May 8, 2018 • 58 mins
When your life is as outsized as the World’s Greatest Showman PT Barnum it’s pretty easy to - you know - gloss over the grimmer aspects when you turn it into an uplifting musical movie. But the way to understand a person is to look at them, warts and all.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bright. There's Jerry Hello. Hello, Hello, Hello.
(00:22):
Jerry's got a top hat on. I know, I don't
know why. I don't know. She's trying to be all
Mr Monopoly or P. T. Barnum. Oh yeah, I forgot
he wore a top hat allegedly. Oh no, he did.
I saw a picture of it. Yeah, Hugh Grant certainly did.
Hugh Grant, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Laurie. I think it's no,
(00:47):
it's Clive Owen. You're thinking, yeah, Hugh Jackman, Man, where's
that top hat? Like a champ? He does? Um, I
don't know how much you went on the internet for
this one, because this is a pretty comprehensive article actually was,
but um, The Greatest Showman really set the Internet on
fire Man and a lot of like it really brought
(01:09):
out a lot of people saying like, whoa, whoa whoa
whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Yeah, this is the the
very definition of the word fantasy. Yeah, it seemed like
that movie was can be best described as a musical
whitewashing mm hmm in every sense of that word. So
(01:33):
let's destroy it. Yeah, I mean after reading this, I
didn't think, like man P. T. Barnum, what a complete
a whole. No, he was just a lot more complicated
than that and did a lot of stuff that you
just shouldn't just pass over because you can't figure out
lyrics too. What what why? What raps with racism? Uh? Yeah,
(01:57):
I mean he was. He was definitely an enigma and um,
it seems like he did some good. But also, I
mean he was a hustler man for sure. So this
is what I didn't fully understand until researching this chuck.
He he was He's known as the greatest showman, right,
but there were plenty of other showmen out there at
(02:19):
the time, which makes sense because you have to have
something to compare, to be compared to, to be the greatest, right.
But I I guess I had just assumed he was
like the first or the originator. No, he was not
the first showman. He was a great showman. What he
really left his mark on was introducing America to pure,
(02:41):
unadulterated hucksterism and using it for marketing. Humbug that's what
he called it, and he had he had a lot
of quotes somewhere somewhere, definitely something he said like every
crowd has a silver lining, which means you can shake
it out of him and get some money from a
bunch of people. Right, Yeah, the one about a sucker
(03:02):
board every minute. That's never been successfully attributed to him. Well, yeah,
And one thing is for sure, and uh is that
his autobiography is I think if you order it, it
comes with a salt lick, so you can just lick
on that salt while you're reading it. Right. I don't
know what that means, but it seems like something that
(03:23):
they would do. Yeah, I mean he he uh. I
think when the man is writing about himself, it's like,
you know what, you may just want to believe a
third of this. I would take it with a grain
of salt, but so much so that you need an
actual salt lick. I got it, now, I got it. So,
So there is one quote that I think kind of
(03:44):
describes this guy best, or at least his philosophy, and
it also kind of reveals like you can't call him harmless,
but also the intentions were not entirely evil, right, he
had a quote it said that, um, people don't mind
being deceived so long as they're being amused at the
(04:05):
same time, which it does, and it largely lets him
off the hook as far as being a huckster. Right.
But the thing that that The Greatest Showman really glossed over,
just outright ignored, was that a lot of the the
amusements that he was presenting to the public were extraordinarily
(04:25):
degrading two people at the time, Um, they were super racists.
There were, um, just a lot of There was just
a lot of exploitation. He made his money not just
by hustling Americans, but by exploiting other Americans too, right. Um.
And again, like this, a lot of this is contextual.
It's not necessarily fair for later generations to judge previous generations,
(04:49):
although it's really fun to do. Um. But yes, you
could say, like this guy was exploitative even even in
compared even compared to like his contemporary right. Perhaps so
he is just this very complex character who I think
you and I can agree was not an evil person.
He just did some horrible things here there. Should we
(05:11):
go back in time? Yes, let's all right, let's go
back to the beginning, let's hop in the way back machine,
which is appropriately steampunky right now. It takes many forms.
I don't know if people realize that it has a
clock without the glass and you can see the parts inside,
but it doesn't actually function. It's strictly for decoration. So
(05:38):
let's go back to eight ten, back to Bethel, Connecticut,
where this man was born, Mr Phineas Taylor Barnum. Um.
He had sort of a mixed family life. He I mean,
he was they point out in this article. He was
firmly American. His great great great grandfather came over from
England as an indentured servant in the seventeenth century. Eventually
(06:00):
became a landowner, but they didn't It's not like they
had a ton of money. His dad, Filo great name, yeah,
all these are great names. Was he was not super successful. Um.
So it was kind of up to young pt to
Um to make his own way in life. Right as
his father was a farmer, which introduced um Phineas to
(06:22):
the idea that he really hated like manual, mindless work. Now,
he didn't like doing that farm work, but it's that's
not to say he didn't like work. He just liked
very specific kinds of work where his energies were appropriately
chanted building people out of money. Sure, yeah, I mean
that was that was kind of it. He liked. Um.
He was the definition of the word enterprising, right, she
(06:43):
could figure out a way. He could look at something
literally look at something that you couldn't you could almost
not give away, you certainly couldn't sell, and turn it
into pure profits like like he got into lauteries for
a little while once, right, Yeah, I mean he went
he went to work. He left the farm into work
at a country store and realized quickly, like, just because
you're in the country doesn't mean there aren't like swindlers
(07:06):
and cheaters out here. So he kind of learned some
of the tricks of the trade there. His old man
died when he was fifteen, uh, and he was kind
of his his mom had his mom had to get
a job. But he was basically like, all right, it's
kind of up to me now to provide for my family.
So he moved got that another job as a store clerk,
and as you said, got into lotteries. Yeah, And he
(07:28):
was early on pursuing a career at clerkship, which I
guess is a thing. But but yeah, so there's this.
He saw easy money and lottery, so he set up
one himself. Apparently when he was working for these owners
of the store, um, they were away at one point
and he got his eyes on some um tin kitchenware
(07:49):
that just would not sell. So he took some other
stuff that wouldn't sell at that store. These things weren't his,
by the way, and he traded him for a bottle
collection of I guess was the thing that people wanted
at the time. And he put those things up as prizes, right,
and he started a lottery and these were the prizes,
and there were cash prizes. But he ended up selling
(08:11):
like a thousand tickets or something like that in this
little town store, um based on these prizes and some
cash prizes, saying like half of all tickets were going
to be winners and you might win a bottle or
you might win like a tin muffin pan, but you
could also win this cash. And so these things that
had just been sitting on these shelves forever were suddenly
(08:31):
turned into something valuable thanks to his marketing expertise. And
this is while he's still a teenager. Yeah, it's we've
covered this and something before that. Lotteries were a thing
back then that someone could just cook up, you know,
Like it's not like the lotteries we have today, like
be sanctioned, uh, sanctioned ways of stealing people's money, right,
(08:52):
But back then, you could just cook up a lottery
in a small town and be like, you know what
I've got. Uh. It was almost like a Ponzi thing,
like I can raise money, give away some of that
money and prizes, and then keep the rest, right. I
think that was in our lotteries episode. Oh really yeah, Okay, Well,
in order to do that, though, you have to be
a natural born salesperson, which is what he was. You
(09:14):
really do And like lottery has been played like a
theme throughout his early career, like that's how he ended
up making his initial I don't know if fortune is
the right word, but that's how he staked himself and
his family was through lotteries and working in stores and
then eventually owning stores like general stores, grocery stores, that
kind of thing. But the lotteries are where he made
his money, and he actually figured out that you could
(09:37):
make more money with less work than having to go
to the trouble of setting up a lottery. Like you said,
anybody could just set up a lottery, um by taking
tickets from somebody else's lottery and selling them further out
at an increased price. But then he figured out one
more thing, Chuck, You didn't even have to go out
(09:57):
and sell these things yourself. You could hire other are
people to sell them even further out. All you had
to do was give them the tickets and collect the
money that they brought you. So he ended up making
money by basically expanding other people's lotteries for a while,
that's right. And in the middle of this, and he
had moved to Brooklyn at this point, he's kind of
kind of hopping all over the place there in the northeast.
(10:19):
But uh and and to be fair, we're hopping kind
of all over his early life right now. Yeah, chronologically. Yeah. Yeah.
So in this time period he met um who would
become his wife, a woman named Charity Hallett, who he
described in his autobiography as a fair, rosy cheeked buxom girl,
beautiful white teeth. Did I mention she had big boobs,
(10:44):
but those teeth, man. Uh. So they would get married
and I think they had four daughters, Um. But during
all this time he he did he had a little
Josh Clark in him, because how do you mean, Well,
he was writing letters to local papers that weren't getting published,
so he said, you know what, I'm gonna start my
(11:05):
own paper. Yeah, where he clarked himself a paper I'll
see you all in hell media. Yeah, and much like yourself,
you started your own paper, which was kind of cool. Sure,
I mean like, if people won't print your crank ideas,
go start your own paper. It's like if you want
to get your manifesto out there and either either yeah,
(11:25):
either become un obomb or esque, which we don't recommend,
or start your own paper. That's right. And his was
called Harold of Freedom, which is terrible. And this is
where it gets a little weird because he he kind
of went after people. Um was eventually hit with a
libel suit and spent sixty days in jail. But that
sold a lot of papers, and he was also hailed
(11:46):
as a hero because apparently he was legitimately exposing corruption.
So to me, Chuck, that one really stood out, um,
because it shows just how huge this guy's life still
where he is. That that even if you make a
movie out of it all. The best you can hope
for is to pick like five or six or ten
(12:07):
different things and try to find a thread throughout him. Right,
whether that's an accurate portrayal or not, it can't possibly be,
because this guy's life was just so enormous and he
did so many things, and he was such an outsize
character that a lot of times you either vilify him
or glorify him, and it was much more a combination
(12:28):
of both of those things. And I think that example
really says it all. Like he had his his notions,
and he started his own paper and ended up going
to jail and subscription boosted, so he ended up making
money from it. But at the same time, he was
legitimately trying to call out corruption in this town that
he cared about. So his character was much more complex
(12:48):
than than you get just from just about any source
unless you read biographies about him. Agreed. Um, So finally
he says, or I'm sorry, Connecticut said no more lotteries
in Connecticut. So he's like, all right, what am I
doing here? Even if I can't do this little scam?
He's like, I love this time, but not that much.
(13:10):
So in eighteen thirty four, he left the paper, shut
that down, moved his family to New York City, and uh,
should we take a break? Perfect ail, Right, we're in
New York City and we'll be back right after this.
If you want to know then you're in luck. Just
listen up to chuck shoo. Shoot, I got a falafel?
(13:49):
Is it good? It's pretty good? Is it from the
Hallau guys? Of course? Man? Who else you going to
get a falafel from? That's good stuff? Yeah? Uh so, man,
this guy really just reading through this thing. He did
so many jobs, right, he was a factotem dozens and
dozens of jobs through his lifetime. Yeah, and I'm glad
(14:11):
he didn't just stick to clerking, right, or even lottery.
