May 16, 2012 • 21 mins
P.T. Barnum is best known as a circus man, but he spent most of his career running a curiosity museum and staging freak shows. Barnum attracted people to his American Museum through shrewd advertising, or "humbug." He also wasn't afraid of a hoax.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Downey and I'm Deblina chuckol Boarding, and we
have a few podcast regulars who we like to talk about.
Queen Victoria, of course, seems to pop up in the
(00:22):
most unlikely of episodes, as does Arthur Conan Doyle Lord
Byron had a little run there for a while, but P. T.
Barnum may have the strangest record of all of those folks.
I think if an episode takes place in the nineteenth century,
you'll often find P. T. Barnum somewhere in it, trying
to buy something, trying to hustle someone. And once I
(00:44):
learned a little bit more about his life, though, those
regular appearances seemed a lot less unlikely, because in life
he really was everywhere buying odds and ends off of folks,
cooking up hoaxes, entertaining celebrities, even running for state legislature. Today,
of course, we think of P. T. Barnum as the
Great circus Man, the guy behind the greatest show on Earth.
(01:07):
Along with his cohort and former competitor James Bailey, the
Barnum and Bailey Circus, which eventually teamed up with Ringling
brother Circus became the premier circus in the US. So
if you've seen one circus in the States, it's probably
Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey. But while Barnum helped to
make the Three Ring Circus the massive spectacle we know today,
he really didn't get into the business until he was
(01:29):
in his sixties. For most of his entertainment career, Barnum
ran a curiosity museum filled with wax works, fun house mirrors,
and other strange stuff like taxi jermy hybrid animals. He
also ran ten and one shows, which we'll talk about
a little bit more in a minute, and he management
Nagerie's and he just really promoted everything he did, earning
(01:50):
the nickname the Prince of Humbug. Which it's interesting to
point out here that Humbug had the same meeting then
as it does today, you know, being deceitful on purpose,
but it also was the equivalent of what today we'd
call hype. And I think that's really the point to
remember when thinking about Barnum. He was a hype man.
He was the Prince of humbug at the end, he
(02:12):
really was so phineas. Taylor Barnum was born July ten
in Bethel, Connecticut. His father was kind of a jack
of all trades who was a tailor, a farmer, a
tavern keeper, and as a kid. P T. Barnum worked
the farm, but also showed his business streak pretty early.
According to his New York Times obituary, he sold homemade
(02:33):
molasses candy which sounds pretty good, and gingerbread, and even
some sort of moonshine he'd make called cherry rum, not
quite as appetizing as the molasses candy and gingerbread, I think.
When Barnum was fifteen, his father died, leaving him to
care for his mother and his five sisters and brothers.
This started a string of jobs and moves to get
(02:53):
away from manual farm work because he really disliked it.
He worked in a general store, moved to Brooklyn, and
came home to Bethel to open his own store at
age eighteen. Then he got married at nineteen to a
local girl named Charity Hallett. He published a weekly paper
called The Herald of Freedom and Dan Barry, Connecticut, and
was arrested three times for Libel gives you a little
(03:15):
peek at his his future career too, But it was
his eighteen thirty five moved back to New York City
at the age of twenty five that really got him
into show business, and compared to his later insistence on
family friendly entertainment, his first gigs in New York were
considered quote low amusements. According to Timothy Gilfoyle in the
(03:37):
Journal of the History of Sexuality, He'd run minstrel shows.
He'd write ads for the Bowery Amphitheater in the very
rough Five Points neighborhood, and he would talent scout there too.
He discovered acts like William Henry Lane, who was better
known later as Juba Black Dancer, who broke into the
all white minstrel shows. But Barnum's first really big discovery
(03:59):
was an old old woman named Joyce Heth. And Heth
claimed to have been born in sixteen seventy four, which
would have made her a hundred and sixty one years old.
