal and colorfully graphic lithographed advertising, which advance men liberally pasted over fences and buildings in cities and the tiniest towns. They easily flattered audiences as a privileged citizenry by exclaiming how much risk a given impresario had taken on to bring the most extraordinary animals to all ticket-payers, regardless of their station in life, illustrating those claims with bizarrely surreal and glamorous images of people and animals in every imaginable pose. Barnum was additionally notorious that century as a master of “Humbug” (today we might say hype). He was an early expert at issuing press releases, interviews to friendly journalists, letters to the editor, and various day-by-day bits of information that contextualized his advertising with a broader controversy or shared public story. Thus, when Barnum considered Jumbo at the London Zoo in 1881, he saw an elephant who might carry a dramatic individual story while serving as the perfect agent for the penultimate execution of mammoth marketing in history. The elephant was then a much-loved resident of the Zoo and a favorite of Queen Victoria herself. Born in 1861, in the French Sudan (Mali), he had resided for a short time after his capture at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris before arriving in London around age four, where he spent plenty of time accepting food from visitors and being driven by his trainer William Scott about the grounds, carrying a howdah filled with the children who paid for a ride. By the late 1870’s, Jumbo was maturing into an adult, and so was experiencing dangerous periods of irritability known as musth (central to elephantine reproduction and social organization in the wild). He had also begun to resist the dominance training used to subdue him by becoming unpredictable when Scott was not immediately present. Jumbo had a strange dual personality as far as the British public could see. As portrayed by citizens and the press, he was at once a friend to children and a dangerous wild animal surely bound to kill someone. Looking to relieve himself of the responsibility of the elephant, London Zoo Superintendent Abraham Bartlett agreed to sell Jumbo to Barnum, who would acquire the largest elephant in the world, as the advertising would insist, as the centerpiece for a show branded “Greatest Show on Earth Combined with the

85

Fig. 1. The iconic Jumbo broadside, 1882, Tibbals Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art , Saratosa, FL.

86

Great London Circus,” produced by his merger with the ventures of legendary circus impresarios James Hutchinson and James A. Bailey (Saxon 1995, 284). When news of the sale became public, the British press ignited a public controversy that would lay the groundwork for the elephant’s transformation from mildly famous zoo captive to provocative advertising symbol. In London, the newspapers and plenty of angry citizens, including children, called Barnum and all Americans “Philistines” and “slave-owners” who would make the noble Jumbo mere “chattel” held captive to entertain a “Yankee mob.” (The US had abolished slavery sixteen years earlier, but that cliché along with older suspicions of the America as a degenerate and rebellious nation had stuck) (Harding 2000, 43-45; Harris 1981, 257; Jolly 1976, 57-58; Rubin and Rubin 2005, 3-20). At first, the controversy had little resonance since North Americans could not closely follow the scandal in the London papers. So Barnum encouraged the local press to give over many column inches over to Jumbo’s arrival in New York on April 9, 1882. Thereafter his marketing team used broadsides and show programs to reconstruct media representations of the difficult evacuation of Jumbo from Britain found in newspapers and illustrated magazines like The Illustrated London News and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, much of which consisted of pseudo-events devised to lengthen and make more theatrical the shipping of the elephant. Barnum’s lithograph broadsides, show programs and newspaper spots certainly billed Jumbo’s journey “like a circus,” with a colorful and dramatic giantism (Figure 1). One iconic poster globalized “THE GIANT AFRICAN ELEPHANT JUMBO” as “The Biggest Elephant in the World” in tapered typeset that evoked the curvature of the earth, reminding viewers that Jumbo’s “Removal” had been “remonstrated against by the whole British nation and was accomplished in the face of seeming insurmountable objections” by Barnum and company. It showed a resistant Jumbo “FORCED INTO HIS BOX” and bracing himself against the outside of the crate. It also portrayed “JUMBO CHAINED,” wearing an angry expression and straining against his halter. Other promotional materials depicted Jumbo’s height and size with great exaggeration, as was Barnum’s frequent practice with animal attractions (Presbrey 1968, 215). One show program offered “All-Famous and Gigantic ‘JUMBO’ The Mighty Lord of all Beasts… The Largest Living Quadruped on Earth…[and] Towering Monster” with Jumbo drawn twice his

