Game Stallions and Other “Horseface Minstrelsies” of the AmericanTurf

Susan Nance

Theatre Journal, Volume 65, Number 3, October 2013, pp. 355-372 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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Theatre Journal 65 (2013) 355–372 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Susan Nance is a historian of communication and live entertainment. She is an associate professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario and an affiliated faculty member of the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare. She is the author of How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935 (2009) and Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and Business in the American Circus (2013).

Game Stallions and Other “Horseface Minstrelsies” of the American Turf

Susan Nance

Although scholars of theatre and performance are beginning to turn their attention to grittier, consumer-oriented venues and mass entertainments employing living animals, we are still just beginning to understand human practices of collaboratively imagining animal characters to support those fictions. In fact, one’s ability to see animals as “per-formers” seeking to flatter a human spectator lies at the very root of modern experience. Especially over the course of the last two centuries, most people have come to relate to animals primarily in the role of consumer, not producer, which was traditionally the case for the vast bulk of people who engaged in rural living before mechanized farm-ing. And for generations, consumers have consistently shown a desire to be protected from knowledge of the suffering and loss of life that animals endure in service to con-sumer capitalism, a phenomenon that Keith Thomas has called the “human dilemma” of the industrial world.1 Consequently, the animals most citizens find at hand today are primarily present for therapeutic purposes and are perceived as knowing, willing participants in human cultures (for example, racehorses, zoo captives, pet-keeping stock, service animals), while the animals perceived to be unwilling participants and upon which people materially rely are kept hidden from them (industrially produced food animals and mass-harvested sea life, laboratory animals, fur- and leather-bearing stock). Human debates over the legitimate place in “our world” of species that defy these two categories (coyotes, rats, pigeons, sharks, and so on) are the exceptions that prove how pervasive the consumer’s interpretive paradigm has become.

To examine how consumer societies came to express and cope with this polarized “animalculture” by way of performance conventions employing animals who appear to endorse it, consider the character of the game racehorse.2 Among all the types of knowing equine performers that humans have invented, the racehorse is one of the earliest and most venerated. This creature emerged as a mediated entity in the early nineteenth century, although it had probably existed in live performance for centuries

1 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 242–303.

2 Una Chaudhuri, “(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance,” TDR: The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 10.

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before that. In the United States, this quickly became a vehicle for thinking about competitive individualism and how capitalism was transforming American life as the nation underwent a series of economic and technological revolutions made possible in large part by the exploitation of equine labor. One’s knowledge of, admiration for, and ability to identify the racehorse became key components of nineteenth-century subjectivities, especially white, masculine ones, linking citizens from California to New York to Kentucky, even through times of great political division and civil war.

Since the early days, the racehorse also functioned as an allegory celebrating the myth of the animals’ knowing consent to their use in human rituals that pondered modernity, so it was a comforting distraction from the “human dilemma.” The racehorse ideal was a pioneering American articulation of performing the sagacious animal, a speciesist though sentimental practice of portraying carefully chosen animals (especially horses, dogs, and elephants) as emotionally rich, intelligent, and inevitably sympathetic ser-vants to humans.3 This is a belief that has long challenged the presumed nature–culture divide and helped people come to terms with, or be in denial about, the degree to which consumers cause animal suffering. As Una Chaudhuri explains it, today, “the self-identification as animal lovers that we perform every day . . . is part of a paper-thin but rock-hard veneer on an animalculture of staggering violence and exploitation.”4 This modern contradiction was just forming in the early to mid-nineteenth-century United States, with its industrializing economy premised on the expansive use of human and nonhuman labor and bodies, including millions of workhorses. But this is only half the story: the elite racehorse, who shamed lesser horses with his breeding and vigor on the track, was also a template for racial and economic inequality in the nation more broadly. Animal figures have long served this purpose by “figuring prominently in the material foundations and the ideological underpinnings of human societies,” as Margo DeMello explains. So did early Americans invent modes of interspecific performance with purpose-bred, trained, tried, and celebrated individual horses that would serve “to perpetuate heirarchical human-human relationships such as racism, sexism and class privilege.”5

To understand how the consumer-mode of animal interpretation made human and interspecies hierarchies manifest and apparently natural and consensual, I examine the game racehorse as a collaborative performance of elite, individualistic “horseness.” Although some women participated as spectators and horse-owners, in the nineteenth century, it was primarily men who selectively bred, trained, tried, and traded horses, whose bodily appearance and ability to produce particular behaviors in the race context founded the traditions of the sport. The game racehorse and his various elaborations, such the “celebrated stallion,” “famous mare,” and the “trotter of indomitable persever-ance,” were equine characters created at the intersection of those purpose-bred horses and the colloquial “yard cultures” around horse racing, commercial print and graphic media promoting turf sports, and the wide community of participants who followed, gambled, and gossiped about racing.6 In this way, horses were (unknowingly) hon-

3 Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 37–38.

4 Chaudhuri, “(De)Facing the Animals,” 10.5 Margo DeMello, Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human–Animal Studies (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2012), 4, 6.6 On the concept of “yard cultures” and how to produce particular people and particular animals,

see Lynda Birke et al., “The Horse’s Tale: Narratives of Caring for/about Horses,” Society and Animals 18, no. 4 (2010): 331–47.