He had this thing like something about show business attracted
this guy. I don't know what it was. Maybe nobody
but him knows what it was. Maybe he doesn't even
know what it was. But he was attracted to the
idea of like wowing and amusing and amazing crowds. And
(14:36):
he he did that pretty early on. I think he
was twenty five when he got into exhibiting a human
being who he purchased and owned for a while, which
by the way does not show up in the Greatest Showman. Right,
And this is after in New York he started a
boarding house for a while and co owned a grocery
(14:57):
store for a while, right, And so like his life
is full of him just trying to do these kind
of regular things and then being like, Nope, I gotta
go buy a lady and put her on display. Right,
And this is after Chuck. By the way, he had
come down with smallpox for a while. Oh did we
miss a small box. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like,
(15:18):
this guy had a huge life. But let's get a
Joyce Heath right, because she is a very controversial part
of um P. T. Barnum's life. She was the first,
his first foray in the show business. And there's no
other way to put it. Like he purchased her. She
was a slave and elderly slave, um who he purchased
(15:39):
from another promoter who had been touting her as General
George Washington's nursemaid from when George Washington was a child.
This is eighteen thirty five, right, she was supposedly a
hundred and sixty one years old. Yeah, so he negotiates
a price. He went, he went and sour, and she
(16:00):
was blind, she had no teeth, she was partially paralyzed,
but she could talk and tell her story. Yeah, she
told stories about young George as a boy. And and
to be fair, she she was already being exploited. It's
not like he which is not great, but it's not
like Barnum introduced this into her life. No, he just
(16:22):
purchased her and took it over, took over the exploitation
for for a thousand dollars, and he toured with her
until she died. Um not that long later, just like
a year later, not even inty six. He made a
lot of dough Um and it was it was sort
of a watershed moment for him where I think he
(16:43):
was like, wait a minute, I've realized that I can
get people um in a room by cooking up these
stories and and getting things in the newspaper and printing
these posters. Uh. And even if, like if if business
was down, he would do these crazy things like one
(17:03):
of them when business was down, appearing with Heth. At
one point he accused her of being a robot what
they called at the time an automaton in an anonymous
letter to the editor in a newspaper. Yeah, a robot
made of whalebone rubber in springs. So everyone was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Not only is she George Washington's nurse maid, but she's
(17:25):
really a robot. Right. What that did was it got
the people who had been avoiding going to see her,
because even at the time, people were like, this is
pure exploitation. This woman is being exhibited like a giraffe
would be or something like that. She's an old lady's
working or ten to twelve hours a day. Some people
(17:46):
think that he worked her to death literally, um. And
so there was part of the press that was saying
and reporting on this with with great distaste. So there's
a segment of American society who would not be caught
dead seeing George Washington's a hundred and sixty year old
nurse maide, but they would conceivably go see an autonomouton
(18:07):
if that's really what was going on. So he managed
to dupe the very people who were critical of this
exploitation that he was undertaking. He got everybody in that one. Well, yeah,
and it gets even worse. Um. Finally, when she passed away,
he actually sold tickets to a public autopsy in a
saloon so people could come look at this poor woman's insides.
(18:32):
And this is where it was finally revealed. Doctor said
she's maybe like eight eight one years old at most, right,
And this was so so Jane um McGrath kind of
walks past, like what a controversy this was. Like this
guy had been like very much touting that she was
the nurse Maide, like he supposedly had the bill of
(18:54):
sale to George Washington's father for her. So like he
was saying, like, this is legitimately hundred and six year
old woman, so in this autopsy that he charged for.
When when it was exposed that she was actually half
that age, um, it was there was a bit of
disgrace there and he had to learn to roll with
the punches. And it was about this time that that
(19:15):
he basically said to himself, you can you can take
this as a lesson and go on the straight and narrow,
maybe get back into clerking, or you can double maybe
triple and quadruple down on this and and see where
that goes. And he chose the ladder of the two
for sure, that's right. He sure did. The next thing
(19:38):
that he did the next person that he kind of
took under his wing. Was his greasy greasy wing? Was
someone called signore senior? Is that senior? Yeah? Was it
spelled that way? Uh? That is the Italian spelling of senor.
Oh well, let me turn it on then, s an
(20:00):
Daniel Antonio. Antonio had an extra bit in there. Senor
Antonio is another way to say, well, sure, if you're
a dullard, I'm a bit of a dullard. Chuck. I
think you know that after ten years, So this guy,
we're really milking that tenure thing. Huh. I've got my
(20:22):
s y s k ten your army short. I see that.
It's very nice, thank you. I've been working on my bucksomeness.
You're quite bucksom. So. Senor Antonio was a balancer. He's
he's one of these guys like a plate spinner, walked
on stilts, juggles. Um. He could throw things in the
air and catch them very fast. Yeah, he's like a hippie.
(20:44):
Yeah exactly. He would be on tour with he'd had
those little sticks what are those called, devil sticks? Devil
sticks or a hackey sack, any of those things. You
pull a hackey stack out of his ear at any moment.
So this guy, he said, all right, you need to
be my newest client. I will make you famous. Change
your your stage name from Senior Antonio to Senor Viva
(21:06):
La because that's a little more I don't know, exciting.
I guess Senor Antonio. Yeah, it's a lateral move. Uh.
Here's the thing, though, is there were a lot of
dudes out there spinning plates. So he it wasn't like
he was so unique, but uh, Barnum thought, you know what,
I think you're better than the rest. So here's what
(21:28):
I'll do. And again this is just another example of
how how good he was at promotion. He said, I'll
do a free performance for a theater. Uh, and I'll
even be your assistant on stage. And people came, and
so the theater said, all right, I guess if people
come for free, they'll pay. I think I think what
he was saying was he Yeah, I think that's exactly.
(21:51):
I think you're right. He just wild them enough. I
think that's that's the impression I have. Yeah. But even still,
despite Vivala being genuinely good, he was I think head
and shoulders above most of his contemporary spinners. Yeah, I
think people saw in the press. Oh there's a really
good plate spinner. We saw a plate spinner at you know,
the at the office last week. So I'm not gonna
(22:14):
go anywhere to see another plate spinner. I'm certainly not
gonna pay. So Barnum had a pretty good idea, but
it actually came out of um an uncomfortable situation that
fell into his lap with Robert's another plate spinner. Yeah,
so this is a rival plate spinner who apparently would
go to prove West Coast. Yeah, he was. He was
(22:36):
a crip and he would go to uh Vivalo's performances
and heckle him. I guess you call that plate spinning boo,
terrible plate spinning stuff like that. And so uh p T.
Barnum cooked up a thing where he was like, all right,
I'll of for one thousand American dollars to anyone who
can perform Vivalo's act in public. Roberts accepted. But here's
(23:00):
what really happened. As he got together with Roberts and
they all three hatched a plan to do these kind
of staged competitions, right, So they promoted in the spinning
competitions East Coast, West Coast plate spinning rivalry is going
on right now. Everybody's gonna come see this, and everybody did.
And in that first performance, Roberts as was staged, conceded
(23:24):
he could not replicate Vivala's act. It was too good.
But I would love to see Vivola replicate my act.
And I challenge you, Senor Vivola, to replicate my act
tomorrow night at this same theater. And they kept going
back and forth like that, Um, with this staged rivalry
that they they they made some cash off of thanks
(23:47):
to Barnum's ingenuity. They did. Finally, in eighteen thirty six,
the circus comes into the picture. He joined a traveling circus.
Barnum did as a ticket seller, which I take it
to mean he doesn't sit in a booth and sell tickets,
but he goes around town selling tickets. Yeah, like chambers
of commerce or something like that. Yeah. And of course
he got a little uh commission off this thing, so
(24:09):
he was making some dough. Favola joined the same circus
as a performer. Of course they were attached at the
hip at that point. That was Chang and Ang bunker
you're thinking of. That's a dad joke. It totally um,
and this one I thought was a little bit weird.
Apparently the circus proprietor, a guy named Turner, was into
(24:33):
practical jokes, and not very good ones. Because this practical
joke was he convinced the crowd that Barnum was the
reverend from Avery who had been acquitted of murder. But
everyone thought that this guy had committed murder, and back
then no one knew anyone looked like So he said,
this guy is from Avery, and he almost got lynched. Apparently, yeah,
(24:55):
like from Avery's name was not very well liked in
the area. He was at the very least he, through
having an adulterous affair with a young woman, had induced
her to kill herself, or at worst, had murdered her
to prevent her from having his illegitimate child. But he's
gonna quit it, right, Andy's a reverend, did we mentioned Um?
(25:17):
So yeah, the crowd, like, according to Barnum, almost killed him.
That's a real funny joke, I know. But then later on,
Jane says that Um that Barnum got got even with
him with his own practical joke. I could find nothing anywhere,
including in Barnum's autobiography that that mentions that I think
he covered his toilet and seran rep cruads. That's so nasty.
(25:43):
Uh No, No, he gave him an upper decker grows.
That's even worse. So apparently these guys got into business
together and it became a thing where people would go
see the circus, where the two ringmasters would would kind
of go at each other with these practical jokes, right,
that became a thing. So so there's a transition going on,
(26:05):
another transition now he is he started out store clerking,
lottery ng when got into show business where it's like
basically a Colonel Tom two different performers, and then now
he's transitioning into the circus. But by now he's been
like married to the road about as much as he's
been married to Charity as as well. And from all accounts,
(26:28):
um like he was very much in love with her
and they were like he was faithful and they were
they were a real couple. But he was on the
road a lot. There's just no if and or butts
about it. He was out there on the road quite
a bit. So transitioning to a circus was basically the
same thing. It was just a little bigger of an outfit,
so it was like a step up. But you got
(26:48):
to also keep in mind here that he's spending a
lot of time on the road at a time when
travel was really long and really tough. That's right, And
so he eventually decides working for when else's circus is
for the birds, I'm gonna start my own. You buy
some horse and wagons. I'm gonna get a clown. You
gotta have a clown. Uh. I think he still had
(27:09):
Vivala at the time. Yeah, and started Barnum's Grand Scientific
and Musical Theater toward all over the place for a
little while, and then they disbanded. Right, Nothing never seemed
to work out for very long. No, I think that
Um he got fed up and says with some of
the rivalries with other showmen, Um that they, you know,
(27:34):
you would build your whole circus around like an act,
and all of a sudden, the act would be like,
I'm I'm sick of this, I'm sick of being on
the road. I'll see you later, and all of a
sudden your circus would fall apart. I think they were
kind of tenuous outfits, right, but he he The thing
about Barnum was like something about this called to him
like he would when his circus collapsed and he was
(27:55):
out in the middle of the country on the road
and he had to go back home. The first thing
you would do is start figuring out his next circus
or his next act, or whatever it was. He would
go back out again. He he was into fact indefatigable
and into fatiguablele in that sense. Uh. Yeah, so I
(28:16):
mean we'll quickly speed through the next couple of years.
He did a little steamboat circus for a little while
along the Mississippi River. Um, that didn't come along. He
tried to do a respectable business again. Uh, went into
business with a guy who manufactured grease paste and cologne.
