Ronald B. Tobias discovered the story of Topsy the circus elephant while working as a producer for the Discovery Channel — and has been haunted by the sad tale since.
The History of the
Elephant in America
by Ronald B. Tobias
(Harper Perennial)
Topsy was marquee attraction to Coney Island’s Luna Park at the turn of the century. But her star power turned into notoriety in 1903, when, after being jabbed with a pitchfork, Topsy lashed out at her trainers.
Topsy was sentenced to death by electrocution. As 1,500 people watched, Topsy’s body was hit with a current of over 6,600 volts. She died almost instantly. Thomas Edison filmed the event, titling it “Electrocuting an Elephant” (Google it, but be warned, it’s not for the faint of heart).
Tobias knew he wanted to cover this story, so he pitched it to Discovery. “They told me it was too depressing,” Tobias tells The Post.
“But the story stayed with me for years,” he says. “And the more I looked into the history, the crazier it got and the more I believed there was a bigger story there.”
That bigger story became “Behemoth: The History of Elephants in America,” Tobias’ first book, which follows the role of elephants in American society beginning with the first elephant to land on American soil in 1796.
Tobias found that elephants “always find themselves in the middle of every social controversy that was going on in this country.”
The Political Beast
By the 19th century, elephants had earned their own catchphrase: to “see the elephants” was to have seen something incredible or memorable, something not to be missed.
By the start of the Civil War, newspapers published political cartoons depicting the Union as an elephant, showing the rise of popularity of the enormous animals. In one cartoon titled “Jeff.
Sees the Elephant,” an elephant, dressed in a topcoat and shoes, brandishing the Constitution and a sword represents the Union; while a donkey in dandy clothes donning a dapper monocle, representative of the Confederacy, stares apprehensively on. The political symbols stuck.
Editorial writers from the North began to boast of the South’s fear of “seeing the elephant,” believing that their threats of secession were bluster. Once the Confederates felt the elephant’s “kick, would go home perfectly satisfied.”
Once the war began in earnest, southern solders began to complain of having “seen the elephant” on the battlefield — which had become a very bad omen.
With all this good press linking elephants to the Union, Abraham Lincoln took on the elephant as his spirit animal. By his re-election campaign in 1864, trunks and tusks were used in his campaign materials and “the elephant is coming” became his slogan.
Republicans have been called elephants ever since.
The Capitalist Beast
Around that same time, P.T. Barnum and Hatch Bailey (of, later, Barnum & Bailey) began to include elephants as the cornerstones of their circus acts.
But no other elephant matched Jumbo’s star appeal. Captured as a newborn in the late 1860s, Jumbo was shipped to London, where he became an overnight celebrity and symbol of the British Empire. (Even Churchill, just a child then, rode him, according to Tobias.)
He was called the largest elephant “ever seen by mortal man,” but this was a stretch. He was hardly bigger than the average bull, writes Tobias. No matter — the people came running and tickets sold out fast.
Jumbo became a catchphrase, much like “supersized” today. There was the Jumbo Whistle, or the biggest steam engine train in America, Jumbo Nut brands and Jumbo soda sizes.
Jumbo “became the symbol of the American spirit as equated with its strength and size,” says Tobias. “The elephant fed into the idea of the young aggressive country that wanted to grow and control.”
In 1884, Brooklyn Bridge architects even employed Jumbo to prove to anxious New Yorkers that the newly built Brooklyn Bridge, with its modern suspension system, was safe enough to traverse. Jumbo, joined by 20 other elephants and 17 camels, walked the bridge, showing the public that technology and modernity are exciting, not scary.
Sadly, his story did not end happily. Jumbo, only 24 years old, was hit by a freight train in 1885. Never missing a marketing opportunity, Barnum claimed that Jumbo jumped in the way of the incoming train to save his trainer — another example of the fearless and giving spirit of new America.
Murderous Mary
In the post-Jumbo era (perhaps because of Jumbo’s outsized legacy), elephants were afforded American citizenship and could, according to Tobias, hold every right as a human except the right to own property.
