SYMHC Classics: P.T. Barnum's Biggest Stars

This 2012 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers some of the performers he worked with, including General Tom Thumb. Swedish singer Jenny Lind, and his biggest act, Jumbo the Elephant. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since we had our prior episode on P. T.
Barnum as last week's Saturday Classic, this week we're returning
to a follow up episode on some of Barnum's biggest
side show acts and other stars. These are changing Ing Bunker,
Charles Sherwood Stratton who was known as General Tom Thum,
Jenny Lynn, and Jumbo the Elephants. And of course this

(00:26):
means that this episode is largely about an industry that
turned people's disabilities and differences into carnival attractions. And as
another heads up, it does involve a pretty horrifying animal
death towards the end of the episode. This originally came
out on Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,

(00:48):
a production of I Heart Radio Hello and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Blan choker Boy.
And when we talked about the Prince of Humbug P. T.
Barnum recently, we really focused on what a diverse career
he had. He wasn't all about the circus that of

(01:10):
course didn't even come along until he was in his
sixties and was long after he had already established his name.
And he also ran menagerie's, He managed a museum filled
with wax works and taxidermy animals, and he had hoaxes
like the Fiji Mermaid. Early in his career he staged
minstrel shows and other quote low forms of entertainment, and

(01:31):
later he of course mounted freak shows like ten in One,
and even took a swing at some kind of highbrow
entertainment acting as an impressario for a famous European opera singer.
He did a lot of stuff he did. So today
we're going to visit a few stages of Barnum's career,
taking a closer look at the acts that made him
famous and seeing how some of his performers could become

(01:53):
incredibly famous and successful themselves. But since we'll be starting
with some of Barnum's most famous quote freaks before moving
on to more conventional and animal stars, it might be
good to discuss that strange combination of exploitation and success
that existed in the sideshow world of the eighteen hundreds.
I mean, the fact that some freak show stars did

(02:15):
achieve success might be surprising to modern audiences, because today
it can actually be really disturbing to read the details
of many of Barnum's prized acts, especially the ones involving
people with physical disabilities, it really can be. I mean,
everything seems wrong about exhibiting a six year old Burmese
girl and allowing audience members to touch her just because

(02:37):
she had hair covering her body, as Barnum did in
fact do with kral Ferini, who was billed as the
Missing Link. And some stories from Barnum's contemporaries are really
just plain tragic. Theodore Lent, for instance, who toured Europe
with another hair covered woman, this time Mexican born Julia Pastrna,
eventually married her, but when she died after having there

(02:59):
still born baby, Lent had both of them mummified and
continued to exhibit them. But for some of these stars,
a disability or an unusual skill actually really did bring
fame and fortune, with many of the biggest names finding
a way to separate their stage identity is so called freaks,
from their off stage identities as normal business people and performers.

(03:21):
One of Barnum's hit acts, Isaac W. Sprague, the American
human skeleton who weighed only forty three pounds, was as
much of a marketing man as Barnum himself. He wrote
an autobiography, and he sold trading cards and all the
profits went to him. Yeah, And the trading card business
was a big deal for a lot of these performers
because whereas the showman would get a cut of their performances,

(03:43):
they could pocket all that money from the trading cards.
And according to Laura Grand in History Magazine, Barnum quote
built a strong rapport with the majority of his freaks
in the US, And to me that made sense. It
seems like it would be a bad idea to do otherwise,
because with so competition from other showmen, it would be
bad business to alienate your performers. And we're going to

(04:06):
see some of that what kind of alienation can happen
there with our first entry on this list. But the
first act that we're going to discuss kicked off the
heyday of small American freak shows and really set a
standard to for side show performers making serious money and
living lives that were also completely apart from their work
on stage. So Ladies and Gentlemen, Chang and Ang Bunker.

(04:30):
These first entries on our list were associated with Barnum,
but probably less so than some of the later acts
that we're going to discuss, but still they could be
the names that you're most likely to recognize today because
Changang Bunker Sarah mentioned they were the original Siamese twins,
which meant basically that was the first time that the
word Siamese twin or the term Siamese twin was used

(04:52):
to describe this particular joint condition exactly. They were born
May eleven, eighteen eleven, on a houseboat in Siam, which
is out Thailand, and they were connected from birth by
a band of tissue between their chests and stomachs. Their
umbilical cord fed into this band, and when they were born,
they were twisted so that they faced different directions. So