That did all right for a little while, but then
(28:37):
that failed. Uh. And then this whole time, he still
feels that pool to the tent. Right. He sold illustrated
bibles for a little while. Finally, here's the thing he
wanted stability, Like being out on the road was tough,
as Steve Perry, right, but he wanted this this to
(29:01):
be tied to show business in some way. Finally, one day,
and I think the eighteen forty one, he um he
had another big break or another big vision. There was
a there was a place in New York museum and
what you would call today a museum that was up
(29:22):
for sale in I'm not sure where it was, but
it was in New York, right, and it was called
Scudder's American Museum. And Barnum heard that um Scudder wanted
to get out and was putting the whole collection up
for fifteen grand, which is a substantial amount of money
and definitely more money than than Barnum had. But he said,
that's it right there. I can have a permanent place
(29:44):
where people come to me, and I can be home
with my wife and daughters, but I can still have
this daily interaction with show business. I gotta buy that
thing well, and it will also accomplish this is um.
I can still have my freak show performers. But because
it's a museum, somehow it has a little bit more
(30:06):
respectability because apparently at the time, theaters weren't like they
are today. It wasn't like we're going to the theater.
Theaters could be a little bit like a a second
tier entertainment, right. It was like hoi POLOI tawdry. Crowds
went to the theater that was associated with like burlesque
or something like that, or even like um human oodities
(30:29):
exhibition stuff like that that was theater stuff. A museum
like Scudder's, like respectable people could go there. So what
Barnum did was he he bought a museum and then
dragged it down into the mud, right And this this
whole the way he financed the museum, I didn't fully understand,
to be honest. Do you want me to explain it
if you want, or we could just say he ended
(30:51):
up with the museum in eighteen forty one through a
lot of work, and I think that's that's fair enough
because it is a little bit like you know, Robin
Peter to pay Paul. It wasn't just a straight up purchase.
Let's just say that, right. But so one thing that
you can say about this museum, which he renamed Barnum's
American Museum, it was a big success. And one of
(31:11):
the reasons it was a big success was because he
was he tirelessly worked at finding new and interesting ways
to market the thing, right um, and by I'm not
sure exactly when, but by a very short time after
he opened it, I think that same year, in one
(31:33):
um he he was charged. He charged twenty five cents
a person for admission. He had something like four thousand
visitors a day. And he took this thing, like I
say that he dragged the word museum down in the mud.
He definitely added and expanded to the definition of museum.
And then he also had this lecture hall where he
(31:55):
had like performances that you would see like in a
circus or something like that. And he turned this place
into an emporium just something huge in a an enormous spectacle.
And something like eight hundred and fifty thousand pieces were
on display in his museum. So you definitely got your
quarters worth for sure. Yeah, and those are just the
(32:16):
pieces he also, I mean as far as the circus element,
he had everything covered. He had dancers, musicians, plate spinners, ventriloquists.
Well you gotta have the plate spin He had little people,
he had big people. He had ladies with beards, and
robots and puppets and animals. He had drafts and grizzly bears.
(32:37):
Like he really had everything humming on all cylinders at
this point. Yeah, he really did um. And again there
was still there was that whole thread of like you know,
there are people being exploited. There were people who were
complicit in that. There were people who were Um. Anyone
who came to the museum was gawking at, you know,
(33:01):
the weirdness of these other people or whatever, which again
today is very odd to us, but at the time
um was still odd. Like that's the thing that I
think it's lost on people. Like there were sideshows and
things like that, but Barnum took it to an extraordinary
degree and really ran with it and became extremely rich
(33:22):
as a result. Actually, should we take a break. I'm
ready to all right, the museum's coming along. We're gonna
take a break. We'll be back right after this. If
you want to know you're in luck, just to chuck, Okay,
(33:57):
we're back. Yeah. So we mentioned earlier about the humbug
Um this kind of hucksterism in his biography there or autobiography,
which was rewritten by himself, by the way, after people
read the first version and said, what a jerk. Yeah. Yeah,
he was like just openly boastful and braggart about how
much he exploited people and how much he duped the
(34:19):
American public. He turned it down a little bit in
this in the revision, but he he did talk a
little bit about being slightly embarrassed about kind of how
shameless he was. But then again in the next line
he would say, but you know what, this is how
everyone is in my business. I'm just better at it
than them. Basically, yeah, he said, Um, he said, oh,
(34:43):
there's a great quote. I can't find it anywhere though
where Basically if he if he oh, here it is um.
If his advertising was quote more audacious than his competitors,
it was not because I had less scrupled than they,
but more energy, far more ingenuity, and better foundation for
such promises. He thought a lot of himself. He definitely did.
(35:04):
But he also worked pretty hard at it, for sure.
And I think if you, if you compared apples to
apples at the time, Barnum's jam was way better than
anybody else's jam. Yeah, for sure. So uh. He had
three really big successes in a row with his with
his museum here. The first one was called the Fiji
(35:25):
Mermaid f E j E and um and this was
a big, big deal. He got a man named Levi
Lyman or Levy Lyman. He was an old colleague of his,
and he said, here's what I'll do. You're gonna you
are now, Dr J. Griffin. You're a naturalist for the
British Lyceum of Natural History, which was not a real place,
(35:50):
and you were the you're an ownership of what we'll
call the Fiji mermaid, which was a uh what do
we call it in a taxidermy? Rogue taxidermy. Yeah, it
was rogue taxidermy. It totally was. It was like a jackalope,
except what was it. It was a head of a
baboon torso and orange and tang and a fish tail
(36:13):
just for good measure. Yeah, And as far back as
they can tell, it was probably made by a Japanese
sailor in the eighteen twenties and it passed through a
few hands before Barnum finally leased it and put it
on display. I wonder where that thing is now. I looked.
I I don't know there are other Fiji mermaids out there.
There was it was like kind of a thread of
(36:34):
rogue taxidermy in the mid nineteenth century, and I think
Harvard has went on display. But I looked to find
out where P. T. Barnum's is, and um, I can't find.
It's probably like on Richard Branson's headboard or something. It
may have actually burned up in one of the many
fires that plagued PiZZ Barnum's life. Things are going to
get fiery here in this last bit too. Yeah well, ay, well,
(36:56):
let's get back to the Fiji mermaid though. Okay, so
Dr J. Griffin is touring, touring with this supposedly touring
with this mermaid, right sure, and Barnum, but the guy's
actually not out there touring. Barnum basically creates out a
whole cloth tour of this mermaid, writes letters about how
(37:16):
great this thing is uh in different people's names, and
then mails them two friends that live around the country
and asks them to mail those letters in to two
newspapers in New York, talking about how this thing has
to be seen to be believed. Yeah, so people came
far and wide to see this piece of taxidermy. Yeah.
(37:37):
And by the way, this whole Jay Griffin thing, like
this guy was posing as him. He was giving public
lectures made up as a naturalist, British naturalist, and he
was an American promoter. He had nothing to do. He
was just making all this stuff up. But he would
give like public lectures on it, like the audacity. It's amazing.
(38:00):
Uh So the second big victory was when he met
up with a four year old named Charles Stratton. Uh
he was a little person, his cousin actually, and he
stopped growing when he was two ft tall and he
changed his name, rebranded him as General Tom Thumb and
that name probably rings a bell. They became very famous together.
(38:20):
He said, he was eleven years old, and they were
a a media and ticket selling sensation. Yeah. They would
be like invited in to meet like royalty whatever country
they toured. Um, he was a huge hit at the museum.
It was like a big deal for both barnol Man
and Charles Stratton. The sensation, that's the best way to
(38:44):
put it. In The final big victory of of the
trifecta when he was in Europe with UM with Stratton,
he heard of Jenny Lynn. He was a Swedish opera
singer and this was the kind of thing where he
was like, you know what, she doesn't have a beard.
She's all she is as a talented singer. But she's
amazing and this would really legitimize me if I did
(39:07):
like a straight up act for a change. So even
though she's big over here, they don't know about her
in America and she could blow up there. So I'm
gonna offer her a thousand dollars per performance, which was
a ton of money and a big risk, but he
made about a half a million dollars with her or more.
We branded the Swedish Nightingale by trotting her around the
(39:28):
United States. And uh, she was like beyond a sensation
in the United States. Yeah, that was another thing too.
I mean, like she was pretty big in Europe, but
I don't think she was well known, if known at all,
in America. But by the time she showed up for
the tour starting in eighteen fifty, he had managed to get,
like you said, just turned her into a national sensation.
(39:50):
Like people had like beat a beatlemania for this lady. Um.
This article says that she was not a very nice person.
I didn't see that anywhere else, and I actually saw that.
So after the contract between her and Barnum was up
in eighteen fifty one, she continued to tour America with
like an actual orchestra, I believe um. And she made
(40:14):
three hundred thousand dollars in eighteen fifties money Um from
this whole American tour and donated every single penny of
it to Sweden's public school system, which burgeoning at the time. Yeah,
so I don't know what Jane was talking about, but
I think she just kind of didn't find America very cultured,
(40:34):
is what I get. But apparently Jane didn't like that
America probably wasn't very cultured, right, But I thought that
was pretty neat man. She took all that money and
donated it to the public school system in Sweden. That's crazy.
But yeah, so, so Barnum was not legitimized thanks to that.
I think it actually didn't go all that well. But
he did enrich himself thoroughly through Jenny Lynn, for sure,
(40:58):
that's right. But he go broke again because he's P. T.
Barnum and that's what he does. On the eighteen fifties,
he bought up a lot of land near Bridgeport, Connecticut,
because he wanted to make east Bridgeport. That happened in place. Uh.
He invested in a in the Jerome Clock Company wanted
to relocate it to east Bridgeport. It was not a
(41:18):
smart thing to do. The company went bankrupt and all
of a sudden he was broke again, and this is
fire number one. He moves out of his mansion because
he's broke, and then when after he had moved out,
the mansion burned down. Right, But if he had to
move out, you would think that he had relinquished ownership.
So why does it matter as far as his life goes,
(41:42):
unless he had a bunch of money stuffed into the
insulation or something. I don't know, making bad thing going on.
It might have just been a footnote or something, or
he maybe maybe he did no I guess if he
had moved out then I didn't known it. It's I
just thought that was a little weird. Yeah, so he Um,
he was in debt like big time, like broke bankrupt,
(42:03):
in debt um because of this terrible clock company thing,
which you should always take as a reason to never
put all of your eggs in one basket, which I
guess is what he did. But he managed to um
emerge from debt after I think five years UM, and
he ended up during this time, he pawned his museum,
(42:27):
but he also put the name of the museum in
his wife's name, who was not bankrupt, and so they
were able to make some income off of the lease
for the museum, and then when he managed to buy
the museum back after five years, he just went like
right back to it, like like like he didn't miss
a beat. Yeah, I mean this this tenure period from
(42:49):
eighteen fifty eighteen sixty he went broke. He did the
smart thing, like he said, with his wife. He started
giving lectures about making money. He went on tour again
with Tom Thumb. He got a dead whale. He bought
a dead whale and said, surely people will pay money
to see this. So he was still doing all this
crazy stuff. Um, he bought a hippopotamus, he bought two
(43:14):
beluga whales. Like, it's just crazy the things that he
was doing. Also, Chuck, we have to say that the
title of the lecture tour the Art of money getting.
It's not even the art of making money, the art
of money getting. Yea. So um so the the he's
(43:35):
his stars starting to rise again at the very least,
his fortunes are reversing from from you know, just doing
any kind of work he can get his hands on.
And then all along this way, like Barnum was a
pretty he was what's known as the jackson Ian Democrat.