actual size, and a horse and carriage passing comfortably under his belly.[i] Jumbo’s advertising told viewers that he was an extraordinary and powerful individual reluctantly forced to the United States, a feat only Barnum could produce. That narrative drew its cultural sense from the century’s hunting narratives, a genre that was popular in book publishing, magazines and newspapers. Hunting narratives provided dramatic tales of western men who, with the aid of local servants, tracked, captured or killed wild animals in Asia and Africa. Their prey, including elephants, were routinely portrayed as fierce and noble adversaries of the hunter, beasts who fought valiantly against their pursuers, then died in dramatic fashion—all the better to display the honor and strength of the hunter (here Barnum as financial risk taker) brave enough to initiate the chase (Donald 2006, 50-68; Wylie 2008, 83-84). An editorialist in the influential Harper’s Weekly agreed that citizens, too, had “reasons for satisfaction” in Jumbo’s acquisition because he seemed the largest and perhaps the most robust captive African elephant left in a world in which the ivory trade was decimating wild elephant populations.[ii] Soon, he speculated, the American public might possess the last African bull elephant on earth! Barnum’s victory was a victory for the whole nation, the colloquial and promotional wisdom insisted. One Greatest Show on Earth broadside got this point across with an image of Jumbo towering over the preserved skeleton of a North American mastodon, a late eighteenth-century totem of national prestige that people remembered well.[iii] On both sides of the Atlantic, pundits noted frequent public fatigue in the face of such tactics, yet also noted that many Britons and North Americans seemed sincerely interested in Jumbo’s life. So did the naysayers hasten to participate in the Jumbo scandal by lampooning the deftness with which Barnum and his staff were making an international incident out of the sale of a captive animal (a transaction zoos and circuses performed regularly with no public notice). The lampooners probably only heightened Jumbo’s versatility as a “rhetorical animal” since they made cultural space for reticent observers to make their own interpretive use of Jumbo by complaining or taking ironic enjoyment from Jumbo as symbol of consumer credulity (Ritvo 1989, 5-6). Funny Folks, an illustrated humor tabloid supplement added to the British paper, Weekly Budget,[iv] stayed relevant with a cover (in its own way an advertisement for the

87

Fig. 2. Funny Folks, 1882. McCaddon Collection, Special Collections and Rare Books, Princeton Library, Princeton, NJ.

88

magazine’s contents and character) depicting Jumbo as a figurative and literal vehicle for Barnum’s marketing efforts (Figure 2). Drawn with circus handbills and broadsides glued to his skin, he was a caricature of Barnum’s entrepreneurial persona as an American media monarch. In a satirical Roman or British style, he rides Jumbo with paste-brush scepter in hand while wearing a stars and stripes suit and jaunty crown. Below him, a grumpy looking Jumbo passes a handbill celebrating his own captivity to a small girl. Plenty of people understood that Jumbo had become a living communication medium. He was a figurative billboard onto which, not only Barnum and the British and North American press, but also citizens—the customers of zoos, circuses and the media—were projecting their own needs and identities. Jumbo was then the most famous animal in the world and a turning point in the commercialization of the human habit of using animals “to think”—in this case about nature and national rivalries. And as Jumbo toured the US and Canada with Barnum’s company over the next three years, the public noise around the elephant came to be known as “Jumbo Mania.” Certainly, Jumbo’s arrival in New York in April of 1881 was a moment many saw as a sign of the American public’s right to have privileged access to whatever the world contained. If Barnum wrestled that “whatever” away from the British for his own profit, he did so equally on Americans’ behalf, many believed. In a widely republished telegram to the editor of the London Telegraph, Barnum insisted the elephant was a right owed to “Fifty-one millions American citizens [for whom] my 40 years’ invariable practice of exhibiting [the] best that money could procure makes Jumbo’s presence here imperative.”[v] Here—and this was crucial—Barnum’s bombastic claims of sparing no expense or effort to bring the most gigantic land animal on earth to the American public were not signs of fraud, but elements of an authentically American cultural event. Each citizen-consumer could speak his or her mind about Jumbo’s story and vicariously capture the mighty elephant. In effect, Barnum’s advertising told consumers: Expect more. You deserve it. Jumbo Mania was possible, in part, because the elephant’s ads constituted a radical departure from previous circus advertising for elephants, or any animal for that matter. Since the 1870’s, when it became possible to inexpensively produce detailed illustrations, advertisers had begun experimenting with ads featuring animal and child figures, especially for

