P. T. Barnum

Showman

• Born: July 5, 1810
• Birthplace: Bethel, Connecticut
• Died: April 7, 1891
• Place of death: Bridgeport, Connecticut

American showman

With a strong business sense and the ability to take huge risks, Barnum invented the modern museum and the musical concert, and converted the tent carnival into the three-ring circus. He also ran for a variety of political offices, serving for two terms on the Connecticut legislature and for one as a mayor of his hometown.

Areas of achievement Entertainment, government and politics

Early Life

Phineas Taylor Barnum was born on July 5, 1810, in Bethel, Connecticut. Throughout his life, Barnum always regretted that he had not been born on the Fourth of July, the perfect birth date for the man who would become one of the first American showmen. He was the sixth child of Philo and Irene Barnum, Philo’s second wife. Barnum was named for his maternal grandfather, Phineas (a biblical name meaning “brazen mouth”) Taylor. As Barnum’s life progressed, it turned out that the name fit him and that the ancestor he was named for would influence Barnum unlike anyone else in his life.

As a boy, Barnum looked to his grandfather Phineas for amusement. Phineas Taylor, a great practical joker whose antics helped liven up the harsh New England winters, would go further than most to create his little jokes and hoaxes that he concocted to weather the stern Calvinism of his day. When Barnum was christened, grandfather Phineas deeded to him five acres of land called Ivy Island. Phineas liked to brag to others in Barnum’s presence that, because of that land, Barnum would one day be wealthy, and Barnum believed this throughout his childhood. At the age of four, he began begging his father to see his inheritance; finally, when Barnum was ten, his father acquiesced. The boy was led to an ivy-infested swamp, and even at that young age he knew that he had been the butt of a long-running hoax and that his inheritance was worthless. (Ironically, later in life Barnum put Ivy Island up for collateral.) P. T. Barnum, who loved his grandfather Phineas, ended up getting the last laugh by naming his illegitimate son Phineas Taylor.

The young P. T. Barnum, who would one day prudently know when to cut his losses, excelled in mathematics. While in grammar school (high school), Barnum helped his father out on the family farm; like thinkers down through the ages, however, he detested menial work and began planning for a different life. Philo’s farm was a disappointment, and so, with a partner, he bought a general store and put Barnum in charge. In that position Barnum learned much about people, about bartering, and about business. By chance, he was being trained and goaded toward his future.

When Barnum was only fifteen, his father died. Suddenly finding himself the head of the family, he liquidated the store only to discover that the family was bankrupt. Quickly he obtained a similar job in another store. Tiring of that, he moved to Brooklyn to clerk at a better store. His influential grandfather, Phineas, wanted him to return to Bethel and offered to set him up in business if he would come home. That was all the encouragement Barnum needed, and he returned to set up a profitable business in half of his grandfather’s carriage house.

On November 8, 1829, at the age of nineteen, Barnum eloped with Charity Hallett, a twenty-one-year-old Bethel woman. One of Barnum’s daughters, Frances, died before her second birthday; his surviving daughters were Caroline, Helen, and Pauline. Like King Lear, Barnum suffered much from the actions of his daughters, who let their father down innumerable times, disappointing him by their various divorce scandals and their eagerness to divide up their father’s estates while he was still alive.

Barnum, disappointed that his wife never had sons, left twenty-five thousand dollars and a yearly 3 percent of his enterprises to his eldest grandson, Clinton H. Seeley. To receive the inheritance, Seeley was required to change his middle name to Barnum in order to perpetuate Barnum’s name. Clinton Barnum Seeley accepted the bequest but dishonored Barnum by conducting licentious parties, one of which included a nude Little Egypt in the center ring.

Life’s Work

P. T. Barnum’s life is almost inseparable from the freaks, the oddities, the hoaxes, the hokum, the sheer entertainment that he presented to the world, from the “sucker” on the street to Queen Victoria and the president. This six-foot-two man with curly, receding hair, blue eyes, a cleft chin, a bulbous nose, and a high voice was a pitchman par excellence and might almost be said to have invented the art of mass publicity.

After an apprenticeship spent selling hats, working in grocery stores, running lotteries, and maintaining a boardinghouse, Barnum found his métier. The catalyst was his discovery and purchase of Joice Heth, a black woman with legal documents that proved she was 161 years old and had served as George Washington’s nurse. Barnum quit his grocery job and gambled both borrowed money and his life savings to make his break from convention.