But even more impressively, she claimed to have been the
nurse for the young George Washington. She was blind and frail,
but she'd smoke a pipe and tell visitors stories about
(04:20):
Washington as a boy. To kind of authenticate these outrageous stories,
Barnum presented her alongside her seventeen twenty seven bill of
sale to George Washington's father. So no surprise probably that
this was eventually exposed as a hoax, but it certainly
convinced Barnum that show biz was worth a while. With
Heth and his act, he earned seven d fifty dollars
(04:43):
a week. So in eighteen forty one, after that first
big success with Hath, Barnum decided that he wanted to
go into the museum business. And it may be kind
of hard to understand why a hoax promoting former minstrel
show admin would want to get into museum, but David A. Norris,
writing in History Magazine, helped explain a little bit to
(05:05):
me how different and uncommon American museums were in the
eighteen forties from what they are today. And one of
the country's earliest museums was called Peels and it was
in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Was established in seventeen eighty
four by Charles Wilson Peel, and visitors who were going
there could just see a real mixed bag of stuff
(05:25):
folk clothing from around the world, a quote tiger cat,
even lava from Mount Vesuvius, or at least something built
as lava from Mount Pesuvia's. The first mastodon skeleton shown
in the United States was there, and there were also
plant and animal specimens from Lewis and Clark's expedition, so
anything you could imagine could be found, apparently at Peel's museum.
(05:50):
Another major museum in the style of Peels was that
of John Scutter, who ran his front of five story
marble building in New York City. When Scutter's closed in
eighteen forty one, Barnum tried to buy it, but was
beat out by representatives from Peels, who paid for the
building in stock. When that stock collapse, though, Barnum wound
up being able not only to buy Scudders, but quite
(06:11):
a few of Peel's exhibits too. He reopened this as
Barnum's American Museum and kept some of the flavor of
the old style museums, including the menagerie's tax Jurny's exotic
items from around the world, but he also added another
popular element of the day, which was freak shows. Okay,
so it's time to talk a little bit about the
(06:32):
tradition of so called freak shows, because if we just
jump right into it, it's going to seem a little
bit out of play. According to Laura Grand in History Magazine,
the tradition of freak shows had really been around for
quite some time by the time Barnum was getting into
the business, really since the early sixteen hundreds, right around
the time that many people stopped seeing major physical abnormalities
(06:54):
as some kind of divine punishment or bad omen. But
in the nineteenth century, the exit of people with physical
abnormalities bearded ladies for example, or thin men really started
to pick up. Ten and one shows would exhibit ten performers,
usually a mix of physically unusual people with folks with
(07:14):
unusual talents such as sword swallowing or fire eating, so
two of the earliest American freak show stars where Chang
and Hang can join twins the original Siamese twins. Of course.
Then basically visitors would walk by these ten performers and
look at them. It's something that sounds very awkward and
uncomfortable today, but these shows were really getting very popular
(07:37):
in the nineteenth century, and Barnum's technique of combining these
ten and one shows and other types of freak show acts.
With a curiosity filled museum proved to be a major hit.
Visitors would flood to his American museum, paying twenty five
cents for the privilege of seeing his curated collection from
around the world. He built the place at admission to Everything,
(08:01):
and in addition to a sideshow type performances, he staged
beauty pageants, cultural exhibits, and dramatics like adaptations of Harriet
Beatrice Stowe's novels or those of Charles Dickens, who was
incidentally a visitor. So the museum was open six days
a week, fifteen hours a day. He was a real
modern businessman. I mean, I even think that admission to
(08:23):
everything sounds kind of like a slogan you would hear today. Um,
but well, many side shows at the time featured adults
only entertainment. Barnett was really big on bringing the whole family.
And once the whole family was there, though, he would
hustle them through the exhibits by displaying a large sign
in the back labeled egress, And so people would wonder,
(08:46):
what's an egress? You know, it's just beyond that door
I need to go see. And then once they get there,
they'd realize, oh, agres is just another word for exit,
and they'd have to pay if they wanted to get
back in again. The museum's first big hit was Fiji Mermaid,
supposedly caught by a Japanese fisherman, but this was really
just a hoax personally engineered by Barnum. It was a
(09:08):
monkey's body sewn onto a large fish tail. Other attractions
over the years included a giant python and electric eels,
and Albino Beauty, the Wild Boy, who was an exceptionally
hairy child, Pharaoh's chariot Wheel, Rosa Richter, the Human Cannonball,
Annie Jones, the Bearded Lady, Isaac W. Sprague, the American
(09:30):
human Skeleton, Kraal Farini, the Missing Link, the Wonder of
the World, who was an armless man who used his
feet to do tricks like firing a pistol or playing
an instrument. In eighteen sixty one, Barnum even added a
white whale to his menagerie's pipes, would supply it with
fresh sea water, and he'd also include hoaxes of hoaxes,
(09:53):
like the fake version of the already fake Cardiff Giant
we discussed in our historical hoaxes upside from last summer.
After Barnum's offer to buy the real fake giant was
turned down, he just made his own and started saying, well,
that one is fake, I have the real one. I think.