products aimed at women (Laird 1998, 93). Spots for foods and medicines depicted anonymous animals as spirits of transformation representing the power of the product at hand. Some even linked human and non-human life in whimsical and ancient ways by offering amusing animals portrayed in human clothing or, particularly in the case of patent medicines like liniments, assuring viewers they could use the product on a horse’s body or their own (Lears 1994, 145). These promotional animal representations revealed an early industry understanding that advertising should engage the viewer with an open-ended interrogation of some common truth (for instance the complexity of citizens’ constructions of the non-human), the memory of which the customer could link to purchasing the product. Traditionally the circuses had advertised their elephants even more simply as naturalist’s curiosity or happy performer. Jumbo, however, was depicted as a complex individual experiencing a broad range of human-style emotions and personality traits: frustration, love, fear, stubbornness, sadness, anger and melancholy resignation. As much as it asked the viewer to pay to see him at the circus, Jumbo’s advertising also invited consumers to empathize with his feelings over his fate, while imagining themselves as his captors. It was that mediated representation of Jumbo as traveler that gave the elephant his real value. “Men and women are selfish,” Barnum had advised fellow entrepreneurs of why this was so. “We all prefer purchasing where we can get the most for our money,” he explained, knowing that in the case of his animal exhibitions he sold not just the chance to view an animal but an opportunity to participate in a story about the animal that reflected one’s own identity (quoted in Rowell 1870, 82). Barnum had pioneered the “exchange of story for value” in his earlier promotions of human performers as celebrities and freaks, but tread new territory when he extended it to the non-human Jumbo (Twitchell 2000, 25; see also Presbrey 1968, 219-22). And, in fact, it appears that the Greatest Show on Earth circus sold far more tickets than usual because of the fame Jumbo achieved in the US. Barnum boasted, in one of his biographies, that he earned several times over the reported $30,000 he invested in importing and maintaining the elephant (Barnum 1888, 333). Jumbo Mania continued unabated for three years. North Americans immediately began making colloquial use of the elephant’s title, for instance as a name for horses and household

89

pets. Consumers identified with Jumbo further because the elephant complimented contemporary technologies for the inexpensive reproduction of images, which were proving a boon to the work of persuasion by way of storytelling with characters (Laird 1998, 69, 93, 149-51). In the spirit of Barnum’s “Jumbo chained” vignette, a Boston thread manufacturer issued a color trade card advocating for the strength of their product, showing a fierce, red-eyed Jumbo being dragged through the streets of London to the ship that would send him to America “Because Drawn by Willamantic Thread!”[vi] Clark’s Spool Cotton company produced a series of ten trade cards showing: Jumbo arriving in America; with suitcase in trunk playing tourist; in a tuxedo at the Opera; in a bathing suit at the beach at Coney Island; in a bow tie, guzzling beer at the bar (here as a male overindulging at the saloon in reference to the reality of manly alcoholism

and media reports, probably accurate, that Jumbo liked alcohol)[vii] (Figure 3). A billiard ball company similarly presaged the abstraction of Jumbo as promotional ideal. They ignored the fact that Jumbo had broken off his tusks back in London to offer ivory “Jumbo Billiard and Pool Balls” to consumers in a “Jumbo Catalogue” sent by mail. Linking Jumbo’s notoriety to their the product they offered a simple, opaque profile elephant with the word “JUMBO” superimposed across the hide in white letters.[viii] Indeed, most companies appropriated Jumbo into scenarios divorced from the persona of P.T. Barnum or their even their own company profiles. That is, while many companies had been branding with the rags-to-riches story of their proprietors (which indeed P.T. Barnum did as an impresario and self-declared celebrity), others opted to connect their products to the viewer’s experience of the media blitz around the elephant’s transformation into American pet. The main purpose of Jumbo as celebrity was to empower and endorse an emotional and self-interested consumerist subjectivity beyond the context of circus advertising. And that act set the stage for all consumers to appropriate the power of Jumbo the bull elephant just as P. T. Barnum had, but with less effort and expense. Jumbo as the L iberty to Enjoy More Then Jumbo died, hit by a train in the small town of St. Thomas, Ontario. It was 1885. Barnum, Bailey and Hutchinson pressed on, exhibiting Jumbo’s skeleton and taxidermied skin for some years, then donating the former to the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the latter to Tufts College in Medford, Massachusetts. Yet, the idea of Jumbo had been such a great step forward in using animal figures to link spending to the consumer’s symbolic appropriation of the animal’s energy that it did not die. Jumbo first reappeared as “jumbo,” a promotional notion in the 1910’s and 1920’s in the world of music production, seen as a “craze of composers and concert-givers for long compositions and monster performances,” and other works featuring “long-drawn-out arias” and other gimmicks.[ix] Later the word became a term for the marketing of newspapers with sensational stories and “Jumbo editions,” and the drive to produce ever-taller skyscrapers.[x] Early twentieth-century jumboism—“the tendency to esteem art in proportion to its bulk” (as circuses similarly had in their mammoth marketing programs)—was a sign of gauche excess and imprudent faith in

