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Phineas Taylor Barnum (July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American showman remembered for hoaxes and for founding the circus that 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, his profession was entertainment, and he was perhaps the first "show business" millionaire. He never said "There's a sucker born every minute" but his rebuttal to critics was often "I am a showman by profession...and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me.".
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Quotations
To the Egress.
(a deceptive sign used to reduce crowding)
I don't care what they say about me, just make sure they spell my name right!
You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people
A fool and his money are soon parted.
Every crowd has a silver lining.
No one went broke underestimating public taste.
Encyclopedia
Phineas Taylor Barnum (July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an American showman remembered for hoaxes and for founding the circus that 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, his profession was entertainment, and he was perhaps the first "show business" millionaire. He never said "There's a sucker born every minute" but his rebuttal to critics was often "I am a showman by profession...and all the gilding shall make nothing else of me.". The Tufts University Biology Building is named in honor of Barnum.
Life
Early life and career
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. 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 wag, legislator, landowner, justice of the peace, and lottery schemer, and he had a great influence on his favorite grandson. Barnum was adept at arithmetic but hated physical work. Barnum started as a store-keeper, and he learned haggling, striking a bargain, and using deception to make a sale. He was involved with the lottery mania in the United States. He married Charity Hallett when he was 19; she'd be his companion for the next 44 years.
The young husband had several businesses: a general store, a book auctioning trade, real estate speculation, and a state-wide lottery network. He became active in local politics and advocated against blue laws promulgated by Calvinists who sought to restrict gambling and travel. Barnum started a weekly paper in 1829, The Herald of Freedom, in Danbury, Connecticut. His editorials against church elders led to 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 income, Barnum sold his store and moved to New York City. In 1835 he began 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.
Funhouse showman
Joice Heth died in 1836, no more than 80. 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 years 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 addition of exhibits and improvements in the building, it became a popular showplace. Barnum added a lighthouse lamp which attracted attention up and down Broadway and flags along the roof's edge that attracted attention in daytime. From between the upper windows, giant paintings of animals drew stares from pedestrians. The roof was transformed to a strolling garden with a view of the city, where hot-air balloon rides were launched daily. To the static exhibits of stuffed animals were added a 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 menagerie of animals.
In 1842, Barnum introduced his first major hoax, the "Feejee" mermaid, which he leased from fellow museum owner Moses Kimball of Boston, who became his friend, confidant, and collaborator. it was a tail of a fish and the head of a monkey. 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 fraudsters (see below). Barnum followed that with the exhibition of Charles Stratton, the dwarf "General Tom Thumb" ("the Smallest Person that ever Walked Alone") who was then four years of age but was stated to be 11. With heavy coaching and natural talent, the boy was taught to imitate people from Hercules to Napoleon. By five, he was drinking wine and by seven smoking cigars for the public's amusement. Though exploited, Tom Thumb enjoyed his job and had a good relationship with Barnum free of bitterness.
In year 1843 Barnum hired the traditional Native American dancer fu-Hum-Me, the first of many Native Americans he presented. During 1844-45, Barnum toured with Tom Thumb in Europe and met Queen Victoria, who was and saddened by the little man, and the event was a publicity coup. It opened the door to visits from royalty across Europe including the Czar of Russia and let him acquire dozens of attractions, including automatons and other mechanical marvels. He 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, food and drink, and lived a carefree existence. On his return to New York, he went on a spending spree, buying other museums, including Peale's museum in Philadelphia, the nation's first major museum. By late 1846, Barnum's Museum was drawing 400,000 visitors a year.
Barnum and Jenny Lind
A much-cited experience of Barnum as a legitimate impresario was his engagement of Jenny Lind, the "Swedish Nightingale", to sing in America at $1,000 a night for 150 nights, all expenses paid by the entrepreneur in advance - an unprecedented offer. "Jenny Lind mania" was sweeping Europe and she was a favorite of Queen Victoria. She was unpretentious, shy, and devout, and possessed a crystal-clear soprano voice projected with a wistful quality which audiences found touching. The offer was accepted in part to free her from opera performances which she disliked and to 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. He borrowed heavily on his mansion and his museum. With bravado, he drummed up publicity but 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 preparations, close to 40,000 greeted her at the docks and another 20,000 at her hotel, the press was in attendance, and "Jenny Lind items" were available. The tour began with the concert at Castle Garden on September 11, 1850 and turned out a success, 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!"
Diversified leisure-time activities
Using profits from the Lind tour, Barnum's next challenge was to change attitudes about the theater from 'dens of evil' to palaces of edification and delight, respectable middle-class entertainment. He built the largest and most modern theater and named it the "Moral Lecture Room", to avoid seedy connotation and 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 The Drunkard, a thinly disguised temperance lecture (he had become a teetotaler after returning from Europe with Tom Thumb). He followed that with melodramas, farces, and historical plays, put on by highly regarded actors. He watered down Shakespearean plays and others such as Uncle Tom's Cabin to make them family entertainment.