(05:12):
their mother sort of untwisted that band almost so that
each baby faced the same direction. If you see pictures
of them, they just looked like two guys standing next
to each other. And as they grew she really encouraged
them to be as active as possible. They could run,
they could swim, something that's very amazing. They could fight
each other, which they did a lot too, and they

(05:34):
could maneuver the houseboat that they lived on too. And
they would also work on stretching that band a little bit,
stretching in enough so that eventually they could each stand
relatively upright, and they would usually pose with their arms
around each other's shoulders. They were healthy too, and they
survived smallpox, the same outbreak that killed three of their

(05:54):
other siblings, and when their father died when they were eight,
They helped support their family by raising ducks while their
unique medical condition earned them an audience before the King
of Siam. Interestingly, the king's predecessor had briefly considered having
them executed. When he learned of their existence, he changed
his mind. He decided there was nothing threatening about them,

(06:14):
but still a close call for little Chang and Ang there.
Each boy, of course, also had a completely separate identity.
Chang was considered to be very outgoing, kind of had
a quick temper. Ang was considered to be very thoughtful,
introspective and right away. This was something that distinguished them
from earlier conjoined twin acts like the Colorado Brothers from

(06:36):
early seventeenth century Genoa, which was an act that featured
Lazarus and his smaller, incomplete twin who couldn't speak, he
couldn't really control his own movements. It was basically Lazarus
that was in charge. The draw with Chang and Ang
was that they were each so independent in a way,
so distinct, and their distinct personalities, combined with their cooperative coordination,

(06:59):
eventually caught the eye of Scottish merchant Robert Hunter, who
partnered up with a captain Able Coffin to exhibit the
Boys in nine They bought the nearly grown teens from
their mother, and according to Holly Martin in the Journal
of American Culture, they were billed as quote the Monster
and then quote the Siamese Double Boys, and they were

(07:20):
pretty much a hit from the start. At first, they
also felt comfortable with their working arrangement because they'd get
what they saw is a fair cut of what was
made the profits, and they'd invest in their own act
by adding tricks like flips and somersaults, making the show
a little more exciting for folks. But in eighteen thirty one,
Coffin took soul management and the brothers, who were displeased

(07:42):
by their take. He reduced what they were making significantly,
they decided to ditch their management. They left Coffin and
managed themselves, and this started a very profitable stage in
their career. They met Barnum, they briefly worked at his museum.
The three men apparently didn't get along that well, so
they left Barnum and just continued to break it in

(08:04):
touring the US, Cuba, Canada, Europe, and even eventually earned
enough to retire from show business to North Carolina and
buy a farm. And they also at that point became
naturalized citizens and took the last name Bunker. Chang soon

(08:28):
began courting Adelaide Yates, the daughter of a neighboring Quaker family,
while and courted her sister, Sarah. Neighbors were not in
favor of this. They protested it because it was doubly
scandalous to them conjoined twins who were also ethnically Chinese
and from Siam. It just wasn't something that the neighborhood
approved of, not at all. They even smashed out windows

(08:51):
in the Yates family home. But the two couples were
married anyway in eighteen forty three, and while at first
they all shared one home, after a few years Chang
and Aang set up their own houses and Mount Airy,
which is interestingly the real Mayberry Andy Griffin this hometown.
Their houses were about a mile and a half away
from each other, and so to do this, they obviously

(09:11):
had to set up a different kind of arrangement, and
Chang and Ang, since they couldn't separate from each other,
would spend three days with one wife and one family
in one house, and then they would go to the
other brother's house and spend three days there, and each
twin would be the master of his own household. So
the twin who wasn't living there would sort of, you know,

(09:33):
keep his own opinions to himself for three days and
then expect that of his brother. But the whole master
of the household thing really has extra significance considering that
Chang and Ang also owned thirty three slaves between them.
I mean, they owned quite a bit of land and
they had quite a few slaves working on it, something
that I think often surprises people about them, but in

(09:54):
a way fit into this normality they were trying to
achieve as large landowners, which at the time in North
Carolina might have met slaveholders, so they were trying to
fit in with that. Seems like Chang and Adelaide ultimately
had ten kids, while Ang and Sarah had nine, and
the whole family was primarily engaged in farm work, but
the brothers would still pick up extra cash by touring

(10:16):
now and again, sometimes with the wife and the kids
in tow. And their early performances had emphasized their conjoined state,
but also their Chinese heritage, and in these later shows
they always appeared in western clothes, and they wanted to
emphasize that normalcy that you mentioned, Sarah. There were farmers
with wives and big families, and that's how they wanted
to be seen, just like you, but obviously not quite so.

