ULTIMATE HUCKSTER
Grifter held a funhouse mirror up to a gullible American public willing to pay
Barnum: An American Life Robert Wilson Simon & Schuster
Early on in a new American century, there appeared a self-promoting blowhard of a man with an easily branded name and a poof of noticeably weird hair. He conjured fortunes and then lost them in spectacular catastrophes. He would eventually catapult himself into political office as a Bible-hugging Christian, committed to reclaiming American virtue. His proper name would become a common noun, a contemptible exclamation and novel profanity. His name was Phineas T. Barnum.
For Robert Wilson’s smart new biography Barnum, the author chose the plainest subtitle — An American Life — perhaps because nearly every one of the myriad connotations of that central word can be traced to the work of the nation’s first and greatest impresario of grift and the forgotten contributions to what his contemporary, Alexis de Tocqueville, tried to describe as the American character.
As a young kid growing up in small-town Connecticut in the 1820s, Phineas Taylor Barnum, or Tale, as he was known then, right away picked up a key quirk of marketplace capitalism. On one hand there were simple transactions — selling a thing for a fair price — and on the other, there were more impulsive purchases, often hypocritical because they came laced with unspoken hope or morbid curiosity. He noticed that the very clergymen and churchgoers who condemned alcohol also found all kinds of excuses — at funerals, for instance — for why they had to drink. And so teenage Tale created his first truly profitable line of work, selling lottery tickets hyped by worthless prizes to congregations that otherwise thundered about the perils of gambling.
In the 1830s, in a young nation eager to connect to the past, Barnum toured with Joice Heth, an enslaved woman who claimed to be 161 years old and the former nursemaid to George Washington. When she died, there was a call to have an autopsy in the hopes of understanding her longevity, and Barnum agreed. And sold tickets. Fifty cents a pop to see a human being dismembered.
Barnum’s grotesque work, especially early on, seems extreme to us, but it seemed extreme then, too. Wrote one reviewer: A “more indecent mode of raising money than by the exhibition of an old woman — black or white — we can hardly imagine.” And we have to read Barnum today for what is obviously there — issues of race and misogyny, abuse and contempt. But the river that runs through it is marketing.
When minstrel shows were the thing — white men in blackface performing African dance moves — Barnum got into the business. He discovered the best dancer, but there was a problem. The performer, according to a journalist of the time, “was a genuine Negro, and not a counterfeit one, and there was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real Negro.” So Barnum created a new kind of blackface that made a black man look like a white man looking like a black man — and the show went on.
When he began marketing a new find — a stuffed mermaid (a taxidermied fish tail sewn onto the body of an orangutan whose arms had been shortened with a saw and reattached) — he worked every angle.
He created acts so famous that people still know of them. Tom Thumb, Chang and Eng, even animal acts like Jumbo the elephant. These extravaganzas were an attempt to display the world to America, he said, but just as much, America to itself.
Sure, the historians and essayists wrote about America as “a city on a hill.” But for this young country, such stately branding was underselling the place. Barnum was on the road booking “Zazel, the Beautiful Human Cannon Ball” and a “$25,000 Hippopotamus from the river Nile,” busily puffing ticket sales, arriving in brightly painted train cars, and for over a century after he died, his spectacle would tour America with its wonders. Not a nation. The Greatest Show on Earth.