Remembering the Man Who “Discovered the Adjective” — Tody Hamilton, the Octosyllabic Artist
Likely you have never heard of Richard F. “Tody” Hamilton, who died 100 years ago today, on August 16, 1916. And that would be one difference between you and your great-grandfather.
Hamilton, the longtime press agent for P.T. Barnum and Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth, was one of the most well-known men of his time. Because of his wild linguistic gymnastics — he once described the trapeze artists’ “turning, twisting, tossing, tilting, transposition in midair” and deemed their act “the most daring and desperate aerial duel with death ever ventured by mortal man” — he was nearly as famous as the circus itself. And back then, the circus was pretty famous, enough so to shut down entire towns upon its arrival.
Hamilton’s words appeared in newspaper articles, ads, and posters (or “placards,” as thy were known), and set the ballyhooing promotional tone not just for the circus, but for the advertising revolution that would sweep across America in the latter half of the 20th Century. Indeed, his style was so popular that the New York Sun reported in 1906 that “the outpourings of Mr. Hamilton’s muse have been more widely perused than any other literary efforts of the age.”
Hamilton was said to have cranked out two million words of promotional copy a year, and to have memorized more adjectives than any man alive — 10% of which he supposedly invented himself. He called C.M. Robinson, Champion Bareback Rider of the World, the “teetotal topmost tallest” man in the universe. He immortalized Jumbo, the “mastodonic marvel,” La Paloma, “the peerless pedestrian puma,” and a pachyderm whose “ebullitions of athletic elephantine power are sometimes stupendous….”
In one apparently spontaneous interview with the New York Times in 1903, Hamilton declared:
This, the greatest show on earth, is a most supremely satisfying, enobling [sic], gratifying, superb, spectacular affair, teeming with life and vivid color, inspiring admiration and abundantly complete with gorgeous sights and the truthfully illustrated art of athletics, the whole forming a blazing kaleidoscopic vision of animated and iridescent splendor that has astonished the crowned heads of Europe and the high officers of the Republic of France.
(The Times then noted sardonically that the stenographer ran out of ink in the fountain pen’s reservoir.)
Mercifully, William Safire had not yet been born when Hamilton declared: “To state a fact in ordinary language is to permit a doubt concerning the statement.”
To many people, Hamilton’s stylized adjectival creativity, hyperbole, and stunning use of alliteration were even more entertaining than the acrobats, trained animals and side-show acts of which he wrote. “Octosyllabic artist,” the Washington Times called him (1916). “Word-juggler,” said The Little Chronicle (1903). “Barnum’s cyclone press agent and descriptive epigrammist,” intoned London’s Daily Mail (1898). “America’s representative word-smith! A wild, whirling tornado of breathless adjectives!! An inexhaustible mine of glittering epithet!!!” The Grand Rapids Herald (1916) went even further: “He discovered the adjective.”
Along with men like John M. Burke of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and Moses P. Handy of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Hamilton was part of the first generation of press agents, the now-forgotten founding fathers of the marketing industry. They capitalized on the Gilded Age explosion in newspaper publishing (an average of two copies per capita by 1900), the increased disposable income available to spend on entertainment, and rising literacy rates to transform marketing into an art and a profession. Barnum himself — certainly the greatest marketing mind of the 19th Century — acknowledged that he owed more of his success to Tody than to any other man.
And almost all of it happened through the one tool that was available to them, the sharpest one society has ever known (albeit one that has now been rendered down to a toothless 140-character pen knife): the English language.
It is true that Tody Hamilton also earned a degree of notoriety — not to mention a huge amount of “ink” for the circus — with another innovation: he was one of the first publicists to manufacture news. In 1884, for example, he arranged to parade the circus animals over the year-old Brooklyn Bridge, led by none other than Jumbo the African Elephant, “This Miraculous Moving Mountain of Flesh, This Most Prodigious Towering Animate Wonder.” In 1899 he orchestrated the “Revolt of the Freaks,” a Gilded Age version of political correctness in which side-show characters including Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, the Skeleton Dude, the Armless Wonder and the Rubber-Skinned Man declared their distaste for the term “freaks” and voted to be known henceforth as “prodigies.” And nearly every year, just before the new season opened, Hamilton gathered reporters at Barnum & Bailey’s winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut to conduct experiments — one time, setting up a press luncheon inside the wild animal cage, and on other occasions allowing reporters to see what happened when polar bears were given whiskey or mice were introduced into the lions’ cage. To the 21st Century observer, who bathes in the unavoidable daily marketing goo, it all reeks of exploitation and publicity stunts; but in Tody Hamilton’s day, when people were accustomed to the dull news of officialdom, it was truly a sensation.
Still, it was Hamilton’s startlingly fresh use of the language and radical departure from the over-starched prose of the day that made him so famous. He announced the coming of the circus as “Marvelous Miracles of Monstrous Moment.” He described an act called Le Autobolide as “the thrilling dip of death, an absolutely unparalleled deed of daring, just as illustrated and costing nearly $2,000 a minute; the sensation of all sensations, which may be aptly termed a fearful frolic with fate.” Under his promotional leadership, the circus became the most popular form of entertainment in the country, so much so that the Arizona Republican could report in 1905 that “there is not a free born American west of the Rockies over ten years of age who has not heard of Barnum’s show.”
Not surprisingly, Hamilton’s work elicited many tributes and imitators.
Another circus press agent, Doc Waddell, said that “Every old time case and compositor, every modern linotype and operator, every printing press, business manager, editor and reporter, every newsboy of every alley and every street knew him, and gladly, willingly, enthusiastically did his bidding.”
Similarly, the humor magazine Puck in 1905 printed a parody song called The Circus Placard (As Sung by Tody Hamilton) which captured Tody’s adjectival artistry beautifully, reading in part:
Radiant, ravishing, lustrous, quotidian.
Fulgent, prodigious, colossal, bizarre.
Enchanting, astonishing, Afric, Numidian.
Shimmering, glimmering spectacular.Gargantuan, Gog and Magog, Brobdingnagian.
Magical, marvellous, mystical, Magian.
Only live specimen born in a cage ian.
Novel, eccentric, abnormal, unique.
Loop looping, death flouting, killed every week –Take of these adjectives all that are usable.
Set them in order so they’ll be perusable.
Print on pink paper, and paste by the yard.
And the happy result is a circus placard.
And when 400 of Hamilton’s friends threw him a big tribute dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1907, even the staid New York Times launched into Tody-isms in tribute to the “sanguine, salubrious, stalwart segregator of seductive, seemly, sentimental sentences, strung seriatim and structurally sincere.”
When Tody Hamilton died, other press agents and publicists were there to carry on his playful linguistic style. But eight months later, the country plunged into war and a more sanitized publicity patois quickly emerged under the auspices of the government’s first true press-agent-cum-censor, George Creel and his Committee on Public Information. Tody Hamilton — the “Advance Agent of Happiness,” according to a commemoration in the New York Sun — would be quickly forgotten. And the adjective would not be rediscovered until it was unearthed on Madison Avenue in the 1960s.
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Joe Dobrow is the author of Natural Prophets (Rodale Books, 2014) and a forthcoming history of the early publicity visionaries entitled Pioneers of Promotion.