(10:39):
After the Civil War and after emancipation, Chang and Ang
didn't have any money anymore. They were broke, they couldn't
farm the farm, and they returned to show business more fully,
even going back to Barnum, who employed them until they
were over sixty years old. In eighteen seventy four, Chang,
who had become a heavy drinker and who had suffered

(11:00):
from a stroke, died of bronchitis, and before a doctor
could arrive to separate the two brothers, Ang died. At
the time, I think the diagnosis was that he had
died of shock, which it would be rather shocking, I'm sure,
but later analysis suggests that he probably died of blood
loss because they did share an artery, and Ang may

(11:21):
have just been pumping blood and not having it pumped
back into his body, since Chang was dead at that point,
and they didn't know that until later write that they shared.
It was in the or that they realized they shared
an artery after the autopsy, but they didn't come up
with this idea until the nineteen sixties. It's interesting too
that the brothers had long sought out separation and had
nearly attempted surgery in Philadelphia after they got engaged. They

(11:45):
were each willing to die if it meant a chance
to live independently, but their wives stepped in. The wives
begged them not to risk the surgery. They didn't want
them to die. So, like we said, Chang and Eng
aren't super associated with Barnum. But the next treat on
our list certainly is. In eighteen forty two, P. T.
Barnum met the boy who would become his most famous star,

(12:07):
Charles Stratton, who was the four year old son of
a Bridgeport carpenter. And when Stratton was born, he was
a pretty large baby. He was about nine pounds, but
before he was even one year old, he basically stopped
growing and by the time he met Barnum, he was
four years old, fifteen pounds and inches tall. After his
teens he did grow a little bit more. He reached

(12:29):
forty inches, ultimately in seventy pounds, but he had a
fairly small stature for much of his life. Though Stratton
was Barnum's distant cousin, he drafted him for a show,
calling him General Tom Thumb and teaching him how to
sing and dance and do imitations of people like Hercules,
and having him pretend to be eleven years old rather

(12:50):
than five, so that his small stature would be even
more impressive. Barnum started Stratton out on three dollars a week,
but as the little boy proved to be kind of
a natural performer with as Barnum said, quote a keen
sense of the ludicrous, he raised Charles's rate to fifty
dollars a week. So in eighteen forty four Barnum and

(13:12):
Stratton left for Europe, where they would do these sell
out shows in London's Egyptian Hall. And Barnum, as we
discussed in the earlier episode, was always hankering for more prestige,
not just more money. He wasn't just about money. He
was interested in prestige and a wider audience, and that
was something he really did get through Tom Thumb when

(13:33):
Baroness Rothschild heard about the act and invited the two
over for dinner. And the dinner alone was an achievement
for Barnum, but he used it as an opportunity for
stirring up some humbug like like he always did. He
dropped hints that the General General Tom Thumb might like
to meet Queen Victoria, and soon enough an invitation to

(13:55):
meet the Queen did arrive. According to Peter Carlson in
American History, before Stratton could enter with Barnum, they got
some very specific instructions, so this was upon their visit
to the Queen. They were told not to speak directly
to the Queen and not to turn their backs. They
were escorted into the Queen's picture gallery and presented before

(14:16):
a twenty five year old Victoria, her husband, Prince Albert,
and the court, and Barnum later described the entry as such.
He said, quote the General walked in looking like a
wax doll gifted with the power of locomotion. The General
advanced with a firm step, and as he came within
Haaling distance made a very graceful bow and exclaimed good evening,

(14:37):
ladies and gentlemen. So before a performance where he exhibited
his impressions. Apparently the British really loved his Napoleon impression.
Victoria spent some personal time with the little boy. They
walked hand in hand around the gallery. She told him
about the pictures, asked him about things he liked, and
he even asked her this is very cute. He asked

(14:59):
her if he could meet her three year olds on
the Prince of Wale. She tells him no, he's asleep
right now. They do ultimately meet, though, when it came
time for them to leave, Tom kind of dramatically fended
off one of Victoria's poodles with this cane. It was
sort of like the sword fight pantomime. And I think
there's an engraving of it, right, Yeah, I might have
to put that one up on Pinterest at some point.

