Dan Rice
In the mid-1800s Dan Rice was as celebrated a showman as Barnum, to whom he was often compared. Across a long career he was a clown, a blackface minstrel, a circus impresario of great note, a political orator and a presidential candidate. All sorts of legends and myths grew up around him, many of which Dan, like Barnum, propagated himself. That he invented pink lemonade and the peanut gallery, that he coined the term “on the bandwagon,” that he played cards with Louis Napoleon and was Abe Lincoln’s “court jester,” and many others. One story is still retailed today: that Dan Rice, with his sharp features, signature goatee, top hat and striped outfits, was the model for Thomas Nast’s depictions of Uncle Sam. And something that might sound like legend is actually true: that Dan Rice was a key influence on both Stephen Foster and the Ringling brothers.
Yet where Barnum’s name lived on – if only, in many cases, to be unfairly maligned – Rice’s was already fading when Maria Ward Brown self-published The Life of Dan Rice in 1901, a year after his death. Brown was a relative, to whom Rice had dictated the mostly fanciful stories in the book. Circus history buffs unquestioningly repeated the tall tales in Brown’s book through the twentieth century. Then in 2001 David Carlyon, a former Ringling clown with a Ph.D. in theater history, published his Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You Never Heard Of, trying to set the record as straight as a pile of myths and legends can be.
In his self-promotions Rice cast himself as a classic Horatio Alger hero who rose up against adversity to great success, and that part at least comes close to the truth. His mother, Elizabeth Crum, was a girl from the straitlaced Methodist camp on the Jersey shore later known as Ocean Grove. In 1821 she met Daniel McLaren at a dance in nearby Long Branch. She ran away with him to Manhattan, stopping for a quick wedding performed by a justice of the peace on the way. Though hasty, it was not a bad union for the girl. McLaren was studying law under Aaron Burr while helping his father run his upscale grocery near City Hall, where Burr and other of the city’s finer types shopped for quality wines and teas. Young Dan was born in the McLaren’s Mulberry Street home in January 1823, and might have gone on to a life of some privilege and comfort had not Elizabeth’s outraged father managed to find her after a long search. He dragged her and the child back to Jersey and had the marriage annulled. According to Brown, he also changed the boy’s surname to Rice, a Crum family name, to signify a total estrangement from the dastardly McLaren. Carlyon doubts it.
Two years later Elizabeth broke with her father again and returned to Manhattan, where she met and married Hugh Manahan, of the Manahan & Mills dairy near today’s Cooper Square, then still farmland. As the city spread up the island the dairy would move north ahead of it. Little Dan returned to Mulberry Street, to a house between Prince and Spring Streets. As he grew up he helped his stepfather deliver milk, learning how to ride and handle horses. Impromptu horse races up and down Third and Sixth Avenues were great, rowdy sport at the time, and apparently young Dan bounced on and off his share of wild rides. Meanwhile he spent a lot of time wandering the Bowery and Five Points. He was frequently one of the raucous boys in the pit at the Old Bowery, where he conceived his love of showmanship and spectacle.
Elizabeth died in childbirth in 1836, and Manahan quickly remarried. Dan didn’t like his stepmother. When he was thirteen he ran away from home and lit out for the frontier. He made his way up the Hudson to Albany, along the new Erie Canal west to Buffalo, then trekked along the shores of Lake Erie and down the Allegheny River to Pittsburgh. He met a lot of other vagabonds out on the road, heading west in search of better times than they’d known in the cities. Around the campfire Dan would entertain by singing “nigero” songs (as he spelled it) and dancing jigs he no doubt had learned on the docks and in the theaters back on the Lower East Side.
In Pittsburgh Dan found work as a stable boy and jockey. He befriended Morrison Foster, Stephen’s older brother, and the adolescent Stephen tagged along when they went to the races he’d later immortalize in a song. The minstrel songs Dan was fond of singing weren’t the first ones Stephen Foster heard. Early minstrelsy’s greatest hits like “Zip Coon” and “Coal Black Rose” had spread from the Bowery to the frontier by the time Dan appeared. But Stephen idolized his brother’s boisterous, worldly pal, and Dan exerted a strong influence on him. It’s not too big a stretch to say that had Stephen Foster not met Dan when they were youths, he might have become a composer only of pretty parlor ballads like “Jeanie With the Light Brown Hair,” and the world would never have known “Camptown Races” or “Oh! Susanna.” In some ways it’s Rice’s most significant and lasting contribution to American popular culture. Completing the circle, Foster would later live, and die, on the Bowery.
