The creative and crazy genius behind several famous hoaxes and the Barnum & Bailey Circus was Phineas Taylor Barnum. His biography, however, is full of exciting stories that go beyond those well-known attributes–such as the fact that he did not establish a circus until later in life. Instead,
Barnum was a racist and misogynist — not the nice guy portrayed by Hugh Jackman.
Along with millions of other movie watchers, I am a fan of Hugh Jackman and The Greatest Showman musical, a work of fiction, very loosely based on the life of PT Barnum.
The creative and crazy genius behind several famous hoaxes and the Barnum & Bailey Circus was Phineas Taylor Barnum. His biography, however, is full of exciting stories that go beyond those well-known attributes–such as the fact that he did not establish a circus until later in life. Instead, Barnum started in the field of publishing and published a weekly newspaper in Bethel, CT. In 1842, he built the American Museum of Barnum, where he exhibited various human curiosities, such as the Feejee Mermaid and General Tom Thumb.
During the 1840s, Barnum displayed the Feejee Mermaid, and it soon became the most recognizable fake Mermaid on the show (they were a common attraction in the period). Typically at that time, counterfeit mermaids had the upper apes heads that were sewn on fish legs. Feejee Mermaid is believed to have been half orangutans and half trout.
Within his memoir, Barnum identified the specimen as an ugly and dark looking small being, around 3 feet long. His mouth was open, his ears bent over, and his arms were thrown up, giving him the appearance of having died within great pain. The Feejee Mermaid’s current whereabouts are not known; it is perceived to have been rescued from a museum fire and donated to Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. It’s unclear, though, whether the specimen is the real Mermaid.
In 1842, Barnum met a tiny boy of four, named Charles Sherwood Stratton. Charles, who happened to be a distant relative, weighed 15 pounds and was only 25 inches tall. Barnum was skilled in discovering “freaks,” and realized the kid would be a star on the sideshow circuit right away.
He showed Charles how to sing and dance, and changed his name to General Tom Thumb.
Tom Thumb became so famous that he toured across Europe with Barnum, and even visited Queen Victoria in England. As he aged, he grew to 35″ (just under 3 feet) tall.
Interesting tidbit: In the movie “The Greatest Showman”, the actor who played Tom Thumb was “too tall” at 4’2″ tall, and spent the movie walking on his knees. Editing changed this to appear as if he was walking on his feet. Even in Barnum’s death, he still found a way to deceive us.
PT Barnum paid $1,000 for an aging woman, Joice Heth, in 1835, saying she was 161 years old and former nurse to George Washington. She soon won her purchase price back: Barnum made up $1,000 per week by showcasing her across the Northeast.
When this started to lose attention from the media, Barnum initiated a theory that this slave was not a human being but a robot. This slave later died in 1836, and he went on to conduct a public autopsy, where people paid 50 cents to join. Heth was only around 80 years old, the autopsy revealed. More on Heth later in this commentary.
Just after the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, there was a stampede that left 12 people dead. Before the crash, the owners of the bridge had turned down Barnum’s invitation to parade his elephants across the bridge to show their strength. But they have taken Barnum up on his offer after the disaster.
On May 17, 1884, PT Barnum walked over the bridge from Manhattan to Brooklyn with 21 elephants (including the famous Jumbo) and 17 camels. For both sides, this was a win-win. To Barnum’s circus, it was great advertising, and the weight of the animals showed that the bridge was indeed healthy and safe enough to accommodate cars and pedestrians.
In 1882 Barnum purchased from the Royal Zoological Society in London Jumbo, a large 11 1/2 foot, 6 1/2 ton elephant. He was the best elephant people ever seen, and crowds embraced him.
In 1885, Barnum decided to return to Britain for his show-and Jumbo. But while Jumbo was being carried off a train in Ontario, Canada, a locomotive struck him. He died beside him with his trainer, who, in his final moments, did their best to offer the elephant some comfort.