(15:19):
Victoria's impressions of the night, though, are particularly interesting, since
she was clearly bothered a bit by what she found
to be troubling about this act. What we might consider
to be troubling today exactly a very young boy away
from his parents and performing around the world for money,
and she saw this as we as you said, as

(15:39):
we would see it. She wrote, quote after dinner, we
saw the greatest curiosity I, or indeed anybody ever saw
a little dwarf. He made the funniest little bow, putting
out his hand and saying much obliged, ma'am. One cannot
help feeling sorry for the poor little thing, and wishing
he could be properly cared for. For the people who
show him off tease him a good deal. I should

(16:00):
think he was made to imitate Napoleon and do all
sorts of tricks. So that's sort of the perception that
folks had a guess of Stratton when he was so
young five years old, six years old, working under Barnum.
But as he got older, the relationship between him and
Barnum did clearly become more one of business partners, with
Stratton making a good living and creating a life for

(16:23):
himself off the stage. Laura Grand wrote that Stratton quote
made his stage persona a caricature completely separate from his
identity as Charles Stratton. He was able to shed his
guys of Tom Thumb at the end of each day,
not that his personal life and stage career didn't intersect
at times. Probably the most famous event in Stratton's life

(16:43):
was his eighteen sixty three marriage to Lavina Warren, a
little person from Middleborough, Massachusetts with Mayflower ancestors, and Lavigna
called the quote Queen of Beauty in the New York
Times write up of their marriage and Stratton were married
at Grace Episcopal Church, New York City with people like
the Asters and the Vanderbilts and attendants, and during their

(17:04):
honeymoon they even got to visit the White House. It
was considered to be one of the biggest celebrity marriages
of the century. Our next act moves away from the
kind of side show entertainments that Barnum was best known for.

(17:27):
While he was visiting London to such great acclaim with
Little Tom Thumb, he happened to hear about a singer
who was selling out shows in England and Ireland, Jenny Lynn,
who was better known as the Swedish Nightingale, and Barnum,
who didn't even bother to attend one of her shows
or request some sort of sample performance, pitched Lynd on

(17:47):
this one D fifty date US tour with a guarantee
of one thousand dollars per show was apparently a pretty
unheard of some at the time, so Lynn did negotiate
for a little bit more. Though she was very charitably minded,
and she negotiated with Barnum to make some further donations
on top of that too, charities of her choosing. She did, eventually, though, agree,

(18:09):
and left Liverpool in August of eighteen fifty for her
big American tour. Just a little background on Lynn. She
was born in Stockholm in eighteen twenty and was already
a European star. Charlotte Bronte, in fact, was a huge fan.
According to Cassandra fell In Bronte studies, and she had
debuted in Sweden in eighteen thirty eight and had studied

(18:29):
opera in Paris, where she perfected her coloratura and became
known for her range, stretching from the B below middle
C to high G. And when she teamed up with
Barnum she actually had been considering leaving the stage. He
really made her an offer she couldn't refuse, though, so
for six months leading up to that big US debut,

(18:50):
Barnum stirred up his humbug again, even though in this
case Lynn's talents really did prove to be much more
than hype. He would write articles about how beautiful she
it's how sweet and good she was. He would run
these poetry contests like pitch us your best poem about
Jenny Lynde, and he ultimately stirred up what was called Lindamania.

(19:10):
People were just so excited to hear this young woman
saying even though they were just going on his word
for it, and I mean it worked as tactics really worked.
There were more than thirty thousand people waiting for her
steamer when it arrived in New York. Twenty thousand more
lined the route to her hotel. And Barnum wasn't stingy

(19:31):
with this either, with with her, after seeing how successful
that she was. After finally hearing her and realizing how
good she was, he renegotiated her contract after just a
few shows. But he made out pretty well too. He
probably made close to a half a million dollars that year,
and it did give him some of that legitimacy that
he was hoping for. He was working with a famous

(19:53):
opera singer here. It was different from his American Museum
kind of performance as he normally promote did. Other people
made a lot of money off of Jenny Lynn too,
though when we mentioned her in the last episode, we
talked about how she was just this huge merchandizing sensation,
one of the earliest sensations of that magnitude, and people

(20:14):
marketed porcelain around her. You could get Jenny Lynde hats
and face cream, sheet music. That's maybe the thing that
makes the most sense here, pianos, chairs, and even a
crib which I did a little Google searching earlier. Today,
the Jenny lynd crobe is still a very well known
type of crib. It looks exactly how you would imagine

(20:36):
a baby's crib to look, nothing old fashioned about it.
So you can still pick one up, I guess you can.
After her grand u s tour, Lynd married her accompanyist
Otto Goldschmidt and lived in Dresden in England, where she
eventually taught at the Royal College of Music before she
died in eight seven. So our final entry is a

(20:56):
very different one from this classic opera singer. It rivals
only Tom Thumb is Barnum's most famous act and even
today you probably associate Ringling Brothers in Barneum Bailey Circus
with elephants, but Jumbo was the original and the most
famous elephant of them all. So Jumbo had been captured
in East Africa when he was four years old and