By the age of seventeen Dan was traveling around with his first of three wives and Sybil, the Learned Pig. Learned pig acts had been big in England and America for some time by then. Smarter than most domesticated animals, pigs easily learned their handlers’ secret cues so they could appear to tell time, do arithmetic, read minds. A British pig named Toby even wrote his memoirs. Many a learned human was fooled or at least entertained by learned pig acts, and when they were too obviously faked it was usually the fault of an inept handler, not the pig. A gregarious natural showoff, Rice was soon as much a draw as the pig.
He would spend most of the rest of his life on the road. By his early twenties he was touring constantly around the country and into Canada with various circuses. Traveling tent circuses were still a relatively new phenomenon in the 1840s. They were closer to the rowdy nights at the Old Bowery than to today’s family entertainment, drawing adult audiences with bawdy and slapstick humor, raucous songs and girls in tights riding horses bareback, the very thought of which was quite racy at the time. Just as at the Bowery, they played to sold-out crowds while the moral watchdogs at mainstream newspapers denounced the “obscene” goings-on of these “bacchanalian mountebanks.”
Circuses were also smaller than they’d become, and it helped for a performer to be versatile. Rice performed as a whiteface clown, a blackface minstrel who sang his own variations on Foster’s songs (Carlyon believes it’s now that Dan adopted the stage name Rice, after the great minstrel Thomas Dartmouth Rice), a trick rider, acrobat, strongman, and deliverer of comic monologues. These included minstrel-style stump speeches on modern scientific marvels like phreno-magnetism, and comic portrayals of current events, such as Zachary Taylor’s victories in the war with Mexico. Old Rough and Ready himself caught a show and went backstage to shake Rice’s hand; years later Rice would style himself Colonel Dan Rice, claiming that President Taylor had given him the rank for helping him get elected. It was, like much of Rice’s ballyhoo, pure fiction.
He also travestied the classics and Shakespeare. Unlike today, everyone at the time, from urbanites to rustics, had some familiarity with Shakespeare’s plays, and comic parodies of them were very popular. Rice lampooned the fancy-pants Hamlet of William Charles Macready, the British thespian whose feud with the American actor Edwin Forrest would lead to the Astor Place riot in 1849. Rice’s version of Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger which I see before me,/The handle toward my hand?” went:
Is that a beefsteak which I see before me,
The burnt side toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee…
I see thee still in form as palpable
As that I ate for breakfast this morning.
By 1848 he had the first of his own outfits, Dan Rice & Co.’s Metropolitan and Hippo-Dramatic Circus, and toured it everywhere. He was still a roisterer and prone to use his fists to settle arguments, which often landed him before a judge. He was arrested at least once in a suit charging him with adultery.
He was performing in New Orleans, one of his winter homes, when Barnum arrived with Jenny Lind during the soprano’s triumphant tour in 1851. In his stump speeches Rice poked fun at the Swedish Nightingale; Barnum was far too successful to give the upstart the benefit of a response. Rice would soon open his own New Orleans version of Barnum’s American Museum and promote it with Barnumesque brio, advertising Dan Rice’s Southern Museum as containing 50,000 artifacts, then 100,000, then a million. He later added Dan Rice’s Amphitheatre nearby.
Both would close in a few years, but Rice’s traveling circus was on the ascendant. In the 1850s he assembled Dan Rice’s Great Show. He hired the best acrobats, equestrians and clowns, including the Englishman William F. Wallett, who performed in cap and bells and billed himself as the Queen’s Jester after appearing once before Victoria and Albert. (Barnum and Rice weren’t the only humbugs in the show business by a long shot.) Among Rice’s amazing trained animals were the snow-white steed Excelsior, whose apparent feats of intellect exceeded those of any learned pig; Lalla Rookh, an elephant who could actually walk a tightrope; Pete and Barney, the Educated Mules; the Waltzing Camel; and Old Put, said to be the first rhinoceros shown to Americans. He toured up and down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the Great Lakes and Erie Canal, presenting a five-hour bill under a striped big top that could seat five thousand. Rice’s major competitor was a former partner, “Doc” Spalding, another canny showman. Rather than drag tents up and down the Mississippi, Spalding built the lavish Floating Palace, an amphitheater on the water, and simply towed it from one town to the next. Rice would later steal the idea.
