P. T. Barnum

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Phineas Taylor Barnum (July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American showman who is best remembered for his entertaining hoaxes and for founding the circus that eventually became the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Barnum never flinched from his stated goal "to put money in his own coffers." He was a businessman above all else, his profession was pure entertainment, and he was perhaps the first "show business" millionaire. He never said "There's a sucker born every minute" as is famously ascribed, but his rebuttal to his critics was often "I am a showman by profession...and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me."^[1] Although famous for his brazen self-promotion and blatant puffery, he understood his times and profited from them brilliantly.

Contents 1 Life 2 Death 3 Author and debunker 4 Politician and reformer 5 Publications 6 See also 7 References 8 Further reading 9 External links

[edit] Life

Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut, the son of inn-keeper, tailor, and store-keeper Philo Barnum (1778-1826) and second wife Irene Taylor, who had ten children altogether. He was the third great grandson of Thomas Barnum (1625-1695), the immigrant ancestor of the Barnum family in North America. His maternal grandfather Phineas Taylor was a famous wag, legislator, landowner, justice of the peace, and lottery schemer, and he had a great influence on this favorite grandson. Barnum was very adept at arithmetic, but hated physical work. Barnum first started as a store-keeper, and he learned the arts of haggling, striking a hard bargain, and using deception to make a sale. He was also involved with the lottery mania then prevailing in the United States. He married Charity Hallett when he was 19, his companion for the next 50 years.

The enterprising young husband had several businesses going at once--a general store, a book auctioning trade, real estate speculation, and most lucrative of all, a state-wide lottery network. He became active in local politics and advocated against the strict blue laws promulgated by the Calvinists who sought to restrict gambling and travel. To further his liberal beliefs, Barnum started a weekly paper in 1829, The Herald of Freedom, in Danbury, Connecticut. His inflammatory editorials against church elders led to several libel suits and a prosecution which resulted in imprisonment for two months, but he became a champion of the liberal movement upon his release. In 1834, when lotteries were banned in Connecticut, cutting off his main source of income, Barnum sold his store and moved to New York City. In 1835 he began his career as a showman with his purchase and exhibition of a blind and almost completely paralyzed slave woman, Joice Heth, claimed by Barnum to have been the nurse of George Washington, and to be over 160 years old.

Joice Heth died in 1836, when her age was proved to be not more than eighty. After a year of mixed success with his first variety troupe called "Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater", followed by the Panic of 1837 and a three year period of difficult circumstances, he purchased Scudder's American Museum, at Broadway and Ann Street, New York City, in 1841. Renamed "Barnum's American Museum" with a considerable addition of exhibits and improvements in the building, it became one of the most popular showplaces in the United States. Barnum added a huge lighthouse lamp to the roof which at night attracted attention up and down Broadway and flags all along the roof's edge that attracted attention in the daytime. From between the upper windows, giant paintings of animals drew stares from passing pedestrians. The roof was transformed to a strolling garden with a view of the city, and where hot-air balloon rides were launched daily. To the static exhibits of stuffed animals were added a constantly changing series of live acts and "curiosities", including albinos, giants, midgets, "fat boys", jugglers, magicians, "exotic women", detailed models of cities and famous battles, and eventually a live menagerie of animals--promoted all over town from billboards and advertising carts.

In 1842, Barnum introduced his first major hoax at his museum, the bogus "Fejee" mermaid, which he leased from fellow museum owner Moses Kimball of Boston, who became his good friend, confidant, and collaborator. He justified his hoaxes or "humbugs" as "advertisements to draw attention...to the Museum. I don't believe in duping the public, but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them." ^[2] Later, he crusaded against outright fraudsters (see below). Barnum followed that hit with the exhibition of Charles Stratton, the celebrated dwarf "General Tom Thumb" ("the Smallest Person that ever Walked Alone") who was then four years of age but passed off as eleven. With heavy coaching and natural talent, the boy was taught to imitate famous people from Hercules to Napoleon. By five, he was drinking wine and by seven smoking cigars for the public's amusement. Though clearly exploited to a degree, Tom Thumb enjoyed his job and had a good relationship with Barnum free of any bitterness.