Barnum capitalized from the assassination of Jumbo. He purchased an elephant called Alice, who was buddies at the London Zoo with Jumbo and sent her out on tour with the packed bones of Jumbo. Sadly, in 1886 Alice herself died in a fire, though the remains of Jumbo had been spared. His skeleton currently houses the American Museum of Natural History in New York City
Barnum became a proponent of the pro-temperance movement in the late 1840s. Despite apparently being a heavy drinker in his younger days, he became a teetotaler in his 30s and swore off alcohol. He has often given speeches detailing alcohol’s evils. No one was allowed to imbibe in his American museum, and visitors were treated to the play The Drunkard, which was centered on alcoholism.
PT Barnum fed his prized elephant Jumbo a lot of alcohol despite his enthusiastic support for prohibition, likely to control him. A special treat for the pachyderm has been reportedly consisting of biscuits soaked in gravy.
Barnum’s thesis on his memoir continued several years. He wrote the first version of P.T.’s The Living. Barnum, Written by himself in 1854 and continued to edit and update it throughout his life. Barnum was so obsessed with keeping the book published that, after his retirement, he told his wife to include a chapter about his burial. Indeed, shortly before his death, Barnum allowed a newspaper to run its necrology, so that he could read it in advance and make any changes that he considered necessary.
Barnum authorized anyone to print his memoir to bump up profits. He has managed to sell over a million copies of the book during his career.
PT Barnum’s adult life had been politically active. In 1865 he sat on the Connecticut General Assembly as a Democrat. While retaining a slave, Joice Heth fought for multiracial citizenship and rights for people to be allowed to participate in voting process.
Barnum failed a bid for a seat in Congress but was elected Mayor of Bridgeport, CT, in 1875 for one year. As mayor, he urged prisoners to be required to work, protested against the saloons, and tried to modernize the utilities of the town.
Because of his propensity to deceive people into believing his crazy actions, many have attributed Barnum with coining the statement, “There is a sucker born every minute.” Still, there is no proof that he said so.
Barnum told newspaper writers in New York City that businessman and horse dealer David Hannum commented after Barnum produced a wax model of Cardiff Giant (which proved to be a fabricated one). People came in droves to witness the giant Barnum, and Barnum believed that the false one was the giant of Hannum.
It was then revealed that the original Cardiff Giant was indeed fake. Hannum prosecuted PT Barnum for defamation, but a judge ruled that it is not libel to label it false when it is fake.
Barnum was not having good fire luck. Fire destroyed his attainments on five separate occasions. His Connecticut house, Iranistan, based on the Pavilion of George IV in Brighton, England, which was burned down in 1857. In 1865, his first museum lost to flames. Museums subsequently burnt down in 1868 and 1872.
Then, in 1887, when it burned in its winter quarters, PT Barnum lost almost the entire menagerie of his great circus.
Despite earning the right amount of money out of his sideshow acts, Barnum made a wrong business decision that financially crippled him. At age 46, he went bankrupt in 1855 after trying to build a town in East Bridgeport, CT, in the center of the countryside.
Fortunately, the condition in Barnum was brief. He was debt-free by 1860, after giving paying seminars on “The Art Of Money Gathering” and learning about the temperance movement.
Unfortunately, movies like this often glamorize and idolize people by presenting them in such a warm light, that all the negatives about that person are hidden away in the darkness. Barnum’s story is well known, and his traveling show’s depiction became a cliché in American popular culture in the 19th century. However, there is a darker side to his story that has been eclipsed by the glamorous spectacles associated with his name.
Nevertheless, as scholars like James W. Cook have shown, the early success of PT Barnum was built upon the oppression of an old, vulnerable multiracial lady by the name Joice Heth. The ambitious Barnum turned his attention to a future in showmanship, after a series of failed work and company adventures.
He acquired an elderly black lady by the name of Joice Heth when he was 25. She would be the highlight of his latest, reportedly 161-year-old performing series. Barnum is reported to have gotten Heth drunk one night and pulled all of her teeth out of her mouth to make her appear older.