Jack Andrew Jackson was a populist president, and um he
(43:55):
was Uh I think, didn't we lay? Uh? He was
the one who was responsible for the Trail of tears. Right,
I'm pretty sure that was Andrew Jackson. It was remember
our two part on Trail of Tears. Okay, so he
was he was um P. T. Barnum was of this
man's party. He was Jackson supporter. And then the Civil
(44:18):
War breaks out and all of a sudden, Um Barnum
has this like total conversion. He was not like an
outright bigoted racist who worked to keep African Americans enslaved,
worked as a Confederate sympathizer anything like that. He was
(44:40):
fairly unremarkable and pretty normal, like for example, at his
at his museum, Um, if you were black, you couldn't
come in. It was a segregated museum. But that was
like a lot of businesses at the time. So he
was a very normal pedestrian person as far as his
politics go, and and and socially as well. But something
happened and around the time of the Civil War and
(45:01):
he converted and actually became an abolitionist, huge union supporter,
and um just basically became patriotic and dedicated this idea
of preserving the Union and abolishing slavery. Yeah, and he
used that museum as a sort of ground zero for
his cause. Uh. He had speeches, he had plays that
(45:23):
sort of endorsed this. He had Southern copper heads that
were protesting outside. They threatened his life. And then he said,
at this point, you know what, I might as well
just get into politics, um, legitimately. And in April of
eighteen sixty five, he actually won an election to the
Connecticut General Assembly, where he worked really hard to ratify
(45:44):
the thirteenth Amendment and supported another cause to allow the
rights of black people to vote in Connecticut. Yeah. So
like he was, he was legitimately dedicated to the cause
of abolition, which is totally bizarre. Right. And about this time, too,
is when the revisions to his autobiography are starting to
get much more contrite, much less boastful, um, and even
(46:07):
more apologetic. Uh so he he like he something happened
and he was converted to um the right side of history.
I guess you could call it, you know. Yeah, So
here's where fire number two comes in. After a few
months after this election, his museum burned down along with
the animals in the exhibit, which is super sad is
(46:28):
the first of like two animal fires. Uh. He opened
a new museum a couple of months after that. Three
years later that museum burned down. Didn't want to rebuild
that one. Uh. And then finally in the eighteen seventies,
like it took a long long time before he became
the P. T. Barnum that most people know as the
(46:49):
big circus guy, right, the greatest show on Earth guy. Yeah,
he um hooked up with Barnum and Bailey after hooking
up with a guy named William Cameron or Coup I'm
not sure which one it is, Um, But he had P. T.
Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Circus. That was
(47:10):
eighteen seventy one. And then, Um, did you cover the
eighteen seventy two fire. No, there was another fire that
killed circus animals that the winter at the winter Um
uh camp, which is on the site of where Madison
Square Garden is right now, there's a horrific fire in
the winter Camp in eighteen seventy two killed a bunch
(47:33):
of other circuits animals, which this is this is why
this is one of the reasons why years later Um
Barnum and Bailey's Wrinkling Brothers Circus went away was because
of animals. Yeah, and he, I mean he was by
the time this uh fire happened. That the what was
it called the Hippo Theatron? I think so he uh,
(47:56):
he was very successful with that circus circus he started
with Coupe or coup. Uh. They've made about four grand
in the first year, and it was the very first
circus to kind of do the traditional thing that we
all think of is travel by train, acrobats, clowns, exotic animals,
stuff like that. Uh. And that's when it officially was
called the Greatest show on Earth. So the Hippo Theatron,
(48:22):
such a strange word, burns down and then he's visiting
his friend in England, uh, John Fish. And this is
when his wife, Charity passes away. And as Jane put it,
he was supposedly to grief stricken to return for her funeral,
But the grief must have subsided quickly because he secretly
married Fish's daughter at sixty three years old. He married
(48:45):
twenty two year old Nancy Fish about three and a
half months later after his wife passed. No word about
her teeth no no, or her brass eyes. So um,
they got married secretly fourteen weeks after Charity died, and
then and when they came to the US, they had
a public wedding nine months after that. So um, yeah,
(49:08):
he married her, and I guess he was with her
until his death, right, Well, yeah, in eighteen sixty or
I'm sorry, seventy five, he took a break from the circus,
got back into politics and became the mayor of Bridgeport
for a little while, not US Bridgeport, though he's talking
trash about the Bridgeport And apparently he gets a little
(49:29):
on his high horse now because even though he was
a drinker, pretty heavy drinker for a while, he quit
drinking and then campaigned against um like Sunday sales and
saloons and kind of got a little self righteous, it
seems like. Yeah. He also sponsored the Comstock Law in Connecticut,
which banned contraception, which puts a lot of onus onto
(49:53):
the ladies. Um. And it was in place apparently until
nineteen sixty five and was a really important word in
their chuck sponsored like that means you're the person who
brought it to the General Assembly, not you didn't just
vote yes on it, Like you're the one who said, everybody, everybody,
(50:13):
let's ban contraception for a hundred years and it was successful. Actually,
so yeah, he was. He was a weird dude with
a lot of different weird um thoughts about things and
that were sometimes very contradictory over time. And then finally,
ironically here at the very end of this podcast, in
eighteen eighty he partnered with one James A. Bailey for P. T.
(50:37):
Barnham's Great London Combined. It's it's a terrible name for
a circus, worst circus name ever. Then he had the
word circus in there, and uh, this is when he
got Jumbo the Elephant, which it was. Jumbo was a
legendary attraction until eighty five when Jumbo was killed by
a train and probably caught fire too. And did you
(51:00):
know we were just in Boston that Toughs University their
mascot is Jumbo the Elephant. No, I didn't know that. Yeah,
my buddy Robert explained that to me. And um, apparently
Barnum was one of the early Um what do you
what do you call the people who give universities a
lot of money? Uh, endowment and donors grand person. Sure,
(51:24):
he was all of that. What is that word? I
know what you're talking about. He was all that two
toughs and so Jumbo the elephant became their mascot. And
I think because it does say in here he he
displayed Jumbo's preserved hide and skeleton. I think it was,
or maybe is on display at toughs Um. I'm not
sure if it still is, but I think at one
(51:44):
time it was. So wait a minute, this guy also
gave a substantial amount of money to help found a university.
I don't know found, but to the university. That's a benefactor.
Is that the word benefactor? Yeah? Maybe the found found it.
And I'm not sure the timeline there. Man, that's that's
really crazy. He did lot of stuff. So go jumbos, Yeah,
the fighting jumbos or the passive aggressive jumbos or the
(52:06):
stomping jumbos. Yeah, that's a pretty kid. So Barnem and
Bailey weren't together for too long. Initially they parted ways
but then again joined in seven ultimately finally for the
Barnum and Bailey circus. Yep, they broke up and then
they got back together, and then it stayed that way
until two thousand and sixteen, I think, and then the
(52:28):
circus finally closed down. I went to that thing as
a kid. I think we talked about that. Sure I
did too, um and now we will only go to
the Big Apple Circus, as you know. And I took
a long break because Emily and I were tired of going,
and then uh, now we got a kid. My mom
was like, you know, you gotta start going again. You
have to. So we went this year. How was it. Oh,
(52:52):
it's okay. You know, I'm not the biggest circus guy.
I've realized. Are you afraid of clowns? No? Not these?
Are you afraid of acro bat? I could take these clowns.
Um No. And actually the acrobats at the Big Apple
Circus or the the what's it called, it's the famous ones.
The family, Oh, the Flying Zamboni's Yeah, or was it
(53:13):
Zamboni's not Zamboni's, I don't remember. It's something like that,
but it's them. It's still still that family. Wow, that's
really that's something. And they you know, they did a
great job. But at the end of the day, I'm
just kind of about a third of the way through,
I'm looking at my watch you know. Oh, I got you.
I've seen a couple of circus so lates. Those are
the last circus as I saw. Those are okay. But
(53:35):
we saw the Michael Jackson one in Las Vegas and
man Alive was good. Yeah, there's a Michael Jackson cirque. Yes, dude.
And I have to tell you, like, I'm not some
die hard Michael Jackson fan, but you don't have to
be this to appreciate this. It is amazing, like like
it's worth going to Vegas to go see, turning around
(53:56):
and going home. I don't know. There's probably a few
I bet we hear from some Michael Jackson anti Michael
Jackson fans. Uh. Finally, p T. Barnum has a stroke
during a performance. He has one weird, strange wish at
the end of his life is to have his obituary
(54:17):
published before he dies. Yeah. I don't know why I
did that, maybe too, I don't know either. I think
I don't know, but that's a heck of a way
to end this podcast. And so maybe he wanted to
feel the public outpouring or something. Uh, it could be that,
or he wanted to proof read it or something. I
don't know, but if he wanted. If that was what
he was after, why didn't they just um send it
(54:40):
to him ahead of time to actually published it. Yeah,
it's weird. Well, we'll find out one day when we
die and go to heaven and meet P. T. Barnum. Agreed,
So are you got anything else? Nope, there's probably tons
more that we missed. And if you know something about
Pete Barnum that we didn't know, let us know. We'll
(55:03):
just add to this guy's story over time. Okay. Uh.
In the meantime, if you want to read this great
article by Jay McGrath, type im P. T. Barnum in
the search bar. How stuff works. Since I said search bars,
time for listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this
Uni Bomber follow up. Okay. I was into that one,
(55:24):
The UNI Bomber. Yeah, yeah, that was a good episode.
That was a good tenth anniversary episode. Milk. Hey, guys,
congratulation on ten years milk, Milk. I look forward to
many more listen to Uni Bomber and thought it would
share something that covers a related, if somewhat different, aspect
of the story about ten years ago when I was
still a wee law student taking a legal ethics course.
(55:46):
One of the situations we discussed was Ted Kazinski and
the ethical dilemma his lawyers faced. Criminal defendants had the
absolute right to dictate certain aspects of their representation, like
whether or not flee guilty, but there are other aspects
of the representation that the lawyer controls, the most notable
being trial strategy. While lawyers should always listen to the
clients overall goals, sometimes as necessary to override a client's
(56:10):
wishes on how to achieve their goals, but because the
client's desired strategy is either legally incorrect, unethical, or simply
ill advise, Kazynski's case presented an interesting ethical problem for
the attorneys because he refused to allow them to pursue
what they perceived to be his best defense and his
only hope of avoiding the death penalty, namely claiming he
(56:31):
was not guilty by reason of mental disease, known as
the insanity defense. The conflict was that, on one hand,
his attorneys had a duty to zealously represent him, but
Kazinski objected so vehemently to the chosen defense. At at
one point he attempted to go pro say a k
a represent himself, which would have been an utter disaster. Uh.
(56:53):
As you noted, he pled guilty, so we'll never know
what they would have decided to do had he conned
a trial. But his case is one which most lawyers
thought about or discussed at some point in their careers.
That is good Fordham Walk go Rams And that is
from Deb. Thanks Deb, appreciate that. Yeah, I remember what
(57:14):
kind of saying like this whole thing was. He didn't
he played guilty because they didn't want to plead insane
because his ramblings would have been the ramblings of a
convicted insane mad man. Very interesting. Uh again, thanks Deb.
We always love hearing from lawyers out there. That whole
joke about lawyers at the bottom of the sea being
a good start. We have always found it tasteless. So
(57:36):
get in touch with us. You can via Twitter. I'm
at josh Um Clark and at s y s K podcast,
and Chuck is at movie Crush, Chuck's on Facebook dot com,
Slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and slash stuff. You should
know you can send us and Jerry an email to
Stuff podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and has
(57:57):
always joined us at our home on the Web Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
Mhm m
Welcome to Stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bright. There's Jerry Hello. Hello, Hello, Hello.
