P.T. Barnum, architect of American popular culture.

The King of Humbug (Story)
U.S. News & World Report, 09/10/2001, 131(9) p. 48-50, 1698 words.

Highlight: P. T. Barnum created a culture of sensationalism that lives on today
Section: Culture & Ideas

Full Text: For a 161-year-old, Joice Heth had a tough schedule. Over the course of 1835, "this rare piece of antiquity" could be seen six days a week, nine hours a day, in towns all across the northeastern United States. After all, Heth wasn't just very old; she had also been George Washington's nursemaid, it was said, and had fond memories of baby "Georgy."

A former plantation slave, Heth quickly became a national sensation. Visitors marveled at "the living mummy," paying 25 cents to poke and prod her, ask her questions about the famous man she raised, and listen to her sing hymns. Far from being concerned about the declining health of his meal ticket, her owner and promoter, an eager unknown named Phineas Taylor Barnum, used the possibility of Heth's demise as a selling point. "She will be 162, if she lives till February," ran one ad. "Death won't always forget her."

The oldest lady. Eventually, critics began to attack Heth's authenticity. It was even claimed that she was "a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, India-rubber, and numberless springs ingeniously put together and made to move at the slightest touch." Barnum (who later crowed about planting the rumors himself) was thrilled. "Hundreds who had not visited Joice Heth were now anxious to see the curious automaton," he wrote, "while many who had seen her were equally desirous of a second look, in order to determine whether or not they had been deceived." Heth died in February 1836, but her exploitation didn't end then. Barnum staged a public dissection, charging 50 cents a head--the same price as a good seat at the opera. The surgeon's shocking find? "Joice Heth could not have been more than seventy five, or at the most eighty years of age!"

So began the colorful career of P. T. Barnum. Born in Bethel, Conn., in 1810, he was catapulted onto the national stage after touring with Heth and would stay there for more than 50 years, bringing Americans a curious mix of entertainment and education, all grounded in wild exaggeration. "He has his hand in every current in American popular entertainment," says James Cook, a history professor at the University of Michigan and author of the new The Arts of Deception: Playing With Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Harvard University Press).

From the emerging genres of blackface minstrel shows, burlesque, and melodramatic theater to the penny press that flooded America's cities with cheap, colorful, and occasionally reliable news, Barnum was there. "He's really the architect of American popular culture in its modern form," says Cook. Barnum taught America to love spectacle, regardless of its content. Professional wrestling, Jerry Springer, the tabloids--all can be said to have their roots in his invention. But Barnum's legacy to America is also a reflexive cynicism, a tendency to assume anything amazing must really be nothing but humbug.

Not until the end of his long career did Barnum take his show on the road, linking himself with the traveling circuses for which he is known today. For most of his life, Barnum was first and foremost a museum man and impresario. In the 1860s, Barnum's American Museum in New York City was perhaps the premier entertainment destination in America. The five-story building was covered with bright flags; paintings and banners advertised the wonders inside; an illuminated color wheel spun while a giant limelight on the roof brightened the night sky and gas-lit letters spelled out the impresario's name; and at street level, a brass band blared while ticket takers persuaded those passing by to come in. Inside, visitors were kept moving by signs that read "This way to the egress"; people with an underdeveloped vocabulary soon found themselves paying another quarter to get back in.

The museum's exhibits straddled the line between entertainment and education, science and sensationalism. All were given equal weight: historical paintings, Shakespearean productions, and carefully prepared animal skeletons were displayed alongside attractions like the corpse of the Feejee Mermaid, "positively asserted by its owner to have been taken alive in the Feejee Islands." The Mermaid (probably a well-sewn composite of a monkey torso and fish tail) in turn shared space with live performers. Some, like the midget Tom Thumb and the conjoined twins Chang and Eng, were made famous in their own right; others, like the world's fattest boys, contortionists, and bearded women, were merely part of a revolving cast of characters.

