The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 8, Number 3, Spring 2020 | Page 28

Reconnecting America: P.T. Barnum
the national market and pushed capital
into the west. 63 Both the Trans-Siberian
and Canadian Pacific railways were
longer than the Pacific Railroad, but
Americans created a transcontinental
line first. 64 Both the modern American
circus and the Transcontinental Railroad
were created by men whose grandiose
expectations and goals spanned
decades and eventually brought together
and helped define the new American
culture in the nineteenth century.
The Transcontinental Railroad had
been talked about and promoted for
three decades, and the American people
wanted it because it was necessary
to reunify the nation. 65 The American
people may not have specifically asked
for Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth,
but it is clear they craved entertainment
and diversions. They wanted to be
awed and wanted something uniquely
American. The modern circus, like the
rest of the burgeoning popular culture
industry in the Gilded Age, reflected
the country’s industrial move toward
“efficiency, organization, incorporation,
discipline, and punctuality.” 66 It reflected
all this while also “pitting excess and
escapism against discipline, fun against
work ... pleasureful abandon against
restraint, and unfamiliar, alternative
worlds against the traditional and the
respectable.” 67 Both Barnum’s circus
and the Transcontinental Railroad became
worlds of clocks and times that
infiltrated and influenced everyday life.
Those who lived through the last
half of the nineteenth century in America
are often seen as those who lived
through the country’s greatest change. 68
The decades after the Civil War saw
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