The McDougal Family Tree: A Portrait in Greatness (Part 4)

The late 1800s are regarded among historians to be the Golden Age of the Circus. By 1944 numerous factors, including the rise of the motion picture, the Great Depression and two World Wars had caused a steady decline of the American circus, but it had yet to be dealt its death blow by the arrival of television. It is in this climate that we find Bernard Stockton McDougal, owner of a struggling circus, tearing down his tent after a weekend of shows in Lawrence, Kansas. The Saturday afternoon show, his best-selling of the weekend, still only filled a mere 150 seats in his 800-person capacity tent. These were desperate times for Bernie McDougal. Overwhelmed by the cost of feeding dozens of exotic animals like elephants and camels, he had not paid most of the human performers in weeks. The entire sideshow walked off the job three weeks earlier, taking their freakish talents to a rival carnival. In Albuquerque he had been run out of town on a rail when a newspaper reporter revealed that his "zebras" were diseased horses stolen from a local glue factory.

As Bernard McDougal sat pondering his misfortune, a newspaper drifted across the empty fairgrounds and caught on the tent support rope nearest to McDougal. The headline caught his eye immediately and he snatched up the paper. That same weekend, in Hartford, Connecticut his largest competitor had a tragic fire! Hundreds killed! McDougal could not believe his luck. He knew immediately what he had to do. McDougal franticly called around, canceling his remaining Midwest dates, and set off by train for the East Coast.

Upon his arrival in Boston, Massachusetts, Bernie McDougal furiously promoted his weekend performance, paying particular attention to Boston's wealthiest neighborhoods. He promised the cream of Boston's high society that for the princely sum of five dollars they would be able to witness the spectacle from very special "Gold Circle" seating. However, when the morning of the performance dawned, these wealthy citizens found themselves seated not within the big top, but on a large set of covered bleachers two hundred yards away.

Meanwhile, inside the tent, a capacity crowd of widows, orphans and Irishmen, who had paid a nickel each, were enjoying the antics of various clowns, animals and acrobats. At least, until the cry of "fire" began to ring out from several different locations inside the tent. Bernard McDougal had spent the entire train ride East stewing over the free publicity that his competitor was receiving from newspapers across the country and grew determined not only to match him, but to finally one-up him.

Outside, the Gold Circle spectators watched, fascinated, as the horror unfolded. Afterwards, all agreed that although they found McDougal's use of the widows and orphans in the act to be a bit distasteful, they did not think that they would really miss the Irishmen all that much. They also agreed that Bernard McDougal had really thought of everything when planning the show. The Gold Circle bleachers were erected upwind, out of the smoke, and the spectators were fully protected from trampling by panicked crowds and dangerous flaming elephants by an enormous wrought-iron fence.

McDougal's success was short-lived of course, as he was immediately arrested for numerous counts of murder and arson. But to quote one stunned spectator "although Mr. Barnum's circus has ownership of the title, for today at least, it was B.S. McDougal's Circus that was truly the greatest show on earth."