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est vehicles for naturalized performances of the “restored behaviors” of horse racing that supported the commercialization of the sport across the nation in the nineteenth century.7 The human acts of producing, racing, and evaluating horses were highly ritualized habits that referred back to aristocratic traditions in Britain and Arabia. Yet, being flexible enough in allowing individual men to decide how and when to participate or to devise their own theories on what made a particular horse a winner, men could find personal identity as individuals by their participation in the cultures of the racing community. Hence, horses were performers in two senses: first, in terms of producing competitive race results and/or winning offspring, which provided the element of “play” or chance and thus suspense to the rituals of breeding, racing, and betting on horses; and second, by their lineage and behavior, which brought to life the history of and values constituting racing as a sporting subculture in the United States, as well as the ideology of racial and class hierarchy that it articulated.

Boosters and fans of early racing founded traditions that portrayed a ritual of driving mounted, whipped, and spurred horses (spurring was common at the time) around a track or down a country road into a ritualized narrative about “courageous” equines who sought to compete in order to bestow honor and wealth upon their owners and admirers. That is, these Americans elaborated foundational live performance, image, and print conventions for what J. J. Clark has called “horseface minstrelsy.” In her analysis, it is a literary mode integral to the Western genre by which authors depicted the “good” Western horse as the obedient cowboy’s horse. Willing to go to any length to serve his owner, he was a stand-in for the harmless and pitied “Uncle Tom” slave characters that became very popular during that century in both books and nostalgic minstrel shows that endorsed white supremacy, but advocated for merciful treatment of blacks and an end to slavery.8

In the case of the game racehorse, the practices of horseface minstrelsy still saw people misconstrue or fabricate horse behavior that flattered human desires, but flipped the logic of subservience by materially and culturally producing ostensibly eager, elite horses who functioned as honorary whites. Like their wealthy owners, the racehorse was served by working-class and African American men who did the practical work of caring for and training elite horses or who wagered on the races. Racing traditions minstrelized horseness through living racehorses by way of their physical appearance and win or breeding record, a practice amplified in textual, graphic, and colloquial descriptions of racehorses and particular races that sought to engender consumer interest in the sport. All these forms allowed individuality only to the elites involved in racing—namely, well-to-do white men and winning horses—and invited all others to internalize the belief that such famous individuals had fairly earned public interest and sympathy—interest that represented both privileged culture and mass entertain-ment simultaneously.

Horse racing is part of what Brooks McNamara identified many years ago as the “invisible theatre” of the United States. He saw it in street parades and Mardi Gras, jazz

7 Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 35–37; Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 5.

8 J. J. Clark, “The Slave Whisperer Rides the Frontier: Horseface Minstrelsy in the Western,” in Ani-mals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, ed. Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, 159–81 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2009).

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funerals, Saint Patrick’s Day, and many other community events at which one could find performers and spectators. In additionally allowing that “it is possible for some or all of the performers to be nonhuman,” McNamara used the term “nonhuman” to indicate the use of “puppets, giant figures, automata or other mechanical devices . . . substituted for live performers.”9 But we might complete his thought here by noting that live nonhumans have often served in this role, although with more complexity than a puppet or robot. Along with cockfighting and coursing and hunting with dogs, colonial Americans held and watched horse races as a kind of community theatre in which wealthy men competed for status, honor, and money, with the spectacle entertain-ing whole communities, including recent immigrants, Native Americans, and slaves.

Both Thoroughbred flat racing and harness racing began before the American Revo-lution and, after the war-era ban on amusements and games—”especially all Horse Racing, and all Kinds of Gaming”—was lifted in 1789, the sport proceeded apace throughout the next century.10 In the late 1820s, the Lexington Association was one of the first organizations to promote racing stock, holding three races a year where people knew that “many of the most celebrated horses that have graced the America turf made their début.”11 Racing ebbed and flowed in the various sections of the nation depending on the state of the economy and periodic laws banning the sport in this county or that. Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, New Jersey, and New York were central, although Kentucky became especially famous for its bluegrass-fed horses and horse culture. Americans found records of races, gossip about particular horses, imports, acquisitions, and race rules, distances, and times run in stud books, sporting calendars, magazines, and racing papers.12 By end of the century, horse racing took place in or near most major American cities, supported by private racing clubs, public proprietary tracks, off-track betting parlors, and bookmakers in saloons.

There was a constant stream of puritanical complaint by pious Americans about all this, as well as legislation attempting to ban racing, or at least the lower-class and “professional” gambling associated with it. Additionally, many wealthy though less pious Americans judged their own wagering to be moral, but disliked the “disreputable odor” of plebian betting and drink at proprietary tracks.13 Certainly, there was a carnival atmosphere at many races, where one found vendors selling food, souvenirs, alcohol, and prostitution. Many hoped that elite racing would be exempted from the seedy and greedy reputation people ascribed to horse racing, and that “the excitement and pleasure [would be] principally derived from a genuine interest in the performances of favorite animals,” as one contemporary magazine chided.14 However, the elite and public venues of racing were actually two intermingled worlds and, in combination, were simply too profitable to resist. Accordingly, networks of organized-crime figures,

9 Brooks McNamara, “The Invisible Theatre: The Folk and Festival Tradition in America,” in Theatre Byways: Essays in Honor of Claude L. Shaver, ed. C. J. Stevens and Joseph Aurbach, 6–16 (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1978), quote on 6–8.