In year 1843 Barnum hired the traditional Native American dancer fu-Hum-Me, the first of many Native Americans he presented to the Eastern public. During 1844-45 Barnum toured with Tom Thumb in Europe and met with Queen Victoria, who was both amused and saddened by the actions of the little man, and the event was an enormous publicity coup for Barnum. It opened the door to visits from royalty across Europe including the Czar of Russia and give him opportunities to acquire dozens of new attractions, including various automatons and other mechanical marvels of that era. He even tried to buy the birth home of William Shakespeare and almost got away with it. Barnum was having the time of his life, and for all of the three years abroad with Thumb, except for a few months when his serious, nervous, and straitlaced wife joined him, he had piles of spending money, plentiful food and drink, and lived an exhilarating, carefree existence. On his return to New York, he went on a spending spree, buying up other museums, including Peale's famous museum in Philadelphia, the nation's first major museum. By late 1846, Barnum's Museum was drawing 400,000 visitors per year.^[3]

A remarkable instance of his enterprise was the engagement of Jenny Lind "the "Swedish Nightingale" to sing in America at $1,000 a night for 150 nights, all expenses being paid by the entrepreneur and all in advance--an unprecedented offer at the time. "Jenny Lind mania" was sweeping Europe then and she was a favorite of Queen Victoria and legions of fans. She was unpretentious, shy, and devout, and possessed a crystal-clear soprano voice projected with a wistful quality which audiences found touching and unforgettable. The offer was accepted in part to free her from opera performances which she disliked and to help endow a music school for poor children. The risk for Barnum was huge. Besides never having heard her or knowing whether Americans would take to her, he had to assume all the financial risk as well. He borrowed heavily against his mansion and his museum, putting both in jeopardy. With his customary bravado, he pulled out all the stops to drum up publicity for the event but realistically conceded, " 'The public' is a very strange animal, and although a good knowledge of human nature will generally lead a caterer of amusement to hit the people right, they are fickle and ofttimes perverse." ^[4]

As a result of months of Barnum's detailed preparations, close to 40,000 people greeted her at the docks upon her arrival and another 20,000 at her hotel, the press was in full attendance, and "Jenny Lind items" were available all over town. The tour began with the first concert at Castle Garden on September 11, 1850 and turned out to be the great success both Lind and Barnum had hoped for, recouping Barnum four times his investment. Washington Irving proclaimed "She is enough to counterbalance, of herself, all the evil that the world is threatened with by the great convention of women. So God save Jenny Lind!"^[5]

Using some of the profits from the Lind tour, Barnum's next challenge was to change the prevailing attitudes about the theater and transform them from 'dens of evil' to palaces of edification and delight, thereby turning theater into respectable middle-class entertainment. He built the largest and most modern theater of the time and coyly named it the "Moral Lecture Room", to avoid the seedy connotation that 'theater' conveyed and to make a bold play to attract a family crowd and to get the approval of the moral crusaders of New York City. He started the nation's first theater matinées to encourage families and to lessen the fear of crime. He opened with a play called The Drunkard, a thinly disguised temperance lecture (he had become a teetotaler after returning from Europe with Tom Thumb). He followed that with a series of melodramas, farces, and historical plays, put on by a first-class troupe of highly regarded actors. He often watered down Shakespearean plays and other plays such as Uncle Tom's Cabin to make them suitable for family entertainment, to the chagrin of theater traditionalists.