A heavy dose of commerce overlaid the entire operation, well beyond the limits of any museum gift shop enterprise today. Performers sold their biographies and photos alongside copies of Barnum's puffed-up personal history. Phrenologists and fortune tellers stood ready to analyze and predict. And gaudy trinkets--like wood rings "turned from the beams of Abraham Lincoln's cabin"--were hawked at every turn. In the early days, prostitutes and booze were also on hand, but that aspect of the museum experience fell victim to Barnum's effort to appeal to the strict mores of the emerging middle class.

The uberhuckster. Scholars today see Barnum as a driving force in creating mass popular culture in America, a move that was closely tied to the flowering economy. As the country grew, personal relationships disappeared from the market; buyers who had once known the producers of their goods personally had to rely on middlemen making (often outrageous) claims about their products. As the young nation's premier purveyor of fraud, Barnum became the benevolent embodiment of the Yankee huckster. "The Europe of his age saw America as Barnumesque, and there was an idea of the American as huckster and humbugger," says Ricky Jay, a sleight-of-hand artist, historian, and author of Jay's Journal of Anomalies (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), out next week. "Barnum is much more than the concept of the circus--the whole issue of humbuggery was a vital part of his persona."

That persona was as carefully constructed as any of his exhibits. One of the many images Barnum sold was his rags-to-riches success, a tale that appealed to the rising middle class that made up most of his audience. Though his father was a well-off merchant, Barnum preferred to sell a story of struggle. "I began the world with nothing, and was barefooted at that," he recalled in one autobiography. "I was a poor inexperienced boy, thrown out on the wide world to shift for myself." The fiction of his poverty-stricken New England boyhood became a fixture in his public identity. It was one of the few constants, though. Barnum's skill at periodically repackaging himself rivaled that of many 20th-century entertainers, and with each new iteration came a fanfare of publicity.

His fame and fortune were founded on a keen sense of what his audiences wanted. Freaks were a way for a rigidly confined society to get a thrill while reinforcing their own normalcy. "Unlike today, very respectable white middle-class city dwellers would go see these things with no concerns," says Cook. "The rules [at the time] are so strict it's liberating to gaze at figures that define possibilities you aren't allowed to consider."

Barnum also capitalized on the racial dynamics of the time. Though later he would distance himself from the Heth hoax--claiming in his last biography that he had actually been the one deceived by the old woman's original owners--race remained a Barnum mainstay. One of his signature attractions--simply called "What is it?" and said to be half man, half ape--was actually an African-American man in a fur suit. "Even as race became such a pressing political issue, there were still emotional responses to undiscussed feelings about race that people weren't ready to face up to at the time," says Benjamin Reiss, a Tulane University English professor who tells the Heth story in the forthcoming The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America (Harvard University Press). "People could go and touch her and prod her, take her pulse--the humiliating subjection to people's bodily scrutiny was behavior that wouldn't have been countenanced for a white person."

Barnum's relentless reinventions were rarely challenged. His Joice Heth exploits (he bragged at the time about being a Northern slaveholder) were conveniently papered over by the time he ran for Congress in 1867 on an antislavery platform. His autobiographies--there were at least four (often contradictory) versions--gleefully recounted his many hoaxes, and yet the public was usually ready to forgive, forget, and believe again. In his 1855 The Life of P. T. Barnum: Written by Himself, an unsuspecting ticket taker tells an incognito Barnum the secret of his success: "People will go to see old Barnum. First he humbugs them, and then they pay to hear him tell how he did it! I believe if he should swindle a man out of $20, the man would give a quarter to hear him tell about it."

But even Barnum could only reinvent himself so many times; by the end of his career he had painted himself into a corner. "As he became more successful he tried to cultivate an air of respectability, and tried to distance himself from some of his earlier exploits," says Reiss. But decades of his humbuggery had created a deeply skeptical public. "Scholars talk about cynicism as a malaise of the 20th century, but you see some of the roots of modern cynicism start to emerge in the Barnum era," says Cook. "Barnum creates cynicism towards mass culture as an industry . . . and people don't believe him even when he's telling the truth."

Indeed, public cynicism may have been Barnum's most lasting contribution, one that haunted him late in life. He probably never uttered the famous quote, "There's a sucker born every minute," and Cook says he complained bitterly about it: "He was too smart a marketing man to accuse the public of being stupid."