In reality, Heth became blind and almost entirely disabled in her late 70s. According to the Smithsonian Magazine, while slavery in Pennsylvania and New York had been abolished, Barnum discovered an inadequacy in the law that gave him the authority to lease her from her previous owners for a year at an amount of $1000.
She created his latest attraction’s centerpiece. Barnum said she had taken care of George Washington at young age.
Barnum became acutely aware of the public’s desire for entertainment and soon realized that he could turn a profit on people like Heth. The crowds loved human curiosities: assumed nature freaks who defied reasonable expectation.
He created the tale of Heth to make it as entertaining and ridiculous as possible and quickly became both a professional seller and showman.
Although his claims regarding Heth’s actual age were ridiculed, the show went ahead to pull in the punters. Even after her demise at the age of 80, Barnum still did his best to manipulate the story.
In a New York Saloon, he arranged a grisly public autopsy, which attracted about 1,500 spectators. Although the fraud was discovered, and it was revealed that Heth was only half the age he believed, he nevertheless made a handsome profit from the incident.
Many of PT Barnum’s prime attractions included other “nature freaks,” including the African American cook William Henry Johnson, according to the literary historian Benjamin Reiss. Throughout Barnum’s shows, Johnson was portrayed as “half-man, half-monkey,” a beast “made in the wilds of Africa.”
The promotion of these exhibits built into prevailing racial prejudices and perceptions about the perceived inferiority of African Americans, and as such, further cemented concepts of ethnic otherness. In his later years — and perhaps in his most significant fraud of all — Barnum gained the acceptance that he sought from smart society by reinventing himself as a philanthropist, reforming mayor, and campaigning against slavery.
Barnum claimed to have had a change of heart in later life, and he advocated as a leader against segregation and the subjugation of African Americans. Nonetheless, the foundation of his career was built on the systemic exploitation of non-white people, who were displayed and paraded in a variety of degrading ways before large audiences.
The Greatest Showman leaves us with a warm and fuzzy feeling for “good” Phineas T Barnum. Part of that is because of Hugh Jackman playing the role of Barnum. Handsome and debonair Jackman could almost make anyone look great.
But Jackman wasn’t playing the real-life Barnum. In real life, Barnum was anything but good — or helpful.
From his modest early days as a completely rural made boy, Phineas Taylor Barnum from Bethel, Connecticut, had portrayed himself as the greatest showman as the new musical about his life would say — of his generation some five decades into his life.
Thanks to possession of intelligent marketing tricks and less-than-excellent business practices, PT Barnum had actually arrived. In 1865, by using his book Humbugs of the World, Barnum wanted to enlighten his target group, that by scamming the public, he had not achieved his success story of rags to riches.
His success in show business spread from the American Museum to “P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Zoo, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome” at the end of his life. Each was full of larger-than-life concepts that were sold to an audience engaged in mass entertainment, and often crass ones.
As was understood, Barnum wrote in the novel, the term humbug “consists of putting on interesting images outside show in order capture the public attention and attract their eyes and ears.” And he wanted to make it understood that such a practice was worth it. There are numerous trades and professions that only need recognition to ensure success, he said, concluding no damage, no bad, as long as consumers knew at the end it all day that they had the benefit of their money.
Growing up in the antebellum north, he had his first true dive into show game at the age of 25 when he bought the opportunity to “cast” an old black lady by the name of Joice Heth, whom a relative trumpeted around Philadelphia as George Washington’s 161-year-old former wife.
PT Barnum had been trying to work as a lottery manager, a shopkeeper, and a newspaper editor by this time. He stayed in New York City, was working in a boarding house and a grocery store, and was looking for a trick that made money.
“I have long dreamed that I could prosper if I could only get hold of a public exhibition,” he commented on his life at the time in his 1855 memoir, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Through Heth, he saw an opportunity to strike it wealthy. Although at the time slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania and New York, a loophole allowed him to rent it for $1,000 a year, investing $500.
