Medicine Show, Huntingdon, Tennessee (October 1935)

What a medicine show was

The traveling medicine show was a major form of American popular entertainment from about 1870 until the First World War. A troupe arrived in town, often announced by a parade, and performed for free or for very little from a wagon or a street stand. According to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, "Entertainment composed two-thirds of a two hour show"; the rest was the sales pitch, delivered by a self-styled doctor selling tonics and liniments that were usually harmless mixtures of herbs, alcohol and sugar. Shows played either from a wagon, the "high pitch," or from a portable stand on the street, the "low pitch." Musicians, jugglers, comedians and minstrel performers made up the bill, and some shows used blackface comedy. Caricature was built into the business in other ways too: the well-known Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company hired Native American performers, often leased through Indian agents on reservations.

The automobile, the movies and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 pushed the form into decline by about 1920, though the form sputtered on into the 1950s and, according to the same encyclopedia, the last show left the road in 1964. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, passed three years after Shahn's visit, added harsher penalties for fake medicines. By 1935, when Shahn saw this one, it was already a holdover from an earlier America.

Shahn's memory of the day

Nearly thirty years later Shahn still remembered it. He told the interviewer Richard Doud in 1964 that he had made a series of photographs on a Saturday afternoon in a small town in Tennessee of a medicine man who worked with a ventriloquist's dummy and a Black assistant. What struck him most was how far back in time the scene seemed: "I don't think there were ten cars in the square, they were all mule drawn carts that had come there." And then: "This was 1935; it was incredible you see." The Library of Congress caption card names the town as Huntingdon and dates the negative October 1935.

What the photograph shows

The frame is tightly composed. In the foreground sits the ventriloquist's figure in a striped jacket and battered cap, its carved face painted with the exaggerated features of minstrel caricature. Just behind it a Black man in a jacket and cap sits looking straight toward the camera; his mouth is outlined in pale makeup in the minstrel style. Cardboard boxes and a small tin sit on a table beside him, a brick wall closes off the background, and the legs and coats of onlookers stand at the top edge of the picture.

The typed caption on the original mounted print, visible in one of the Library of Congress scans, calls the picture "A medicine show puppet." The caption does not name the man, and it is not clear from the records whether he is the medicine man Shahn remembered or his assistant.

Reading the picture today

The photograph can be uncomfortable to look at, and that is part of its value as a document. Minstrel conventions, in which Black people were mocked through painted faces and exaggerated features, were part of the medicine-show tradition, and here a Black performer works inside that tradition to earn a living. Shahn puts the man's face and the dummy's face next to each other and at nearly the same height, so that the viewer has to compare the living person with the caricature. The performer's direct, unsmiling look at the lens is the most striking thing in the frame. Shahn usually worked with an angle finder on his Leica so that people would not realize they were being photographed; here, whether or not the man saw the lens, he meets the camera's gaze.

Shahn's own words about the scene use the vocabulary of his time; this page paraphrases them rather than repeating the period term.

Versions and which one this archive holds

This archive holds the Library of Congress record for Medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee (item 2017730590), negative number LC-USF33-006167-M4.

Shahn made more than one exposure that afternoon. Harvard Art Museums, whose Fogg Museum holds more than 5,000 of Shahn's photographs given by his widow, Bernarda Bryson Shahn, catalogues prints titled Untitled (medicine show, Huntingdon, Tennessee), such as P1970.1411, dated October 1935. This archive holds only the one frame described here.