Appendix I P. T. Barnum: Humbug and Reality
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APPENDIX I P. T. BARNUM: HUMBUG AND REALITY s a candidate for the father of American show business, Barnum’s Awider significance is still being quarried by those with an interest in social and cultural history. The preceding chapters have shown how vari- ety, animal exhibits, circus acts, minstrelsy, and especially freak shows, owe much of their subsequent momentum to his popularization of these amusement forms. For, while Barnum has long been associated in popular memory solely with the circus business, his overall career as an entertainment promoter embraced far more than the celebrated ringmas- ter figure of present-day public estimation. Barnum saw himself as “the museum man” for the better part of his long show business career, following his successful management of the American Museum from the 1840s to the 1860s. To repeat, for all Barnum’s reputation today as a “circus man,” he saw himself first and foremost as a museum proprietor, one who did much to promote and legitimize the display of “human curiosities.”1 While the emergence of an “American” national consciousness has been dated to the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Barnum’s self- presentation was central to the cultural formation of a particular middle- class American sense of identity in the second half of the nineteenth century (see chapter 1), as well as helping to shape the new show business ethos. Over time, he also became an iconic or referential figure in the wider culture, with multiple representations in cinematic, theatrical, and literary form (see below).Yet was Barnum really the cultural pacesetter as he is often presented in popular biographical writing, not to mention his own self-aggrandizing prose. At the 1864 reopening of his American Museum theater, Barnum used verse to shed some light on his then P. T. Barnum, portrait, circa 1855–65. Owner: Brady-Handy Collection Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-DIG-cwpbh-02176). APPENDIX I 181 achievements, with claims that he either first exhibited or initiated most of the following exceptional items: Who as a “General” thing brought out Tom Thumb?/ Who introduced (you can’t say there I sinned)/ The Swedish Nightingale, sweet Jenny Lind?/ Who brought you Living Whales from Labrador?/ . The family of Albinos? the Giraffe?/ The famous Baby Show that made you laugh?/ . The curious “What Is It?” which you, though spunky,/ Won’t call a man and cannot call a monkey./ These things and many more time forbids to state,/ I first introduced, if I did not originate.2 While Barnum merits an important place in the history of nineteenth- century show business, his contribution as an originator of certain paid-for amusements and as being the first to show various museum exhibits can be overstated. Undoubtedly a seminal figure in the development of commercial entertainment, he is unwisely given credit for being a cultural innovator. “He [Barnum] would introduce to America the modern public museum, the popular concert, and the three-ring circus, all forerunners of vaudeville, motion pictures, and television,” claimed novelist Irving Wallace (The Chapman Report) fulsomely in his popular biography The Fabulous Showman (1959). In addition, “he would invent modern advertising and showman- ship.” A recent work confirms the latter and more defensible assertion: “Modern advertising and promotion, marketing, and show business ...all of them . began with Barnum.”3 Such definitive statements take Barnum as a cultural pioneer too much at his own inflated estimation for, as will become evident, he did not initi- ate a single one of the innovations Wallace attributes to him above. Taking each in turn, ● “He would introduce to America the modern public museum . .” The privately-owned museum open to the public, owed its American origins not to Barnum but to Charles Willson Peale and his sons in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. Before Barnum purchased it in late 1841, the American Museum in New York was little more than a moribund imitator of the Peale family museums. ● “He would introduce to America . the popular concert . .” The Jenny Lind concerts that Barnum promoted at mid-century were not the first popular American musical concerts for “decent folk” but certainly among the most successful. ● “He would introduce to America . the three-ring circus . .” Barnum made no claim to be the first to introduce the three-ring circus format, possibly because he knew English showman “Lord” George Sanger insisted he had experimented with three rings as early 182 APPENDIX I as in his 1856 circus show, possibly because of a loose interpretation of the word “ring.” ● “He would invent modern advertising . .” Barnum was only par- tially the inventor of modern American advertising, with his pictorial handbills, lithograph posters, squibs, and newspaper promotions, since “puffing” had been a feature of the American popular press from at least the early 1830s onward (see artist George Catlin). ● “He would invent . [modern] showmanship.” While a great show- man, Barnum was part of a long tradition and his exhibits and displays were not particularly innovative. Even the Feejee Mermaid, the property of his friend Moses Kimball, had long been displayed by traveling showmen. Barnum merely loaned such exhibits and devised innovative ways of marketing them as incredible crowd-pleasing exhibitions.4 In reality, with the notable exception of Tom Thumb, Barnum was not the first exhibitor of what he offered his patrons, nor the actual “originator” of any single mode of entertainment, although this is not to diminish his wider social and cultural significance. The record shows that Barnum actu- ally took over, publicized, and energized preexisting amusement forms, like those whose multifarious history has been recounted in previous chapters. “The Feejee Mermaid, the American Museum, Jenny Lind, Commodore Nutt, and the great Jumbo himself had all been before the public when he arrived on the scene,” points out a more reliable biographer. On the other hand, Barnum most probably created the first reserved seats; the first mati- nee shows for women; the first celebrity marketing campaigns; the first venues with national audiences, and; the first corporate model for commer- cial entertainment. Yet the student needs to maintain a firm historical dimension, given the extensive literature on the showman’s career, to evade the kind of uncritical or exaggerated claims made for Barnum, not least by the man himself in his autobiographical and other writings.5 Representations of Barnum Even in his own lifetime, P. T. Barnum came to represent a larger-than- life personality or cultural phenomenon associated with peculiar northeast American or Yankee qualities (see chapter 1). When he first took “General” Tom Thumb, “the Yankee Dwarf,” to see Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace in 1844, Barnum was listed in the Court Circular as the midget’s “guardian.” The English satirical journal Punch insisted, however, that the appropriate term was “showman.” Such was Barnum’s interna- tional fame 40 years later that Punch now lionized him as “the great APPENDIX I 183 Phineas the First, Emperor of Showmen.” Consequently, the familiar nineteenth-century European caricature of the bragging, overbearing but egalitarian Yankee was, to some extent, indebted to Barnum’s self- promotion during his international tours with Tom Thumb in the 1840s and, now a more portentous figure, with the Barnum & Bailey circus in the 1880s.6 Frequently, as related in his own The Life of P. T. Barnum, assembled crowds cheered the trickster-showman in recognition of his Yankee ingenuity, and showing a fondness for being misled by a clever hoaxer, to the extent of liking to be fooled. Equally, the great showman as emblem- atic of humbug, hucksterism, and trickery is pertinent to the invariable assumption that Yankee entrepreneurs routinely espoused ruthless tactics to secure a profitable business deal. The label “confidence-man,” first attached by a journalist in 1849 to a New York swindler of “genteel appearance” who talked his victims out of their pocket watches, might seem appropri- ate here. Interestingly, Herman Melville of Moby Dick (1851) fame devoted his financially unsuccessful last novel to the concept of The Confidence-Man (1857). This work can be read as a sardonic if mystifying satire on the prevailing Barnum-like manipulation of commercial encounters in which, on a long Mississippi steamboat journey, one trickster after another peddles bogus stocks, patent medicines, and real estate. The disillusioned Melville had long been interested in Barnum and the novel refers indirectly to various of his exhibits. Sixteen years later, a prominent Barnum-like figure in fiction was the great comic character “Colonel” Eschol Sellers, the self- deceiving land speculator in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s The Gilded Age (1873), a satire on corrupt Washington lobbying that gave its name to an era.7 A quarter of a century after Barnum’s death, it was widely recognized that he had come to represent an element of the national character. “[Barnum’s] name has taken a permanent place in the language as the synonym of trickery and bombast,” pointed out the theater critic of The New York Herald in 1918 reviewing the new play Mr Barnum. This comedy of circus life at the Criterion on Broadway was penned by Harrison Rhodes and portly actor Thomas A. Wise, who played Barnum. Going beyond the self-evident, the anonymous critic also acknowledged certain defining aspects of a middle-class, provincial American in the intensely ambitious and hardworking Barnum, enduring qualities that were recog- nizably part of a white, Protestant, cultural repertoire: “American brag and American bluff; our love of clever new trickery and our passion for all the old moralities; our remorseless calculation in matters of business and our astounding personal kindliness and generosity—they were all there in Barnum.”8 184 APPENDIX I Five years later Harvard literary critic Gamaliel Bradford (1863–1932), in reviewing M.