JULY 5
P.T. Barnim
(right)
Born July 5, 1810 in Bethel, Connecticut
Died April 7, 1891 Bridgeport, Conecticut
U.S. Showman
P.T.
Barnum
Original Name - Phineas Taylor Barnum
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." Although famous
for his brazen self-promotion and blatant
puffery, he understood his times and profited
from them brilliantly.
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." Later, he crusaded against outright
fraudsters. 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.
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."
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!"
1856 newspaper advertisement for Barnum's
American Museum located on Ann Street in
Manhattan.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."
In the early 1850s, 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'.
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.
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. 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). 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.
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