In 1835, a Mr. Lindsay showed Barnum documents on the old woman and sold her to him for one thousand dollars. Barnum hired a hall by promising the owner half the gross, and he employed several people to help him launch a publicity campaign. At her shows, Joice Heth sang hymns and told her story of rearing Washington. The newspaper helped to spread the story, and eventually the show was a success, with Barnum splitting the weekly gross of fifteen hundred dollars with his partner.

Finally the dreaded event occurred: Joice Heth died. Barnum had given Dr. David Rogers permission to perform an autopsy, which in the end proved that Joice Heth was not more than eighty years old. Thus, the hoax was exposed and the newspapers made Barnum even more famous.

Barnum continued to collect and display oddities, both human and otherwise. He needed a central stage for his show and in 1841 acquired a dilapidated museum at Broadway and Ann Street in New York City that became known as Barnum’s American Museum. For the admission fee, one could see the Feejee Mermaid (which was nothing more than a female monkey torso joined to a large stuffed fish tail), midgets, beauty contests, a bearded lady (she went to court to prove she was not a man), a tattooed man, the world’s tallest woman, the Woolly Horse, the authentic “Siamese twins” Chang and Eng, and countless other abnormalities.

Barnum was always in search of another main attraction, and one materialized for him in 1842 when he discovered a five-year-old midget named Charles Stratton. Barnum taught him to sing and dance, to tell jokes, and to perform other stunts, all while wearing several different military uniforms. Stratton was thus converted into General Tom Thumb, one of Barnum’s biggest entertainment successes.

To gain greater fame, Barnum took Tom Thumb on tour in Europe. There he was a huge success before five million people (according to Barnum’s own count), and Barnum connived to make headlines when the General performed for Queen Victoria, who presented Tom with a court uniform. When Barnum and Tom Thumb returned to the United States, the clamor was great, and even President James K. Polk requested and got a private show at the White House.

Barnum’s next big success was the signing of the famous Swedish singer Jenny Lind, whom he had neither seen nor heard, to perform on a concert tour. To finance the tour, he was forced to mortgage both his $150,000 home and his museum, as well as borrow heavily from friends. The risk paid off; Jenny Lind’s tour was both a critical and a financial success. The Swedish Nightingale opened in New York City on September 11, 1850, and after ninety-five concerts in nineteen cities, Barnum had cleared profits in excess of $500,000.

In 1855, however, Barnum’s time for high-risk profits had run out. As he had in the past, he became obsessed with an investment, this one with the Jerome Clock Company. Through his own bad management, Barnum carelessly invested more than $500,000 in the company, only to watch it go bankrupt. Barnum contemplated suicide, but instead, this religious man concluded that the Almighty Himself wished to teach him that there was something higher in life than money. Except for Charity’s nineteen thousand dollars a year from the museum lease, all was lost. “Without Charity,” he quipped, “I am nothing.” This may have simply been a clever pun, however, because his financial recovery had begun immediately after the losses.

At forty-six, Barnum began his long climb toward repaying his debts. He turned to his standby, General Tom Thumb; he also realized that he himself was a marketable commodity and began lecturing to packed houses. Capitalizing, as always, on a good thing, he turned his lecture notes into a best-selling pamphlet, The Art of Money Getting, and reused the notes a second time in his autobiography.

Fire seemed to follow Barnum around like a demon. His home, Iranistan, was lost in a fire. The Barnum American Museum burned to the ground (miraculously, the freaks with their immobile bodies all escaped). The museum loss was calculated at $400,000, with insurance covering only $40,000. Many precious objects, including irreplaceable relics of the Revolutionary War, were lost. Barnum, with his typical verve, rebuilt the museum.

One of Barnum’s greatest claims to fame began when he was sixty. He joined forces with James A. Bailey to created “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Barnum’s London Zoo purchase of Jumbo the Elephant (who had given rides to some five million British children, including Winston Churchill) became one of his most famous and most disputed purchases. Queen Victoria and others in England wanted the famous elephant back. By the time Jumbo reached the American shores, the elephant was an international cause célèbre and had generated much free publicity. The elephant act was an instant success: The purchase price of thirty thousand dollars was recouped in six weeks, with a box office of $336,000.

In 1873, Charity died, and in the following year Barnum married Nancy Fish, an Englishwoman forty years his junior. Barnum and his second wife had no children.