(00:22):
Jerry's got a top hat on. I know, I don't
know why. I don't know. She's trying to be all
Mr Monopoly or P. T. Barnum. Oh yeah, I forgot
he wore a top hat allegedly. Oh no, he did.
I saw a picture of it. Yeah, Hugh Grant certainly did.
Hugh Grant, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Laurie. I think it's no,
(00:47):
it's Clive Owen. You're thinking, yeah, Hugh Jackman, Man, where's
that top hat? Like a champ? He does? Um, I
don't know how much you went on the internet for
this one, because this is a pretty comprehensive article actually was,
but um, The Greatest Showman really set the Internet on
fire Man and a lot of like it really brought
(01:09):
out a lot of people saying like, whoa, whoa whoa
whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. Yeah, this is the the
very definition of the word fantasy. Yeah, it seemed like
that movie was can be best described as a musical
whitewashing mm hmm in every sense of that word. So
(01:33):
let's destroy it. Yeah, I mean after reading this, I
didn't think, like man P. T. Barnum, what a complete
a whole. No, he was just a lot more complicated
than that and did a lot of stuff that you
just shouldn't just pass over because you can't figure out
lyrics too. What what why? What raps with racism? Uh? Yeah,
(01:57):
I mean he was. He was definitely an enigma and um,
it seems like he did some good. But also, I
mean he was a hustler man for sure. So this
is what I didn't fully understand until researching this chuck.
He he was He's known as the greatest showman, right,
but there were plenty of other showmen out there at
(02:19):
the time, which makes sense because you have to have
something to compare, to be compared to, to be the greatest, right.
But I I guess I had just assumed he was
like the first or the originator. No, he was not
the first showman. He was a great showman. What he
really left his mark on was introducing America to pure,
(02:41):
unadulterated hucksterism and using it for marketing. Humbug that's what
he called it, and he had he had a lot
of quotes somewhere somewhere, definitely something he said like every
crowd has a silver lining, which means you can shake
it out of him and get some money from a
bunch of people. Right, Yeah, the one about a sucker
(03:02):
board every minute. That's never been successfully attributed to him. Well, yeah,
And one thing is for sure, and uh is that
his autobiography is I think if you order it, it
comes with a salt lick, so you can just lick
on that salt while you're reading it. Right. I don't
know what that means, but it seems like something that
(03:23):
they would do. Yeah, I mean he he uh. I
think when the man is writing about himself, it's like,
you know what, you may just want to believe a
third of this. I would take it with a grain
of salt, but so much so that you need an
actual salt lick. I got it, now, I got it. So,
So there is one quote that I think kind of
(03:44):
describes this guy best, or at least his philosophy, and
it also kind of reveals like you can't call him harmless,
but also the intentions were not entirely evil, right, he
had a quote it said that, um, people don't mind
being deceived so long as they're being amused at the
(04:05):
same time, which it does, and it largely lets him
off the hook as far as being a huckster. Right.
But the thing that that The Greatest Showman really glossed over,
just outright ignored, was that a lot of the the
amusements that he was presenting to the public were extraordinarily
(04:25):
degrading two people at the time, Um, they were super racists.
There were, um, just a lot of There was just
a lot of exploitation. He made his money not just
by hustling Americans, but by exploiting other Americans too, right. Um.
And again, like this, a lot of this is contextual.
It's not necessarily fair for later generations to judge previous generations,
(04:49):
although it's really fun to do. Um. But yes, you
could say, like this guy was exploitative even even in
compared even compared to like his contemporary right. Perhaps so
he is just this very complex character who I think
you and I can agree was not an evil person.
He just did some horrible things here there. Should we
(05:11):
go back in time? Yes, let's all right, let's go
back to the beginning, let's hop in the way back machine,
which is appropriately steampunky right now. It takes many forms.
I don't know if people realize that it has a
clock without the glass and you can see the parts inside,
but it doesn't actually function. It's strictly for decoration. So
(05:38):
let's go back to eight ten, back to Bethel, Connecticut,
where this man was born, Mr Phineas Taylor Barnum. Um.
He had sort of a mixed family life. He I mean,
he was they point out in this article. He was
firmly American. His great great great grandfather came over from
England as an indentured servant in the seventeenth century. Eventually
(06:00):
became a landowner, but they didn't It's not like they
had a ton of money. His dad, Filo great name, yeah,
all these are great names. Was he was not super successful. Um.
So it was kind of up to young pt to
Um to make his own way in life. Right as
his father was a farmer, which introduced um Phineas to
(06:22):
the idea that he really hated like manual, mindless work. Now,
he didn't like doing that farm work, but it's that's
not to say he didn't like work. He just liked
very specific kinds of work where his energies were appropriately
chanted building people out of money. Sure, yeah, I mean
that was that was kind of it. He liked. Um.
He was the definition of the word enterprising, right, she
(06:43):
could figure out a way. He could look at something
literally look at something that you couldn't you could almost
not give away, you certainly couldn't sell, and turn it
into pure profits like like he got into lauteries for
a little while once, right, Yeah, I mean he went
he went to work. He left the farm into work
at a country store and realized quickly, like, just because
you're in the country doesn't mean there aren't like swindlers
(07:06):
and cheaters out here. So he kind of learned some
of the tricks of the trade there. His old man
died when he was fifteen, uh, and he was kind
of his his mom had his mom had to get
a job. But he was basically like, all right, it's
kind of up to me now to provide for my family.
So he moved got that another job as a store clerk,
and as you said, got into lotteries. Yeah, And he
(07:28):
was early on pursuing a career at clerkship, which I
guess is a thing. But but yeah, so there's this.
He saw easy money and lottery, so he set up
one himself. Apparently when he was working for these owners
of the store, um, they were away at one point
and he got his eyes on some um tin kitchenware
(07:49):
that just would not sell. So he took some other
stuff that wouldn't sell at that store. These things weren't his,
by the way, and he traded him for a bottle
collection of I guess was the thing that people wanted
at the time. And he put those things up as prizes, right,
and he started a lottery and these were the prizes,
and there were cash prizes. But he ended up selling
(08:11):
like a thousand tickets or something like that in this
little town store, um based on these prizes and some
cash prizes, saying like half of all tickets were going
to be winners and you might win a bottle or
you might win like a tin muffin pan, but you
could also win this cash. And so these things that
had just been sitting on these shelves forever were suddenly
(08:31):
turned into something valuable thanks to his marketing expertise. And
this is while he's still a teenager. Yeah, it's we've
covered this and something before that. Lotteries were a thing
back then that someone could just cook up, you know,
Like it's not like the lotteries we have today, like
be sanctioned, uh, sanctioned ways of stealing people's money, right,
(08:52):
But back then, you could just cook up a lottery
in a small town and be like, you know what
I've got. Uh. It was almost like a Ponzi thing,
like I can raise money, give away some of that
money and prizes, and then keep the rest, right. I
think that was in our lotteries episode. Oh really yeah, Okay, Well,
in order to do that, though, you have to be
a natural born salesperson, which is what he was. You
(09:14):
really do And like lottery has been played like a
theme throughout his early career, like that's how he ended
up making his initial I don't know if fortune is
the right word, but that's how he staked himself and
his family was through lotteries and working in stores and
then eventually owning stores like general stores, grocery stores, that
kind of thing. But the lotteries are where he made
his money, and he actually figured out that you could
(09:37):
make more money with less work than having to go
to the trouble of setting up a lottery. Like you said,
anybody could just set up a lottery, um by taking
tickets from somebody else's lottery and selling them further out
at an increased price. But then he figured out one
more thing, Chuck, You didn't even have to go out
(09:57):
and sell these things yourself. You could hire other are
people to sell them even further out. All you had
to do was give them the tickets and collect the
money that they brought you. So he ended up making
money by basically expanding other people's lotteries for a while,
that's right. And in the middle of this, and he
had moved to Brooklyn at this point, he's kind of
kind of hopping all over the place there in the northeast.
(10:19):
But uh and and to be fair, we're hopping kind
of all over his early life right now. Yeah, chronologically. Yeah. Yeah.
So in this time period he met um who would
become his wife, a woman named Charity Hallett, who he
described in his autobiography as a fair, rosy cheeked buxom girl,
beautiful white teeth. Did I mention she had big boobs,
(10:44):
but those teeth, man. Uh. So they would get married
and I think they had four daughters, Um. But during
all this time he he did he had a little
Josh Clark in him, because how do you mean, Well,
he was writing letters to local papers that weren't getting published,
so he said, you know what, I'm gonna start my
(11:05):
own paper. Yeah, where he clarked himself a paper I'll
see you all in hell media. Yeah, and much like yourself,
you started your own paper, which was kind of cool. Sure,
I mean like, if people won't print your crank ideas,
go start your own paper. It's like if you want
to get your manifesto out there and either either yeah,
(11:25):
either become un obomb or esque, which we don't recommend,
or start your own paper. That's right. And his was
called Harold of Freedom, which is terrible. And this is
where it gets a little weird because he he kind
of went after people. Um was eventually hit with a
libel suit and spent sixty days in jail. But that
sold a lot of papers, and he was also hailed
(11:46):
as a hero because apparently he was legitimately exposing corruption.
So to me, Chuck, that one really stood out, um,
because it shows just how huge this guy's life still
where he is. That that even if you make a
movie out of it all. The best you can hope
for is to pick like five or six or ten
(12:07):
different things and try to find a thread throughout him. Right,
whether that's an accurate portrayal or not, it can't possibly be,
because this guy's life was just so enormous and he
did so many things, and he was such an outsize
character that a lot of times you either vilify him
or glorify him, and it was much more a combination
(12:28):
of both of those things. And I think that example
really says it all. Like he had his his notions,
and he started his own paper and ended up going
to jail and subscription boosted, so he ended up making
money from it. But at the same time, he was
legitimately trying to call out corruption in this town that
he cared about. So his character was much more complex
(12:48):
than than you get just from just about any source
unless you read biographies about him. Agreed. Um, So finally
he says, or I'm sorry, Connecticut said no more lotteries
in Connecticut. So he's like, all right, what am I
doing here? Even if I can't do this little scam?
He's like, I love this time, but not that much.
(13:10):
So in eighteen thirty four, he left the paper, shut
that down, moved his family to New York City, and uh,
should we take a break? Perfect ail, Right, we're in
New York City and we'll be back right after this.
If you want to know then you're in luck. Just
listen up to chuck shoo. Shoot, I got a falafel?
(13:49):
Is it good? It's pretty good? Is it from the
Hallau guys? Of course? Man? Who else you going to
get a falafel from? That's good stuff? Yeah? Uh so, man,
this guy really just reading through this thing. He did
so many jobs, right, he was a factotem dozens and
dozens of jobs through his lifetime. Yeah, and I'm glad
(14:11):
he didn't just stick to clerking, right, or even lottery.