Another of Barnum's innovations was the national competition. He organized flower shows, beauty contests, dog shows, poultry contests, but the most popular were the baby contests (fattest baby, handsomest twins, etc.). In 1853, he started a pictorial weekly newspaper Illustrated News and a year later he completed his autobiography, which through many revisions, over time sold more than one million copies. Mark Twain loved it but the British Examiner thought it "trashy" and "offensive" and "inspired...nothing but sensations of disgust...and sincere pity for the wretched man who compiled it."^[6]

In the early 1850's, Barnum began investing heavily in real estate in an effort to develop East Bridgeport, Connecticut. He made very substantial loans to the Jerome Clock Company, in an attempt to get it to move to the new industrial area he was underwriting. But by 1856, the company went bankrupt sucking Barnum's wealth with it. So began four years of contentious court litigation and public humiliation. Both his friends and enemies rallied around him. Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed that Barnum's downfall showed "the gods visible again" and other critics celebrated Barnum's moral comeuppance. But his friends pulled hard too, and Tom Thumb, now touring on his own, offered his services again to the showman and they undertook another successful European tour. Barnum also started a successful lecture tour, mostly as a temperance speaker. By 1860, he emerged from debt and built a new mansion "Lindencroft" (his palace "Iranistan" had accidentally burnt down in 1857) and he resumed ownership of his museum.

Despite critics who predicted that he could not revive the old magic, Barnum went on to even greater success. He added America's first aquarium and expanded the wax figure department. His "Seven Grand Salons" demonstrated the Seven Wonders of the World. He created a rogues gallery of the world's great criminals. The collections expanded to four buildings and he published a "Guide Book to the Museum" which claimed 850,000 'curiosities'. ^[7]

Late in 1860, the famous Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, came out of retirement (they needed more money to send their numerous children to college). The Twins had had a successful touring career on their own and then went to live on a North Carolina plantation with their large families and their slaves, under the name of "Bunker". They appeared at Barnum's Museum for six successful weeks. Also in 1860, Barnum introduced his "missing link", the "man-monkey" William Henry Johnson, a microcephalic black dwarf who spoke a mysterious jungle language created by Barnum. In 1862, he discovered the giantess Anna Swan and Commodore Nutt, a new Tom Thumb, who with Barnum visited President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. During the Civil War, Barnum's museum drew large audiences seeking diversion from the conflict. He added many pro-Unionist exhibits, lectures, and dramas, and he demonstrated a total commitment to the cause, inciting a Confederate arsonist to start a fire in 1864. On July 13, 1865, Barnum's American Museum burned to the ground from a fire of unknown origin. Barnum quickly reestablished the Museum at another location in New York City, but this too was destroyed by fire in March 1868. This time the loss was too great to restore and Barnum retired from the freak business.

Contrary to popular belief, Barnum did not enter the circus business until very late in his career (he was 61 years old). In Delavan, Wisconsin in 1871 with William Cameron Coup, he established "P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome", a traveling amalgamation of circus, menagerie and museum of "freaks", which by 1872 was billing itself as "The Greatest Show on Earth". It went through a number of variants on these names: "P.T. Barnum's Travelling World's Fair, Great Roman Hippodrome and Greatest Show On Earth", and after an 1881 merger with James Bailey and James L. Hutchinson, "P.T. Barnum's Greatest Show On Earth, And The Great London Circus, Sanger's Royal British Menagerie and The Grand International Allied Shows United", soon shortened to "Barnum & London Circus". Despite more devastating fires, train disasters, and other setbacks, Barnum confidently plowed ahead, aided by a small army of circus professionals who ran the daily operations. He and Bailey split up again in 1885, but came back together in 1888 with the "Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show On Earth", later "Barnum & Bailey Circus", which toured around the world. The show's primary attraction was Jumbo, an African elephant he purchased in 1882 from the London Zoo and who died famously in a train wreck.

Barnum was probably the first circus owner in history to move his circus by train, and also the first to purchase his own train. Given the lack of paved highways in America, this turned out to be a shrewd business move that vastly enlarged Barnum's market. Many circus historians actually credit Bailey with this innovation. In this new field, Barnum leaned more on the advice of Bailey and other circus managers, most of whom were young enough to be his sons.

The Tufts University mascot is Jumbo the elephant, in honor of a major donation from Barnum in 1882.