Ultimately he was sued and the judge ruled, both of
(10:13):
your giants are fake. This is a non issue. M
Barnum himself was also something of an attraction at his museum,
much like Madam Tissot was at her wax works. He
was fairly striking, six to balding. He had blue eyes
and a giant nose in a pot belly, and was
always there, always roaming around if he wasn't out looking
(10:34):
for new curiosities to bring to it. Barnum's real name maker, though,
was his own distant cousin, Charles Stratton, and we'll talk
a little bit more about Stratton's life later, maybe in
a different episode. He and Barnum went from being manager
and child performer to being business partners and lifelong friends.
But Stratton's appearance as General Tom Thumb introduced Barnum to
(10:56):
really new heights of fame. Stratton, who was a little
person twenty I've inch just toll when He was discovered
by Barnum at age five, was trained to sing, dance,
and do comic impressions. He was a natural ham and
an actor, and met folks like Abraham Lincoln and even
Queen Victoria. She is again we need to start keeping
a tally here, but Barnum had ambitions outside of the museum.
(11:20):
Even though Tom Thumb made him a huge hit in
this world. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, he wanted to be
an impresario too, and he recruited the Swedish soprano Jinny
Lynn to make that happen. She's somebody who appeared in
our Hans Christian Anderson episode he had. She was his
celebrity crush. Essentially, even though Barnum hadn't ever seen Lynde,
(11:43):
hadn't ever heard her sing, he latched onto her, decided
that she would be his ticket to the real big time,
and publicized her as the Swedish Nightingale. He publicized her
so successfully that forty thou people were waiting for her
upon her arrival in the United States. She toured for
about nine months to sell out shows and really became
(12:05):
one of the earliest marketing sensations too. She had all
this tie in merchandise connected to her, like a Jenny
Lynn bonnet, a Jenny Lynn porcelain said, all sorts of
things that are easy to imagine today, but we're fairly
unusual at the time. Barnum also got into politics. He
served twice in the Connecticut legislature and as mayor of Bridgeport,
where he was an especially strong opponent of racial discrimination
(12:29):
and of prostitution. In eighteen forty eight, he became a teetotaler,
hiring undercover detectives to patrol his museum for anyone who
could be maybe sneaking in a drink, or just any
low people. He was very concerned about them potentially being
in his museum. Kind of odd, considering his earlier show
his career exactly when he got into real estate in
(12:49):
the eighteen fifties, he'd even have leasers or buyers signed
covenants spanning the use of liquor or tobacco on the property.
He even eventually made his performers swear off alcohol and
ran a temperance point at the museum for one hundred
shows so to mark all of his achievements in life.
At this point in politics, in the business world, Barnum
decided to build a palace. And you can't imagine somebody
(13:12):
like Barnum building a little understated house, but this really
was a palace. It was on seventeen acres in Connecticut.
He called it a Ranistan and the inspiration for the
building was Brighton's Royal Pavilion, which I saw when I
was in ninth grade, I think, and it's a you
can look up a picture of it. It's pretty elaborate.
Anything that it's the inspiration for would be pretty elaborate
(13:35):
to I'd imagine he entertained big names there too, people
like Mark Twain, Horace Greeley. But in eighteen fifty seven,
Barnum's luck started to turn. The palace burned down, which
started a chain of misfortune that eventually drove Barnum coincidentally
into the circus business. He lost his money though through
bad investments in a clock of business, and saw his
(13:57):
museum burned down twice. During the Civil War, or Confederate
spies had plotted to set fires throughout New York City,
including one at Barnum's. The plot failed, with the museum
burned down just a few months later. Anyway, after twice
rebuilding his museum and twice losing it to fire. He
switched to a menagerie, but saw this burned down two
in eighteen seventy three. That same year, his wife Charity died,
(14:21):
and two outward appearances. After Charity died, Barnum waited ten
months before remarrying twenty two year old Nancy Fish, who
was forty four years younger than him. According to that
Guilfoil article we mentioned earlier, though he was actually remarried
after only thirteen weeks and before he had even returned
(14:41):
home to the United States following Charity's death. The whole
thing was super super secret. Nobody knew about it except
the couple, and the marriage certificate wasn't even found until
nineteen four, so he really took the secret to the grave.
Barnum's remarriage also coincided with his entrance to the circus world.