10 Foster Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation, 1607–1940 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1963), 65.

11 Hamilton Busby, “The Running Turf in America,” Harper’s Monthly 41, no. 242 (1870): 245.12 Rebecca Cassidy, Horse People: Thoroughbred Culture in Lexington and Newmarket (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2007), 2–19.13 John Elderkin, “The Turf and the Trotting Horse in America,” Atlantic Monthly 21, no. 12 (May

1868): 533.14 Ibid.

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city officials, and police protected proprietary horse tracks and the gambling associ-ated with them, all of which helping to support well-to-do racing and horse-trading.15

By the 1860s, gambling and rail travel had helped create a national market for horses and racing, transforming the sport from a colonial gentlemen’s hobby to the third most popular sport in the nation, after boxing and baseball.16 Along the way, many Americans worried that wealthy horse owners publicizing the competition for rich purses in the hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars—truly extraordinary sums during the 1830s or ’70s—encouraged more middling and poor men to eschew hard work in favor of days spent drinking and hoping for easy money by betting on the right horse. Of course, this was the essential belief at the root of American capitalism and its male subcultures.17 Specifically, since, with the right information and a bit of luck, any individual might make a huge fortune overnight, horse racing seemed an advertisement for elite privileges (wagering/spending thousands of dollars on horse racing), and for the myth that any (by implication, white) man could potentially out-smart his rivals and join the elite. Indeed, horse racing carried a “dual potential,” as Rebecca Cassidy has noted, “to preserve existing inequalities and to vividly express those inequalities in a socially accepted way, and to create upheaval through the un-predictable rewards of gambling.”18

The diversity of Americans whose work ethic was supposedly endangered by horse sports also staffed the bulk of the industry’s jobs as groomsmen, barn men, jockeys, horse trainers, and track managers. They often entered the industry as homeless boys, many of them African American, growing up in the trade and supplying the required nonequine labor. (Today, the same labor is often provided by undocumented workers.) Thus the elite reputation of horse racing as the “sport of kings” masked the degree to which it was a collaborative production by a cross-section of society: the wealthy in the clubhouse, the working class in the barn and stables, and a diverse array at the betting stalls. The portrayal of horses as game competitors was an integral and natural element of sporting culture. Any man might participate in the common conversation about horses in order to demonstrate his knowledge of and keep alive the etiquette, history, and politics of the sport. From the act of placing a bet or reading horse journals to noting the apparent excitability exhibited by horses just before a race, theories about what made a particular race horse successful fostered the competition and white male, elite, human supremacy by grounding these interpretations in the ostensible honesty of equine behavior.

The first horses employed to embody this sporting universe were ones of mixed Eu-ropean ancestry that, in time, became known as the Quarter Horse breed, a type found on countless farms and city roads and designated as such because of their speed over short distances. Wealthy horse aficionados began to import and breed Thoroughbred horses in earnest after the American Revolution, and during the first decades of the nineteenth century, the racing of Quarter Horses gradually declined. Thoroughbred

15 Ann Fabian, Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 12–58; Steven A. Riess, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime: Horse Racing, Politics, and Organized Crime in New York, 1865–1913 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011), 1–45.

16 Riess, The Sport of Kings, xi. 17 Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003), 25–95.18 Cassidy, Horse People, 14.

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horses became the vogue among Americans because they offered a seemingly more refined and exclusive animal than the workaday Quarter Horse. Thoroughbreds were descended from a number of celebrated Arabian stallions imported to Britain in the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries, who were bred by matching their de-scendents to local mares, thereby establishing an unbroken line back to those original Arabians. Contemporaneous breeding philosophy held that the traits of beauty, endur-ance, and speed came only from males, whose lineage and offspring were recorded in a national studbook. The fixation on the purity of “blooded” horses betrays how individuals experimented with modes of “artificial selection” that sought to perfect the breed and assumed that the form and lineage of a horse, including both males and females, were predictors of their performance as racers (genetics were not known until the twentieth century.)19 This fixation on stallions and their supposed purity of blood was also a way for men in particular to symbolically endorse the idea that masculine traits determined one’s success in the world.

The other common horse found on the track was the trotter, or pacing horse. Trotters were a purpose-bred horse derived from various European and British stock, combined with some Thoroughbred/Arabian animals. The trotter was a horse valued as a type rather than breed and evaluated according to his or her physical strength and endur-ance, although lineage became increasingly important later in the century.20 When not on the track, trotters often worked as wagon or sulky animals. Like Thoroughbreds, some trotters raced well into their teens before (hopefully) earning an honorable retire-ment in which they might be put out for stud or foaling, which could be very lucrative for their owners. By mid-century, a speculative business in trotters had developed in parallel with the Thoroughbred breeding industry, by which those farmers who could afford to bred trotters specifically for racing.21