Fig. 3. Clark’s O.N.T. Spool Cotton Jumbo trade card series by Buek and Lindner Lithograph, 1883, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

90

scale.[xi] The phenomenon showed how Barnum’s satire and celebration of American pretensions to greatness was so often repeated that it had become a cliché, now devoid of its original tongue-in-cheek roasting of the public’s fascination for “firsts” and “mosts.” Whether nervous or dismissive of the trend, critics noted that jumboism seemed a peculiarly American aesthetic, a code for lowbrow abundance.[xii] Fueled by the booming consumer culture many urban Americans were experiencing in those decades, it was also promoted by consumers’ groups and ad men determined to establish mass consumption as a basic element of national identity and social participation. In doing so, they were reinvigorating the old “politics of ‘more,’” introduced by trade unions in the 1890’s, as an alternative to radical economic reforms, to offer workers a bigger cut of the wealth they helped to produce (Currarino 2006, 17-36; McGovern 2006).

Meanwhile, advertisers turned to “scientific advertising” campaigns that assumed the emotional pliability of consumers and so associated products with experiences of satisfaction or the creation and display of personality (Marchand 1985, 68-69). In moving from the carnivalesque to realism in their art, ad men emphasized aspirational consumption of home appliances, automobiles, jewelry, clothing, and cosmetics. Anonymous elephants continued to appear in various kinds of advertising in those years, for instance as icons for India (pictured as a decorated Asian elephant carrying riders), or in cartoons, as symbols for the American Republican Party, and (if pink) for a state of intoxication. When the Great Depression hit, the contemporary ethos evoked “Fear and Hoarding,” as one recent interpretation put it, as consumers focused especially on food staples.[xiii] It was also the era of safari-style “tooth

Fig. 4. Fruit crate label, ca. 1933. Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives, London

91

and claw” movies and other cultural products that celebrated a forceful and independent manhood in order to reassure Canadians and Americans who saw the men in their lives buckling emotionally under the humiliation of chronic unemployment. Inviting vicarious participation by viewers, in safari films, wild animal wranglers like Frank Buck and Clyde Beatty dominated their animal subjects—tigers, lions, elephants and others—who were noble adversaries because they were equally powerful as their captors. (Stokes 2004, 138-54) Indeed, had it not been so for Barnum and his audience with Jumbo as well? Consequently, for parity products like food, the old aesthetic of abundance became newly important and jumboism as marketing theory for musicians and newspaper men jostled in those days with an archetypical African bull, a generic Jumbo of sorts. He appeared on cans and boxes to give “regenerative” meaning to oversized produce like “Jumbo Olives” (Lears 1994, 157-58). Strength Valencias oranges of California created a series of animal themed labels for their wooden crates featuring rhinos, lions, and others. The Strength-brand African elephant sniffed down his trunk at the viewer with his ears outstretched displaying his size and might (Figure 4). For consumers weary of restraint and uncertainty, this jumbo elephant was a sign of gigantism to be sure, yet not as hype or satire, but as relief. He was a comforting promise for the future and metaphor for citizens’ inner fortitude, mental and physical. (Indeed, the University of Alabama still uses an “angry” African bull elephant as promotional mascot for their sports teams.) Older forms would overlap with these new trends. The formal “Jumbo” still served as a nostalgic stock character of the circus arts, advertising the genre in films and Broadway shows set in circuses. And after the Cole Brothers Clyde Beatty Circus had the gumption to offer an elephant as “JUMBO 2nd – The Only African Elephant with Any Circus” in the 1930’s, there would be more than thirty zoo and circus elephants around the world given that name.[xiv] One 1948 Levi’s ad for working-class men combined jumbo as circus trope and metaphor by portraying two elephants giggling about a third, who vainly struggles to pull his leg free from a stake to which he is tethered with a pair of jeans: “Since they tied him up with those Levi’s – he never gets away,” one explains to the other.[xv] Still, post-War advertising practice expanded to include promotion by the selling of