Though he started a traveling show and called it the
(15:03):
Great Traveling World's Fair, it was really bigger than most
of the circuses of the day, and Barnum would even
arrange it was so big, in fact, that it would
have to be way on the outskirts of town. So
Barnum would arrange these excursion trains so that people in
cities could easily come to his show. He could just
shuttle them back and forth and get more customers that way.
(15:24):
In eighteen eighty he merged with the Great London Circus,
Sanger's Royal British Menagerie and the Grand International Allied Shows,
and later became the Barnum and Bailey Circus, better known
as the Greatest Show on Earth, which we talked about
in the intro. Barnum, of course, didn't invent the modern circus,
but by working with Bailey, he helped make it the giant,
really spectacular event that we know it as today rather
(15:48):
than the sort of small time entertainment it was in
the past exactly, and Barnum's eighteen eighty two purchase of
Jumbo the African Elephant also helped to make this act
a hit, really helped to make the Barnum and Bailey
Circuits get off the ground. Jumbo is another subject we're
gonna say for later. He has a pretty interesting story,
but he was popular enough that his name caught on
(16:09):
as a term for Jumbo, really really big um. That's
just a little hint of how crazy Jumbo's ultimate story is, though,
the Prince of Humbug stayed devoted to self promotion to
the end too. In eighteen eighty four, he moved his
autobiography into the public domain because he was more concerned
with attracting readers than making money off of it. In
(16:32):
at the age of eighty one and clearly dying at
this point, he had a New York obituary published ahead
of schedule so that he could read it and enjoy
his own hype before he passed away. So P. T.
Barnum died April seventh in Bridgeport, leaving most of his
estate to his sole grandson, and aside from his circus legacy,
(16:53):
of course, I think Barnum is probably most famous for
a quote that he likely never said, and that's of course,
there's a sucker worn every minute. We meant to mentioned
that in the Cardiff Giant episode. One quote that might
suit him a little better, though, in one that he
really did say, is that people quote appear disposed to
be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.
(17:14):
And he got a lot of flak for some of
his deceptions. I think he was pretty frank about them
in his autobiography, but he stuck by it. To a
certain extent, revised some things in his in his biography,
but was fairly open about the deceptions he had committed
and how he did them, and how it was all
just in good fun if you still enjoyed the show.
(17:37):
According to his biographer Candice Flemming, when he was asked
whether he wished he had done something more important with
his life, he said, quote, Amusement may not be the
great aim of life, but it gives us to our days.
So that's it for P. T. Barnum. But we're not
going to completely close out this story yet because if
you haven't picked up already with all these hints about
(17:57):
John Bo and Tom Thumb, we'd really like to talk
more about some of P. T. Barnum's famous acts, whether
elephant or man. And I think that'll give us sort
of the other side of the story too, because of course,
today something like freak shows, you don't even want to
call people freaks or mentioned freak shows. I mean, it's
(18:17):
an uncomfortable term. But we're gonna look a little bit
about the performers and whether they were taken advantage of
or whether they made fortunes out of it, or maybe
sometimes both. I think it'll be fun. But before we
give too much away on that, I think we should
go ahead and move on to listener mail. We have
(18:38):
a card here from listener Steven, and he says he's
been listening since serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in
South Africa and that he'll for forever link part of
his service to stuff he missed in history class. And
he relates a story about the village that he was
serving in, and he says that they're known for their
beautiful bead work, bright geometric patterns, and generally being amazing.
(19:00):
So he goes on to say, the boys go out
to the bush for six weeks during an initiation school,
and I didn't realize I wasn't allowed to go out
there during that time. While enjoying a wonderful stuff you
missed in History class podcast, I took a shortcut through
the bush. Immersed in historical drama, I wasn't paying attention
and stumbled across the boys. I was chased for half
(19:20):
a kilometer by a gang of half starved teen boys
who had been ritually circumcised the prior week for initiation school.
When they finally caught me, they wanted to swap music
on their phones. Next time you get too engrossed in history,
be careful you don't get chased by a bunch of
music loving semi naked teen boys. So yes, advicee to
(19:41):
live by. Thank you Stephen for sending that and sharing
that story with us, And we should say, we really
want to caution you guys not to listen to podcasts
when you are in potentially dangerous situations. Yeah, I mean,
you really need to pay attention in certain scenarios. But
thank you for sending that. If you have other tidbits
(20:02):
to share with us, stories of what you do while
you're listening to the podcast, or even just suggestions for us,
maybe Pete Barnum related maybe otherwise, you can write to
us Where History Podcast at Discovery dot com and you
can also look us up on Facebook and we're on
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(20:23):
You can find that one by searching for swords Followers
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dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Because it how stuff works dot com, I am it
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Sarah Downey and I'm Deblina chuckol Boarding, and we
have a few podcast regulars who we like to talk about.