In 1891, Barnum was almost eighty-one and in poor health. After a lifetime of financial reversals, he was surrounded by wealth. He remarked to a friend that he wondered how his obituary would read. Word of this got back to the New York Evening Sun, and the newspaper asked for and got permission to print Barnum’s obituary before he died. On April 7, 1891, this American folk hero died at his home in Bridgeport.

Significance

According to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the expression “There’s a sucker born every minute” is attributed to P. T. Barnum. Researchers have stated repeatedly that Barnum never said this. Indeed, in his own life he was often a “sucker.” He assumed as a child that Ivy Island would make him wealthy, and as an adult he thought that he could get rich quick through his Jerome Clock investment.

Barnum knew many secrets about human nature, one of which was that although no one enjoys being duped, if the game is all in good fun, people do enjoy becoming “suckers” to an extent—so much so that they are willing to pay for the honor. Another secret Barnum learned was that of the publicist: In his pre-“global village” age, Barnum might be said to have invented the high-pressure sales campaign, creating the “hype” that sold his wares.

Barnum himself became a household name and an original American folk hero. His life was filled with contradictions. He was a good family man, yet he fathered an illegitimate son, the only son he was ever to have. He was reared in an anti-entertainment age yet believed devoutly that each person deserved to be entertained. He made a great amount of money; he lost all of his money; he made more money. He sustained spectacular triumphs unmatched by rivals. Living a long life, he experienced many personal tragedies, including the death of a daughter, the death of his wife, Charity, the loss of property and money, and the divisiveness and greed of his surviving three daughters.

Barnum became an archetype of American Dream merchants such as Walt Disney, Samuel Goldwyn, Oscar Hammerstein I, John Ringling, Mike Todd, Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Rose, the brothers Shubert, Florenz Ziegfeld, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and hundreds of others. A lively musical, Barnum, and the circus that bears his name reintroduces Barnum to thousands each year.

“To the Egress,” a sign in the Barnum’s American Museum once read. Expecting to find another oddity, people entered and found themselves outside the museum, on the street.

Bibliography

Adams, Bluford. E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Written for readers who have a basic knowledge of Barnum’s life, this book examines the cultural context of his mass entertainment. Adams maintains Barnum’s productions appealed to low- and middle-class audiences’ desire for “high” culture.

Barnum, Phineas T. The Life of P. T. Barnum. Introduction by Terence Whalen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. A recent reprint of Barnum’s autobiography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum. Edited by A. H. Saxon. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. The only published collection of Barnum’s letters.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Struggles and Triumphs: Or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum. Edited by Carl Bode. New York: Penguin Books, 1981. Good starting point for research. Barnum wrote three versions of this book, which Bode condenses into one readable volume. Bode has written an excellent introduction and has included a short, annotated bibliography.

Benton, Joel. Life of Honorable Phineas T. Barnum. Philadelphia: Edgewood, 1891. This book largely paraphrases (in the third person) Barnum’s own autobiography. Benton knew Barnum, and he includes some of his own recollections.

Cook, James W. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. An analysis of mass entertainment in nineteenth century America, focusing on Barnum.

Dennett, Andrea Stulman. Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America. New York: New York University Press, 1997. History of Barnum’s American Museum.

Desmond, Alice Curtis. Barnum Presents: General Tom Thumb. New York: Macmillan, 1954. The story of one of the most famous midgets in the world and how he became a gigantic drawing card for Barnum.

Harding, Less. Elephant Story: Jumbo and P. T. Barnum Under the Big Top. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000. History of the famed elephant, a star attraction in Barnum’s circus.

Harris, Neil. Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. The most reliable biography. Sound scholarship is used to place Barnum in his own cultural setting.

Sutton, Felix. Master of Ballyhoo: The Story of P. T. Barnum. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968. A Literary Guild edition with large print for juveniles.

Wallace, Irving. The Fabulous Showman: The Life and Times of P. T. Barnum. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959. One of the best introductions available on Barnum, covering all the major events. Well researched with an excellent bibliography and sixteen pages of photographs.

Related Articles in Great Events from History: The Nineteenth Century

August 10, 1846: Smithsonian Institution Is Founded; 1850’s-1880’s: Rise of Burlesque and Vaudeville; April 10, 1871: Barnum Creates the First Modern American Circus.