In a research work on Barnum and his reputation misrepresenting African cultures, Berth Lindfors, professor emeritus at Austin’s University of Texas, appropriately sums up the importance of that dark exchange as Barnum the showman’s launching point an individual who started his profession in show business by taking debts in order to purchase an extra ordinary female slave, who was later found to be fake.
As explained in an interview with Smithsonian.com by Benjamin Reiss, instructor and chair of English at Emory University, and creator of The Showman and The Slave of Barnum, Barnum’s reputation has become a sort of cultural touchstone. “The narrative that we choose to write about his past is, in fact, the tale we choose to hear about American culture,” he notes. We can choose to erase things or roam around touchy subjects and present some sort of feel-good story. We can also use it as an opportunity to look at very complex and troubling stories our culture has been struggling with for centuries.”
This begins with Heth, the first big break PT Barnum has ever had. It was when he noticed a crowd desperate for action while on tour with her. “Human curiosities, or luaus nature— nature freaks — were among the most common traveling entertainments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Reiss notes in his novel, but by the time Barnum went on tour with Heth, there was a shift. In the 1830s, for some radical carnivalesque culture, and others, the showing of grotesquely articulated human forms was an insult to genteel sensibilities,” Reiss notes.
So while the Jacksonian press in N.Y., “the vanguard of mass culture,” was breathlessly covering Heth’s shows, he found, following Barnum’s paper trail, that the more old-fashioned New England press was bristling at the show.
Nevertheless, with Heth, Barnum proved to be able to dip and swerve enough, playing different stories of her to appeal to diverse audiences across the Northeast. In the days of George Washington, of course, Heth was not present. It doesn’t matter if Barnum believed the fable. Although later claiming to have done so, he wasn’t above making up his own stories regarding Heth to attract to see her; he once planted a lie alleging that the poor woman wasn’t even a human at all.
By the time she died in February 1836, Barnum had one last trick up his sleeve instead of having her go in peace: he had drummed up a final public spectacle, holding a televised execution in a New York Saloon. There, 1500 fans charged 50 cents to see the dead woman cut to pieces, “revealing” that she was only half her age.
After Heth, Barnum had several other traveling acts— notably the trick to get the world-famous Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” to fly across the Atlantic and make her widely and popularly celebrated American debut with him— until he became the American Museum’s proprietor in New York in December 1841.
More than 4,000 tourists spilled out per day at the American Museum to search about 850,000 “ordinary curiosities” at 25 cents a day. The false and the actual mingled in a vacuum, with smuggled, live wild animals mixed with hoaxes such as the Feejee Mermaid.
Perhaps uncomfortably, PT Barnum proceeded to show “freakiness” in the form of “human curiosities” in the exhibit. One of the most famous shows depicted a man called “a monster discovered in the wilds of Africa… intended to be a hybrid of the wild native African and the orangutan, a kind of man-monkey.” The derogatory poster concluded: “For want of a better description, the specimen was called a man-monkey.”
But if you look at Barnum with a clear eye, one undeniable fact in his biography is his role in marketing racism to the masses. He had these tricks of portraying racism to be considered fun and for masses to engage in acts that demean a victim of racism practices in intimate and funny, surprising and novel ways,” Reiss says.
“That’s part of his legacy, that’s part of what he left us, just as he left us some very great jokes and circus acts and that kind of funny, wise-cracking name for’ America’s dad.’ This is just as much a part of his legacy. But it doesn’t make him a man worthy of our respect or accolades. He was a racist, lying, hypocrite con-man — and even the amazing acting, singing and dancing of Hugh Jackman can’t cover the smell that emanates from the memory of PT Barnum
Another Movie Tidbit: (The movie cast included the Albino Sisters, who experienced real life tragedies because of their genetic condition. There is an interesting article about their true struggles and subsequent grant of asylum in the USA here.)
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