Queen Victoria, of course, seems to pop up in the
(00:22):
most unlikely of episodes, as does Arthur Conan Doyle Lord
Byron had a little run there for a while, but P. T.
Barnum may have the strangest record of all of those folks.
I think if an episode takes place in the nineteenth century,
you'll often find P. T. Barnum somewhere in it, trying
to buy something, trying to hustle someone. And once I
(00:44):
learned a little bit more about his life, though, those
regular appearances seemed a lot less unlikely, because in life
he really was everywhere buying odds and ends off of folks,
cooking up hoaxes, entertaining celebrities, even running for state legislature. Today,
of course, we think of P. T. Barnum as the
Great circus Man, the guy behind the greatest show on Earth.
(01:07):
Along with his cohort and former competitor James Bailey, the
Barnum and Bailey Circus, which eventually teamed up with Ringling
brother Circus became the premier circus in the US. So
if you've seen one circus in the States, it's probably
Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey. But while Barnum helped to
make the Three Ring Circus the massive spectacle we know today,
he really didn't get into the business until he was
(01:29):
in his sixties. For most of his entertainment career, Barnum
ran a curiosity museum filled with wax works, fun house mirrors,
and other strange stuff like taxi jermy hybrid animals. He
also ran ten and one shows, which we'll talk about
a little bit more in a minute, and he management
Nagerie's and he just really promoted everything he did, earning
(01:50):
the nickname the Prince of Humbug. Which it's interesting to
point out here that Humbug had the same meeting then
as it does today, you know, being deceitful on purpose,
but it also was the equivalent of what today we'd
call hype. And I think that's really the point to
remember when thinking about Barnum. He was a hype man.
He was the Prince of humbug at the end, he
(02:12):
really was so phineas. Taylor Barnum was born July ten
in Bethel, Connecticut. His father was kind of a jack
of all trades who was a tailor, a farmer, a
tavern keeper, and as a kid. P T. Barnum worked
the farm, but also showed his business streak pretty early.
According to his New York Times obituary, he sold homemade
(02:33):
molasses candy which sounds pretty good, and gingerbread, and even
some sort of moonshine he'd make called cherry rum, not
quite as appetizing as the molasses candy and gingerbread, I think.
When Barnum was fifteen, his father died, leaving him to
care for his mother and his five sisters and brothers.
This started a string of jobs and moves to get
(02:53):
away from manual farm work because he really disliked it.
He worked in a general store, moved to Brooklyn, and
came home to Bethel to open his own store at
age eighteen. Then he got married at nineteen to a
local girl named Charity Hallett. He published a weekly paper
called The Herald of Freedom and Dan Barry, Connecticut, and
was arrested three times for Libel gives you a little
(03:15):
peek at his his future career too, But it was
his eighteen thirty five moved back to New York City
at the age of twenty five that really got him
into show business, and compared to his later insistence on
family friendly entertainment, his first gigs in New York were
considered quote low amusements. According to Timothy Gilfoyle in the
(03:37):
Journal of the History of Sexuality, He'd run minstrel shows.
He'd write ads for the Bowery Amphitheater in the very
rough Five Points neighborhood, and he would talent scout there too.
He discovered acts like William Henry Lane, who was better
known later as Juba Black Dancer, who broke into the
all white minstrel shows. But Barnum's first really big discovery
(03:59):
was an old old woman named Joyce Heth. And Heth
claimed to have been born in sixteen seventy four, which
would have made her a hundred and sixty one years old.
But even more impressively, she claimed to have been the
nurse for the young George Washington. She was blind and frail,
but she'd smoke a pipe and tell visitors stories about
(04:20):
Washington as a boy. To kind of authenticate these outrageous stories,
Barnum presented her alongside her seventeen twenty seven bill of
sale to George Washington's father. So no surprise probably that
this was eventually exposed as a hoax, but it certainly
convinced Barnum that show biz was worth a while. With
Heth and his act, he earned seven d fifty dollars
(04:43):
a week. So in eighteen forty one, after that first
big success with Hath, Barnum decided that he wanted to
go into the museum business. And it may be kind
of hard to understand why a hoax promoting former minstrel
show admin would want to get into museum, but David A. Norris,
writing in History Magazine, helped explain a little bit to
(05:05):
me how different and uncommon American museums were in the
eighteen forties from what they are today. And one of
the country's earliest museums was called Peels and it was
in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Was established in seventeen eighty
four by Charles Wilson Peel, and visitors who were going
there could just see a real mixed bag of stuff
(05:25):
folk clothing from around the world, a quote tiger cat,
even lava from Mount Vesuvius, or at least something built
as lava from Mount Pesuvia's. The first mastodon skeleton shown
in the United States was there, and there were also
plant and animal specimens from Lewis and Clark's expedition, so
anything you could imagine could be found, apparently at Peel's museum.