The horses’ performances (meaning their style and speed of running) and the race as dramatic performance (meaning a staged competition for spectators) was, then, “a mix of human fiction and animal documentary.”22 Certainly, people minstrelized equines by fostering the “perform[ed] caricature” of the game racehorse. Selective breeding and training singled out individual horses who ran faster when whipped and spurred, persevered when fatigued or in pain, and obeyed the jockey and measured his energy as a way of taking direction. Such crafted creatures were perceived as loyal and ea-ger competitors. In images and print portrayals, this artistic license went further, the racehorse becoming a knowing creature who sought to glorify and enrich his “wise” owners and bettors.23 To be sure, this was a realistic and thus authoritative perfor-mance: horses were never portrayed speaking English or waving a hoof to the crowd after a big win. Still, in depicting racehorses’ equine persona, the media in particular portrayed horses as courageous individuals with unique histories and lineages who mirrored their elite owners by striving to triumph in competitions; they were proud

19 Margaret E. Derry, Horses in Society: A Story of Animal Breeding and Marketing Culture, 1800–1920 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 3–25.

20 Ibid., 33–36, 38.21 Elderkin, “The Turf and the Trotting Horse,” 519, 523.22 Shelley R. Scott, “The Racehorse as Protagonist: Agency, Independence, and Improvisation,” in

Animals and Agency: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, ed. Sarah E. McFarland and Ryan Hediger, 45–65 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2009), quote on 49.

23 Clark, “The Slave Whisperer Rides the Frontier,” 159.

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winners who looked men in the eye and invited them to enhance their own personas with these equine victories.

Even with its fixation on purity of blood (in the case of Thoroughbreds) and descent from famous horses (in the case of trotters), the horse-racing universe had a tension whereby a horse’s form and lineage were actually tested against its “performances”—the word used to describe its running style, stamina, and speed. Therefore racing events had three practical purposes: “a test of the breed, . . . a gambling medium, [and] a prolonged advertising campaign” for speculation in horses.24 Horse competitions also provided participants, bettors, and fans with a “narrative of conflict” in the ritual of the race in which horses became characters representing and flattering (or disappointing) the profit-minded, risk-taking men who cheered them on.25 Satirists would mine this rich tradition, of course, in order to create lampooning cartoons that likened a given political campaign to a horse race, depicting the candidates as befuddled jockeys on horseback, or even in the guise of a horse with a man’s head.26

Races were held on rural and urban roads and on turf and dirt oval tracks on saddle, sulky, or wagon. Contests could involve a group of horses or only two. Early races were four miles in length, later reduced to two miles, and started with the sounding of a drum. Often, they required multiple one- or two-mile heats wherein horses would be run, then rubbed down for a short time, then brought back and raced again. Horses could be required to run up to three times a day and many became injured on the second or third heat. Each horse was ridden by a jockey brandishing a whip and spurs to keep the pace going—whatever the jockey surmised was the best strategy at any given point. Frequently, horses suffered broken legs and “sprung” tendons; addition-ally, quite a few famed stallions and mares were retired from an onset of blindness and other then untreatable conditions. To be sure, equine veterinary medicine specific to high-performance animals was rudimentary back then, especially with respect to stress and compression injuries caused by intense training in juvenile horses, as well as by spurred and whipped running that compelled many horses to run at top speed regardless of pain or injury.

The jockey was the regulator and enforcer of a horse’s performance and served as an admission that many horses were not necessarily determined or savvy enough to want to “win.”27 Many horses behaved negatively in races—for example, by running in the wrong direction, attempting to bolt from the track, slowing down, or running to the outside of the track (from where it was difficult to win). Certainly, more than one man “lost his bet and his temper” while watching a race lost by a horse who could not be managed. “Smuggler behaving badly throughout,” the New York Clipper said of one trotter in an 1876 contest, “and Great Eastern won the heat and the race in 2:25, to the unmitigated disgust of the backers of the Boston horse [Smuggler].”28 Even though these kinds of reports were not the norm with respect to the game racehorse type, occasionally the racing papers reported such horse-initiated events, since the humili-

24 Cassidy, Horse People, 88.25 Scott, “The Racehorse as Protagonist,” 46. 26 My thanks to one of the reviewers for this example. The Library of Congress digital collection holds

a number of these kinds of cartoons. See, for example, www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/app/item/2003674577/ and www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/app/item/2008661446.

27 Scott, “The Racehorse as Protagonist,” 52–57.28 “Great Stallion Trotting Match,” New York Clipper, 28 October 1876.

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ation they caused only served to embellish the reputations of compliant horses, while training readers how to respond emotionally to and talk about horses’ wins and losses.

Ideally, the racehorse was regarded as follows: “The turfman judges a horse by his blood, his form, his deeds, and his produce [offspring].”29 So explained Harper’s Monthly writer Hamilton Busby in 1870, perhaps unknowingly citing characteristics that many prominent men might have applied to themselves as well, in the shared tradition that excluded African Americans and other working-class individuals from their ranks. Busby wrote for an audience of readers who may or may not have been familiar with the way equine personae were created. And it was true that the performance of the game racehorse required the basic components that Busby listed, which were compiled into a kind of horse biography tradition that venerated winning horses as unique individuals, sagacious and fierce beings whom men could admire and whose trials and victories were instructive. Such horses were routinely referred to as “celebrated,” “admired,” “noble,” or “famous” in sporting papers like Spirit of the Times, American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, New York Sporting Magazine, and New York Clip-per, as well as in numerous city newspapers and highbrow monthly magazines like Scribner’s, Harper’s, and Atlantic Monthly.