He had this thing like something about show business attracted
this guy. I don't know what it was. Maybe nobody
but him knows what it was. Maybe he doesn't even
know what it was. But he was attracted to the
idea of like wowing and amusing and amazing crowds. And
(14:36):
he he did that pretty early on. I think he
was twenty five when he got into exhibiting a human
being who he purchased and owned for a while, which
by the way does not show up in the Greatest Showman. Right,
And this is after in New York he started a
boarding house for a while and co owned a grocery
(14:57):
store for a while, right, And so like his life
is full of him just trying to do these kind
of regular things and then being like, Nope, I gotta
go buy a lady and put her on display. Right,
And this is after Chuck. By the way, he had
come down with smallpox for a while. Oh did we
miss a small box. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like,
(15:18):
this guy had a huge life. But let's get a
Joyce Heath right, because she is a very controversial part
of um P. T. Barnum's life. She was the first,
his first foray in the show business. And there's no
other way to put it. Like he purchased her. She
was a slave and elderly slave, um who he purchased
(15:39):
from another promoter who had been touting her as General
George Washington's nursemaid from when George Washington was a child.
This is eighteen thirty five, right, she was supposedly a
hundred and sixty one years old. Yeah, so he negotiates
a price. He went, he went and sour, and she
(16:00):
was blind, she had no teeth, she was partially paralyzed,
but she could talk and tell her story. Yeah, she
told stories about young George as a boy. And and
to be fair, she she was already being exploited. It's
not like he which is not great, but it's not
like Barnum introduced this into her life. No, he just
(16:22):
purchased her and took it over, took over the exploitation
for for a thousand dollars, and he toured with her
until she died. Um not that long later, just like
a year later, not even inty six. He made a
lot of dough Um and it was it was sort
of a watershed moment for him where I think he
(16:43):
was like, wait a minute, I've realized that I can
get people um in a room by cooking up these
stories and and getting things in the newspaper and printing
these posters. Uh. And even if, like if if business
was down, he would do these crazy things like one
(17:03):
of them when business was down, appearing with Heth. At
one point he accused her of being a robot what
they called at the time an automaton in an anonymous
letter to the editor in a newspaper. Yeah, a robot
made of whalebone rubber in springs. So everyone was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Not only is she George Washington's nurse maid, but she's
(17:25):
really a robot. Right. What that did was it got
the people who had been avoiding going to see her,
because even at the time, people were like, this is
pure exploitation. This woman is being exhibited like a giraffe
would be or something like that. She's an old lady's
working or ten to twelve hours a day. Some people
(17:46):
think that he worked her to death literally, um. And
so there was part of the press that was saying
and reporting on this with with great distaste. So there's
a segment of American society who would not be caught
dead seeing George Washington's a hundred and sixty year old
nurse maide, but they would conceivably go see an autonomouton
(18:07):
if that's really what was going on. So he managed
to dupe the very people who were critical of this
exploitation that he was undertaking. He got everybody in that one. Well, yeah,
and it gets even worse. Um. Finally, when she passed away,
he actually sold tickets to a public autopsy in a
saloon so people could come look at this poor woman's insides.
(18:32):
And this is where it was finally revealed. Doctor said
she's maybe like eight eight one years old at most, right,
And this was so so Jane um McGrath kind of
walks past, like what a controversy this was. Like this
guy had been like very much touting that she was
the nurse Maide, like he supposedly had the bill of
(18:54):
sale to George Washington's father for her. So like he
was saying, like, this is legitimately hundred and six year
old woman, so in this autopsy that he charged for.
When when it was exposed that she was actually half
that age, um, it was there was a bit of
disgrace there and he had to learn to roll with
the punches. And it was about this time that that
(19:15):
he basically said to himself, you can you can take
this as a lesson and go on the straight and narrow,
maybe get back into clerking, or you can double maybe
triple and quadruple down on this and and see where
that goes. And he chose the ladder of the two
for sure, that's right. He sure did. The next thing
(19:38):
that he did the next person that he kind of
took under his wing. Was his greasy greasy wing? Was
someone called signore senior? Is that senior? Yeah? Was it
spelled that way? Uh? That is the Italian spelling of senor.
Oh well, let me turn it on then, s an
(20:00):
Daniel Antonio. Antonio had an extra bit in there. Senor
Antonio is another way to say, well, sure, if you're
a dullard, I'm a bit of a dullard. Chuck. I
think you know that after ten years, So this guy,
we're really milking that tenure thing. Huh. I've got my
(20:22):
s y s k ten your army short. I see that.
It's very nice, thank you. I've been working on my bucksomeness.
You're quite bucksom. So. Senor Antonio was a balancer. He's
he's one of these guys like a plate spinner, walked
on stilts, juggles. Um. He could throw things in the
air and catch them very fast. Yeah, he's like a hippie.
(20:44):
Yeah exactly. He would be on tour with he'd had
those little sticks what are those called, devil sticks? Devil
sticks or a hackey sack, any of those things. You
pull a hackey stack out of his ear at any moment.
So this guy, he said, all right, you need to
be my newest client. I will make you famous. Change
your your stage name from Senior Antonio to Senor Viva
(21:06):
La because that's a little more I don't know, exciting.
I guess Senor Antonio. Yeah, it's a lateral move. Uh.
Here's the thing, though, is there were a lot of
dudes out there spinning plates. So he it wasn't like
he was so unique, but uh, Barnum thought, you know what,
I think you're better than the rest. So here's what
(21:28):
I'll do. And again this is just another example of
how how good he was at promotion. He said, I'll
do a free performance for a theater. Uh, and I'll
even be your assistant on stage. And people came, and
so the theater said, all right, I guess if people
come for free, they'll pay. I think I think what
he was saying was he Yeah, I think that's exactly.
(21:51):
I think you're right. He just wild them enough. I
think that's that's the impression I have. Yeah. But even still,
despite Vivala being genuinely good, he was I think head
and shoulders above most of his contemporary spinners. Yeah, I
think people saw in the press. Oh there's a really
good plate spinner. We saw a plate spinner at you know,
the at the office last week. So I'm not gonna
(22:14):
go anywhere to see another plate spinner. I'm certainly not
gonna pay. So Barnum had a pretty good idea, but
it actually came out of um an uncomfortable situation that
fell into his lap with Robert's another plate spinner. Yeah,
so this is a rival plate spinner who apparently would
go to prove West Coast. Yeah, he was. He was
(22:36):
a crip and he would go to uh Vivalo's performances
and heckle him. I guess you call that plate spinning boo,
terrible plate spinning stuff like that. And so uh p T.
Barnum cooked up a thing where he was like, all right,
I'll of for one thousand American dollars to anyone who
can perform Vivalo's act in public. Roberts accepted. But here's
(23:00):
what really happened. As he got together with Roberts and
they all three hatched a plan to do these kind
of staged competitions, right, So they promoted in the spinning
competitions East Coast, West Coast plate spinning rivalry is going
on right now. Everybody's gonna come see this, and everybody did.
And in that first performance, Roberts as was staged, conceded
(23:24):
he could not replicate Vivala's act. It was too good.
But I would love to see Vivola replicate my act.
And I challenge you, Senor Vivola, to replicate my act
tomorrow night at this same theater. And they kept going
back and forth like that, Um, with this staged rivalry
that they they they made some cash off of thanks
(23:47):
to Barnum's ingenuity. They did. Finally, in eighteen thirty six,
the circus comes into the picture. He joined a traveling circus.
Barnum did as a ticket seller, which I take it
to mean he doesn't sit in a booth and sell tickets,
but he goes around town selling tickets. Yeah, like chambers
of commerce or something like that. Yeah. And of course
he got a little uh commission off this thing, so
(24:09):
he was making some dough. Favola joined the same circus
as a performer. Of course they were attached at the
hip at that point. That was Chang and Ang bunker
you're thinking of. That's a dad joke. It totally um,
and this one I thought was a little bit weird.
Apparently the circus proprietor, a guy named Turner, was into
(24:33):
practical jokes, and not very good ones. Because this practical
joke was he convinced the crowd that Barnum was the
reverend from Avery who had been acquitted of murder. But
everyone thought that this guy had committed murder, and back
then no one knew anyone looked like So he said,
this guy is from Avery, and he almost got lynched. Apparently, yeah,
(24:55):
like from Avery's name was not very well liked in
the area. He was at the very least he, through
having an adulterous affair with a young woman, had induced
her to kill herself, or at worst, had murdered her
to prevent her from having his illegitimate child. But he's
gonna quit it, right, Andy's a reverend, did we mentioned Um?
(25:17):
So yeah, the crowd, like, according to Barnum, almost killed him.
That's a real funny joke, I know. But then later on,
Jane says that Um that Barnum got got even with
him with his own practical joke. I could find nothing anywhere,
including in Barnum's autobiography that that mentions that I think
he covered his toilet and seran rep cruads. That's so nasty.
(25:43):
Uh No, No, he gave him an upper decker grows.
That's even worse. So apparently these guys got into business
together and it became a thing where people would go
see the circus, where the two ringmasters would would kind
of go at each other with these practical jokes, right,
that became a thing. So so there's a transition going on,
(26:05):
another transition now he is he started out store clerking,
lottery ng when got into show business where it's like
basically a Colonel Tom two different performers, and then now
he's transitioning into the circus. But by now he's been
like married to the road about as much as he's
been married to Charity as as well. And from all accounts,
(26:28):
um like he was very much in love with her
and they were like he was faithful and they were
they were a real couple. But he was on the
road a lot. There's just no if and or butts
about it. He was out there on the road quite
a bit. So transitioning to a circus was basically the
same thing. It was just a little bigger of an outfit,
so it was like a step up. But you got
(26:48):
to also keep in mind here that he's spending a
lot of time on the road at a time when
travel was really long and really tough. That's right, And
so he eventually decides working for when else's circus is
for the birds, I'm gonna start my own. You buy
some horse and wagons. I'm gonna get a clown. You
gotta have a clown. Uh. I think he still had
(27:09):
Vivala at the time. Yeah, and started Barnum's Grand Scientific
and Musical Theater toward all over the place for a
little while, and then they disbanded. Right, Nothing never seemed
to work out for very long. No, I think that
Um he got fed up and says with some of
the rivalries with other showmen, Um that they, you know,
(27:34):
you would build your whole circus around like an act,
and all of a sudden, the act would be like,
I'm I'm sick of this, I'm sick of being on
the road. I'll see you later, and all of a
sudden your circus would fall apart. I think they were
kind of tenuous outfits, right, but he he The thing
about Barnum was like something about this called to him
like he would when his circus collapsed and he was
(27:55):
out in the middle of the country on the road
and he had to go back home. The first thing
you would do is start figuring out his next circus
or his next act, or whatever it was. He would
go back out again. He he was into fact indefatigable
and into fatiguablele in that sense. Uh. Yeah, so I
(28:16):
mean we'll quickly speed through the next couple of years.
He did a little steamboat circus for a little while
along the Mississippi River. Um, that didn't come along. He
tried to do a respectable business again. Uh, went into
business with a guy who manufactured grease paste and cologne.
That did all right for a little while, but then
(28:37):
that failed. Uh. And then this whole time, he still
feels that pool to the tent. Right. He sold illustrated
bibles for a little while. Finally, here's the thing he
wanted stability, Like being out on the road was tough,
as Steve Perry, right, but he wanted this this to
(29:01):
be tied to show business in some way. Finally, one day,
and I think the eighteen forty one, he um he
had another big break or another big vision. There was
a there was a place in New York museum and
what you would call today a museum that was up
(29:22):
for sale in I'm not sure where it was, but
it was in New York, right, and it was called
Scudder's American Museum. And Barnum heard that um Scudder wanted
to get out and was putting the whole collection up
for fifteen grand, which is a substantial amount of money
and definitely more money than than Barnum had. But he said,
that's it right there. I can have a permanent place
(29:44):
where people come to me, and I can be home
with my wife and daughters, but I can still have
this daily interaction with show business. I gotta buy that
thing well, and it will also accomplish this is um.