(05:50):
Another major museum in the style of Peels was that
of John Scutter, who ran his front of five story
marble building in New York City. When Scutter's closed in
eighteen forty one, Barnum tried to buy it, but was
beat out by representatives from Peels, who paid for the
building in stock. When that stock collapse, though, Barnum wound
up being able not only to buy Scudders, but quite
(06:11):
a few of Peel's exhibits too. He reopened this as
Barnum's American Museum and kept some of the flavor of
the old style museums, including the menagerie's tax Jurny's exotic
items from around the world, but he also added another
popular element of the day, which was freak shows. Okay,
so it's time to talk a little bit about the
(06:32):
tradition of so called freak shows, because if we just
jump right into it, it's going to seem a little
bit out of play. According to Laura Grand in History Magazine,
the tradition of freak shows had really been around for
quite some time by the time Barnum was getting into
the business, really since the early sixteen hundreds, right around
the time that many people stopped seeing major physical abnormalities
(06:54):
as some kind of divine punishment or bad omen. But
in the nineteenth century, the exit of people with physical
abnormalities bearded ladies for example, or thin men really started
to pick up. Ten and one shows would exhibit ten performers,
usually a mix of physically unusual people with folks with
(07:14):
unusual talents such as sword swallowing or fire eating, so
two of the earliest American freak show stars where Chang
and Hang can join twins the original Siamese twins. Of course.
Then basically visitors would walk by these ten performers and
look at them. It's something that sounds very awkward and
uncomfortable today, but these shows were really getting very popular
(07:37):
in the nineteenth century, and Barnum's technique of combining these
ten and one shows and other types of freak show acts.
With a curiosity filled museum proved to be a major hit.
Visitors would flood to his American museum, paying twenty five
cents for the privilege of seeing his curated collection from
around the world. He built the place at admission to Everything,
(08:01):
and in addition to a sideshow type performances, he staged
beauty pageants, cultural exhibits, and dramatics like adaptations of Harriet
Beatrice Stowe's novels or those of Charles Dickens, who was
incidentally a visitor. So the museum was open six days
a week, fifteen hours a day. He was a real
modern businessman. I mean, I even think that admission to
(08:23):
everything sounds kind of like a slogan you would hear today. Um,
but well, many side shows at the time featured adults
only entertainment. Barnett was really big on bringing the whole family.
And once the whole family was there, though, he would
hustle them through the exhibits by displaying a large sign
in the back labeled egress, And so people would wonder,
(08:46):
what's an egress? You know, it's just beyond that door
I need to go see. And then once they get there,
they'd realize, oh, agres is just another word for exit,
and they'd have to pay if they wanted to get
back in again. The museum's first big hit was Fiji Mermaid,
supposedly caught by a Japanese fisherman, but this was really
just a hoax personally engineered by Barnum. It was a
(09:08):
monkey's body sewn onto a large fish tail. Other attractions
over the years included a giant python and electric eels,
and Albino Beauty, the Wild Boy, who was an exceptionally
hairy child, Pharaoh's chariot Wheel, Rosa Richter, the Human Cannonball,
Annie Jones, the Bearded Lady, Isaac W. Sprague, the American
(09:30):
human Skeleton, Kraal Farini, the Missing Link, the Wonder of
the World, who was an armless man who used his
feet to do tricks like firing a pistol or playing
an instrument. In eighteen sixty one, Barnum even added a
white whale to his menagerie's pipes, would supply it with
fresh sea water, and he'd also include hoaxes of hoaxes,
(09:53):
like the fake version of the already fake Cardiff Giant
we discussed in our historical hoaxes upside from last summer.
After Barnum's offer to buy the real fake giant was
turned down, he just made his own and started saying, well,
that one is fake, I have the real one. I think.