Among the many horses that Americans would celebrate during the nineteenth century, two primeval, separate equine personalities seemed representative of how desirable blood, form, deeds, and produce (offspring) came together to perfect the racehorse in a kind of restored behavior performance that referred back to all previous horses. First, there was the Godolphin Arabian, an early horse imported into Britain from which many Thoroughbreds were descended. Eighteenth-century racing legends of his exploits described him as a stallion who “rallies against adversity, . . . fights when necessary, . . . [and] shows no fear and no mercy,” as Cassidy says.30 Similarly, the famed trotter Messenger, who spawned many winning pacing horses, came across in the sporting press as a feisty stallion with a hunger for competition and life in America. “All accounts concur in representing Messenger as a horse of superb form and extraordinary power and spirit,” insisted a writer for Atlantic Monthly in 1868:

A groom who saw him taken off the ship which brought him to this country was accustomed to relate that, “the three other horses that accompanied him on a long voyage had become so reduced and weak that they had to be helped and supported down the gang-plank; but when it came to Messenger’s turn to land, he, with a loud neigh, charged down, with a negro on each side holding him back, and dashed off up the street on a stiff trot, carrying the negroes along, in spite of all their efforts to bring him to a stand-still.’31

For readers immersed in the racial hierarchy of the nation, in which African American men were relegated to all manner of service work, especially with animals, Messenger was here coded white, as his black attendants could barely contain his virile, individu-alistic spirit. If indeed Messenger behaved this way it was almost beside the point, since, as a horse with no understanding of the human cultures around him, he was in no way able to create a scene specifically in order to impress racing enthusiasts. Still, this kind of unique personification of horses became a common storytelling tactic and inspired Americans to produce numerous horse biographies claiming to provide

29 Busby, “The Running Turf in America,” 246 (emphasis in original).30 Cassidy, Horse People, 10.31 Elderkin, “The Turf and the Trotting Horse,” 513.

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“accurate” though flattering accounts of distinguished animals.32 Various “Memoir of . . .” and “Historical Notice of . . .” horse stories, as well as other promotional articles called “puffs” and simply titled with a horse’s name placed all of the races and purses won by the animal in the context of his or her exceptional character.

The game racehorse was no herd or prey animal, but rather an individual with ambi-tion and so had a unique name that set him or her apart from all the unnamed people who worked in the stables or at the racetracks to make his or her successes possible. Their owners helped bettors keep track of horses’ individualities with names that either conveyed their famous lineage or else personified them. The owners of trotters often conferred names that invoked success, such as Lady Victory, or played on patrio-tism—for instance, Independence. Alluding to the fact that the sport was a for-profit entertainment, other horses received wry names referring to the famous or notorious. Well-known trotters included Aaron Burr (after the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and later plotted against the Jefferson administration), Edwin Forrest (after the famed American actor who was, in part, the cause of the 1849 Astor Place Opera House riot in Manhattan), Stonewall Jackson (after the iconic Confederate general), and Commodore Vanderbilt (in honor/satire of industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt). These naming practices produced descriptions of horses that seem humorously incongruous now and perhaps also did at the time, since without any context they could describe humans; for example, “Kemble Jackson, another son of Andrew Jackson, was equally distinguished” in reference to an 1840s pacing horse and his sire.33 All of these acts of personification encouraged sporting men and women to recall horses’ personalities, idiosyncrasies, and family histories, which helped to engage people emotionally in the fiction that racehorses were eager competitors deserving of commemoration just as elite Americans were eager actors in their own celebrated biographies.

With an awareness that each race and the time spent haggling over stud fees was a reenactment of aristocratic British traditions, horsemen documented Thoroughbred lineages in particular in order to show their horses’ aristocratic descent, which many connected to the animals’ competitiveness. This notion of lineage was also important because participants worried that “animals known to have descended from ancestry of the highest and purist blood, have been confounded with the vulgar mass of their species,” as American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine noted in 1829 in reference to gossip surrounding ostensibly regal animals whose records were lost and were thus forced into hard labor like common workhorses.34 Accordingly, the Godolphin Arabian was reputed to have spent part of his youth in France employed in “the drudgery of drawing a cart in the streets.”35 Two generations later, Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty would depict the imagined misery of a cart horse by drawing on the slave narrative tradition, using horseface minstrelsy to tell the story from the horse’s ostensible point of view. Sewell did so in an attempt to foster empathy in readers for the more working-class horses that people knew, thus setting the stage for the horseface minstrelsy of the Western genre and showing how both modes of ventriloquizing horses—the white horse and black horse—would come to coexist and similarly serve to naturalize white authority and human supremacy in the United States.

32 “Historical Notice of the Godolphin Arabian,” American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine 1, no. 1 (1829): 4.

33 Elderkin, “The Turf and the Trotting Horse,” 519.34 “Introduction,” American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine 1, no. 1 (1829): 1.35 “Historical Notice of the Godolphin Arabian,” 5.