Barnum built four mansions in Bridgeport, Connecticut during his life: Iranistan, Lindencroft, Waldemere and Marina. Iranistan was the most notable: a fanciful and opulent Moorish Revival splendor designed by Leopold Eidlitz with domes, spires and lacy fretwork, inspired by the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, England. This mansion was built 1848 but burned down in 1857.^[8]

[edit] Death

Barnum died in his sleep at his home on April 7, 1891 and was buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery, Bridgeport, Connecticut, a cemetery he designed himself.^[9] A statue in his honor was placed in 1893 at Seaside Park, by the water in Bridgeport. Barnum had donated the land for this park in 1865. His circus was eventually sold to Ringling Brothers on July 8, 1907 for $400,000 (roughly equal to $8,500,000 in 2008). ^{[10] [11]} At the time of his death, most critics had forgiven him and he was praised for his good works. Barnum was hailed as a beloved icon of American spirit and ingenuity, and was perhaps the most famous American in the world. Just before his death, he gave permission to the Evening Sun to print his obituary, so that he might have a chance to read it. On April 7 he asked about the box office receipts for the day; a few hours later, he was dead.

[edit] Author and debunker

Barnum wrote several books, including Life of P.T. Barnum (1854), The Humbugs of the World (1865), Struggles and Triumphs (1869), and The Art of Money-Getting (1880).

Mass publication of his autobiography was one of Barnum's more successful methods of self-promotion. The autobiography was so popular that some people made a point of acquiring and reading each edition. Some collectors were known to boast they had a copy of every edition in their library. Barnum eventually gave up his claim of copyright to allow other printers to publish and sell inexpensive editions. At the end of the 19^th century the number of copies printed of the autobiography was second only to the number of copies of the New Testament printed in North America.

Often referred to as the "Prince of Humbugs", Barnum saw nothing wrong in entertainers or vendors using hype (or "humbug", as he termed it) in their promotional material, just as long as the public was getting good value for its money. However, he was contemptuous of those who made money through fraudulent deceptions, especially the spiritualist mediums popular in his day, testifying against noted spirit photographer William H. Mumler in his trial for fraud. Prefiguring illusionists Harry Houdini and James Randi, Barnum publicly exposed "the tricks of the trade" used by mediums to deceive and cheat the bereaved. In The Humbugs of the World, he offered a $500 reward to any medium who could prove their claimed power to communicate with the dead without trickery.

[edit] Politician and reformer

Barnum was significantly involved in the politics surrounding race, slavery, and sectionalism in the period leading up the American Civil War. As mentioned above, he had some of his first success as an impresario through his slave Joice Heth. Around 1850, he was involved in a hoax about a weed that would turn black people white.

Barnum was involved (both as performer and promoter) in blackface minstrelsy. According to Eric Lott, Barnum's minstrel shows were often more double-edged in their humor than most at this period. While still replete with racist stereotypes, Barnum's shows also satirized white racial attitudes, as in a stump speech in which a black phrenologist (like all performers in the show, actually a white man in blackface) made a dialect speech paralleling and parodying lectures given at the time to "prove" the superiority of the white race: "You see den, dat clebber man and dam rascal means de same in Dutch, when dey boph white; but when one white and de udder's black, dat's a grey hoss ob anoder color." (Lott, 1993, 78)

Promotion of minstrel shows led indirectly to his sponsorship in 1853 of H.J. Conway's politically watered-down stage version of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; the play, at Barnum's American Museum, gave the story a happy ending, with Tom and various other slaves freed. The success of this Uncle Tom led, in turn, to his promotion of a production of a play based on Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. By 1860, Barnum had become a Republican. He had evolved from a man of common prejudices in the 1840's to a leader for emancipation by the Civil War.