I can still have my freak show performers. But because
it's a museum, somehow it has a little bit more
(30:06):
respectability because apparently at the time, theaters weren't like they
are today. It wasn't like we're going to the theater.
Theaters could be a little bit like a a second
tier entertainment, right. It was like hoi POLOI tawdry. Crowds
went to the theater that was associated with like burlesque
or something like that, or even like um human oodities
(30:29):
exhibition stuff like that that was theater stuff. A museum
like Scudder's, like respectable people could go there. So what
Barnum did was he he bought a museum and then
dragged it down into the mud, right And this this
whole the way he financed the museum, I didn't fully understand,
to be honest. Do you want me to explain it
if you want, or we could just say he ended
(30:51):
up with the museum in eighteen forty one through a
lot of work, and I think that's that's fair enough
because it is a little bit like you know, Robin
Peter to pay Paul. It wasn't just a straight up purchase.
Let's just say that, right. But so one thing that
you can say about this museum, which he renamed Barnum's
American Museum, it was a big success. And one of
(31:11):
the reasons it was a big success was because he
was he tirelessly worked at finding new and interesting ways
to market the thing, right um, and by I'm not
sure exactly when, but by a very short time after
he opened it, I think that same year, in one
(31:33):
um he he was charged. He charged twenty five cents
a person for admission. He had something like four thousand
visitors a day. And he took this thing, like I
say that he dragged the word museum down in the mud.
He definitely added and expanded to the definition of museum.
And then he also had this lecture hall where he
(31:55):
had like performances that you would see like in a
circus or something like that. And he turned this place
into an emporium just something huge in a an enormous spectacle.
And something like eight hundred and fifty thousand pieces were
on display in his museum. So you definitely got your
quarters worth for sure. Yeah, and those are just the
(32:16):
pieces he also, I mean as far as the circus element,
he had everything covered. He had dancers, musicians, plate spinners, ventriloquists.
Well you gotta have the plate spin He had little people,
he had big people. He had ladies with beards, and
robots and puppets and animals. He had drafts and grizzly bears.
(32:37):
Like he really had everything humming on all cylinders at
this point. Yeah, he really did um. And again there
was still there was that whole thread of like you know,
there are people being exploited. There were people who were
complicit in that. There were people who were Um. Anyone
who came to the museum was gawking at, you know,
(33:01):
the weirdness of these other people or whatever, which again
today is very odd to us, but at the time
um was still odd. Like that's the thing that I
think it's lost on people. Like there were sideshows and
things like that, but Barnum took it to an extraordinary
degree and really ran with it and became extremely rich
(33:22):
as a result. Actually, should we take a break. I'm
ready to all right, the museum's coming along. We're gonna
take a break. We'll be back right after this. If
you want to know you're in luck, just to chuck, Okay,
(33:57):
we're back. Yeah. So we mentioned earlier about the humbug
Um this kind of hucksterism in his biography there or autobiography,
which was rewritten by himself, by the way, after people
read the first version and said, what a jerk. Yeah. Yeah,
he was like just openly boastful and braggart about how
much he exploited people and how much he duped the
(34:19):
American public. He turned it down a little bit in
this in the revision, but he he did talk a
little bit about being slightly embarrassed about kind of how
shameless he was. But then again in the next line
he would say, but you know what, this is how
everyone is in my business. I'm just better at it
than them. Basically, yeah, he said, Um, he said, oh,
(34:43):
there's a great quote. I can't find it anywhere though
where Basically if he if he oh, here it is um.
If his advertising was quote more audacious than his competitors,
it was not because I had less scrupled than they,
but more energy, far more ingenuity, and better foundation for
such promises. He thought a lot of himself. He definitely did.
(35:04):
But he also worked pretty hard at it, for sure.
And I think if you, if you compared apples to
apples at the time, Barnum's jam was way better than
anybody else's jam. Yeah, for sure. So uh. He had
three really big successes in a row with his with
his museum here. The first one was called the Fiji
(35:25):
Mermaid f E j E and um and this was
a big, big deal. He got a man named Levi
Lyman or Levy Lyman. He was an old colleague of his,
and he said, here's what I'll do. You're gonna you
are now, Dr J. Griffin. You're a naturalist for the
British Lyceum of Natural History, which was not a real place,
(35:50):
and you were the you're an ownership of what we'll
call the Fiji mermaid, which was a uh what do
we call it in a taxidermy? Rogue taxidermy. Yeah, it
was rogue taxidermy. It totally was. It was like a jackalope,
except what was it. It was a head of a
baboon torso and orange and tang and a fish tail
(36:13):
just for good measure. Yeah, And as far back as
they can tell, it was probably made by a Japanese
sailor in the eighteen twenties and it passed through a
few hands before Barnum finally leased it and put it
on display. I wonder where that thing is now. I looked.
I I don't know there are other Fiji mermaids out there.
There was it was like kind of a thread of
(36:34):
rogue taxidermy in the mid nineteenth century, and I think
Harvard has went on display. But I looked to find
out where P. T. Barnum's is, and um, I can't find.
It's probably like on Richard Branson's headboard or something. It
may have actually burned up in one of the many
fires that plagued PiZZ Barnum's life. Things are going to
get fiery here in this last bit too. Yeah well, ay, well,
(36:56):
let's get back to the Fiji mermaid though. Okay, so
Dr J. Griffin is touring, touring with this supposedly touring
with this mermaid, right sure, and Barnum, but the guy's
actually not out there touring. Barnum basically creates out a
whole cloth tour of this mermaid, writes letters about how
(37:16):
great this thing is uh in different people's names, and
then mails them two friends that live around the country
and asks them to mail those letters in to two
newspapers in New York, talking about how this thing has
to be seen to be believed. Yeah, so people came
far and wide to see this piece of taxidermy. Yeah.
(37:37):
And by the way, this whole Jay Griffin thing, like
this guy was posing as him. He was giving public
lectures made up as a naturalist, British naturalist, and he
was an American promoter. He had nothing to do. He
was just making all this stuff up. But he would
give like public lectures on it, like the audacity. It's amazing.
(38:00):
Uh So the second big victory was when he met
up with a four year old named Charles Stratton. Uh
he was a little person, his cousin actually, and he
stopped growing when he was two ft tall and he
changed his name, rebranded him as General Tom Thumb and
that name probably rings a bell. They became very famous together.
(38:20):
He said, he was eleven years old, and they were
a a media and ticket selling sensation. Yeah. They would
be like invited in to meet like royalty whatever country
they toured. Um, he was a huge hit at the museum.
It was like a big deal for both barnol Man
and Charles Stratton. The sensation, that's the best way to
(38:44):
put it. In The final big victory of of the
trifecta when he was in Europe with UM with Stratton,
he heard of Jenny Lynn. He was a Swedish opera
singer and this was the kind of thing where he
was like, you know what, she doesn't have a beard.
She's all she is as a talented singer. But she's
amazing and this would really legitimize me if I did
(39:07):
like a straight up act for a change. So even
though she's big over here, they don't know about her
in America and she could blow up there. So I'm
gonna offer her a thousand dollars per performance, which was
a ton of money and a big risk, but he
made about a half a million dollars with her or more.
We branded the Swedish Nightingale by trotting her around the
(39:28):
United States. And uh, she was like beyond a sensation
in the United States. Yeah, that was another thing too.
I mean, like she was pretty big in Europe, but
I don't think she was well known, if known at all,
in America. But by the time she showed up for
the tour starting in eighteen fifty, he had managed to get,
like you said, just turned her into a national sensation.
(39:50):
Like people had like beat a beatlemania for this lady. Um.
This article says that she was not a very nice person.
I didn't see that anywhere else, and I actually saw that.
So after the contract between her and Barnum was up
in eighteen fifty one, she continued to tour America with
like an actual orchestra, I believe um. And she made
(40:14):
three hundred thousand dollars in eighteen fifties money Um from
this whole American tour and donated every single penny of
it to Sweden's public school system, which burgeoning at the time. Yeah,
so I don't know what Jane was talking about, but
I think she just kind of didn't find America very cultured,
(40:34):
is what I get. But apparently Jane didn't like that
America probably wasn't very cultured, right, But I thought that
was pretty neat man. She took all that money and
donated it to the public school system in Sweden. That's crazy.
But yeah, so, so Barnum was not legitimized thanks to that.
I think it actually didn't go all that well. But
he did enrich himself thoroughly through Jenny Lynn, for sure,
(40:58):
that's right. But he go broke again because he's P. T.
Barnum and that's what he does. On the eighteen fifties,
he bought up a lot of land near Bridgeport, Connecticut,
because he wanted to make east Bridgeport. That happened in place. Uh.
He invested in a in the Jerome Clock Company wanted
to relocate it to east Bridgeport. It was not a
(41:18):
smart thing to do. The company went bankrupt and all
of a sudden he was broke again, and this is
fire number one. He moves out of his mansion because
he's broke, and then when after he had moved out,
the mansion burned down. Right, But if he had to
move out, you would think that he had relinquished ownership.
So why does it matter as far as his life goes,
(41:42):
unless he had a bunch of money stuffed into the
insulation or something. I don't know, making bad thing going on.
It might have just been a footnote or something, or
he maybe maybe he did no I guess if he
had moved out then I didn't known it. It's I
just thought that was a little weird. Yeah, so he Um,
he was in debt like big time, like broke bankrupt,
(42:03):
in debt um because of this terrible clock company thing,
which you should always take as a reason to never
put all of your eggs in one basket, which I
guess is what he did. But he managed to um
emerge from debt after I think five years UM, and
he ended up during this time, he pawned his museum,
(42:27):
but he also put the name of the museum in
his wife's name, who was not bankrupt, and so they
were able to make some income off of the lease
for the museum, and then when he managed to buy
the museum back after five years, he just went like
right back to it, like like like he didn't miss
a beat. Yeah, I mean this this tenure period from
(42:49):
eighteen fifty eighteen sixty he went broke. He did the
smart thing, like he said, with his wife. He started
giving lectures about making money. He went on tour again
with Tom Thumb. He got a dead whale. He bought
a dead whale and said, surely people will pay money
to see this. So he was still doing all this
crazy stuff. Um, he bought a hippopotamus, he bought two
(43:14):
beluga whales. Like, it's just crazy the things that he
was doing. Also, Chuck, we have to say that the
title of the lecture tour the Art of money getting.
It's not even the art of making money, the art
of money getting. Yea. So um so the the he's
(43:35):
his stars starting to rise again at the very least,
his fortunes are reversing from from you know, just doing
any kind of work he can get his hands on.
And then all along this way, like Barnum was a
pretty he was what's known as the jackson Ian Democrat.