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On one level, the story of the Thoroughbred who was unrecognized created an un-derdog character with which many identified when they pondered the nature of social privilege. Such tales also implied that a fine horse was not always recognized by the untrained eye, but instead was produced, in part, by knowledge of his or her lineage, which to establish was the owner’s responsibility. Such ways of documenting horses separated Thoroughbreds and, in time, trotters as well from what one contemporary account called the “vast hordes of wild horses which roam over the plains of Texas, Mexico, and South America.” Of course, these particular horses would make the rodeo world proud in the twentieth century, but in the meantime, racing enthusiasts believed that from these anonymous and interchangeable, effectively nonwhite horses “not a single animal equal in size, speed, and enduring power to these English horses” had emerged.36

Admirers of sporting horses also wanted to see their bodies, hence painted and engraved equine portraiture made its way into sporting press as soon as the image-reproduction technology became available (fig. 1). Although newspaper and magazine editors often touted them as unvarnished representations—”the public has been in constant possession of the true portraiture of this famous horse, so remarkable and strik-ing in his form”—these depictions were actually interpretive representations of a given horse’s spirit, expressed through his or her physical form, stance, and countenance.37

Usually shown in profile to highlight the anatomy, these portraits did not show horses dozing in their stalls, rearing up or pulling away from humans, defecating, or displaying other behaviors that might indicate anything other than a calm and proud stance while being inspected. Some portraits depicted horses with undersized heads, emphasizing powerful rumps and shoulders that symbolized the way the animals were crafted to embody and produce speed and endurance. Some of these images were almost as unreal as the contemporaneous “Zip Coon” and other stereotyped representations of blacks, likewise employing living horses to naturalize human and white power by relegating ostensibly less-refined, commonplace animals to the side-lines of racing, the economy, and culture. By mid-century, consumers could purchase inexpensive reproductions of such illustrations for display in the home; consequently, equine portraiture spread beyond the clubs and parlors of the wealthy.

The game racehorse was also a product of his or her statistical win and earnings record and, later, the records of offspring (fig. 2). The right lineage plus “exceptional equine performances” by a horse vaulted him or her beyond personified individual to “celebrated,” “esteemed,” “distinguished,” or “famous”—that is, publicly known and admired in a quantified and commercial way. “At the head of the winning stallions, the immortal Lexington, although dead, still keeps his pride of place,” New York Clip-per informed readers in 1876, due to “the large amount of $21,690 being credited to him, from the earnings of Tom Ochitree, Sultana, Brother to Basset, Acrobat, Shylock, and Chesapeake,” all of whom were Lexington’s progeny.38 Atlantic Monthly estimated that the famed trotter Messenger “was held in such estimation . . . [that] those best acquainted with the subject do not hesitate to estimate his value to the country at one hundred millions of dollars.”39 As with baseball and hockey nowadays, detailed

36 Elderkin, “The Turf and Trotting Horse,” 514. 37 “Historical Notice of the Godolphin Arabian,” 4 (emphasis added).38 “Winning Horses and Owners at Jerome Park,” New York Clipper, 28 October 1876.39 Elderkin, “The Turf and the Trotting Horse,” 514.

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Figure 1. The Thoroughbred Chorister addressing the viewer, from New York Sporting Magazine (1833). (Source: Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.)

Figure 2. “The Celebrated Horse Dexter, the ‘King of the World’” portrayed as a game stallion by way of commercial statistics indicating his wins and earnings. Lithograph by John Cameron (1865).

(Source: Museum of the City of New York, Currier & Ives Collection, 57.300.84.)

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knowledge of horses’ performance statistics and money earned became a way to dem-onstrate one’s endorsement of the profit motive underlying horse racing. Even drinking songs and other popular musical forms celebrating the racing community captured the basic ideology of hitching male success to the exploits of winning horses, whether through personal ownership of them or simply gambling (fig. 3). The famed Stephen Foster song “Camptown Races” literally merged horseface and blackface minstrelsy, putting words in the mouths of (white) blackface performers who celebrated a day at the races in “coon” language, which directly compared the elite horse to his credulous fans of all colors and classes (fig. 4). The song endorsed white authority in defining the public identities of horses, while at the same time poking fun at the anonymous blacks and working-class people who lost money by following and wagering on rich men’s competitions.

Sportsmen often explained that horses won races because they possessed “courage,” which meant that a pacer or Thoroughbred was “a horse of great endurance, what we call bottom or game.”40 Courage or gameness was a euphemism for a horse’s act of continuing to run while being raced down the track, even when injured or frightened. Like the cowboy’s obedient horse during the twentieth century, a racehorse was a ra-cially white, sagacious being who shared human goals and was rewarded accordingly. “The spirit of the blood-horse is unconquerable. He will proudly struggle on through pain and distress, when less heroic animals would give up the contest,” one observer explained.41 One breathless account of a famous race cued readers in the same way by shaming horses (and, by extension, people) who did not perform with such individual-ism and sense of responsibility: “The mettlesome Shakespeare, becoming ungovernable, set furiously forward, and Flirtilla following close in the rear . . . by prodigious effort, passed her competitor near the goal . . . winning the heat by about the saddle skirts.” Flirtilla, as it happened, was “seriously injured” in that heat. Nonetheless, her owners started her for the second heat, yet no amount of whipping or belief in her courage could persuade Flirtilla to persevere. She failed to finish the second heat and never raced again, although people still imagined her as a “remarkable animal.”42

