The disaster that changed the circus

Stewart O'Nan thought of himself as a novelist. Living in Hartford, Conn., he took an interest in the Hartford circus fire of 1944, which took 167 lives. Why had nobody ever written a book about it? He began gathering information about it, intending to try to tempt some other writer into tackling such a book. Then, with some reluctance, he wrote it himself.

The result was The Circus Fire (2000), a work of history that reads like an edge-of-your-seat novel. O'Nan takes the reader minute-by-minute, and then day-by-day, through the fire and its aftermath, an aftermath that continued even into the 1990s.

Circus fires were not a rarity in those days, but it took the Hartford disaster to persuade anyone to take them seriously. In 1944 the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus was much more concerned about rain than fire. And so to waterproof tents the canvas was coated with a highly flammable compound made of paraffin and white gasoline. Even the circus seating was covered with layer upon layer of flammable paint.

The cause of the Hartford fire was never determined, although a known arsonist in Ohio was long considered the prime suspect. However the fire started, it spread quickly, giving the matinee audience, composed mostly of women and children, little time to exit.

Smoke, not flames, accounts for most fire fatalities, but not this time. The smoke quickly escaped through the top of the tent, but the burning canvas and wooden fixtures quickly set people on fire. Many burned to death, while others were trampled in the stampede to get out.

O'Nan gives us all the details about those who died and those who survived and about the confusion created when families tried to identify badly burned bodies. We read about the severe burns suffered and about how the fire affected survivors for decades afterward. We learn, too, about legal efforts to assign blame for the fire.

Circuses changed their practices after the Hartford fire, and communities took more seriously the passage of fire safety laws and their enforcement. Yet by the end of the 1940s, tent circuses were mostly a thing of the past. The Greatest Show on Earth moved into arenas and stadiums.

Stewart O'Nan returned to writing novels after this book, and he has written some excellent ones. But we can be thankful that he took a break to write this excellent work of nonfiction.