lifestyles (enacted through specific products) such that jumboism proliferated to a broad array of products promising modernity, joy and liberty in unrestrained consumption, especially for the valuable adult female market segment (Leiss, Kline, Jhally and Botterill 2005, 190-98). The 1955 mail-order catalogue Housewares for Homemakers proposed that the Pearl-Wick Jumbo Shelf Hamper could make post-War laundry storage elegantly functional: “Super giantized hamper with handy built in shelf for cosmetics… Largest hamper ever made.” In the Miss America Pageant Official Yearbook for 1963, an ad for Toni Home Beauty Collection offered, “for the girl who wants just curves, not curls. Big, big jumbo size body curlers.”[xvi] Jumbo had come to mean “enjoy more – you deserve it”—more volume, more options, more convenience—as a sort of consumerist carpe diem. Jumbo as modern abstraction offered acquisitiveness without the taint of gluttony. It reified a corporate, government and popular consensus that North Americans would be defined by what Lizabeth Cohen has called “an economy of inexhaustible abundance,” that many consumers appear to have embraced wholeheartedly as a right they had earned (Cohen 2003, 10). Indeed, every agricultural fair and carnival offered “Jumbo Malts” and milkshakes for carefree summer eating in places of commercial leisure, and so employed jumbo as a food design element evoking relaxed celebration. It made sense for Jumbo to become so abstract. New streams of conceptual advertising were emerging just then to explain products, services, whole companies, and even political candidates with impressionistic and highly symbolic or metaphorical messaging. The Volkswagen Beetle “Think Small” ad miniaturized a Beetle in the upper left hand corner of a blank, white space in order to advertise the car by engaging its critics (resulting in “The most admired print ad of all time,” by one telling) (Tungate 2007, opposite 118). Such advertising asked consumers to do the mental work of interpreting and incorporating promotional communication into a persona evincing membership in subcultures defined by particular modes of consumption. Accordingly, in the context of growing public awareness of the abilities and complex mental lives of elephants publicized by media-savvy ethologists and behaviorists in those years, North Americans soon found advertising bearing trained elephants pictured attempting to crush luggage in order to demonstrate its durability or pictured

92

with home computers as a metaphor for memory [xvii] (Mitman 2006, 175-94). Perhaps the peak of innocent faith in jumbo as product design concept came in 1970 with the advent of commercial travel by the Boeing 747 (Figure 5). The “Jumbo Jet” incorporated the essence of a long-dead animal to express an ethos of “more” by its very form. It evoked a sense of wonder for the can-do-ism in American industrial production, linking consumer emotions and ideology in every flight (Kramer 2006, 156-59). Like the promotional stamp the United States Postal Service would issue in 1999 to celebrate the first commercial flight of the Boeing 747, the aircraft would advertise American power and affluence as it traveled the globe.

Jumbo: “Help Yourself to Happiness” Today, Jumbo seems, in many respects, a throwback to simpler times. In our contemporary “fifth frame” of promotional communication, much advertising refrains from telling consumers that products and services are tied to a particular lifestyle, social group or persona; instead offering that it can be a medium for the creation of one’s own meanings (Leiss, Kline, Jhally and Botterill 2005, 563-72). Yet, Jumbo remains more ideologically rigid. It is a tenacious classic that paradoxically speaks of an admiration for “more,” while promoting products and services directed at people for whom more is often less. To be sure, many uses of jumbo remain innocuous enough

Fig. 5. Consumer as astonished innocent. United States Postal Service, “Jumbo Jets,” 1999