Reports and industry lore surrounding such self-sacrificing equines at once ac-knowledged and diminished the hazards of the sport to individual horses; they also provided a language of nostalgic regret that the racing community could use to explain injuries and accidents as part of the risk of the sport, which separated the strong from the weak (whether horse or human) and excluded women, nonwhites, and others that were deemed less fit. Considering the quotidian reality of living with work horses, who regularly bit and kicked, became spooked and ran away, or destroyed valuable wagons and other equipment, the self-sacrificing racehorse was an idealization of human–animal relations by which many Americans surely identified. Such uses of horseface minstrelsy subjugate the horses, since the imagined horses that people created seldom rejected human demands. In fact, the mediated proliferation of exaggerated and self-interested portrayals of Thoroughbreds and trotters during the nineteenth century ultimately forced horses to function as an “animate version of its own stereotype” as the public internalized the nature of the minstrelized racehorse as the normative sporting

40 “Leviathan,” New York Sporting Magazine 1, no. 8 (1833): 374 (emphasis in original).41 Busby, “The Running Turf in America,” 250. 42 “Further Notice of Virginian and His Get,” American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine 1, no. 12

(1830): 581–82.

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Figure 3. “Hurrah for the Soul Stirring Race,” a drinking song by which racing fans recall and reenact how racing tradition linked money and manhood to

the exploits of famous horses, from New York Sporting Magazine (1833). (Source: Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.)

“horseness.”43 These repeated portrayals by racing aficionados created “cultural pre-sets” against which all future racehorses have come to be measured, which, in turn, shaped the breeding, training, and selection of future animals.44

43 Clark, “The Slave Whisperer Rides the Frontier,” 159–81.44 Suzanne Keen, “Fast Track to Empathy: Anthropomorphism and Dehumanization in Graphic

Narratives,” SubStance 40, no. 1 (2011): 138.

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Figure 4. “Camptown Races” (here called “Racers”) song sheet (n.d.). Stephen Foster’s 1850 minstrel song lampooned the seediness of the racetrack and credulity of bettors and other anonymous,

plebian racing aficionados. (Source: American Song Sheets, American Singing Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

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Racing enthusiasts promoted the truest horseface minstrelsy when they gave heroic accounts of extraordinary equestrian performances that placed horses as the subjects of their sentences, whether textual or spoken, in order to elaborate motivations for them that mirrored human ideologies of white masculine competition in both the marketplace and politics. Such accounts seldom named or even mentioned the jockeys involved (except in steeplechase events), thus denying their role in order to exalt the horses they rode. Writers, and presumably speakers, always referred to race horses as “he” or “she” and never as “it.” New York Clipper said of one Michigan trotter, Goldsmith Maid, that “this heat she drew down close to the fence, and struck out for her work as much as to say, ‘I know what you want’ . . . beating her own time [by] ¾ of a second.”45 The sporting press so routinely employed language implying equine intentionality toward human goals, we must assume that some readers accepted these conventions for the interpretation of equine bodies and behaviors. Stories of races used phrases like “at her option” and “as she pleases” to describe horses as strategists who held back, went outside, or took the lead (fig. 5). Other stories declared horses’ motivations toward winning and earning human admiration, perhaps satirically, but still as an expected convention that helped readers to participate in the fiction of subservient horseness (in aspiring to please humans) that the races performed. For instance, American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine noted that one race was held so as “to afford Hickory John an opportunity of proving to the world that his friends have not overrated him.”46

Much of the storytelling about horse racing kept unnamed spectators, jockeys, and even some owners of horses out of the limelight, at times seemingly creating a stage upon which the horses raced as though no other participants were present. Indeed, the individuality of horses, with their names, lineages, and race histories, was central to their role as symbols of human struggles. Still, many of the most exciting accounts did include both spectators and riders in the narrative so as to suggest ways that one could elaborate one’s own identity by participating in the collective performance that constituted a big race and the ideology of competition and privilege implicit within it. “Gray Eagle, perhaps, was one of the finest-looking horses that ever charmed the eye. He was sixteen hands high, a beautiful gray, with flowing silver main and tail. He was sired by Woodpecker, and he by Bertrand. He was a game and fleet horse, and the idol of Kentuckians,” a Harper’s Monthly writer gushed in introducing one protagonist of a celebrated 1839 challenge. His opponent was a “game chestnut,” the Louisiana stallion Wagner. Sporting men and women were known to have been deeply invested in the race’s outcome, and “during spring and summer the chances [of each horse] in this stake had been widely canvassed, and the feeling between the partisans of each horse was most intense. For months, all over the South, the coming struggle was the topic of earnest discussion.”47 Here, the textual performance of the gossip surrounding the race was an invitation, a way of repeating accepted conventions about the racehorse as a protagonist in human contests that said, in effect, “these game racehorses want you to cheer them on!”

Finally, the horses raced in Louisville, where “the crowd was immense, and the excitement at fever point” over the “terrible contest”:

45 “Goldsmith Maid Eclipses Herself!” New York Clipper, 25 July 1874. 46 “Hickory John and Miss Medley,” American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine 7, no. 9 (1836): 425.47 Busby, “The Running Turf in America,” 245.

