Dan Rice Totally Explained

Everything about Dan Rice totally explained

Dan Rice (January 23, 1823 – February 22, 1900), was an American entertainer of many talents, most famously as a clown, who was pre-eminent before the American Civil War. During the height of his career, Rice was more of a than Abraham Lincoln or Mark Twain. Coining the terms "One Horse Show" and "Greatest Show", he was a leading personality in the new American "pop culture", brought on by the technological changes of the Industrial Revolution and resultant mass culture. Rice became so popular he ran for President of the United States in 1868. Gaining fame and popularity he changed styles once again he starred in various parodies of works by William Shakespeare, including that of "Dan Rice's Version of Othello" and "Dan Rice's Multifarious Account of Shakespeare's Hamlet". He would perform these with various songs and dialects. "Rice wasn't simply funnier than other clowns; he was different, mingling jokes, solemn thoughts, civic observations, and songs." Expanding his horizons he went into producing his own shows and often had more than one tour going on at the same time. He wanted to move on from his frivolous clowning and reinvented himself into a gentleman. He started to take up politics and would often have Democratic undertones in his shows. He was then regarded as not only a multi-talented performer, but a smart and noble man who was to be looked up to. He won the affection of many newspapers and publicists including that of a then unknown Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Mark Twain paid him homage in his description of a circus in Huckleberry Finn, and it's likely a boyhood Twain actually saw Rice perform when his circus came to Hannibal for a show. His shows became more famous than any of the other shows touring at the time including that of rival, Phineas Taylor Barnum. During the 19th century, his name was synonymous with theater. He reinvented the theater into a vaudevillian style before there was vaudeville. He was very patriotic later influencing the likes of George M. Cohan. He was also one of the main models for "Uncle Sam".

Expressions

A number of popular expressions came into being around Dan Rice.

Rice campaigned for Zachary Taylor as president, inviting him to campaign on the circus bandwagon, whence the expression "to jump on the bandwagon".
Early in his career, Rice was down on his luck and only had one horse (in early circuses the core show was a horse show). His competitors mocked him, saying it was a "one horse show" as a derogatory. Rice was able to turn the expression around by putting on a good show, and it became famously attached to him for the rest of his life.
The rallying cry of "Hey, Rube!" - later transformed into a noun - originated in New Orleans in 1848 when a member of Rice's troupe was attacked by a mob and he yelled to his friend Reuben, "Hey, Rube!". The phrase is most commonly known today in the circus world as a "Hey, Rube" meaning "come help in this fight".
Decades before other circuses used the phrase, an Arkansas paper praised Rice's as "The Greatest Show on Earth."
The town of Girard, Pennsylvania, has an annual Dan Rice Days community event each summer.
Footnotes

References and further reading

The Life of Dan Rice

, by Maria Ward Brown, 1901. via Internet Archive (scanned book, illustrated)

Further Information

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Everything about Dan Rice totally explained

Expressions

Footnotes

References and further reading