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This essay explores the historical significance of the Jack London Club, founded by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and dedicated to staging walkouts during amusements containing animal performers. I pay special attention to the circus, the nation’s most popular form of entertainment in 1918, the year the Club was founded. Earlier generations of circuses had experienced little conflict with SPCAs because most animal advocates were philosophically comfortable with captivity, training, and performance in a muscle powered world. In the 1910s, however, several historical forces converged to trigger an ethical reassessment of the circus: the nation’s move from animal power to motorization; the destruction of wilderness and concurrent rise of conservationism; the growing visibility of evolutionary theory; and the volatile climate of xenophobia, nativism, and racism during World War I, which represented animal trainers as ‘cruel’ Germans. Further, the increasingly elaborate scale of circus animal acts in the early twentieth century became a source of censure. Jack London Club members assumed that complex tricks were the product of hidden cruelties during training and they denounced such acts as implicitly cruel because they forced wild animals to live in society, rather than ‘wild’ nature, thus moving American animal welfare into a new and distinctly modern direction. [editor summary]