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By the most extraordinary exertions, Wagner got up neck and neck with the gallant gray, as they swung round the turn into the quarter stretch. The feelings of the assembled thou-sands were wrought up to a pitch absolutely painful. Silence the most profound reigned over that vast assembly as these noble animals sped on as if life and death called forth their utmost energies. Both jockeys had their whiphands at work, and at every stroke each spur, with a desperate stab, was buried to the rowel-head. . . . Both [horses] were out and doing their best.48

Wagner ultimately won the race. Of course, neither he nor Gray Eagle had any knowledge of the cultural work that would transform their run around a track, being whipped and spurred “to the rowel-head” by jockeys (which may have been a bit of hyperbole designed to cue readers to imagine suspense) before a crowd of fixated spectators, into racing legend that Americans would still be reading about a genera-tion later. Here was an invitation to the reader to relive or imagine that day in 1839 as almost too suspenseful to bear, improvising an emotion that may not have been so intense at the time, but rehearsed ways of seeing future races as emotionally powerful.

By this telling, the race was almost violently emotional—”desperate,” “terrible,” “painful,” “as if life and death called forth their utmost energies”—with men urging the brave animals on to triumph before a crowd riveted by suspense. Nineteenth-century elite culture tended to be emotionally reserved (with the exception of the raucous world of politics), yet here was one of the few occasions in which the wealthy appeared to manifest emotion both in public and in print. Only the horses and jockeys were in physical danger that day, and certainly the possibility of a disastrous collision or break-down haunted the sport, adding a very real aspect of risk and emotion to the ritual of races. Indeed, no two races could ever be completely alike. Therefore, although the

Figure 5. The horse as courageous competitor, here carrying white jockeys: “We Strive to Excel.” D. B. Tennant and Co. cigarette advertising card (n.d.). (Source: Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and

Tilden Foundations, New York City.)

48 Ibid.

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conventions of how to personify and interpret equines were established, rule changes and new horses would keep the performances fresh for a growing audience.

During the 1890s, due to increased mechanization that reduced the demand for horses of all kinds, over-breeding, and the Depression of 1893, there was a collapse in the Thoroughbred and Standardbred horse markets.49 Yet the industry would persevere by relying upon its traditions of equine performance and new technologies to reach out, decade after decade, to larger audiences of bettors, investors, and admirers. By then, mainstream newspapers like the New York Times carried news of notable animal victories, sales, injuries, and deaths, exposing the degree to which the stage was set for Americans to elevate future equine athletes and the idealized elite competition they represented to new levels of public visibility. Although the industry grew throughout the century, the racial and class implications of the conventions of performance in rac-ing did not change significantly for some time. The racing community adapted the old tradition of horseface minstrelsy to modern ways by, for instance, using photography, which conveyed equine gameness and personality in modes more compelling than the old paintings and lithographs. In these new images, horses bred for competitiveness on the track still addressed the viewer, with jockey and owner nearby, but with details that, like the cinematic experience, could evoke more emotion from those familiar with the storied traditions of admiring successful equines (fig. 6). A 1904 Chicago Daily News image shows a frowning African American rider and the distracted “horse man,” Bud May, with the photographer indicating where to crop them out of the final, published image in order to emphasize the countenance of the horse, Highball. This portrait, intended for mass audiences, indicates the degree to which horses would remain the celebrities of the industry. Minstrelized as game competitors, famed Thoroughbreds and trotters diverted attention from the continued problems of horse injury and death in the industry, while simultaneously working to normalize the human hierarchies they performed.

Twentieth-century artists would minimize the reality of African American participa-tion in the industry by portrayal of blacks in “lawn jockey” yard ornaments. With their exaggerated “Sambo” facial features, red jackets, and pose indicating a readiness to serve, these minstrelized idealizations of the African American horse rider and groom were at once sentimental and degrading. For the elite and those white Americans who admired them, they rehearsed the old idea that blackness was defined by service to whites, just as game racehorses—both the monetized and quantified ones and the imag-ined others—were sagacious animals whose performances on the track, in the stable, and in the racing papers were defined by service to humans. In time, codes of racial-ized performance changed and Americans did away with the lawn jockey and much of the blackface performance that had been established alongside horseface minstrelsy during the early nineteenth century. Instead, an increasingly diverse audience of emo-tionally invested fans, which were increasingly female and of various ages, investors, and bettors collaborated to use carefully crafted horse bodies and behavior to conjure up the game racehorse in ever more compelling and elaborate forms—”the little colt that could” or “tragic heroine,” for instance—by following the news of celebrity horses like Seabiscuit, Man o’War, Secretariat, Barbaro, and Zenyatta.50 Indeed, since racial and class minstrelsy have become unacceptable, the urge to perform hierarchies and

49 Derry, Horses in Society, 40.50 Scott, “The Racehorse as Protagonist,” 45–65.

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to define certain groups by their (ostensibly) willing service to more privileged and powerful individuals has meant that horseface and other modes of animal minstrelsy have become only more useful and necessary for American consumers.

Figure 6. Modern game racehorse as knowing individual. Portrait of Highball, with cropping, from the Chicago Daily News (1904). (Source: Chicago Daily News Negatives Collection, SDN-002447,

courtesy of the Chicago History Museum.)