Ultimately he was sued and the judge ruled, both of
(10:13):
your giants are fake. This is a non issue. M
Barnum himself was also something of an attraction at his museum,
much like Madam Tissot was at her wax works. He
was fairly striking, six to balding. He had blue eyes
and a giant nose in a pot belly, and was
always there, always roaming around if he wasn't out looking
(10:34):
for new curiosities to bring to it. Barnum's real name maker, though,
was his own distant cousin, Charles Stratton, and we'll talk
a little bit more about Stratton's life later, maybe in
a different episode. He and Barnum went from being manager
and child performer to being business partners and lifelong friends.
But Stratton's appearance as General Tom Thumb introduced Barnum to
(10:56):
really new heights of fame. Stratton, who was a little
person twenty I've inch just toll when He was discovered
by Barnum at age five, was trained to sing, dance,
and do comic impressions. He was a natural ham and
an actor, and met folks like Abraham Lincoln and even
Queen Victoria. She is again we need to start keeping
a tally here, but Barnum had ambitions outside of the museum.
(11:20):
Even though Tom Thumb made him a huge hit in
this world. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, he wanted to be
an impresario too, and he recruited the Swedish soprano Jinny
Lynn to make that happen. She's somebody who appeared in
our Hans Christian Anderson episode he had. She was his
celebrity crush. Essentially, even though Barnum hadn't ever seen Lynde,
(11:43):
hadn't ever heard her sing, he latched onto her, decided
that she would be his ticket to the real big time,
and publicized her as the Swedish Nightingale. He publicized her
so successfully that forty thou people were waiting for her
upon her arrival in the United States. She toured for
about nine months to sell out shows and really became
(12:05):
one of the earliest marketing sensations too. She had all
this tie in merchandise connected to her, like a Jenny
Lynn bonnet, a Jenny Lynn porcelain said, all sorts of
things that are easy to imagine today, but we're fairly
unusual at the time. Barnum also got into politics. He
served twice in the Connecticut legislature and as mayor of Bridgeport,
where he was an especially strong opponent of racial discrimination
(12:29):
and of prostitution. In eighteen forty eight, he became a teetotaler,
hiring undercover detectives to patrol his museum for anyone who
could be maybe sneaking in a drink, or just any
low people. He was very concerned about them potentially being
in his museum. Kind of odd, considering his earlier show
his career exactly when he got into real estate in
(12:49):
the eighteen fifties, he'd even have leasers or buyers signed
covenants spanning the use of liquor or tobacco on the property.
He even eventually made his performers swear off alcohol and
ran a temperance point at the museum for one hundred
shows so to mark all of his achievements in life.
At this point in politics, in the business world, Barnum
decided to build a palace. And you can't imagine somebody
(13:12):
like Barnum building a little understated house, but this really
was a palace. It was on seventeen acres in Connecticut.
He called it a Ranistan and the inspiration for the
building was Brighton's Royal Pavilion, which I saw when I
was in ninth grade, I think, and it's a you
can look up a picture of it. It's pretty elaborate.
Anything that it's the inspiration for would be pretty elaborate
(13:35):
to I'd imagine he entertained big names there too, people
like Mark Twain, Horace Greeley. But in eighteen fifty seven,
Barnum's luck started to turn. The palace burned down, which
started a chain of misfortune that eventually drove Barnum coincidentally
into the circus business. He lost his money though through
bad investments in a clock of business, and saw his
(13:57):
museum burned down twice. During the Civil War, or Confederate
spies had plotted to set fires throughout New York City,
including one at Barnum's. The plot failed, with the museum
burned down just a few months later. Anyway, after twice
rebuilding his museum and twice losing it to fire. He
switched to a menagerie, but saw this burned down two
in eighteen seventy three. That same year, his wife Charity died,
(14:21):
and two outward appearances. After Charity died, Barnum waited ten
months before remarrying twenty two year old Nancy Fish, who
was forty four years younger than him. According to that
Guilfoil article we mentioned earlier, though he was actually remarried
after only thirteen weeks and before he had even returned
(14:41):
home to the United States following Charity's death. The whole
thing was super super secret. Nobody knew about it except
the couple, and the marriage certificate wasn't even found until
nineteen four, so he really took the secret to the grave.
Barnum's remarriage also coincided with his entrance to the circus world.
Though he started a traveling show and called it the
(15:03):
Great Traveling World's Fair, it was really bigger than most
of the circuses of the day, and Barnum would even
arrange it was so big, in fact, that it would
have to be way on the outskirts of town. So
Barnum would arrange these excursion trains so that people in
cities could easily come to his show. He could just
shuttle them back and forth and get more customers that way.
