Phineas T. Barnum

Phineas Taylor Barnum, photograph by Mathew Brady, c.1860

Phineas Taylor Barnum (July 5, 1810 – April 7, 1891) was an entrepreneur, Bridgeport Mayor, Connecticut state legislator, urban developer, civic leader, community benefactor, philanthropist, abolitionist, and author. He made an indelible mark on American culture not only through his innovative entertainment but also in his wealth of written work.

Barnum was devoted to intellectual and cultural development in American society. His efforts integrally forged great advancements in entertainment and industry, not only in the United States, but globally as well. The imapct of P.T. Barnum's life's work reaches far into the American heritage, and the story of his vast contributions are preserved and celebrated in the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Early Life

Ad for "The Greatest Show on Earth," 1878.

Barnum was born in Bethel, Connecticut, the oldest of five children of inn-keeper and store-keeper Philo Barnum and third great grandson of Thomas Barnum, the immigrant ancestor of the Barnum family in North America. Following his father Barnum started as a store-keeper, and became involved with the lottery mania then sweeping the United States. After failing in business, he started a weekly newspaper in 1829, The Herald of Freedom, in Danbury, Connecticut. After several libel suits and a prosecution which resulted in imprisonment, he moved to New York City in 1834.

Showman

In 1835 began his career as a showman with his $1000 purchase of a blind and almost completely paralyzed African-American slave woman, Joice Heth. Barnum claimed she had been the nurse of George Washington, and to be over 160 years old. Barnum exhibited her in New York and New England, profiting in about $1,500 per week.

With this woman and a small company he made well-advertised and successful tours in America until 1839, though Joice Heth died in 1836, when her age was proved to be not more than eighty. After a period of failure he purchased Scudder's American Museum, at Broadway and Ann Street, New York City, in 1841. He renamed it "Barnum's American Museum" with a considerable addition of exhibits, it became one of the most popular showplaces in the United States. He made a special hit in 1842 with the exhibition of Charles Stratton, the celebrated dwarf "General Tom Thumb," as well as the Feejee Mermaid which he exhibited in collaboration with his Boston counterpart Moses Kimball. His collection also included the original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker. In 1843 Barnum hired the traditional Native American dancer Do-Hum-Me. During 1844-45 Barnum toured with Charles Stratton in Europe and met with Queen Victoria. A remarkable instance of his enterprise was the engagement of Jenny Lind to sing in America at $1,000 a night for 150 nights, all expenses being paid by the entrepreneur. The tour began in 1850, and was a great success for both Lind and Barnum.

1856 newspaper advertisement for Barnum's American Museum located on Ann Street in Manhattan.

Barnum retired from the show business in 1855, but had to settle with his creditors in 1857, and began his old career again as showman and museum proprietor. In 1862 he discovered the giantess Anna Swan but on July 13, 1865, Barnum's American Museum burned to the ground. Barnum quickly reestablished the Museum at another location in New York City, but this too was destroyed by fire in March, 1868. In Brooklyn, New York 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." 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.

Author and debunker

Parody of Jenny Lind's first American tour for P.T. Barnum, New York City, October 1850

In 1854, Barnum wrote and published his autobiography: The Life Of P.T. Barnum, Written By Himself. Mass publication of his autobiography was one of Barnum's more successful methods of self-promotion. The autobiography was so popular that some people made a point of acquiring and reading each edition. Some collectors were known to boast they had a copy of every edition in their library. Barnum eventually gave up his claim of copyright to allow other printers to publish and sell inexpensive editions. At the end of the 19th century the number of copies printed of the autobiography was second only to the number of copies of 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 their promotional material, just as long as the public was getting good value for its money. However, he was contemptuous of those who made money through fraudulent deceptions, especially the spiritualist mediums popular in his day. Prefiguring illusionists Harry Houdini and James Randi, Barnum publicly exposed "the tricks of the trade" used by mediums to deceive and cheat grieving survivors. In The Humbugs of the World, he offered a $500 reward to any medium who could prove their claimed power to communicate with the dead without trickery.