In one case of animal cruelty, an elephant was asked to testify in a case against his abusive owner. The elephant took his oath by lifting a trunk and placing it on a Bible (it’s unclear what he added to the case).
But with all these rights came a new responsibility. Now these animals — most of whom had started their lives as wild creatures — were suddenly held responsible for their so-called “moral transgressions.” Many were “arrested, put in jail, hauled before a judge and sentenced to death,” writes Tobias.
One such elephant was Big Mary, a circus star who spent two decades as a docile lead performer at various circus shows. One newspaper reporter at the time commented that Big Mary made him “believe that animals really think.”
Her perceived facility for rational thought worked against her in 1916 during a parade through St. Paul, Va. There, Mary caught sight of a person holding some watermelon, her favorite food. When she veered off her path toward the fruit, a hostile trainer jabbed her with a bullhook. As she continued off her course, the trainer hit her again with the hook. The response was swift: Mary pummeled the trainer, squashing his head “like a melon,” writes Tobias.
The town decided that Mary had “conspired” to kill her handler. The magistrate agreed, convicted her of first-degree murder and sentenced her to death by hanging.
A crowd of 3,000 people looked on as Mary was chained by her neck and lifted up by a crane. She gasped for air and began to swing around in circles.Then the chain broke.
“Mary had split her pelvis and couldn’t get up. At first she was too dazed to feel her pain, but as oxygen returned to her lungs and her brain, she began to moan. It took 80 minutes for men to find another chain heavy enough to hang her. The second time, [they] hung Mary . . . she barely contested,” writes Tobias.
Free Billy
Murderous Mary showed Americans that elephants have the gift of reason — but it was only in the last part of the 20th century that researchers uncovered the full extent of elephants’ rich inner lives.
Thanks to animal behavior and cognition research, we know that some elephants can recognize themselves in mirrors (one example of the self-observing elephant is Happy, who still resides in the Bronx Zoo). Videos of elephants engaging in funeral rites have gone viral.
There’s even evidence that elephants experience emotions like jealousy, love and even post-traumatic stress disorder.
One example of an elephant’s inner complexity: Billy, who came to Los Angeles Zoo in 1989 at the age of 4. He lived happily for 17 years with his mate, Becky, until her early death.
Three years after her death, alone in the zoo, he meandered around a “barren half-acre as hard as concrete.” As a result, he started to incessantly bob his head. Zoo keepers told concerned visitors that Billy was merely “rapping to his iPod.”
It wasn’t long until animal-rights groups uncovered the real reasons behind Billy’s obsessive movements: a neurotic reaction to excessive boredom.
“In other words, Billy was self-medicating,” Tobias writes.
When news of Billy’s unhappy existence hit the news in 2009, celebrities like Halle Berry, Cher and Lily Tomlin joined forces to launch a worldwide free Billy campaign to raise funds to move him to a sanctuary.
They cited studies showing that only 2% of elephants in captivity live past the age of 50 (which is closer to their life expectancy in the wild). In captivity the life expectancy of an Asian elephant is 18.9 years, while an African elephant fares worse at 16.9 years.
Even an elephant who spends her life at a Burmese labor camp lives longer (on average 22.8 years) than one in a zoo.
Even with the celebrity endorsements, Billy still lives at the zoo, which expanded in 2010 and took on two new elephants. And while most zoos across the country have either closed or announced plans to phase out elephant exhibits (the Bronx Zoo is one), American zoos still plan to spend $200 million in construction updates for elephant exhibits in the coming decade.
Still, experts that spoke to The Post said they believe we are in the final chapter of the captive elephant in America history. Perhaps one day we will view zoos and circuses the way that we now view the treatment of Murderous Mary.
“I believe that people are going to look back and not believe that we ever kept wild animals the way that we do,” said Catherine Doyle, science director at PAWS animal sanctuary. “Twenty or 30 years from now, I think we will be saying, ‘Oh my god, that was primitive.’ ”