THE INCENDIARY ED SAMS THE INCENDIARY BARNUM Ed Sams Yellow Tulip Press www.curiouschapbooks.com Copyright 2006 - 2014 by Ed Sams All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, ex- cept by reviewers who may quote brief passages in a review. Nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored ina retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other without written permission from the publisher. Published by Yellow Tulip Press PO Box 211 Ben Lomond, CA 95005 www.curiouschapbooks.com Printed in the United States of America. FOR JEFF ...AT LAST Contents The Spark of Life . .1 The Burning of Iranistan . .5 The American Museum Fire of 1865 . .9 The Immolation of Barnum’s New American Museum . .13 Fire at the Hippotheatron . .17 The Holocaust at the Winter Quarters . .21 The Gem-Hard Flame . .25 Works Cited . .31 The Spark of Life he life of Phineas Taylor Barnum T (1810-1891), America's first and fore- most showman, burned with an incan- descent energy that brightened two continents. That spark of life which fueled the wonders of Barnum's museums and circuses fueled the fires that five times burned to the ground all his ac- complishments. In Barnum's autobiography The Phineas Taylor Barnum Greatest Showman: Life of Barnum, the Great- est Showman recounts five fires out of the many to consume his life. These fires were the destruction of his home Iranistan, the conflagrations of Barnum's American Museum, Barnum's new American Museum, and Barnum's Hippotheatron, and the holocaust at the winter quarters of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. In each instance, Barnum was away from the scene of the devastation, often learning of the calamities nonchalantly over breakfast or at the barbershop. Never- theless, these five fires demonstrate a theatricality in execution worthy of the Greatest Showman himself. Barnum was famously quoted as saying that “the people liked to be humbugged.” Was the Great Humbug him- self a great firebug as well? Beginning life the son of a tavern-keeper in Bethel, Connecticut, P.T. Barnum grew up among the traveling drums and salesmen, listening to their jokes and learning their pranks, which would later define his adult life. Barnum took the Yankee tradition of the practical joke and devel- oped it into an art form of the public hoax. In the early nineteenth cen- tury, optimism and ambition were so strong that Americans were eager to believe any wonder of their new republic. Two years before Edgar Allan Poe's notorious Balloon Hoax of 1844, P. T. Barnum was already hum- bugging the public to the public's delight. The Greatest Showman tells of one incident in which he used a slight deception to move traffic through his American Museum and out the back door, allowing more customers to enter. On July 4, 1842, Barnum learned-- 1 The Incendiary Barnum Ed Sams Pretty much all of my visitors had brought their dinner [. .] No one expected to go home till night; the building was overcrowded and meanwhile 100s were waiting at the front entrance to get in [. .]. In despair [. .] I hap- pened to see the scene painter at work [. .] . 'Here,' I exclaimed, 'take a piece of canvas four foot square, and paint on it 'To the Egress.' [. ] The crowd [. .] stopped and looked at the new sign [. .- 'Aigress [. .] Sure that's an animal we haven't seen yet' and the throng began to pour down the back stairs [. .]. Meanwhile I began to accommodate those who had long been wait- ing with their money at the Broadway entrance." (Bar- num 95) By such means, P.T. Barnum defined his professional persona by his ability to outsmart competitors, whether in business or in sport. During his triumphant European tour with General Tom Thumb, the Greatest Showman met John Anderson, the Wizard of the North. Anderson was then the premier magician of Europe due to his novel new trick, pulling rabbits out of his hat. The Wizard, obviously believing his powers greater than the Showman, played a harmless practical joke by introduc- ing Barnum as himself. Holding back to observe Barnum's discomfiture, Anderson himself received a shock. As Barnum tells it: It occurred to Anderson to introduce me to several per- sons who were sitting in the room as the Wizard of the North at the same time asking me about my tricks and my forthcoming exhibition. He kept this up so persist- ently that some of our friends [. .] declared that Ander- son was 'too much for me,' and meanwhile, fresh introductions to strangers who came in had made me pretty generally known [. ] as the Wizard of the North who was to astonish the town in the following week. I accepted the situation at last, and said: 'Well, gentlemen, as