(15:24):
In eighteen eighty he merged with the Great London Circus,
Sanger's Royal British Menagerie and the Grand International Allied Shows,
and later became the Barnum and Bailey Circus, better known
as the Greatest Show on Earth, which we talked about
in the intro. Barnum, of course, didn't invent the modern circus,
but by working with Bailey, he helped make it the giant,
really spectacular event that we know it as today rather
(15:48):
than the sort of small time entertainment it was in
the past exactly, and Barnum's eighteen eighty two purchase of
Jumbo the African Elephant also helped to make this act
a hit, really helped to make the Barnum and Bailey
Circuits get off the ground. Jumbo is another subject we're
gonna say for later. He has a pretty interesting story,
but he was popular enough that his name caught on
(16:09):
as a term for Jumbo, really really big um. That's
just a little hint of how crazy Jumbo's ultimate story is, though,
the Prince of Humbug stayed devoted to self promotion to
the end too. In eighteen eighty four, he moved his
autobiography into the public domain because he was more concerned
with attracting readers than making money off of it. In
(16:32):
at the age of eighty one and clearly dying at
this point, he had a New York obituary published ahead
of schedule so that he could read it and enjoy
his own hype before he passed away. So P. T.
Barnum died April seventh in Bridgeport, leaving most of his
estate to his sole grandson, and aside from his circus legacy,
(16:53):
of course, I think Barnum is probably most famous for
a quote that he likely never said, and that's of course,
there's a sucker worn every minute. We meant to mentioned
that in the Cardiff Giant episode. One quote that might
suit him a little better, though, in one that he
really did say, is that people quote appear disposed to
be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.
(17:14):
And he got a lot of flak for some of
his deceptions. I think he was pretty frank about them
in his autobiography, but he stuck by it. To a
certain extent, revised some things in his in his biography,
but was fairly open about the deceptions he had committed
and how he did them, and how it was all
just in good fun if you still enjoyed the show.
(17:37):
According to his biographer Candice Flemming, when he was asked
whether he wished he had done something more important with
his life, he said, quote, Amusement may not be the
great aim of life, but it gives us to our days.
So that's it for P. T. Barnum. But we're not
going to completely close out this story yet because if
you haven't picked up already with all these hints about
(17:57):
John Bo and Tom Thumb, we'd really like to talk
more about some of P. T. Barnum's famous acts, whether
elephant or man. And I think that'll give us sort
of the other side of the story too, because of course,
today something like freak shows, you don't even want to
call people freaks or mentioned freak shows. I mean, it's
(18:17):
an uncomfortable term. But we're gonna look a little bit
about the performers and whether they were taken advantage of
or whether they made fortunes out of it, or maybe
sometimes both. I think it'll be fun. But before we
give too much away on that, I think we should
go ahead and move on to listener mail. We have
(18:38):
a card here from listener Steven, and he says he's
been listening since serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in
South Africa and that he'll for forever link part of
his service to stuff he missed in history class. And
he relates a story about the village that he was
serving in, and he says that they're known for their
beautiful bead work, bright geometric patterns, and generally being amazing.
(19:00):
So he goes on to say, the boys go out
to the bush for six weeks during an initiation school,
and I didn't realize I wasn't allowed to go out
there during that time. While enjoying a wonderful stuff you
missed in History class podcast, I took a shortcut through
the bush. Immersed in historical drama, I wasn't paying attention
and stumbled across the boys. I was chased for half
(19:20):
a kilometer by a gang of half starved teen boys
who had been ritually circumcised the prior week for initiation school.
When they finally caught me, they wanted to swap music
on their phones. Next time you get too engrossed in history,
be careful you don't get chased by a bunch of
music loving semi naked teen boys. So yes, advicee to
(19:41):
live by. Thank you Stephen for sending that and sharing
that story with us, And we should say, we really
want to caution you guys not to listen to podcasts
when you are in potentially dangerous situations. Yeah, I mean,
you really need to pay attention in certain scenarios. But
thank you for sending that. If you have other tidbits
(20:02):
to share with us, stories of what you do while
you're listening to the podcast, or even just suggestions for us,
maybe Pete Barnum related maybe otherwise, you can write to
us Where History Podcast at Discovery dot com and you
can also look us up on Facebook and we're on
Twitter at mist in History. And we have a lot
of side show type articles, including how swords followers work.
(20:23):
You can find that one by searching for swords Followers
on our home page at www dot how stuff works
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