Jack Andrew Jackson was a populist president, and um he
(43:55):
was Uh I think, didn't we lay? Uh? He was
the one who was responsible for the Trail of tears. Right,
I'm pretty sure that was Andrew Jackson. It was remember
our two part on Trail of Tears. Okay, so he
was he was um P. T. Barnum was of this
man's party. He was Jackson supporter. And then the Civil
(44:18):
War breaks out and all of a sudden, Um Barnum
has this like total conversion. He was not like an
outright bigoted racist who worked to keep African Americans enslaved,
worked as a Confederate sympathizer anything like that. He was
(44:40):
fairly unremarkable and pretty normal, like for example, at his
at his museum, Um, if you were black, you couldn't
come in. It was a segregated museum. But that was
like a lot of businesses at the time. So he
was a very normal pedestrian person as far as his
politics go, and and and socially as well. But something
happened and around the time of the Civil War and
(45:01):
he converted and actually became an abolitionist, huge union supporter,
and um just basically became patriotic and dedicated this idea
of preserving the Union and abolishing slavery. Yeah, and he
used that museum as a sort of ground zero for
his cause. Uh. He had speeches, he had plays that
(45:23):
sort of endorsed this. He had Southern copper heads that
were protesting outside. They threatened his life. And then he said,
at this point, you know what, I might as well
just get into politics, um, legitimately. And in April of
eighteen sixty five, he actually won an election to the
Connecticut General Assembly, where he worked really hard to ratify
(45:44):
the thirteenth Amendment and supported another cause to allow the
rights of black people to vote in Connecticut. Yeah. So
like he was, he was legitimately dedicated to the cause
of abolition, which is totally bizarre. Right. And about this time, too,
is when the revisions to his autobiography are starting to
get much more contrite, much less boastful, um, and even
(46:07):
more apologetic. Uh so he he like he something happened
and he was converted to um the right side of history.
I guess you could call it, you know. Yeah, So
here's where fire number two comes in. After a few
months after this election, his museum burned down along with
the animals in the exhibit, which is super sad is
(46:28):
the first of like two animal fires. Uh. He opened
a new museum a couple of months after that. Three
years later that museum burned down. Didn't want to rebuild
that one. Uh. And then finally in the eighteen seventies,
like it took a long long time before he became
the P. T. Barnum that most people know as the
(46:49):
big circus guy, right, the greatest show on Earth guy. Yeah,
he um hooked up with Barnum and Bailey after hooking
up with a guy named William Cameron or Coup I'm
not sure which one it is, Um, But he had P. T.
Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Circus. That was
(47:10):
eighteen seventy one. And then, Um, did you cover the
eighteen seventy two fire. No, there was another fire that
killed circus animals that the winter at the winter Um
uh camp, which is on the site of where Madison
Square Garden is right now, there's a horrific fire in
the winter Camp in eighteen seventy two killed a bunch
(47:33):
of other circuits animals, which this is this is why
this is one of the reasons why years later Um
Barnum and Bailey's Wrinkling Brothers Circus went away was because
of animals. Yeah, and he, I mean he was by
the time this uh fire happened. That the what was
it called the Hippo Theatron? I think so he uh,
(47:56):
he was very successful with that circus circus he started
with Coupe or coup. Uh. They've made about four grand
in the first year, and it was the very first
circus to kind of do the traditional thing that we
all think of is travel by train, acrobats, clowns, exotic animals,
stuff like that. Uh. And that's when it officially was
called the Greatest show on Earth. So the Hippo Theatron,
(48:22):
such a strange word, burns down and then he's visiting
his friend in England, uh, John Fish. And this is
when his wife, Charity passes away. And as Jane put it,
he was supposedly to grief stricken to return for her funeral,
But the grief must have subsided quickly because he secretly
married Fish's daughter at sixty three years old. He married
(48:45):
twenty two year old Nancy Fish about three and a
half months later after his wife passed. No word about
her teeth no no, or her brass eyes. So um,
they got married secretly fourteen weeks after Charity died, and
then and when they came to the US, they had
a public wedding nine months after that. So um, yeah,
(49:08):
he married her, and I guess he was with her
until his death, right, Well, yeah, in eighteen sixty or
I'm sorry, seventy five, he took a break from the circus,
got back into politics and became the mayor of Bridgeport
for a little while, not US Bridgeport, though he's talking
trash about the Bridgeport And apparently he gets a little
(49:29):
on his high horse now because even though he was
a drinker, pretty heavy drinker for a while, he quit
drinking and then campaigned against um like Sunday sales and
saloons and kind of got a little self righteous, it
seems like. Yeah. He also sponsored the Comstock Law in Connecticut,
which banned contraception, which puts a lot of onus onto
(49:53):
the ladies. Um. And it was in place apparently until
nineteen sixty five and was a really important word in
their chuck sponsored like that means you're the person who
brought it to the General Assembly, not you didn't just
vote yes on it, Like you're the one who said, everybody, everybody,
(50:13):
let's ban contraception for a hundred years and it was successful. Actually,
so yeah, he was. He was a weird dude with
a lot of different weird um thoughts about things and
that were sometimes very contradictory over time. And then finally,
ironically here at the very end of this podcast, in
eighteen eighty he partnered with one James A. Bailey for P. T.
(50:37):
Barnham's Great London Combined. It's it's a terrible name for
a circus, worst circus name ever. Then he had the
word circus in there, and uh, this is when he
got Jumbo the Elephant, which it was. Jumbo was a
legendary attraction until eighty five when Jumbo was killed by
a train and probably caught fire too. And did you
(51:00):
know we were just in Boston that Toughs University their
mascot is Jumbo the Elephant. No, I didn't know that. Yeah,
my buddy Robert explained that to me. And um, apparently
Barnum was one of the early Um what do you
what do you call the people who give universities a
lot of money? Uh, endowment and donors grand person. Sure,
(51:24):
he was all of that. What is that word? I
know what you're talking about. He was all that two
toughs and so Jumbo the elephant became their mascot. And
I think because it does say in here he he
displayed Jumbo's preserved hide and skeleton. I think it was,
or maybe is on display at toughs Um. I'm not
sure if it still is, but I think at one
(51:44):
time it was. So wait a minute, this guy also
gave a substantial amount of money to help found a university.
I don't know found, but to the university. That's a benefactor.
Is that the word benefactor? Yeah? Maybe the found found it.
And I'm not sure the timeline there. Man, that's that's
really crazy. He did lot of stuff. So go jumbos, Yeah,
the fighting jumbos or the passive aggressive jumbos or the
(52:06):
stomping jumbos. Yeah, that's a pretty kid. So Barnem and
Bailey weren't together for too long. Initially they parted ways
but then again joined in seven ultimately finally for the
Barnum and Bailey circus. Yep, they broke up and then
they got back together, and then it stayed that way
until two thousand and sixteen, I think, and then the
(52:28):
circus finally closed down. I went to that thing as
a kid. I think we talked about that. Sure I
did too, um and now we will only go to
the Big Apple Circus, as you know. And I took
a long break because Emily and I were tired of going,
and then uh, now we got a kid. My mom
was like, you know, you gotta start going again. You
have to. So we went this year. How was it. Oh,
(52:52):
it's okay. You know, I'm not the biggest circus guy.
I've realized. Are you afraid of clowns? No? Not these?
Are you afraid of acro bat? I could take these clowns.
Um No. And actually the acrobats at the Big Apple
Circus or the the what's it called, it's the famous ones.
The family, Oh, the Flying Zamboni's Yeah, or was it
(53:13):
Zamboni's not Zamboni's, I don't remember. It's something like that,
but it's them. It's still still that family. Wow, that's
really that's something. And they you know, they did a
great job. But at the end of the day, I'm
just kind of about a third of the way through,
I'm looking at my watch you know. Oh, I got you.
I've seen a couple of circus so lates. Those are
the last circus as I saw. Those are okay. But
(53:35):
we saw the Michael Jackson one in Las Vegas and
man Alive was good. Yeah, there's a Michael Jackson cirque. Yes, dude.
And I have to tell you, like, I'm not some
die hard Michael Jackson fan, but you don't have to
be this to appreciate this. It is amazing, like like
it's worth going to Vegas to go see, turning around
(53:56):
and going home. I don't know. There's probably a few
I bet we hear from some Michael Jackson anti Michael
Jackson fans. Uh. Finally, p T. Barnum has a stroke
during a performance. He has one weird, strange wish at
the end of his life is to have his obituary
(54:17):
published before he dies. Yeah. I don't know why I
did that, maybe too, I don't know either. I think
I don't know, but that's a heck of a way
to end this podcast. And so maybe he wanted to
feel the public outpouring or something. Uh, it could be that,
or he wanted to proof read it or something. I
don't know, but if he wanted. If that was what
he was after, why didn't they just um send it
(54:40):
to him ahead of time to actually published it. Yeah,
it's weird. Well, we'll find out one day when we
die and go to heaven and meet P. T. Barnum. Agreed,
So are you got anything else? Nope, there's probably tons
more that we missed. And if you know something about
Pete Barnum that we didn't know, let us know. We'll
(55:03):
just add to this guy's story over time. Okay. Uh.
In the meantime, if you want to read this great
article by Jay McGrath, type im P. T. Barnum in
the search bar. How stuff works. Since I said search bars,
time for listener mail. All right, I'm gonna call this
Uni Bomber follow up. Okay. I was into that one,
(55:24):
The UNI Bomber. Yeah, yeah, that was a good episode.
That was a good tenth anniversary episode. Milk. Hey, guys,
congratulation on ten years milk, Milk. I look forward to
many more listen to Uni Bomber and thought it would
share something that covers a related, if somewhat different, aspect
of the story about ten years ago when I was
still a wee law student taking a legal ethics course.
(55:46):
One of the situations we discussed was Ted Kazinski and
the ethical dilemma his lawyers faced. Criminal defendants had the
absolute right to dictate certain aspects of their representation, like
whether or not flee guilty, but there are other aspects
of the representation that the lawyer controls, the most notable
being trial strategy. While lawyers should always listen to the
clients overall goals, sometimes as necessary to override a client's
(56:10):
wishes on how to achieve their goals, but because the
client's desired strategy is either legally incorrect, unethical, or simply
ill advise, Kazynski's case presented an interesting ethical problem for
the attorneys because he refused to allow them to pursue
what they perceived to be his best defense and his
only hope of avoiding the death penalty, namely claiming he
(56:31):
was not guilty by reason of mental disease, known as
the insanity defense. The conflict was that, on one hand,
his attorneys had a duty to zealously represent him, but
Kazinski objected so vehemently to the chosen defense. At at
one point he attempted to go pro say a k
a represent himself, which would have been an utter disaster. Uh.
(56:53):
As you noted, he pled guilty, so we'll never know
what they would have decided to do had he conned
a trial. But his case is one which most lawyers
thought about or discussed at some point in their careers.
That is good Fordham Walk go Rams And that is
from Deb. Thanks Deb, appreciate that. Yeah, I remember what
(57:14):
kind of saying like this whole thing was. He didn't
he played guilty because they didn't want to plead insane
because his ramblings would have been the ramblings of a
convicted insane mad man. Very interesting. Uh again, thanks Deb.
We always love hearing from lawyers out there. That whole
joke about lawyers at the bottom of the sea being
a good start. We have always found it tasteless. So
(57:36):
get in touch with us. You can via Twitter. I'm
at josh Um Clark and at s y s K podcast,
and Chuck is at movie Crush, Chuck's on Facebook dot com,
Slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant and slash stuff. You should
know you can send us and Jerry an email to
Stuff podcast at how Stuff Works dot com and has
(57:57):
always joined us at our home on the Web Stuff
you Should Know dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.
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