Politician and reformer

Phineas Taylor Barnum in his later years. Yale University archive)

Barnum was significantly involved in the politics surrounding race, slavery, and sectionalism in the period leading up the American Civil War. He had some of his first success as an impresario through the former slave Joice Heth. Around 1850, he was involved in a hoax in which it was claimed that a weed existed that would turn black people white.

Barnum was involved (both as performer and promoter) in blackface minstrelsy. According to Eric Lott, Barnum's minstrel shows were often more double-edged in their humor than most at this period. While still replete with racist stereotypes, Barnum's shows also satirized white racial attitudes, as in a stump speech in which a black phrenologist (like all performers in the show, actually a white man in blackface) made a dialect speech paralleling and 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."

Promotion of minstrel shows led indirectly 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 various other slaves freed. The success of this Uncle Tom led, in turn, to his promotion of a production of a play based on Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. By 1860, Barnum had become a Republican.

While he claimed "politics were always distasteful to me," Barnum was elected to the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as the 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 eloquently before the legislature and said, in part, "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 elected mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut for a one year term and worked vigorously to improve the city water supply, bring gaslighting to the streets, and strictly enforce liquor and prostitution laws. Barnum was instrumental in starting Bridgeport Hospital, founded in 1878, and served as its first president.

Later Life and Legacy

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.

Several weeks before he died in his sleep, on April 7, 1891, Barnum read his own obituary: The New York Sun newspaper, responding to Barnum's comment that the press says nice things about people after they die, ran his obituary on the front page with the headline, "Great And Only Barnum — He Wanted To Read His Obituary — Here It Is."? Barnum was laid to rest at Mountain Grove Cemetery in Bridgeport, Connecticut after a pre-arrangement funeral by Barnum himself. A statue in his honor was erected 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 a price of $400,000 USD.

Barnum was a very generous man. He left Bridgeport Universalist society a legacy of $15,000. He bequeathed Tufts College $50,000 to establish a Museum of Natural History; and later he gave Tufts another $100,000 to build two wings to the museum. Barnum further aided the museum with exhibits of mounted skins, skeletons and other animal remains, and the great elephant Jumbo's hide.

Works

• Art of Getting Money, or, Golden Rules for Making Money
• Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years' Recollections of P.T. Barnum
• The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe
• The Life of P.T. Barnum: Written By Himself
• The Wild Beasts, Birds and Reptiles of the World: The Story of their Capture
• The Humbugs of the World

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Adams, Bluford. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ISBN 9780816626311
• Barnum, Patrick Warren. Barnum genealogy 650 years of family history. Laredo, Tex: Ediciones InterGrafica 2005. ISBN 9780976872702
• Benton, Joel. The life of Phineas T. Barnum. [Ottawa]: eBooksLib 2004. ISBN 9781554493289
• Cook, James W. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN 9780674005914
• Harding, Les. Elephant Story: Jumbo and P. T. Barnum Under the Big Top. Jefferson, NC.: McFarland & Co., 2000. ISBN 0786406321
• Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. ISBN 0226317528.
• Reiss, Benjamin. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. ISBN 0674006364
• Saxon, Arthur H. P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. ISBN 0231056877.

External links

• P.T. Barnum's genealogy Retrieved October 16, 2007.
• P.T. Barnum's gravesite Retrieved October 16, 2007.
• The Barnum Museum Retrieved October 16, 2007.
• P.T. Barnum at Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus Retrieved October 16, 2007.
• Barnum's American Museum Retrieved October 16, 2007.
• The Lost Museum Retrieved October 16, 2007.
• The Life of Phineas T. Barnum Retrieved October 16, 2007.
• P.T. Barnum and Henry Bergh Retrieved October 16, 2007.

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