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, 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 in real estate to develop East Bridgeport, Connecticut. He made substantial loans to the Jerome Clock Company, 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 court litigation and public humiliation. 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 European tour. Barnum also started a lecture tour, mostly as a temperance speaker. By 1860, he emerged from debt and built a mansion "Lindencroft" (his palace "Iranistan" had burnt down in 1857) and he resumed ownership of his museum.
Despite critics who predicted he could not revive the magic, Barnum went on to 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. The collections expanded to four buildings and he published a "Guide Book to the Museum" which claimed 850,000 'curiosities'.
Late in 1860, the 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 touring career on their own and went to live on a North Carolina plantation with their families and slaves, under the name of "Bunker". They appeared at Barnum's Museum for six weeks. Also in 1860, Barnum introduced the "man-monkey" William Henry Johnson, a microcephalic black dwarf who spoke a mysterious 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 pro-Unionist exhibits, lectures, and dramas, and he demonstrated 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 re-established 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, and Barnum retired from the freak business.
Circus king
Barnum did not enter the circus business until late in his career (he was 61). In Delavan, Wisconsin in 1871 with William Cameron Coup, he established "P. T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome", a traveling circus, menagerie and museum of "freaks", which by 1872 was billing itself as "The Greatest Show on Earth". It went through various 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 fires, train disasters, and other setbacks, Barnum plowed ahead, aided by 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 the world. The show's primary attraction was Jumbo, an African elephant he purchased in 1882 from the London Zoo and who died in a train wreck. Jumbo even\tually became a mascot of Tufts University, in honor of a donation from Barnum in 1882.
Barnum was the first circus owner to move his circus by train, and 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 enlarged Barnum's market. Many circus historians credit Bailey with this innovation. In this new field, Barnum leaned more on the advice of Bailey and other business partners, most of whom were young enough to be his sons.
His life and legacy
Barnum built four mansions in Bridgeport, Connecticut: 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 home on April 7, 1891 and was buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery, Bridgeport, Connecticut, a cemetery he designed. 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 sold to Ringling Brothers on July 8, 1907 for $400,000 (about $8.5 million in 2008 dollars). At his death, most critics had forgiven him and he was praised for good works. Barnum was hailed as an 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 read it. On April 7 he asked about the box office receipts for the day; a few hours later, he was dead.
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 (1880).
Mass publication of his autobiography was one of Barnum's more successful methods of self-promotion. Some had every edition. Barnum eventually gave up his copyright to allow other printers to sell inexpensive editions. At the end of the 19th century the number of copies printed was second only to 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 promotional material, as long as the public was getting value for 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 exposed "the tricks of the trade" used by mediums to cheat the bereaved. In The Humbugs of the World, he offered $500 to any medium who could prove power to communicate with the dead.
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 a performer and promoter in blackface minstrelsy. According to Eric Lott, Barnum's minstrel shows were more double-edged in their humor than most. While still replete with racist stereotypes, Barnum's shows satirized white racial attitudes, as in a stump speech in which a black phrenologist (like all performers, a white man in blackface) made a dialect speech 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 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 other slaves freed. The success led to 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 1840s 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 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 before the legislature and said, "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 mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut for a year and worked to improve the water supply, bring gaslighting to streets, and enforce liquor and prostitution laws. Barnum was instrumental in starting Bridgeport Hospital, founded in 1878, and was its first president.
"Profitable Philanthropy"
Barnum enjoyed what he publicly dubbed "profitable philanthropy." In Barnum's own words: "I have no desire to be considered much of a philanthropist...if by improving and beautifying our city [Bridgeport, CT], and adding to the pleasure and prosperity of my neighbors, I can do so at a profit, the incentive to 'good works' will be twice as strong as if it were otherwise." In line with this philosophy was Barnum's pursuit of major American museums and spectacles. Less known is Barnum's significant contributions to Tufts University. Barnum was appointed to the Board of Trustees prior to the University's founding and made several significant contributions to the then fledgling institution. The most noteworthy example of this was his gift in 1883 of $50,000 dollars ($1,061,700 2007 U.S. dollars) to the University, and with it was established a museum and hall for the Department of Natural History, which today is home to the department of biology.
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.
Statue
David Guesualdi, local resident of Bethel, CT is in the process of creating a sculpture of PT Barnum. The Bethel Public Library hosted a contest to chose between three different statues.
See also
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, .
- 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.
- Jefferson,Margo. On Michael Jackson. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2006. ISBN 978-0307277657. Critique of Michael Jackson, including his obsession with P.T. Barnum and "Freaks."
External links
- at the Barnum Family Genealogy website
- at findagrave
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- - An article about Barnum's handwriting & signature
- - A virtual reproduction of Barnum's American Museum; includes a collection of primary source materials
- Barnum gave $50,000 toward construction of the first building in the Department of Natural History
- Full text of by Joel Benton, from Project Gutenberg
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- Bergh was founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).
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