Book Review

Shrine Circus: A History Of the Mystic Shriners Yankee Circus in Egypt

by John H. McConnell

     There’s no business like show business, they say, and the circus business is no exception. If you are interested in the business side of the circus then John McConnell’s Shrine Circus: A History Of the Mystic Shriners Yankee Circus in Egypt is the book for you. It is written from a management angle so if you want to read about circus performers and circus performances, you probably should look for another book.

     Shrine Circus starts out by explaining who the Ancient Arabic Order Of the Nobles Of the Mystic Shrine, otherwise known as Shriners, are and how they began after the Civil War. They are that fraternal order of businessmen who wear red fezzes and drive tiny cars in parades. They formed as an appendage to the Freemasons but developed a reputation for being a bunch of drunks with a penchant for mischief and disorder. To counter their unsavory public image, they engaged in a campaign of philanthropy that involved running free hospitals for physically disabled children. Contrary to popular belief, the Shrine Circus was not started to raise funds for their charity but to pay the expenses necessary for financing the fledgling secret society. The chapter outlining the history of the Shriners also goes into a long, unnecessary sidetrack about the history of Freemasons and the Knights Templar. This section should have been left out of this book.

     The most interesting chapter gives the history of the circus from its start in ancient Rome to its modern origins in Europe, its spread to America and its rise to prominence in the 19^th century. The circus of P.T. Barnum merged with the rival Bailey circus and the two eventually merged with another rival run by the Ringling Brothers thereby forming the now famous, and now defunct, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Throughout the warmer months of the year, they were one of many circuses that traveled around America by rail; their performances were given in tents alongside carnivals on rural fairgrounds. During the winter months, the performers and carnies were unemployed. Enter the Shriners whose major contribution to circus history was starting the winter circus. The Shriner’s Moslem Temple in Detroit began holding a yearly production in an indoor arena, hiring off-season performers to do their shows. The idea was a hit and other Shrine Temples around the USA began doing the same.

     McConnell’s narrative is broken into several sections. Each era of the Shrine Circus timeline is demarcated by who produced the shows. Al Dobritch was the most innovative and spectacular producer; his career went downhill as he became more and more coarse in his behavior and ended up extorting money from strippers in Las Vegas before falling to his death from a hotel window. The other producers tended to be unimaginative and mediocre in comparison; businessmen tend to have a conservative outlook by nature and their lack of creativity did not do the Shriners much artistic or financial good in the long run.

     Accounts of the Shrine Circus from the performance point of view probably takes up less than half the book. The rest is all about management. There is more information about advertising, telemarketing, accounting, labor union disputes, and committee formation than you might care to imagine. Financial mismanagement and internal power squabbling have proven to be endemic drawbacks. Circus management teams have even had a long history of disagreements with the Shriners themselves and at times the story reads like a bunch of grand poobahs bickering over which grand poobah is the grandest of all grand poobahs. If you take all references to the Shriners and their circus out of this book, it would read like a generic tale of any ordinary corporation.

     John McConnell’s Shrine Circus is not a well-written book. It is loaded with bizarre spelling and grammatical errors; sentence structures are awkward and information is unnecessarily repetitive. There is no overall sense of how a book should be put together. The author could have invested in a better editor and proofreader. Although it is well-researched, it is written without any regard for what a reader interested in circuses might actually want to know. It appears to be the work of a retired businessman who finally got around to writing the book he had always dreamed of writing. McConnell probably thought of himself as a great writer the way Donald Trump thinks of himself as a Valentino; it would be no use in telling him he is wrong since he probably wouldn’t listen anyway.

     Overall, Shrine Circus is a mediocre history book that would have benefited from more awareness of what an audience might want. Maybe that is also a reflection of the Shrine Circus’s trajectory as well. The bits about the performers are interesting and it does present a good historical perspective. It simply does not have enough of that type of content to make it a great book. It is the aesthetic equivalent of watching the greatest circus in the world on a tiny black and white television screen mounted on a desk in an office cubicle while trying to do paperwork.

McConnell, John H. Shrine Circus: A History Of the Mystic Shriners Yankee Circus in Egypt. Astley& Ricketts, Detroit: 1998.