68 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
been valued at thirty-two thousand dol-
lars, somehow ended up mortgaged for
more than three times that much.)
Those who had deplored Barnum’s
humbug-fuelled rise exulted in his fall.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that it
showed the gods to be “visible again.”
James Gordon Bennett, a longtime Bar-
num foe and the editor of the New York
Herald, wrote, “It is a case eminently
adapted to ‘point a moral or adorn a
tale.’” But from other quarters came out-
pourings of sympathy and support. The
citizens of Bridgeport offered to lend
Barnum fifty thousand dollars. Strat-
ton, now eighteen years old, volunteered
to help, and he and Barnum set off on
another tour of Britain, which proved
just as successful as the first. Barnum
also developed his lecture on “the art of
money-getting,” and took it on the road.
(On the lecture circuit, he was accompa-
nied by the Fejee mermaid.) A few years
after he declared himself bankrupt, Bar-
num boasted to a pal that the American
Museum, which he had “leased” to his
wife and some friends, was earning him
ninety thousand dollars a year. As Wil-
son points out, “he told a much differ-
ent story to those still making claims”
on the notes he had signed. The hold-
ers of these had to settle for less than
twenty cents on the dollar.
W
ilson admires Barnum. He thinks
it’s regrettable that he’s been re-
duced to a caricature, to the kind of per-
son who’d sneer, “There’s a sucker born
every minute”—another Barnum line
that Barnum probably never actually ut-
tered. In Wilson’s telling, Barnum is a
far more complex character—a huckster,
yes, but one with high-minded ideals
that he strove, sometimes successfully, to
live up to. As evidence, he points to the
showman’s evolving views on slavery.
As a young man, Barnum briefly
owned slaves. During a swing through
the South in the late eighteen-thirties,
he acquired a man and an unrelated
woman and her child; then, before head-
ing north again, he sold them. But by
the mid-eighteen-fifties, at least on paper,
Barnum had become an abolitionist. In
a letter dated 1855, he wrote that he had
“grown to abhor the curse from witness-
ing its fruits.” (In the same letter, Bar-
num claimed to have “spent months on
the cotton plantations of Mississippi”;
as Wilson notes, this was almost cer-
tainly a fabrication.)
Also around 1855, Barnum switched
his allegiance from the Democratic to
the Republican Party. During the Civil
War, he ardently supported the Union,
filling his museum with military para-
phernalia and staging patriotic dramas
in the theatre. The museum came to be
identified with the Northern cause, and
when Confederate agents travelled to
New York in the fall of 1864, planning
to burn down the city, one of the blazes
they set was at Barnum’s establishment.
(All the fires were quickly put out, and
Barnum capitalized on the plot by com-
missioning a wax figure of an agent
named Robert Cobb Kennedy, who was
later executed.) As the war was drawing
to a close, Barnum decided to run for
the Connecticut state legislature, and
won. Once in office, he fought to extend
voting rights to blacks.
“Over many years, Barnum became a
steady, civic-minded, fun-loving man”
who “embodied many of the best aspects
of the American character,” Wilson writes
at one point. Barnum became “a better
person as he navigated a long lifetime,”
he says at another. As cruel as Barnum’s
stunts seem now, Wilson asks that we
view them in their context. “Human cu-
riosities” were a standard feature of the
travelling acts of the day. Even as Bar-
num was exhibiting his Tom Thumb,
another dwarf called Tom Thumb was
making the rounds; and, in the mid-nine-
teenth century, minstrel shows were a
popular form of entertainment. “We live
in an ahistorical age,” Wilson laments.
But if, as Wilson suggests, Barnum
became “a better person” with age, “bet-
ter” is a relative term. Twenty-five years
after the Heth affair, Barnum put on
display a microcephalic black man
named William Henry Johnson. “On
the Origin of Species” had recently been
published, and Barnum advertised John-
son as the “connecting link” between
humans and apes. For a while, he ex-
hibited as “Aztec Children” two other
microcephalics. A long-running act at
his museum featured a family of Dan-
ish albinos, who were billed as “white
negroes” from Madagascar.
And the later-life hoaxes weren’t solely
professional. When Barnum was sixty-
three, his long-suffering wife, Charity,
died. The showman had by this timegone all in on a circus—the so-called
“Greatest Show on Earth”—and was in
Hamburg, meeting with Europe’s lead-
ing animal supplier. (The supplier, Carl
Hagenbeck, would remember Barnum
as der König aller Schausteller, “the king
of all showmen.”) “However deep his
private grief was,” Wilson writes, Bar-
num didn’t return from Germany upon
receiving the news. Instead, he sailed for
London, “where he could be among
friends.” Charity had been in her grave
for less than three months when Bar-
num married one of these “friends,” a
comely twenty-three-year-old named
Nancy Fish. He came back to Connecti-
cut without Fish, then staged a second,
sham wedding six months later.
In his autobiography, which he pub-
lished and then repeatedly revised over
the years, Barnum is, by turns, confiding
and aggrandizing. He lays out the sor-
did details of the Heth affair, then main-
tains that he was shocked to learn her
true age. The book’s self-regard is breath-
taking. For “the elevation and refinement
of musical taste,” he has “done more than
any man living,” Barnum writes. His mu-
seums have been “the largest and most
interesting ever.” For instructing “the
masses” about animals, “no author, or
university even has ever accomplished as
much.” He has been “a public benefac-
tor, to an extent seldom paralleled in the
histories of professed and professional
philanthropists.”
Doubtless it’s true that the cartoon
Barnum doesn’t do justice to the real one,
who brought so much pleasure and ex-
citement to his contemporaries. The mu-
seum, the Tom Thumb tour, the Jenny
Lind performances, the circuses—these
were the “Game of Thrones” of their day.
But to ask readers to look past Barnum’s
faults would seem to miss the point.
Barnum became one of the most cel-
ebrated men in America not despite his
bigotry and duplicity, his flimflamming
and self-dealing, but because of them.
He didn’t so much fool the public as in-
dulge it. This held for Joice Heth and
the Fejee mermaid and also for himself;
he turned P. T. Barnum into yet another
relentlessly promoted exhibit—the
Greatest Showman on Earth. Ameri-
cans, he knew, were drawn to such hum-
bug. Why they are still being drawn to
it is a puzzle that, now more than ever,
demands our attention.