‘Between Batman and P.T. Barnum’

The Second Greatest Show on Earth: Henry Bergh, the Protection of Animals, and the Evolution of the Modern Social Movement
by Darcy Ingram

Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025
$34.95 / 9780228025801

Reviewed by Sheldon Goldfarb

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This is a book about Henry Bergh.  Who, you say? The founder of the American SPCA.

Oh, you say, that sounds boring: dogs and cats and animal shelters. But no, no, no, he didn’t even like dogs (“savage beasts!”), and he wasn’t boring at all, more like a flamboyant cross between Batman and P.T. Barnum.

He was a showman first of all, seeking publicity, trolling his adversaries and shrugging off their disdain. Cartoonists loved to caricature him, with his top hat, dark suit, and cane marching around the streets of New York, grabbing the reins of a horsedrawn bus back in 1866, blocking traffic, forcing drivers to unload passengers who were putting too great a strain on the poor horse.

1866 was the year he founded the American SPCA, based on the model of the Royal SPCA in London. He was 53 years old and up until a few years before he had not been particularly interested in animals. Then while in St. Petersburg, Russia he saw a driver mistreating a horse and had a revelation: animals would be his life’s work.

But why?  That is the question Darcy Ingram, who teaches at Selkirk College in the Kootenays, seeks to answer. To do so he traces Bergh’s history, not so much to create a biography, but more as a sociological case study to determine why people join or even come to lead social movements. 

Is Henry Bergh typical, one wonders? But Henry Bergh is what we have here.  He came from a well-to-do background.  Ingram is at pains to pinpoint his class status: a patrician aristocrat type but American, son of a prosperous shipbuilder who disdained his father’s business (but not his money) and spent his young adulthood promenading across Europe, taking in shows, going to museums, mixing with celebrities and royalty, just having a good if grumpy time (he was always complaining about tailors and hotel rooms).

He wanted to be a playwright or a poet, but wasn’t successful as either.  He did take up some diplomatic posts (that’s why he was in Russia), but they were mostly sinecures.  He enjoyed the diplomatic dinner parties and networking, but it seems he felt something was missing.  This in fact is Ingram’s explanation (and others’ too): Henry Bergh was bored; he wanted something serious to do, something that would make a name for himself (Ingram’s explanation) and also let him feel he was doing his civic duty.

Ingram almost seems to be criticizing him for finding his niche and enjoying his work as a literally hands-on president of the American SPCA.  He will have none of the celebratory accounts of Henry Bergh being a selfless martyr for animals; no, he did it because he liked it.  But is that really so bad?

In any case, Bergh spent the next 22 years harassing bus drivers and carters, leading raids on dogfighting establishments, trying to stop the mistreatment of cows in dairy barns, even trying to stop pigeon hunts.  And he expressed concern over turtles.  Some felt he went too far.  Ingram thinks he had an underlying agenda that had nothing to do with animals: it was all about preserving social order against the threat of lower-class violence: all those cruel bus drivers and the roughs who organized animal fighting.

There may be something to that; Bergh seemed to be notably illiberal in other spheres beyond animals: wishing for the return of flogging, lamenting democracy and preferring autocracy and hierarchy.  Ingram almost makes out animal protection to be an upper-class movement meant to keep the lower orders in line.

And yet, and yet … even if Bergh’s initial focus was on cruelty perpetrated by the masses, somehow, perhaps because of the very logic of animal protection, he ended up taking on higher class opponents: the milk producers, the sportsmen who wanted to shoot pigeons, and the medical establishment.

Bergh ran afoul of the latter by trying to stop animal experimentation, dissection, vivisection.  He even arranged for an undercover investigation of a medical lab.  It sounds almost radical, like something PETA might do.  But this was a battle Bergh lost, as he lost the battle to stop pigeon shooting.  He was most successful with his fight to protect horses, perhaps because when he ventured into medical testing and pigeon shooting he was confronting people from a class who knew how to fight back.

Speaking of fighting back, the press, especially the cartoonists, had a field day attacking him, but he almost seemed to relish it.  One time showing off a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings, he lingered over the attacks, but when he came to a complimentary article, he said “[l]et’s pass over that one.”  No such thing as bad publicity, but he actually seemed to prefer bad publicity to good.  It gave him a chance to be dramatic, theatrical.  He’d wanted to make a name for himself in the theatre, but instead made animal rights into a theatre.

Though he finds his underlying attitudes too conservative and self-serving, Ingram is quite admiring of Bergh’s tactics.  He used the latest media developments, such as the interview, and was quick to grasp the importance of cartoons: they ridiculed him, but that was fine. Ridicule is great publicity, he said.

After his death, his successors toned things down.  Where Bergh emphasized theatrical policing, his successors focused on education and on building a professional, moderate organization. 

They of course hailed their late great founder, but one has to think Bergh would snort dismissively at their moderate ways – and he would perhaps be disappointed that his name has not lived on for the general public. 

But while he lived he was the creator of perhaps the second greatest animal show of his time, after P.T. Barnum’s circus, and though he had run-ins with Barnum over the latter’s treatment of his animals, Barnum respected him enough to donate money to a memorial for him; after all, as Ingram has it in his title, Bergh created the second greatest show on earth.

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Sheldon Goldfarb is the author of The Hundred-Year Trek: A History of Student Life at UBC (Heritage House, 2017), reviewed by Herbert Rosengarten. Sheldon’s latest book, Sherlockian Musings: Thoughts on the Sherlock Holmes Stories (London: MX Publishing, 2019), was reviewed by Patrick McDonagh. He has been the archivist for the UBC student society for over twenty years; he’s published a murder mystery and two studies of William Makepeace Thackeray. His mystery, Remember, Remember (Bristol: UKA Press), was nominated for an Arthur Ellis award. Originally from Montreal, Sheldon has a history degree from McGill University, a MA in English from the University of Manitoba, and two degrees from UBC: a PhD in English and a MA in archival studies. Here is the link to his segment in The British Columbia Review Interview Series. [Editor’s note: Sheldon has reviewed books by Septimus Brown, Rodney DeCroo, J.A. Weingarten (ed.), Catherine Lang, Reed Stirling, and Bill Arnott for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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