In 1858 Rice brought the Great Show to Niblo’s Garden on Broadway near Prince Street, just a few blocks from where he was born (and not far from Barnum’s museum). By this point he was appearing less often in clown costume, presenting himself in his stump speeches more as a serious, or semi-serious, orator on social and political affairs. The increasingly violent argument over slavery, touchstone for many other regional and economic tensions, was tearing the country apart. Given his background – growing up on the Lower East Side, where anti-abolitionist sentiments ran hot; his years as a blackface minstrel; his adoption of the South as a second home – it’s no surprise that Rice sided with the Democrats in defending Southern tradition, opposing Lincoln’s Republicans and their abolitionism. When the war started, however, he supported the union.
The guardians of culture remained unamused by this new Dan Rice. Horace Greeley’s Republican and abolitionist Tribune, for instance, frequently denounced the clown and showman for having the temerity even to speak on affairs of state, let alone hold the wrong opinions. The paper loathed the folksy humor and slang in Rice’s speeches – and more gently chided Lincoln for the same lapses of taste in his. Other papers saw the same resemblance; one even called Rice “a second Lincoln.” Toward the end of his life, Rice would invent a long, close relationship with the martyred president, claiming to have visited him often in the White House to cheer him up in the darkest days of the Civil War. Brown’s Life of Dan Rice goes on about this friendship at some length. Evidently the two never met, and Lincoln, lover of pop culture though he was, never even saw Rice perform. Still, it became a central narrative of Rice’s mythology, reiterated to this day.
In 1864, Rice took his politics to the next level. From his winter quarters at the small Lake Erie town of Girard, Pennsylvania he ran as a Democrat for a seat in the state senate. He polled well, but lost. In 1866 he started a run for Congress, then withdrew. And late in 1867 he threw his top hat in the ring for the Democrat presidential nomination. Some people took him seriously, and some newspapers even supported him. He withdrew from a crowded field after a few months, and skeptics wrote it off as a publicity stunt.
In 1869, August Rüngeling’s sons caught Rice’s circus in the tiny town of McGregor, Iowa. In a way, Carlyon says, it was the beginning of the end of Dan Rice’s generation of circuses. The Ringling Brothers later said that seeing Rice’s show that day inspired them to go into circus themselves – another of Rice’s lasting effects on pop culture. In the 1880s they, along with Barnum and others, would revamp circus, touring spectacles that were much larger than anything Rice had ever pulled together, while cleaning circus up into (relatively) respectable family entertainment.
It was also in 1869 that the famed illustrator Thomas Nast first drew Uncle Sam in Harper’s Weekly. The idea of Uncle Sam had been around at least since the War of 1812, when it was a joking explanation for the U.S. stamped on military supplies. Various depictions of him had appeared in print before Nast drew the image we know today, later adapted and popularized by the aptly named James Montgomery Flagg in his recruitment posters during World War I. Rice for once never claimed to be the model, but many others have seen a striking resemblance. Carlyon notes a big hitch: Rice was a Democrat and Nast a staunch Republican, in an era when Democrats and Republicans despised each other at least as much as they do today. Nast’s Uncle Sam bears as close a resemblance to Abe Lincoln, a more likely model.
Unlike Barnum, who kept piling triumph on top of triumph until he drew his last breath in 1891, Rice seems to have been too much a roughneck from the antebellum world to adjust to the Victorian era with its rules about polite family entertainment. He struggled from the 1870s into the 1880s, touring with his own outfits of decreasing magnitude, then as a hired entertainer with others’ – including, briefly, Barnum’s. He went bankrupt, fought with the bottle, took the pledge, and gave up the circus business altogether. He went on lecture tours during his last few years in the public eye, discoursing seriously on the bible, the temperance movement, and of course the politics of the day. In the 1890s, a frail old man whose goatee had turned as snow white as Excelsior’s tail, he retired to live quietly with family in Long Branch, where he died in 1900.
As late as the 1930s an outfit calling themselves the Dan Rice Circus still toured. In their promotions they claimed to have been “established in 1852.” If it was ballyhoo it was nothing he wouldn’t have done, and at least it kept his name alive. More recently, one weekend every summer for the last couple of decades the town of Girard has hosted a Dan Rice Days festival.
by John Strausbaugh