(21:18):
was purchased by a the very an animal collector. He
started out his public life though in Paris at the
Gardonde Plance and ironically, considering his eventual size, I mean
you can get a good idea of it by his name.
His Paris owners were really disappointed with how tiny he was,
and according to Bill Kelly in American History, they didn't

(21:39):
realize that African elephants grow more slowly than Indian elephants do,
and so they thought they just had a dud of
an elephant. He was not as big as they were hoping,
so after they traded him for a rhino, the African
elephant wound up in London, where he was named Jumbo,
which they believed meant elephant, and he started to grow.

(21:59):
Eventually got up to eleven and a half feet tall,
and Jumbo spent most of his life there. He entertained
kids who visited the zoo and even gave rides Barnum
on one of his England visits. Coveted him. He said quote,
I have often looked wistfully on Jumbo, but with no
hope of ever getting possession of him, as I know
him to be a great favorite of Queen Victoria, whose

(22:20):
children and grandchildren are among the tens of thousands of
British juveniles whom Jumbo has carried on his back. I
did not suppose he would ever be sold. Finally, though,
knowing that Jumbo's temper had worsened lately, his British owners
unloaded him on. Barnum didn't tell him about the temper.
Probably I'm an angry elephant on that on her hand, right,

(22:42):
But he sold him for a ten thousand dollars to Barnum.
So the British public, though, was very upset about this.
They were mad. I mean, think of the children who
loved Jumbo so much. And Jumbo's keeper, Matthew Scott remembered
people actually picketing the zoo and thousands of kids lining
up to see Jumbo, just crying their hearts out. And

(23:02):
it was too bad for them because Barnum was going
to be taking his ten thousand dollar elephant back to
the States, and in eighteen eighty two he had Jumbo
and his elephant friend from the zoo named Alice, but
on board a ship. Poor Jumbo here, he did not
enjoy his transatlantic trip at all. He was apparently very
seasick and apparently had daily beer rations. I can't imagine

(23:26):
that's in a normal elephants rations today. Yeah, well probably not.
But it's sad that he just didn't get unlimited beer
if he needed it. Poor thing one state side. Jumbo
helped make Barnum's new circus a hit, also helping transform
the Three Ring Circus to something more akin to what
it is today, which is, of course kind of a spectacle.
He even grew some more and his temper issues disappeared,

(23:51):
so Barnum didn't have to worry about that after all. Well,
and Barnum also pulled another Jenny Lynde and marketed his
new elephant like crazy. You could buy Jumbo every thing.
I don't know about, Jumbo face cream or Jumbo cribs.
He applied the elephant's name to all sorts of products,
and eventually Jumbo became ubiquitous enough to mean very large.
I mean that's how we think of it today. Something

(24:13):
is Jumbo size. So then, after four seasons with the circus,
where Jumbo had certainly earned back his ten thousand dollars
and really helped make Barnum's circus a hit. He was
killed in a railway accident, and he and Barnum's tiniest elephant,
strangely also named Tom Thumb. We're crossing some rail road

(24:34):
tracks with their keeper, and an unexpected engine came speeding through.
It knocked Tom Thumb out of the way. He rolled
down an embankment, and Jumbo just panicked and he tried
to run, but he was hit by the train in
a crash that also killed the engineer. Barnum, who had
kind of hedged his bets for a while and seen

(24:55):
about whether Jumbo's hide and skeleton could be preserved. I
think he wrote about it like God forbid anything ever
happens to Jumbo, but just in case, so he did
have a plan in place, and he had the elephants
skeleton and hide saved and set up this big funeral procession,
even spinning a whole story that Jumbo had died trying

(25:15):
to push the baby Tom Thumb out of the way
of the train. So while the hide was eventually destroyed
in a fire, jumbo skeleton can sometimes be seen in
the American Museum of Natural History, so you can still
check that out now and again, hey, your spects to Jumbo.
So it's been fun talking about these different acts, and
it's been interesting to coming across all the names that

(25:37):
you can find just a little tidbit of information on.
These are obviously all pretty well documented, pretty well researched
figures because they were so famous, but there are so
many names, you just get the most tantalizing little peek
at what their life must have been like. Thank you

(25:57):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or Facebook U r L or something similar
over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now.
Our current email address is History Podcast at i heart
radio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address
no longer works, and you can find us all over

(26:19):
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple Podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from i heeart Radio,
visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you

(26:41):
listen to your favorite shows.