93

(and thus all the more persuasive because seemingly free of ideology): jumbo paint tray, jumbo raisins, jumbo paper towels, jumbo frame (ethernet network), Jumbotron. This is particularly so with utilitarian products for which “more” is indeed a practical matter of convenience. Yet, as a term, jumbo has become a broadly applicable cloak for the marketing of overindulgence—the post-War consumerist carpe diem taken to the extreme. Some commentators have labeled the resulting phenomenon, “affluenza,” an affliction suffered by “The Overspent American,” strung out on credit and a facile belief in the cheapness of buying in bulk.[xviii] Recent uses of the jumbo idea bear troubling testament to that self-destructive streak in North American consumers. With the economic bubbles North Americans created at the end of the twentieth-century, there came robust modes of consumption and display to celebrate them. The conceptual jumbo became a marker (satirical for some, invigorating for others) of brands encouraging proud rejection of modesty and self-restraint, with food as a particular fixation: Jumbo 2 for 1 Pizza, jumbo hot dog, Super Size meal, Super Big Gulp, Meat’Normous Omelet Sandwich. Jumboism materialized as an entire genre of “all-you-can-eat” restaurants unique to the continent (the most unintentionally depressing slogan being attached to the Golden Corral chain: “Help Yourself to Happiness”). We see it in the branding of box stores and bulk retailers like Costco, Big Lots and the Direct Buy Club that promise the consumer economies of scale but actually burden them with the costs of transporting, storing and financing inventory that supermarkets and department stores once bankrolled. Those patterns were in turn facilitated by the public’s desire for increasingly large vehicles (remember the Hummer?) to carry warehouse shopping finds to spacious “monster houses,” all of it financed by “jumbo loans.” (Figure 6) Eagles, beavers, elk, bison, coyotes and other symbolic species aside, the African bull elephant—the Jumbo elephant—has been the iconic animal of North American capitalism. Unlike the fictionalized and essentialized animal figures that represent human feeling in advertising for cellular companies, zoos, foods, animated films and countless other products, services and experiences, jumbo advertises the overarching ideal by which consumption has constantly expanded. Although embraced sporadically across the population, the ethos of jumbo has been grounded in a simple but very old idea: if

some is good, more must be better; North Americans should have the most, and it will be easy. Since Jumbo’s day, images and stories extracted from events around his life seem to have had a mysterious power to communicate manifestly fraudulent claims with a sense of authenticity that have made them seem normative and comforting. The puzzle and power of jumbo as advertising trope is that this effect did not fade as the generations passed. Today he still naturalizes the most unsustainable consumer desires and habits. Notes [i] “The Great African Elephant Jumbo,” Strobridge Lithograph Co., 1882, Tibbals Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, retrieved May 2, 2011; http://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/4/title-asc?t:state:flow=9dc5b092-f73d-4076-ada6-c44123d3e916; “Barnum & London: 8 United Monster Shows,” 1883, C-131a, Circus Poster Collection, Princeton University Library, Princeton, NJ. [ii] “Jumbo,” Harper’s Weekly, April 1, 1882. [iii] “Barnum & London: Jumbo,” Strobridge Lithograph Co., 1882, Tibbals Digital Collection, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, retrieved May 2, 2011, http://emuseum.ringling.org/emuseum/view/objects/asitem/search$0040/1/title-asc?t:state:flow=04cd6684-1e6b-4674-8c76-74dfb893acc5. [iv] “History of the Collection – Funny Folks,” British Comics Collection, British Library, retrieved April 17, 2011, http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/findhelprestype/news/britcomics/. [v] “Barnum and His Elephant Jumba (sic.),” New York Times, February 24, 1882. [vi] The Willamantic trade card is reproduced in Deborah Walk, Jennifer Lemmer and Marcy Murray, “Colorful Circus Paper Traces the Spread of ‘Jumbomania’,” Ephemera Society Articles, retrieved March 21, 2011, http://www.ephemerasociety.org/articles.html. [vii] Clark’s O.N.T. Spool Cotton Jumbo trade card series by Buek and Lindner Lithograph, 1883, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, retrieved March 27, 2011, http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/19th_century_tcard/. The full series can be viewed at http://www.tradecards.com/articles/jumboBL/index.html. [viii] “Jumbo Billiard and Pool Balls,” Puck, June 27, 1883.

Fig. 6. Asian elephant as stand in for jumbo as suddenly precarious product design concept, 2010. Image courtesy of Diamond Funding Corporation.

94

[ix] “A Few Lines,” Review of Reviews 4 (1891): 289; Henry Theophilus Finck, Songs and Songwriters (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1900), 28. [x] “Journalism,” The Spectator 114 (June 12, 1915): 805. [xi] Finck, Songs and Songwriters, 19. [xii] “Jumbomania,” Littell’s Living Age 287 (1915): 187 [xiii] “An American Dream Timeline,” Vanity Fair, March 13, 2009, retrieved May 2, 2011, http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/03/an-american-dream-timeline.html. [xiv] http://www.elephant.se/database.php. [xv] “Levi’s,” Hoofs & Horns 43, no. 3 (September 1948): 21. [xvi] John Wanamaker Department Stores, Housewares for Homemakers (Philadelphia: Whipple & Kelley, 1955), 13; Official Yearbook of the Miss America Pageant, 1963, 31, Miss America Programs Collection. Both these sources reside in the Digital Archives of the Hagley Library and Museum, Greenville, DE, http://digital.hagley.org/. [xvii] For a sampling of such advertising see http://www.advertisingarchives.co.uk/. [xviii] At least five books by different authors bear the title Affluenza. Juliet Schor, The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999).