While he claimed "politics were always distasteful to me," Barnum was elected to the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as the Republican representative for Fairfield and served two terms. In the debate over slavery and African-American suffrage with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Barnum spoke eloquently before the legislature and said, in part, "A human soul is not to be trifled with. It may inhabit the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hotentot - it is still an immortal spirit!" He ran for the United States Congress in 1867 and lost. In 1875, Barnum was elected mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut for a one year term and worked vigorously to improve the city water supply, bring gaslighting to the streets, and strictly enforce liquor and prostitution laws. Barnum was instrumental in starting Bridgeport Hospital, founded in 1878, and served as its first president. ^[10]

[edit] Publications

• Art of Money Getting, or, Golden Rules for Making Money. Originally published 1880. Reprint ed., Bedford, MA: Applewood, 1999. ISBN 1-55709-494-2.
• Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years' Recollections of P.T. Barnum. Originally published 1869. Reprint ed., Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2003. ISBN 0-7661-5556-0 (Part 1) and ISBN 0-7661-5557-9 (Part 2).
• The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe. Ed. by James W. Cook. Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2005. ISBN 0-252-07295-2.
• The Life of P.T. Barnum: Written By Himself. Originally published 1855. Reprint ed., Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ISBN 0-252-06902-1.
• The Wild Beasts, Birds and Reptiles of the World: The Story of their Capture. Pub. 1888, R. S. Peale & Company, Chicago.

[edit] See also

• Barnum, a Broadway musical about P.T. Barnum
• Barnum's American Museum
• Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus
• Fiji Mermaid
• Cardiff Giant
• James Anthony Bailey
• Fedor Jeftichew
• Moses Kimball
• Barnum effect
• There's a sucker born every minute
• Middlebush Giant
• General Tom Thumb
• Human zoo
• Zip the Pinhead
• Carl Hagenbeck
• Lucia Zarate
• Wild Men of Borneo
• Jumbo

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• Adams, Bluford. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8166-2631-6.
• Barnum, Patrick Warren. Barnum Genealogy: 650 Years of Family History. Boston: Higginson Book Co., 2006. ISBN 0-7404-5551-6 (hardcover), ISBN 0-7404-5552-4 (softcover), LCCN 2005903696.
• Benton, Joel. The Life of Phineas T. Barnum, [1].
• Cook, James W. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-674-00591-0. Relates Barnum's Fiji Mermaid and What Is It? exhibits to other popular arts of the nineteenth century, including magic shows and trompe l'oeil paintings.
• Harding, Les. Elephant Story: Jumbo and P. T. Barnum Under the Big Top. Jefferson, NC.: McFarland & Co., 2000. ISBN 0-7864-0632-1. (129 p.)
• Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. ISBN 0-226-31752-8.
• Kunhardt, Philip B., Jr., Kunhardt, Philip B., III and Kunhardt, Peter W. P.T. Barnum: America's Greatest Showman. Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. ISBN 0-679-43574-3.
• Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507832-2. (Especially p. 76–78.)
• Reiss, Benjamin. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-674-00636-4. Focuses on Barnum's exhibition of Joice Heth.
• Saxon, Arthur H. P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-231-05687-7.
• Uchill, Ida Libert. Howdy, Sucker! What P.T. Barnum Did in Colorado. Denver: Pioneer Peddler Press, 2001. OCLC 47773817

[edit] External links

• P.T. Barnum's genealogy at the Barnum Family Genealogy website
• P.T. Barnum's gravesite at findagrave
• The Barnum Museum
• P.T. Barnum at Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus
• Barnum's American Museum
• House of Deception - An article about Barnum's handwriting & signature
• The Lost Museum - A virtual reproduction of Barnum's American Museum; includes a collection of primary source materials
• A Founding Trustee of Tufts University, Barnum gave $50,000 toward construction of the first building in the Department of Natural History
• O.T.I.S.: Odd Things I've Seen
• Full text of The Life of Phineas T. Barnum by Joel Benton, from Project Gutenberg
• Works by P. T. Barnum at Project Gutenberg
• P.T. Barnum did not say "There's a sucker born every minute"
• P.T. Barnum, the Shakespeare of Advertising
• P.T. Barnum and Henry Bergh Bergh was founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).
• In Search Of The Sons Of BarnumRegularly updated Barnum blog

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.