I perform here for the first time on Monday evening, I like to be liberal, and I should be very happy to give you orders of admission to those of you who will attend my 2 Ed Sams The Incendiary Barnum exhibition.' The applications for orders were quite gen- eral, and I had written 30 or 40 when Anderson, who saw I was in a fair way of filling his house with 'dead- heads,' cried out: 'Hold on! I am the Wizard of the North. I'll stand the orders already given, but not an- other one.' Our friends, including the Wizard himself, began to think that I had rather the best of the joke. (Barnum 144) In this magician's duel, the Wizard of the North lost to the Wizard of the West. In the hard scrabble, sharp practice world of American business in the early nineteenth century, Barnum soon learned to give no quarter. Then practical jokes were lessons to steel men of business in their resolve not to lower their guard lest they be taken in. However, the public hoaxes taught Barnum another valuable set of lessons concerning the impor- tance of publicity. His early partner in a medicine show, Aaron Turner, once roused the entire town of Annapolis, Maryland, against Barnum as a practical joke. Their circus in miniature, with its magician, dancer and singer, was just beginning to turn a profit and Barnum thought to spend an advance on a splendid new suit of clothes. Looking finally respectable in black broadcloth, the Greatest Showman took a walk down the main thoroughfare as much to see as be seen. Turner, a self-made man himself, indulged Barnum's desire to be noticed in public by spreading word that there on the street “as bold as brass” walked the notorious Reverend E. K. Avery, lately acquitted of the murder of Miss Cordell in nearby Rhode Island (Barnum 63). The sensational murder trial had been in all the pa- pers and sentiments ran high against the compromised clergyman, so much so, that Barnum found himself unaccountably fleeing from a mob threatening to lynch him themselves! After the hue and cry, P. T. Barnum was apprehended and rode out of town on a rail, his new suit of black broadcloth in tatters. Later, when he protested this shabby treatment to Turner, his partner laughed and imparted this valuable advice: “All we need to ensure success is notoriety. You will see that this will be noised all about town as a trick played by one of the circus managers upon the 3 The Incendiary Barnum Ed Sams other, and our pavilion will be crammed to-morrow night” (64). And so it was! In time the Greatest Showman developed such business savvy that practi- cal jokes, hoaxes and magic tricks came as second nature. One of his final practical jokes was played posthumously. When P. T. Barnum died on April 7, 1891, at 82 years of age, he left an estate worth more than $4 mil- lion. Part of this estate included a mystery box. This large packing case was nailed to the wall of the back office of his circus winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and written on its side was the legend, “Not to be Opened Until After the Death of P. T. Barnum.” Matthew Scott, Jumbo's trusty trainer who remained in Barnum’s employ long after the elephant's death, “took it into his head that this mysterious box contained his cash inheritance from Barnum. When the box was opened, it was found to contain for each of his oldest employees a copy of The Life of P. T. Barnum Written by Himself.” According to Irving Wallace, “Scott went to pieces from sheer disappointment” (215). Too often P. T. Barnum’s mysteries were hoaxes, yet these frauds were more than business ploys. They were works of art that expressed the Greatest Showman's philoso- phy and even religion. In mysteries and hoaxes, and in works of art, the real and unreal are so blended as to be inseparable. Thus, Barnum be- lieved, in any accident were blended the good and the bad inseparably. As a Universalist, Barnum maintained that God does everything right. Even when interviewed about the fire of 1887, Barnum expressed no distress, perhaps as publicity, claiming that he had faith that good would come out of it. As he told the press, “I have got a novel sensation. The destruction of the Greatest Show on Earth is a direct interposition of Providence on be- half of the public” (“Mr. Barnum Undisturbed”). Such august equanimity in the face of such ensuing disasters is indeed im- pressive, yet it begs the question: Were the five great fires of Barnum's life merely accidents, publicity stunts, or devilish acts of infernal gods re- sponding to the Greatest Showman's flair for the dramatic? 4 For the Whole Story, Order ‘The Incendiary Barnum’ from www.curiouschapbooks.com or Amazon.com.