Bibl iography

Adams, Bluford. 1997. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making

of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Barnum, Phineas T. 1888. The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Buffalo,

NY: Courier Company.

Breen, T. H. 2004. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics

Shaped American Independence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cohen, Lizabeth. 2003. A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass

Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Vintage.

Cook, James W. 2001. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of

Barnum. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Currarino, Roseanne. 2006. “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the

Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America” in Journal of American History

Vol. 93, No. 1, 17-36

Day, Charles H. 1995. “The Elephant as an Advertisement,” Billboard, March

23, 1901 reprinted in Charles H. Day. Ink from a Circus Press Agent. San

Bernadino, CA: Borgo Press.

Denney, Reuel. 1989. The Astonishing Muse. 1957; repr. New Brunswick, NJ:

Transaction Publishers.

Donald, Diana. 2006. “Pangs Watched in Perpetuity: Sir Edwin Landseer’s

Pictures of Dying Deer and the Ethos of Victorian Sportsmanship,” in The Animal

Studies Group, ed., Killing Animals. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois

Press, 50-68.

Harding, Les. 2000. Elephant Story: Jumbo and P. T. Barnum Under the Big Top.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.

Harris, Neil. 1981. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Jolly, W. P. 1976. Jumbo. London: Constable.

Kramer, Cheryce. “Digital Beasts as Visual Esperanto: Getty Images and the

Colonization of Sight” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds. Thinking with

Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia

University Press, 137-72.

Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally and Jacqueline Botterill. 2005. Social

Communication in Advertising: Consumption in the Mediated Marketplace, 3

ed. New York: Routledge.

Laird, Pamela Walker. 1998. Advertising Progress: American Business and the

Rise of Consumer Marketing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lears, Jackson. 1994. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in

America. New York: Basic Books.

Marchand, Roland. 1985. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for

Modernity, 1920-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McGovern, Charles F. 2006. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship,

1890-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Mitman, Gregg. 2006. “Pachyderm Personalities: The Media of Science,

Politics and Conservation” in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman, eds. Thinking

with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism. New York: Columbia

University Press, 175-94.

Presbrey, Frank. 1968. The History and Development of Advertising. 1929; repr.

New York: Greenwood Press.

Ritvo, Harriet. The Animal Estate: The English and other Creatures in the

Victorian Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Rowell, George P. 1870. The Men Who Advertise: An Account of Successful

Advertisers, Together with Hints on the Method of Advertising. New York: Nelson

Chesman.

Rubin, Barry and Judith Colp Rubin. 2005. Hating America: A History. New York:

Oxford University Press.

Saxon, Arthur H. 1995. P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. 1989; repr. New

York: Columbia University Press.

Shukin, Nicole. 2009. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Somkin, Fred. 1967. Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of

American Freedom, 1815-1860. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Stokes, John. 2004. “‘Lion’s Griefs’: The Wild Animal Act as Theatre” in New

Theatre Quarterly Vol. 20, No. 2, 138-54

Twitchell, James B. 2000. Twenty Ads That Shook the World: The Century’s Most

Groundbreaking Advertising and How It Changed Us All. New York: Three Rivers

Press.

Tungate, Mark. 2007. Adland: A Global History of Advertising. London: Kogan

Page.

Weeks, William Earl. 1994. “American Nationalism, American Imperialism: An

Interpretation of United States Political Economy, 1789-1861” in Journal of the

Early Republic Vol. 14, No. 4, 485-95.

Wylie, Dan. 2008. Elephant. London: Reaktion.

Susan Nance is a historian of communication and live entertainment. She is Associate Professor at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario and affiliated faculty of the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2003 and has since published on the histories of parades, civic festivals and the business of tourism, as well as a book, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), documenting uses of Eastern personae in amateur and professional entertainment. Susan's most recent work, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and Business in the American Circus (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) documents the lives and labors of 19th-century circus elephants. She is currently working on the nature of animal celebrity as well as a book-length history of rodeo animals in North America.